Sometimes, pictures don't have anything on the evocative purity of a simple phrase.
I read your first post, read it again, cracked a huge grin, and repeated it to myself in different voice impressions about 20 times:)
First it was a voice imitating the narrator voice on the intro to the original Law & Order series ("In the criminal justice system, there are...").
Next I imagined it with a more "grave" voice that might be used for a trailer narration of some sci-fi war flick.
Then I giggled like a little girl for about 5 minutes straight. Still am.
All of which is a long way of saying: great post. You brightened my day, but the impression from the picture isn't nearly as good as the impression from the post.
I think the best use of something like this would be for incremental and bottom-up development. Write some new code, test it immediately without having to build entire app again. Play with ideas quickly and once you have a good sense of how design should fall out, then go implement it (I do that now, except with prototyping in python and implementation in C).
I've often wished that I could have an interactive interpreter with C. Just so when I write a little bit of code, I don't have to compile it, and then write another little bit of code to test that it works like I expect it to, and then compile that other bit of code.. and then add it to the build (since you have to do as much work anyway if you have reasonably complex include/lib paths).
I can see this removing a bunch of headaches from C/C++ development.
But I agree with you, aside from that, other applications are limited.
Let's keep writing software in an unsafe, glorified assembly language (and glorified assembly languages with OBJECTS!). You know, because it's not like we care about safe applications or anything. We need our button widgets to complete their draw operations in under 5 microseconds.
Seriously, we don't need to check array dereferences. It takes up AN ENTIRE WHOLE INSTRUCTION for each dereference. That's insane, we might have to wait a whole millisecond for a button widget to redraw. And how can we deal with that? I mean, remote code getting executed on my local machine every once in a while, I can understand.. but I want my user interface to be SNAPPY.
And besides, only stupid programmers write programs that can't deal with unsafe memory access. I mean, how stupid do you have to be? It's very easy: only clobber memory that needs to be clobbered. It's not rocket science!
No, we don't need garbage collection, either. Real men keep track of all their pointers, all over their programs, and use ad-hoc reference counting schemes if necessary!
It's part of the RIAA modifications to math. I think there's a bill working it's way through congress right now. Essentially, all mathematical functions f(a1,..., aN) will now be defined as: rho(f(a1,..., aN)). rho is a function that will be decided upon, on a case by case basis, by the newmath oversight committee (to be established by an act of congress), for the benefit of artists and content producers.
I think your parent poster had access to drafts of the bill.
Like I said, I agree with your sentiments. It would be better to not have the runtime optimizer worrying about stuff that could be easily inferrable at compile/load time.
Sun decided that jvm compatibility was more important to them than any performance they could gain from low-level support for parametrized types. To a certain extent, I'm happy even with just the syntax and compiler-level support for it. It'll make my code cleaner and easier to follow, anyway.
The Java snail-oil salesmen try to convince you that your code will be bug free because certain classes of errors just can't happen. Again, what crap. They can happen. The only thing the JVM does is tell you precisely when they happen. Is this better than insideous bugs in C that change memory they shouldn't but don't crash as a result until later? Certainly. But the bugs still happen in Java. And they can be insideous in different ways.
Ah, snail oil, it does wonders for the skin;)
Anyway, yes, it IS better to know WHAT is happening and WHEN it happens, than for it to blindly happen and cause problems later. This is because it bounds the code and its runtime behaviour. A NullPointerException or array out of bounds exception is not nearly as insidious as random memory getting clobbered. For one, it eliminates an entire class of possible bugs: buffer overflows. They simply wont happen. Knowing that there will be certain strict bounds on the runtime behaviour of the program is extremely important.
Dammit, I should have read my preview more carefully.
So that piece of code that ends up dealing with Strings in practice, ends up doing only a single pointer check, instead of the heavyweight operations needed for a blind dynamic cache.
The bolded section should have been: blind dynamic cast
I don't think the generics in Java are very ugly at all. The interface - i.e. the syntax itself - is reasonably clean. The implementation ends up being just a fallback to the safe-dynamic-casting functionality of the JVM, but you don't know that when you actually use the generics.
I think the major benefit of generics is that developers can structure their code easier. They can tell the compiler that something is a List of Strings, and not a List of Objects. The performance aspect of it is less important.
Also, you are not considering that there are low-level VM operations that can mollify, to a significant degree, the potential performance hits caused by dynamic casting.
If you read papers related to Self (a Sun research language, based on smalltalk, using prototype-based OO semantics), you'll notice that there was a lot of work done on doing fast dynamic type-inferencing. A lot of that work has been rolled back into Java.
So let's say you have a List of Strings in Java. And there's a location in the code which grabs the first element from a list, and that first element happens to be a String all the time, or most of the time (this occurrs very frequently even in OO code - even though the strict semantics might imply polymorphic behaviour, in practice, a lot of code ends up being monomorphic anyway). The Java VM will actually figure that out at runtime, and compile a special version of the code, which does one pointer check (to see if the object you're pulling out is a string), and if that pointer check succeeds, makes a call to a custom-compiled version of the method based on that type assumption. If that check fails, then it falls back to less efficient code. So that piece of code that ends up dealing with Strings in practice, ends up doing only a single pointer check, instead of the heavyweight operations needed for a blind dynamic cache.
Even when you have limited polymorphic behaviour (code that is polymorphic over a handful of tyes), the java VM optimizes it by using polymorphic inline caches (I think this was added in the 1.5.* VMs).
And the nice thing is, this happens on the dynamic properties of the code, not just the static properties. So if you have some code that, according to the syntax, deals with plain Objects, but in practice, deals with instances of Foo a vast majority of the time.. then most of the time, it WILL execute with the type-assumption, with the added cost of a pointer check.
So yes, it would be nice if the generics system had support at the bytecode level. But it's not as much of a hit on performance as one might think. The jitter and its low-level optimizations compensate for that quite a bit.
I'm pretty sure Sun developers were aware of this when they decided not to mess with the VM bytecode definition when adding generics support to the Java language.
With video games, "out of print" doesn't mean the game data is rare and valuable. It means just what it says. "Out of print".
Umm, article poster needs a clue. He sounds like quite the conscientious idiot to me.
Original game "paraphanelia" for out of print would be quite valuable yes. Even if there are newer versions of the game out. An unopened retail box of an original "tetris" for the NES would, I'm guessing, be worth a lot to some people.
The game DATA is not that valuable. It's a string of bits. Anyone can make perfect infinite duplicates of it. That tends to decrease the "rareness" aspect of it.
Look, original article poster guy, good for you that you don't download games. I don't download games either - for another reason entirely - I tend not to play them. And your suggestions for what game publishers can do are nice.
But your apparent doe-eyed naivety about copyright infringement, and the attitude... makes me wonder.
IF YOU ARE NOT AN AVERAGE USER, YOU SHOULD NOT BE USING GNOME. GNOME IS INTENDED FOR A DIFFERENT TARGET AUDIENCE THAN YOU. IT IS DESIGNED FOR THE 95% OF USERS WHO ARE USING WINDOWS RIGHT NOW. IT IS DESIGNED TO PROTECT AND INSULATE USERS FROM THE UNDERLYING SYSTEM.
The problem with this suggestion is that it presents a false dichotomy: that either GNOME can be friendly for the "average" user, or it can be friendly for the "expert" user. And that it's not possible to create a user experience that works well with both types of users.
I don't agree with that premise. It _is_ possible. The problem that I think GNOME is suffering from is an ideological fanaticism that is blind to a proper sense of moderation. Anything in extremes is bad. I agree that too many choices are bad. But too few choices are also bad. But the kind of choices that the gnome devs are taking out of the system go beyond the pale.
It IS possible to express more powerful constructs and ideas in ways that are more easily understood. However, that takes a lot of effort. More effort than it takes to simply chop off an option and set a default value.
Less choices doesn't mean that something is magically easier to use or to understand. It just means that there are less choices.
quick note.. is there specific reason you spell 'fuck' as 'fcuk'? I don't get it.
Do you think Ford build a bespoke car for each and every different FCUKing driver???
Do you think Burger Kind hand prepare and cook a bespoke burger for every FCUKing customer???
Do you think . . . oh this is getting boring.
See, cars and burgers exist in the physical world, where it is VERY HARD to change things. Software exists in the virtual world, where changing somethings structure is VERY EASY.
You think if people could press a button and have their car's paint color change, they wouldn't want it?
You think if people could press a button and have the layout of the dashboard, stereo, and steering wheel, change to fit their exact preferences, they wouldn't want it?
You think if people could press a button and have their burger change from beef patty to spicy chicken or any other meat they want, they wouldn't want it?
You think... hey you're right, this does get boring.
The whole FCUKing world revolves around the average person. Trust me - I'm 260lbs and 6 foot 6 inches in the buff. I KNOW how things get built and sold for Mr Average.
And wouldn't it be nice if it wasn't? If you could buy a pair of generic shirts, turn a dial to point to 6'6", and have it change to fit your size, wouldn't that be BETTER? Do you think that would be "too confusing" for the average user?
The physical world has its limitations, limitations that are not present in bitspace. Why exactly do we want to replicate inherent difficulties present in the physical world in a world where we don't have to?
You can't complain just because you are different however. The GNOME team are tageting one very big area - not you, not me, not my Gran and not the bloke next door. They are targeting a huge number of users - and that means that the average rule has to come into play.
It doesn't HAVE to come into play. Right now, the gnome developers are putting EXTRA work into making it harder for people like myself to build a proper user environment from their tools.
If they want to, thats their perogative. However, it does drive people away.
That, and I don't share the common conception that the "average" user is somehow a blumbering idiot who'll get confused by more options. The right way to deal with user ignorance is to make it easier for them to deal with powerful constructs, not to remove the powerful constructs and present fisher-price interfaces to grown-up tools.
So pack your FCUKing bags you ass-hole. Go and FCUK off and use some obscure desktop environment. Better still - return your FCUKing computer to whoever you bought it from and return to pen and FCUKing paper because you can do whatever you FCUKing want with that.
Umm, no. Computers by themselves are more than flexible enough for me. Since, you know, they _are_ turing complete when you get down to it. I'm quite happy with having to deal with the inherent limitations in computability imposed by the church/turing model. It's artificially restricted tools that get my goat.
Hold on - SHIT. Paper comes in STANDARD FCUKING SIZES. BOLLOX. Guess you're going to have to make your FCUKing own you immature little shit.
Actually, I have the ability to use the "scissors" tool to modify paper sizes to fit my needs, thank you very much.
And as a footnote . . . 12 hours a day on a FCUKing computer??? You REALLY ought to get out, have some beers and get laid. It's usually someone from the opposite sex, but hell - choose bespoke sex if you really want to.
HAHA. YOU SO FUNNY!!1! YOU MAKE SLASHDOT GEEK SEX JOKE! YOU WIN.
Sure, computers are tools. But I think that statement isn't really that revealing.
My desktop is not a fucking hammer. It's not simple. The things I do with it are not simple. I stare at it for 8 hours a day at work, and several more hours after I get home. I do a million disparate, discrete things with it.
So a better analogy for it would be my ENVIRONMENT. Much like my house and my room within my house, is an environment. Now, if someone were to come in and tell me that "yeah, your room should be a cube, because it's 'simple'. And oh yeah, you can't put a fan _there_, it doesn't make sense. And you have to put your CDs _there_, because that's the most aesthetically pleasing, and your monitor goes _here_ and your desk goes _here_", I would tell them to fuck off.
I'll use strong words to try to relate how emphatic I am about this point: FUCK THE AVERAGE USER. I'm the one that has to use my computer 12 hours a day, NOT the average user. And if a desktop environment is going to make it a pain in the ass for me to get it to work the way I want it, then I'll use something else. Simple as that.
I really don't give a shit what you, or the gnome developers, or the waitress at Wendys, thinks the 'average user' can handle, or what is 'aesthetically pleasing'.. as LONG as it doesn't interfere with MY ideas on what is appropriate. If it does, then I'll pack my bags and leave.
It's sheer arrogance for someone to suggest that I don't know how best to arrange my environment.. even worse for my aesthetic tastes to be usurped in the name of an almost-mythical "average user" that the GNOME developers claim to understand intimately.
Ok, let me explain to you a little bit about the fundamentals of capitalism: private property. This is the concept that all other constructs in capitalism arise from. When you own something - i.e. it is your property - then you control it. A second concept is that of contracts. Contracts establish the basis for trade, exchange of value, and creation of wealth. A contract usually involves you agreeing to provide something of value to another person, while extracting in exchange, something of value from them.
If you're following so far, please keep in mind that the above are all standard capitalist constructs.
So let's examine the GPL in this context. You wrote some code. You release it under the GPL to person X. At that point, you have established a contract. The stipulations of that contract involve the following:
you give X the following rights: X can use the application your code generates. X can look at your code. X can change your code.
you require of X, the following concessions: X can give away, or sell, your code to anyone, as long as they transfer it under the GPL. X can give away, or sell, your code with their modifications, to anyone, as long as they transfer it under the GPL.
That, my friend, is a contract. Perfectly well within the rules of most sane capitalist systems. And you call it analagous to 'Communism'?
For comparison purposes, let's take a look at most commercial licenses:
When you buy a commercial license you get the right to: Use the application associated with the license.. On one computer.
Can you redistribute to someone else? No. Can you install in more than one place? No. Can you look at source code? No. Can you change source code? No.
If you think the GPL is analagous to communism, then I wonder what you consider commercial licenses to be analagous to. Fascism perhaps? Maybe despotism? Totalitarianism?
I dunno. My family, which was an Indian immigrant family living in the US, didn't have much in the way of problems immigrating to Canada. I think all in all, the process took less than two years. The barrier of entry to become a part of canadian society, is, in my experience, much lower than in the states.
Even getting citizenship in Canada is a breeze compared to the states, especially for us "third world escapees". After I had lived here for 5 years, I applied for citizenship, and within a year and half, had gone through the entire process.
I don't know where you're getting those statements from, but they definitely don't reflect my experience with Canadian immigration. I find the bureaucracy here to be much more tempered than in the states. Not nearly as much red tape to deal with.
Algorithms are just a certain kind of information.
Consider a GA system that operated on bitstrings that are considered inputs to a universal turing machine. Then, the information created is an alrogithm.
True, when designing a GA system to do that, you might have problems in creating test cases for evaluating solution fitness, but that doesn't detract from the point.
There has been research done on using GAs on lisp-style expressions, using subexpression substitution instead of crossovers, to generate useful algorithms. GAs aren't just for parameter optimization, although they are particularly suited to parameter optimization problems.
If you had studies GAs, you would know that GAs do "create" new information that doesn't exist in the original solution set (i.e. any given generation of potential solutions).
GA systems both propogate "good" information, as well as generate and test new information incrementally across generations. Of course, this is done within whatever limitations you choose to impose on the solution set (i.e. if you're using a fixed N-bit string to represent entities in the solution space, then you'll search across all 2^N possible solutions in the N-bit string space).
Fundamentally, GAs are just a way of searching a solution space for good solutions. They are slow, but can tackle a more diverse set of problems easier than the traditional backpropogation-based neural network. I would consider neural networks to be more in line with your description of an 'adapting' learning algorithm.
The following analogy can only be taken so far, but you can compare backpropogation-based neural networks to be akin to hill-climbing algorithms - you start from one solution, move some limited distance towards what you think is a better solution. For a neural network with N vertices, you can think of neural network learning as hill-climbing in an N-dimensional space over whatever field used to specify edge weights.
GAs, on the other hand, do a much more disparate search over any solution space. And it is surprising how well it finds near-optimal solutions even for problems where the relation between solutions is complex and non-intiuitive (e.g. minimums for seemingly chaotic functions).
So, I read the article. And the author makes a reasonable point about newbies being more accustomed to the spatial metaphor. I'm not going to dispute that. It might or might not be a valid claim.
The question I want to ask is: what about those of us that are NOT newbies? The author states early on that he tries to avoid anything that would expose the filesystem tree abstraction to the end user. Maybe you could argue that it is good for newbie users, maybe not. But it DEFINITELY isn't good for non-newbie users.
Look, the filesystem is a TREE. That's what it IS. Any metaphor that you try to make the filesystem fit some other pattern will only take you so far. A tree is a very nice, clean structure. A lot of its expressive power is lost when you try to impose some strange alternate metaphor on it. When you deal with the filesystem as a tree, any operation that maps well onto trees, you can map well onto filesystems. It's a powerful abstraction.
And quite frankly, don't we WANT newbies to be learning the actual behavioural properties of the tools they use, rather than an artificially constructed interface which we deem them more able to use? Won't this lead to more intelligent users?
Personally, I think it's insulting to people to say that they can't "deal" with basic abstract structures. It's not THAT complicated guys. And we're not that smart for knowing how filesystems work. MOST people in the world can grok the concept perfectly fine, you just have to teach them. Perhaps some people feel threatened by that?
I was an avid gnome user. I stopped using it once I noticed the clear trend for gnome to assume that I'm dumb. That I can't deal with certain choices - which are better made by the developers than by me. Limiting excess in choice is fine.. but there is a fine line between reasonable limits, and top-down control. I think gnome crossed the line a ways back.
For a commercial music, you want to try to offend as few people as possible, while still playing interesting music that people won't mind listening to. Generally you want it to be instrumental, apolitical, and good.
You don't want to be playing The Clash or blaring Radiohead out to the world.
Downtempo electronica and acid jazz fit that bill perfectly. They have a certain amount of respectability because they generally sample jazz and mix it with electronic beats and modulations to produce very "chill out" music. It's not hard on the ears, it's not loud. It's quiet and relaxing, and still good. The nice thing is, there's a lot of it that is purely instrumental. No annoying vocals to deal with, so you have to neither risk alienating people with controversial vocals, nor dumb down vocals to the point where they are stupefyingly trite and banal.
For concrete suggestions, try the following: Suzuki by Tosca Bricolage by Amon Tobin
Another choice you have is to play straight up good Jazz. Put on some Coltrane or Miles Davis or Herbie Hancock or something. There's no fucking way anybody can be offended by that music. It's all instrumental, and it's all rock solid.
Jazz and jazz-based electronica seem to be a perfect fit for what you're looking for in terms of: apolitical, instrumental, and good.
I'm a Canadian citizen, and I'll be voting for the first time in the upcoming election. I realize that technology issues are important and all. But let's get this straight: there are MUCH more important issues on the table, and on the line, in this election.
The Liberals, in their stupendous arrogance, have gone and done a lot of stupid things. They've commited fraud on the scale of a hundred million dollars in Quebec. They've let the health care system atrophie and waste away. In short, they've fucked up.
But that's not the big problem. The big problem is that by fucking up as they have, they've pissed off a lot of people and driven votes toward the new Conservative party (leader: Stephen Harper - AKA Bush Lite). The problem is, these guys have come closer than they ever have to winning the election. And that's bad. This problem trumps a LOT of technology issues. If it had been up to these people, we would have jumped wholeheartedly in with the US on the royal clusterfuck that is the Iraq War.
The Alliance platform can be described as thus: Massive tax cuts Massive increases in military spending "Free Votes" on the issue of gay marriage (which in practicality means that if they form Parliament, they'll pass some notwithstanding-clause backed bill banning gay marriages) Generally antagonistic views on abortion (no definite statement by the party that they are not going to allow bills trying to roll back time on the abortion issue).
It's a close race, and there's a lot at stake. If the conservatives get into power, we're looking at a future of exteme debt, insane and useless military spending, longterm delay in the ability of homosexuals to get equal rights, potential issues with abortion rights, and the slow death of the social services that makes this country such a nice place to live in.
For all his faults, Martin (Paul Martin - Liberal leader and current prime minister) - has shown that he can actually manage the budget and churn out a significant surplus (at a cost to services, but regardless, it's a notable achievement). We can't afford to waste this money on military spending and corporate tax cuts.
Not to say that I love the liberals though. If the PC was still together (the old, more moderate conservative party), I would have voted for them this election. I'm disgusted with the way the Liberals have behavd.
But being disgusted is one thing. Being scared to death is another. And I'm scared to death of a Conservative majority. They'll take us right down the shitter.
Anyway, I'm sure there are equally strong opinions on the matter from the Conservative supporters.
What I'm trying to say is: there are bigger issues in this election than technology. Much bigger issues.
The concept of a 'winner' is not too emphasized in most Go games, so I don't think it's really that important. It's not like chess or something where you work towards one well defined goal (checkmate). In go, if you're worse, then that doesn't mean that you still can't capture and control portions of the board.
The fact that there are multiple scoring systems emphasizes the fact that the game is not about the score you get.
In most games you play, there are areas of the board which you are happy with, because you were able to play well, and make headway into enemy territory and capture territory, or successfully defend against a well planned attack.. and then there are areas you feel that you did badly in.
But regardless, when you are done with the game, the finished board state reflects both your triumphs and your failures. It's not an all-or-nothing mentality that occurs with games like chess, where it doesn't matter how well you executed some plan, if you still end up getting checkmated.
The scoring is an afterthought to me. An exercise at the end to mark some numbers down. Most of the time, I don't even do it. It's more fun to talk with the opponent about the progress of the game, and explain your strategy, and listen to his strategy, and compare the results of the clash of ideas on an informal basis based on the layout of the endgame board.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes, pictures don't have anything on the evocative purity of a simple phrase.
:)
...").
I read your first post, read it again, cracked a huge grin, and repeated it to myself in different voice impressions about 20 times
First it was a voice imitating the narrator voice on the intro to the original Law & Order series ("In the criminal justice system, there are
Next I imagined it with a more "grave" voice that might be used for a trailer narration of some sci-fi war flick.
Then I giggled like a little girl for about 5 minutes straight. Still am.
All of which is a long way of saying: great post. You brightened my day, but the impression from the picture isn't nearly as good as the impression from the post.
-Laxitive
I think the best use of something like this would be for incremental and bottom-up development. Write some new code, test it immediately without having to build entire app again. Play with ideas quickly and once you have a good sense of how design should fall out, then go implement it (I do that now, except with prototyping in python and implementation in C).
I've often wished that I could have an interactive interpreter with C. Just so when I write a little bit of code, I don't have to compile it, and then write another little bit of code to test that it works like I expect it to, and then compile that other bit of code.. and then add it to the build (since you have to do as much work anyway if you have reasonably complex include/lib paths).
I can see this removing a bunch of headaches from C/C++ development.
But I agree with you, aside from that, other applications are limited.
-Laxitive
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84? Yeah I suppose some people might refer to that as "some screenshots". May I suggest
"A fuck of a lot" as an alternate quantifier?
-Laxitive
Hey, I have a great idea!
Let's keep writing software in an unsafe, glorified assembly language (and glorified assembly languages with OBJECTS!). You know, because it's not like we care about safe applications or anything. We need our button widgets to complete their draw operations in under 5 microseconds.
Seriously, we don't need to check array dereferences. It takes up AN ENTIRE WHOLE INSTRUCTION for each dereference. That's insane, we might have to wait a whole millisecond for a button widget to redraw. And how can we deal with that? I mean, remote code getting executed on my local machine every once in a while, I can understand.. but I want my user interface to be SNAPPY.
And besides, only stupid programmers write programs that can't deal with unsafe memory access. I mean, how stupid do you have to be? It's very easy: only clobber memory that needs to be clobbered. It's not rocket science!
No, we don't need garbage collection, either. Real men keep track of all their pointers, all over their programs, and use ad-hoc reference counting schemes if necessary!
Yep, hooray for C and C++.
-Laxitive
Of course.
It's part of the RIAA modifications to math. I think there's a bill working it's way through congress right now. Essentially, all mathematical functions f(a1,
I think your parent poster had access to drafts of the bill.
-Laxitive
Control.
-Laxitive
Really?!
If true, that's just plain silly. Can you provide more info? I'd like to read about this.
-Laxitive
Like I said, I agree with your sentiments. It would be better to not have the runtime optimizer worrying about stuff that could be easily inferrable at compile/load time.
Sun decided that jvm compatibility was more important to them than any performance they could gain from low-level support for parametrized types. To a certain extent, I'm happy even with just the syntax and compiler-level support for it. It'll make my code cleaner and easier to follow, anyway.
-Laxitive
The Java snail-oil salesmen try to convince you that your code will be bug free because certain classes of errors just can't happen. Again, what crap. They can happen. The only thing the JVM does is tell you precisely when they happen. Is this better than insideous bugs in C that change memory they shouldn't but don't crash as a result until later? Certainly. But the bugs still happen in Java. And they can be insideous in different ways.
;)
Ah, snail oil, it does wonders for the skin
Anyway, yes, it IS better to know WHAT is happening and WHEN it happens, than for it to blindly happen and cause problems later. This is because it bounds the code and its runtime behaviour. A NullPointerException or array out of bounds exception is not nearly as insidious as random memory getting clobbered. For one, it eliminates an entire class of possible bugs: buffer overflows. They simply wont happen. Knowing that there will be certain strict bounds on the runtime behaviour of the program is extremely important.
-Laxitive
Dammit, I should have read my preview more carefully.
So that piece of code that ends up dealing with Strings in practice, ends up doing only a single pointer check, instead of the heavyweight operations needed for a blind dynamic cache.
The bolded section should have been:
blind dynamic cast
-Laxitive
I agree with your sentiment, to a limit.
I don't think the generics in Java are very ugly at all. The interface - i.e. the syntax itself - is reasonably clean. The implementation ends up being just a fallback to the safe-dynamic-casting functionality of the JVM, but you don't know that when you actually use the generics.
I think the major benefit of generics is that developers can structure their code easier. They can tell the compiler that something is a List of Strings, and not a List of Objects. The performance aspect of it is less important.
Also, you are not considering that there are low-level VM operations that can mollify, to a significant degree, the potential performance hits caused by dynamic casting.
If you read papers related to Self (a Sun research language, based on smalltalk, using prototype-based OO semantics), you'll notice that there was a lot of work done on doing fast dynamic type-inferencing. A lot of that work has been rolled back into Java.
So let's say you have a List of Strings in Java. And there's a location in the code which grabs the first element from a list, and that first element happens to be a String all the time, or most of the time (this occurrs very frequently even in OO code - even though the strict semantics might imply polymorphic behaviour, in practice, a lot of code ends up being monomorphic anyway). The Java VM will actually figure that out at runtime, and compile a special version of the code, which does one pointer check (to see if the object you're pulling out is a string), and if that pointer check succeeds, makes a call to a custom-compiled version of the method based on that type assumption. If that check fails, then it falls back to less efficient code. So that piece of code that ends up dealing with Strings in practice, ends up doing only a single pointer check, instead of the heavyweight operations needed for a blind dynamic cache.
Even when you have limited polymorphic behaviour (code that is polymorphic over a handful of tyes), the java VM optimizes it by using polymorphic inline caches (I think this was added in the 1.5.* VMs).
And the nice thing is, this happens on the dynamic properties of the code, not just the static properties. So if you have some code that, according to the syntax, deals with plain Objects, but in practice, deals with instances of Foo a vast majority of the time.. then most of the time, it WILL execute with the type-assumption, with the added cost of a pointer check.
So yes, it would be nice if the generics system had support at the bytecode level. But it's not as much of a hit on performance as one might think. The jitter and its low-level optimizations compensate for that quite a bit.
I'm pretty sure Sun developers were aware of this when they decided not to mess with the VM bytecode definition when adding generics support to the Java language.
-Laxitive
With video games, "out of print" doesn't mean the game data is rare and valuable. It means just what it says. "Out of print".
Umm, article poster needs a clue. He sounds like quite the conscientious idiot to me.
Original game "paraphanelia" for out of print would be quite valuable yes. Even if there are newer versions of the game out. An unopened retail box of an original "tetris" for the NES would, I'm guessing, be worth a lot to some people.
The game DATA is not that valuable. It's a string of bits. Anyone can make perfect infinite duplicates of it. That tends to decrease the "rareness" aspect of it.
Look, original article poster guy, good for you that you don't download games. I don't download games either - for another reason entirely - I tend not to play them. And your suggestions for what game publishers can do are nice.
But your apparent doe-eyed naivety about copyright infringement, and the attitude... makes me wonder.
-Laxitive
IF YOU ARE NOT AN AVERAGE USER, YOU SHOULD NOT BE USING GNOME. GNOME IS INTENDED FOR A DIFFERENT TARGET AUDIENCE THAN YOU. IT IS DESIGNED FOR THE 95% OF USERS WHO ARE USING WINDOWS RIGHT NOW. IT IS DESIGNED TO PROTECT AND INSULATE USERS FROM THE UNDERLYING SYSTEM.
The problem with this suggestion is that it presents a false dichotomy: that either GNOME can be friendly for the "average" user, or it can be friendly for the "expert" user. And that it's not possible to create a user experience that works well with both types of users.
I don't agree with that premise. It _is_ possible. The problem that I think GNOME is suffering from is an ideological fanaticism that is blind to a proper sense of moderation. Anything in extremes is bad. I agree that too many choices are bad. But too few choices are also bad. But the kind of choices that the gnome devs are taking out of the system go beyond the pale.
It IS possible to express more powerful constructs and ideas in ways that are more easily understood. However, that takes a lot of effort. More effort than it takes to simply chop off an option and set a default value.
Less choices doesn't mean that something is magically easier to use or to understand. It just means that there are less choices.
-Laxitive
quick note.. is there specific reason you spell 'fuck' as 'fcuk'? I don't get it.
Do you think Ford build a bespoke car for each and every different FCUKing driver???
Do you think Burger Kind hand prepare and cook a bespoke burger for every FCUKing customer???
Do you think . . . oh this is getting boring.
See, cars and burgers exist in the physical world, where it is VERY HARD to change things. Software exists in the virtual world, where changing somethings structure is VERY EASY.
You think if people could press a button and have their car's paint color change, they wouldn't want it?
You think if people could press a button and have the layout of the dashboard, stereo, and steering wheel, change to fit their exact preferences, they wouldn't want it?
You think if people could press a button and have their burger change from beef patty to spicy chicken or any other meat they want, they wouldn't want it?
You think... hey you're right, this does get boring.
The whole FCUKing world revolves around the average person. Trust me - I'm 260lbs and 6 foot 6 inches in the buff. I KNOW how things get built and sold for Mr Average.
And wouldn't it be nice if it wasn't? If you could buy a pair of generic shirts, turn a dial to point to 6'6", and have it change to fit your size, wouldn't that be BETTER? Do you think that would be "too confusing" for the average user?
The physical world has its limitations, limitations that are not present in bitspace. Why exactly do we want to replicate inherent difficulties present in the physical world in a world where we don't have to?
You can't complain just because you are different however. The GNOME team are tageting one very big area - not you, not me, not my Gran and not the bloke next door. They are targeting a huge number of users - and that means that the average rule has to come into play.
It doesn't HAVE to come into play. Right now, the gnome developers are putting EXTRA work into making it harder for people like myself to build a proper user environment from their tools.
If they want to, thats their perogative. However, it does drive people away.
That, and I don't share the common conception that the "average" user is somehow a blumbering idiot who'll get confused by more options. The right way to deal with user ignorance is to make it easier for them to deal with powerful constructs, not to remove the powerful constructs and present fisher-price interfaces to grown-up tools.
So pack your FCUKing bags you ass-hole. Go and FCUK off and use some obscure desktop environment. Better still - return your FCUKing computer to whoever you bought it from and return to pen and FCUKing paper because you can do whatever you FCUKing want with that.
Umm, no. Computers by themselves are more than flexible enough for me. Since, you know, they _are_ turing complete when you get down to it. I'm quite happy with having to deal with the inherent limitations in computability imposed by the church/turing model. It's artificially restricted tools that get my goat.
Hold on - SHIT. Paper comes in STANDARD FCUKING SIZES. BOLLOX. Guess you're going to have to make your FCUKing own you immature little shit.
Actually, I have the ability to use the "scissors" tool to modify paper sizes to fit my needs, thank you very much.
And as a footnote . . . 12 hours a day on a FCUKing computer??? You REALLY ought to get out, have some beers and get laid. It's usually someone from the opposite sex, but hell - choose bespoke sex if you really want to.
HAHA. YOU SO FUNNY!!1! YOU MAKE SLASHDOT GEEK SEX JOKE! YOU WIN.
-Laxitive
Sure, computers are tools. But I think that statement isn't really that revealing.
My desktop is not a fucking hammer. It's not simple. The things I do with it are not simple. I stare at it for 8 hours a day at work, and several more hours after I get home. I do a million disparate, discrete things with it.
So a better analogy for it would be my ENVIRONMENT. Much like my house and my room within my house, is an environment. Now, if someone were to come in and tell me that "yeah, your room should be a cube, because it's 'simple'. And oh yeah, you can't put a fan _there_, it doesn't make sense. And you have to put your CDs _there_, because that's the most aesthetically pleasing, and your monitor goes _here_ and your desk goes _here_", I would tell them to fuck off.
I'll use strong words to try to relate how emphatic I am about this point: FUCK THE AVERAGE USER. I'm the one that has to use my computer 12 hours a day, NOT the average user. And if a desktop environment is going to make it a pain in the ass for me to get it to work the way I want it, then I'll use something else. Simple as that.
I really don't give a shit what you, or the gnome developers, or the waitress at Wendys, thinks the 'average user' can handle, or what is 'aesthetically pleasing'.. as LONG as it doesn't interfere with MY ideas on what is appropriate. If it does, then I'll pack my bags and leave.
It's sheer arrogance for someone to suggest that I don't know how best to arrange my environment.. even worse for my aesthetic tastes to be usurped in the name of an almost-mythical "average user" that the GNOME developers claim to understand intimately.
-Laxitive
Communism?
Ok, let me explain to you a little bit about the fundamentals of capitalism: private property. This is the concept that all other constructs in capitalism arise from. When you own something - i.e. it is your property - then you control it. A second concept is that of contracts. Contracts establish the basis for trade, exchange of value, and creation of wealth. A contract usually involves you agreeing to provide something of value to another person, while extracting in exchange, something of value from them.
If you're following so far, please keep in mind that the above are all standard capitalist constructs.
So let's examine the GPL in this context. You wrote some code. You release it under the GPL to person X. At that point, you have established a contract. The stipulations of that contract involve the following:
you give X the following rights:
X can use the application your code generates.
X can look at your code.
X can change your code.
you require of X, the following concessions:
X can give away, or sell, your code to anyone, as long as they transfer it under the GPL.
X can give away, or sell, your code with their modifications, to anyone, as long as they transfer it under the GPL.
That, my friend, is a contract. Perfectly well within the rules of most sane capitalist systems.
And you call it analagous to 'Communism'?
For comparison purposes, let's take a look at most commercial licenses:
When you buy a commercial license you get the right to:
Use the application associated with the license..
On one computer.
Can you redistribute to someone else? No.
Can you install in more than one place? No.
Can you look at source code? No.
Can you change source code? No.
If you think the GPL is analagous to communism, then I wonder what you consider commercial licenses to be analagous to. Fascism perhaps? Maybe despotism? Totalitarianism?
Enlighten me.
-Laxitive
-Laxitive
I dunno. My family, which was an Indian immigrant family living in the US, didn't have much in the way of problems immigrating to Canada. I think all in all, the process took less than two years. The barrier of entry to become a part of canadian society, is, in my experience, much lower than in the states.
Even getting citizenship in Canada is a breeze compared to the states, especially for us "third world escapees". After I had lived here for 5 years, I applied for citizenship, and within a year and half, had gone through the entire process.
I don't know where you're getting those statements from, but they definitely don't reflect my experience with Canadian immigration. I find the bureaucracy here to be much more tempered than in the states. Not nearly as much red tape to deal with.
-Laxitive
Algorithms are just a certain kind of information.
Consider a GA system that operated on bitstrings that are considered inputs to a universal turing machine. Then, the information created is an alrogithm.
True, when designing a GA system to do that, you might have problems in creating test cases for evaluating solution fitness, but that doesn't detract from the point.
There has been research done on using GAs on lisp-style expressions, using subexpression substitution instead of crossovers, to generate useful algorithms. GAs aren't just for parameter optimization, although they are particularly suited to parameter optimization problems.
-Laxitive
If you had studies GAs, you would know that GAs do "create" new information that doesn't exist in the original solution set (i.e. any given generation of potential solutions).
GA systems both propogate "good" information, as well as generate and test new information incrementally across generations. Of course, this is done within whatever limitations you choose to impose on the solution set (i.e. if you're using a fixed N-bit string to represent entities in the solution space, then you'll search across all 2^N possible solutions in the N-bit string space).
Fundamentally, GAs are just a way of searching a solution space for good solutions. They are slow, but can tackle a more diverse set of problems easier than the traditional backpropogation-based neural network. I would consider neural networks to be more in line with your description of an 'adapting' learning algorithm.
The following analogy can only be taken so far, but you can compare backpropogation-based neural networks to be akin to hill-climbing algorithms - you start from one solution, move some limited distance towards what you think is a better solution. For a neural network with N vertices, you can think of neural network learning as hill-climbing in an N-dimensional space over whatever field used to specify edge weights.
GAs, on the other hand, do a much more disparate search over any solution space. And it is surprising how well it finds near-optimal solutions even for problems where the relation between solutions is complex and non-intiuitive (e.g. minimums for seemingly chaotic functions).
-Laxitive
So, I read the article. And the author makes a reasonable point about newbies being more accustomed to the spatial metaphor. I'm not going to dispute that. It might or might not be a valid claim.
The question I want to ask is: what about those of us that are NOT newbies? The author states early on that he tries to avoid anything that would expose the filesystem tree abstraction to the end user. Maybe you could argue that it is good for newbie users, maybe not. But it DEFINITELY isn't good for non-newbie users.
Look, the filesystem is a TREE. That's what it IS. Any metaphor that you try to make the filesystem fit some other pattern will only take you so far. A tree is a very nice, clean structure. A lot of its expressive power is lost when you try to impose some strange alternate metaphor on it. When you deal with the filesystem as a tree, any operation that maps well onto trees, you can map well onto filesystems. It's a powerful abstraction.
And quite frankly, don't we WANT newbies to be learning the actual behavioural properties of the tools they use, rather than an artificially constructed interface which we deem them more able to use? Won't this lead to more intelligent users?
Personally, I think it's insulting to people to say that they can't "deal" with basic abstract structures. It's not THAT complicated guys. And we're not that smart for knowing how filesystems work. MOST people in the world can grok the concept perfectly fine, you just have to teach them. Perhaps some people feel threatened by that?
I was an avid gnome user. I stopped using it once I noticed the clear trend for gnome to assume that I'm dumb. That I can't deal with certain choices - which are better made by the developers than by me. Limiting excess in choice is fine.. but there is a fine line between reasonable limits, and top-down control. I think gnome crossed the line a ways back.
Keep your spatial browser. I'll keep my trees.
-Laxitive
As an Indian, this is my official take:
This is gay.. seriously gay.
I'm at a loss for words. Someone needs to find the focus group that came up with this, and remove them from the gene pool.
Spiderman with a dhoti? What the fuck? What is wrong with the world today?
-Laxitive
For a commercial music, you want to try to offend as few people as possible, while still playing interesting music that people won't mind listening to. Generally you want it to be instrumental, apolitical, and good.
You don't want to be playing The Clash or blaring Radiohead out to the world.
Downtempo electronica and acid jazz fit that bill perfectly. They have a certain amount of respectability because they generally sample jazz and mix it with electronic beats and modulations to produce very "chill out" music. It's not hard on the ears, it's not loud. It's quiet and relaxing, and still good. The nice thing is, there's a lot of it that is purely instrumental. No annoying vocals to deal with, so you have to neither risk alienating people with controversial vocals, nor dumb down vocals to the point where they are stupefyingly trite and banal.
For concrete suggestions, try the following:
Suzuki by Tosca
Bricolage by Amon Tobin
Another choice you have is to play straight up good Jazz. Put on some Coltrane or Miles Davis or Herbie Hancock or something. There's no fucking way anybody can be offended by that music. It's all instrumental, and it's all rock solid.
Jazz and jazz-based electronica seem to be a perfect fit for what you're looking for in terms of: apolitical, instrumental, and good.
-Laxitive
I'm a Canadian citizen, and I'll be voting for the first time in the upcoming election. I realize that technology issues are important and all. But let's get this straight: there are MUCH more important issues on the table, and on the line, in this election.
The Liberals, in their stupendous arrogance, have gone and done a lot of stupid things. They've commited fraud on the scale of a hundred million dollars in Quebec. They've let the health care system atrophie and waste away. In short, they've fucked up.
But that's not the big problem. The big problem is that by fucking up as they have, they've pissed off a lot of people and driven votes toward the new Conservative party (leader: Stephen Harper - AKA Bush Lite). The problem is, these guys have come closer than they ever have to winning the election. And that's bad. This problem trumps a LOT of technology issues. If it had been up to these people, we would have jumped wholeheartedly in with the US on the royal clusterfuck that is the Iraq War.
The Alliance platform can be described as thus:
Massive tax cuts
Massive increases in military spending
"Free Votes" on the issue of gay marriage (which in practicality means that if they form Parliament, they'll pass some notwithstanding-clause backed bill banning gay marriages)
Generally antagonistic views on abortion (no definite statement by the party that they are not going to allow bills trying to roll back time on the abortion issue).
It's a close race, and there's a lot at stake. If the conservatives get into power, we're looking at a future of exteme debt, insane and useless military spending, longterm delay in the ability of homosexuals to get equal rights, potential issues with abortion rights, and the slow death of the social services that makes this country such a nice place to live in.
For all his faults, Martin (Paul Martin - Liberal leader and current prime minister) - has shown that he can actually manage the budget and churn out a significant surplus (at a cost to services, but regardless, it's a notable achievement). We can't afford to waste this money on military spending and corporate tax cuts.
Not to say that I love the liberals though. If the PC was still together (the old, more moderate conservative party), I would have voted for them this election. I'm disgusted with the way the Liberals have behavd.
But being disgusted is one thing. Being scared to death is another. And I'm scared to death of a Conservative majority. They'll take us right down the shitter.
Anyway, I'm sure there are equally strong opinions on the matter from the Conservative supporters.
What I'm trying to say is: there are bigger issues in this election than technology. Much bigger issues.
-Laxitive
The concept of a 'winner' is not too emphasized in most Go games, so I don't think it's really that important. It's not like chess or something where you work towards one well defined goal (checkmate). In go, if you're worse, then that doesn't mean that you still can't capture and control portions of the board.
The fact that there are multiple scoring systems emphasizes the fact that the game is not about the score you get.
In most games you play, there are areas of the board which you are happy with, because you were able to play well, and make headway into enemy territory and capture territory, or successfully defend against a well planned attack.. and then there are areas you feel that you did badly in.
But regardless, when you are done with the game, the finished board state reflects both your triumphs and your failures. It's not an all-or-nothing mentality that occurs with games like chess, where it doesn't matter how well you executed some plan, if you still end up getting checkmated.
The scoring is an afterthought to me. An exercise at the end to mark some numbers down. Most of the time, I don't even do it. It's more fun to talk with the opponent about the progress of the game, and explain your strategy, and listen to his strategy, and compare the results of the clash of ideas on an informal basis based on the layout of the endgame board.
-Laxitive