What's wrong with that? My understanding is that C is excellent for operating system but that GUI are best done with OO languages... No?
As good as the C API can be, it will still take longer to develop a GUI with a C interface than a C++ one (and I know what I am talking about!).
OO concepts can be used also when programming in C if appropriate programming practice are followed. In fact this is how gtk+ works.
True, coding GUIs in an object-oriented language such as c++ can feel more "natural" to those accustomed to it, but in the end it all boils down to use whatever language and toolkit you feel most comfortable and productive with, it's as simple as that.
Re:Mixing (L)GPL and non GPL compatible code
on
IBM Releases SashXB
·
· Score: 2
Actually SashXB uses Gecko, not Mozilla (for the unaccultured, Gecko is the layout engine of Mozilla).
I don't know whether Gecko is among the GPL'ed parts of Mozilla though.
- Batman the animated series has some Japanese/Korean flavour AFAIK (it was an US/Japan co-prod, and a lot of the drawings are done in Korea, as it happens with increasing frequency)
-X-Men sucks big time. Can you read "booooooring"? Also, it's utterly simplicistic: here's the good ones, here's the bad ones. They fight. The good ones win (mostly). End of episode. Next week, we're off from the start. Bah.
-Spawn is animated so badly it hurts.
I can agree with you on the Simpsons and Futurama.
Interestingly, you forgot to mention the Gargoyles. Yes, it's Disney. But IMHO it's somewhat nice and gothic.
Re:Should the hard part be server or client-side?
on
XFree & Rendering
·
· Score: 2
There is a slight fault in your reasoning.
The X server is a single-threaded application right now, and turning it multi-thread would be VERY hard work.
If it was in charge do do computation-intensive tasks, while performing them it would stop responding at all. I wouldn't like that much, would you?
From a "perspective" point of view: in the scenario you're presenting (application server plus x-terminals), the app. server is usually a "big iron", while the Xterms are tiny systems. Moving a lot of computational load unto them would worsen the usage experience a lot, IMHO.
Netscape, at least on the Unix platforms, has long had this feature where, if feeded a gzipped text file, it would decompress it on-the-fly and display it.
If you apply this to the SVG data-stream, and your stream immediately gets a size comparable to what it'd be if it was some obscure binary format.
The creation of an Anime is usually very traditional. CG is usually used very little, and often it's hidden as much as possible (at least, most good shows do that). This doesn't make shows any worse, or any less successful (at least in Japan, here it's sadly another story).
The problem is that animation fims are most of all stories. If the story sucks, the movie sucks. Plain and simple. Nobody is going to watch it, even if it has all the eye-candy in the world. Disney learnt the story. The Little Mermaid and the Beauty and the Beast are both reductions of hits centuries old, and The Lion King is a cheap Rip-off from Tezuka's "Jungle TaiTei" (I hope I got the title right). You just can't miss with titles like these. What does Fox retaliate with? Anastasia (which I still haven't had the change to watch, despite wanting to), and Titan, which I haven't seen and I'll pride myself not to see since I've gotten so bad reviews that it's not funny. The bottom line is: if you don't have a certain hit (and Disney sort of snagged all those), you have to be sure you have a damn good story, or it won't matter how much money you pump into a movie, it won't sell.
Take Princess Mononoke for instance. When I went to see it, I was utterly moved by the beatiful backgrounds, the great animation, the wonderful story. There is no way that CG art can give me those kind of backgrounds, that essential yet immensely expressive way to draw characters, and the story has nothing to do with how you draw it. Photorealistic drawing is not what I want either: if I wanted that, I'd go watch a live movie. Aardman studios' works are great, or take the Muppets, or Barney (*heh, just kidding. There's not a chance in hell*). There is no CG in them, yet they're both good and they sell. CG in and by itself is irrelevant, if there is no story to tell, and I'm not surprised that many geeks (myself included) turn to Anime as a preferred form of entertainment.
Pike (recently discussed on/. offers many cute features on this: - functions are first-level variables. They can be (and are quite often) shuffled around - it supportsclosures - it has anonymous (lambda) functions - tail-recursion optimizations - automatic memory management, via both refcounts and garbage collector for more stuff check the previous discussion.
This does NOT make Pike a functional language by all means. It's just that it allows people to write functionally those tasks where it helps to do so.
I second most of your ideas, save the "major apps should be on fileservers". If the hosts you're going to serve are "good enough" (that is, have enough disk space), I'd look into using rdist as an application distribution system. You set some software up on some "reference" workstation, then push it out at night. I have never tried this, but it looks like a sensible solution...
While I agree with your point (sometimes I hang out in Anime shops and I hear people judging some works ONLY by their price per minute ratio), I find that you chose a crappy argument when you're talking about Napster. The point in buying a CD you already downloaded from the Net somehow is IMO giving the artist his/her rightful compensation, since it's currently not possible to do so except by buying the media. It sucks, and I hope this will change, but it's the hard reality.
I don't know about the US version, but in the italian version they also altered dialogue in the movie to give it sort-of-an-happy ending, with Lady Eboshi pledging to be more respectful of Nature in the future. In only 2 phrases they managed to completely subvert the movie's message.
As far as Italy is concerned, you should avoid Rome and go to Milan instead. Most of Italy's IT businesses are in or around Milan, while Rome has only those having to deal with State-related work.
Wouldn't want to disappoint you, but all over Europe UMTS licenses are being assigned, and deployment will begin soon. Those sweetums will have 1.5 Mbps bandwidth...
I never had to deal with Sun, so I don't know how they conduct business. But I guess that they would do a leasing type of deal (and they throw maintainance in), or something like that. But Suns are not really aimed at the consumer market: they're for business and research, where that kind of contracts is the norm, isn't it?
I am now working for an NT-only shop (*sic*), and I sometimes talk with my colleagues about this. And from the talks with them, I got some insights on the "real world". (disclaimer: I don't like this, but it has some merit).
The point is that non-techies and semi-techies (non-geek techies) will not go with the solution that works better, but rather with the solution that allows them to make the most money. It's that simple. For instance, I was talking with a consultant, and I was arguing that Un*x requires less maintainance, thus lowering costs and ultimately allowing a fatter earn percentage. His reply was "but if everything works and I have to make less maintainance calls, I won't get any money for those calls". It's as easy as that. If you think about it, the whole Microsoft business is not about creating good software. It's about creating software that works well enough to sort of do the job it's supposed to do, but bad enough that when in two years the Next Release (tm) will come to the shelves, you will have to buy it so that you won't BSOD every half a day. And the Next Release (tm) will require more powerful hardware to do the same tasks, so the computer manufacturers will be happy. And while it will actually convey some improvements, it will still lack some key features so that MS-trained professionals will have to be called to fix problems and the cycle will begin.
Can we do something about this? Damn right we can, but it will take time and hard work.
Is he? I recall some people saying at the beginning of the trial that since he was a quite conservative fellow, Microsoft could have a better chance.
The real problem is that along the way, this process changed its face. It begun as an antitrust process, but then the Microsoft side held some behaviours which lean towards contempt of the court and perjury more than a bit, and turned some of the discussion into legal squabble and technicalities. Sure, they might be in the right, but they had a damn bad way of showing it and this has people thinking that maybe they didn't believe that much in their actions.
It was a client-server app, which made heavy use of applets, RMI, runtime object inspection (Beans-like), JNI and JavaCC parsers (I only counted the grammar lines, not the generated parser's).
Also, I'd figure that about one fourth to one third of the total size are comments, documentation and similar stuff. Still, the important fact is the actual code ratio, rather than the overall size.
An example in comparative sizes between Java and Pike: my thesis paper involved writing a net management system in Java. I prototyped the application in Pike. The prototype was 8k pike lines, the final app was 60k Java lines, and IT DID THE EXACT SAME THINGS.
Also, due to its prototype nature, I modeled the pike program to do things the same way I'd do them in Java, thus the actual numbers if I had followed the correct programming style for Pike would be even more extreme
MicroLPC was a rewrite-from-scratch of LPC for licensing issues (LPC didn't allow for commercial purposes) and performance reasons. Pike is MicroLPC renamed, plus tons of improvements.
Roxen was initially (circa 1993) by Per Hedbor as Spider at Lysator. It was later renamed as Spinner, and then Roxen for trademark-related reasons. There should be some historic background info at http://docs.roxen.com/
Pike is close to java in that they are both follow C syntax somewhat, extending it to OO concepts.
It is unlike java in that while Java is strongly typed and you have to use typecast, Pike is as strongly-typed as you wish. You can use the mixed type to completely defeat any typechecking, or you can use classes and call them by name to be as strongly-typed as you wish. Also notice that pike's concept of "class compatibility" is somewhat different from all other strongly typed OO languages, as it doesn't call into play inheritance. If two classes have similar signatures (names and types of public methods and variables), they are compatible.
Another novel approach Pike has is to function and operator overloading. With C++ (and Java, if I remember correctly), overloading is defined by having different functions take different numbers and types of arguments: i.e. void foo (int arg); void foo (char* arg); They are distinguishable at compile-time because the function signature is extended to its arguments' types, usually via name mangling.
Pike insteads allows arguments to be of different types. The above example would translate to: void foo (int|string arg). The programmer can then use runtime type information to discriminate.
Pike has both refcounting and garbage collection. It is quite uncommon to see the gc in action, as it will kick in when some percentage (I think half) of the object references are deemed garbage (it uses some adaptive algorithm to determine when to run). Or when explicitly invoked.
About static typing, see above. It can be as strict (or as lax) as the programmer wishes. It is refreshing to have some "mixed tmp" variable in a function and use it for loops etc.
About control flow structures, it has some more than C (i.e. foreach()). The preprocessor if used wisely can be a nice weapon. For instance, you can detect the interpreter's version and use threads when possible. Of course, this also means that it allows people to write messy code. But they'd do it anyways...
It can be as dynamic as you wish. For instance, setting a method of another object can be done using a "function"-type variable: class foo { private int foo_bar() { werror "foo"; } function bar=_bar; } class gazonk { private int gazonk_bar() { werror "gazonk"; } object foo_object=foo(); void create() {/* constructor */ foo_object->bar=gazonk_bar; } }
I could have also used anonymous functions (lambda) here. i.e. function foo_bar=lambda() {werror "foo";}
A nice thing about the language is that it doesn't try to hide details from the user. It is known what is handled by reference (every composite type, classes, objects, functions) and what is by value (basic types). It allows runtime inspection (via the indices, and typeof operators), remote objects, etc.
Since functions are primary objects, the whole runtime library follows a very consistent callbacks-based approach. This comes very handy when doing asynchronous I/O (one of Pike's strong points) or GTK programming.
About its "product placement" in terms of heavy-ness. It has some at-large programming helpers (more than TCL), and its syntax is less shell-ish than TCL's. Perl is IMO simpler for very simple tasks, but heavier for more complex ones (especially when need to go further than the string-array-hash types, and references come into play. Pike is much easier in this respect). Python, I don't know really.I've never used it. I suspect that Pike and Python play roughly in the same league, neither clearly besting the other. I find Pike very convenient in I/O-related task, X programming (although here TCL/TK is better), and some simple text-manipulation tasks, requiring little text manipulation and a bit of variables-juggling.
About the runtime environment, Pike offers a two-pass compiler (no forward declarations), a mixed static+dynamic names binding model (intra-object references are static, inter-object they are dynamic), and a nice (but not comparable to CPAN) runtime library, including some nice DB-connectivity options.
Apple has again and again changed the way computers are used in the last 15 years (unlike a certain other software giant whose idea of 'innovation' is "let's leave somebody else develop something good, then we buy them out and claim it was ours").
Think about it: WIMP was first deployed in a wide commercial environment by Apple (along with the mouse). Apple's user interfaces are actually very use-able (I usually say that if Un*x allows people to have a computer do what they want. Windows allows the computer have people do what it wants. Apple does the same, but usually the computer's and user's ideas of what is to be done are the same). Apple was able to slip a processor architecture in without skipping a beat (almost), and is about to introduce a really kick-ass environment (MacOS X is way cool). Always without skipping a beat. Damn, that other software company still has 16-bit stuff in their OS!
So yes, I am impressed more often than not by Apple. And this is a nice idea. Let's just wait and see how well it delivers on its promises.
(btw: I'm not usually an Apple user, so I'm not evangelizing)
Not many oldies were mentioned, so I'll focus mainly on those:
First off, everything that has "Hayao Miyazaki", "Isao Takahata" or "Studio Ghibli" written on it. That stuff is poetry in images. Go see "Mononoke Hime", possibly in a good theater. Go twice (the message gets more powerful as you see it again, as it happens for many Studio Ghibli movies). Watch Nausicaa, Tonari no Totoro, Porco Rosso. I'll pitch in another movie by Takahata: Grave of the Fireflies. It's a very very sad story, but it has a very powerful message indeed. After a while you'll forget you're even watching anime (I know: it happened to me), and the message will get straight to your heart (ok, so maybe you traded yours for a T1, but that's not the point:-P).
Lupin III (especially the first series) is relly funny, kind of slapstick sometimes, poetic sometimes. Cagliostro no Shiro is by Miyazaki, maybe the single best episode/movie/special in the whole series.
Stuff from Go Nagai. Some is good, some is not-as-good. But Devilman is always an all-time-big. Shin Getter Robot should be good too. And his CB-chara (super deformed) is fun, if properly adapted. (notice: I mostly watch the italian editions, so I have no clue about the level of the US version).
Gundam ('nuff said): RX-78 (TOS), Z, maybe ZZ, Shia's counterattack, 0083, 8th MS platoon. Avoid everything else (hope I have not missed anything in the include-list).
Lodoss is a good fantasy OVA series. Good detail, average animations, good D&D-type story.
A good no-strings-attached fun-story: Nadia, from Gainax (their first TV hit). Space-opera-giant-robots type comedy: GunBuster (also from Gainax).
On more recent stuff: Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, Escaflowne, maybe Neoranga (in this order). I don't like Otomo's style, but Spriggan is visually impressive (if a bit confusing).
There are only two kinds of goods that can be bought, be it over the Internet or otherwise: material and immaterial goods. Governments can get as tight a control over material goods as they want: they can intercept the supply lines at any point: the producer, the trader, etc etc. It is trickier when we're dealing with information-type goods, which can range from the Reuters newsfeed to Mpeg-1-Layer-3 (MP3, for short) music. Here it _is_ difficult to tax on the goods, but indicators of the exchanged volume can be used, and exploited to tax the actual transfers: bandwidth usage, for instance. It's enough to spoof at the carrier level et voila`. Good privacy _and_ taxation. Want another approach? Think of your income. total yearly earnings = savings + accountable expenses + everything else just tax that 'everything else', and you are effectively taxing internet sales. A nightmare when it comes to accounting, but governments are not usually known for being subtle when extor- ahem - collecting money from their citizens. The problem with the grand-design you envision is that if there is only one weak link in the whole production chain for a good - someone that is easier to check on - then the whole chain becomes (mostly) accountable. In a lot of fields this is not going to happen (that is not to say that it won't happen at all, just not everywhere).
Slashdot Mirror
"it's not really free unless you place restrictions on how you can use it"
Huh? What has use restrictions to do with RMS' idea of Free Software? Last time I checked, the GPL was all about software distribution.
OO concepts can be used also when programming in C if appropriate programming practice are followed. In fact this is how gtk+ works.
True, coding GUIs in an object-oriented language such as c++ can feel more "natural" to those accustomed to it, but in the end it all boils down to use whatever language and toolkit you feel most comfortable and productive with, it's as simple as that.
Actually SashXB uses Gecko, not Mozilla (for the unaccultured, Gecko is the layout engine of Mozilla).
I don't know whether Gecko is among the GPL'ed parts of Mozilla though.
Wouldn't want to disappoint you, but
- Batman the animated series has some Japanese/Korean flavour AFAIK (it was an US/Japan co-prod, and a lot of the drawings are done in Korea, as it happens with increasing frequency)
-X-Men sucks big time. Can you read "booooooring"? Also, it's utterly simplicistic: here's the good ones, here's the bad ones. They fight. The good ones win (mostly). End of episode. Next week, we're off from the start. Bah.
-Spawn is animated so badly it hurts.
I can agree with you on the Simpsons and Futurama.
Interestingly, you forgot to mention the Gargoyles. Yes, it's Disney. But IMHO it's somewhat nice and gothic.
There is a slight fault in your reasoning.
The X server is a single-threaded application right now, and turning it multi-thread would be VERY hard work.
If it was in charge do do computation-intensive tasks, while performing them it would stop responding at all. I wouldn't like that much, would you?
From a "perspective" point of view: in the scenario you're presenting (application server plus x-terminals), the app. server is usually a "big iron", while the Xterms are tiny systems. Moving a lot of computational load unto them would worsen the usage experience a lot, IMHO.
Netscape, at least on the Unix platforms, has long had this feature where, if feeded a gzipped text file, it would decompress it on-the-fly and display it.
If you apply this to the SVG data-stream, and your stream immediately gets a size comparable to what it'd be if it was some obscure binary format.
and Japanese animation is proving it.
The creation of an Anime is usually very traditional. CG is usually used very little, and often it's hidden as much as possible (at least, most good shows do that). This doesn't make shows any worse, or any less successful (at least in Japan, here it's sadly another story).
The problem is that animation fims are most of all stories. If the story sucks, the movie sucks. Plain and simple. Nobody is going to watch it, even if it has all the eye-candy in the world. Disney learnt the story. The Little Mermaid and the Beauty and the Beast are both reductions of hits centuries old, and The Lion King is a cheap Rip-off from Tezuka's "Jungle TaiTei" (I hope I got the title right). You just can't miss with titles like these. What does Fox retaliate with? Anastasia (which I still haven't had the change to watch, despite wanting to), and Titan, which I haven't seen and I'll pride myself not to see since I've gotten so bad reviews that it's not funny.
The bottom line is: if you don't have a certain hit (and Disney sort of snagged all those), you have to be sure you have a damn good story, or it won't matter how much money you pump into a movie, it won't sell.
Take Princess Mononoke for instance. When I went to see it, I was utterly moved by the beatiful backgrounds, the great animation, the wonderful story. There is no way that CG art can give me those kind of backgrounds, that essential yet immensely expressive way to draw characters, and the story has nothing to do with how you draw it.
Photorealistic drawing is not what I want either: if I wanted that, I'd go watch a live movie. Aardman studios' works are great, or take the Muppets, or Barney (*heh, just kidding. There's not a chance in hell*). There is no CG in them, yet they're both good and they sell. CG in and by itself is irrelevant, if there is no story to tell, and I'm not surprised that many geeks (myself included) turn to Anime as a preferred form of entertainment.
All of the above ;-)
Pike (recently discussed on /. offers many cute features on this:
- functions are first-level variables. They can be (and are quite often) shuffled around
- it supportsclosures
- it has anonymous (lambda) functions
- tail-recursion optimizations
- automatic memory management, via both refcounts and garbage collector
for more stuff check the previous discussion.
This does NOT make Pike a functional language by all means. It's just that it allows people to write functionally those tasks where it helps to do so.
I second most of your ideas, save the "major apps should be on fileservers".
If the hosts you're going to serve are "good enough" (that is, have enough disk space), I'd look into using rdist as an application distribution system. You set some software up on some "reference" workstation, then push it out at night.
I have never tried this, but it looks like a sensible solution...
While I agree with your point (sometimes I hang out in Anime shops and I hear people judging some works ONLY by their price per minute ratio), I find that you chose a crappy argument when you're talking about Napster.
The point in buying a CD you already downloaded from the Net somehow is IMO giving the artist his/her rightful compensation, since it's currently not possible to do so except by buying the media. It sucks, and I hope this will change, but it's the hard reality.
I don't know about the US version, but in the italian version they also altered dialogue in the movie to give it sort-of-an-happy ending, with Lady Eboshi pledging to be more respectful of Nature in the future.
In only 2 phrases they managed to completely subvert the movie's message.
As far as Italy is concerned, you should avoid Rome and go to Milan instead.
Most of Italy's IT businesses are in or around Milan, while Rome has only those having to deal with State-related work.
Wouldn't want to disappoint you, but all over Europe UMTS licenses are being assigned, and deployment will begin soon.
Those sweetums will have 1.5 Mbps bandwidth...
I never had to deal with Sun, so I don't know how they conduct business.
But I guess that they would do a leasing type of deal (and they throw maintainance in), or something like that.
But Suns are not really aimed at the consumer market: they're for business and research, where that kind of contracts is the norm, isn't it?
I am now working for an NT-only shop (*sic*), and I sometimes talk with my colleagues about this. And from the talks with them, I got some insights on the "real world". (disclaimer: I don't like this, but it has some merit).
The point is that non-techies and semi-techies (non-geek techies) will not go with the solution that works better, but rather with the solution that allows them to make the most money. It's that simple.
For instance, I was talking with a consultant, and I was arguing that Un*x requires less maintainance, thus lowering costs and ultimately allowing a fatter earn percentage. His reply was "but if everything works and I have to make less maintainance calls, I won't get any money for those calls".
It's as easy as that. If you think about it, the whole Microsoft business is not about creating good software. It's about creating software that works well enough to sort of do the job it's supposed to do, but bad enough that when in two years the Next Release (tm) will come to the shelves, you will have to buy it so that you won't BSOD every half a day. And the Next Release (tm) will require more powerful hardware to do the same tasks, so the computer manufacturers will be happy. And while it will actually convey some improvements, it will still lack some key features so that MS-trained professionals will have to be called to fix problems and the cycle will begin.
Can we do something about this? Damn right we can, but it will take time and hard work.
Is he?
I recall some people saying at the beginning of the trial that since he was a quite conservative fellow, Microsoft could have a better chance.
The real problem is that along the way, this process changed its face. It begun as an antitrust process, but then the Microsoft side held some behaviours which lean towards contempt of the court and perjury more than a bit, and turned some of the discussion into legal squabble and technicalities. Sure, they might be in the right, but they had a damn bad way of showing it and this has people thinking that maybe they didn't believe that much in their actions.
It was a client-server app, which made heavy use of applets, RMI, runtime object inspection (Beans-like), JNI and JavaCC parsers (I only counted the grammar lines, not the generated parser's).
Also, I'd figure that about one fourth to one third of the total size are comments, documentation and similar stuff. Still, the important fact is the actual code ratio, rather than the overall size.
An example in comparative sizes between Java and Pike: my thesis paper involved writing a net management system in Java.
I prototyped the application in Pike.
The prototype was 8k pike lines, the final app was 60k Java lines, and IT DID THE EXACT SAME THINGS.
Also, due to its prototype nature, I modeled the pike program to do things the same way I'd do them in Java, thus the actual numbers if I had followed the correct programming style for Pike would be even more extreme
MicroLPC was a rewrite-from-scratch of LPC for licensing issues (LPC didn't allow for commercial purposes) and performance reasons. Pike is MicroLPC renamed, plus tons of improvements.
Roxen was initially (circa 1993) by Per Hedbor as Spider at Lysator. It was later renamed as Spinner, and then Roxen for trademark-related reasons. There should be some historic background info at http://docs.roxen.com/
Pike is close to java in that they are both follow C syntax somewhat, extending it to OO concepts.
/* constructor */
It is unlike java in that while Java is strongly typed and you have to use typecast, Pike is as strongly-typed as you wish. You can use the mixed type to completely defeat any typechecking, or you can use classes and call them by name to be as strongly-typed as you wish.
Also notice that pike's concept of "class compatibility" is somewhat different from all other strongly typed OO languages, as it doesn't call into play inheritance. If two classes have similar signatures (names and types of public methods and variables), they are compatible.
Another novel approach Pike has is to function and operator overloading.
With C++ (and Java, if I remember correctly), overloading is defined by having different functions take different numbers and types of arguments: i.e.
void foo (int arg);
void foo (char* arg);
They are distinguishable at compile-time because the function signature is extended to its arguments' types, usually via name mangling.
Pike insteads allows arguments to be of different types. The above example would translate to:
void foo (int|string arg).
The programmer can then use runtime type information to discriminate.
Pike has both refcounting and garbage collection. It is quite uncommon to see the gc in action, as it will kick in when some percentage (I think half) of the object references are deemed garbage (it uses some adaptive algorithm to determine when to run). Or when explicitly invoked.
About static typing, see above. It can be as strict (or as lax) as the programmer wishes. It is refreshing to have some "mixed tmp" variable in a function and use it for loops etc.
About control flow structures, it has some more than C (i.e. foreach()).
The preprocessor if used wisely can be a nice weapon. For instance, you can detect the interpreter's version and use threads when possible. Of course, this also means that it allows people to write messy code. But they'd do it anyways...
It can be as dynamic as you wish. For instance, setting a method of another object can be done using a "function"-type variable:
class foo {
private int foo_bar() {
werror "foo";
}
function bar=_bar;
}
class gazonk {
private int gazonk_bar() {
werror "gazonk";
}
object foo_object=foo();
void create() {
foo_object->bar=gazonk_bar;
}
}
I could have also used anonymous functions (lambda) here.
i.e.
function foo_bar=lambda() {werror "foo";}
A nice thing about the language is that it doesn't try to hide details from the user. It is known what is handled by reference (every composite type, classes, objects, functions) and what is by value (basic types). It allows runtime inspection (via the indices, and typeof operators), remote objects, etc.
Since functions are primary objects, the whole runtime library follows a very consistent callbacks-based approach. This comes very handy when doing asynchronous I/O (one of Pike's strong points) or GTK programming.
About its "product placement" in terms of heavy-ness. It has some at-large programming helpers (more than TCL), and its syntax is less shell-ish than TCL's. Perl is IMO simpler for very simple tasks, but heavier for more complex ones (especially when need to go further than the string-array-hash types, and references come into play. Pike is much easier in this respect).
Python, I don't know really.I've never used it. I suspect that Pike and Python play roughly in the same league, neither clearly besting the other. I find Pike very convenient in I/O-related task, X programming (although here TCL/TK is better), and some simple text-manipulation tasks, requiring little text manipulation and a bit of variables-juggling.
About the runtime environment, Pike offers a two-pass compiler (no forward declarations), a mixed static+dynamic names binding model (intra-object references are static, inter-object they are dynamic), and a nice (but not comparable to CPAN) runtime library, including some nice DB-connectivity options.
Apple has again and again changed the way computers are used in the last 15 years (unlike a certain other software giant whose idea of 'innovation' is "let's leave somebody else develop something good, then we buy them out and claim it was ours").
Think about it: WIMP was first deployed in a wide commercial environment by Apple (along with the mouse). Apple's user interfaces are actually very use-able (I usually say that if Un*x allows people to have a computer do what they want. Windows allows the computer have people do what it wants. Apple does the same, but usually the computer's and user's ideas of what is to be done are the same). Apple was able to slip a processor architecture in without skipping a beat (almost), and is about to introduce a really kick-ass environment (MacOS X is way cool). Always without skipping a beat. Damn, that other software company still has 16-bit stuff in their OS!
So yes, I am impressed more often than not by Apple. And this is a nice idea. Let's just wait and see how well it delivers on its promises.
(btw: I'm not usually an Apple user, so I'm not evangelizing)
Not many oldies were mentioned, so I'll focus mainly on those:
:-P).
First off, everything that has "Hayao Miyazaki", "Isao Takahata" or "Studio Ghibli" written on it. That stuff is poetry in images. Go see "Mononoke Hime", possibly in a good theater. Go twice (the message gets more powerful as you see it again, as it happens for many Studio Ghibli movies). Watch Nausicaa, Tonari no Totoro, Porco Rosso.
I'll pitch in another movie by Takahata: Grave of the Fireflies. It's a very very sad story, but it has a very powerful message indeed. After a while you'll forget you're even watching anime (I know: it happened to me), and the message will get straight to your heart (ok, so maybe you traded yours for a T1, but that's not the point
Lupin III (especially the first series) is relly funny, kind of slapstick sometimes, poetic sometimes. Cagliostro no Shiro is by Miyazaki, maybe the single best episode/movie/special in the whole series.
Stuff from Go Nagai. Some is good, some is not-as-good. But Devilman is always an all-time-big. Shin Getter Robot should be good too. And his CB-chara (super deformed) is fun, if properly adapted. (notice: I mostly watch the italian editions, so I have no clue about the level of the US version).
Gundam ('nuff said): RX-78 (TOS), Z, maybe ZZ, Shia's counterattack, 0083, 8th MS platoon. Avoid everything else (hope I have not missed anything in the include-list).
Lodoss is a good fantasy OVA series. Good detail, average animations, good D&D-type story.
A good no-strings-attached fun-story: Nadia, from Gainax (their first TV hit). Space-opera-giant-robots type comedy: GunBuster (also from Gainax).
On more recent stuff: Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, Escaflowne, maybe Neoranga (in this order). I don't like Otomo's style, but Spriggan is visually impressive (if a bit confusing).
There are only two kinds of goods that can be bought, be it over the Internet or otherwise: material and immaterial goods.
Governments can get as tight a control over material goods as they want: they can intercept the supply lines at any point: the producer, the trader, etc etc.
It is trickier when we're dealing with information-type goods, which can range from the Reuters newsfeed to Mpeg-1-Layer-3 (MP3, for short) music. Here it _is_ difficult to tax on the goods, but indicators of the exchanged volume can be used, and exploited to tax the actual transfers: bandwidth usage, for instance. It's enough to spoof at the carrier level et voila`. Good privacy _and_ taxation.
Want another approach? Think of your income.
total yearly earnings = savings + accountable expenses + everything else
just tax that 'everything else', and you are effectively taxing internet sales. A nightmare when it comes to accounting, but governments are not usually known for being subtle when extor- ahem - collecting money from their citizens.
The problem with the grand-design you envision is that if there is only one weak link in the whole production chain for a good - someone that is easier to check on - then the whole chain becomes (mostly) accountable. In a lot of fields this is not going to happen (that is not to say that it won't happen at all, just not everywhere).