Whenever I run the demo of Zero4 vs Fatality, I can't see the other player's model at all. Its like the other player is completely invisible. Any ideas as to what I am doing wrong?
This device would be really interesting if a good GNUtella servant or Freenet node was tied to it in a way that freed the user from running P2P services on their workstation, yet still let them share music.
Oh, and 10GB is just about right, for my collection, which is around 7GB of mostly MP3s.
Computer Science deals with computability and algorithm design and complexity. Hardware is nothing more than a specific application of Computer Science. Before our time, they used mechanical gears, during this era, we use semiconductors to build NOT/NAND/NOR gates, and in the future, some other specific implementation will be used - one that might not make use of boolean gates.
However, the foundational concepts created by Church, Turing, Kleene, Post, etc, will always be useful, will always be applicable, and will always be enlightening. Therefore, such material belongs in any "computer" library.
Algorithm "cook books" and books on algorithmic complexity are also useful, though they can and will date faster than the foundational concepts found in S.C. Kleene's Introduction to Metamathematics (*hint* YOU MUST BUY THIS BOOK *hint*). Intro to Metamathematics covers constructive logics, countability, decidability (Church, Turing, Kleene, Post), completeness, and more. Not only that, the book is written by the legendary mathematician and computer scientist, S.C. Kleene. Read his book, and you will be learning from one of the few grandfathers/grandmasters of computer science.
While its always good to be open-minded and well-rounded, a few books on popular industry technologies are also a good thing to have in a library, but in small amounts. My advice is to build a good foundation first. The article asked for books that would last, books that would be read many years from now. Kleene's Introduction to Metamathematics is currently 50 years old, and the book is still read today! Why? Because the truth is always good to know.
Books about programming in C, C++, Java? Ha! Those things will be outdated in under 50 years. If you want to really understand computation, computer science, and programming, give these classics a try:
Academic research is an ongoing process played out by thousands of people. They all give to the common good, so why not take it a step furthur and have each researcher run a Freenet node? Most universities already supply computers for each researcher or for each department, and these computers are typically hooked up to a broadband dedicated net connection. Freenet seems like a perfect match.
In addition, an open review board could be formed, similar to the open group that develops Debian. Also, just like Debian has standards for packages entering into unstable, testing, and stable distributions, the same could be done for research papers in this Freenet scholarly research paper archive, so that material available in the "stable" archive is assured to be of high quality and passed through strict peer-review.
Its important to form a system that is not only open and free, but the system should also allow smaller research departments to chip in (run a freenet node, help review papers, and submit new research papers). Linux is free and open, it supplies the proper networking capabilities, document editing apps, and more.
Uhhh, last time I checked, the Palm and clones maxed out at 8MB of RAM, which actually is fairly limiting.
You have to realize that the IPAQ can do many things that the best Palm can't do. Complex font and format support for texts, music, movies, full color pictures, etc...
I own a TRGPro, and I am smart enough to see that Palm and crew are getting left in the dust. If people really wanted simplicity, they could just keep their trusty pen and paper organizer, which has infinite battery life and is actuall extremely durable, small, and light-weight. The pen and paper PDA is also far cheaper than any Palm clone.
My point is that the Palm Pilots were cool a few years ago, but they are looking more and more like old hat, with every new pocketPC/Linux PDA released.
So did they ever release the source for the earlier binary that was causing all of the trouble? It would be like Microsoft making MS-Linux, but not releasing source code, and then, in order to settle out of court, they make another different version called MS-Linux XP which has things separated to avoid lincensing issues. The point is that the issues are with a different binary and a different code base! Breaking the GPL and then releasing a different similar binary and source code can't be an accepted way to allow people to break the GPL and get away with it.
Re:The Truth Ain't Purdy
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 2
I still hold that FP and Procedural Programming can be compared directly, and many have done so over the past decades. Both languages are used to describe the same thing, so they aren't as different as apples and oranges. Anyway, FP nor PP will be the wave of the future. Read below...
Recent research in Linear Logic and Mobile calculi show the possibility of a programming language that is simple and elegant yet is a generalization of functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming languages. Mozart-Oz is kind of a hack compared to the more recent stuff (but still very interesting). Check it out here! The site has info on free mobile languages (don't think they are all ultra-complex like Mozart-Oz).
Re:The Truth Ain't Purdy
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 2
Imperative and functional languages can easily be directly compared to eachother, and it has been argued time and time again that imperative languages lack the type checking features available in modern functional languages. Imperative languages also fall short when you want to formally verify aspects of your code. Functional languages have wonderful easy to use algebraic properties that lend to easy verification compared to imperative programs which lack referential transparency. I think that I even remember the father of imperative languages saying at a key speech of his, that functional programming was the right way to go and that imperative programming was the wrong path.
However, it is my theory that the newer mobile calculi such as the pi-calculus and ambient-calculus will lead to a canonical generalization of all of the various paradigms, from imperative to object to functional to logic. Once that generalization is found, there will be one language for all jobs.
Re:The Truth Ain't Purdy
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 2
If you like Haskell, but want a mission critical ready implementation you will have to try a slightly different functional language called Clean, which has everything Haskell has as far as purity, expressiveness, elegance, rock-solid static type checking (most important feature IMO), lazy evaluation, and Clean has more like Linear (Uniqueness) Types ala Girard's Linear Logic, which allow you to have greater control over system resources, yet still maintaining functional purity and expressiveness.
GUI Spreasheet programs have been written in Clean. Video Games have been written in Clean, and even Clean's GUI integrated development environment and compiler are written in clean. There is only one problem with Clean... it is proprietary, but don't let that detract you for playing around with it for non-profit use.
Check out Clean here. You only have to pay money for the compiler if you want to use it for commercial purposes. I started out learning Functional Programming with Haskell, which is a favorite language of mine, but I ended up seeing the brilliance of Clean as a language that has the beauty of Haskell yet can still "get things done".
Moderators: If you don't agree with the text below, then refute it with a real arguement. Its about time that people admit the reasons why they picked the programming language they know best...
Why not Haskell?
Why not Mozart-Oz?
Why not Prolog?
Why not Pict?
Why not Programming Language X?
The truth is, most people do not choose a programming language based on the technical merits of the language, but instead, most people choose a programming language based on a mix of the following list of reasons:
First Come/The Only One You Will Learn
Hey, its the reason most have for why they use their natural language. I use English because it is the first language I learned, but English is not necessarily the best natural language.
Ignorance
For example, most people simply aren't educated in computer science, and therefore don't understand Object-Orientation, functional programming, declarative programming, etc, and therefore, these people are turned off my languages that they simply cannot understand. Why do you think that Visual Basic is so popular?
Legacy
Never under estimate the horrible effects of legacy. It comes in many forms, from having large amounts of code written in previous languages, to only having experience with writing code in previous languages. If you have legacy code, then moving to another language requires allot of work to migrate the code or you could end up complicating things by keeping the old code base and introducing the new latest and greatest programming language. And the other form of legacy, mindshare legacy, is even worse. A programmer should constantly be on the hunt for tools that will make him/her more productive, but the fact is that most people are lazy and really only know how to efficiently code in one programming language... even when something better comes out, people that have already become efficient in their one favorite programming language are very reluctant to change. Why do you think that C++ is so popular?
Hype
Its obvious that hype and its flip-side, FUD, heavily influence the average person's choice in programming languages. Over the past 5 years, the ultimate way to sell a programming language was to fill the description of the language with all sorts of "Object-Oriented" buzz words. However, big dollar marketing campaigns have made at least two programming languages catch on: Java and Visual Basic. Meanwhile, FUD has been used to slam alternative programming languages into the background. Whoever thought that the words "procedural programming" would become programming language profanity?
Actually, you are right, it is a very cool idea to be able to choose your kernel (Linux or Hurd for example), in addition to things like your desktop (KDE or GNOME for example). All the while, applications can be easily recompiled for the specific configuration of Debian. This would require some kind of "ports" type system though.
It would make more sense to optimize things by locating the next conference at a location that minimizes the average cost of travel for each developer. I guess that problem is too tough?
The Playstation 2 consumes so much power, with its many DSPs and CPUs, that even with a giant card lead/acid battery strapped to the Playstation 2, you probably wouldn't break an hour of battery life. Here is another way of saying it: It would be like trying to use one of those >1ghz AMD CPUs, as a portable processor.
You are better off buying a few Gameboy Advance systems and some copies of the upcoming port of Doom. Can you say portable lan party?
Honestly, what is a standard? I claim that Debian Linux is just as much of a standard for Linux, as is the LSB. Debian is not controlled by a company, and it even provides a reference implementation of the standard.
I guess the question is, do Linux users base their decisions on the technical merit of a Distribution or do they make decisions based on the herd mentality?
Apt-get can do the same thing that Windows Update does, but with less effort and greater robustness. The command is:
apt-get dist-upgrade
...and thats another thing, what is so difficult and unfriendly about that? Seems pretty damn straight forward to me. How is Windows Update easier than that? Oh, and how much you wanna bet that dist-upgrade does a better job than Windows Update?
While Google caches both summaries and full length webpages, they only seem to cache thumbnails for the images. It would be really nice if they also cached the full size image.
Anyone who has taken USA Gov 101 knows that the prez appoints people in the Judicial arm of the government. James Madison did it that way because he feared a democracy, which he believed was nothing more than a mobocracy.
I hate it when people claim that OS X will bring Unix to the masses, when Linux has already done so. Right now, Linux is running on far more desktops and servers than OS X, and there is no reason to think that OS X will overtake the popularity of Linux. Being a great OS for free... its going to be hard to overcome that market share.
Van Gogh filters are cool and all, but in this geeky day & age, I would be more impressed with a code filter that could be trained to make my C programs look like they were written by Linus Torvalds... you know, change the indention styles, white space usage styles, identifier naming styles, and how bout going as far to use the same algorithmic patterns too?
The question is, what would happen if you fed your average Visual Basic program written by your average VB coder, through a Linus Torvalds filter? Wouldn't that be like "crossing the beams" in Ghost Busters?
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever I run the demo of Zero4 vs Fatality, I can't see the other player's model at all. Its like the other player is completely invisible. Any ideas as to what I am doing wrong?
Amen! I wish I had mod points ( +1 Insightful ).
This device would be really interesting if a good GNUtella servant or Freenet node was tied to it in a way that freed the user from running P2P services on their workstation, yet still let them share music.
Oh, and 10GB is just about right, for my collection, which is around 7GB of mostly MP3s.
Computer Science deals with computability and algorithm design and complexity. Hardware is nothing more than a specific application of Computer Science. Before our time, they used mechanical gears, during this era, we use semiconductors to build NOT/NAND/NOR gates, and in the future, some other specific implementation will be used - one that might not make use of boolean gates.
However, the foundational concepts created by Church, Turing, Kleene, Post, etc, will always be useful, will always be applicable, and will always be enlightening. Therefore, such material belongs in any "computer" library.
Algorithm "cook books" and books on algorithmic complexity are also useful, though they can and will date faster than the foundational concepts found in S.C. Kleene's Introduction to Metamathematics (*hint* YOU MUST BUY THIS BOOK *hint*). Intro to Metamathematics covers constructive logics, countability, decidability (Church, Turing, Kleene, Post), completeness, and more. Not only that, the book is written by the legendary mathematician and computer scientist, S.C. Kleene. Read his book, and you will be learning from one of the few grandfathers/grandmasters of computer science.
While its always good to be open-minded and well-rounded, a few books on popular industry technologies are also a good thing to have in a library, but in small amounts. My advice is to build a good foundation first. The article asked for books that would last, books that would be read many years from now. Kleene's Introduction to Metamathematics is currently 50 years old, and the book is still read today! Why? Because the truth is always good to know.
Academic research is an ongoing process played out by thousands of people. They all give to the common good, so why not take it a step furthur and have each researcher run a Freenet node? Most universities already supply computers for each researcher or for each department, and these computers are typically hooked up to a broadband dedicated net connection. Freenet seems like a perfect match.
In addition, an open review board could be formed, similar to the open group that develops Debian. Also, just like Debian has standards for packages entering into unstable, testing, and stable distributions, the same could be done for research papers in this Freenet scholarly research paper archive, so that material available in the "stable" archive is assured to be of high quality and passed through strict peer-review.
Its important to form a system that is not only open and free, but the system should also allow smaller research departments to chip in (run a freenet node, help review papers, and submit new research papers). Linux is free and open, it supplies the proper networking capabilities, document editing apps, and more.
Uhhh, last time I checked, the Palm and clones maxed out at 8MB of RAM, which actually is fairly limiting.
You have to realize that the IPAQ can do many things that the best Palm can't do. Complex font and format support for texts, music, movies, full color pictures, etc...
I own a TRGPro, and I am smart enough to see that Palm and crew are getting left in the dust. If people really wanted simplicity, they could just keep their trusty pen and paper organizer, which has infinite battery life and is actuall extremely durable, small, and light-weight. The pen and paper PDA is also far cheaper than any Palm clone.
My point is that the Palm Pilots were cool a few years ago, but they are looking more and more like old hat, with every new pocketPC/Linux PDA released.
So did they ever release the source for the earlier binary that was causing all of the trouble? It would be like Microsoft making MS-Linux, but not releasing source code, and then, in order to settle out of court, they make another different version called MS-Linux XP which has things separated to avoid lincensing issues. The point is that the issues are with a different binary and a different code base! Breaking the GPL and then releasing a different similar binary and source code can't be an accepted way to allow people to break the GPL and get away with it.
I still hold that FP and Procedural Programming can be compared directly, and many have done so over the past decades. Both languages are used to describe the same thing, so they aren't as different as apples and oranges. Anyway, FP nor PP will be the wave of the future. Read below...
Recent research in Linear Logic and Mobile calculi show the possibility of a programming language that is simple and elegant yet is a generalization of functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming languages. Mozart-Oz is kind of a hack compared to the more recent stuff (but still very interesting). Check it out here! The site has info on free mobile languages (don't think they are all ultra-complex like Mozart-Oz).
Imperative and functional languages can easily be directly compared to eachother, and it has been argued time and time again that imperative languages lack the type checking features available in modern functional languages. Imperative languages also fall short when you want to formally verify aspects of your code. Functional languages have wonderful easy to use algebraic properties that lend to easy verification compared to imperative programs which lack referential transparency. I think that I even remember the father of imperative languages saying at a key speech of his, that functional programming was the right way to go and that imperative programming was the wrong path.
However, it is my theory that the newer mobile calculi such as the pi-calculus and ambient-calculus will lead to a canonical generalization of all of the various paradigms, from imperative to object to functional to logic. Once that generalization is found, there will be one language for all jobs.
If you like Haskell, but want a mission critical ready implementation you will have to try a slightly different functional language called Clean, which has everything Haskell has as far as purity, expressiveness, elegance, rock-solid static type checking (most important feature IMO), lazy evaluation, and Clean has more like Linear (Uniqueness) Types ala Girard's Linear Logic, which allow you to have greater control over system resources, yet still maintaining functional purity and expressiveness.
GUI Spreasheet programs have been written in Clean. Video Games have been written in Clean, and even Clean's GUI integrated development environment and compiler are written in clean. There is only one problem with Clean... it is proprietary, but don't let that detract you for playing around with it for non-profit use.
Check out Clean here. You only have to pay money for the compiler if you want to use it for commercial purposes. I started out learning Functional Programming with Haskell, which is a favorite language of mine, but I ended up seeing the brilliance of Clean as a language that has the beauty of Haskell yet can still "get things done".
Why not Haskell?
Why not Mozart-Oz?
Why not Prolog?
Why not Pict?
Why not Programming Language X?
The truth is, most people do not choose a programming language based on the technical merits of the language, but instead, most people choose a programming language based on a mix of the following list of reasons:
Hey, its the reason most have for why they use their natural language. I use English because it is the first language I learned, but English is not necessarily the best natural language.
For example, most people simply aren't educated in computer science, and therefore don't understand Object-Orientation, functional programming, declarative programming, etc, and therefore, these people are turned off my languages that they simply cannot understand. Why do you think that Visual Basic is so popular?
Never under estimate the horrible effects of legacy. It comes in many forms, from having large amounts of code written in previous languages, to only having experience with writing code in previous languages. If you have legacy code, then moving to another language requires allot of work to migrate the code or you could end up complicating things by keeping the old code base and introducing the new latest and greatest programming language. And the other form of legacy, mindshare legacy, is even worse. A programmer should constantly be on the hunt for tools that will make him/her more productive, but the fact is that most people are lazy and really only know how to efficiently code in one programming language... even when something better comes out, people that have already become efficient in their one favorite programming language are very reluctant to change. Why do you think that C++ is so popular?
Its obvious that hype and its flip-side, FUD, heavily influence the average person's choice in programming languages. Over the past 5 years, the ultimate way to sell a programming language was to fill the description of the language with all sorts of "Object-Oriented" buzz words. However, big dollar marketing campaigns have made at least two programming languages catch on: Java and Visual Basic. Meanwhile, FUD has been used to slam alternative programming languages into the background. Whoever thought that the words "procedural programming" would become programming language profanity?
Actually, you are right, it is a very cool idea to be able to choose your kernel (Linux or Hurd for example), in addition to things like your desktop (KDE or GNOME for example). All the while, applications can be easily recompiled for the specific configuration of Debian. This would require some kind of "ports" type system though.
It would make more sense to optimize things by locating the next conference at a location that minimizes the average cost of travel for each developer. I guess that problem is too tough?
How about you tell us why its being taken down? I mean, is it because of budget problems, or is it due to a change in management?
The Playstation 2 consumes so much power, with its many DSPs and CPUs, that even with a giant card lead/acid battery strapped to the Playstation 2, you probably wouldn't break an hour of battery life. Here is another way of saying it: It would be like trying to use one of those >1ghz AMD CPUs, as a portable processor.
You are better off buying a few Gameboy Advance systems and some copies of the upcoming port of Doom. Can you say portable lan party?
Honestly, what is a standard? I claim that Debian Linux is just as much of a standard for Linux, as is the LSB. Debian is not controlled by a company, and it even provides a reference implementation of the standard.
I guess the question is, do Linux users base their decisions on the technical merit of a Distribution or do they make decisions based on the herd mentality?
Britney Spears is just so much more popular, so she is the best choice!
Lets try to keep the discussion based around technical arguements.
Apt-get can do the same thing that Windows Update does, but with less effort and greater robustness. The command is:
...and thats another thing, what is so difficult and unfriendly about that? Seems pretty damn straight forward to me. How is Windows Update easier than that? Oh, and how much you wanna bet that dist-upgrade does a better job than Windows Update?
apt-get dist-upgrade
While Google caches both summaries and full length webpages, they only seem to cache thumbnails for the images. It would be really nice if they also cached the full size image.
Anyone who has taken USA Gov 101 knows that the prez appoints people in the Judicial arm of the government. James Madison did it that way because he feared a democracy, which he believed was nothing more than a mobocracy.
Well, remember, Java is also available under a shared source license, which actually could hurt open source Java implementations.
I hate it when people claim that OS X will bring Unix to the masses, when Linux has already done so. Right now, Linux is running on far more desktops and servers than OS X, and there is no reason to think that OS X will overtake the popularity of Linux. Being a great OS for free... its going to be hard to overcome that market share.
Van Gogh filters are cool and all, but in this geeky day & age, I would be more impressed with a code filter that could be trained to make my C programs look like they were written by Linus Torvalds... you know, change the indention styles, white space usage styles, identifier naming styles, and how bout going as far to use the same algorithmic patterns too?
The question is, what would happen if you fed your average Visual Basic program written by your average VB coder, through a Linus Torvalds filter? Wouldn't that be like "crossing the beams" in Ghost Busters?
Eck, I was holding my breath...
(can't go a 24 hours without my slashdot fix)