Each balloon can provide connectivity to a ground area about 40 km in
diameter at speeds comparable to 3G. For balloon-to-balloon and
balloon-to-ground communications, the balloons use antennas
equipped withspecialized radio frequency technology. Project
Loon currently uses ISM bands (specifically 2.4 and 5.8 GHz bands)
that are available for anyone to use.
I'd like to see a rope-variant of the 2-3 finger tree.
2-3 finger trees are immutable/persistent and support access to both ends in amortized constant time and logarithmic concatenation and splitting.
The complicating factor being that for flyweight values, like characters, the interior nodes of the tree would be prohibitive for one leaf per character. Surely there must be a variant of 2-3 finger trees that addresses this.
you can implement a rope as a 2-3 finger tree of string literals. i wrote a java implementation of 2-3 finger trees a few months ago and implemented both ropes of bytes and ropes of chars (rope backed by finger tree of java Strings here: https://github.com/jeffplaisance/fingertree/blob/master/src/...).
Mathematica is absolutely incredible and everyone who calls themselves a programmer should own a copy, learn how to use it, and internalize its philosophy.
However, I too find his self-aggrandizing intolerable.
Sentences like "Looking back at its documentation, SMP was quite an impressive system, especially given that I was only 20 years old when I started designing it." Just make me dislike him. Was his age really necessary there? He already mentioned his age a few paragraphs up in a sentence that was far less objectionable.
1) Term rewriting systems are a beautiful and powerful model of computation that a lot of people know nothing about.
2) The "everything is data" philosophy is life changing. This same philosophy can be seen in the Clojure community (there are more than a few Mathematica-isms that Rich has admitted being influenced by). Mathematica goes further to say that all data is expressions, which is really a subpoint of #1, but I think that data is the more fundamental important idea than expressions. Even though expressions have extremely wide applicability.
3) Having some mastery over the basics of Mathematica is like having a bunch of secret programming super powers. One time, I came across an exceedingly complex if/and/or/else clusterfuck and reduced it to a trivial truth table in only a few minutes of fiddling with Mathematica. There are lots of cases where experimenting in Mathematica was just a much faster way to understanding and solving a problem prior to implementation.
Thanks for the response, I have not found it to well matched for all of my tasks but it is definitely well set up for certain types of programming tasks, has several high level abstractions and a diverse set well documented libraries.
I haven never tried to write a script or algorithm or anything in Mathematica. It's not useful for that (at least to me). I use it more to explore and to understand problems.
That's why I mentioned truth tables. Being able to quickly perform symbolic simplifications is awesome. If nothing else, learn how to do that!
A quick Googling will show you that Rich has popped his head into a bunch of conversations where both Clojure and Mathematica are mentioned. He's also mentioned it in a talk or two.
Well let me ask you this, then: what do you recommend as a way to learn Mathematica? I feel like I should know more about it. My interest is less in the details of using the software and more in its computational model and its approach to language design. Any suggestions on what a natural approach would be?
Start with Mathematica's builtin documentation. The overview pages are actually quite good. They are also online [1].
Of course, given that the early drafts were written by Wolfram himself, you'll have to ignore absurd statements like this one: "Long viewed as an important theoretical idea, functional programming finally became truly convenient and practical with the introduction of Mathematica's symbolic language." [2]
However, my next question is: What can we do to make more companies be like Amazon?
Not every business needs to operate on razor thin margins, but I'd love to see more big companies playing the long game and continuously innovating. Wall Street invests in returns, not innovation. What can be done to help reset that balance a bit?
Do we really want other companies to be like Amazon? If the Amazon endgame is "own the entire retail sector," I'm not sure that we ("we" meaning "society at large", not just "Amazon shareholders") want any company to be like Amazon... even Amazon.
Not to mention that when the endgame is "own the entire retail sector," even if other companies want to be like Amazon, in the end they'd have to kill Amazon to do it. Owning the entire retail sector is incompatible with the existence of lots of thriving alternatives. It's like the Highlander -- there can be only one.
And, don't forget the rather nasty consequences of Amazon's ability to operate on no margins: it kills all their competitors who have to actually profit to stay alive. When Amazon moves into your market, your company is probably in big trouble. Really, thats good in the very short term (lower prices for consumers), but bad in the long term (because once amazon controls everything, theres no reason to keep their margins so low).
i think we're forgetting the bad side of amazon. these few article were just brought to my attention recently, which has given me pause on where i shop, etc. i have not stopped using amazon, but i'm def more aware and hope they treat employees better.
my gf is the one who has been telling me about amazon and their labor practices. she tells me about jeff not giving back to the community (she is from seattle), tax issues, labor issues. i'm not educated on the whole ordeeal but she has def sparked my interest. does anyone have any feedback? is amazon different from any other warehouse job?
i used to work at UPS and a document storage company a while back and i don't remember it being terrible on either accounts.
Maybe willing to invest small percentage of one's pension in companies that try this kind of innovations. For example investing in disruptive healthcare companies, with an understanding that it help you when you grow old. Maybe even tie this with some sort of voting power to us, and less to fund managers.
And of course encourage changes towards long term investment, maybe using the tax code.
Would be awesome if the demo app was baked into the download. I'd love to be able to try the UI instantly without even having to load up my own application.
We'll be 'pre-integrating' a few apps available on GitHub soon so you'll be able to play with Reveal by simply cloning and running those iOS apps. A full sample may be on the cards when we're out of beta.
In the late 90s, I cowrote OpenGL bindings for Java, which became the model for jogl and so forth. Whereas other bindings using JNI duplicated the native/C structs, I just carried around the native pointer as a long and used it as an "opaque" pointer. Much less copying (thunking) back and forth.
Temporarily ignoring all of Microsoft's specific problems (and there are many) and any other company's specific problems for that matter (every company has them)...
Nobody gets a product right on the first try. Full Stop.
The more interesting question here is this:
Why does Microsoft expose the first try to the public?
