There isn't too much more to say... the Lemur is marketed primarily as a customizable controller for audio applications, and so it's designed for very low latency (i.e. you could use it as a virtual drum pad, etc). It comes with a program called JazzEditor that lets you drag-and-drop any combination of six or seven various widgets (1D and 2D sliders, text displays, etc) into a work area in the editor window, and matching widgets show up on the touch-screen. You can then set various properties of the "physics" of the widgets, to give them more or less friction, bounce, etc. It also lets you type in mathematical equations to further control things, but I haven't played around with that very much. Finally, it lets you set up a few dozen different "virtual screens" (analagous to virtual desktops under Linux) and then use the buttons at the top of the Lemur unit to switch quickly back and forth between them, or you can press the menu button (also at the top of the unit) to bring up a screen showing all the programmed screens at once (in miniature) and you can touch the one you want to bring up.
The built-in OpenSoundControl support is quite good; it gives you full bi-directional control over the unit (i.e. your app can receive UDP packets whenever the user touches a widget, and your app can also send UDP packets to the unit to tell it to move a widget automatically)
I agree it would be a little small for general computer use, but as a customizable controller / input device, it works well. I think the price is around $2600US.
FWIW, you can buy something like this right now. The Lemur is a touch screen that supports multiple touch-points at once, and communicates over Ethernet via OpenSoundControl. I have one on my desk at work, and it works well -- e.g. I can use 5 fingers to drag 5 different balls around the Lemur's touch-screen simultaneously, and see my actions mirrored instantaneously on the software on my PC.
It doesn't need to be. The point of parasitic behaviour control isn't to harm the host, it's to help the parasite. Making the host human suicidal would probably not help the parasite spread to other humans (unless it could convince its host to jump into the nearest sausage-grinding machine, perhaps...)
And when *you* get sick, you either blame God for it, or you pray to God to get healed...taking *zero* responsibility for the diet and lifestyle that got you sick in the first place
That's the price of being omnipotent, you know -- if it's in your power to fix anything with a wave of your hand, then of course people are going to blame you when things don't get fixed. If God can't handle the criticism, then perhaps he'd better get off his ass and pitch in more often. This whole "I love you all but I'm going to sit on my hands and watch you suffer and die because I think it builds character" schtick is a weak cop-out and frankly we should expect better from someone who styles themself as an All-Powerful Benevolent Diety. But I'm personally not worried -- if God can't deliver the goods, then maybe the competition will.
More to the point, with software it doesn't have to be an either/or proposition. There's no reason apps can't be designed to make use of centralized resources when they are available, and yet still handle their absence gracefully and remain useful in stand-alone mode.
Of course it would be up to Microsoft whether to make their apps work like that or not... but then it's also up to people whether or not to buy or use Microsoft's apps.
and where did you get the idea i was advocating violent, criminal and unethical behavior?
From the "The Third Man" quote you supplied, it sounded very much like you were claiming that 'warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed' were prerequisites for cultural advance, and that brotherly love and 'getting along' cause cultural stagnation.
Sorry, but youve got that backwards. Political science offers far more evidence that conflict happens as a result of starvation than vice versa.
Okay, I'm willing to believe that. But it doesn't change the point that every dollar spent on guns and bullets is a dollar that can't be spent on food, health care, or anything else.
Our inventions improve economies around the world, helping more people put food on their tables. Our secret: competition.
Again, I have nothing against competition; I think it can be (and generally is) a powerful force for advancement. What I am against (and I apologize if I misread the intent of your post) is the rationalization of violence and warfare as somehow necessary or beneficial to mankind.
As long as there's one person who is willing to resort to force to get what they want, everybody needs to be able to use force to defend their interest
Yes, that's very true. But being able to use force (as a last resort when all else has failed) is very different from using force as a preferred or even common tactic. Like chemotherapy, it may be the only way in the end to solve a problem, but the risk of collateral damage and unintended consequences is so high that it's not something that should ever be used lightly.
Why can't we take advantage of multi CPU software using networked PCs?
Well, you can, for some things. The problem is that the speed of even gigabit Ethernet is so slow (compared to the speed of the interconnect between two CPUs on the same chip or motherboard) that in order for a program that runs well over a cluster, it often has to be designed completely differently from a program that will run well on a multi-CPU machine. In particular, things like shared memory are extremely difficult to simulate over a network, but trivial when you've got a single machine where the CPUs, well, share the memory.
For a lot of problem types, the high latency and low bandwidth of the network interconnect lead to the situation where you've spent hours and hours getting your app to run across all the CPUs in your cluster, only to find out that it's actually running slower than the simple version of the app that does everything on a single CPU. That's really embarrassing...
Man, I gotta go find out why multithreading is so hard.
I'll tell you why it's hard: "Normal"/Single-threaded programming is like training Helen Keller to dance: not easy, but once she's learned the layout of the room and memorized the steps, she can do the routine pretty well. Multi-threaded programming is like training a dozen Helen Kellers to do a synchronized group routine: each of them still has to know the steps and avoid tripping over the furniture, but they each also have to know how to do it without ever colliding with any of the 11 other dancers. Add to that the fact that every dancer moves at a unpredictable, varying speed with respect to the other dancers, and you've got quite the challenge if you want to have a successful show night after night.
Still, it can be done, and it can even be fun once you get the hang of it. Prepare for a good bit of hair pulling and "why does my program crash randomly, about once a week?" until then, though...
it takes ambitious risk-takers (read: dicks) to sustain an economy.
I have nothing against ambitious risk-takers; I think they are great. But it's perfectly possible to be ambitious and competitive without being violent, criminal, or unethical. Wiping out war and crime would not mean that competition and innovation would disappear. To the contrary, people who no longer had to worry about being shot dead would have more time to devote to creative or industrious pursuits.
the fact is we would starve if everyone just got along.
Most starvation in the modern world is due to political conflict, not to lack of innovation. And that makes perfect sense: the more resources that are wasted on conflict, the fewer that are left over to be used for other things (like food production).
they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Pretty paintings and clever inventions are not an end unto themselves -- they are means towards a larger end, which is an improved quality of life. "500 years of democracy and peace" is not something to be dismissed lightly -- it is a strong indication of a successful society. "warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed", on the other hand, describes no society that I would want to live in, and I suspect you wouldn't either. I don't see any reason why those things are necessary in order to drive progress -- in fact, I think they do just the opposite.
unfortunately, most are designed by women who dont understand the development of boys, so theyll probably end up turning the entire classes into pussies
If you are using the word "pussies" as shorthand for "people who solve social problems in stereotypically feminine ways such as negotiation, compromise, and concensus, rather than by stereotypically masculine ways such domination, intimidation, manipulation, and violence"... then I think that "turning entire classes into pussies" would probably be the best thing that could happen to the human race. We could then spend more of our time and energy on improving the quality of life for everyone, and less of it on finding clever new ways to kill each other.
(because lets face it creativity is often driven by depression and despair)
While that sounds very romantic and all, I'm pretty sure it's wrong. It's true that creative people can also be depressed, but I think they would be more creative without the depression. The whole essence of depression can be summed up as "Why bother? Nothing I do will make any difference anyway." -- hardly a mindset conducive to creative activity.
(that said, I wouldn't feel comfortable taking medicine for depression myself, unless I was seriously debilitated by the depression. It's not that I don't think it would help, it's that I don't trust ~40 years of pharmaceutical research to regulate my brain more reliably than 50 million years of evolution can)
Sure you can, you'll just have to continue compiling it as regular c++, with an c++/cli interface layer if you want to access it from.net.
Right, I could use a cross-language interface layer, the same as if I had written the code any other non-compatible language. Which is the point: Without MI, C++/CLI is not C++ in any meaningful sense of the term. It's a separate, similar-but-incompatible language, much like C# or Java.
And gratuitous use of multiple inheritance is bad design, so you might want to think about that. Yes it's a good thing sometimes, but this is VERY RARE - it always increases complexity and can cause problems later, it's just that sometimes the benefits are worth it.
I agree that it's very easy to misuse multiple inheritance and get into trouble, and I have been bitten by that in the past. From those experiences I was able to learn where MI is helpful and where it isn't, and now I use it only when it's appropriate. But really, whether MI is considered "good", "bad", or "ugly" is beside the point -- it's an integral part of C++, and a language that doesn't support it simply can't claim to be "C++ ".
The only real C++ feature that isn't supported is multiple inheritance (with the exception of interface implementation). And that's just fine with me.
It sure as hell isn't fine with me. I use multiple inheritance a lot, and if Microsoft's language doesn't support it, that means I would have to throw away (or at least, radically redesign) most of my existing code in order to use their compiler. The whole point of having a standardized language specification is so that you can migrate existing code without rewriting it. So their new language may be many things, but without multiple inheritance it's not C++.
Maybe you're a conservative who dislikes the idea of the welfare state - do you actively go around disrupting the welfare state for others?
Maybe you're an abolitionist fighting slavery -- is it okay for you to help slaves escape to the North, essentially "stealing property" from their owners?
Doing so means punishing someone for an opinion, not an intention
Seems to me that it's intention in both cases. In a typical non-hate-crime murder, your thought might be "I'm going to kill that guy and steal his wallet, so I buy some more crack". In a typical hate-crime murder, your thought might be "I'm going to kill that faggot and spray paint FAG all over him so that every pervert in this town knows what happens to fags around here". i.e. you are killing with the intent of terrorizing part of the population. That makes it a crime not just against the individual, but against everyone who is a target of your implicit threat.
Dunno, the NYT has gone way beyond that to lending aid and comfort to the terrorists and I don't see them in jail yet.
Really? How much money did the NYT give to the terrorists?
Or are you actually just saying you think they should be jailed for printing things you didn't want them to print? If so, please re-read the First Amendment. I think it is pretty clear on that point.
you are useless raving moonbats leading your party to destruction.
Mixing langauges essentially means that a person who introduces a new langauge gets to build themselves (and a few of their pals) a little ghetto where other programmers are afraid to walk at night.
Just to be contrarian... it can work the opposite way as well. Many of my co-workers are scared of C++, but when I added a Python interpreter to the codebase and started implementating some of the program's functionality in Python, they felt comfortable creating and editing Python code.
a 3% annual ROI isn't worth the trouble unless they have some IP AAPL, really, really wants
Apple is clearly having second thoughts about their decision to purchase the inferior NeXTStep instead of BeOS, and are now seizing their opportunity to switch to the OS they should have used in the first place. This also explains their switch to Intel chips, as BeOS R5 runs better on Intel...
(this post close captioned for the humour impaired::^) )
Read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those are the ideals I'm referring to, whether you choose to ignore them or not.
Germany lost WWII because Hitler didn't have WMDs and mismanaged his generals.
... and also because so much of the world was willing to fight against him. Why? Because his actions were intolerable. The worse US actions become, the more resistance it will face as well.
And if you think America will give up the profit motive to live in harmony with the world and other nations- then you're as much of a dreamer as I was 6 years ago before corporate America decided that my life wasn't worth supporting.
Have you considered that maybe you are dreaming now, but your dream is a nightmare? Perhaps the country isn't as hopelessly corrupt as you think it is.
Alternatively, if the country is as bad as you say, why do you support making it stronger? If the situation is hopeless, wouldn't you prefer to see it destroyed so that something better could take its place?
Slashdot Mirror
There isn't too much more to say... the Lemur is marketed primarily as a customizable controller for audio applications, and so it's designed for very low latency (i.e. you could use it as a virtual drum pad, etc). It comes with a program called JazzEditor that lets you drag-and-drop any combination of six or seven various widgets (1D and 2D sliders, text displays, etc) into a work area in the editor window, and matching widgets show up on the touch-screen. You can then set various properties of the "physics" of the widgets, to give them more or less friction, bounce, etc. It also lets you type in mathematical equations to further control things, but I haven't played around with that very much. Finally, it lets you set up a few dozen different "virtual screens" (analagous to virtual desktops under Linux) and then use the buttons at the top of the Lemur unit to switch quickly back and forth between them, or you can press the menu button (also at the top of the unit) to bring up a screen showing all the programmed screens at once (in miniature) and you can touch the one you want to bring up.
The built-in OpenSoundControl support is quite good; it gives you full bi-directional control over the unit (i.e. your app can receive UDP packets whenever the user touches a widget, and your app can also send UDP packets to the unit to tell it to move a widget automatically)
I agree it would be a little small for general computer use, but as a customizable controller / input device, it works well. I think the price is around $2600US.
FWIW, you can buy something like this right now. The Lemur is a touch screen that supports multiple touch-points at once, and communicates over Ethernet via OpenSoundControl. I have one on my desk at work, and it works well -- e.g. I can use 5 fingers to drag 5 different balls around the Lemur's touch-screen simultaneously, and see my actions mirrored instantaneously on the software on my PC.
No need to invoke parasites to explain that. We keep doing those things because those were all things that worked very well in the past.
It doesn't need to be. The point of parasitic behaviour control isn't to harm the host, it's to help the parasite. Making the host human suicidal would probably not help the parasite spread to other humans (unless it could convince its host to jump into the nearest sausage-grinding machine, perhaps...)
That's the price of being omnipotent, you know -- if it's in your power to fix anything with a wave of your hand, then of course people are going to blame you when things don't get fixed. If God can't handle the criticism, then perhaps he'd better get off his ass and pitch in more often. This whole "I love you all but I'm going to sit on my hands and watch you suffer and die because I think it builds character" schtick is a weak cop-out and frankly we should expect better from someone who styles themself as an All-Powerful Benevolent Diety. But I'm personally not worried -- if God can't deliver the goods, then maybe the competition will.
More to the point, with software it doesn't have to be an either/or proposition. There's no reason apps can't be designed to make use of centralized resources when they are available, and yet still handle their absence gracefully and remain useful in stand-alone mode.
Of course it would be up to Microsoft whether to make their apps work like that or not... but then it's also up to people whether or not to buy or use Microsoft's apps.
From the "The Third Man" quote you supplied, it sounded very much like you were claiming that 'warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed' were prerequisites for cultural advance, and that brotherly love and 'getting along' cause cultural stagnation.
Sorry, but youve got that backwards. Political science offers far more evidence that conflict happens as a result of starvation than vice versa.
Okay, I'm willing to believe that. But it doesn't change the point that every dollar spent on guns and bullets is a dollar that can't be spent on food, health care, or anything else.
Our inventions improve economies around the world, helping more people put food on their tables. Our secret: competition.
Again, I have nothing against competition; I think it can be (and generally is) a powerful force for advancement. What I am against (and I apologize if I misread the intent of your post) is the rationalization of violence and warfare as somehow necessary or beneficial to mankind.
Yes, that's very true. But being able to use force (as a last resort when all else has failed) is very different from using force as a preferred or even common tactic. Like chemotherapy, it may be the only way in the end to solve a problem, but the risk of collateral damage and unintended consequences is so high that it's not something that should ever be used lightly.
Well, you can, for some things. The problem is that the speed of even gigabit Ethernet is so slow (compared to the speed of the interconnect between two CPUs on the same chip or motherboard) that in order for a program that runs well over a cluster, it often has to be designed completely differently from a program that will run well on a multi-CPU machine. In particular, things like shared memory are extremely difficult to simulate over a network, but trivial when you've got a single machine where the CPUs, well, share the memory.
For a lot of problem types, the high latency and low bandwidth of the network interconnect lead to the situation where you've spent hours and hours getting your app to run across all the CPUs in your cluster, only to find out that it's actually running slower than the simple version of the app that does everything on a single CPU. That's really embarrassing...
I'll tell you why it's hard: "Normal"/Single-threaded programming is like training Helen Keller to dance: not easy, but once she's learned the layout of the room and memorized the steps, she can do the routine pretty well. Multi-threaded programming is like training a dozen Helen Kellers to do a synchronized group routine: each of them still has to know the steps and avoid tripping over the furniture, but they each also have to know how to do it without ever colliding with any of the 11 other dancers. Add to that the fact that every dancer moves at a unpredictable, varying speed with respect to the other dancers, and you've got quite the challenge if you want to have a successful show night after night.
Still, it can be done, and it can even be fun once you get the hang of it. Prepare for a good bit of hair pulling and "why does my program crash randomly, about once a week?" until then, though...
I have nothing against ambitious risk-takers; I think they are great. But it's perfectly possible to be ambitious and competitive without being violent, criminal, or unethical. Wiping out war and crime would not mean that competition and innovation would disappear. To the contrary, people who no longer had to worry about being shot dead would have more time to devote to creative or industrious pursuits.
the fact is we would starve if everyone just got along.
Most starvation in the modern world is due to political conflict, not to lack of innovation. And that makes perfect sense: the more resources that are wasted on conflict, the fewer that are left over to be used for other things (like food production).
they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The
cuckoo clock.
Pretty paintings and clever inventions are not an end unto themselves -- they are means towards a larger end, which is an improved quality of life. "500 years of democracy and peace" is not something to be dismissed lightly -- it is a strong indication of a successful society. "warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed", on the other hand, describes no society that I would want to live in, and I suspect you wouldn't either. I don't see any reason why those things are necessary in order to drive progress -- in fact, I think they do just the opposite.
If you are using the word "pussies" as shorthand for "people who solve social problems in stereotypically feminine ways such as negotiation, compromise, and concensus, rather than by stereotypically masculine ways such domination, intimidation, manipulation, and violence"... then I think that "turning entire classes into pussies" would probably be the best thing that could happen to the human race. We could then spend more of our time and energy on improving the quality of life for everyone, and less of it on finding clever new ways to kill each other.
While that sounds very romantic and all, I'm pretty sure it's wrong. It's true that creative people can also be depressed, but I think they would be more creative without the depression. The whole essence of depression can be summed up as "Why bother? Nothing I do will make any difference anyway." -- hardly a mindset conducive to creative activity.
(that said, I wouldn't feel comfortable taking medicine for depression myself, unless I was seriously debilitated by the depression. It's not that I don't think it would help, it's that I don't trust ~40 years of pharmaceutical research to regulate my brain more reliably than 50 million years of evolution can)
Right, I could use a cross-language interface layer, the same as if I had written the code any other non-compatible language. Which is the point: Without MI, C++/CLI is not C++ in any meaningful sense of the term. It's a separate, similar-but-incompatible language, much like C# or Java.
And gratuitous use of multiple inheritance is bad design, so you might want to think about that. Yes it's a good thing sometimes, but this is VERY RARE - it always increases complexity and can cause problems later, it's just that sometimes the benefits are worth it.
I agree that it's very easy to misuse multiple inheritance and get into trouble, and I have been bitten by that in the past. From those experiences I was able to learn where MI is helpful and where it isn't, and now I use it only when it's appropriate. But really, whether MI is considered "good", "bad", or "ugly" is beside the point -- it's an integral part of C++, and a language that doesn't support it simply can't claim to be "C++ ".
It sure as hell isn't fine with me. I use multiple inheritance a lot, and if Microsoft's language doesn't support it, that means I would have to throw away (or at least, radically redesign) most of my existing code in order to use their compiler. The whole point of having a standardized language specification is so that you can migrate existing code without rewriting it. So their new language may be many things, but without multiple inheritance it's not C++.
BadAnalogyGuy, indeed. Please, stop!
Maybe you're an abolitionist fighting slavery -- is it okay for you to help slaves escape to the North, essentially "stealing property" from their owners?
Ah, I understand. Yes, I agree with you. :^)
Seems to me that it's intention in both cases. In a typical non-hate-crime murder, your thought might be "I'm going to kill that guy and steal his wallet, so I buy some more crack". In a typical hate-crime murder, your thought might be "I'm going to kill that faggot and spray paint FAG all over him so that every pervert in this town knows what happens to fags around here". i.e. you are killing with the intent of terrorizing part of the population. That makes it a crime not just against the individual, but against everyone who is a target of your implicit threat.
Really? How much money did the NYT give to the terrorists?
Or are you actually just saying you think they should be jailed for printing things you didn't want them to print? If so, please re-read the First Amendment. I think it is pretty clear on that point.
you are useless raving moonbats leading your party to destruction.
Ah, abuse, the hallmark of a brilliant mind.
Just to be contrarian... it can work the opposite way as well. Many of my co-workers are scared of C++, but when I added a Python interpreter to the codebase and started implementating some of the program's functionality in Python, they felt comfortable creating and editing Python code.
Apple is clearly having second thoughts about their decision to purchase the inferior NeXTStep instead of BeOS, and are now seizing their opportunity to switch to the OS they should have used in the first place. This also explains their switch to Intel chips, as BeOS R5 runs better on Intel...
(this post close captioned for the humour impaired:
Really? The last time I checked, India was supposed to be "the placed your programming career just got outsourced to"...
Read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those are the ideals I'm referring to, whether you choose to ignore them or not.
Germany lost WWII because Hitler didn't have WMDs and mismanaged his generals.
And if you think America will give up the profit motive to live in harmony with the world and other nations- then you're as much of a dreamer as I was 6 years ago before corporate America decided that my life wasn't worth supporting.
Have you considered that maybe you are dreaming now, but your dream is a nightmare? Perhaps the country isn't as hopelessly corrupt as you think it is.
Alternatively, if the country is as bad as you say, why do you support making it stronger? If the situation is hopeless, wouldn't you prefer to see it destroyed so that something better could take its place?
Dude, I don't think those are women.