I was chatting with Marvin Minsky a few days ago, we started bitching about space, and he had this sad story to relate:
Once some of the ISS modules were relatively complete and ready for launch, NASA rounded up a group of dignitaries to bless it (I can't think of another reason why they were called in, and you'll see why I had more interesting things to ask about..), and he noticed an engineer really screwing up a docking procedure. He asked why they didn't just have a simple bit of robotics to handle it (any of a billion implementations would work great for something this trivial), and the answer was that NASA had dictated from high up that a human must be the operator for a wide class of tasks.
So there you have it! The space industry has some luddite motivations, which is absolutely terrifying. And unfortunately the great success of JPL/Caltech's probes gives more justification of their _small_ budgets (wow! you're so great you can keep being great with only $10 !!); I guess a large set of the administration still feels a need to justify 'manhood'. fucking retards.
I think it would find most use if it was given an easy API; obviously most of the time you say 'oh I want to start working on ______', and you know where it is; the on the fly stuff--inserting images, tracking down headers, reading docs, checking some email for a spec: little files needed for something larger, which could have littered your hard drive for years in who knows what locations--THAT is where I believe this would find greatest use, and hence wants to be closely integrated into programs (enhanced file selection dialogs for instance).
Ruby iterator blocks can be passed to functions which use yield in an identical fashion to pass control over to them with any desired parameters. Note that doing this from within a C module intended for use within ruby is similarly trivial (rb_yield()).
President Bush strongly opposes any treaty or policy that would cause the loss of a single American job, let alone the nearly 5 million jobs Kyoto would have cost
what about the ~7 billion lives it will eventually cost to ignore this?
I'm shocked and awed that, immediately after re-election, not helping the environment is used to garner support. I'm going to go kick someone.
Your statements are quite rude. For some reason, following gnome's irritation with imlib, bashing raster came into style. But that is another tale.
E had fully themed widgets, both for window manager utilities and the decorations themselves. Shortly thereafter I saw this creeping into other window managers and toolkits, and then windows and macs both unofficially and officially began carrying similar flexible interface enhancements. As far as this unparalleled flexibility, E _was_ the first, and the pattern I just described is no coincidence--the influence was definitely there to a not insignificant extent.
raster's a nice and very enthusiastic guy, dedicated and ambitious. Take a look at E17 if you have a moment.
(note zealotry is not the aim here--E is not even my primary; simply I hate this damned bashing)
ok, so apples and oranges vary more than types of apples. But a good chef will discriminate intelligently between granny smith and fuji apples, and that's what I was discussing, not the former.
One thing that I am sure has enraged many is the lumping of C and C++ together. I programmed primarily in C for about 5 years, and a couple months back learned C++ and now use that as my primary language.
I used to write code in gtk+, and it was quite painful. Function calls look ugly, you are casting things non stop, and constantly finding gross ways to wrap data into a void * which you pass with signals.
I've been writing apps with gtkmm lately and it is practically a sexual experience in comparison. I can write much cleaner apps, and do so much more quickly.
I don't mean to appear elitist, but anyone saying C/C++, and furthermore that they are both finished, sounds like someone who hasn't really used C++. And no I don't mean writing an app with methods instead of global functions, new/delete instead of malloc()/free(), and replacing char * with std::string (in C++ you use char * all the time! std::string is another entity altogether); no no no I mean using C++ paradigms (I'm _not_ talking about OO--C++ has a plethora of interesting methodologies which result in extremely fast and safe code (we're not just throwing exceptions and building abstract class heirarchies every time we want to move a bit!)).
What is important about C++'s heritage of C is _not_ the shared syntax--it's the fact that you can still figure out your overhead basically exactly (as well as you can in C, at least). But the rest is drastically altered. Go to boost.org to see what I'm talking about.
Note that this is not an anti-C post--that would be ridiculous as not only do I love C but furthermore there are great gtk+ apps (gimp for example--gnome is a bloated mess and doesn't really count IMHO!).
Remember: the rallying cry of OSS is 'show me the code'. If you think you have a nicer way to code, make it and then publicize. I'll stick to gtkmm for now, and recommend others take a look at it.
yes yes, very true, I apologize if I seemed to cast different languages stupidly. Very true that the best tools easily make the worst result, and the worst torse also can make the best result--all depends on the wielder.
What _is_ also true is that certain tasks are stereotypically associated with certain tools, and often in actuality are used in tandem.. I was merely leveraging upon that to illuminate my point.
You can take what I just said, apply it to my previous post, and logically come up with the connection that I was the boring part of the programming I did... well, I'm sorry =P
While that is true, it's also naive to think it would be any other way. Why? Think about every other profession! The opportunity to be doing something creative is delegated to a selective, lucky few. I say lucky few because everyone has met great people in crap jobs.
So the question of course becomes--how do you dodge the bullet of crap positions? Doing well in academia is probably unfortunately the best solution. I'm going to CMU next year, annd had a nice talk with one of their CS profs about some openGL + C++ projects I'm working on, plus some AI research I started. I will get to work on these things, however I will also have to try not to swallow cyanide while dying through Java classes teaching me how to program in a way so dumbed down that even the greatest imbecile can't screw up.
This of course touches upon a great sadness of modern engineering training for me: you don't get taught to think--you get taught to use prescribed methods. Why? Ostensibly to never never reinvent the wheel, but also to get retards to do the job fine.
Let's not be stupidly depressed about everything, however. Trying to shoot to the very top has always required talent and hard work, and always been possible.
I think programming is truly great, truly beautiful. This afternoon I made some money writing some boring PHP code, but also worked on my personal projects, and I'll work to have the tides change in the future.
Keep him away from losers. Not everyone in the world needs to enjoy drinking bear and swearing boorist, chauvinist comments at ladies and poorly thought out televeision programs. Reaffirm his believe in his interests and see if you can get him around similar people. Anything else will cause him to suffer.
So basically he's saying he's seen pictures from labs with vegetation from some place that isn't Mars
Incorrect. The discrepancy lies between the semantic difference of 'life' and 'active intelligent life', clearly separating the contexts. The first paragraph you quoted obviously refers to Mars, as he states "I'm still hoping we'll find some Martians up there".
Note I am not commenting on the validity of his assertions vis a vis lab pictures--just on your statements.
I never understood the desire for a movie and a book to be identical. I mean honestly: you already have the god damned book--why would you want the exact plot _again_! Add to that the fact that a) imagination factors in entirely differently, and b) a text is read at an entirely different pace and duration then a film is enjoyed, meaning that the dramatic flow cannot be a direct mapping from one to the other.
I would really much rather have something new to watch (intentional repetition). Kurosawa's Ran for instance--I derive great pleasure from and associate much of the intelligence of the work precisely with the alteration he made when deriving from the original Shakespeare.
It seems to me that the only projects which can attest to an admirable security record are the ones that not only pursued security with a paranoid fervor for the entirety of their development, but furthermore were envisioned/designed with security as a prime consideration and can comment on security as a foremost issue in basically any context. If you go through examples in your head (postfix, openssh), you'll realize what I say.
Don't be ridiculous. Bush only glanced favorably at space travel following the Columbia disaster and the subsequent (immediate and temporary) surge in the mob's interest in space. His pollsters (puppetmasters, whatever) told him it was time to throw a little care in the direction of NASA, and for the first time in his administration, he gave them some funding, rather than slashing and slashing, which he has been doing (including shuttle related projects). And gee look, the project he picked to help has craploads of direct relation to weapons research. What an ass.
There's a source port called doom legacy (http://legacy.newdoom.com/) which not only has a GL renderer, but also comes with an additional wad specifying lightmaps and stuff like that for already existing items. I use it often to great satisfaction. The BFG can light up a room well enough to read in a corner. Rockets are nice, and there's transparency on lots of enemy fireballs etc.
This is not not true, though it was in the past. They removed this crutch months ago. It was one of the two things (the other being fully GPL) which was preventing it from being so liked by distributions... Note that if you see how they implement some codecs (for example the ones requiring you to d/l windows dlls) makes distribution issues nasty..
I like mplayer because: speed, features, supported formats, MENCODER (lets you encode arbitrary video sources--save internet streams, DVDs, etc.)
It always bothers me when we (the linux community, technically the underdog) make some snide reference to the failures of our competitor, especially when in the big picture the direct issue is rather silly.
Consider:
We _know_ that they have lots of cash. Granted a loss is not cool, and they will try to remedy it, also consider
How widely popular the xbox is. Even people that planned on hating it drool over it
The upheaval in the console market
This is similar to how we report linux and windows vulnerabilities. When a windows vuln is mentioned, we bitch about the OS and its quality etc. etc.; when a linux vuln is mentioned, we downplay the potential risks, and then compliment the speed of patch/update/fix release.
Don't get me wrong--I love linux, use nothing else, and haven't for many years; this ridiculous attitude of most zealots is annoying, however.
I run the network for the dorm here. I know that we have 1.544Mbps full duplex on both T1s because of...
P2P software. Yessir, these suckers are fully saturated at all times as the year goes on =)
Seriously though, the way I've tested is get a machine a few hops away, and start moving as many bits as you can. I use RRDtool to track everything, and it works quite excellently. I have multiple graphs, which collect data using SNMP directly from the routers...
Look, they write drivers for us, which these days outperform the windows ones sometimes.
what the fuck are you complaining for?
and this crap you say about binary only, they ARE released in source, I have it right here. Ok sorry their openGL libraries I don't have the code to. But you can download the driver code off their website
here are other things about them. Each release has a rather substantial ChangeLog. They support cool things like Xrender. They give us support for that mouse cursor-shadow hack that you see in windows. They even let Brian Paul implement some of their proprietary openGL extensions in Mesa.
so, troll, tell me again why NVIDIA sucks. last I checked, running an NVIDIA card under linux you have a MUCH MUCH MUCH better chance of having fast 3D than with an ATI card. when I mean much better, I mean like 10 to 1.
We live in a money-centered world...
on
Man Conquers Space
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...and unfortunantely we will not be venturing into space until it is commercially viable to do so.
There's a whole slew of phrases like 'when in rome, do as the romans do' or 'the best way to change a system is from the inside'
I'm afraid we're just going to have to accept this fact (that space exploration won't get another kick 'til it makes people money), and work towards making new propulsion systems, more efficient systems, etc. until we get to this point, then hopefully awareness will increase and people will get excited about space exploration for the sake of space exploration again (after it has blown up again for the sake of money).
Of course, a miracle (or a disaster) could cause this to go another way
Call me a pessimist, or even a defeatist, but this is how I see things.
Kind of like when a bacterial culture gets week strains weeded out in a tough time, maybe this can be good... if it doesn't kill everything.
Sorry, it's sorenson level v3 (SVQ3) so both xine and new (cvs) mplayer can play only the audio. Because of the furious work on this front, however, this may change. I hope so.
I told my friends not to watch the last trailer because of the spoiler.
Slashdot Mirror
I was chatting with Marvin Minsky a few days ago, we started bitching about space, and he had this sad story to relate:
Once some of the ISS modules were relatively complete and ready for launch, NASA rounded up a group of dignitaries to bless it (I can't think of another reason why they were called in, and you'll see why I had more interesting things to ask about..), and he noticed an engineer really screwing up a docking procedure. He asked why they didn't just have a simple bit of robotics to handle it (any of a billion implementations would work great for something this trivial), and the answer was that NASA had dictated from high up that a human must be the operator for a wide class of tasks.
So there you have it! The space industry has some luddite motivations, which is absolutely terrifying. And unfortunately the great success of JPL/Caltech's probes gives more justification of their _small_ budgets (wow! you're so great you can keep being great with only $10 !!); I guess a large set of the administration still feels a need to justify 'manhood'. fucking retards.
I think it would find most use if it was given an easy API; obviously most of the time you say 'oh I want to start working on ______', and you know where it is; the on the fly stuff--inserting images, tracking down headers, reading docs, checking some email for a spec: little files needed for something larger, which could have littered your hard drive for years in who knows what locations--THAT is where I believe this would find greatest use, and hence wants to be closely integrated into programs (enhanced file selection dialogs for instance).
Ruby iterator blocks can be passed to functions which use yield in an identical fashion to pass control over to them with any desired parameters. Note that doing this from within a C module intended for use within ruby is similarly trivial (rb_yield()).
less than the number which will.
President Bush strongly opposes any treaty or policy that would cause the loss of a single American job, let alone the nearly 5 million jobs Kyoto would have cost
what about the ~7 billion lives it will eventually cost to ignore this?
I'm shocked and awed that, immediately after re-election, not helping the environment is used to garner support. I'm going to go kick someone.
Your statements are quite rude. For some reason, following gnome's irritation with imlib, bashing raster came into style. But that is another tale.
E had fully themed widgets, both for window manager utilities and the decorations themselves. Shortly thereafter I saw this creeping into other window managers and toolkits, and then windows and macs both unofficially and officially began carrying similar flexible interface enhancements. As far as this unparalleled flexibility, E _was_ the first, and the pattern I just described is no coincidence--the influence was definitely there to a not insignificant extent.
raster's a nice and very enthusiastic guy, dedicated and ambitious. Take a look at E17 if you have a moment.
(note zealotry is not the aim here--E is not even my primary; simply I hate this damned bashing)
ok, so apples and oranges vary more than types of apples. But a good chef will discriminate intelligently between granny smith and fuji apples, and that's what I was discussing, not the former.
One thing that I am sure has enraged many is the lumping of C and C++ together. I programmed primarily in C for about 5 years, and a couple months back learned C++ and now use that as my primary language.
I used to write code in gtk+, and it was quite painful. Function calls look ugly, you are casting things non stop, and constantly finding gross ways to wrap data into a void * which you pass with signals.
I've been writing apps with gtkmm lately and it is practically a sexual experience in comparison. I can write much cleaner apps, and do so much more quickly.
I don't mean to appear elitist, but anyone saying C/C++, and furthermore that they are both finished, sounds like someone who hasn't really used C++. And no I don't mean writing an app with methods instead of global functions, new/delete instead of malloc()/free(), and replacing char * with std::string (in C++ you use char * all the time! std::string is another entity altogether); no no no I mean using C++ paradigms (I'm _not_ talking about OO--C++ has a plethora of interesting methodologies which result in extremely fast and safe code (we're not just throwing exceptions and building abstract class heirarchies every time we want to move a bit!)).
What is important about C++'s heritage of C is _not_ the shared syntax--it's the fact that you can still figure out your overhead basically exactly (as well as you can in C, at least). But the rest is drastically altered. Go to boost.org to see what I'm talking about.
Note that this is not an anti-C post--that would be ridiculous as not only do I love C but furthermore there are great gtk+ apps (gimp for example--gnome is a bloated mess and doesn't really count IMHO!).
Remember: the rallying cry of OSS is 'show me the code'. If you think you have a nicer way to code, make it and then publicize. I'll stick to gtkmm for now, and recommend others take a look at it.
yes yes, very true, I apologize if I seemed to cast different languages stupidly. Very true that the best tools easily make the worst result, and the worst torse also can make the best result--all depends on the wielder.
What _is_ also true is that certain tasks are stereotypically associated with certain tools, and often in actuality are used in tandem.. I was merely leveraging upon that to illuminate my point.
You can take what I just said, apply it to my previous post, and logically come up with the connection that I was the boring part of the programming I did... well, I'm sorry =P
While that is true, it's also naive to think it would be any other way. Why? Think about every other profession! The opportunity to be doing something creative is delegated to a selective, lucky few. I say lucky few because everyone has met great people in crap jobs.
So the question of course becomes--how do you dodge the bullet of crap positions? Doing well in academia is probably unfortunately the best solution. I'm going to CMU next year, annd had a nice talk with one of their CS profs about some openGL + C++ projects I'm working on, plus some AI research I started. I will get to work on these things, however I will also have to try not to swallow cyanide while dying through Java classes teaching me how to program in a way so dumbed down that even the greatest imbecile can't screw up.
This of course touches upon a great sadness of modern engineering training for me: you don't get taught to think--you get taught to use prescribed methods. Why? Ostensibly to never never reinvent the wheel, but also to get retards to do the job fine.
Let's not be stupidly depressed about everything, however. Trying to shoot to the very top has always required talent and hard work, and always been possible.
I think programming is truly great, truly beautiful. This afternoon I made some money writing some boring PHP code, but also worked on my personal projects, and I'll work to have the tides change in the future.
careful, you just proved yourself incorrect. Do Hoover and Coke have 100% market share?
Keep him away from losers. Not everyone in the world needs to enjoy drinking bear and swearing boorist, chauvinist comments at ladies and poorly thought out televeision programs. Reaffirm his believe in his interests and see if you can get him around similar people. Anything else will cause him to suffer.
So basically he's saying he's seen pictures from labs with vegetation from some place that isn't Mars
Incorrect. The discrepancy lies between the semantic difference of 'life' and 'active intelligent life', clearly separating the contexts. The first paragraph you quoted obviously refers to Mars, as he states "I'm still hoping we'll find some Martians up there".
Note I am not commenting on the validity of his assertions vis a vis lab pictures--just on your statements.
I never understood the desire for a movie and a book to be identical. I mean honestly: you already have the god damned book--why would you want the exact plot _again_! Add to that the fact that a) imagination factors in entirely differently, and b) a text is read at an entirely different pace and duration then a film is enjoyed, meaning that the dramatic flow cannot be a direct mapping from one to the other.
I would really much rather have something new to watch (intentional repetition). Kurosawa's Ran for instance--I derive great pleasure from and associate much of the intelligence of the work precisely with the alteration he made when deriving from the original Shakespeare.
It's extremely useful for things like 'this glibc function deviates slightly from POSIX section xx.yy, which states:'
Another good one is 'This extension[/odd syntax/whatever] is for compliance which POSIX section aa.bb, which states as follows:'
(purposeful inconsistency.. boredom otherwise)
It seems to me that the only projects which can attest to an admirable security record are the ones that not only pursued security with a paranoid fervor for the entirety of their development, but furthermore were envisioned/designed with security as a prime consideration and can comment on security as a foremost issue in basically any context. If you go through examples in your head (postfix, openssh), you'll realize what I say.
No old technology, eh? How'd they obviate the use of electricity?
Don't be ridiculous. Bush only glanced favorably at space travel following the Columbia disaster and the subsequent (immediate and temporary) surge in the mob's interest in space. His pollsters (puppetmasters, whatever) told him it was time to throw a little care in the direction of NASA, and for the first time in his administration, he gave them some funding, rather than slashing and slashing, which he has been doing (including shuttle related projects). And gee look, the project he picked to help has craploads of direct relation to weapons research. What an ass.
There's a source port called doom legacy (http://legacy.newdoom.com/) which not only has a GL renderer, but also comes with an additional wad specifying lightmaps and stuff like that for already existing items. I use it often to great satisfaction. The BFG can light up a room well enough to read in a corner. Rockets are nice, and there's transparency on lots of enemy fireballs etc.
This is not not true, though it was in the past. They removed this crutch months ago. It was one of the two things (the other being fully GPL) which was preventing it from being so liked by distributions... Note that if you see how they implement some codecs (for example the ones requiring you to d/l windows dlls) makes distribution issues nasty..
I like mplayer because: speed, features, supported formats, MENCODER (lets you encode arbitrary video sources--save internet streams, DVDs, etc.)
This is similar to how we report linux and windows vulnerabilities. When a windows vuln is mentioned, we bitch about the OS and its quality etc. etc.; when a linux vuln is mentioned, we downplay the potential risks, and then compliment the speed of patch/update/fix release.
Don't get me wrong--I love linux, use nothing else, and haven't for many years; this ridiculous attitude of most zealots is annoying, however.
I run the network for the dorm here. I know that we have 1.544Mbps full duplex on both T1s because of...
P2P software. Yessir, these suckers are fully saturated at all times as the year goes on =)
Seriously though, the way I've tested is get a machine a few hops away, and start moving as many bits as you can. I use RRDtool to track everything, and it works quite excellently. I have multiple graphs, which collect data using SNMP directly from the routers...
matusa
what?
I never understood this anti-NVIDIA fud.
Look, they write drivers for us, which these days outperform the windows ones sometimes.
what the fuck are you complaining for?
and this crap you say about binary only, they ARE released in source, I have it right here. Ok sorry their openGL libraries I don't have the code to. But you can download the driver code off their website
here are other things about them. Each release has a rather substantial ChangeLog. They support cool things like Xrender. They give us support for that mouse cursor-shadow hack that you see in windows. They even let Brian Paul implement some of their proprietary openGL extensions in Mesa.
so, troll, tell me again why NVIDIA sucks. last I checked, running an NVIDIA card under linux you have a MUCH MUCH MUCH better chance of having fast 3D than with an ATI card. when I mean much better, I mean like 10 to 1.
...and unfortunantely we will not be venturing into space until it is commercially viable to do so.
There's a whole slew of phrases like 'when in rome, do as the romans do' or 'the best way to change a system is from the inside'
I'm afraid we're just going to have to accept this fact (that space exploration won't get another kick 'til it makes people money), and work towards making new propulsion systems, more efficient systems, etc. until we get to this point, then hopefully awareness will increase and people will get excited about space exploration for the sake of space exploration again (after it has blown up again for the sake of money).
Of course, a miracle (or a disaster) could cause this to go another way
Call me a pessimist, or even a defeatist, but this is how I see things.
Kind of like when a bacterial culture gets week strains weeded out in a tough time, maybe this can be good... if it doesn't kill everything.
Sorry, it's sorenson level v3 (SVQ3) so both xine and new (cvs) mplayer can play only the audio. Because of the furious work on this front, however, this may change. I hope so.
I told my friends not to watch the last trailer because of the spoiler.