Sarcasm fully understood. So, to address the point you're making underneath the snark:
No one (that I've seen, anyway) is ragging on Brendan Eich for being a Christian. I don't even know whether he is, although it's a fair guess given his decision to support Proposition 8.
Many people are saying that Eich's support of Proposition 8 is a bad thing, makes him a bad choice for CEO of Mozilla, discourages them from using Mozilla's products, etc.
Attacking someone for being a Christian: religious bigotry based on disapproving of someone simply on the basis of their identity. Generally a bad thing.
Attacking someone for supporting Proposition 8: disapproval based on what the person has actually done and its likely consequences. No reason why it shouldn't be a reasonable thing.
This doesn't seem to me to be a very subtle distinction.
(Aside: I do find it curious that of the four people who first come to mind when I think of Mozilla -- Mitchell Baker, Gervaise Markham, Robert O'Callahan, Brendan Eich -- two are rather vocally Christian (gerv's blog is called "Hacking for Christ"!) and a third has become infamous for an action that's probably the result of a similar religious position. Just coincidence?)
The question I have is why it's those four people who come to mind for you. Why Mitchell and Brendan is very clear, since they are the ultimate project leadership. But why specifically Robert and Gerv, as opposed to David Baron or Asa Dotzler or Johnny Stenback or Stuart Parmenter or Mike Shaver or various other people who were involved with the project since close to the beginning?
I have some hypotheses (e.g. Johnny doesn't blog, so isn't as "famous"), but I'm curious whether you have any yourself.
Of course there's a link. But criticizing an action someone has taken that happens to have been religiously motivated is not the same thing as objecting on principle to their religion.
An example more extreme than Brendan Eich's: Suppose someone is a devout Christian but also rather deranged, and believes that the Bible is full of coded messages telling him to kill (say) school biology teachers. So he goes and kills a bunch of school biology teachers. If I say "That was a terrible thing to do and he shouldn't have done it", that doesn't mean that I am going to hate on everyone else who is a devout Christian -- because, as it happens, plenty of people manage to be devout Christians without murdering biology teachers.
Perhaps (so far as I know this is pure speculation) Brendan Eich is a Christian and the particular variety of Christianity he adheres to tells him to try to stop same-sex couples' relationships being legally recognized. If so, then I think the particular variety of Christianity he adheres to is leading him to do harmful things and I wish he would stop. But that doesn't require me to object on principle to everyone who is a Christian, not least because plenty of people manage to be Christians without trying to stop same-sex couples' relationships being legally recognized.
Now, let us suppose there is a Christian denomination that has opposition to same-sex marriage as a central part of its teaching, and that does not permit anyone to belong to it unless they work to oppose same-sex marriage, including making financial contributions to campaigns like the one for Proposition 8. And suppose it turns out that some particular person is a member in good standing of that denomination. Then I'm quite happy following the following line of thought: This person belongs to that denomination; belonging to it means being a fervent opponent of same-sex marriage and contributing to campaigns against same-sex marriage; therefore this person has almost certainly done things I consider harmful and antisocial; so much the worse for this person. You may, if you please, consider this anti-religious bigotry. If so, I invite you to consider the following two questions. (1) Is it possible for a religion (or some particular version of a religion) to be morally harmful to its practitioners? (2) If you learned that someone was a member in good standing of an Islamic sect that had glorification of terrorism as a central doctrine, would you think worse of them as a result?
> Lagrange interpolations are only distantly related to Legendre/Hermite/etc polynomials
Actually ... take an nth degree polynomial from your favorite orthogonal set. For each of its n+1 zeros, construct by Lagrange interpolation the polynomial which is 1 at that zero and 0 at the others. Then that set of n+1 interpolating polynomials has the same relation to the orthogonal polynomials of degree 0 through n that (periodized) sincs have to sinusoids, i.e. you can decompose an n degree or lower polynomial in either basis, and the two representations are related by something like a Fourier transform.
Huh, cool. I was familiar with using the division algorithm to prove that Gauss quadrature worked, but I never chased the notion any further. I suppose you're right, the DCT does the exact same thing when it samples a function at a finite number of points.
"Signal" has always bugged me because it has the connotation of a function of time, whereas historically the Fourier series were first used to represent functions of space.
It doesn't need to be time- and frequency- based. For example in quantum mechanics you transform from position to momentum space. I think the complaint was that the word "signal" excludes this later case while "function" is more general.
Everyone says that, until they're put in charge of babysitting an old HPUX or AIX box and it's time to install something. Then no one complains about Autoconf again (though they can't bring themselves to praise it, either).
> Years ago David Cheriton at Stanford taught me something that seemed very obvious at the time -- that if you have a network link with low bandwidth then it's an easy matter of putting several in parallel to make a combined link with higher bandwidth, but if you have a network link with bad latency then no amount of money can turn any number of them into a link with good latency.
You can tell it's dated from this little tidbit:
> The Cable TV industry is hyping "cable modems" right now
Theoretically, if your bandwidth is high enough, you can transfer the entire computational state of the distant resource to a local substrate, and then run the computation locally for a low-latency conversation.
So, if you are annoyed by the slow comms of our alpha centauri - earth channel, just transfer _your entire brain_ to a local avatar and I'll converse with that. Then run "git merge" to bring the remote history back to the master repo.
Unlike the iPad, the iPhone, Dropbox, and "The Web," credit for this metaphor may fairly be given to David Gelertner. Although he applied it to naming files rather than servers.
> If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don't bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous.
For what it's worth he was also the first to use the metaphor of a cloud, although in his sense the cloud represented your personal data and it drifted to follow you, casting a shadow over pavestones representing computers, as opposed to the usual sense of the cloud being an amorphous body of computers.
That's not really the same metaphor. The naming is almost incidental, it's the individual effort going into each item that matters. Most of my 'pet' files are nameless, but they are individually pampered and treated and difficult to recreate.
Problem is that you usually only want a subset of what TCP does, and sometimes the simplest/most straightforward way of getting that is a little reliability sauce over a standard UDP connection.
Most games that use UDP do not reimplement TCP because data that is too old is simply not relevant to the game anymore so it is not resent. If TCP had a way to indicate messages shouldn't be delivered anymore that would be great.
Edit: That's sarcasm, people.