Re:Why the bloody hell does the release day matter
on
Gamecube Hits US Early
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· Score: 2
In that case that makes the X-Box try #2. Microsoft's first shot at the console market was the MSX machine from the 80's... which was somewhat successful everywhere except the US, oddly enough.
Re:Why the bloody hell does the release day matter
on
Gamecube Hits US Early
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· Score: 2
Or who spends more on marketing. Microsoft: $500 million for demo units, Taco Bell tie-ins (every fucking employee wearing an X-Box Tee), and a payola system to retailers to pump up X-box and not mention Gamecube vs. $60 million for a quiet rollout. As much as I love the Gamecube so far I think it's clear who will win the console wars. PlayStation 2 first, with X-Box close behind and the Gamecube faithfully bringing up the rear.
The console industry has always been about closed up boxen. Well, since the NES...
The bitter irony is, in 1983 the Wall Street Journal wrote a report on the kinds of predatory practices that TI was engaging in by charging exorbitant sums for the right to develop game ROMS for their 99/4A computer. These days, that's not only standard industry practice, with the way they undersell consoles the market would collapse totally without it!
Sony is headed in the right direction with PS2 Linux (which AFAIK contains an OpenGL driver for their high-speed graphics thingy).
You keep saying that. Have AOL, Microsoft, and Apple taught you nothing? People don't want hard. They want easy! They don't want freedom, self-sufficiency, and responsibility for one's own actions. They want a benevolent government grandfather who will take care of them and put their kids through school and keep the thugs off their streets. But woe to the person who raises the ire of this government. It's spare the rod and spoil the child. That's the price you pay for an advanced, "progressive" society, I guess.
Frickin' EUian elitists. Oh wait, that's hate speech! Lock me up!
So it seems that my biggest problems don't lie with LISP at all. I may find myself a LISP convert yet! Perhaps solving criticism #1 (above) may facilitate that.:)
Really? Good news! I prefer Scheme myself, and so would recommend you get a hold of Guile or DrScheme (IMNSHO, two of the most robust Scheme inplementations around) and grab a copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs off the Web. This is a general programming book that uses Scheme as a teaching tool. There's also Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days.
If you want to crack the spine of an actual book, The Little LISPer and The Little Schemer are good places to start.
As for your complaint about no applications: Yahoo! Store is a Common LISP application. The database system that Squaresoft developed in-house to manage the Final Fantasy movie project was also written in LISP. AutoCAD was once written in LISP (and still incorporates LISP); but these days Autodesk is so enamored with the Microsoft way I wouldn't be surprised if ACAD 2002 was written in C#. All of these are "major applications" though with the exception of AutoCAD you are not likely to find them running on a workstation near you. They all deal with handling massive amounts of complex, hard-to-define data. This is something that LISP excels at. Strangely enough, that definition encompasses a great many computer applications, so now you know why LISP advocates can sometimes wax obnoxious. Especially if their day job requires them to code in something grotesque like Perl or VB, a program that would have taken a quarter or less of the time if written in LISP!
My/home partition is reiser and I have been satisfied with it. But when X decides to poo itself for the umpteenth time (Radeon DRI drivers cause a hard freeze on my ALi chipset... unless I booted and used 3D under Windows first) I hate having to fsck my / partition (which is still stuck in ext2 land because I'm afraid to change it). Maybe ext3 will be the solution for this.
I have argued (and continue to argue in part 2 of the interview), that people need to know a lot of different languages. I have no deathwish for other languages. I just wish people would stop having a deathwish for the language I choose to use. I find Lisp powerful and useful. Some others have different callings. But the aim oughtn't be be beat each other into not using things. It should be to make people aware of the choices that are available to people who want them.
This is an excellent point, one that I made but perhaps didn't clarify sufficiently, when I mentioned that LISP is a good tool to have in your toolkit. I know many languages including C, C++, Java, Smalltalk, Perl, and a couple forms of assembly and I use them all because they're all suited for different tasks. They are part of my "toolkit" which I use to solve a wide variety of problems. For me, LISP (and Scheme) happen to be suited well to the kinds of problems that involve manipulation of complex structured data objects. Once you get the hang of programming in LISP, you will find it much easier to code, debug, and maintain because you can build and test your application incrementally. Some of my work involves managing HTML and XML text and data. Writing code to parse the data and assemble it into Web pages is trivial in Scheme; for me, even Perl is somewhat more difficult to make work.
What does LISP offer the average programmer? A clean syntax. A clean, straightforward Way of Doing Things. Interactive, incremental editing, compiling and debugging. Unit testing becomes a snap: in some other languages I find I must run an entire program to determine if there's a bug in function foo. In LISP I can interactively call just foo over a set of data before integrating it with the rest of my code. In many cases, tail recursion (which makes iterating over a list or a problem space a bit like programming by math induction; very cool and very intuitive). Symbolic representation of data (useful because our brains represent data as symbols, too). Closures for those functions you need only once. Self-introspection, and a powerful macro facility that lets me add OO (if it doesn't come with the language already), coroutines, generic functions and function generators, and other things that are tricky to implement in other languages. This is real power, and while many programmers don't need it all at once, they will develop useful skills from having been exposed to it. My Scheme experience has improved all of the code I write, even in C++ and Perl which brings me to the taste aversion.:)
Many Scheme and LISP hackers have a taste aversion to Perl because of its complex and arbitrarily abstruse syntax. This is something that the LISP community has been seeking to avoid. I don't like Perl the language very much for many of the same reasons but I do admire Larry Wall (and more so Heidi ^_^) and I will use Perl when the situation demands it (which is frequent given the number of Perl installations vs. Guile or Common LISP on Web servers though I'm pushing for a change in this area). But at least I took the time to understand Perl (as my well-thumbed Camel Book will attest) instead of dismissing it right away.
This article by Pitman, however, is more level-headed, and I appreciate that. It's nice to hear a LISP advocate describe and defend rather than criticize and condemn. The main reason I have stayed away from LISP (and Emacs and OpenBSD, for that matter) is because I don't want to be associated with the people who support it. Someone may say I'm a moron for boycotting those things for such a "lame" reason, but, then again, is it really such a lame reason? What, exactly, am I missing out on by not participating in LISP, Emacs, and OpenBSD? I can tell you that I'm missing out on cavorting with condescending, arrogant pricks, for one thing. My computing needs are served quite adequately without those technologies.
You're missing out on much more than that: LISP is the most powerful, elegant programming language in the world.:) (OK, OK, so Smalltalk approaches it in power and elegance.) The advantages to using LISP far outweigh the disadvantages of associating with arrogant pricks because you really don't have to deal with the arrogant pricks if you don't want to. My communication with the LISP/Scheme "community" is limited mainly to Slashdot and the GNU project's guile-users mailing list and most of the Lispers and Schemers I've met are genuinely good, level-headed people. (Though many have a taste aversion to Perl...)
LISP offers some advantages like complete self-introspection, closures, and the ability to scratch together deeply-nested data structures on the fly, that the Algol camp is still struggling with. And LISP has had these things for years. These things are not necessary for every task (I certainly wouldn't write an operating system kernel in LISP (though it is possible) or a really high-speed graphics routine), but they sure come in handy for many tasks on a high level of abstraction, and so LISP is a good thing to have in your toolkit.
Oh, and by the way, Emacs is probably the world's most powerful text editor. Which is a bit like saying the Space Shuttle is the world's most powerful airplane. It has its downside in that it's quite heavyweight if your intent is merely to edit text but it is infinitely customizable to nearly any task within that domain and can really make life easier on a programmer. And code bloat being what it is, the Microsoft Word of today is easily many times the size of Emacs. The Emacs model of customization and code reuse also beats COM hands-down.
Don't get me wrong. I know of what you speak. I've had to deal with arrogant Mac weenies for, like, a decade now and there are quite a great deal more of those than there are rabid LISP fanatics. Doesn't mean I want to dissociate myself from the Macintosh: Quite the opposite. My sister has started drooling when a Windows Xp commercial comes on and I want to show her there's a better way.:) Short version: Don't miss out on something cool because of a few lunatics.
If CS was ever fun to you, there's something. Why don't you find an open source project that interests you, and join in or at least become part of the community? Scheme and Smalltalk have revitalized my interest in computing; this is largely due to me downloading and playing with Guile and Squeak, respectively. And they weren't even covered in class yet.
If computing is something you really enjoy, you should start learning and discovering on your own. Then the boring classes won't be so bad (and might turn into easy A's).
Dude, modern x86 CPU's are RISC cores running CISC emulators in a sort of on-chip firmware. Still crufty, but to say that they are "outdated CISC CPU's" is a fallacy. The ISA != the design of the chip.
Japanese and German work in something like this way! I'm taking Japanese and the way I remember to keep my word order straight is to think of an RPN calculator.
And why yes, I do p1mp my own Webcomic in my sig right after that rant about UF. Guess I'm into a little marketing too. -_- Though at least I've been trying to improve as an artist over the past two years...:)
I'm not a big User Friendly fan either. The thing that bugs me most, though, is not the rushed art, lame jokes, constant rehash of the "yay Linux/boo Microsoft" theme, overuse of the word "geek", or the fact that many hackers think that vague scribble called Miranda is hot.
No. What bothers me is that UF is now a commercial cash cow. As such, whatever quasi-rebellious, hackerly "edge" the strip may have had during its early days is now gone, and the strip now relentlessly panders to its readership, each joke carefully crafted to appeal to a market-demographic profile of the "typical geek". This is not the Illiad who brazenly stated that Microsoft products were three-coiled turds. This is the new, marketroid Illiad, determined to make his bland comic the perfect vector for sales pitches from large IT companies.
Maybe that is why Illiad is so cruel to Stef... he's rebelling against his very nature.
Then again we have a second amendment in this country, which guarantees the right to own and use a gun to any able-bodied (and minded) person. The idea being that even if you do have someone with a screw loose, and he successfully kills someone, he will have a hard time killing again, or he wouldn't be stupid enough to try unless he wanted a bullet in HIS head.
I think that's the point that some people here are making about nanotech.
And MacOS X.1 actually takes 53 minutes off of your work day. I think this is pretty subjective, so I'll make my own claims. My computer at Work (Win NT) is constantly getting blue screens, unexpected errors (access violation), and other freezes. My Mac at home, which I do the same things on, is rock solid, and doesn't look like a throwback to the 70's.
... but it does look like Candy Land.:)
Interface preferences are a matter of taste but I hope this "gooey GUI" fad passes soon.
Yes, but sometimes showing commented source code for a complex algorithm is more illustrative of the implementation of the algorithm than attempting to supply a verbose explanation in English, which is optimized for less technical forms of communication. Source code is thus a preferred method of discourse for certain contexts.
Regardless, what the court essentially was saying was, "Is source code a form of expression? Yes. Are the movie studios' intellectual property rights more important than the near absolute right to freedom of expression the First Amendment secures? No, and don't give us any of that 'national security' crap, either."
Most DVD's have software in them to drive the DVD player/computer display menus, etc. So even a film only DVD with no DVD addons but "special features" has a software component.
This is a consumer-entertainment device aimed at a market that's not as adept with computers as the usual/. crowd. It's intended for someone who needs Steve the Dell Computer Kid to tell him what to look for in a PC.
I remember Slackware 3.6. I remember whenever I wanted a new piece of software, it involved a few steps:
1) Go to freshmeat and search.
2) find the Web page or FTP site for the software I wanted.
3) Download.
4) Untar.
5)./configure ; make ; make install
Those were the good old days. I love apt-get as much as the next guy but I just felt so much more in control with Slack, installing virtually every new piece of software myself. Maybe Slackware will be in my future, too?
Re:Rather than whine about Mozilla...
on
Netscape 6.2
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· Score: 2
I have a Pentium 266 laptop and the Moz is quite usable even on that. Yes, you read that right. A Pentium. I. It has MMX, though, and 64MB RAM, but still.
Re:Netscape? no thanks.
on
Netscape 6.2
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Nah. Netscape 4 holdouts will find themselves left behind as more and more web shops stop caring about making their sites look good in NS4, and just worry about IE6/NS6.
ITYM "just worry about IE6". The large but dwindling Netscape 4.x user base is what kept Web developers from saying "fuck it" and turning the Web into an IE-exclusive platform these past four years. When you have 90% of the installed base, diminishing returns dictate that to third-party developers, interoperability with your competitors' offerings will be, at best, an afterthought.
But it gets worse! When Netscape 4 finally fades into irrelevance, the MSN.com lockout will be only the beginning as non-IE users find themselves shunned from more and more sites. Content providers will rely on proprietary components to supply DRM with their content, including HTML, and again, diminishing returns will dictate the OS/client platform: IE on Windows and possibly Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
In that case that makes the X-Box try #2. Microsoft's first shot at the console market was the MSX machine from the 80's... which was somewhat successful everywhere except the US, oddly enough.
Or who spends more on marketing. Microsoft: $500 million for demo units, Taco Bell tie-ins (every fucking employee wearing an X-Box Tee), and a payola system to retailers to pump up X-box and not mention Gamecube vs. $60 million for a quiet rollout. As much as I love the Gamecube so far I think it's clear who will win the console wars. PlayStation 2 first, with X-Box close behind and the Gamecube faithfully bringing up the rear.
The console industry has always been about closed up boxen. Well, since the NES...
The bitter irony is, in 1983 the Wall Street Journal wrote a report on the kinds of predatory practices that TI was engaging in by charging exorbitant sums for the right to develop game ROMS for their 99/4A computer. These days, that's not only standard industry practice, with the way they undersell consoles the market would collapse totally without it!
Sony is headed in the right direction with PS2 Linux (which AFAIK contains an OpenGL driver for their high-speed graphics thingy).
You keep saying that. Have AOL, Microsoft, and Apple taught you nothing? People don't want hard. They want easy! They don't want freedom, self-sufficiency, and responsibility for one's own actions. They want a benevolent government grandfather who will take care of them and put their kids through school and keep the thugs off their streets. But woe to the person who raises the ire of this government. It's spare the rod and spoil the child. That's the price you pay for an advanced, "progressive" society, I guess.
Frickin' EUian elitists. Oh wait, that's hate speech! Lock me up!
Really? Good news! I prefer Scheme myself, and so would recommend you get a hold of Guile or DrScheme (IMNSHO, two of the most robust Scheme inplementations around) and grab a copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs off the Web. This is a general programming book that uses Scheme as a teaching tool. There's also Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days.
If you want to crack the spine of an actual book, The Little LISPer and The Little Schemer are good places to start.
As for your complaint about no applications: Yahoo! Store is a Common LISP application. The database system that Squaresoft developed in-house to manage the Final Fantasy movie project was also written in LISP. AutoCAD was once written in LISP (and still incorporates LISP); but these days Autodesk is so enamored with the Microsoft way I wouldn't be surprised if ACAD 2002 was written in C#. All of these are "major applications" though with the exception of AutoCAD you are not likely to find them running on a workstation near you. They all deal with handling massive amounts of complex, hard-to-define data. This is something that LISP excels at. Strangely enough, that definition encompasses a great many computer applications, so now you know why LISP advocates can sometimes wax obnoxious. Especially if their day job requires them to code in something grotesque like Perl or VB, a program that would have taken a quarter or less of the time if written in LISP!
My /home partition is reiser and I have been satisfied with it. But when X decides to poo itself for the umpteenth time (Radeon DRI drivers cause a hard freeze on my ALi chipset... unless I booted and used 3D under Windows first) I hate having to fsck my / partition (which is still stuck in ext2 land because I'm afraid to change it). Maybe ext3 will be the solution for this.
This is an excellent point, one that I made but perhaps didn't clarify sufficiently, when I mentioned that LISP is a good tool to have in your toolkit. I know many languages including C, C++, Java, Smalltalk, Perl, and a couple forms of assembly and I use them all because they're all suited for different tasks. They are part of my "toolkit" which I use to solve a wide variety of problems. For me, LISP (and Scheme) happen to be suited well to the kinds of problems that involve manipulation of complex structured data objects. Once you get the hang of programming in LISP, you will find it much easier to code, debug, and maintain because you can build and test your application incrementally. Some of my work involves managing HTML and XML text and data. Writing code to parse the data and assemble it into Web pages is trivial in Scheme; for me, even Perl is somewhat more difficult to make work.
What does LISP offer the average programmer? A clean syntax. A clean, straightforward Way of Doing Things. Interactive, incremental editing, compiling and debugging. Unit testing becomes a snap: in some other languages I find I must run an entire program to determine if there's a bug in function foo. In LISP I can interactively call just foo over a set of data before integrating it with the rest of my code. In many cases, tail recursion (which makes iterating over a list or a problem space a bit like programming by math induction; very cool and very intuitive). Symbolic representation of data (useful because our brains represent data as symbols, too). Closures for those functions you need only once. Self-introspection, and a powerful macro facility that lets me add OO (if it doesn't come with the language already), coroutines, generic functions and function generators, and other things that are tricky to implement in other languages. This is real power, and while many programmers don't need it all at once, they will develop useful skills from having been exposed to it. My Scheme experience has improved all of the code I write, even in C++ and Perl which brings me to the taste aversion.
Many Scheme and LISP hackers have a taste aversion to Perl because of its complex and arbitrarily abstruse syntax. This is something that the LISP community has been seeking to avoid. I don't like Perl the language very much for many of the same reasons but I do admire Larry Wall (and more so Heidi ^_^) and I will use Perl when the situation demands it (which is frequent given the number of Perl installations vs. Guile or Common LISP on Web servers though I'm pushing for a change in this area). But at least I took the time to understand Perl (as my well-thumbed Camel Book will attest) instead of dismissing it right away.
You're missing out on much more than that: LISP is the most powerful, elegant programming language in the world.
LISP offers some advantages like complete self-introspection, closures, and the ability to scratch together deeply-nested data structures on the fly, that the Algol camp is still struggling with. And LISP has had these things for years. These things are not necessary for every task (I certainly wouldn't write an operating system kernel in LISP (though it is possible) or a really high-speed graphics routine), but they sure come in handy for many tasks on a high level of abstraction, and so LISP is a good thing to have in your toolkit.
Oh, and by the way, Emacs is probably the world's most powerful text editor. Which is a bit like saying the Space Shuttle is the world's most powerful airplane. It has its downside in that it's quite heavyweight if your intent is merely to edit text but it is infinitely customizable to nearly any task within that domain and can really make life easier on a programmer. And code bloat being what it is, the Microsoft Word of today is easily many times the size of Emacs. The Emacs model of customization and code reuse also beats COM hands-down.
Don't get me wrong. I know of what you speak. I've had to deal with arrogant Mac weenies for, like, a decade now and there are quite a great deal more of those than there are rabid LISP fanatics. Doesn't mean I want to dissociate myself from the Macintosh: Quite the opposite. My sister has started drooling when a Windows Xp commercial comes on and I want to show her there's a better way.
1e3 terabytes, or 1e6 gigabytes.
If CS was ever fun to you, there's something. Why don't you find an open source project that interests you, and join in or at least become part of the community? Scheme and Smalltalk have revitalized my interest in computing; this is largely due to me downloading and playing with Guile and Squeak, respectively. And they weren't even covered in class yet.
If computing is something you really enjoy, you should start learning and discovering on your own. Then the boring classes won't be so bad (and might turn into easy A's).
Dude, modern x86 CPU's are RISC cores running CISC emulators in a sort of on-chip firmware. Still crufty, but to say that they are "outdated CISC CPU's" is a fallacy. The ISA != the design of the chip.
Japanese and German work in something like this way! I'm taking Japanese and the way I remember to keep my word order straight is to think of an RPN calculator.
And why yes, I do p1mp my own Webcomic in my sig right after that rant about UF. Guess I'm into a little marketing too. -_- Though at least I've been trying to improve as an artist over the past two years... :)
I'm not a big User Friendly fan either. The thing that bugs me most, though, is not the rushed art, lame jokes, constant rehash of the "yay Linux/boo Microsoft" theme, overuse of the word "geek", or the fact that many hackers think that vague scribble called Miranda is hot.
No. What bothers me is that UF is now a commercial cash cow. As such, whatever quasi-rebellious, hackerly "edge" the strip may have had during its early days is now gone, and the strip now relentlessly panders to its readership, each joke carefully crafted to appeal to a market-demographic profile of the "typical geek". This is not the Illiad who brazenly stated that Microsoft products were three-coiled turds. This is the new, marketroid Illiad, determined to make his bland comic the perfect vector for sales pitches from large IT companies.
Maybe that is why Illiad is so cruel to Stef... he's rebelling against his very nature.
Your comic looks magnificent! It's very beautiful.
Then again we have a second amendment in this country, which guarantees the right to own and use a gun to any able-bodied (and minded) person. The idea being that even if you do have someone with a screw loose, and he successfully kills someone, he will have a hard time killing again, or he wouldn't be stupid enough to try unless he wanted a bullet in HIS head.
I think that's the point that some people here are making about nanotech.
... but it does look like Candy Land.
Interface preferences are a matter of taste but I hope this "gooey GUI" fad passes soon.
John Romero's birthday is also on Oct. 28. Sure explains Doom (though not Daikatana).
Yes, but sometimes showing commented source code for a complex algorithm is more illustrative of the implementation of the algorithm than attempting to supply a verbose explanation in English, which is optimized for less technical forms of communication. Source code is thus a preferred method of discourse for certain contexts.
Regardless, what the court essentially was saying was, "Is source code a form of expression? Yes. Are the movie studios' intellectual property rights more important than the near absolute right to freedom of expression the First Amendment secures? No, and don't give us any of that 'national security' crap, either."
Most DVD's have software in them to drive the DVD player/computer display menus, etc. So even a film only DVD with no DVD addons but "special features" has a software component.
Tough call.
This is a consumer-entertainment device aimed at a market that's not as adept with computers as the usual /. crowd. It's intended for someone who needs Steve the Dell Computer Kid to tell him what to look for in a PC.
I remember Slackware 3.6. I remember whenever I wanted a new piece of software, it involved a few steps:
./configure ; make ; make install
1) Go to freshmeat and search.
2) find the Web page or FTP site for the software I wanted.
3) Download.
4) Untar.
5)
Those were the good old days. I love apt-get as much as the next guy but I just felt so much more in control with Slack, installing virtually every new piece of software myself. Maybe Slackware will be in my future, too?
I have a Pentium 266 laptop and the Moz is quite usable even on that. Yes, you read that right. A Pentium. I. It has MMX, though, and 64MB RAM, but still.
ITYM "just worry about IE6". The large but dwindling Netscape 4.x user base is what kept Web developers from saying "fuck it" and turning the Web into an IE-exclusive platform these past four years. When you have 90% of the installed base, diminishing returns dictate that to third-party developers, interoperability with your competitors' offerings will be, at best, an afterthought.
But it gets worse! When Netscape 4 finally fades into irrelevance, the MSN.com lockout will be only the beginning as non-IE users find themselves shunned from more and more sites. Content providers will rely on proprietary components to supply DRM with their content, including HTML, and again, diminishing returns will dictate the OS/client platform: IE on Windows and possibly Mac.
Ever see the movie Small Soldiers? I don't think I want my bits and atoms coming together so quickly.