Since the legality of things is determined by politicians who are humans, setting one's moral compass by it is about as valid as setting one's watch by blowing on dandelions.
People who attempt set their moral compass in such a way are often vexed when laws come to pass which are contradictory to their true internal moral compass. Things like the banning of prayers at school sporting events and being charged with assault for defending yourself from robbery tend to upset these people.
I'm not saying there is any 'one true morality' but those who model theirs after the laws have no imagination and are abdicating their responsibility of humans. Laws exist to reflect morality (albeit imperfectly) not vice versa.
Motion blur will allow you to get away with lower framerates to a degree. After all, it does what your eyes do which is time average over a number of frames.
I do agree that 9fps is pretty shitty. I figure you'd need to be talking 20 at the extreme lowest before you're any better off than just pumping out the framerates that are available today
Do you know anyone who might want to tackle
such a project?
The correct question is "Would I be better off writing this with vi or Emacs". In the open source world, the idea is not to get people to give you free software, it's that people want something done so they do it. If your idea is interesting enough, other people will get involved.
Side note: I ban calculators in my Physical Chemistry tests. I'm thinking about giving extra credit to anyone who
can do the problems with a slide rule.
Reminds me of one of my maths exams. I turned up late and I had forgotten my calculator. On the front of the exam paper it said "log tables available on request" so I asked for one and proceeded to complete the whole of the exam using them. It was only afterwards that I found out that you could ask for a calculator too. Doh.
you'd have to try extremely hard to write an unportable program.
Ok. i'm not disagreeing with you there
i'll bet you most java programs won't cope properly when the path element separator is any possible character. (i
remember a system where '.' was the path separator.
But that is a problem with the program as written, not with the interpreter. Say I had a file called blue/beard.txt (note: not a file called beard.txt in the directory blue). How do I ask Infernal to open it for me? I admit this is a specious argument but it could happen.
in the inferno way, all you have to do is define a two-way mapping between file names in the host system and file
names seen by programs inside inferno. as inferno uses Unicode throughout, you've got enough characters to play
with.
Except as I say, if / is a valid filename character, then you have to mess around with escape characters or map some other character to it (which could be a pain if the / is meaningful
that's rubbish, i'm afraid. in C, everything is transparent. the path separator is transparent, the endianness of the
machine is transparent, in fact almost everything is transparent.
Dare you assume that I don't need to know the endianness of the machine? A lot of what I do is getting systems to interoperate. Say I have a program, compiled for two different machines. It saves its data in the endianness of the host machine (just does a memory dump or such). Now I want to write a (binary) portable program to run on both machines to interpret these data files. Without knowing the endianness of the machine, I'm stuffed.
it's possible to write portable programs in ANSI C, if you try hard, but that doesn't mean that C is a particularly
portable language.
For what it is, it doesn't do too bad. Besides, I wasn't saying "If you have transparentness, you have a wonderfully portable language", I was saying that it is an important factor.
it's not handy for portability, it's handy for porting. programs written under c++ on winnt won't be any more or
less portable than programs written under other c++ platforms.
I meant source code portability, not binary
in inferno, all programs are portable, even if they're badly written.
Whether they'll work correctly or not is another matter. Is it not possible to make incorrect assumptions about the virtual hardware (such as whether there is a graphics interface available or not) or is the virtual hardware interface strictly defined?
Note that I'm not trying to dis Inferno overall, I'm just not sure that the Inferno method of path handling is "correct". Heck, I'd even say that assuming a traversable directory tree is suspect (What a program should really call is system.UserFileInterface and let the underlying system handle it).
The first one will work in Inferno on ALL platforms
Heck, it's just a matter of abstraction. If you want to be able to use / then subclass the File object or something. And you know, there may be a filesystem where / is a valid part of a filename, then where is your Inferno? The only safe way for platform portability is to have everything transparent.
Interestingly, using c++ on winnt, you can use either the '/' or '\' as a path separator which is quite handy for portability.
Is that activity at ZDnet has peaked and settled. They've had all their startup excitement and honeymoon period and now things are ticking over and running smoothly. People have a tendency to project their situation on to others. Just as e-mail saw the growth of the internet into a worldwide infrastructure and the web gre that worldwide infrastructure to be a worldwide structure, so a new "killer app" will bring yet another surge in internet growth.
Back when consoles first died out, you could buy 8-bit computers for ~200-400 UKP (300-600 dollars) which were in the same price range as consoles. The games were of a similar quality, often incorporated greater complexity and were cheaper. Consoles lost
Then came the rise of the PC. A typical entry level PC has always been around 1000 UKP (that's $1500). Prices have stayed stable for a long time. But finally they are starting to creap down and with inflation over the intervening couple of decades, $1500 now is probably not worth much more than $600 was then. PCs have become cheap, real cheap and while the games cost more than the 8 bit ones did, the prices for those are coming down and budget games just put the icing on the cake.
I'm not saying consoles won't make it but they have a struggle ahead and the x-box (though I hate the idea) will probably just make things more complex.
Regardless of the state of the Linux desktop, Corel did just drop their distribution into the marketplace. Those who know Linux would probably go for the distributions they know, those who don't probably wouldn't know that they should buy it. I suspect that any ten random slashdotters have probably done more Linux advocacy than Corel did.
If they'd have released Corel Draw for Linux, I would have bought it (really for Linux mind. Wine is fine for running win32 native stuff but I don't believe it justifies "for Linux")
I used to have great success running downloaded binaries under different kernels, different distributions. Of course, with kde and gnome on the scene it now seems like everything requires you to download last-night's version of the libraries. But someone writing commercial software should probably be able to avoid that annoyance with a bit of thought.
For printing, Corel could have done postscript, which is the "standard" for Unix or they could have done what people once did and include drivers with the application or heck, they could have developed a general Linux printing solution. Open Source is like that.
Agree with you on the Netscape part. Though when netscpae was being developed, the availability of non-commercial dynamically linkable widget sets was very sparse. KDE and Gnome can help that but things need to calm down a bit and people have to stop writing their code to use up-to-the-minute libraries and allow admins a bit of breathing space between upgrades.
although $5 million in cash and 20% in the company that's doing the
purchase.
Hmm, nice use of the language. Spelling I can accept, grammar is annoying put usually livable but can we at least have the articles have sentences that make sense please.
Oh, they constructed some real good messes with their several "We're changing your area code. But don't worry, we won't ever have to do it again" ph/one/ day fiascos. There were companies which hadn't changed over their advertising from the first one by the time the second one came around.
The point is that the play button is an icon. You press it, just like you would press an icon in a GUI. Even icons in
GUIs are labeled. The difference is that the CD player isn't just a box with no labels or buttons that you have to
remember the commands for
OK. But a CD player is called on only to do a small number of tasks. Most cd player apps for computers duplicate a similar interface. I think the issue becomes how you handle more complex stuff.
You should be able to enter 2" by 1" in coreldraw.
Yes, that is my point. I am not trying to say "CLI only, no GUI", I'm just arguing against the opposite opinion.
You should be able to say to your computer, "format the hard drive - make it 1/3 of available space."
Fine. But that's not what I said. 1/3 is an exact quantity, I included the word "about" which has no real meaning to a computer
The software interfaces do not properly model the way that humans accomplish tasks.
Humans accomplish tasks according to the interface and tools given them. this happens in real life also. We use improvisation and lateral thinking all the time. We are flexible, may as well take advantage of it. Let computers do what they're good at, and we, us. Don't cripple them just so we can be a bit more lazy.
I mean, look at the Easel, KDE and Gnome - Brand new user interface layers, and what are they? More of the
same old thing - with different pictures and colors.
Oh look, it's the "Unix is crap cos it's 20 years old" argument with a different subject. While not being a huge fan of GUIs, I have to say that the reason things are duplicated and persist is because they work. We seem to be in an age where we have gone beyond change being good but it's become compulsory.
Humans are NOT exact things - computer/human interfaces should be designed to interact with humans, not
humans having to be trained to become explicit and precise.
Computers are a tool and tools should be designed with the job at hand. I don't complain when I'm fixing my car that my screwdriver should be able to prevent me having to lie down on the ground under the car and thread my arm through a narrow path between the engine and the firewall, nor do i complain that the whole engine should be dismantleable by undoing a nut on the top of the engine. Humans are by far the most flexible thing in the known universe. Sure computers shouldn't be programmed by dip switches anymore but there is a middle ground and it's not to have computers do all our thinking for us.
Well, I remember hearing a while back that AMD was going to be integrating Gravis Ultrasound technology into their processors. Nothing came of it it appears. Gravis no longer do soundcards. Shame as it was a nice little unit (and in groovy red too)
There's a little triangle
pointing to the right, you know that it means play, it doesn't say play
Yes it does. It doesn't say it in written English but you've learnt that a little triangle pointing to the right means "play". It could reasonably mean "eject tape" or "move player three inches to the right". It says play just as much as the combination of the P,L,A and Y symbols.
and you don't command the player to "spin
up the motor, focus the laser and detector assembly for optimal signal/noise ratio and start reading", you push the
play button.
See, you just proved my point.
Incidently, it's been shown that accomplished readers recognise whole words rather than actually "read" them so in a certain sense, for these people, words become like pictograms anyway.
but it would be interesting to
see you create an illustration with a CLI
pov-ray creates it's images based on an interpreted language (Yes, it's not a CLI as such but neither would you create an image with a graphical shell so I took your allusion to somewhere sane).
Many times with a technical illustration, I've wished I could create an image with words ("box 0,0,3.5,2;circle 3.5,2,1" would be so much easier than "try and draw a box to the right dimensions with mouse, try and center circle somwhere on the top right corner of the box. Guides are a help but start to fall down with anything complex.
Which might be easier, saying "move the mauve sofa 3 feet from the south wall and 2 feet from the east
wall. Place the couch facing north, with a 30 degree angle from the east wall," or "Put that {point} there {point}
and aim it towards there {point}. So, the command line is not the most natural way to interact with a computer for
all cases.
Of course, you really want to be saying to a computer "put that file somewhere around my home directory" or "Format that hard drive, make it about a third of the drive" or "Cad program, make that sewer pipe about this long" (holds hands apart).
Computers are an exact thing, they need to be handled in an exact way. The command line provides that exact way. The number of times I've been using Corel Draw and wished I could just type in "box, 2in x 1in" rather than have to click and fiddle with the mouse, having it jump 0.1" bigger when I release the mouse button. Angles in circles are even worse.
Think about Star Trek. How does the computer know when a crew member is talking to it or to another person?
Duh, it's a story, it's *not real* dummy.
If you want some semi-plausible explanation, try that as I recall, they actually address the thing "Computer do this"
And back to your point about instructions in foreign language, you have to remember that the conventions of pictograms are a learned thing as well. There's nothing "natural" about an arrow meaning "this direction" (ask any Floridian) and if you've ever tried to learn something by watching someone do it, if they don't describe what they're doing, it's very easy to get it wrong (e.g. "Insert this rod into this hole but make sure it's the end with the blue mark". If you weren't told, you may not have noticed the blue mark )
There's a reason that Macdonalds cash registers have pictures of food on it while any serious programmer works in words. And that is because words convey more information in a less ambiguous way.
Slashdot Mirror
Or something
Rich
No, that was last year under the old version numbering system. Now it's "William Henry Gates 1955"
Rich
People who attempt set their moral compass in such a way are often vexed when laws come to pass which are contradictory to their true internal moral compass. Things like the banning of prayers at school sporting events and being charged with assault for defending yourself from robbery tend to upset these people.
I'm not saying there is any 'one true morality' but those who model theirs after the laws have no imagination and are abdicating their responsibility of humans. Laws exist to reflect morality (albeit imperfectly) not vice versa.
Rich
Rich
I do agree that 9fps is pretty shitty. I figure you'd need to be talking 20 at the extreme lowest before you're any better off than just pumping out the framerates that are available today
Rich
The correct question is "Would I be better off writing this with vi or Emacs". In the open source world, the idea is not to get people to give you free software, it's that people want something done so they do it. If your idea is interesting enough, other people will get involved.
Rich
Rich
The little man who rejected your form because you filled out a box wrong is in the heart of every cop who wrote out a speeding ticket.
Reminds me of one of my maths exams. I turned up late and I had forgotten my calculator. On the front of the exam paper it said "log tables available on request" so I asked for one and proceeded to complete the whole of the exam using them. It was only afterwards that I found out that you could ask for a calculator too. Doh.
Rich
Ok. i'm not disagreeing with you there
i'll bet you most java programs won't cope properly when the path element separator is any possible character. (i remember a system where '.' was the path separator.
But that is a problem with the program as written, not with the interpreter. Say I had a file called blue/beard.txt (note: not a file called beard.txt in the directory blue). How do I ask Infernal to open it for me? I admit this is a specious argument but it could happen.
in the inferno way, all you have to do is define a two-way mapping between file names in the host system and file names seen by programs inside inferno. as inferno uses Unicode throughout, you've got enough characters to play with.
Except as I say, if / is a valid filename character, then you have to mess around with escape characters or map some other character to it (which could be a pain if the / is meaningful
that's rubbish, i'm afraid. in C, everything is transparent. the path separator is transparent, the endianness of the machine is transparent, in fact almost everything is transparent.
Dare you assume that I don't need to know the endianness of the machine? A lot of what I do is getting systems to interoperate. Say I have a program, compiled for two different machines. It saves its data in the endianness of the host machine (just does a memory dump or such). Now I want to write a (binary) portable program to run on both machines to interpret these data files. Without knowing the endianness of the machine, I'm stuffed.
it's possible to write portable programs in ANSI C, if you try hard, but that doesn't mean that C is a particularly portable language.
For what it is, it doesn't do too bad. Besides, I wasn't saying "If you have transparentness, you have a wonderfully portable language", I was saying that it is an important factor.
it's not handy for portability, it's handy for porting. programs written under c++ on winnt won't be any more or less portable than programs written under other c++ platforms.
I meant source code portability, not binary
in inferno, all programs are portable, even if they're badly written.
Whether they'll work correctly or not is another matter. Is it not possible to make incorrect assumptions about the virtual hardware (such as whether there is a graphics interface available or not) or is the virtual hardware interface strictly defined?
Note that I'm not trying to dis Inferno overall, I'm just not sure that the Inferno method of path handling is "correct". Heck, I'd even say that assuming a traversable directory tree is suspect (What a program should really call is system.UserFileInterface and let the underlying system handle it).
Rich
Heck, it's just a matter of abstraction. If you want to be able to use / then subclass the File object or something. And you know, there may be a filesystem where / is a valid part of a filename, then where is your Inferno? The only safe way for platform portability is to have everything transparent.
Interestingly, using c++ on winnt, you can use either the '/' or '\' as a path separator which is quite handy for portability.
Rich
Rich
Then came the rise of the PC. A typical entry level PC has always been around 1000 UKP (that's $1500). Prices have stayed stable for a long time. But finally they are starting to creap down and with inflation over the intervening couple of decades, $1500 now is probably not worth much more than $600 was then. PCs have become cheap, real cheap and while the games cost more than the 8 bit ones did, the prices for those are coming down and budget games just put the icing on the cake.
I'm not saying consoles won't make it but they have a struggle ahead and the x-box (though I hate the idea) will probably just make things more complex.
Rich
If they'd have released Corel Draw for Linux, I would have bought it (really for Linux mind. Wine is fine for running win32 native stuff but I don't believe it justifies "for Linux")
I used to have great success running downloaded binaries under different kernels, different distributions. Of course, with kde and gnome on the scene it now seems like everything requires you to download last-night's version of the libraries. But someone writing commercial software should probably be able to avoid that annoyance with a bit of thought.
For printing, Corel could have done postscript, which is the "standard" for Unix or they could have done what people once did and include drivers with the application or heck, they could have developed a general Linux printing solution. Open Source is like that.
Agree with you on the Netscape part. Though when netscpae was being developed, the availability of non-commercial dynamically linkable widget sets was very sparse. KDE and Gnome can help that but things need to calm down a bit and people have to stop writing their code to use up-to-the-minute libraries and allow admins a bit of breathing space between upgrades.
Rich
Hmm, nice use of the language. Spelling I can accept, grammar is annoying put usually livable but can we at least have the articles have sentences that make sense please.
Rich
I have never had a console and have always considered keyboard based computers far superior (for my purposes)
Rich
Rich
OK. But a CD player is called on only to do a small number of tasks. Most cd player apps for computers duplicate a similar interface. I think the issue becomes how you handle more complex stuff.
Rich
Yes, that is my point. I am not trying to say "CLI only, no GUI", I'm just arguing against the opposite opinion.
You should be able to say to your computer, "format the hard drive - make it 1/3 of available space."
Fine. But that's not what I said. 1/3 is an exact quantity, I included the word "about" which has no real meaning to a computer
The software interfaces do not properly model the way that humans accomplish tasks.
Humans accomplish tasks according to the interface and tools given them. this happens in real life also. We use improvisation and lateral thinking all the time. We are flexible, may as well take advantage of it. Let computers do what they're good at, and we, us. Don't cripple them just so we can be a bit more lazy.
I mean, look at the Easel, KDE and Gnome - Brand new user interface layers, and what are they? More of the same old thing - with different pictures and colors.
Oh look, it's the "Unix is crap cos it's 20 years old" argument with a different subject. While not being a huge fan of GUIs, I have to say that the reason things are duplicated and persist is because they work. We seem to be in an age where we have gone beyond change being good but it's become compulsory.
Humans are NOT exact things - computer/human interfaces should be designed to interact with humans, not humans having to be trained to become explicit and precise.
Computers are a tool and tools should be designed with the job at hand. I don't complain when I'm fixing my car that my screwdriver should be able to prevent me having to lie down on the ground under the car and thread my arm through a narrow path between the engine and the firewall, nor do i complain that the whole engine should be dismantleable by undoing a nut on the top of the engine. Humans are by far the most flexible thing in the known universe. Sure computers shouldn't be programmed by dip switches anymore but there is a middle ground and it's not to have computers do all our thinking for us.
Rich
Rich
a)Private Industry
b)Charities and government funding
Rich
Yes it does. It doesn't say it in written English but you've learnt that a little triangle pointing to the right means "play". It could reasonably mean "eject tape" or "move player three inches to the right". It says play just as much as the combination of the P,L,A and Y symbols.
and you don't command the player to "spin up the motor, focus the laser and detector assembly for optimal signal/noise ratio and start reading", you push the play button.
See, you just proved my point.
Incidently, it's been shown that accomplished readers recognise whole words rather than actually "read" them so in a certain sense, for these people, words become like pictograms anyway.
Rich
pov-ray creates it's images based on an interpreted language (Yes, it's not a CLI as such but neither would you create an image with a graphical shell so I took your allusion to somewhere sane).
Many times with a technical illustration, I've wished I could create an image with words ("box 0,0,3.5,2;circle 3.5,2,1" would be so much easier than "try and draw a box to the right dimensions with mouse, try and center circle somwhere on the top right corner of the box. Guides are a help but start to fall down with anything complex.
Rich
Of course, you really want to be saying to a computer "put that file somewhere around my home directory" or "Format that hard drive, make it about a third of the drive" or "Cad program, make that sewer pipe about this long" (holds hands apart).
Computers are an exact thing, they need to be handled in an exact way. The command line provides that exact way. The number of times I've been using Corel Draw and wished I could just type in "box, 2in x 1in" rather than have to click and fiddle with the mouse, having it jump 0.1" bigger when I release the mouse button. Angles in circles are even worse.
Rich
Duh, it's a story, it's *not real* dummy.
If you want some semi-plausible explanation, try that as I recall, they actually address the thing "Computer do this"
And back to your point about instructions in foreign language, you have to remember that the conventions of pictograms are a learned thing as well. There's nothing "natural" about an arrow meaning "this direction" (ask any Floridian) and if you've ever tried to learn something by watching someone do it, if they don't describe what they're doing, it's very easy to get it wrong (e.g. "Insert this rod into this hole but make sure it's the end with the blue mark". If you weren't told, you may not have noticed the blue mark )
There's a reason that Macdonalds cash registers have pictures of food on it while any serious programmer works in words. And that is because words convey more information in a less ambiguous way.
Rich
OK then, place these in order of private industry priority for development
1)Drug that cures an illness or physiological problem requiring no further medication
2)Expensive medication for illness or physiological problem that patients will have to take twice daily for the rest of their lives
It's not hard to see the real reason we don't have a cure for cancer yet.
Rich