but don't think anything other than a microsoft OS will actually be able to access the files
in order for your theory to work, one of the following things will have to happen:
The Office 11 XML file format will not be the same for the Macintosh and Windows versions.
Apple will have to sign on with to MS's Trusted Computing initiative.
Which are you suggesting is going to happen? Neither seems likely to me. Unless the mac version of Office 11 also engages in the policy of secrecy, any attempt to keep people from "getting at" the files directly will have no teeth.
And Microsoft cannot afford to marginalize the mac users. They can afford neither to make it so office 11/mac can't read the files from office 11/windows, nor to make it so that users are somehow restricted from transferring files between windows and non-windows box (becuase how are they going to be able to tell if you're e-mailing that file to a mac user or linux user?). There are situations and businesses where one of Office's biggest advantages is a standard, uniform platform for word processing between the macs and PCs in the office. Lose that advantage, and entire businesses could be convinced to switch to something else so that all of their computers can interoperate. And now that MS has eliminated all serious competitors to Office, MS's biggest fear is that some tiny niche (such as the mac users) could for some reason find themselves needing to switch to something other than MS Office.
Remember, users are funding, and if all those mac users start funding Nisus or whoever, Nisus could potentially get enough money together to port to windows and become a potential competitor to microsoft. Microsoft doesn't want that..
The would secretly charge people $3.99+ per minute whenever they make a call from that location. Of course the person would be none the wiser.
While this is a good point, and i can definitely see the scenario you describe occuring, it is worth pointing out that every single multi-mode cell phone i've ever seen warns you when you entered a roaming area. My phone, a Sprint, actually has a guard where if you try to make a call from a roaming area, it pops up a screen that say "Roaming charges will apply! Are you sure you want to do this? Yes/No"
Forgive me if i'm wrong, but i'm pretty sure if verizon tried to sell a phone where you could potentially be charged hyper-roaming charges at a moment's notice without the cell phone warning you "this will be a super- expensive roaming call" in some way, they'd have to face some kind of deceptive trade practices lawsuit no matter what their terms of service disclaimers say.
Of course, that won't stop the hypothetical companies you mention from still going through with that plan, and leaving people with the option "you can go down 24 stories and stand outside in the piercing cold, or you can hit 'yes' on your cellphone and accept our roaming rates". It just stops them from doing it secretly.
This brings up an interesting question i never quite understood-- can you put something at a lagrange point if there's already something there?
If the SOHO satellite and the proposed space station are both at L1, how close will they be? Visible distance?
How big are these "point"s? I get that there's going to be one optimum point, which is L1's location, but how big is the area where the effects of L1 are still felt to the degree where it's a useful place to park something? I.E., how big is this space station's playpen?
If RMS doesn't understand the vocabulary issue, then why does he refer to "trusted computing" as "treacherous computing" throughout the article?
Oops.
Okay, so, yeah, RMS does get it. I must confess i did not actually read his article before making my post.. there were like 10 links in that blurb and it wasn't clear what was what:). Nevertheless, i am quite embarrased.
Although i'll hold to what i said-- RMS may get it, but in general not all of the other free software advocate people do.
Actually, RMS *really* gets it. This is a great article. It's too bad RMS never gets published outside of the incestuous circle of slashdot-like sites, he's so much more eloquent in writing... I wonder how hard it would be to get something like this RMS article published as a one-page advertisement in Newsweek. If karyn wossername can get $20,000 just becuase she couldn't manage her debt and she knows how to set up a website, the Slashdot Community could probably put together enough money for a newsweek ad:)
The fact the word "trusted" is in this thing means NOTHING. The word is just there as a PR thing, something microsoft set up to make people feel all warm and fuzzy toward them. I could move into your neighborhood and start a program i call the "community trust system" in which you pay me money, and as a result you get to sleep safe at night trusting that my hired thugs will not come smash in your windows... and the fire department, which i have bribed, will actually come to your aid in the case of an unfortunate fire at your house... but that wouldn't have anything to do with either "community" or "trust". It would just be extortion...but then, if I also paid off the town newspaper and made sure that all anyone from other sections of town heard about was how great it was that the areas with the Community Trust System had much lower crime, then people on the other side of town would walk away thinking the Community Trust System was something really good.
This is what the RMS bunch never gets. If you let the other side set the language of the debate, they start out with a huge advantage. If you just sit there and LET the debate begin in a mode where "trusted computing" is always being used to describe "computing in which microsoft, not the owner of the box, is the one who has final say-so as to what happens on that box" (or "computing in which the user is not trusted at all".. really, palladium is a complicated concept, and trying to reduce it to one catchphrase is just silly).. and "anti-piracy" is always used for "prevents copying".. and "digital rights management" is always used for "technology which lets providers of copyrighted material limit the manner in which that material is used"..
If you let that happen, you're always at a huge disadvantage, because people who walk into the debate late will hear RMS or whoever saying "and so, Trusted Computing is bad!" and they'll go "wait, Trusted Computing sounds good! huh?"
This is made even worse in this particular case becuase the technical issues are simply beyond the grasp of the average person. Unless you have a pretty decent idea of how a computer works, you can't understand what Palladium does, and it takes quite a while for someone to explain to you what Palladium's effect for the consumer will be. As such, the average person, upon hearing about all this, will be faced with two sides to the debate: Microsoft's version of things, which is incredibly simple and easy to grasp because Microsoft is oversimplifying the truth to the point where it's practically out and out lying, and the Free Software People's version of things, which is disgustingly, disgustingly complex becuase it tells the whole truth, with all its confusing technical details and collateral damage. (Well, and becuase the Free Software People are a large, disorganized, and largely not very eloquent group, whereas Microsoft has everything being written by PR firms, and a large advertising budget.) Who do you think the average person is going to listen to? It seems obvious to me-- they simply won't be able to wrap their heads around what the Free Software People are saying. People may walk away with some vague sense Microsoft may be up to something shady, but they'll assume that even if it gives Microsoft lots of power, Palladium does the things Microsoft says it does (which it doesn't, not effectively), and will just forget about all those "side effects" that they heard about but didn't understand.
For people who spend so much time haggling over hacker vs cracker and the whole "GNU/" thing, it always seems so wierd to me they don't get that one simple thing. The vocabulary of the debate matters.
Remember, always remember: With Trusted Computing, you are not the consumer. You are the product. You are being sold to entertainment companies by Microsoft-- and they are paying Microsoft not in money, but by agreeing to use Microsoft's platform for "digital rights management", and Microsoft benefits in that they get validation for their secure, locked-down stranglehold on every single step within the computer between your fingertips on the keyboard and the rays of light coming out of the monitor. (And, of course, if things turn out the way MS hopes, eventually things will reach the point where your average computer user can't realistically ever switch Palladium off, because if they do there will be too many programs they can't run and too many websites they can't visit.) Of course, if Microsoft ever does secure that degree of control, you can bet the entertainment industries will wind up paying Microsoft a decent amount of money, if nothing else for the licensing to encode and decode into the formats of Microsoft's secure platform..
The branch davidians, among quite a lot of other things, refused to cooperate with an ATF investigation that was being carried out as much in accordance with due process of law as one could possibly ask, and shot some ATF agents. The south in the civil war, among quite a lot of other things, seceded from the united states despite having no clear authority to do so just because they didn't like the results of a presidential election, and fired on U.S. naval ships outside charleston.
The 20,000 people in the article have a plan to move to some state and then vote there. And y'all are comparing that to armed attempts to declare oneself outside of federal jurisdiction??
I don't think the Free State project or whatever is all that realistic, and i don't know if i agree with all of their goals. But they are serious, honest attempts to work within the system to effect change. Their goal basically comes down to using the democratic system for its intended purpose.
As such, i have to respect them as a movement, and i don't really think comparisons to the confederate states or the branch davidians are really in order. The free state people (look at their FAQ:P) are actually trying to achieve their goals by nonviolent, political, legal means. That is a big, big difference! The government isn't going to send troops in to stop people from bloc voting (unlike in some countries i could name).
I for one would say attempting to force some kind of 10th amendment confrontation between state and federal governments is a noble goal, and would be beneficial at least in that it would bring a marginalized issue to the forefront and force the supreme court to clarify a constitutional question that right now seems very very muddy (where is the border between state and federal jurisdiction?). And i for one would say this even if the confrontation in question were caused by a movement led by a zombified resurrection of Ayn Wacko Libertarian Rand herself:)
Won't there be performance and stability impacts from basing it on HFS+ instead of a more modern framework?
HFS+ isn't "modern"? HFS+ was released along with Mac OS 8.1, in 1998. HFS+ is four years old. That doesn't exactly *seem* ancient.
Honestly, this is a serious question-- i don't know very much about filesystem design. From what i do know, it does seem to make perfect sense that filesystem journaling could be implemented as an invisible, optional layer on top of an existing filesystem. But i could be wrong.
What, exactly, is it that is not "modern" about the four-year-old HFS+? Have there been some new advances in the theory of filesystems since then? I notice there seems to have been a lot of work in the world of new linux filesystems (reiserfs, ext3, etc) but i for one don't know the differences between all this stuff.
But then again, the Apple switch ads don't offer a single reason to use a Mac that WinXP doesn't have.
And you've completely missed the exact same thing that Microsoft missed about the Switch campaign.
The point isn't to show these people talking about all the things they can do with their macintoshes. The point is to show how happy that all these people are about all these things that they can do with their macintoshes. The point is demonstrate to all those disgruntled windows users in the Great Unwashed, using real people, that computing can actually be a pleasurable experience.
Apple doesn't want you to pay attention to what any of those people in the Switch ads are saying. What they want you to pay attention to is the quiet, joyful glow in Ellen Feiss' eyes as she talks about how happy she is that she doesn't have to worry anymore about the computer going all, like, BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP and deleting, like, half her paper. (And it was a really *good* paper.)
They want people to see these Switch ads and go, "Wow. These people all seem to actually enjoy using their computers. I don't enjoy using my computer at all. Maybe if I bought an apple, I'd enjoy using my computer too."
(Of course, usually the ACTUAL effect is that people see that quiet glow and they go "Wow. Maybe if I started smoking pot, I'd be happy too". Or they start stalking Ellen Fiess. But the point is the intent of the whole thing.)
This is why the switchy-PR thing on MS's website is such a joke. [S]he's describing how "great" her experience with WinXP has been, but the experience that she describes sounds about as fun as a trip to the DMV in which the line was short and you managed to get in and out and get everything you needed done without particularly any hassle. Meanwhile, any emotion that there is in the article feels about as real as Anne Coulter.
Try this site.. it's basically a "phrasebook" that shows common tasks being done in both perl and python. It's a great introduction to the language, and it helps a lot in terms of getting the python-idiom-y ways to do lots of commonthings embedded into your head.
It isn't *very* long, and doesn't go too deep, and the formatting's not great, but it's a quick read, and if it doesn't fit your needs there's always that book Snowbike recommended.
At present I think my python programming is too formal
The catch about the funkiness of python's syntax is not that it demands formalism; it's just that it demands you will do only one thing per line. It's kind of hard to get yourself thinking this way, and it's really irritating to write code this way (i never write python without pining for a ?: construct, a single-line version of "except", or a less-crippled lambda construct).
The thing is, though, that obeying python's rule basically comes down to seperating each expression into unnecessary variables, and mercilessly abstracting all those potentially-repeated 'common tasks' that somehow always seem to wind up taking five lines in python into functions. However, i find when i write perl, most of the time i spend revising code is spent going back and doing the above two things-- splitting overly-complex expressions into subvariables, pulling out bits of code and making them subexpressions. Python just forces you to do these things ahead of time, and you benefit greatly in the long run. (Whether that's worth all the irritation, though, i don't know:))
The students claim that the "bring it down" remark referred to a car that they were considering "bringing down" to florida from a northern state. They claim that either the waitress was mistaken or lied about the "september 13" comment she said she overheard. They claim that the conversation was completely normal and did not touch on terrorism, september 11, or september 13. There is absolutely no reason to believe they were joking about anything.
I think the waitress just misheard stuff. However, I do not blame the waitress either. I think she did the correct thing, given the circumstances. I do not blame the police, either, though it seems they overreacted a bit. They were just doing their jobs, in investigating and clearing a possible threat.
I blame the media outlets for gross negligence. How they have handled this has been really, really stupid.
I am perplexed and disappointed at the number of media outlets who printed or said outright that the medical students admitted to "joking" about september 11. It appears, at the moment, that that particular rumor is baseless, and APPEARS to originate (I am not 100% sure about this bit) from early reports stating that the waitress' daughter told reporters that "maybe [the students] were making a joke", which were then accidentally rereported by other news outlets as saying flat-out the students had joked about september 11. You will notice that no news outlets in the latter half of the weekend have said anything at all about "joking".
An extra note, becuase an AC asked for elaboration on cribcage's "being expelled" comment: The students have been asked, at least temporary, to leave their internships at the hospital they are studying at because the hospital had been recieving threats from people who didn't quite grasp everything the news told them (Can't find link at this moment, sorry, but there was an article on CNN.com this morning which now seems to be gone.) The hospital said they would consider allowing the students back in time, or if local law enforcement would agree to assist in providing extra protection from "patriotic" nutjobs.
Actually, the 68K emulator on PPC macs WAS there to run the OS. The OS wasn't fully PPC native til around System 8.5. The PPC macs were launched long before this.
Yes. You are right, and i probably should have mentioned this.
It is probably worth noting that the emulator in an x86 mac os x would not have to run the os, however, as os x has a very flexible, platform-agnostic architecture that it inherited from NeXTSTep (which was a cross-platform OS)..
Secondly, I suspect the lack of PPC emulation on x86 is more to do with it being a significant project that doesn't actually have a great deal of use right now. After all, mac owners have often wished to emulate x86 for the sheer weight of the app support -- but how many x86 people have been bothered about PPC?
This is an excellent point. However, i wasn't really trying to say PPC emulation on x86 isn't possible; just that it is really, really hard.:) I would suggest you take a look at this list of various mac emulators for various platforms; clearly, someone has an interest in emulating macs. There's 18 different packages listed there (although apparently a couple of them are for platforms other than windows). All 18 are 68k-only.
So, yeah, the nonexistence of a PPC-on-x86 emulator doesn't say a *lot*, but it does say something interesting. At the least, i think it says that if apple tried to include a PPC emulator layer with an x86 OS X, it would be a really expensive undertaking, and maybe not worth the trouble.
And the really important thing is that every time in the last 8 years i've seen a PPC-emu project give up, the complaint wasn't that they couldn't make it work, but that they couldn't make it work with acceptable enough performance to justify completing the project. This has happened two or three times, but unfortunately i don't have documentation (links) of this, so you'll just have to trust my (admittedly rather unreliable) memory. You may want to plow through that emulators.com site i addressed earlier; they've been saying for years that they're going to have a PPC-on-x86 emulator done, like, any day now, man, for years, and produced nothing (although they seem to be actually nearing a release date now.. or so they say..)-- but i seem to remember that periodically they will release a kind of progress update, which mostly consists of complaining about how hard it is to emulate a PPC:)
Hello.. please stop staring at your cock, and please in future read posts before you attack the poster.
Furthermore, your assumption that PPC is automagically more powerful than Intel architectures is a clear indication that you are severiously under-informed.
Note that the poster you responded to never said the PPC was more powerful than intel. They referenced the fact that when apple changed from 68k to PPC hardware, they included an emulator so that legacy apps could be run on PowerPC computers. The emulation he referred to was for third party apps which have yet to be recompiled, not for the ported OS.
All the original poster said was that while it was no big deal to emulate the 68k on the vastly more powerful PPC, emulating a PPC on an x86 would be not so easy, as x86 and PPC are roughly equal. I am not able to see where your rediculous ad hominem attack comes from. They did not even advocate PPC as more powerful than x86.
That being said, it would indeed be extremely difficult to emulate PPC on the x86! This is simply because of the way the chips are designed. The PPC is RISC; it has simple instructions and lots of registers; the x86 is CISC; has few registers and complex instructions. RISC is not necessarily better or worse than CISC, and the x86 is not necessarily better or worse than the PPC. However, it is generally well-known and accepted fact that it is easier to write an emulator that runs on a RISC machine than a CISC one, and it is quite obvious to anyone who is familiar with the emulation scene that the PPC and x86 are good at different things, and one of the things that the PPC really shines at is emulation.
This will become blatantly obvious if you consider that there are multiple, at least three, separately developed programs-- one of which is open source-- which emulate an x86 PC on a PPC Macintosh. There are, however, no extant PPC Macintosh emulators for the x86 PC. None. And it isn't for want of trying; you can see here that there have been a number of macintosh emulators for the PC, just that none of them have done PPC emulation, only 68k. There have been many attempts to emulate the PPC on the x86, it is just that they have all come to nothing-- becuase the architecture of the two machines is simply such that it is relatively easy to emulate x86 on PPC and relatively extremely difficult to emulate PPC on x86.
I suspect i am responding to a troll. I really ought to submit this as AC. Oh well..;;winces, hits submit;;
If Apple uses the APSL [apple.com], then the source code could not be used in Linux [kernel.org].
The APSL is not compatible with the GPL. This means that you could not link the APSL code directly into GPLed code such as the linux kernel. However, i do not see why the rendezvous code would need to actually be in the kernel. It seems preferable to me that a linux implementation of rendezvous would be just a daemon or something, like inetd or any other number of things are, in which case it would just be a normal program and could be under any license at all.
If for some reason i can't forsee it is somehow necessary for the rendezvous implementation to be in the kernel, it could just be done as a kernel module; there is some dispute as to whether it is okay for linux kernel modules to be non-GPL, but a lot of people, including Linus Tourvalds, interpret the GPL such that OS kernel modules do not have to be GPLed.
I'm uncertain if Debian [debian.org] would accept any APSL submissions.
Incidentally, Debian does maintain a non-free portion to their distribution, it is just that this portion is not considered "part of the main distribution", and it is not always included with the install discs (it depends on how you obtain your copy of debian, as far as i can tell). But that's irrelivant here because the APSL is OSI certified!
The only reason Apple's decision not to use the GPL would be a problem, as far as i can tell, is that some people don't like to release code under non-GPL licenses, and those people may decide not to contribute to a rendezvous implementation. But other than a few offended people, that's about the extent of the problems the APSL presents.
Re:Perl and .NET
on
Ask Larry Wall
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I would like to ask the following as kind of a rider on the parent question:
From looking at perl 6, it really and honestly seems to me like the perl 6 team is trying to position itself as a competitor to.NET, or at least mono. Specifically, Parrot as it's been described in the apocalypses looks like a natural replacement for the.NET CLR, as a more abstract and thus powerful VM that will let objects from different languages interact with each other seamlessly, without being neutered/"managed" the way that CLR languages have to be in order to fit the C# object model.
Is this an accurate assessment? Was perl 6 meant to be a "better" CLR, and are you people intending to market it as such? If so, do you think that perl 6 could seriously compete with the.NET CLR or the JVM-- given that while those two may be a bit behind in the virtual machine department, they come with really complicated tightly-integrated framework APIs (J2EE, swing, the.net framework..) whereas perl just has a bunch of assorted disorganized modules that do everything?
Can it be honestly said that perl 6 is a threat to.NET?
Maybe that's the reason there are so many financially poor scientists in Russia.
Hmm.. and here i thought it was because russia is an economically devastated country that hasn't completely recovered from 40 years of autocracy in which an absolutely powerful government accountable to no one (and rife with corruption at all levels) purposefully tried to engineer an agrarian culture, while mismanaging funds and the economy and covering up the damage it had done by arresting anyone who dared to speak out about anything that was wrong with the country. I had also thought that the reason the economy hadn't yet gotten back on its feet was a combination of a total lack of basic infrastructure, and the fact that what capitalistic infrastructure there was in russia at the time of the fall of the berlin wall was controlled entirely by organized crime syndicates-- organized crime syndicates who still administer and control significant amounts of the country's economic infrastructure to this day.
But now that i have read your eloquent and intelligent post, i have seen the light. Clearly, as you have shown to us, the fact that russian scientists are poor has nothing to do with the fact the bulk of the country is living on bare subsistence wages to the point that doctors and college professors are making absolutely minimal amounts of money, and the government cannot afford to pay the wages of the troops in its army; it's because Russia's intellectual property laws aren't stringent enough. Thank you for opening my eyes. I understand now that my view of Russia's needs at the moment was misguided; after all, what good would having enough food to go around be, if corporations cannot exercise direct control over the way in which their customers use intellectual property they have purchased?
---- GM: Make a Sarcasm roll, d20. MCC: I am exercising my "shooting fish in a barrel" feat and adding +5 to this roll.
Out of respect for the dead man, let us frame this instead in terms of structured programming; Perhaps call/cc. We could think of it as if our souls are continuations that God passes us at birth, and... no. I've lost you, haven't i. Let's start over
OK, here's a much better one: exception handling. Things like organ failure raise exceptions; death is just what happens when an exception isn't caught, and program flow drops back into the primordial brahman from whence all things come. Here is the stack trace for E. Dijkstra:
Process exited unexpectedly Exception in thread "endocrine" life.cell.Exception.Cancer: "Heart not responding"
at life.entity.vertabrate.human.dijkstra.Edsger.Liver.maintainCell( Vitalsigns.protein:1241412 )
at life.entity.vertabrate.human.dijkstra.Edsger.Liver.processInput( Vitalsigns.protein:954423 )
at life.entity.vertabrate.human.dijkstra.Edsger.main( homonculus.protein:3423245 )
See? Like Dijkstra said. No need for goto in an intelligently designed language.
To be serious for a second, though, we're all talking about Goto Considered Harmful because that's the one thing we've all read. This man did a bunch of other stuff. If i knew more about computer history i'd mention some of the stuff he did, but to be honest i don't really know what all he did:) I do know, however, that do a google search for the man, and you won't get Goto Considered Harmful. You'll mostly, in fact, get pages discussing his Shortest Path Algorithm.
It may suffice to say this, before i go: In the Computers->History->Pioneers section of google.com's Web Directory section, exactly 33 people are listed (People like Tim Berners-Lee, Grace Hopper, and Alan Turing).
Dijkstra is one of them.
If that isn't 'net immortality, then i don't know what is.
What's this look like to the programmer?
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Clockless Computing
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· Score: 2
I am just curious. Would the way an asynchronous chip worked dictate anything about the instruction set of the chip? Would it be possible to use today's instruction sets in an asyn chip? Would you have to come up with something different? Would someone writing an asyn compiler have any special issues or optimisation techniques they would have to be aware of that would be inherent to the concept of the asyn chip itself?
Are there any "features" related to the asynchronocity of the chip that it would be possible to add to the assembly language of an asyn chip? Becuase individual sectors of the chip can function independently and not have to synchronize, can you kind of get a multiprocessing-within-a-single-chip effect? I.E. can you create a singular asyn chip split up into separate sectors, each of which functions as if it were an autonomous processor? Can you have one chip concurrently execute single threads?
If the answer to this last question is "yes", do you have to do this by organizing the chip such that the different sectors are basically seperate chips on the same cast, or can you just have it so that the exact borders of the the chip area working on a certain thread at a certain moment is reconfigured dynamically? Would it be possible someday to create a microchip whose internal execution model is somewhat like that of Cilk?
How does asynchronous design fit in with atomic-execution technologies like VLIW and EPIC?
Just one little interesting tidbit i noticed that is getting kind of lost in the noise: Did anyone else notice the little note on the Jaguar page? Apparently the 10.2 developer tools use GCC 3.1!
I found this interesting, as i had heard that the bulk of the linux distributions had not yet managed to migrate to GCC 3. Neat to see Apple is staying on top of this whole UNIX-technology thing:)
The full quote: Next was the USB Keyboard. This was packaged in a yellow cardboard box. Upon opening it, it appears as a standard black keyboard, but on closer inspection you find that the Windows keys are missing. In their place were keys with diamonds on them. I guess Sony is making a point that Microsoft is not their friend. Also diamonds kind of go with the schema of circle, square, triangle, and cross that's found on the Playstation controller.
This is tiny, irrelivant, and unimportant, but i just thought everyone might want to know: the choice of diamonds was not arbitrary. The diamond keys are standard for Sun keyboards-- they have a bunch of Sun hardware up at my college, and they all have little diamond keys on them. They act kind of like the command key on a macintosh, for example Netscape4/Solaris is wired so that diamond-N opens a new window instead of alt-N or whatever it is in linux. ((I can't remember, it's been awhile since i've used X in linux except remotely or in my incorrectly-xmodmapped linux/PPC install::grin:: stupid delete key..))
According to this page, the diamond keys also act as "meta" keys-- that is to say, every time in EMACS that you have one of those special commands that you have to call by pressing ESC and then another key, you can just hold down "meta" and press the key instead. Useful ((If you like EMACS, that is... ^_^))
So this was actually a consious choice by Sony to be more UNIXy, not just Sony being anti-MS.
Does anyone know, if you plug a Sun/Playstation keyboard into a macintosh, does the diamond key act as a command key?
link request & loose thoughts
on
MP3 for Gameboy
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· Score: 2
There was this product awhile back that was kind of an integrated low-level sound synth and sequencer/drum machine for the normal, 4-color gameboy. It was only available in europe, and you could make these REALLY funky tiny little techno tunes on it. Very aphexy. Does anyone remember the name of this, or have a link?
I would probably have more fun with a sequel to that, than this... but that's just me. That being said, this soundpro thing is an absolutely amazing work of engineering. I mean, LOOK at that thing.. it's tiny, it has a 512 MB upper ceiling, it's mac-compatible, and it's CHEAP. And this part really impresses me:
Besides playing songs in the standard MP3 and Windows Media Audio formats, the SongPro device will also play a proprietary SongPro Audio, or SPA, format that will use the Game Boy's screen to display lyrics and pictures.
That makes me happy.. it's always cool when people try to push a device like the Game Boy to the limit of its abilities, rather than just saying "well, we have an mp3 player in it, that's impressive enough on its own, lets stop here". -_-
I wonder how hard it would be to create a gameboy version of Vib Ribbon and then stuff it inside the SongPro II along with the mp3 player? ^_^ Eh, that's probably pushing it.
That being said, I dunno. If you just want a handheld thingy that plays mp3s and games, i still say-- i've said this on slashdot before-- it might be worth a shot to try to hack the iPod to have a first-gen gameboy emulator on it:) I still have no idea if that's POSSIBLE, but by all accounts the iPod has an ARM chip, a 4-color lcd screen and some buttons. I'm not certain that reverse-engineering the iPod's firmware would be more difficult than designing a system that stores 512 MB of mp3s in the backslot of a Game Boy:) Is this relevant? Is this? Anyway, if you could get it to work, that would be way more expensive than gameboy+songpro, but a MUCH nicer form factor than this lumpy songpro thing:)
Re:Hidden slashdot discussions
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Pet Bugs?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Oh, crud, it's still there.. Yeah. Sorry. I didn't notice, but here it is: the several active discussions page. These days it seems to mostly link to slashdot journals. Sorry, i somehow missed it when i was writing the parent post. I feel dumb.
I really, really hope this is something that the/. crew doesn't mind me bringing attention to. I just think it's cool:)
Hidden slashdot discussions
on
Pet Bugs?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
As others have noted, this isn't a bug, these are just the stories that the editors decided weren't important enough to warrant a full front-page thing. Funnily enough, these "section page only" articles tend to have much better and more insightful comments than the front page articles, because people only post there if they really care:)
Beyond that, though, what i liked was that used to, on slashdot, you could post to sid's that didn't exist. Like, you could go to http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=haiku, or something, and while there wouldn't be a story at the top of the page, you could post comments there, and the next person to go to http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=haiku would see that comment and could reply to it, until the comment reached a certain age and was automatically deleted. There used to be a whole bunch of these little "hidden" discussion areas littered all over slashdot that people would form entire little communities around them. Unfortunately, this was mostly used for troll groups to coordinate attacks. (K-9-something-inches or something? I don't remember.)
Unfortunately they seem to have removed this feature from slashdot:( Unless i'm just confused about how it's done, anyway. But it seems to be disabled, going to a non-existent sid now shows "Nothing for you to see here, move along".
There were some other really bizarre but fun slashdot bugs, like how there was some wierd twilight zone area at sid 0, or sid null (or something.. "slashdot.org/?sid=", i think was the url.. i can't remember. i think it was called "test discussion". or something) that you'd sometimes get dumped at if you clicked on the "parent" link in the preview of a post you were writing. Not always, just sometimes. The thing was though, there was some other bug that for some unfathomable reason would sometimes cause posts to get moved out of their correct threads, and into the null discussion, at random. And people wouldn't notice this. And so if you went to the test discussion, you'd just see hundreds and hundreds of random posts, totally irrelivant to each other or anything else, on totally random subjects. It was fun to go through this and try to guess what subjects the posts were on.
And then there was.. i barely even remember this one. There was a page i managed to get to a couple times-- i can't remember how, but there was a simple way to do it that would work every time-- that just said, "Here are some open discussions", and linked a bunch of articles. The Test Discussion was always near the top of this list. I'd expect that whatever this page is, it's gone now, but can anyone remember what this page was or how i would have gotten to it?
Slashdot Mirror
in order for your theory to work, one of the following things will have to happen:
- The Office 11 XML file format will not be the same for the Macintosh and Windows versions.
- Apple will have to sign on with to MS's Trusted Computing initiative.
Which are you suggesting is going to happen? Neither seems likely to me. Unless the mac version of Office 11 also engages in the policy of secrecy, any attempt to keep people from "getting at" the files directly will have no teeth.And Microsoft cannot afford to marginalize the mac users. They can afford neither to make it so office 11/mac can't read the files from office 11/windows, nor to make it so that users are somehow restricted from transferring files between windows and non-windows box (becuase how are they going to be able to tell if you're e-mailing that file to a mac user or linux user?). There are situations and businesses where one of Office's biggest advantages is a standard, uniform platform for word processing between the macs and PCs in the office. Lose that advantage, and entire businesses could be convinced to switch to something else so that all of their computers can interoperate. And now that MS has eliminated all serious competitors to Office, MS's biggest fear is that some tiny niche (such as the mac users) could for some reason find themselves needing to switch to something other than MS Office.
Remember, users are funding, and if all those mac users start funding Nisus or whoever, Nisus could potentially get enough money together to port to windows and become a potential competitor to microsoft. Microsoft doesn't want that..
The would secretly charge people $3.99+ per minute whenever they make a call from that location. Of course the person would be none the wiser.
While this is a good point, and i can definitely see the scenario you describe occuring, it is worth pointing out that every single multi-mode cell phone i've ever seen warns you when you entered a roaming area. My phone, a Sprint, actually has a guard where if you try to make a call from a roaming area, it pops up a screen that say "Roaming charges will apply! Are you sure you want to do this? Yes/No"
Forgive me if i'm wrong, but i'm pretty sure if verizon tried to sell a phone where you could potentially be charged hyper-roaming charges at a moment's notice without the cell phone warning you "this will be a super- expensive roaming call" in some way, they'd have to face some kind of deceptive trade practices lawsuit no matter what their terms of service disclaimers say.
Of course, that won't stop the hypothetical companies you mention from still going through with that plan, and leaving people with the option "you can go down 24 stories and stand outside in the piercing cold, or you can hit 'yes' on your cellphone and accept our roaming rates". It just stops them from doing it secretly.
Makes perfect sense to me.. they're the New Scientist. So of course they'd be engaging in New Science.
:)
If you aren't sure what i mean by New Science, think for a minute about what the "New Economy" was
This brings up an interesting question i never quite understood-- can you put something at a lagrange point if there's already something there?
If the SOHO satellite and the proposed space station are both at L1, how close will they be? Visible distance?
How big are these "point"s? I get that there's going to be one optimum point, which is L1's location, but how big is the area where the effects of L1 are still felt to the degree where it's a useful place to park something? I.E., how big is this space station's playpen?
If RMS doesn't understand the vocabulary issue, then why does he refer to "trusted computing" as "treacherous computing" throughout the article?
:). Nevertheless, i am quite embarrased.
:)
Oops.
Okay, so, yeah, RMS does get it. I must confess i did not actually read his article before making my post.. there were like 10 links in that blurb and it wasn't clear what was what
Although i'll hold to what i said-- RMS may get it, but in general not all of the other free software advocate people do.
Actually, RMS *really* gets it. This is a great article. It's too bad RMS never gets published outside of the incestuous circle of slashdot-like sites, he's so much more eloquent in writing... I wonder how hard it would be to get something like this RMS article published as a one-page advertisement in Newsweek. If karyn wossername can get $20,000 just becuase she couldn't manage her debt and she knows how to set up a website, the Slashdot Community could probably put together enough money for a newsweek ad
whatever. ugh. shame.
The fact the word "trusted" is in this thing means NOTHING. The word is just there as a PR thing, something microsoft set up to make people feel all warm and fuzzy toward them. I could move into your neighborhood and start a program i call the "community trust system" in which you pay me money, and as a result you get to sleep safe at night trusting that my hired thugs will not come smash in your windows... and the fire department, which i have bribed, will actually come to your aid in the case of an unfortunate fire at your house... but that wouldn't have anything to do with either "community" or "trust". It would just be extortion. ..but then, if I also paid off the town newspaper and made sure that all anyone from other sections of town heard about was how great it was that the areas with the Community Trust System had much lower crime, then people on the other side of town would walk away thinking the Community Trust System was something really good.
This is what the RMS bunch never gets. If you let the other side set the language of the debate, they start out with a huge advantage. If you just sit there and LET the debate begin in a mode where "trusted computing" is always being used to describe "computing in which microsoft, not the owner of the box, is the one who has final say-so as to what happens on that box" (or "computing in which the user is not trusted at all".. really, palladium is a complicated concept, and trying to reduce it to one catchphrase is just silly).. and "anti-piracy" is always used for "prevents copying".. and "digital rights management" is always used for "technology which lets providers of copyrighted material limit the manner in which that material is used"..
If you let that happen, you're always at a huge disadvantage, because people who walk into the debate late will hear RMS or whoever saying "and so, Trusted Computing is bad!" and they'll go "wait, Trusted Computing sounds good! huh?"
This is made even worse in this particular case becuase the technical issues are simply beyond the grasp of the average person. Unless you have a pretty decent idea of how a computer works, you can't understand what Palladium does, and it takes quite a while for someone to explain to you what Palladium's effect for the consumer will be. As such, the average person, upon hearing about all this, will be faced with two sides to the debate: Microsoft's version of things, which is incredibly simple and easy to grasp because Microsoft is oversimplifying the truth to the point where it's practically out and out lying, and the Free Software People's version of things, which is disgustingly, disgustingly complex becuase it tells the whole truth, with all its confusing technical details and collateral damage. (Well, and becuase the Free Software People are a large, disorganized, and largely not very eloquent group, whereas Microsoft has everything being written by PR firms, and a large advertising budget.) Who do you think the average person is going to listen to? It seems obvious to me-- they simply won't be able to wrap their heads around what the Free Software People are saying. People may walk away with some vague sense Microsoft may be up to something shady, but they'll assume that even if it gives Microsoft lots of power, Palladium does the things Microsoft says it does (which it doesn't, not effectively), and will just forget about all those "side effects" that they heard about but didn't understand.
For people who spend so much time haggling over hacker vs cracker and the whole "GNU/" thing, it always seems so wierd to me they don't get that one simple thing. The vocabulary of the debate matters.
Remember, always remember: With Trusted Computing, you are not the consumer. You are the product. You are being sold to entertainment companies by Microsoft-- and they are paying Microsoft not in money, but by agreeing to use Microsoft's platform for "digital rights management", and Microsoft benefits in that they get validation for their secure, locked-down stranglehold on every single step within the computer between your fingertips on the keyboard and the rays of light coming out of the monitor. (And, of course, if things turn out the way MS hopes, eventually things will reach the point where your average computer user can't realistically ever switch Palladium off, because if they do there will be too many programs they can't run and too many websites they can't visit.) Of course, if Microsoft ever does secure that degree of control, you can bet the entertainment industries will wind up paying Microsoft a decent amount of money, if nothing else for the licensing to encode and decode into the formats of Microsoft's secure platform..
The branch davidians, among quite a lot of other things, refused to cooperate with an ATF investigation that was being carried out as much in accordance with due process of law as one could possibly ask, and shot some ATF agents. The south in the civil war, among quite a lot of other things, seceded from the united states despite having no clear authority to do so just because they didn't like the results of a presidential election, and fired on U.S. naval ships outside charleston.
:P) are actually trying to achieve their goals by nonviolent, political, legal means. That is a big, big difference! The government isn't going to send troops in to stop people from bloc voting (unlike in some countries i could name).
:)
The 20,000 people in the article have a plan to move to some state and then vote there. And y'all are comparing that to armed attempts to declare oneself outside of federal jurisdiction??
I don't think the Free State project or whatever is all that realistic, and i don't know if i agree with all of their goals. But they are serious, honest attempts to work within the system to effect change. Their goal basically comes down to using the democratic system for its intended purpose.
As such, i have to respect them as a movement, and i don't really think comparisons to the confederate states or the branch davidians are really in order. The free state people (look at their FAQ
I for one would say attempting to force some kind of 10th amendment confrontation between state and federal governments is a noble goal, and would be beneficial at least in that it would bring a marginalized issue to the forefront and force the supreme court to clarify a constitutional question that right now seems very very muddy (where is the border between state and federal jurisdiction?). And i for one would say this even if the confrontation in question were caused by a movement led by a zombified resurrection of Ayn Wacko Libertarian Rand herself
Won't there be performance and stability impacts from basing it on HFS+ instead of a more modern framework?
HFS+ isn't "modern"? HFS+ was released along with Mac OS 8.1, in 1998. HFS+ is four years old. That doesn't exactly *seem* ancient.
Honestly, this is a serious question-- i don't know very much about filesystem design. From what i do know, it does seem to make perfect sense that filesystem journaling could be implemented as an invisible, optional layer on top of an existing filesystem. But i could be wrong.
What, exactly, is it that is not "modern" about the four-year-old HFS+? Have there been some new advances in the theory of filesystems since then? I notice there seems to have been a lot of work in the world of new linux filesystems (reiserfs, ext3, etc) but i for one don't know the differences between all this stuff.
Would you like to explain what i missed?
But then again, the Apple switch ads don't offer a single reason to use a Mac that WinXP doesn't have.
And you've completely missed the exact same thing that Microsoft missed about the Switch campaign.
The point isn't to show these people talking about all the things they can do with their macintoshes. The point is to show how happy that all these people are about all these things that they can do with their macintoshes. The point is demonstrate to all those disgruntled windows users in the Great Unwashed, using real people, that computing can actually be a pleasurable experience.
Apple doesn't want you to pay attention to what any of those people in the Switch ads are saying. What they want you to pay attention to is the quiet, joyful glow in Ellen Feiss' eyes as she talks about how happy she is that she doesn't have to worry anymore about the computer going all, like, BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP and deleting, like, half her paper. (And it was a really *good* paper.)
They want people to see these Switch ads and go, "Wow. These people all seem to actually enjoy using their computers. I don't enjoy using my computer at all. Maybe if I bought an apple, I'd enjoy using my computer too."
(Of course, usually the ACTUAL effect is that people see that quiet glow and they go "Wow. Maybe if I started smoking pot, I'd be happy too". Or they start stalking Ellen Fiess. But the point is the intent of the whole thing.)
This is why the switchy-PR thing on MS's website is such a joke. [S]he's describing how "great" her experience with WinXP has been, but the experience that she describes sounds about as fun as a trip to the DMV in which the line was short and you managed to get in and out and get everything you needed done without particularly any hassle. Meanwhile, any emotion that there is in the article feels about as real as Anne Coulter.
Try this site.. it's basically a "phrasebook" that shows common tasks being done in both perl and python. It's a great introduction to the language, and it helps a lot in terms of getting the python-idiom-y ways to do lots of commonthings embedded into your head.
:))
It isn't *very* long, and doesn't go too deep, and the formatting's not great, but it's a quick read, and if it doesn't fit your needs there's always that book Snowbike recommended.
At present I think my python programming is too formal
The catch about the funkiness of python's syntax is not that it demands formalism; it's just that it demands you will do only one thing per line. It's kind of hard to get yourself thinking this way, and it's really irritating to write code this way (i never write python without pining for a ?: construct, a single-line version of "except", or a less-crippled lambda construct).
The thing is, though, that obeying python's rule basically comes down to seperating each expression into unnecessary variables, and mercilessly abstracting all those potentially-repeated 'common tasks' that somehow always seem to wind up taking five lines in python into functions. However, i find when i write perl, most of the time i spend revising code is spent going back and doing the above two things-- splitting overly-complex expressions into subvariables, pulling out bits of code and making them subexpressions. Python just forces you to do these things ahead of time, and you benefit greatly in the long run. (Whether that's worth all the irritation, though, i don't know
You neglect to mention that they "joked" about commiting an act of mass destruction.
And you apparently neglected to read any of the news articles on this subject in the last three or four days.
The students claim that the "bring it down" remark referred to a car that they were considering "bringing down" to florida from a northern state. They claim that either the waitress was mistaken or lied about the "september 13" comment she said she overheard. They claim that the conversation was completely normal and did not touch on terrorism, september 11, or september 13. There is absolutely no reason to believe they were joking about anything.
I think the waitress just misheard stuff. However, I do not blame the waitress either. I think she did the correct thing, given the circumstances. I do not blame the police, either, though it seems they overreacted a bit. They were just doing their jobs, in investigating and clearing a possible threat.
I blame the media outlets for gross negligence. How they have handled this has been really, really stupid.
I am perplexed and disappointed at the number of media outlets who printed or said outright that the medical students admitted to "joking" about september 11. It appears, at the moment, that that particular rumor is baseless, and APPEARS to originate (I am not 100% sure about this bit) from early reports stating that the waitress' daughter told reporters that "maybe [the students] were making a joke", which were then accidentally rereported by other news outlets as saying flat-out the students had joked about september 11. You will notice that no news outlets in the latter half of the weekend have said anything at all about "joking".
An extra note, becuase an AC asked for elaboration on cribcage's "being expelled" comment: The students have been asked, at least temporary, to leave their internships at the hospital they are studying at because the hospital had been recieving threats from people who didn't quite grasp everything the news told them (Can't find link at this moment, sorry, but there was an article on CNN.com this morning which now seems to be gone.) The hospital said they would consider allowing the students back in time, or if local law enforcement would agree to assist in providing extra protection from "patriotic" nutjobs.
I'm sorry.
Actually, the 68K emulator on PPC macs WAS there to run the OS. The OS wasn't fully PPC native til around System 8.5. The PPC macs were launched long before this.
:) I would suggest you take a look at this list of various mac emulators for various platforms; clearly, someone has an interest in emulating macs. There's 18 different packages listed there (although apparently a couple of them are for platforms other than windows). All 18 are 68k-only.
:)
Yes. You are right, and i probably should have mentioned this.
It is probably worth noting that the emulator in an x86 mac os x would not have to run the os, however, as os x has a very flexible, platform-agnostic architecture that it inherited from NeXTSTep (which was a cross-platform OS)..
Secondly, I suspect the lack of PPC emulation on x86 is more to do with it being a significant project that doesn't actually have a great deal of use right now. After all, mac owners have often wished to emulate x86 for the sheer weight of the app support -- but how many x86 people have been bothered about PPC?
This is an excellent point. However, i wasn't really trying to say PPC emulation on x86 isn't possible; just that it is really, really hard.
So, yeah, the nonexistence of a PPC-on-x86 emulator doesn't say a *lot*, but it does say something interesting. At the least, i think it says that if apple tried to include a PPC emulator layer with an x86 OS X, it would be a really expensive undertaking, and maybe not worth the trouble.
And the really important thing is that every time in the last 8 years i've seen a PPC-emu project give up, the complaint wasn't that they couldn't make it work, but that they couldn't make it work with acceptable enough performance to justify completing the project. This has happened two or three times, but unfortunately i don't have documentation (links) of this, so you'll just have to trust my (admittedly rather unreliable) memory. You may want to plow through that emulators.com site i addressed earlier; they've been saying for years that they're going to have a PPC-on-x86 emulator done, like, any day now, man, for years, and produced nothing (although they seem to be actually nearing a release date now.. or so they say..)-- but i seem to remember that periodically they will release a kind of progress update, which mostly consists of complaining about how hard it is to emulate a PPC
Hello.. please stop staring at your cock, and please in future read posts before you attack the poster.
;;winces, hits submit;;
Furthermore, your assumption that PPC is automagically more powerful than Intel architectures is a clear indication that you are severiously under-informed.
Note that the poster you responded to never said the PPC was more powerful than intel. They referenced the fact that when apple changed from 68k to PPC hardware, they included an emulator so that legacy apps could be run on PowerPC computers. The emulation he referred to was for third party apps which have yet to be recompiled, not for the ported OS.
All the original poster said was that while it was no big deal to emulate the 68k on the vastly more powerful PPC, emulating a PPC on an x86 would be not so easy, as x86 and PPC are roughly equal. I am not able to see where your rediculous ad hominem attack comes from. They did not even advocate PPC as more powerful than x86.
That being said, it would indeed be extremely difficult to emulate PPC on the x86! This is simply because of the way the chips are designed. The PPC is RISC; it has simple instructions and lots of registers; the x86 is CISC; has few registers and complex instructions. RISC is not necessarily better or worse than CISC, and the x86 is not necessarily better or worse than the PPC. However, it is generally well-known and accepted fact that it is easier to write an emulator that runs on a RISC machine than a CISC one, and it is quite obvious to anyone who is familiar with the emulation scene that the PPC and x86 are good at different things, and one of the things that the PPC really shines at is emulation.
This will become blatantly obvious if you consider that there are multiple, at least three, separately developed programs-- one of which is open source-- which emulate an x86 PC on a PPC Macintosh. There are, however, no extant PPC Macintosh emulators for the x86 PC. None. And it isn't for want of trying; you can see here that there have been a number of macintosh emulators for the PC, just that none of them have done PPC emulation, only 68k. There have been many attempts to emulate the PPC on the x86, it is just that they have all come to nothing-- becuase the architecture of the two machines is simply such that it is relatively easy to emulate x86 on PPC and relatively extremely difficult to emulate PPC on x86.
I suspect i am responding to a troll. I really ought to submit this as AC. Oh well..
You should really try to spell weird correctly in your .sig
Oh, God, now that's embarrassing. I've had that sig for about eight months now and never noticed that..
I thank you more thank words can express for pointing out my error, o anonymous coward ^_^ uggh..
If Apple uses the APSL [apple.com], then the source code could not be used in Linux [kernel.org].
The APSL is not compatible with the GPL. This means that you could not link the APSL code directly into GPLed code such as the linux kernel. However, i do not see why the rendezvous code would need to actually be in the kernel. It seems preferable to me that a linux implementation of rendezvous would be just a daemon or something, like inetd or any other number of things are, in which case it would just be a normal program and could be under any license at all.
If for some reason i can't forsee it is somehow necessary for the rendezvous implementation to be in the kernel, it could just be done as a kernel module; there is some dispute as to whether it is okay for linux kernel modules to be non-GPL, but a lot of people, including Linus Tourvalds, interpret the GPL such that OS kernel modules do not have to be GPLed.
I'm uncertain if Debian [debian.org] would accept any APSL submissions.
The GNU foundation doesn't like the APSL. However, debian is more aligned with OSI than they are with the GNU foundation. (Correct me if this is incorrect.) Anyway, in order for Debian to include software in its core distribution, that software must fit the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The APSL is on the OSI approved license list meaning it fits the DFSG and APSL code could be included in Debian's main codebase, no problem.
Incidentally, Debian does maintain a non-free portion to their distribution, it is just that this portion is not considered "part of the main distribution", and it is not always included with the install discs (it depends on how you obtain your copy of debian, as far as i can tell). But that's irrelivant here because the APSL is OSI certified!
The only reason Apple's decision not to use the GPL would be a problem, as far as i can tell, is that some people don't like to release code under non-GPL licenses, and those people may decide not to contribute to a rendezvous implementation. But other than a few offended people, that's about the extent of the problems the APSL presents.
I would like to ask the following as kind of a rider on the parent question:
.NET, or at least mono. Specifically, Parrot as it's been described in the apocalypses looks like a natural replacement for the .NET CLR, as a more abstract and thus powerful VM that will let objects from different languages interact with each other seamlessly, without being neutered/"managed" the way that CLR languages have to be in order to fit the C# object model.
.NET CLR or the JVM-- given that while those two may be a bit behind in the virtual machine department, they come with really complicated tightly-integrated framework APIs (J2EE, swing, the .net framework..) whereas perl just has a bunch of assorted disorganized modules that do everything?
.NET?
From looking at perl 6, it really and honestly seems to me like the perl 6 team is trying to position itself as a competitor to
Is this an accurate assessment? Was perl 6 meant to be a "better" CLR, and are you people intending to market it as such? If so, do you think that perl 6 could seriously compete with the
Can it be honestly said that perl 6 is a threat to
Maybe that's the reason there are so many financially poor scientists in Russia.
Hmm.. and here i thought it was because russia is an economically devastated country that hasn't completely recovered from 40 years of autocracy in which an absolutely powerful government accountable to no one (and rife with corruption at all levels) purposefully tried to engineer an agrarian culture, while mismanaging funds and the economy and covering up the damage it had done by arresting anyone who dared to speak out about anything that was wrong with the country. I had also thought that the reason the economy hadn't yet gotten back on its feet was a combination of a total lack of basic infrastructure, and the fact that what capitalistic infrastructure there was in russia at the time of the fall of the berlin wall was controlled entirely by organized crime syndicates-- organized crime syndicates who still administer and control significant amounts of the country's economic infrastructure to this day.
But now that i have read your eloquent and intelligent post, i have seen the light. Clearly, as you have shown to us, the fact that russian scientists are poor has nothing to do with the fact the bulk of the country is living on bare subsistence wages to the point that doctors and college professors are making absolutely minimal amounts of money, and the government cannot afford to pay the wages of the troops in its army; it's because Russia's intellectual property laws aren't stringent enough. Thank you for opening my eyes. I understand now that my view of Russia's needs at the moment was misguided; after all, what good would having enough food to go around be, if corporations cannot exercise direct control over the way in which their customers use intellectual property they have purchased?
----
GM: Make a Sarcasm roll, d20.
MCC: I am exercising my "shooting fish in a barrel" feat and adding +5 to this roll.
Out of respect for the dead man, let us frame this instead in terms of structured programming; Perhaps call/cc. We could think of it as if our souls are continuations that God passes us at birth, and... no. I've lost you, haven't i. Let's start over
r .maintainCell( Vitalsigns.protein:1241412 )r .processInput( Vitalsigns.protein:954423 )( homonculus.protein:3423245 )
:) I do know, however, that do a google search for the man, and you won't get Goto Considered Harmful. You'll mostly, in fact, get pages discussing his Shortest Path Algorithm.
OK, here's a much better one: exception handling. Things like organ failure raise exceptions; death is just what happens when an exception isn't caught, and program flow drops back into the primordial brahman from whence all things come. Here is the stack trace for E. Dijkstra:
Process exited unexpectedly
Exception in thread "endocrine" life.cell.Exception.Cancer: "Heart not responding"
at life.entity.vertabrate.human.dijkstra.Edsger.Live
at life.entity.vertabrate.human.dijkstra.Edsger.Live
at life.entity.vertabrate.human.dijkstra.Edsger.main
See? Like Dijkstra said. No need for goto in an intelligently designed language.
To be serious for a second, though, we're all talking about Goto Considered Harmful because that's the one thing we've all read. This man did a bunch of other stuff. If i knew more about computer history i'd mention some of the stuff he did, but to be honest i don't really know what all he did
It may suffice to say this, before i go: In the Computers->History->Pioneers section of google.com's Web Directory section, exactly 33 people are listed (People like Tim Berners-Lee, Grace Hopper, and Alan Turing).
Dijkstra is one of them.
If that isn't 'net immortality, then i don't know what is.
I am just curious. Would the way an asynchronous chip worked dictate anything about the instruction set of the chip? Would it be possible to use today's instruction sets in an asyn chip? Would you have to come up with something different? Would someone writing an asyn compiler have any special issues or optimisation techniques they would have to be aware of that would be inherent to the concept of the asyn chip itself?
Are there any "features" related to the asynchronocity of the chip that it would be possible to add to the assembly language of an asyn chip? Becuase individual sectors of the chip can function independently and not have to synchronize, can you kind of get a multiprocessing-within-a-single-chip effect? I.E. can you create a singular asyn chip split up into separate sectors, each of which functions as if it were an autonomous processor? Can you have one chip concurrently execute single threads?
If the answer to this last question is "yes", do you have to do this by organizing the chip such that the different sectors are basically seperate chips on the same cast, or can you just have it so that the exact borders of the the chip area working on a certain thread at a certain moment is reconfigured dynamically? Would it be possible someday to create a microchip whose internal execution model is somewhat like that of Cilk?
How does asynchronous design fit in with atomic-execution technologies like VLIW and EPIC?
Just one little interesting tidbit i noticed that is getting kind of lost in the noise: Did anyone else notice the little note on the Jaguar page? Apparently the 10.2 developer tools use GCC 3.1!
:)
I found this interesting, as i had heard that the bulk of the linux distributions had not yet managed to migrate to GCC 3. Neat to see Apple is staying on top of this whole UNIX-technology thing
The full quote:
::grin:: stupid delete key..))
Next was the USB Keyboard. This was packaged in a yellow cardboard box. Upon opening it, it appears as a standard black keyboard, but on closer inspection you find that the Windows keys are missing. In their place were keys with diamonds on them. I guess Sony is making a point that Microsoft is not their friend. Also diamonds kind of go with the schema of circle, square, triangle, and cross that's found on the Playstation controller.
This is tiny, irrelivant, and unimportant, but i just thought everyone might want to know: the choice of diamonds was not arbitrary. The diamond keys are standard for Sun keyboards-- they have a bunch of Sun hardware up at my college, and they all have little diamond keys on them. They act kind of like the command key on a macintosh, for example Netscape4/Solaris is wired so that diamond-N opens a new window instead of alt-N or whatever it is in linux.
((I can't remember, it's been awhile since i've used X in linux except remotely or in my incorrectly-xmodmapped linux/PPC install
According to this page, the diamond keys also act as "meta" keys-- that is to say, every time in EMACS that you have one of those special commands that you have to call by pressing ESC and then another key, you can just hold down "meta" and press the key instead. Useful ((If you like EMACS, that is... ^_^))
So this was actually a consious choice by Sony to be more UNIXy, not just Sony being anti-MS.
Does anyone know, if you plug a Sun/Playstation keyboard into a macintosh, does the diamond key act as a command key?
There was this product awhile back that was kind of an integrated low-level sound synth and sequencer/drum machine for the normal, 4-color gameboy. It was only available in europe, and you could make these REALLY funky tiny little techno tunes on it. Very aphexy. Does anyone remember the name of this, or have a link?
:) I still have no idea if that's POSSIBLE, but by all accounts the iPod has an ARM chip, a 4-color lcd screen and some buttons. I'm not certain that reverse-engineering the iPod's firmware would be more difficult than designing a system that stores 512 MB of mp3s in the backslot of a Game Boy :) Is this relevant? Is this? Anyway, if you could get it to work, that would be way more expensive than gameboy+songpro, but a MUCH nicer form factor than this lumpy songpro thing :)
I would probably have more fun with a sequel to that, than this... but that's just me. That being said, this soundpro thing is an absolutely amazing work of engineering. I mean, LOOK at that thing.. it's tiny, it has a 512 MB upper ceiling, it's mac-compatible, and it's CHEAP. And this part really impresses me:
Besides playing songs in the standard MP3 and Windows Media Audio formats, the SongPro device will also play a proprietary SongPro Audio, or SPA, format that will use the Game Boy's screen to display lyrics and pictures.
That makes me happy.. it's always cool when people try to push a device like the Game Boy to the limit of its abilities, rather than just saying "well, we have an mp3 player in it, that's impressive enough on its own, lets stop here". -_-
I wonder how hard it would be to create a gameboy version of Vib Ribbon and then stuff it inside the SongPro II along with the mp3 player? ^_^ Eh, that's probably pushing it.
That being said, I dunno. If you just want a handheld thingy that plays mp3s and games, i still say-- i've said this on slashdot before-- it might be worth a shot to try to hack the iPod to have a first-gen gameboy emulator on it
Busterman will rise again
Oh, crud, it's still there.. Yeah. Sorry. I didn't notice, but here it is: the several active discussions page. These days it seems to mostly link to slashdot journals. Sorry, i somehow missed it when i was writing the parent post. I feel dumb.
/. crew doesn't mind me bringing attention to. I just think it's cool :)
I really, really hope this is something that the
As others have noted, this isn't a bug, these are just the stories that the editors decided weren't important enough to warrant a full front-page thing. Funnily enough, these "section page only" articles tend to have much better and more insightful comments than the front page articles, because people only post there if they really care :)
:( Unless i'm just confused about how it's done, anyway. But it seems to be disabled, going to a non-existent sid now shows "Nothing for you to see here, move along".
Beyond that, though, what i liked was that used to, on slashdot, you could post to sid's that didn't exist. Like, you could go to http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=haiku, or something, and while there wouldn't be a story at the top of the page, you could post comments there, and the next person to go to http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=haiku would see that comment and could reply to it, until the comment reached a certain age and was automatically deleted. There used to be a whole bunch of these little "hidden" discussion areas littered all over slashdot that people would form entire little communities around them. Unfortunately, this was mostly used for troll groups to coordinate attacks. (K-9-something-inches or something? I don't remember.)
Unfortunately they seem to have removed this feature from slashdot
There were some other really bizarre but fun slashdot bugs, like how there was some wierd twilight zone area at sid 0, or sid null (or something.. "slashdot.org/?sid=", i think was the url.. i can't remember. i think it was called "test discussion". or something) that you'd sometimes get dumped at if you clicked on the "parent" link in the preview of a post you were writing. Not always, just sometimes. The thing was though, there was some other bug that for some unfathomable reason would sometimes cause posts to get moved out of their correct threads, and into the null discussion, at random. And people wouldn't notice this. And so if you went to the test discussion, you'd just see hundreds and hundreds of random posts, totally irrelivant to each other or anything else, on totally random subjects. It was fun to go through this and try to guess what subjects the posts were on.
And then there was.. i barely even remember this one. There was a page i managed to get to a couple times-- i can't remember how, but there was a simple way to do it that would work every time-- that just said, "Here are some open discussions", and linked a bunch of articles. The Test Discussion was always near the top of this list. I'd expect that whatever this page is, it's gone now, but can anyone remember what this page was or how i would have gotten to it?