No, unless there have been some really amazing advances in systems design really recently, you can't do that. You can't even split non-parallelized tasks onto different CPUs of a multiprocessor machine. The best you can hope for is that some day compilers will be really smart and parallelize things for you, but even then the effect would be very limited, I'd think.
But those are pretty major changes that people aren't going to expect from a.1 or.2 release. I would have thought they'd release a 6.3 and then do 7.0 when 2.4 and XF86 4.0 were ready. Oh well, guess I'm surprised.
Ever try to find Classical music on gnutella? (I haven't but I imagine it's not particularly successful; correct me if I'm wrong). This sounds like a GREAT deal. Thank you, jcsmith!! A nice MP3 alterative for the holier-than-thou crowd (guilty as charged), or at least the who-knows-I-might-want-to-be-a-senator-some-day crowd:)
I just got back from Bath, England, and there was a hamburger joint there (don't know if this is a chain) called "Mr.D's", which was written in a script such that it looked a WHOLE lot like "McD's", and it was also written in the yellow and red of McDonald's. Are people actually going to be confused by that?! I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it seems almost ridiculous to try to get away with a variation on as well-established brands as CocaCola and McDonalds!
Or you could just use thresholds. Start everyone out at 0, like Ebay, I guess. You go up or down depending on how people like you. If your reputation is trashed, start again at 0, but most people would limit themselves to associating with positive-numbered people (especially since it would only be absolute newbies and cheaters who would ever be at 0; not the kind of people most want to play with anyway).
Well, assuming it's like PGP mechanism, there'd be enough redundancy that if they are actually cheating, you're far more likely to know someone who explicity distrusts them than someone who explicity trusts them. Certainly some people would get away with cheating a few times, but this might minimize it.
In theory, you could take your cheating all the way to a massively complicated AI you plug in between the machine the game is running on, and the keyboard, mouse and monitor you see.
Unfortunately, such a massively complicated AI has already been created. The world hasn't been the same since.
Why not skip the technical solution and go for the social one? Sort of like Advogato's trust model, or maybe more like PGP's key exchange mechanism. I trust Anna, who trusts Bob, so I trust Bob. Stuff like that. If someone cheats, you don't trust them. That way you don't have to trust everyone explicity, but you still have a wide pool to play from. Perhaps this is a bit too complicated for the average FPS-player (I'm not sure it could be implemented to where I thought it was easy). Do any games have solutions like this? Of course, such a model could possibly be abused and would put new players at a disadvantage (aren't they already, though?).
I'm not so sure about that. I usually type all my papers in LaTeX, and my girlfrined uses Word. But every time she sees one of my papers, she says something to the effect of, "That's so pretty! I wish my papers looked like that! What font are you using?". And my econometrics teacher once looked at my paper and said, "Is this TeX?! Yuck!". Some people have bad experiences in grad school, I guess.
That's what the Docbook is for. Docbook doesn't have formula-writing capabilities on its own, so you use MathML to write the formulas. I was asking about DocBook+MathML. DocBook can do an index, TOC, and cross-references. I'm not sure how easy it is compared to *TeX, though, since I've never used DocBook, just read about it.
What about Docbook with MathML? I don't really know a whole lot about them, but wouldn't those be "a modern replacement for *TeX"? From a cursory glance MathML appears a bit harder to use than LaTeX's equation-writing, but I've never really used MathML.
But dramamine works by gelling you inner-ear, doesn't it? It's for when your view is not moving but your body is (like when you're on a rocking boat but looking at the steady horizon). Unless you're shaking your head a LOT while playing Descent, I don't think dramamine is going to do you any good.
Because gasoline has negative externalities which are only barely taken into account by the US government. If you burn gas, you get the utility (happiness) of it getting you where you want to go. And you also have to bear your share of the pollution it produces, say one in six billion parts of it. Everyone else in the world has to bear the other part of it.
Economics says that you will do something until the additional cost to you equals the additional benefit to you, and that if everyone does this we'll all be pretty ok as a whole. But with something like gasoline the point at which the additional cost to you equals the additional benefit is a bit farther than the rest of society would like you to go, because everyone else has to bear your pollution. This is why things with negative externalities (gasoline, tobacco) are taxed and things with positive externalities (vaccines) are subsidized.
You may think that the tax on gasoline is enough and that gas can never be too cheap, but you're not paying for all of the cost of your driving! I read a study which suggested that in order to take into account all of the costs of gasoline (including the Gulf War, pollution, highway construction, etc.) the gasoline tax would need to be $6.25/gallon. Granted that's probably a bit on the high side, but it should definitely be more than it is now.
Cheap transportation is all well and good, but what we have now is generally subsidized gasoline (because the tax isn't high enough). This results in a lot more transportation being done than should be. It's why we have so much urban sprawl in the US and why there are so many cities you just can't breath in.
But why make the end-programmer do something that the language itself should take care of (unless there are other reasons for the parens). It's generally accepted that fine-grained optimization should generally be done by the compiler, not the programmer, especially if it leads to something more readable. Why then not allow the parser to deal with parsing and not the human? (especially since you have lex and yacc to help you out)
Even C is a bit harsh. What's with all the semicolons? I guess that made it easier to parse (is there another reason for them?). There is nothing more frustrating from moving from a nice session of Python coding to C and getting compiler errors because I've forgotten a few semicolons!
And it looks like Bertrand Meyer is committed to.NET too. Interesting.
"They held up a poor guy, Eiffel author, as proof of their party language support."
I really like Eiffel (except for the increased amount of typing you have to do and the theoretical thread support; not a fan of those), but his comments on free software were a bit sad. And now we see he's a supporter of Microsoft (nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but it certainly makes his earlier views seem less impartial than they otherwise might have been.)
I guess my usual habit of highlighting everything as I read is actually useful here. Red on a gray background? Maybe it's just my LCD, but I can't raed anything. And it's a bit disjointed. Go here for the start of the actual (relevant) commentary.
And if the US were a democracy, you might have a point ("There isn't anything in democracy"? What's that mean?), but it's at least in theory a republic, both through the congress and the electoral college. When the Constitution was written down it wasn't reasonable to assume that everyone would actually know who all the candidates were and what they stood for, so instead they voted for people who presumably knew better who would then directly vote on the president. Of course, this isn't really necessary now (and gets in the way), but it is a valid concern.
Random people who don't care voting are more easily swayed by fancy commercials that tell how the candidate has 15 puppies and kisses babies (our gubernatorial polls this past year changed by almost 25% due to these kinds of commercials and no actual issues were discussed by the gaining candidate). Their votes are more easily bought, too. Now I'm certainly against anything like a literacy test or poll tax, but it doesn't seem to unreasonable that there be an artificial "interest-barrier" to elections.
Re:Yes -- and one opportunity we missed!
on
Pirate DNS?
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· Score: 1
Oh, is that what those New Line ads were referring to when they said "Internet Keyword"? On some of the movie previews, at the end instead of a URL it said "AOL Keyword: Foo" and "Internet Keyword: Foo". I remember thinking, that was a neat preview but I have no idea how I'm supposed to get to that home page, since it didn't actually tell me what an "Internet Keyword" is.
So what ended up happening with the patent? (here.) I see it was granted, and that you obviously have prior art going MUCH farther back than their patent application. But you also implemented it in "The Sims" (excellent job; I don't know how that example slipped my mind). Did you just decide that their patent would never hold up and implemented them anyway?
They're pretty old as far as GUIs go, and they work. Yet no one uses them. Why? I downloaded the GTKPieMenu widget and played with the test. It's amazing how much easier those things are to use than regular menus (once you get over the disorientation, of course). Are there any maintstream programs using any widget set that actually use pie menus? I'm sure there's plenty being done with new GUIs, but if nothing uses them it's not likely to be obvious unless they're all making press releases.
Something I've always wondered about, which this doesn't seem to cover, is does the general population use multiple browser windows and move back and forth between them like I imagine most of us do? I've had a LOT of non-techie people ask me how I made a new window when they see me browsing. I guess it's not that easy to figure out on your own (sure seems like it, though). This seems like a pretty relevant browsing-habit question; any guesses?
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No, unless there have been some really amazing advances in systems design really recently, you can't do that. You can't even split non-parallelized tasks onto different CPUs of a multiprocessor machine. The best you can hope for is that some day compilers will be really smart and parallelize things for you, but even then the effect would be very limited, I'd think.
Darn, you're right. Forgot to carry the one or something :)
More importantly, the RSA patent expires in a scant 20 days! Perhaps they're holding back public release until then?? Please?!
Hey, wait a second. How's he know it doesn't have XFree86 4.0 in it? He made it up! I dun ben triked.
But those are pretty major changes that people aren't going to expect from a .1 or .2 release. I would have thought they'd release a 6.3 and then do 7.0 when 2.4 and XF86 4.0 were ready. Oh well, guess I'm surprised.
Ever try to find Classical music on gnutella? (I haven't but I imagine it's not particularly successful; correct me if I'm wrong). This sounds like a GREAT deal. Thank you, jcsmith!! A nice MP3 alterative for the holier-than-thou crowd (guilty as charged), or at least the who-knows-I-might-want-to-be-a-senator-some-day crowd :)
The cartoon? You mean the "Every episode we find a way home but we always blow it in the last five minutes" cartoon?!
I just got back from Bath, England, and there was a hamburger joint there (don't know if this is a chain) called "Mr.D's", which was written in a script such that it looked a WHOLE lot like "McD's", and it was also written in the yellow and red of McDonald's. Are people actually going to be confused by that?! I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it seems almost ridiculous to try to get away with a variation on as well-established brands as CocaCola and McDonalds!
Or you could just use thresholds. Start everyone out at 0, like Ebay, I guess. You go up or down depending on how people like you. If your reputation is trashed, start again at 0, but most people would limit themselves to associating with positive-numbered people (especially since it would only be absolute newbies and cheaters who would ever be at 0; not the kind of people most want to play with anyway).
Well, assuming it's like PGP mechanism, there'd be enough redundancy that if they are actually cheating, you're far more likely to know someone who explicity distrusts them than someone who explicity trusts them. Certainly some people would get away with cheating a few times, but this might minimize it.
Unfortunately, such a massively complicated AI has already been created. The world hasn't been the same since.
Why not skip the technical solution and go for the social one? Sort of like Advogato's trust model, or maybe more like PGP's key exchange mechanism. I trust Anna, who trusts Bob, so I trust Bob. Stuff like that. If someone cheats, you don't trust them. That way you don't have to trust everyone explicity, but you still have a wide pool to play from. Perhaps this is a bit too complicated for the average FPS-player (I'm not sure it could be implemented to where I thought it was easy). Do any games have solutions like this? Of course, such a model could possibly be abused and would put new players at a disadvantage (aren't they already, though?).
I'm not so sure about that. I usually type all my papers in LaTeX, and my girlfrined uses Word. But every time she sees one of my papers, she says something to the effect of, "That's so pretty! I wish my papers looked like that! What font are you using?". And my econometrics teacher once looked at my paper and said, "Is this TeX?! Yuck!". Some people have bad experiences in grad school, I guess.
That's what the Docbook is for. Docbook doesn't have formula-writing capabilities on its own, so you use MathML to write the formulas. I was asking about DocBook+MathML. DocBook can do an index, TOC, and cross-references. I'm not sure how easy it is compared to *TeX, though, since I've never used DocBook, just read about it.
What about Docbook with MathML? I don't really know a whole lot about them, but wouldn't those be "a modern replacement for *TeX"? From a cursory glance MathML appears a bit harder to use than LaTeX's equation-writing, but I've never really used MathML.
But dramamine works by gelling you inner-ear, doesn't it? It's for when your view is not moving but your body is (like when you're on a rocking boat but looking at the steady horizon). Unless you're shaking your head a LOT while playing Descent, I don't think dramamine is going to do you any good.
Because gasoline has negative externalities which are only barely taken into account by the US government. If you burn gas, you get the utility (happiness) of it getting you where you want to go. And you also have to bear your share of the pollution it produces, say one in six billion parts of it. Everyone else in the world has to bear the other part of it.
Economics says that you will do something until the additional cost to you equals the additional benefit to you, and that if everyone does this we'll all be pretty ok as a whole. But with something like gasoline the point at which the additional cost to you equals the additional benefit is a bit farther than the rest of society would like you to go, because everyone else has to bear your pollution. This is why things with negative externalities (gasoline, tobacco) are taxed and things with positive externalities (vaccines) are subsidized.
You may think that the tax on gasoline is enough and that gas can never be too cheap, but you're not paying for all of the cost of your driving! I read a study which suggested that in order to take into account all of the costs of gasoline (including the Gulf War, pollution, highway construction, etc.) the gasoline tax would need to be $6.25/gallon. Granted that's probably a bit on the high side, but it should definitely be more than it is now.
Cheap transportation is all well and good, but what we have now is generally subsidized gasoline (because the tax isn't high enough). This results in a lot more transportation being done than should be. It's why we have so much urban sprawl in the US and why there are so many cities you just can't breath in.
But why make the end-programmer do something that the language itself should take care of (unless there are other reasons for the parens). It's generally accepted that fine-grained optimization should generally be done by the compiler, not the programmer, especially if it leads to something more readable. Why then not allow the parser to deal with parsing and not the human? (especially since you have lex and yacc to help you out)
Even C is a bit harsh. What's with all the semicolons? I guess that made it easier to parse (is there another reason for them?). There is nothing more frustrating from moving from a nice session of Python coding to C and getting compiler errors because I've forgotten a few semicolons!
And it looks like Bertrand Meyer is committed to .NET too. Interesting.
"They held up a poor guy, Eiffel author, as proof of their party language support."
I really like Eiffel (except for the increased
amount of typing you have to do and the theoretical thread support; not a fan of those), but his comments on free software were a bit sad. And now we see he's a supporter of Microsoft (nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but it certainly makes his earlier views seem less impartial than they otherwise might have been.)
I guess my usual habit of highlighting everything as I read is actually useful here. Red on a gray background? Maybe it's just my LCD, but I can't raed anything. And it's a bit disjointed. Go here for the start of the actual (relevant) commentary.
And if the US were a democracy, you might have a point ("There isn't anything in democracy"? What's that mean?), but it's at least in theory a republic, both through the congress and the electoral college. When the Constitution was written down it wasn't reasonable to assume that everyone would actually know who all the candidates were and what they stood for, so instead they voted for people who presumably knew better who would then directly vote on the president. Of course, this isn't really necessary now (and gets in the way), but it is a valid concern.
Random people who don't care voting are more easily swayed by fancy commercials that tell how the candidate has 15 puppies and kisses babies (our gubernatorial polls this past year changed by almost 25% due to these kinds of commercials and no actual issues were discussed by the gaining candidate). Their votes are more easily bought, too. Now I'm certainly against anything like a literacy test or poll tax, but it doesn't seem to unreasonable that there be an artificial "interest-barrier" to elections.
Oh, is that what those New Line ads were referring to when they said "Internet Keyword"? On some of the movie previews, at the end instead of a URL it said "AOL Keyword: Foo" and "Internet Keyword: Foo". I remember thinking, that was a neat preview but I have no idea how I'm supposed to get to that home page, since it didn't actually tell me what an "Internet Keyword" is.
So what ended up happening with the patent? (here.) I see it was granted, and that you obviously have prior art going MUCH farther back than their patent application. But you also implemented it in "The Sims" (excellent job; I don't know how that example slipped my mind). Did you just decide that their patent would never hold up and implemented them anyway?
They're pretty old as far as GUIs go, and they work. Yet no one uses them. Why? I downloaded the GTKPieMenu widget and played with the test. It's amazing how much easier those things are to use than regular menus (once you get over the disorientation, of course). Are there any maintstream programs using any widget set that actually use pie menus? I'm sure there's plenty being done with new GUIs, but if nothing uses them it's not likely to be obvious unless they're all making press releases.
Something I've always wondered about, which this doesn't seem to cover, is does the general population use multiple browser windows and move back and forth between them like I imagine most of us do? I've had a LOT of non-techie people ask me how I made a new window when they see me browsing. I guess it's not that easy to figure out on your own (sure seems like it, though). This seems like a pretty relevant browsing-habit question; any guesses?