I just got back from Japan and I got addicted to another bemani (Beat Mania) kind of game. It is called "Taiko No Tatsujin" (Drum Master). It is really addictive: you have to play a japanese drum (kodo). The machine has an incredible bone shaking sound, that really gives you the idea of hitting a giant drum. This game is particular, because it is very beginner friendly, but it can also be used by experts. The tune selection is also great! You can see the arcade machine here. A PS2 is on its way, lucky me (and you)!
It is also important to notice that Murakami is the translator in japanese for important english masterpieces like "The great gatsby". I also remember hearing an interview he gave in english. To sum it up, I guess Murakami himself plays a big role in the english translations of his books.
Murakami usually deals with normal life stories, science fiction, or simply fiction is not his area of expertise. His masterpiece is Norwegian Woods, which tells the story of a young man, in the mid of the japanese 68. We can say that there are a lot of biographical points in the book: the music, the environment, probabily the personal experiences.
I can tell you, Norwegian Woods is one exceptional, emotional book. It's not science fiction, but still, one of the best books I've ever read.
Murakami has also witnessed two of the recent tragedies of modern Japan: the sarin gas attack in the subway and the Kobe earthquake.
In the book (Underground) about the sarin (nerve) gas attack from a religious sect, Murakami acts as a journalist, interviewing survivors and members of the sect, trying to find a logic in what happened.
The Kobe earthquake is handled differently: it is a collection of short stories, mainly of people marginally touched by the earthquake, and how it affected their lives. You can find fictional stories, where the earthquake is caused by a huge worm living underground, to more personal, intimate stories.
Anyway, Murakami is an excellent writer, you should read at least one of his books.
This is really a great advacement for security. I hope it will be ported to Linux as soon as possible.
With this mechanism, basically every program can be sandboxed. Basically it would be very useful to restrict the access to the filesystem: applications do not need to access certain directories, or even better they should only access/home and/tmp.
Still the permissions should be defined mainly at system level: for example the mozilla binary must not be allowed to access/etc or/sbin for any user.
Now the only thing missing to the office suit domination is the Mac release. I can't wait to see it. I use Mac/Win/Linux machines and a real cross platform office suite would be a great improvement!
Once, I set up a Linux file server for a very heterogenous network (AppleTalk,FTP,NFS,Samba). Since performance was not an issue (about 10 clients). I decided to underclock the processor (a very old CyrixPR166). The right clock speed would have been 133, but I clocked it to 100. This was a zero maintenance server, in fact it ran for about two years without a single problem. After two years, it needed an HD upgrade, and I opened it, to insert a new HD. To my surprise, the CPU fan broken, and in fact, from the dust I guess it didn't work for some months, but still the CPU had no temperature problems. What's the moral of this story? Don't use the muscles (Mhz) if you don't need to!:)
You can notice that an AMD Athlon XP1800+ with a generation 3 card (Radeon or GeForce 3) is about twice as fast a the new dual 1Ghz Mac with the GeForce4MX.
The only possible explanation is the relative low memory bandwidth of the card, that cripples the performance.
The Qt library offers cross-platform facilities not only for the GUI, but also for the network and threading code. The only thing missing is the serial port: this could be a bit difficult to do. To have an idea of the problems involved you may look at the Wine page: they have a lot of trouble emulating the Windows serial ports behaviour under Linux.
Just think of this: videogames are composed of visual, sound, gameplay.
Visual and sound are widely accepted to be form of arts.
Gameplay is composed in part by code and in part by the experience (story, involvment,...) the game is able to provide.
Compare it to a movie: you just have added the interaction. If a movie is art, why shouldn't a videogame also be?
Playing or looking at Metal Gear Solid has surely an higher artistic value than watching Impossible Mission 2:)
Look at the synopsis from "The Siege", it forecasted a lot of what happened.
A special agent of the FBI, a case officer of the CIA, and a general in the U.S. Army have all taken the same oath - "to support and defend the Constitution" - but when a bus blows up in Brooklyn and a campaign of terror begins to make its bloody mark on a city under siege, the men and women who have sworn to protect the country must now reckon with the many implications of their oath.
Anthony "Hub" Hubbard (Denzel Washington), the head of the joint FBI/NYPD terrorism task force, is the man charged with keeping New York City safe from an array of threats that seem to grow more terrifying with every headline. As an officer of the court, his job is the apprehension and prosecution of criminals. Elise Kraft (Annette Bening) is a CIA operative, now undercover, with important sources in the Arab-American community and ambiguous ties to the suspects. Her agenda, like that of her government's foreign policy, is more complex than Hub's. And yet these two are forced to work together, forging an uneasy alliance, as the incidents of terror threaten to paralyze the city.
But before they can accomplish their mission, the public's clamor for safety forces the hand of the President of the United States - whose only recourse is to declare a State of Emergency and ask help from the military. General William Devereaux (Bruce Willis) is a thoughtful, cautious warrior who well knows the dangers of bringing the army onto the streets of an American city. Although he argues against it, when he's given the unenviable task of imposing military order he responds as a soldier must, with unquestioning obedience and purpose.
As the pursuit of the terrorists becomes more desperate, these three lives become intertwined in a terrible and frightening dilemma, a situation that threatens the very fabric of a democratic society and the central premises on which it is founded.
http://www.thesiege.com/htmls/movie_info2.html
The final parahraph is very important:
At what point does the protection of the country's citizens conflict with the protection of their rights? Faced with such grave danger, how will the members of a free society measure up? How quickly will the country abrogate the Constitution? How shallowly beneath the surface does the ugly spectre of repression and persecution reside? Or more simply put: Will the people of this country be forced to become monsters in order to fight monsters?
At what point does the protection of the country's citizens conflict with the protection of their rights? Faced with such grave danger, how will the members of a free society measure up? How quickly will the country abrogate the Constitution? How shallowly beneath the surface does the ugly spectre of repression and persecution reside? Or more simply put: Will the people of this country be forced to become monsters in order to fight monsters?
A bit of reflection. This dialogue is taken from Patlabor 2. Goto, a policeman is talking with Arakawa, an intelligence officer.
See if you can see some sense in it:
ARAKAWA:
What are you, the police officer, and I, the JSDF officer, trying to
defend?
It's been half a century since the last war.
Neither you nor I have experienced a war.
Peace...
Peace is what we are supposed to defend.
{CLOUDY RIVER AHEAD}
But what is the peace of this city, this nation?
{SIDE VIEW OF WHARF}
The all-out war and the defeat. The US occupation policy. The Cold War
under the nuclear umbrella and the puppet wars. And civil wars that
still go on in many nations of the world.
Ethnic clash - military conflict.
{GRAIN SILO}
Blood-drenched economical prosperity created and sustained by those
countless wars.
That's what's behind our peace.
Peace created by an indiscriminate fear of war.
An unjust peace that is maintained by having the wars elsewhere, but we
keep denying ourselves this truth.
{LOTS OF TOWERS, FLASHING RED LIGHT}
GOTO:
No matter how phony the peace may be, it's our job to defend it.
No matter how unjust it may be, it's better than a just war.
ARAKAWA:
I understand how you hate "just wars".
Whoever said that word was never half decent.
History is filled with people who fell from grace believing in that.
{BUOY}
But you know only too well that there isn't much of a difference
between a just war and an unjust peace.
Ever since the word "Peace" became the excuse of the liars, we lost our
faith in peace.
Just as war creates peace, peace also creates war.
{JET}
A make-belief peace that's merely the period between two wars will
eventually give way to a real war.
Have you ever thought about that?
While receiving the benefits of war, they're hiding the truth behind
the TV screen.
Forgetting that they're merely at the rear of the battle front.
Or rather pretending to forget about it.
Such deceit will be punished sooner or later.
{LOW SHED}
GOTO:
Punished? By whom? God?
ARAKAWA:
In this town, everyone's more or less God.
Seeing everything without being there.
To have knowledge of everything without having physical contact.
God does nothing. If God doesn't do it, the people will.
We'll find out if we can't catch him.
These are the base books for every programmer, since they contain most of the algorithms used in CS:
The Algorithm Design Manual, Skiena
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, N.WirthAlgorithms, Sedgewich
Some good design pattern:
Design Patterns
Some network too:
Computer Networks, Tannenbaum (fun to read)
TCP/IP Network Administrator, O'Reilly
Logical Design and Benchmarking:
Computer Design: A quantitative Approach
The C Programming Language, K&R
Some good advice on design/coding/debugging/documenting and all the rest:
The Practice of programming, Kernigham
Unix:
The secrets of Unix
And don't forget some O'Reilly In A Nutsheel:
Perl/Java/HTML are a must have!
I own and use a Revo Plus, and I think it's the best handheld device. It's small, when folded it's maybe 2 cm bigger than a Paml. It has a real keyboard (I always use it for writing articles while commuting). Very good GUI (the omipresent zoom control on the left is a must!). Software and OS miles better than Palm, with good connectivity (PPP, serial, IR), printer support, sync software. It also had good software like drawing programs, Python (YES!), PDF reader and so on.
Also the user base was something interesting: we can say that if we compare the user base of Palm to the one of Windows, the user base of Psion was like the user base from Linux. Surely of an higher level (at least on the technical side).
Shame on you Palm, with your horrible graffiti:)
I don't think I'll buy another one for a while, or do you know of a similar sized handheld with a full keyboard?
I am an assistant at a university in Europe.
Today we teach mainly Java for CS. So, basic courses about algorithms and data structures a taught in Java. But then we have a mandatory system programming course, where the students must have a deep look at the sparc processor and have to learn it's assembly. Another mandatory lesson teaches some basic of the different programming language styles (imperative, logic, functional): there we use Eiffel, Prolog and SML. I must say this leads to a student being aware of many thing, maybe the real problem is that they don't have a deep knowledge of any of these languages.
Lately I have been playing with Python, and in my opinion it should be a great choice for people learning to program for the first time.
Personally I would also advocate for the use of a bit of C in some course, just to give the students an idea of the real world:).
I had some luck, but I got mine today.
The shop of the local cable tv had a lot of PSX2, but nobody did think they would have had one, so there were some available until 2pm.
As a geeky anecdote, as me and a friend, both CS graduates, walked in, they guy in the shop asked directly: "One or two?". So, we really can't disguise ourselves.
Sadly they had no games/pads/memory cards to sell. I had to go to another shop located nearby, which had sold out all the PSX2, but had plenty of accessories.
Another friend tried to go to the same shop, about 2 hours later, but they said they had no more PSXs, but when he was leaving, a guy working for the shop approached him, giving him a card with a phone number, saying he could get one PSX2 by calling, but it would be a bit more expensive. I guess he had bought some to resell them at a higher price.
Since I work at the university, I directly when to a room with a beamer and tried the console with Tekken Tag Tournament and ISS 2000. Tekken is visually stunning, but in the gameplay department still disappointing (like its predecessors). ISS 2000 has simpler graphics, but its the best soccer game on every platform, improving a bit on PSX ISS Pro Evolution.
On the demo disk, there is the Yabasic, I will test it: sadly I don't have an USB keyboard.
The SSX demo is also very impressive, the best game so far.
Still, I am very annoyed by the region lockout, both for DVDs and PSX 1 CDs. I have many region 1 DVDs and a lot of NTSC games I would like to play on my new console. I guess I will wait for a modchip, but I can hardly wait.
Slashdot Mirror
I just got back from Japan and I got addicted to another bemani (Beat Mania) kind of game.
It is called "Taiko No Tatsujin" (Drum Master).
It is really addictive: you have to play a japanese drum (kodo). The machine has an incredible bone shaking sound, that really gives you the idea of hitting a giant drum.
This game is particular, because it is very beginner friendly, but it can also be used by experts.
The tune selection is also great!
You can see the arcade machine here.
A PS2 is on its way, lucky me (and you)!
It is also important to notice that Murakami is the translator in japanese for important english masterpieces like "The great gatsby".
I also remember hearing an interview he gave in english.
To sum it up, I guess Murakami himself plays a big role in the english translations of his books.
Murakami usually deals with normal life stories, science fiction, or simply fiction is not his area of expertise.
His masterpiece is Norwegian Woods, which tells the story of a young man, in the mid of the japanese 68. We can say that there are a lot of biographical points in the book: the music, the environment, probabily the personal experiences.
I can tell you, Norwegian Woods is one exceptional, emotional book. It's not science fiction, but still, one of the best books I've ever read.
Murakami has also witnessed two of the recent tragedies of modern Japan: the sarin gas attack in the subway and the Kobe earthquake.
In the book (Underground) about the sarin (nerve) gas attack from a religious sect, Murakami acts as a journalist, interviewing survivors and members of the sect, trying to find a logic in what happened.
The Kobe earthquake is handled differently: it is a collection of short stories, mainly of people marginally touched by the earthquake, and how it affected their lives. You can find fictional stories, where the earthquake is caused by a huge worm living underground, to more personal, intimate stories.
Anyway, Murakami is an excellent writer, you should read at least one of his books.
From my physics classes, I recall that electricity follows the line of least resistance.
Now, this means at every crossroad, the electron flow will select the road with the least electric resistance.
This leads to a kind of greedy algorithm, that possibly leads to a good approximation of the shortest path, but still an approximation.
Or does the current flow path oscillate to find the absolute resistance minimum, so it does not get stuck in a relative minimum?
Or do I miss something?
This is really a great advacement for security. I hope it will be ported to Linux as soon as possible.
/home and /tmp.
/etc or /sbin for any user.
With this mechanism, basically every program can be sandboxed. Basically it would be very useful to restrict the access to the filesystem: applications do not need to access certain directories, or even better they should only access
Still the permissions should be defined mainly at system level: for example the mozilla binary must not be allowed to access
Now the only thing missing to the office suit domination is the Mac release.
I can't wait to see it.
I use Mac/Win/Linux machines and a real cross platform office suite would be a great improvement!
Once, I set up a Linux file server for a very heterogenous network (AppleTalk,FTP,NFS,Samba). :)
Since performance was not an issue (about 10 clients).
I decided to underclock the processor (a very old CyrixPR166). The right clock speed would have been 133, but I clocked it to 100.
This was a zero maintenance server, in fact it ran for about two years without a single problem.
After two years, it needed an HD upgrade, and I opened it, to insert a new HD. To my surprise, the CPU fan broken, and in fact, from the dust I guess it didn't work for some months, but still the CPU had no temperature problems.
What's the moral of this story? Don't use the muscles (Mhz) if you don't need to!
Now compare these speeds:
New Mac Quake III
PC Quake III Speed
You can notice that an AMD Athlon XP1800+ with a generation 3 card (Radeon or GeForce 3) is about twice as fast a the new dual 1Ghz Mac with the GeForce4MX.
The only possible explanation is the relative low memory bandwidth of the card, that cripples the performance.
The Qt library offers cross-platform facilities not only for the GUI, but also for the network and threading code. The only thing missing is the serial port: this could be a bit difficult to do. To have an idea of the problems involved you may look at the Wine page: they have a lot of trouble emulating the Windows serial ports behaviour under Linux.
Just think of this: videogames are composed of visual, sound, gameplay. :)
Visual and sound are widely accepted to be form of arts.
Gameplay is composed in part by code and in part by the experience (story, involvment,...) the game is able to provide.
Compare it to a movie: you just have added the interaction. If a movie is art, why shouldn't a videogame also be?
Playing or looking at Metal Gear Solid has surely an higher artistic value than watching Impossible Mission 2
A release of Linux for the PS2 is planned for us poor europeans also.
:)
Just have a look under the coming soon section of SCEE!
Finally I will be able to replace all the PCs in my room with one single sexy black brick
Look at the synopsis from "The Siege", it forecasted a lot of what happened.
A special agent of the FBI, a case officer of the CIA, and a general in the U.S. Army have all taken the same oath - "to support and defend the Constitution" - but when a bus blows up in Brooklyn and a campaign of terror begins to make its bloody mark on a city under siege, the men and women who have sworn to protect the country must now reckon with the many implications of their oath.
Anthony "Hub" Hubbard (Denzel Washington), the head of the joint FBI/NYPD terrorism task force, is the man charged with keeping New York City safe from an array of threats that seem to grow more terrifying with every headline. As an officer of the court, his job is the apprehension and prosecution of criminals. Elise Kraft (Annette Bening) is a CIA operative, now undercover, with important sources in the Arab-American community and ambiguous ties to the suspects. Her agenda, like that of her government's foreign policy, is more complex than Hub's. And yet these two are forced to work together, forging an uneasy alliance, as the incidents of terror threaten to paralyze the city.
But before they can accomplish their mission, the public's clamor for safety forces the hand of the President of the United States - whose only recourse is to declare a State of Emergency and ask help from the military. General William Devereaux (Bruce Willis) is a thoughtful, cautious warrior who well knows the dangers of bringing the army onto the streets of an American city. Although he argues against it, when he's given the unenviable task of imposing military order he responds as a soldier must, with unquestioning obedience and purpose.
As the pursuit of the terrorists becomes more desperate, these three lives become intertwined in a terrible and frightening dilemma, a situation that threatens the very fabric of a democratic society and the central premises on which it is founded.
http://www.thesiege.com/htmls/movie_info2.html
The final parahraph is very important:
At what point does the protection of the country's citizens conflict with the protection of their rights? Faced with such grave danger, how will the members of a free society measure up? How quickly will the country abrogate the Constitution? How shallowly beneath the surface does the ugly spectre of repression and persecution reside? Or more simply put: Will the people of this country be forced to become monsters in order to fight monsters?
At what point does the protection of the country's citizens conflict with the protection of their rights? Faced with such grave danger, how will the members of a free society measure up? How quickly will the country abrogate the Constitution? How shallowly beneath the surface does the ugly spectre of repression and persecution reside? Or more simply put: Will the people of this country be forced to become monsters in order to fight monsters?
A bit of reflection. This dialogue is taken from Patlabor 2. Goto, a policeman is talking with Arakawa, an intelligence officer.
See if you can see some sense in it:
ARAKAWA:
What are you, the police officer, and I, the JSDF officer, trying to
defend?
It's been half a century since the last war.
Neither you nor I have experienced a war.
Peace...
Peace is what we are supposed to defend.
{CLOUDY RIVER AHEAD}
But what is the peace of this city, this nation?
{SIDE VIEW OF WHARF}
The all-out war and the defeat. The US occupation policy. The Cold War
under the nuclear umbrella and the puppet wars. And civil wars that
still go on in many nations of the world.
Ethnic clash - military conflict.
{GRAIN SILO}
Blood-drenched economical prosperity created and sustained by those
countless wars.
That's what's behind our peace.
Peace created by an indiscriminate fear of war.
An unjust peace that is maintained by having the wars elsewhere, but we
keep denying ourselves this truth.
{LOTS OF TOWERS, FLASHING RED LIGHT}
GOTO:
No matter how phony the peace may be, it's our job to defend it.
No matter how unjust it may be, it's better than a just war.
ARAKAWA:
I understand how you hate "just wars".
Whoever said that word was never half decent.
History is filled with people who fell from grace believing in that.
{BUOY}
But you know only too well that there isn't much of a difference
between a just war and an unjust peace.
Ever since the word "Peace" became the excuse of the liars, we lost our
faith in peace.
Just as war creates peace, peace also creates war.
{JET}
A make-belief peace that's merely the period between two wars will
eventually give way to a real war.
Have you ever thought about that?
While receiving the benefits of war, they're hiding the truth behind
the TV screen.
Forgetting that they're merely at the rear of the battle front.
Or rather pretending to forget about it.
Such deceit will be punished sooner or later.
{LOW SHED}
GOTO:
Punished? By whom? God?
ARAKAWA:
In this town, everyone's more or less God.
Seeing everything without being there.
To have knowledge of everything without having physical contact.
God does nothing. If God doesn't do it, the people will.
We'll find out if we can't catch him.
You can accomplish the same on Linux by running multiple X servers.
In random order:
These are the base books for every programmer, since they contain most of the algorithms used in CS:
The Algorithm Design Manual, Skiena
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, N.WirthAlgorithms, Sedgewich
Some good design pattern:
Design Patterns
Some network too:
Computer Networks, Tannenbaum (fun to read)
TCP/IP Network Administrator, O'Reilly
Logical Design and Benchmarking:
Computer Design: A quantitative Approach
The C Programming Language, K&R
Some good advice on design/coding/debugging/documenting and all the rest:
The Practice of programming, Kernigham
Unix:
The secrets of Unix
And don't forget some O'Reilly In A Nutsheel:
Perl/Java/HTML are a must have!
I own and use a Revo Plus, and I think it's the best handheld device. It's small, when folded it's maybe 2 cm bigger than a Paml. It has a real keyboard (I always use it for writing articles while commuting). Very good GUI (the omipresent zoom control on the left is a must!). Software and OS miles better than Palm, with good connectivity (PPP, serial, IR), printer support, sync software. It also had good software like drawing programs, Python (YES!), PDF reader and so on.
:)
Also the user base was something interesting: we can say that if we compare the user base of Palm to the one of Windows, the user base of Psion was like the user base from Linux. Surely of an higher level (at least on the technical side).
Shame on you Palm, with your horrible graffiti
I don't think I'll buy another one for a while, or do you know of a similar sized handheld with a full keyboard?
I am an assistant at a university in Europe. :).
Today we teach mainly Java for CS. So, basic courses about algorithms and data structures a taught in Java.
But then we have a mandatory system programming course, where the students must have a deep look at the sparc processor and have to learn it's assembly.
Another mandatory lesson teaches some basic of the different programming language styles (imperative, logic, functional): there we use Eiffel, Prolog and SML.
I must say this leads to a student being aware of many thing, maybe the real problem is that they don't have a deep knowledge of any of these languages.
Lately I have been playing with Python, and in my opinion it should be a great choice for people learning to program for the first time.
Personally I would also advocate for the use of a bit of C in some course, just to give the students an idea of the real world
To sum it up:
- eat less
- do regular exercise
- eat better (In the USA it's a big problem)
Nothing else.
I had some luck, but I got mine today.
The shop of the local cable tv had a lot of PSX2, but nobody did think they would have had one, so there were some available until 2pm.
As a geeky anecdote, as me and a friend, both CS graduates, walked in, they guy in the shop asked directly: "One or two?". So, we really can't disguise ourselves.
Sadly they had no games/pads/memory cards to sell. I had to go to another shop located nearby, which had sold out all the PSX2, but had plenty of accessories.
Another friend tried to go to the same shop, about 2 hours later, but they said they had no more PSXs, but when he was leaving, a guy working for the shop approached him, giving him a card with a phone number, saying he could get one PSX2 by calling, but it would be a bit more expensive.
I guess he had bought some to resell them at a higher price.
Since I work at the university, I directly when to a room with a beamer and tried the console with Tekken Tag Tournament and ISS 2000. Tekken is visually stunning, but in the gameplay department still disappointing (like its predecessors). ISS 2000 has simpler graphics, but its the best soccer game on every platform, improving a bit on PSX ISS Pro Evolution.
On the demo disk, there is the Yabasic, I will test it: sadly I don't have an USB keyboard.
The SSX demo is also very impressive, the best game so far.
Still, I am very annoyed by the region lockout, both for DVDs and PSX 1 CDs. I have many region 1 DVDs and a lot of NTSC games I would like to play on my new console. I guess I will wait for a modchip, but I can hardly wait.