Yes, I always search groups.google.com as well, and I almost always do find someone has the exact problem that I'm experiencing. But 25% of the time, no one has responded to that person, and I'm out of luck. It's a bit frustrating.
In the 1920's (if memory serves me correctly), Olaf Stapledon took a look at the issues of the future of humanity in his classic sci-fi novel The Last and First Men, which is certainly one of the most unique books in science fiction. Genetic engineering plays an important part of the book. I highly recommend it to anyone that wishes to ponder the relationship of science and exploration to the fate of mankind.
I'd say you are wrong, but I don't need to. The last boom already proved you wrong. With the last boom being about the internet, geographical location was still a huge factor, in fact even bigger than before.
You want other reasons why the internet is not a substitue for proximity? Read the Speech Communication research into the effectiviness of e-mail and telephone compared to face to face communication.
Proximity has definitely not become less relevant.
I'd have to agree with you, and add that OO db's are generally fairly buggy. SQL has had so much time to get the bugs worked out, you can really see the difference when using enterprise software. OO db's get corrupted all the time.
I've worked for two companies now that wrote products using OO db's. Eventually both companies realized they couldn't continue like that, and they both had to spend a lot of effort porting to the code to use SQL.
There really is a difference between scripting and programming. Scripting languages tend to be heavily dependent on compiled code. Where would perl be today if all the modules had to be written in perl? Instead, getting a module from CPAN, there's a good chance you are actually getting C code and a perl wrapper.
Another difference: type safety, programming languages have more stuff being caught at compile time than in runtime, then scripting languages like perl do.
Another differene: scripting languages make the common things easier, while programming languages opt for generality and extensibility. Compare writing to a file in perl, versus Java.
There are indeed differences. But that doesn't mean one is better than the other. I remember a joke that circulated around the internet about the evolution of a programmer. In the beginning was the beginning programmer with "10 HELLO WORLD". Then came C, with #include's, a main function that printed "hello world", etc. Then C++ with a #includes, a class, a main function. Then came COM with about 5 pages of code dedicated to making a COM service that outputted "hello world". Finally, the last stage, a grand master programmer: "10 HELLO WORLD".
You forgot one thing: The internationalization on OmniWeb is the best I've ever seen. Not just the fact you can get the UI in a bunch of languages, but it handles international web pages very nicely.
What? Of course iTunes has a standard menubar at the top. It MIGHT not have one in it's collapsed mode, which is what you might be thinking of. I rarely run in that mode, so I can't say for sure.
I've been saying the same things about skinnable interfaces for a while now. I've never found one that is acceptable. Look at xmms and winamp skins. I'd say 70% are just plain ugly, 30% are good to beautify, and 100% (as far as I've seen) are unusable. When they have text at all, they have tiny unreadable fonts. They have buttons that don't look like buttons, and they are bitmapped so you can't resize it like a normal app.
When I got a Mac and started using iTunes, I was a much happier person.
I agree with you in theory, but I think that health is not purely a private issue. After all, if more people are unhealthy, I do get adversely affected. My health insurance premiums may go up, for example.
I'd agree with the fact that the health reason alone is not enough to justify banning the Segway, but I do believe it is an argument with some validitity.
I'm sorry, did you have a point in there? Because I certainly didn't advocate restricting life (actually I was promoting longetivity), or liberty (regulation of public roads are already well established, and only the looniest they are breaches of liberty), or the pursuit of happiness (could apply just as well to pedestrians who don't want to be afraid of being run over by a Segway).
Um, I needn't tell you that insurance is privatized, so how do people tell the insurance companies what to do? What they can do is to tell the government what to do, since the government's purpose is to serve the people.
And don't get so upset about me deciding what you should be doing. Restricting what vehicles can operate on public property is hardly as intrusive as you seem to think.
Actually, this being a democracy, it is the "fucking business" of people to decide to promote some forms of transit over others. And it makes sense too, to promote healthier living over non-healthy living. Sorry you have such a problem with it. Burn on.
One feature I really liked, that exists in a few places such as VC++ and edebug (for emacs), is the ability to jump around in the code and set values at runtime. You can do a lot with these two features, from running the same code over and over at runtime with different values, to skipping over a part of the code you consider problematic and seeing if it helps.
Re:Worst butchering of a book I've ever seen
on
Solaris: Another View
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You are correct, but basically to make an accurate portrayal of the book would be extremely long and probably boring. This movie does the right thing - it focuses on one aspect of the book, and hints at the rest. If it did too much, it would surely lose focus.
I've read the book (first), the Russian version, and then this one. I've read just about everything you can read of Lem's that has made it into English. I'd say the current movie is, on the whole, a good movie. It does indeed have something to say, but unfortunately leaves out a lot about the planet. It thankfully cuts out a lot of crap that the Russian version had in, but the Russian version had better direction and a better editing. The best to read is the book, but even that is flawed, coming as a translation to an abridgement of the French version of the novel.
I think the movie accurately reflects Lem's theme, in fact his constant theme running through most of his works, which is about the unknowablness of certain things. In Solaris, it is both other's (Kris' wife, who only exists as a memory of his perception), and the planet itself. As all three versions had in it the statement that we search for contact, but all we really want is a mirror. I've always thought that this is a more mature way to look at contact, as opposed to stuff like "Close Encounters" or "Contact".
Yeah, don't believe in any technology that tracks eye movements. It's just too hard right now. It's basically only possible if the user calibrates the eye tracker at the start of the sessions, and then does not move their head at all through the rest of the session. A user moving their head throws off the whole calibration.
When I used to work with eye tracking (not that long ago), the user must be in a piece of equipment that is similar to the one the contact doctor uses on you when he wants to test for glaucoma. That was indeed a step up from the setup that require a "bite-bar", in which the users teeth are sunk into a mold previously taken of their teeth, making sure their head does not move even the slightest bit.
It would be quite amusing for someone to make a 3d version of nethack, yet have it use 3d text instead of actual character graphics. Can you imagine, in the flickering light of a dungeon, the sight of a huge W jumping out from behind the shadows?
Why don't we write server code in C++? Because it tends to crash more (due to programmer error). Microsoft's ISAPI filters are to be in written in C++, and, from my limited experience, they are a complete pain. One bug in an ISAPI filter can bring down the entire server.
Also, Java is far from a scripting language. It basically runs natively, due to the hotspot compilers. I say basically because there are still situations in which sections of the Java code cannot be compiled, but this should not have too much of an effect, and with each release things are getting better.
Office program expose the API. To get the text out of a MS Word program, even if you have Windows and Office, you have to start up Word, which is really inefficient.
Many programs that need to parse the documents still must resort to manual methods. If you were writing a program that needed to access the text from these files (a search engine, for example), you would want to crack it yourself. Using Word to do it would almost certainly be slower, and if you use the COM API's, you are restricting your program to only run on Windows. In fact no search engine that I know of uses COM to crack a document.
I actually use both regularly, and Chimera feels about twice as fast for me. However, I usually still use Omniweb since it looks better, and has better support for international webpages.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I always search groups.google.com as well, and I almost always do find someone has the exact problem that I'm experiencing. But 25% of the time, no one has responded to that person, and I'm out of luck. It's a bit frustrating.
In the 1920's (if memory serves me correctly), Olaf Stapledon took a look at the issues of the future of humanity in his classic sci-fi novel The Last and First Men, which is certainly one of the most unique books in science fiction. Genetic engineering plays an important part of the book. I highly recommend it to anyone that wishes to ponder the relationship of science and exploration to the fate of mankind.
I'd say you are wrong, but I don't need to. The last boom already proved you wrong. With the last boom being about the internet, geographical location was still a huge factor, in fact even bigger than before.
For an explanation of why, read the The Social Life of Information.
You want other reasons why the internet is not a substitue for proximity? Read the Speech Communication research into the effectiviness of e-mail and telephone compared to face to face communication.
Proximity has definitely not become less relevant.
I'd have to agree with you, and add that OO db's are generally fairly buggy. SQL has had so much time to get the bugs worked out, you can really see the difference when using enterprise software. OO db's get corrupted all the time.
I've worked for two companies now that wrote products using OO db's. Eventually both companies realized they couldn't continue like that, and they both had to spend a lot of effort porting to the code to use SQL.
Yes, it should be. But in my defense, I haven't reached the "Grand Master Programmer" stage, so I can't be expected to know that.
It was a variation on that one. Thanks for finding it.
There really is a difference between scripting and programming. Scripting languages tend to be heavily dependent on compiled code. Where would perl be today if all the modules had to be written in perl? Instead, getting a module from CPAN, there's a good chance you are actually getting C code and a perl wrapper.
Another difference: type safety, programming languages have more stuff being caught at compile time than in runtime, then scripting languages like perl do.
Another differene: scripting languages make the common things easier, while programming languages opt for generality and extensibility. Compare writing to a file in perl, versus Java.
There are indeed differences. But that doesn't mean one is better than the other. I remember a joke that circulated around the internet about the evolution of a programmer. In the beginning was the beginning programmer with "10 HELLO WORLD". Then came C, with #include's, a main function that printed "hello world", etc. Then C++ with a #includes, a class, a main function. Then came COM with about 5 pages of code dedicated to making a COM service that outputted "hello world". Finally, the last stage, a grand master programmer: "10 HELLO WORLD".
You forgot one thing: The internationalization on OmniWeb is the best I've ever seen. Not just the fact you can get the UI in a bunch of languages, but it handles international web pages very nicely.
If you bothered to read my post, I explained why all the XMMS skins are unusable (and said the same criticisms apply to WinAmp). Learn to read.
What? Of course iTunes has a standard menubar at the top. It MIGHT not have one in it's collapsed mode, which is what you might be thinking of. I rarely run in that mode, so I can't say for sure.
I've been saying the same things about skinnable interfaces for a while now. I've never found one that is acceptable. Look at xmms and winamp skins. I'd say 70% are just plain ugly, 30% are good to beautify, and 100% (as far as I've seen) are unusable. When they have text at all, they have tiny unreadable fonts. They have buttons that don't look like buttons, and they are bitmapped so you can't resize it like a normal app.
When I got a Mac and started using iTunes, I was a much happier person.
I agree with you in theory, but I think that health is not purely a private issue. After all, if more people are unhealthy, I do get adversely affected. My health insurance premiums may go up, for example.
I'd agree with the fact that the health reason alone is not enough to justify banning the Segway, but I do believe it is an argument with some validitity.
I'm sorry, did you have a point in there? Because I certainly didn't advocate restricting life (actually I was promoting longetivity), or liberty (regulation of public roads are already well established, and only the looniest they are breaches of liberty), or the pursuit of happiness (could apply just as well to pedestrians who don't want to be afraid of being run over by a Segway).
So, tell me. What was your point?
Um, I needn't tell you that insurance is privatized, so how do people tell the insurance companies what to do? What they can do is to tell the government what to do, since the government's purpose is to serve the people.
And don't get so upset about me deciding what you should be doing. Restricting what vehicles can operate on public property is hardly as intrusive as you seem to think.
Actually, this being a democracy, it is the "fucking business" of people to decide to promote some forms of transit over others. And it makes sense too, to promote healthier living over non-healthy living. Sorry you have such a problem with it. Burn on.
One feature I really liked, that exists in a few places such as VC++ and edebug (for emacs), is the ability to jump around in the code and set values at runtime. You can do a lot with these two features, from running the same code over and over at runtime with different values, to skipping over a part of the code you consider problematic and seeing if it helps.
You are correct, but basically to make an accurate portrayal of the book would be extremely long and probably boring. This movie does the right thing - it focuses on one aspect of the book, and hints at the rest. If it did too much, it would surely lose focus.
I've read the book (first), the Russian version, and then this one. I've read just about everything you can read of Lem's that has made it into English. I'd say the current movie is, on the whole, a good movie. It does indeed have something to say, but unfortunately leaves out a lot about the planet. It thankfully cuts out a lot of crap that the Russian version had in, but the Russian version had better direction and a better editing. The best to read is the book, but even that is flawed, coming as a translation to an abridgement of the French version of the novel.
I think the movie accurately reflects Lem's theme, in fact his constant theme running through most of his works, which is about the unknowablness of certain things. In Solaris, it is both other's (Kris' wife, who only exists as a memory of his perception), and the planet itself. As all three versions had in it the statement that we search for contact, but all we really want is a mirror.
I've always thought that this is a more mature way to look at contact, as opposed to stuff like "Close Encounters" or "Contact".
Yeah, don't believe in any technology that tracks eye movements. It's just too hard right now. It's basically only possible if the user calibrates the eye tracker at the start of the sessions, and then does not move their head at all through the rest of the session. A user moving their head throws off the whole calibration.
When I used to work with eye tracking (not that long ago), the user must be in a piece of equipment that is similar to the one the contact doctor uses on you when he wants to test for glaucoma. That was indeed a step up from the setup that require a "bite-bar", in which the users teeth are sunk into a mold previously taken of their teeth, making sure their head does not move even the slightest bit.
It would be quite amusing for someone to make a 3d version of nethack, yet have it use 3d text instead of actual character graphics. Can you imagine, in the flickering light of a dungeon, the sight of a huge W jumping out from behind the shadows?
Why don't we write server code in C++? Because it tends to crash more (due to programmer error). Microsoft's ISAPI filters are to be in written in C++, and, from my limited experience, they are a complete pain. One bug in an ISAPI filter can bring down the entire server.
Also, Java is far from a scripting language. It basically runs natively, due to the hotspot compilers. I say basically because there are still situations in which sections of the Java code cannot be compiled, but this should not have too much of an effect, and with each release things are getting better.
Office program expose the API. To get the text out of a MS Word program, even if you have Windows and Office, you have to start up Word, which is really inefficient.
Many programs that need to parse the documents still must resort to manual methods. If you were writing a program that needed to access the text from these files (a search engine, for example), you would want to crack it yourself. Using Word to do it would almost certainly be slower, and if you use the COM API's, you are restricting your program to only run on Windows. In fact no search engine that I know of uses COM to crack a document.
The XML will be a vast improvement.
I actually use both regularly, and Chimera feels about twice as fast for me. However, I usually still use Omniweb since it looks better, and has better support for international webpages.
He has two more lives left!