Also Jerome Carcopino's (add accents to taste) "Daily Life in Ancient Rome" - later period, and as the title suggests focussing on everyday life rather than great historical figures or events, but very readable.
Athens adopted a democratic system that included all male citizens - even the poor
But not the serf/slave class AFAIK, which is why I find the "total war" description unconvincing. Sparta did use helot serfs as skirmishers, but not in huge numbers and not to any great effect. (Possibly because they also used the helots for target practice...)
You're right about the "wealthier" though; that was a braino.
That was true prior to Alexander the Great. Not true after.
Really? Interesting. IANAClassicist, but I always thought that Greek warfare in the successor state era was more about establishing local hegemony than outright annexation. Can you recommend any good books on the period?
...are the parallels, even in societies that in many ways can look very alien. (Sparta under the Lycurgan regime abolished the family as a social unit, for example.) Certainly the parallels with today's "War on Terror" hysteria are striking:
They altered the accepted usage of words in relation to deeds as they thought fit. Reckless audacity was termed courageous loyalty to party; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation, a cover for spinelessness; and an ability to understand all sides, total inertia. Fanatical enthusiasm was rated a man's part; and cautious deliberation, a euphemism for desertion.
Back just before the first Gulf War - Desert Storm, not Iran/Iraq - the BBC did a special called (IIRC) The War that Never Ends, a set of dramatized talking-heads excepts from the period, drawing these parallels very simply but incredibly effectively. One of the best things I've ever seen on TV, and probably something that only the BBC could ever do.
I wouldn't agree with the viewer in calling Greek warfare "total", however. Yes, they were the first to use shock, but that's another matter. Military participation was generally limited to the wealthier citizens (== voters.... hello, Heinlein), and war aims were generally limited, stopping far short of conquest or delenda-est-Carthago extremes. In many ways, Greek armies were like local sporting teams; war was a test/demonstration of courage and civic-mindedness. When professional combat trainers appeared in Greece, many folk at the time commented that yes, these techniques would make you invulnerable in battle, but what was the point? It wasn't what the activity was about. Rather like Greek theatre, I suppose - the Chorus was the focus of a play, not the individual actors.
This is the big question to my mind. Comments on the 3DIF site indicate that the format will support materials. If they don't support programmable shaders, they'll be excluding most of the interesting stuff happening in 3D at the moment. If they do support programmable shaders, how are they going to handle the plethora of incompatible shader definition languages (OpenGL's GLSLang, Direct3D's HLSL, NVIDIA's Cg etc) in a suitable platform-neutral manner?
I just know I'm going to get modded Troll for this
Yes, because dissing Windows on Slashdot is really sticking your head into the lion's mouth. You wild, untameable, devil-may-care, free-speaking rebel, you.
Well, you could argue that accent change is a kind of meme propagation, and new memes propagate much faster in (densely-populated) core areas than in (sparsely-populated) peripheral/frontier areas. Rather like the extreme vagaries of fashion being primarily urban rather than rural.
No idea whether that's the real explanation, but the phenomenon you describe doesn't sound all that curious.
Incidentally, the Shakespeare's Globe theatre here in London is doing a couple of "original pronunciation" performances as part of this year's season; should be interesting.
No doubt. But isn't it at least possible that some of these revisions could result from, you know, people discovering new stuff? It's not as if the encyclopaedias in 1920 were the Platonic ideals of omniscient, infallible historical truth.
Being a bit hasty in reaching for the tinfoil hat there, I'd say.
Only if a nation has the power to pose a severe threat to neighboring nations or the world at large should drastic military action be taken against them.
Careful. Prior to the latest Gulf War, the US clearly posed a severe threat to Iraq. Had Iraq possessed the capability to mount an effective pre-emptive attack against the US, would it have been morally justified in doing so?
export seems to remain a mystery to everyone besides Comeau
More accurately, the only implementation of "export" to date is by the Edison Design Group. Comeau uses the EDG frontend, as do some others (including Intel, I believe, though I'm not sure).
The EDG members have had some scathing things to say about "export" with the benefit of experience. It was horrendously complicated, and it doesn't (and arguably can't) really achieve any of the goals that motivated its invention in the first place.
There's an increasing consensus that "export" was a misfeature and should never have made it into the Standard.
All the examples given - Dewey, Library of Congress etc - are classification schemes. They don't identify *resources* in the usual sense of the word.
In other words, if I type a Dewey info: URI into Moz n+3, what do I get? The description for that code? A list of Gutenberg texts? A list of ISBNs? An Amazon search result?
Anybody have examples of how these URIs would be used in practice?
What "rights" are they talking about here? That is, what sort of IP is being licensed?
Patents would make a sort of sense, but Dewy Decimal dates back to 1873, so it can't be a patent. Copyright doesn't seem to apply since there isn't obviously a "work" being copied.
Interesting factoid supplied by a lobbyist recently interviewed on Slashdot:
Finally, move faxes and email way up. One of the only good things to come out of 9/11 is that Members of Congress have been forced to use email as a preferred method of communication. Paper mail and knickknacks have become harder to get into the Capitol.
Perversely, I think maybe we're getting so used to the gradual flow of success stories that we're losing sight of just how far Linux has come in the last few years. Five years ago, the notion that governments and corporations would be rolling out Linux desktop deployments numbering into five figures would have been comical to even the most rabid zealot. Now it's almost commonplace. The rate of acceptance has been phenomenal. Five years from now I'd certainly expect OSS OSes to make up more than 10% of worldwide installs, and at that point it's a done deal - the operating system will be a commodity, and the closed-source vendors will be either giving their OS away to support app or service revenue, or actually having to work for a living.
It's an easy answer but prison is like crime college. Lock up a small thief and release a hardened criminal.
There's a lot of truth in that, but that's an argument against the use of incarceration as a judicial punishment, not against DNA profiling. There's no reason DNA profiling couldn't be used to track down criminals and give them hugs and cookies if that's the way you want to go.
I looked at Dev-C++ a couple of years ago, at which point it was largely useless for anything but toy projects. (IIRC, it insisted on opening every single file in the project at startup - heh.) Has it improved a lot since then? Maybe time for another look, though I'm pretty sure I'll be moving to Eclipse now.
I think you missed the "for writing non-production code" qualifier.
For a small, non-critical app which only needs minimal functionality, hand-rolling is hardly a time sink. Writing a bare-bones string or list implementation takes about five minutes, and in terms of time, will "pay" for itself after a dozen or so compiles.
Compile-time performance
on
GCC 3.3 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Yes, this release (like all 3.x releases) is a lot slower than 2.9x was. This is particularly true for C++, to the point where the compile-time cost of standard features like iostreams or STL is prohibitive on older, slower machines. I've largely gone back to stdio.h and hand-rolled containers for writing non-production code, just to keep the edit-compile-test cycle ticking along at a decent pace.
The new support for precompiled headers will help to some extent but is by no means a panacea. There are a lot of restrictions and caveats. The good news is that the GCC team are very well aware of the compile-time issue and (according to extensive discussions on the mailing list a few weeks back) will be making it a high priority for the next (3.4) release.
Incidentally, for those wanting a nice free-beer-and-speech IDE to use with this, the first meaningful release of the Eclipse CDT is at release-candidate stage and is looking good.
It's not verbatim. It's close, because it's attacking the same basic problem, but it's not verbatim. Microsoft's HLSL is certainly not an "alternative implementation" of Cg.
I suspect that MS HLSL, Cg and glslang are all roughly equivalent. Given that, why on earth would anyone pick the single-vendor solution?
Slashdot Mirror
Point yer browsin' gear here for news and discussion, including recent blogs by Nathan ("Mal") and Jewel ("Kaylee") from the set.
And by dint of shameless grovelling the webmaster has just wangled himself a part as an extra on the movie! Kudos.
I noticed the other day that Chrome, an otherwise dull and unremarkable FPS, uses Ogg Vorbis for its music. I'm sure there are others.
MS offers OurOneSizeFitsAll - take it or leave it; Linux offers an OceanOfFreePartsAnyExpertCanUse
WikiWikiMuch?
Try GPGPU.org - "General-Purpose Computation Using Graphics Hardware". Useful clearinghouse for this sort of thing.
Also Jerome Carcopino's (add accents to taste) "Daily Life in Ancient Rome" - later period, and as the title suggests focussing on everyday life rather than great historical figures or events, but very readable.
Athens adopted a democratic system that included all male citizens - even the poor
But not the serf/slave class AFAIK, which is why I find the "total war" description unconvincing. Sparta did use helot serfs as skirmishers, but not in huge numbers and not to any great effect. (Possibly because they also used the helots for target practice...)
You're right about the "wealthier" though; that was a braino.
That was true prior to Alexander the Great. Not true after.
Really? Interesting. IANAClassicist, but I always thought that Greek warfare in the successor state era was more about establishing local hegemony than outright annexation. Can you recommend any good books on the period?
...are the parallels, even in societies that in many ways can look very alien. (Sparta under the Lycurgan regime abolished the family as a social unit, for example.) Certainly the parallels with today's "War on Terror" hysteria are striking:
(From Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War III 82, written in the 5th century BC. Sound familiar?)
Back just before the first Gulf War - Desert Storm, not Iran/Iraq - the BBC did a special called (IIRC) The War that Never Ends, a set of dramatized talking-heads excepts from the period, drawing these parallels very simply but incredibly effectively. One of the best things I've ever seen on TV, and probably something that only the BBC could ever do.
I wouldn't agree with the viewer in calling Greek warfare "total", however. Yes, they were the first to use shock, but that's another matter. Military participation was generally limited to the wealthier citizens (== voters.... hello, Heinlein), and war aims were generally limited, stopping far short of conquest or delenda-est-Carthago extremes. In many ways, Greek armies were like local sporting teams; war was a test/demonstration of courage and civic-mindedness. When professional combat trainers appeared in Greece, many folk at the time commented that yes, these techniques would make you invulnerable in battle, but what was the point? It wasn't what the activity was about. Rather like Greek theatre, I suppose - the Chorus was the focus of a play, not the individual actors.
</ramble>...and it's really rather fun. Think of a cross between Lemmings and Frozen Bubble. Recommended.
Well, I guess that explains why Intel are pushing it... ;-)
Thanks for the info.
This is the big question to my mind. Comments on the 3DIF site indicate that the format will support materials. If they don't support programmable shaders, they'll be excluding most of the interesting stuff happening in 3D at the moment. If they do support programmable shaders, how are they going to handle the plethora of incompatible shader definition languages (OpenGL's GLSLang, Direct3D's HLSL, NVIDIA's Cg etc) in a suitable platform-neutral manner?
Yes, because dissing Windows on Slashdot is really sticking your head into the lion's mouth. You wild, untameable, devil-may-care, free-speaking rebel, you.
Well, you could argue that accent change is a kind of meme propagation, and new memes propagate much faster in (densely-populated) core areas than in (sparsely-populated) peripheral/frontier areas. Rather like the extreme vagaries of fashion being primarily urban rather than rural.
No idea whether that's the real explanation, but the phenomenon you describe doesn't sound all that curious.
Incidentally, the Shakespeare's Globe theatre here in London is doing a couple of "original pronunciation" performances as part of this year's season; should be interesting.
No doubt. But isn't it at least possible that some of these revisions could result from, you know, people discovering new stuff? It's not as if the encyclopaedias in 1920 were the Platonic ideals of omniscient, infallible historical truth.
Being a bit hasty in reaching for the tinfoil hat there, I'd say.
Only if a nation has the power to pose a severe threat to neighboring nations or the world at large should drastic military action be taken against them.
Careful. Prior to the latest Gulf War, the US clearly posed a severe threat to Iraq. Had Iraq possessed the capability to mount an effective pre-emptive attack against the US, would it have been morally justified in doing so?
export seems to remain a mystery to everyone besides Comeau
More accurately, the only implementation of "export" to date is by the Edison Design Group. Comeau uses the EDG frontend, as do some others (including Intel, I believe, though I'm not sure).
The EDG members have had some scathing things to say about "export" with the benefit of experience. It was horrendously complicated, and it doesn't (and arguably can't) really achieve any of the goals that motivated its invention in the first place.
There's an increasing consensus that "export" was a misfeature and should never have made it into the Standard.
All the examples given - Dewey, Library of Congress etc - are classification schemes. They don't identify *resources* in the usual sense of the word.
In other words, if I type a Dewey info: URI into Moz n+3, what do I get? The description for that code? A list of Gutenberg texts? A list of ISBNs? An Amazon search result?
Anybody have examples of how these URIs would be used in practice?
Oops. Yeah, yeah. RTFP...
What "rights" are they talking about here? That is, what sort of IP is being licensed?
Patents would make a sort of sense, but Dewy Decimal dates back to 1873, so it can't be a patent. Copyright doesn't seem to apply since there isn't obviously a "work" being copied.
What gives? Is it just a matter of the trademark?
Fully agree with the sentiment expressed, but...
Interesting factoid supplied by a lobbyist recently interviewed on Slashdot:
Is this boiled-frog syndrome?
Perversely, I think maybe we're getting so used to the gradual flow of success stories that we're losing sight of just how far Linux has come in the last few years. Five years ago, the notion that governments and corporations would be rolling out Linux desktop deployments numbering into five figures would have been comical to even the most rabid zealot. Now it's almost commonplace. The rate of acceptance has been phenomenal. Five years from now I'd certainly expect OSS OSes to make up more than 10% of worldwide installs, and at that point it's a done deal - the operating system will be a commodity, and the closed-source vendors will be either giving their OS away to support app or service revenue, or actually having to work for a living.
There's a lot of truth in that, but that's an argument against the use of incarceration as a judicial punishment, not against DNA profiling. There's no reason DNA profiling couldn't be used to track down criminals and give them hugs and cookies if that's the way you want to go.
I looked at Dev-C++ a couple of years ago, at which point it was largely useless for anything but toy projects. (IIRC, it insisted on opening every single file in the project at startup - heh.) Has it improved a lot since then? Maybe time for another look, though I'm pretty sure I'll be moving to Eclipse now.
I think you missed the "for writing non-production code" qualifier.
For a small, non-critical app which only needs minimal functionality, hand-rolling is hardly a time sink. Writing a bare-bones string or list implementation takes about five minutes, and in terms of time, will "pay" for itself after a dozen or so compiles.
Yes, this release (like all 3.x releases) is a lot slower than 2.9x was. This is particularly true for C++, to the point where the compile-time cost of standard features like iostreams or STL is prohibitive on older, slower machines. I've largely gone back to stdio.h and hand-rolled containers for writing non-production code, just to keep the edit-compile-test cycle ticking along at a decent pace.
The new support for precompiled headers will help to some extent but is by no means a panacea. There are a lot of restrictions and caveats. The good news is that the GCC team are very well aware of the compile-time issue and (according to extensive discussions on the mailing list a few weeks back) will be making it a high priority for the next (3.4) release.
Incidentally, for those wanting a nice free-beer-and-speech IDE to use with this, the first meaningful release of the Eclipse CDT is at release-candidate stage and is looking good.
It's not verbatim. It's close, because it's attacking the same basic problem, but it's not verbatim. Microsoft's HLSL is certainly not an "alternative implementation" of Cg.
I suspect that MS HLSL, Cg and glslang are all roughly equivalent. Given that, why on earth would anyone pick the single-vendor solution?