The first two of these stem from the annoyingly ambiguous spelling rules in English. The words of Norman origin are generally the hardest for people, like "Voila." One thing I liked about German was that, in general, if you could spell it, you could say it - and if you could say it you could spell it. Sure the words get sorta long, but I'd rather have that than all sorts of silent letters and other broken rules. Given the number of exceptions to all the various rules in English, they are really hardly rules - just vague guidelines that will point you in the wrong direction half the time! This is what happens when your language is torn in several directions from Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and French influences.
The rest of them are based on learning these colloquialisms verbally and then trying to write them out. I mean, "site" and "sight" are pronounced exactly the same, and have easily confused meanings. Oftentimes people mumble the "n't" part of contractions, so you could hear the phrase 100 times and think it's "could care less." People learn by hearing these things - there's no colloquialism class. I suppose you could complain people don't read enough; if they read more, the more they would know the actual phrases. Of course, this kind of casual language is generally discouraged even in pulpy fiction novels.
I remember I had an argument with a girl that I liked in High School about the phase "Case in Point" - she was really sure that it was "Point in Case". I have no explanation for that reversal.
Yeah, if you have a thread with a tight main loop that isn't blocked on IO or some other blocking resource, it's gonna use up as much CPU as possible. A solution I've found to make programs like that "nicer" is to just put a Thread.sleep(1) somewhere in the main loop. It doesn't seem to have too much runtime performance impact, but CPU utilization drops dramatically.
When developing for Java mobile phones, we found that the schedulers on some handsets were just terrible, so we often had to do sleeping tricks to ensure that other thread(s) would get enough CPU time.
Heh, is Soda hall still running on a 10Mbps network? I remember using these old HP-UX machines in the underground labs that had all home dirs and apps running over NFS (a seemingly reasonable setup). But, all those damn computers were unusably slow. Turns out they were running the entire undergraduate lab on 10Mbps because they couldn't afford to upgrade the donated HP hardware to 100Mbps ethernet cards - the HP cards were something around $500 each instead of $50 each for the PCI ones.
I was lucky enough to have discovered Linux in high school, so I could do all my projects at home and they would compile on the various unix systems in the labs (we had Solaris x86 and HP-UX and, for the graphics course, an Irix lab) - usually with few or no problems.
Boy, that was back when I checked email in Emacs. Those were the days.
I have always really liked the colorscheme/design of the original Slashdot. The colors for the other sections, as far as I've seen, are uniformly putrid. Who made those color decisions? It can't have been Rob #006666 Malda!!
I know of no way to provide actual suggestions or criticism of this site that would actually get read other than to post offtopic. So please, guys, fix the color schemes! And redo the site in low-bandwidth XHTML/CSS, while you are at it. I don't think it would be that hard.
That's because people pronouce it funny: ROGE. Where the hell does that U go in there? You don't pronouce it. That's why I say it "ROGE-way", like Segue.
Let me start off by saying I'm on your (and TMBG's) side, but I just wanted to point out of a flaw in the Santa Claus argument. Santa Claus's existence or non-existence is a fact. Ignoring all the metaphysical crap you could drag into this, he either exists or he doesn't, and no number of credible people believing he exists actually causes him to exist if he just doesn't.
On the other hand, the "quality" of something, like music, isn't comparable because it is not fact, but opinion. In the absence of some agreed-upon metrics for evaluating the quality of music, it falls to some default: popular opinion. I could define some sensible metrics for evaluating a piece of music right now - off the top of my head: 1. Does it have something to say that promotes discussion and thought? 2. Does it make people respond emotionally? 3. Does it make use of innovative/distinctive techniques? You could use these to evaluate any piece of art, actually.
Also, regarding slavery, I agree with you in that slavery is amoral regardless of public opinion. But there are those (many) who wouldn't. I (and you, I think) believe in Moral Absolutism, or are just absolutists in general. This is as opposed to Moral Relativism. When arguing against a relativist, well, usually as an absolutist it isn't worth it - but if you decide you have to, you have to use tactics that work against them. You have to trick them into agreeing to your criteria before lowering the hammer and showing them how, given that agreement, they are wrong.
I don't think activism through one's "dollar vote" has been particularly effective in the past. The only thing that can keep Sony honest is REAL competition. Most people don't care enough about anything to consciously decide who to buy from. The only competition is with a superior product or lower price (or, sadly, better marketing). The only effective way to beat monopolism is to create some competition. If MS wants to play that role against Sony, I'm glad - they are one of few who has the resources to.
The dollar vote is very powerful, but inherently unorganized. It's always gonna follow the superior product/price/brand. This isn't an election, consumers cannot be held accountable for keeping companies honest - only other companies can do that.
And that isn't the situation because...? I assume they are selling Windows/Office at a profit. Presumably they are using the money from those endeavors to fund the price point they've placed the XBox at. Of course, they aren't really undercutting the PS2 so much, just pricing on par - with better hardware.
Casting in Java is not the same as casting in C. It is more like dynamic_cast in C++. Casting involves a run-time check to ensure that the class is the type being cast to, and throws an exception in the case that it isn't. While this isn't a particularly expensiver operation, it does have to be performed every time the code with the cast is executed. In Java, there is no such thing as an unsafe cast.
I think this could be done with the existing APIs, albiet with some annoying limitations. I had not heard of the Isolation API, but it looks like it takes the heirarchical ClassLoader concept a step further, allowing a programmatic interface to various runtime aspects of the modules. Using sibling ClassLoaders, I believe, already allows for isolation of static data and providing different classpaths.
The trick is that you would need some kind of native (or at least non-java) stub that finds the VM process and convinces it to execute the specified application. It would be great if this was built into the standard java binary, but it could easily be written as a seperate little application.
Also, as someone else mentioned, you also need to take the shell environment where the command was executed and provide that for the new application running in the existing VM. AFAIK, there's no way to do that using the existing API. I didn't actually see anything for that in the Isolation API, either, though.
Another thing is: without these Isolate changes, System.exit() from inside an app is gonna kill the whole VM... eheh... hmm...
I notice that this Isolation API is not included in the 1.5.0 beta2 javadoc... does that mean we'll be waiting for another year or two for these to be rolled in to the following release? Yeesh.
Java is not the best for command line programs mainly because VM initialization is expensive (in terms of time). This could be possibly alleviated by having a system-level VM that was initialized at boot time or something, and programs would just attach themselves to an already-initialized VM; this would have the major disadvantage of bringing down all running Java programs if the VM crashes or one program does some naughty things. Java does have some nice facilities for seperating modules at runtime in the same VM by using ClassLoaders and such.
But, perhaps more relevantly, I think the most successful and widespread use of Java these days is on the server, which generally has no GUI unless you count web-page generation.
Americans have a work ethic of "Hire and fire at will."
I think that this is true in general. The US has a business culture that focuses entirely on 1) personal short-term gains and 2) shareholder short-term gains - in precisely that order. Ethics do not enter into consideration. When evaluating an employee, it's not "What has this employee done for me?" or EVEN "What has this employee done for me lately?" it's "What will this employee do for me, tomorrow?"
Personally, I believe that, if your concern is the long-term outcome, acting ethically in business (e.g. keeping employees happy and rewarded) is the best way to go for the company as well as all the employees. But this belief is not part of the culture that presently dominates Corporate America.
Or, people who divorce could actually try to settle things amicably without lawyers. There are books on how to do your own divorce, and as long as both sides are somewhat rational (which is generally the problem, I think), they can agree on a settlement themselves.
It's just a fact of life, not an insult. Large companies tend to have a frustrating level of internal politics and bureaucracy that work against productivity. I doubt there's any company of that size that doesn't have such problems.
Of course, smaller companies can have this problem too - all you need is one politician. But, the smaller the group, the larger the chance that people can work together in a happy and efficient way.
"Their" is a perfectly acceptable way to express genderless possession. Popular usage defines the language, not the other way around. Slash notation is cumbersome and, frankly, pisses me off. Gender alternation is just plain weird.
Yeah, I played that game a ton as a kid... It was really creepy to me at the time. The controls were pretty clunky, though. I was referring to timothy's "from the aztec-needs-a-movie dept." They could have branded that game with Indy, it would have been one of the few good branded games ever.
Now, finally some may say "but PNG supports lossy compression too" - yep, it's sure does - by using JPEG compression!
I've heard people say this sort of thing before, and I haven't found any evidence of it. I was looking here, and at various other pages on the PNG site, and I didn't see that they mentioned anything about a lossy mode. Some people I've talked to thought PNG was just naturally a lossy format! If lossy compression is supported it must be some kind of extension... If anyone has any more information on that, I'd be interested to hear it.
I think they called it Final Fantasy because they were going to go out of business, and the original Final Fantasy was their final chance to succeed. Unfortunately, I have no source to quote, so I could be completely full of it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is, like, totally off-topic, but...
The first two of these stem from the annoyingly ambiguous spelling rules in English. The words of Norman origin are generally the hardest for people, like "Voila." One thing I liked about German was that, in general, if you could spell it, you could say it - and if you could say it you could spell it. Sure the words get sorta long, but I'd rather have that than all sorts of silent letters and other broken rules. Given the number of exceptions to all the various rules in English, they are really hardly rules - just vague guidelines that will point you in the wrong direction half the time! This is what happens when your language is torn in several directions from Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and French influences.
The rest of them are based on learning these colloquialisms verbally and then trying to write them out. I mean, "site" and "sight" are pronounced exactly the same, and have easily confused meanings. Oftentimes people mumble the "n't" part of contractions, so you could hear the phrase 100 times and think it's "could care less." People learn by hearing these things - there's no colloquialism class. I suppose you could complain people don't read enough; if they read more, the more they would know the actual phrases. Of course, this kind of casual language is generally discouraged even in pulpy fiction novels.
I remember I had an argument with a girl that I liked in High School about the phase "Case in Point" - she was really sure that it was "Point in Case". I have no explanation for that reversal.
-If
Yeah, if you have a thread with a tight main loop that isn't blocked on IO or some other blocking resource, it's gonna use up as much CPU as possible. A solution I've found to make programs like that "nicer" is to just put a Thread.sleep(1) somewhere in the main loop. It doesn't seem to have too much runtime performance impact, but CPU utilization drops dramatically.
When developing for Java mobile phones, we found that the schedulers on some handsets were just terrible, so we often had to do sleeping tricks to ensure that other thread(s) would get enough CPU time.
-If
Heh, is Soda hall still running on a 10Mbps network? I remember using these old HP-UX machines in the underground labs that had all home dirs and apps running over NFS (a seemingly reasonable setup). But, all those damn computers were unusably slow. Turns out they were running the entire undergraduate lab on 10Mbps because they couldn't afford to upgrade the donated HP hardware to 100Mbps ethernet cards - the HP cards were something around $500 each instead of $50 each for the PCI ones.
I was lucky enough to have discovered Linux in high school, so I could do all my projects at home and they would compile on the various unix systems in the labs (we had Solaris x86 and HP-UX and, for the graphics course, an Irix lab) - usually with few or no problems.
Boy, that was back when I checked email in Emacs. Those were the days.
-If
I have always really liked the colorscheme/design of the original Slashdot. The colors for the other sections, as far as I've seen, are uniformly putrid. Who made those color decisions? It can't have been Rob #006666 Malda!!
I know of no way to provide actual suggestions or criticism of this site that would actually get read other than to post offtopic. So please, guys, fix the color schemes! And redo the site in low-bandwidth XHTML/CSS, while you are at it. I don't think it would be that hard.
-If
That's because people pronouce it funny: ROGE. Where the hell does that U go in there? You don't pronouce it. That's why I say it "ROGE-way", like Segue.
-If
Let me start off by saying I'm on your (and TMBG's) side, but I just wanted to point out of a flaw in the Santa Claus argument. Santa Claus's existence or non-existence is a fact. Ignoring all the metaphysical crap you could drag into this, he either exists or he doesn't, and no number of credible people believing he exists actually causes him to exist if he just doesn't.
On the other hand, the "quality" of something, like music, isn't comparable because it is not fact, but opinion. In the absence of some agreed-upon metrics for evaluating the quality of music, it falls to some default: popular opinion. I could define some sensible metrics for evaluating a piece of music right now - off the top of my head: 1. Does it have something to say that promotes discussion and thought? 2. Does it make people respond emotionally? 3. Does it make use of innovative/distinctive techniques? You could use these to evaluate any piece of art, actually.
Also, regarding slavery, I agree with you in that slavery is amoral regardless of public opinion. But there are those (many) who wouldn't. I (and you, I think) believe in Moral Absolutism, or are just absolutists in general. This is as opposed to Moral Relativism. When arguing against a relativist, well, usually as an absolutist it isn't worth it - but if you decide you have to, you have to use tactics that work against them. You have to trick them into agreeing to your criteria before lowering the hammer and showing them how, given that agreement, they are wrong.
-If
I don't think activism through one's "dollar vote" has been particularly effective in the past. The only thing that can keep Sony honest is REAL competition. Most people don't care enough about anything to consciously decide who to buy from. The only competition is with a superior product or lower price (or, sadly, better marketing). The only effective way to beat monopolism is to create some competition. If MS wants to play that role against Sony, I'm glad - they are one of few who has the resources to.
The dollar vote is very powerful, but inherently unorganized. It's always gonna follow the superior product/price/brand. This isn't an election, consumers cannot be held accountable for keeping companies honest - only other companies can do that.
-If
And that isn't the situation because...? I assume they are selling Windows/Office at a profit. Presumably they are using the money from those endeavors to fund the price point they've placed the XBox at. Of course, they aren't really undercutting the PS2 so much, just pricing on par - with better hardware.
-If
Hmm... Well, I think you probably shouldn't feel guilty for getting better from cancer...
-If
Hmm... How can a PNG exploit your computer?
-If
Casting in Java is not the same as casting in C. It is more like dynamic_cast in C++. Casting involves a run-time check to ensure that the class is the type being cast to, and throws an exception in the case that it isn't. While this isn't a particularly expensiver operation, it does have to be performed every time the code with the cast is executed. In Java, there is no such thing as an unsafe cast.
-If
I think this could be done with the existing APIs, albiet with some annoying limitations. I had not heard of the Isolation API, but it looks like it takes the heirarchical ClassLoader concept a step further, allowing a programmatic interface to various runtime aspects of the modules. Using sibling ClassLoaders, I believe, already allows for isolation of static data and providing different classpaths.
The trick is that you would need some kind of native (or at least non-java) stub that finds the VM process and convinces it to execute the specified application. It would be great if this was built into the standard java binary, but it could easily be written as a seperate little application.
Also, as someone else mentioned, you also need to take the shell environment where the command was executed and provide that for the new application running in the existing VM. AFAIK, there's no way to do that using the existing API. I didn't actually see anything for that in the Isolation API, either, though.
Another thing is: without these Isolate changes, System.exit() from inside an app is gonna kill the whole VM... eheh... hmm...
I notice that this Isolation API is not included in the 1.5.0 beta2 javadoc... does that mean we'll be waiting for another year or two for these to be rolled in to the following release? Yeesh.
-If
Java is not the best for command line programs mainly because VM initialization is expensive (in terms of time). This could be possibly alleviated by having a system-level VM that was initialized at boot time or something, and programs would just attach themselves to an already-initialized VM; this would have the major disadvantage of bringing down all running Java programs if the VM crashes or one program does some naughty things. Java does have some nice facilities for seperating modules at runtime in the same VM by using ClassLoaders and such.
But, perhaps more relevantly, I think the most successful and widespread use of Java these days is on the server, which generally has no GUI unless you count web-page generation.
-If
I click buy now and it adds it to my cart for $39.95... Do I need a coupon?
-If
Americans have a work ethic of "Hire and fire at will."
I think that this is true in general. The US has a business culture that focuses entirely on 1) personal short-term gains and 2) shareholder short-term gains - in precisely that order. Ethics do not enter into consideration. When evaluating an employee, it's not "What has this employee done for me?" or EVEN "What has this employee done for me lately?" it's "What will this employee do for me, tomorrow?"
Personally, I believe that, if your concern is the long-term outcome, acting ethically in business (e.g. keeping employees happy and rewarded) is the best way to go for the company as well as all the employees. But this belief is not part of the culture that presently dominates Corporate America.
-If
Or, people who divorce could actually try to settle things amicably without lawyers. There are books on how to do your own divorce, and as long as both sides are somewhat rational (which is generally the problem, I think), they can agree on a settlement themselves.
-If
In the amount of time HandsofBlue got 200 credits, MyOrangeHat has shot up to 22555... My hat is off to Orange Hat.
-DG
Who's his sister? imdb's got nothin.
-If
It's just a fact of life, not an insult. Large companies tend to have a frustrating level of internal politics and bureaucracy that work against productivity. I doubt there's any company of that size that doesn't have such problems.
Of course, smaller companies can have this problem too - all you need is one politician. But, the smaller the group, the larger the chance that people can work together in a happy and efficient way.
-If
Actually, I think in his later years he had made his permanent residence in Santa Barbara, California....
-If
"Their" is a perfectly acceptable way to express genderless possession. Popular usage defines the language, not the other way around. Slash notation is cumbersome and, frankly, pisses me off. Gender alternation is just plain weird.
-If
Yeah, I played that game a ton as a kid... It was really creepy to me at the time. The controls were pretty clunky, though. I was referring to timothy's "from the aztec-needs-a-movie dept." They could have branded that game with Indy, it would have been one of the few good branded games ever.
-If
An Aztec movie would be great!! Oh, wait, they've already made one...
Fedora and everything!
-If
Now, finally some may say "but PNG supports lossy compression too" - yep, it's sure does - by using JPEG compression!
I've heard people say this sort of thing before, and I haven't found any evidence of it. I was looking here, and at various other pages on the PNG site, and I didn't see that they mentioned anything about a lossy mode. Some people I've talked to thought PNG was just naturally a lossy format! If lossy compression is supported it must be some kind of extension... If anyone has any more information on that, I'd be interested to hear it.
-If
I think they called it Final Fantasy because they were going to go out of business, and the original Final Fantasy was their final chance to succeed. Unfortunately, I have no source to quote, so I could be completely full of it.
-If