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Languages form the terrain of computing. Programming languages, protocol specifications, query languages, file formats, pattern languages, memory layouts, formal languages, config files, mark-up languages, formatting languages and meta-languages shape the way we compute. So, what shapes languages? Grammars do. Grammars are the language of languages. After reading this article, you will be able to identify and interpret all commonly used notation for grammars. Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.
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I don't see railroad diagrams in there.
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Being compatible with Heisenberg uncertainty isn't enough for something to be realisable as a physical state. Is there a wavefunction that allows us to know the digits to the right of the decimal point as far as we want for both position and momentum measurements? Maybe surprisingly, the worlds of audio and graphics can help us answer this question. The Dirac comb is an example of a wavefunction whose position and momentum aren't fuzzy.
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I [was] passing the time by poking around on the imgur gallery, and saw a couple animated gifs based on one of my all-time favorite games, Super Mario Bros. It got me wondering: could I use matplotlib’s animation tools to create these sorts of gifs in Python? Over a few beers at an SFO bar, I started to try to figure it out. To spoil the punchline a bit, I managed to do it... This animation was created entirely in Python and matplotlib, by scraping the image data directly from the Super Mario Bros. ROM. Below I’ll explain how I managed to do it. White space is important in the code... and the sprites.
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After I got over how cool it was that this technique was going to be useful, I got uncomfortable. “There’s a giant space of programs that this computer can emit and consume that I have no way of ever understanding,” I thought. That’s cool, but it’s also scary. I made something that caused me to feel deeply insignificant. Programming became scary. The potential of the machine suddenly felt limitless. When our programs make programs we no longer understand.
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Which is that -- (The First Time Programming) Scared Me or The First Time (Programming Scared Me) ? I read it the first way.
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Oh yes indeed, I can feel your pain there. Left associative or right is often open to interpretation in natural languages, but also some of the fun to be had by playing with that uncertainty.
"I had the right to remain silent, but I didn't have the ability!"
Ron White, Comedian
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Usernames and passwords are the de facto standard for accessing user accounts on the web, so it’s likely that if your users have accounts, that’s the way you have them sign in. Keeping up with best practices for handling passwords can be hard, but is important for your users safety. Here’s a quick list of the things you should be doing to secure your passwords today. Is it time to move beyond passwords for security?
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Is it time to move beyond passwords for security?
To what?
biometrics sound like a good idea; but for anything beyond decrypting a local store they're not. Changing a widely used password is a pita if it's compromised; but try changing your fingerprint if an attacker gets a copy of it...
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Biometrics for security is basically using a password that you leak everywhere you go and you can never change it.
And to make things worse: the hardware used as gatekeepers will always lag behind the latest gadgets available to criminals to analyze the information you are unknowing and unwillingly spreading around every day.
Any $10K biometric security system that's secure today can be cracked by anyone with $1000 equipment tomorrow. It's an uphill battle you'll never win. Eventually you'll be spending so much money on security that you're better off getting hacked.
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Books related to the Atari line of computers, including the Atari 400, 800, ST, XL and XE. Titles include: Atari Calculator Manual, Your Atari Computer, Your Atari Computer XL Edition, Your Atari Comes Alive and Users Handbook to the Atari. Sharing our knowledge, just like the early days of personal computing.
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We feature a lot of different DIY electronics projects on Lifehacker, but the barrier for entry might seem high at a glance. However, it's not nearly as difficult as it looks. Here's how to get started. A few tips so you don't let the smoke out.
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So back to my original frustration about Windows Phone and having a default non-WebKit browser. This is a real issue and I feel now that I recommended the wrong solution. The better solution is to add the capability to Windows Phone 8 to choose an alternative default browser. This would leave it open to the browser providers such as Google, Mozilla, Opera, etc. to provide a better option on the platform. Specifying a different default browser is something you can’t do on the iPhone, and Windows Phone could easily turn it into some positive publicity. After all, Windows 8 lets you pick your default browser, so why not enable this in Windows Phone. The real problem is lazy web developers and wobbly standards-compliance, no?
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Typography is one of the important aspect of the web designing . The User Interface / UX (User Experience) design is one of the challenging work in the design and development of the website. In this blog post , we will explore some of the Typography tools which will be useful for the Web Designers. A font of knowledge.
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Researchers have uncovered an ongoing, large-scale computer espionage network that's targeting hundreds of diplomatic, governmental, and scientific organizations in at least 39 countries, including the Russian Federation, Iran, and the United States. Operation Red October, as researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab have dubbed the highly coordinated campaign, has been active since 2007, raising the possibility it has already siphoned up hundreds of terabytes of sensitive information. It uses more than 1,000 distinct modules that have never been seen before to customize attack profiles for each victim. You're afraid of our code. Well, you should be. Personally, I'd give us one chance in three.
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I came across this article discussing why PHP has a bad reputation. A lot of it came down to developers using poor practices. This excerpt: "Copying internet tutorial code and not reviewing it" struck me as particularly relevant, and something I think we see a lot of in the PHP forum. Granted for any language there are the low-quality and outdated tutorials out there, but PHP seems to have an abundance of this. You're living in the past, it's a new generation.
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"I've seen more information on a frickin' sticky note!" - Dave Kreskowiak
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I had another look at PHP and I'm still not convinced. I think the following still applies:
http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/[^]
Also a comment on the Dream.In.Code article sums it up for me:
"Every language has its quirks. C#, a much newer language, is horribly verbose?!"
C# is many things, but verbose it isn't. For my two cents worth it sounds like an ardent PHP advocate trying to justify using an intrinsically broken language by means of prejudice.
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jim lahey wrote: C# is many things, but verbose it isn't.
It really is. I recently converted a C# utility to Python and was shocked by the difference in the amount of code. And I am not even very skilled with Python.
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Maybe a little, but "horribly verbose"? That sounds more like COBOL.
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I concur. Once you have done any amount of COBOL (and I have suffered my share) no other language can be considered verbose.
COBOL:
MULTIPLY A BY B GIVING C ROUNDED.
C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Rexx, et al:
c = a * b;
FORTRAN, PL/1, VB, etc:
c = a * b
- Life in the fast lane is only fun if you live in a country with no speed limits.
- Of all the things I have lost, it is my mind that I miss the most.
- I vaguely remember having a good memory...
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A few months ago while sitting at a Burger King (yes, I know) I recorded a video on "How to use Windows 8 in 3 minutes" and threw it up on YouTube. It's been viewed nearly a half million times. Eek. It's got poor audio, and it's WAY too fast. I did it on a goof. However, people keep showing it to family and friends.... So tonight I took a few hours and did a new video that I'm VERY happy with and I hope you enjoy it. It's clean, clear, and only 25 minutes long and it explains, I believe, Windows 8 and its changes for anyone with basic Windows experience. Here's the story, of a Metro UI, who was showing us some very lovely tiles...
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By focusing on a simple circuit, the 6502 microprocessor chip can actually be understood at the silicon level. It's interesting to see how the complex patterns etched on the chip can be mapped onto gates, and their function understood.... In this article, I show how overflow is computed in the 6502 microprocessor at the transistor and silicon level. I've discussed the mathematics of the 6502 overflow flag earlier and thought it would be interesting to look at the actual chip-level implementation. Even though the overflow flag is a slightly obscure feature, its circuit is simple enough that it can be explained at the silicon level. A circuit's a circuit, no matter how small.
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