AFAIK there's not significant roleplaying in most MMORPGs.
So, say you're a straight guy and not into role playing. Why would you prefer looking at a male character for hours? Usually the camera position in such games would be _behind_ the character, so you'd be staring at the male character's ugly back or butt for hours;).
While the male characters are unlikely to be as bad as goatse.cx, given the larger numbers of males in the game developing industry - I'm sure the female characters are going to look better than the male ones;).
If I control an animal, robot, car or vehicle in a game, I sure don't expect it to resemble me.
Inflation is just another way for a Government to tax people.
The US still has the advantage that the US dollar is the currency used for much international trade, so they get to tax other _countries_.
If the USA "prints money"[1] the US dollars Japan or China gets for selling their stuff to the USA automatically gets worth less even if they're still holding on to it.
Great eh? Now that stops working so well if too many countries switch to the Euro or something else.
Think I'm wrong?;)
[1] Possible ways of printing money are: a) actually printing more money. b) using IOUs to pay for stuff = e.g. borrowing money from Japan/China etc.
"Jesus Christ's lesson for Science: everything in moderation."
I don't know which Jesus you are talking about. The last I checked, the Jesus I believe in was, and is an extremist.
Most Christians (especially the "extremist" ones) don't do a good job of following what Jesus says.
Bombing abortion clinics, spreading hate and violence are on a different extreme from his teachings - which are on the other extreme.
After all he did say in Matthew 5:21-22
21"You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder,[a] and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' 22But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother[b]will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,[c]' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.
[a] Matthew 5:21 Exodus 20:13 [b] Matthew 5:22 Some manuscripts brother without cause [c] Matthew 5:22 An Aramaic term of contempt
27"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' 28But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
And: "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
"Be perfect" is as extreme as it gets. I don't see how you can be perfect in moderation (moderator quips notwithstanding;) ).
I would copy a car if I could pick a car of my choice, just push a button and a perfect 100% copy appears in say 5 minutes. Like the Star Trek replicator only bigger:).
I wouldn't mind even having to pay the cost of raw materials at the usual market rates (as long as I'd know how much it'd cost upfront).
Of course the trouble with private industry trying to sell a perfect replicator is someone would buy two and it stops there;).
But a government or cooperative sponsored one should do ok.
A private company might design a rare raw material as part of their replicator and then corner the market on it.
At work I've a 2GB machine running linux, and I run Windows XP in vmware on it.
After a few days it's not unusual for firefox on Linux to use more memory than my entire Windows XP virtual machine (which uses 300-400MB, runs IE, IM clients, MS viewers, etc).
I do open quite a lot of tabs and windows, but I do that on Windows too.
On my real (nonvirtual) windows machines my windows taskbar is double height - and I've had it "scroll" before. There's a limit of how many IE windows you can have open and I've hit it before, but my machine just stopped allowing me to open more windows rather than die or swap to death.
Maybe this time I won't get modded flamebait/troll for just stating the facts.
It will help. But I'm no longer going to bother explaining in detail how anymore (read the links if you're interested). Since: 0) I already tried many times 1) Nobody who can do anything about it really cares or is listening 2) On the bright side, it means more money in the IT security business. $$$:).
I'm just saying a) yes, something can actually be done to make things better. And it isn't just Google's fault or a Mozilla or IE problem, and b) "I told you so";).
People who say we only need good server side filtering are stupid and/or ignorant. In the real world the web browsers don't parse everything the same way. So how is your server side filtering going to cover all the cases? The attacker just needs one exploitable "discrepancy" and they're in.
Of course my proposal won't fix everything, but just because brakes don't prevent all car crashes doesn't mean we don't need brakes and we should just tell drivers to drive better and avoid crashes (or just raise "security exceptions" if stuff happens;) ).
Yeah, MySQL would have been a better choice than Zope.
But, if the company grows and its database can't do it gracefully then there will be big problems. MySQL is like PHP, it will look ok when you're testing some small stuff, but when you really want to do things properly it gets really difficult (it might still be possible but its difficult and to use the technical term for it - very yucky/icky).
For example: Say it's X years later, and after a few "problems" the company (now bigger) decides it does need to do live backups. So now you want consistent backups of a bigger database (say tens of gigs), and you need to do it without slowing the reporting, orders and deliveries etc too much (it's stockkeeping like you said).
If you picked MyISAM, in a naive system then you'd need to lock _all_ tables otherwise the mysqldump won't be consistent. But locking all the tables blocks stuff...
If you picked innodb, you don't have to lock all tables (yay!). But when stuff goes belly up, and you try to _restore_ from backups, you may find that the estimated time it takes to reload in X gigabytes of data into the innodb tables is more than "a few" days, which is not what you want to tell the boss or your customers (don't ask me how I know this - and it wasn't even _my_ problem). On a related note it seems that innodb has performance problems with concurrent inserts if you have autoincrement fields (weird but true).
So one workaround is to use MyISAM, buy two or three machines. Live data = master, and nonlive reporting and backups on slaves. You can lock all the tables on a slave to make a consistent snapshot and not stop the master (basically you are badly reimplementing MVCC).
The recommended option of course is don't use MySQL. Forgive my ranting, but the fewer MySQL systems out there, the lower chance of me one day inheriting yet another crappy MySQL system.
Same goes for PHP too - braindead bad designs like magic_quotes, addslashes. Then there's peardb vs pdo vs mysql_escape vs mysql_real_escape vs mysql_definitely_real_escape_this_time_no_really. OK last one's a lame joke (for now?) but so's much of PHP.
Sure mod me flamebait, but mysql_real_escape says it all...
My conclusion is, while he might have "rewritten the stuff in PHP in 2 months", he spent > 2 years designing the app (and prototyping in rails) then he finally "typed in" the final version in PHP.
No surprise it's easier, better and actually doable.
He could have even done it in perl and it would be readable by nonperl people given it's the Xth time round;).
But I suppose he was fluent in PHP, so "retelling the same story (with improvements)" in PHP would have been easier for him.
"I did not recommend that you actually use CommonLisp, and which is why it failed in the real world."
The nagging thing is there are a few real world successes. How'd they do it, and why can't others do it?
That said I read how some lisp people did the orbitz thing ( http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html ), and it doesn't really seem like a roaring success story for Lisp IMO - for "real world" reasons they didn't use the other Lisp stuff and stuck mainly to macros. And I don't see why they'd need macros so much for such a "static problem" - you'd only write it once and it seems more a matter of organizing the data correctly, being able to cache, index and update it well.
"See, all the good compiler and language people went off doing one thing and all the real world people went off doing another thing, and the end result was two disasters: CommonLisp and Python/Perl/PHP etc."
Yeah, I think you've summarized the problem. One bunch went off to solve "CS type" problems and another bunch went off to solve "OS/server type" problems. Quite sad really. I see a bit of that in the hardware vs software world too[1].
I tested out parrot and PIR is even slower than Perl5. OK so it's a work in progress, but on some coin counting recursion benchmark the latest parrot appears to be much slower than one some versions back (both being slower than perl5 - which itself is slower than python).
python + psyco can be fast sometimes, but it is deprecated etc.
Oh well.
[1] In the x86 world there is no good way to "get the time of day", either the method is not standard/available on all machines, or slow, or flawed (doesn't work in multicore/SMP). In many programs it is common to do "wake me up when at least one of these events happens, or at latest X seconds from now" (I suppose in theory the X seconds from now should also be considered an event, but in practice, theory != practice;) ).
A colleague has been learning Common Lisp and is using SBCL and it has cored on him more than a few times in the past few weeks. According to him Common Lisp is great but SBCL is not production ready and there is no free Common Lisp that is, so if we are to use a Lisp it'll probably have to be something like Allegro.
I also did try learning CL, but I personally found it hard to find out how to write production code in Lisp - most of the examples on the web are all very nice for CS stuff (e.g. run this from emacs via slime) , but not real world stuff. While you're strictly in the Lisp world everything is nice and all that - 101 ways to do "fibonacci" etc, but seems like the lisp docs are written by people who are so much smarter than I am that they probably find a lot of things so obvious that they don't list them in FAQs;).
Example questions I asked: How do you compile and make an SBCL program executable? (I know now, but still...). How do you trap and handle posix/unix signals? (not sure the ways I found are best practice) How do you redirect STDOUT and STDERR to syslog?[1] Any examples of production style boilerplate code? How do I write a program that listens on UDP port X on all interfaces for packet and know which interface each packet came in from?
I'm currently using Perl and it is a lot slower than sbcl but so far it hasn't cored on me for a long while. With the exception of the last item the above sort of things are also easy or not too hard to find out (just man perlipc gives a lot of real world details).
I would like to learn a _fast_ high level language AND be able to use it to write production grade code (and no, I don't regard Java as high level, even if you program your java program to do XML and reinvent lisp badly).
[1] I do this for most of my programs. I disagree with people who say "STDOUT and STDERR should be closed (or sent to/dev/null) for daemons/servers because daemons aren't supposed to output stuff". While I do agree that daemons aren't normally supposed to send stuff out via STDOUT and STDERR, that is exactly why I want such output to go to syslog (or the equivalent)! Believe me it has been helpful. Even if your code has no bugs that show up that way, you could find bugs in 3rd party libs that you use;).
I usually try to get it prefixed by the program name and PID (or parent PID) e.g. Sep 22 03:07:16 host progname[1312] STDOUT: <std output here> Sep 22 03:07:17 host progname[1312] STDERR: <std err here>
MySQL? I know a company that went MySQL4 for a lot of things (and then later MySQL5). Using MySQL is usually a bad idea (and it does bite them every now and then - though most of them don't even realize it - I suppose they think that sort of thing is normal, they switched to having email on Microsoft Exchange too, so go figure).
They have should have gone postgresql as per my recommendation. Oh well.
With MySQL at first sight you seem to have all these features and behaviours/performance. But when you get down to the technical details you find that many of the "great" features, behaviours and performance are mutually exclusive. Want transactions - go innodb. Want fast inserts, go myisam. Want better concurrent write performance go innodb (or deal with buggy myisam insert delayed vs concurrent_insert vs etc stuff). Want fast selects - go myisam. Want foreign keys to work - innodb. Don't want to lock yourself to MySQL tech that's owned by Oracle (who may not have the best interests of MySQL in mind...) go myisam.
Or just use postgresql. The devs tend to do things right (except when the SQL specs are stupid, in which case they usually follow the stupid spec and do things "wrong").
Break the cable in two spots the way a trawler net/earthquake/shark/etc would break it.
Start splicing in the middle. You will finish before the ISPs etc fix the cable in the two broken spots.
Alternatively you can just break the cable in one spot and splice somewhere not too far and not too near. You'd probably finish splicing before they start doing the TDR stuff to figure out where the cable is broken.
But I am not one of those spy people so what do I know.
"The experience damaged Alison's reputation and exposed her to ridicule from her peers and scrutiny from people who can now Google her, the family said in the lawsuit.
"It's the tag line; it's derogatory," said Damon Chang, 27. "A lot of her church friends saw it."
Damon Chang apparently is her brother.
From the other link: "aleeviation says: hey that's me! no joke. i think i'm being insulted...can you tell me where this was taken."
I'd have thought it would have been more of an insult to be accused of virginity in Oz than USA - after all didn't a joke go:
Question: "Why couldn't Jesus have been born in Australia?" Answer: "No virgins"*
"I'm just pointing out that with proper configuration Vista can be a very functional OS"
That sounds like "with proper configuration Vista can be almost like Win2K";).
A pretty OS can have better functionality, but Vista is not one of those.
I'm sure the horror story was true, there are plenty of them - that's why Microsoft is doing this - if they don't people will do it anyway or switch to Kubuntu or something - since Kubuntu is even more compatible with existing XP certified hardware than Vista is.
I've personally bluescreened Vista within a few minutes on a beige box - another department passed it to me to test with our system (browser access only - I installed NOTHING on vista). And that's so far been the ONLY time this _year_ that I've had Windows BSOD on me. At home I use Win2K and at the office I have XP in vmware on Suse Linux, and both are fine.
But if it's a preinstalled Vista system from a major PC vendor (like your laptop) it is likely to work since they'd do a fair bit of tests before going "Yeah we can put Vista on this"- after all for a while Dell's top end workstation was XP only - they didn't have one with Vista.
So far from what you've said, I don't see any reasons to go for Vista other than what I'd stated already. Other than DirectX10 being only on Vista there's no big plus (and that's a weird plus too), vs a lot of minuses. Microsoft will continue to support XP for a long while despite what they say. The huge corporates have only just switched to XP SP2 from Win2K (since XP SP2 is the first release of XP that is stable enough for corporate use).
To me the advantage of XP over Win2K is XP boots faster, I prefer XP in "classic mode" too. All the stuff I need to run runs on both.
I believe classic mode is actually better since that was made when Microsoft paid GUI people money and actually _listened_ to them:). After that it was stuff like MS Bob or Clippy where Microsoft ignored the "techs" and went "we need it to pop up a bit more often", and it goes downhill from there. I hate the "Personalized Menus", grouped buttons etc, they all get in the way - one more extra thing to click with no real speed up in workflow elsewhere.
It'll be nice if I could have a cheap Win2K. If software copyrights only lasted 7 years, Microsoft would have to come out with something much better than Vista (and Win2K for that matter);).
It boils down to the fact that XP is simply not mature enough yet.
It's mature if there are competing vendors providing Windows XP compatible O/Ses.
Just like in the BIOS world, where most people don't have to care what BIOS they run, they just get on with the "real stuff" they want to do.
Maybe if everyone stuck with XP for long enough there'd be time for someone to make a legal XP compatible.
Of course Microsoft will fight it - they do NOT want to be like one of the BIOS vendors - you don't make billions that way, but hey that's one of the indicators of a mature competitive market.
You can't be sure what really happened based from the article.
And it's Boston after all- so if the guy lied about her having playdough in her hand then he's a big problem. Otherwise you'd risk having another "charles de menezes" case where the cops lied to cover up their mistakes. Or the other guy who was shot after he ran out of the plane - they shot him when he got OUTSIDE. And they claimed that he mentioned "bomb".
Well at least there's a protocol that didn't work too badly for her this time - she's not dead.
I don't see a reason to go around charging anyone with an offense. Just tell her not to do that again. Most people aren't that silly and won't be doing that anyway, not even terrorists.
Why is it always "someone has got to be charged for this". It's as if every incident must be "punished". To me that attitude is creating more harm in the world than reducing harm.
Why'd you go get Vista for anyway? For the DRM? For UAC?
OK the "control audio on a per app basis" feature is nice (so some darn IM program won't blow your ears out while you are trying to make out what is being said in a very quiet recording.
But I suppose the only compelling thing for the masses is that DirectX10 is Vista only.
Yeah I agree that's craziness alright. I can think of a few car analogies but I'll spare everyone:).
But then how about the cop and rest? Weren't they being jerks as well? They could have dropped the "Obstructing Official Business" thing, and told Righi "Look next time please just show the frigging receipt".
Who's a more dangerous to you or the rest of society? Michael Righi or cops like that cop and the current system as it is?
Say you do something that's arguably legal, and you think is reasonable but is viewed as unreasonable by others, why should you suddenly risk getting a criminal record for that?
I'm all for fewer jerks in the world. BUT yes I'm biased - after all in too many occasions I myself have been a jerk, so I still wouldn't want it to be a criminal offense.
Sure he did something unreasonable (go ahead flame him for it), but the Cops and the City went and did something even more unreasonable IMO.
To me it should have gone to court, and Righi should have won, the cop and the rest of the goons behind him should have been reprimanded and made to apologize and Righi should have been awarded X%costs + USD1 buck as damages. Where X% is less than 100% or whatever the court thinks is fair.
A police force willing to behave like this definitely does not make things safer or better.
"Would those jewish kids deserve 'attempted murder' when the bigot walked out of the hospitol hours later with less damage than most people involved in a car crash"
To me a lot depends on the intent.
If they were just intending to bash someone, and that someone got bashed and didn't die, the IMO while it's still a crime it's definitely not attempted murder.
And even if that person did die, it's not attempted murder, but it's: 1) a serious crime for beating that person 2) A crime of homicide, as for what sort of homicide - that's for the courts to decide, same for mitigating circumstances
I agree, his first book was not bad, but in the subsequent books the Discworld universe and style really came to life - Cohen the Barbarian, Death getting more character, etc.
Much like the first drawings of Asterix and Obelix (or some other cartoonists). They were ok, but "not that different from the others", then it's like the artist/writer suddenly gets into gear;).
Slashdot Mirror
How's that relevant to my statement?
AFAIK there's not significant roleplaying in most MMORPGs.
;).
;).
So, say you're a straight guy and not into role playing. Why would you prefer looking at a male character for hours? Usually the camera position in such games would be _behind_ the character, so you'd be staring at the male character's ugly back or butt for hours
While the male characters are unlikely to be as bad as goatse.cx, given the larger numbers of males in the game developing industry - I'm sure the female characters are going to look better than the male ones
If I control an animal, robot, car or vehicle in a game, I sure don't expect it to resemble me.
Inflation is just another way for a Government to tax people.
;)
The US still has the advantage that the US dollar is the currency used for much international trade, so they get to tax other _countries_.
If the USA "prints money"[1] the US dollars Japan or China gets for selling their stuff to the USA automatically gets worth less even if they're still holding on to it.
Great eh? Now that stops working so well if too many countries switch to the Euro or something else.
Think I'm wrong?
[1] Possible ways of printing money are:
a) actually printing more money.
b) using IOUs to pay for stuff = e.g. borrowing money from Japan/China etc.
"Jesus Christ's lesson for Science: everything in moderation."
;) ).
I don't know which Jesus you are talking about. The last I checked, the Jesus I believe in was, and is an extremist.
Most Christians (especially the "extremist" ones) don't do a good job of following what Jesus says.
Bombing abortion clinics, spreading hate and violence are on a different extreme from his teachings - which are on the other extreme.
After all he did say in Matthew 5:21-22
21"You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder,[a] and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' 22But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother[b]will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,[c]' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.
[a] Matthew 5:21 Exodus 20:13
[b] Matthew 5:22 Some manuscripts brother without cause
[c] Matthew 5:22 An Aramaic term of contempt
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew%205:21-22&version=31;
Similarly for adultery:
27"You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' 28But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
And: "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
"Be perfect" is as extreme as it gets. I don't see how you can be perfect in moderation (moderator quips notwithstanding
I would copy a car if I could pick a car of my choice, just push a button and a perfect 100% copy appears in say 5 minutes. Like the Star Trek replicator only bigger :).
;).
I wouldn't mind even having to pay the cost of raw materials at the usual market rates (as long as I'd know how much it'd cost upfront).
Of course the trouble with private industry trying to sell a perfect replicator is someone would buy two and it stops there
But a government or cooperative sponsored one should do ok.
A private company might design a rare raw material as part of their replicator and then corner the market on it.
Maybe someone did a search and replace of the "65535" limit and fubared. ;)
At work I've a 2GB machine running linux, and I run Windows XP in vmware on it.
After a few days it's not unusual for firefox on Linux to use more memory than my entire Windows XP virtual machine (which uses 300-400MB, runs IE, IM clients, MS viewers, etc).
I do open quite a lot of tabs and windows, but I do that on Windows too.
On my real (nonvirtual) windows machines my windows taskbar is double height - and I've had it "scroll" before. There's a limit of how many IE windows you can have open and I've hit it before, but my machine just stopped allowing me to open more windows rather than die or swap to death.
Maybe this time I won't get modded flamebait/troll for just stating the facts.
That's only true because the W3C and the browser people aren't interested in helping make things more secure.
:).
;).
;) ).
I've been proposing the following for _years_:
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=%22Tag+to+disable+unwanted+features%22
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2002May/0021.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/mozilla-security@mozilla.org/msg01448.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2007Aug/0008.html
It will help. But I'm no longer going to bother explaining in detail how anymore (read the links if you're interested). Since:
0) I already tried many times
1) Nobody who can do anything about it really cares or is listening
2) On the bright side, it means more money in the IT security business. $$$
I'm just saying a) yes, something can actually be done to make things better. And it isn't just Google's fault or a Mozilla or IE problem, and b) "I told you so"
People who say we only need good server side filtering are stupid and/or ignorant. In the real world the web browsers don't parse everything the same way. So how is your server side filtering going to cover all the cases? The attacker just needs one exploitable "discrepancy" and they're in.
Of course my proposal won't fix everything, but just because brakes don't prevent all car crashes doesn't mean we don't need brakes and we should just tell drivers to drive better and avoid crashes (or just raise "security exceptions" if stuff happens
Yeah, MySQL would have been a better choice than Zope.
But, if the company grows and its database can't do it gracefully then there will be big problems. MySQL is like PHP, it will look ok when you're testing some small stuff, but when you really want to do things properly it gets really difficult (it might still be possible but its difficult and to use the technical term for it - very yucky/icky).
For example: Say it's X years later, and after a few "problems" the company (now bigger) decides it does need to do live backups. So now you want consistent backups of a bigger database (say tens of gigs), and you need to do it without slowing the reporting, orders and deliveries etc too much (it's stockkeeping like you said).
If you picked MyISAM, in a naive system then you'd need to lock _all_ tables otherwise the mysqldump won't be consistent. But locking all the tables blocks stuff...
If you picked innodb, you don't have to lock all tables (yay!). But when stuff goes belly up, and you try to _restore_ from backups, you may find that the estimated time it takes to reload in X gigabytes of data into the innodb tables is more than "a few" days, which is not what you want to tell the boss or your customers (don't ask me how I know this - and it wasn't even _my_ problem). On a related note it seems that innodb has performance problems with concurrent inserts if you have autoincrement fields (weird but true).
So one workaround is to use MyISAM, buy two or three machines. Live data = master, and nonlive reporting and backups on slaves. You can lock all the tables on a slave to make a consistent snapshot and not stop the master (basically you are badly reimplementing MVCC).
The recommended option of course is don't use MySQL. Forgive my ranting, but the fewer MySQL systems out there, the lower chance of me one day inheriting yet another crappy MySQL system.
Same goes for PHP too - braindead bad designs like magic_quotes, addslashes. Then there's peardb vs pdo vs mysql_escape vs mysql_real_escape vs mysql_definitely_real_escape_this_time_no_really. OK last one's a lame joke (for now?) but so's much of PHP.
Sure mod me flamebait, but mysql_real_escape says it all...
My conclusion is, while he might have "rewritten the stuff in PHP in 2 months", he spent > 2 years designing the app (and prototyping in rails) then he finally "typed in" the final version in PHP.
;).
No surprise it's easier, better and actually doable.
He could have even done it in perl and it would be readable by nonperl people given it's the Xth time round
But I suppose he was fluent in PHP, so "retelling the same story (with improvements)" in PHP would have been easier for him.
"I did not recommend that you actually use CommonLisp, and which is why it failed in the real world."
;) ).
The nagging thing is there are a few real world successes. How'd they do it, and why can't others do it?
That said I read how some lisp people did the orbitz thing ( http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html ), and it doesn't really seem like a roaring success story for Lisp IMO - for "real world" reasons they didn't use the other Lisp stuff and stuck mainly to macros. And I don't see why they'd need macros so much for such a "static problem" - you'd only write it once and it seems more a matter of organizing the data correctly, being able to cache, index and update it well.
"See, all the good compiler and language people went off doing one thing and all the real world people went off doing another thing, and the end result was two disasters: CommonLisp and Python/Perl/PHP etc."
Yeah, I think you've summarized the problem. One bunch went off to solve "CS type" problems and another bunch went off to solve "OS/server type" problems. Quite sad really. I see a bit of that in the hardware vs software world too[1].
I tested out parrot and PIR is even slower than Perl5. OK so it's a work in progress, but on some coin counting recursion benchmark the latest parrot appears to be much slower than one some versions back (both being slower than perl5 - which itself is slower than python).
python + psyco can be fast sometimes, but it is deprecated etc.
Oh well.
[1] In the x86 world there is no good way to "get the time of day", either the method is not standard/available on all machines, or slow, or flawed (doesn't work in multicore/SMP). In many programs it is common to do "wake me up when at least one of these events happens, or at latest X seconds from now" (I suppose in theory the X seconds from now should also be considered an event, but in practice, theory != practice
A colleague has been learning Common Lisp and is using SBCL and it has cored on him more than a few times in the past few weeks. According to him Common Lisp is great but SBCL is not production ready and there is no free Common Lisp that is, so if we are to use a Lisp it'll probably have to be something like Allegro.
;).
/dev/null) for daemons/servers because daemons aren't supposed to output stuff". While I do agree that daemons aren't normally supposed to send stuff out via STDOUT and STDERR, that is exactly why I want such output to go to syslog (or the equivalent)! Believe me it has been helpful. Even if your code has no bugs that show up that way, you could find bugs in 3rd party libs that you use ;).
I also did try learning CL, but I personally found it hard to find out how to write production code in Lisp - most of the examples on the web are all very nice for CS stuff (e.g. run this from emacs via slime) , but not real world stuff. While you're strictly in the Lisp world everything is nice and all that - 101 ways to do "fibonacci" etc, but seems like the lisp docs are written by people who are so much smarter than I am that they probably find a lot of things so obvious that they don't list them in FAQs
Example questions I asked:
How do you compile and make an SBCL program executable? (I know now, but still...).
How do you trap and handle posix/unix signals? (not sure the ways I found are best practice)
How do you redirect STDOUT and STDERR to syslog?[1]
Any examples of production style boilerplate code?
How do I write a program that listens on UDP port X on all interfaces for packet and know which interface each packet came in from?
I'm currently using Perl and it is a lot slower than sbcl but so far it hasn't cored on me for a long while. With the exception of the last item the above sort of things are also easy or not too hard to find out (just man perlipc gives a lot of real world details).
I would like to learn a _fast_ high level language AND be able to use it to write production grade code (and no, I don't regard Java as high level, even if you program your java program to do XML and reinvent lisp badly).
[1] I do this for most of my programs. I disagree with people who say "STDOUT and STDERR should be closed (or sent to
I usually try to get it prefixed by the program name and PID (or parent PID) e.g.
Sep 22 03:07:16 host progname[1312] STDOUT: <std output here>
Sep 22 03:07:17 host progname[1312] STDERR: <std err here>
MySQL? I know a company that went MySQL4 for a lot of things (and then later MySQL5). Using MySQL is usually a bad idea (and it does bite them every now and then - though most of them don't even realize it - I suppose they think that sort of thing is normal, they switched to having email on Microsoft Exchange too, so go figure).
They have should have gone postgresql as per my recommendation. Oh well.
With MySQL at first sight you seem to have all these features and behaviours/performance. But when you get down to the technical details you find that many of the "great" features, behaviours and performance are mutually exclusive. Want transactions - go innodb. Want fast inserts, go myisam. Want better concurrent write performance go innodb (or deal with buggy myisam insert delayed vs concurrent_insert vs etc stuff). Want fast selects - go myisam. Want foreign keys to work - innodb. Don't want to lock yourself to MySQL tech that's owned by Oracle (who may not have the best interests of MySQL in mind...) go myisam.
Or just use postgresql. The devs tend to do things right (except when the SQL specs are stupid, in which case they usually follow the stupid spec and do things "wrong").
That's not a big problem.
Break the cable in two spots the way a trawler net/earthquake/shark/etc would break it.
Start splicing in the middle. You will finish before the ISPs etc fix the cable in the two broken spots.
Alternatively you can just break the cable in one spot and splice somewhere not too far and not too near. You'd probably finish splicing before they start doing the TDR stuff to figure out where the cable is broken.
But I am not one of those spy people so what do I know.
You failed reading comprehension?
From the article:
"The experience damaged Alison's reputation and exposed her to ridicule from her peers and scrutiny from people who can now Google her, the family said in the lawsuit.
"It's the tag line; it's derogatory," said Damon Chang, 27. "A lot of her church friends saw it."
Damon Chang apparently is her brother.
From the other link: "aleeviation says: hey that's me! no joke. i think i'm being insulted...can you tell me where this was taken."
I'd have thought it would have been more of an insult to be accused of virginity in Oz than USA - after all didn't a joke go:
Question: "Why couldn't Jesus have been born in Australia?"
Answer: "No virgins"*
* of child bearing age presumably.
"dump your pen friend" "free text virgin to virgin".
;).
Uh she's a young female teen.
I don't see how it's derogatory that she is being associated with being a virgin. "A lot of her church friends saw it".
Derogatory in this context would be "free text slut to slut".
As for "dump your pen friend", as far as I know, teens nowadays don't have pen friends - they use IM and SMS/"text", so that's true too.
She should be compensated though, not for being insulted, but for whatever the usual photo model gets for that sort of thing.
Now if someone put an image of a 40 year old slashdotter and used that same taglines it would be naughtier, maybe even funnier
"I'm just pointing out that with proper configuration Vista can be a very functional OS"
;).
:). After that it was stuff like MS Bob or Clippy where Microsoft ignored the "techs" and went "we need it to pop up a bit more often", and it goes downhill from there. I hate the "Personalized Menus", grouped buttons etc, they all get in the way - one more extra thing to click with no real speed up in workflow elsewhere.
;).
That sounds like "with proper configuration Vista can be almost like Win2K"
A pretty OS can have better functionality, but Vista is not one of those.
I'm sure the horror story was true, there are plenty of them - that's why Microsoft is doing this - if they don't people will do it anyway or switch to Kubuntu or something - since Kubuntu is even more compatible with existing XP certified hardware than Vista is.
I've personally bluescreened Vista within a few minutes on a beige box - another department passed it to me to test with our system (browser access only - I installed NOTHING on vista). And that's so far been the ONLY time this _year_ that I've had Windows BSOD on me. At home I use Win2K and at the office I have XP in vmware on Suse Linux, and both are fine.
But if it's a preinstalled Vista system from a major PC vendor (like your laptop) it is likely to work since they'd do a fair bit of tests before going "Yeah we can put Vista on this"- after all for a while Dell's top end workstation was XP only - they didn't have one with Vista.
So far from what you've said, I don't see any reasons to go for Vista other than what I'd stated already. Other than DirectX10 being only on Vista there's no big plus (and that's a weird plus too), vs a lot of minuses. Microsoft will continue to support XP for a long while despite what they say. The huge corporates have only just switched to XP SP2 from Win2K (since XP SP2 is the first release of XP that is stable enough for corporate use).
To me the advantage of XP over Win2K is XP boots faster, I prefer XP in "classic mode" too. All the stuff I need to run runs on both.
I believe classic mode is actually better since that was made when Microsoft paid GUI people money and actually _listened_ to them
It'll be nice if I could have a cheap Win2K. If software copyrights only lasted 7 years, Microsoft would have to come out with something much better than Vista (and Win2K for that matter)
It boils down to the fact that XP is simply not mature enough yet.
It's mature if there are competing vendors providing Windows XP compatible O/Ses.
Just like in the BIOS world, where most people don't have to care what BIOS they run, they just get on with the "real stuff" they want to do.
Maybe if everyone stuck with XP for long enough there'd be time for someone to make a legal XP compatible.
Of course Microsoft will fight it - they do NOT want to be like one of the BIOS vendors - you don't make billions that way, but hey that's one of the indicators of a mature competitive market.
You can't be sure what really happened based from the article.
And it's Boston after all- so if the guy lied about her having playdough in her hand then he's a big problem. Otherwise you'd risk having another "charles de menezes" case where the cops lied to cover up their mistakes. Or the other guy who was shot after he ran out of the plane - they shot him when he got OUTSIDE. And they claimed that he mentioned "bomb".
Well at least there's a protocol that didn't work too badly for her this time - she's not dead.
I don't see a reason to go around charging anyone with an offense. Just tell her not to do that again. Most people aren't that silly and won't be doing that anyway, not even terrorists.
Why is it always "someone has got to be charged for this". It's as if every incident must be "punished". To me that attitude is creating more harm in the world than reducing harm.
p.s. it's pretty crappy looking art IMO.
Legally change your name to Bomb and then go places. You don't usually have to say your own name - so just let other people do the fun bits :).
Given how hair trigger people are, doesn't even have to be "Mr Bomb D. Plane".
Why'd you go get Vista for anyway? For the DRM? For UAC?
:).
OK the "control audio on a per app basis" feature is nice (so some darn IM program won't blow your ears out while you are trying to make out what is being said in a very quiet recording.
But I suppose the only compelling thing for the masses is that DirectX10 is Vista only.
Yeah I agree that's craziness alright. I can think of a few car analogies but I'll spare everyone
The cop might not even have been there if Righi didn't call 911 :).
As you said, I'm not standing up for the guy. But something else is broken somewhere...
I suppose it's illegal to be a jerk now eh?
But then how about the cop and rest? Weren't they being jerks as well? They could have dropped the "Obstructing Official Business" thing, and told Righi "Look next time please just show the frigging receipt".
Who's a more dangerous to you or the rest of society? Michael Righi or cops like that cop and the current system as it is?
Say you do something that's arguably legal, and you think is reasonable but is viewed as unreasonable by others, why should you suddenly risk getting a criminal record for that?
I'm all for fewer jerks in the world. BUT yes I'm biased - after all in too many occasions I myself have been a jerk, so I still wouldn't want it to be a criminal offense.
Sure he did something unreasonable (go ahead flame him for it), but the Cops and the City went and did something even more unreasonable IMO.
To me it should have gone to court, and Righi should have won, the cop and the rest of the goons behind him should have been reprimanded and made to apologize and Righi should have been awarded X%costs + USD1 buck as damages. Where X% is less than 100% or whatever the court thinks is fair.
A police force willing to behave like this definitely does not make things safer or better.
IMO the Peelian Principles are still relevant today for the police: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles
"Would those jewish kids deserve 'attempted murder' when the bigot walked out of the hospitol hours later with less damage than most people involved in a car crash"
To me a lot depends on the intent.
If they were just intending to bash someone, and that someone got bashed and didn't die, the IMO while it's still a crime it's definitely not attempted murder.
And even if that person did die, it's not attempted murder, but it's:
1) a serious crime for beating that person
2) A crime of homicide, as for what sort of homicide - that's for the courts to decide, same for mitigating circumstances
I agree, his first book was not bad, but in the subsequent books the Discworld universe and style really came to life - Cohen the Barbarian, Death getting more character, etc.
;).
Much like the first drawings of Asterix and Obelix (or some other cartoonists). They were ok, but "not that different from the others", then it's like the artist/writer suddenly gets into gear
And the stuff moves from blah/good to great.