Security is often annoying. Entering passwords is annoying. Getting RSA keyfobs out of your pocket is annoying.
When it's used to protect against brute force password attacks, a captcha is definitely a security mechanism.
When it's used to discourage spam, well, it's on the edge of the fuzzy area most people understand by "security". It's protecting the availability of a service, against the threat of spam making it unusable.
"Just" get an API and some SLAs standardised, and it's fungible.
You don't care whether it's hosted in Elbonia or next door. You don't care how it's stored. You care about measurable things like transfer speed and disaster recovery performance.
But it is like coal -- or it can be made to be like coal.
You can't buy as much coal as you like at an arbitrary point in time - because there's only so much coal already mined, and it takes time and money to mine more.
If lots of people want coal at the same time, the price goes up. If you buy coal at a time when few other people want it, it will be cheaper.
Make computing resource fungible enough - by standardising the API and the measurements of quality/quantity, and you can certainly treat computing resource like coal. "I could chew through this dataset on Amazon's servers for £10, or on IBM's servers for £9."
The smart thing to do is use Jython, JRuby, Groovy.
Then you can write in Java when the problem demands it, and in something more expressive when you're gluing it together. And you have access to all the thousands of libraries Java has.
I saw a JRuby presentation in which they said they expected JRuby to outperform native Ruby -- because the Ruby runtime is written by a few guys, whereas the JVM has half a campus full of incredibly clever people, just working on making it run Java Bytecode as fast as possible.
... and as OP said "If I want to develop games, I have all the tools necessary as well." -- there are cheaper ways to code games.
If you specifically find entertainment in programming within limitations - low RAM etc, then this could be a fun environment to play around in. You'd have to live with the fact that the potential audience for a game on this platform would be tiny.
If you want to to produce something for your portfolio - to show to potential employers - I guess this could be an option. "Look I wrote this game. I wrote it to be portable to demonstrate that I can do that. Here it is running on a PC. Here it is running on Android. Here it is running on Arduino. The last one shows that I can code for systems with limited resources."
I'm not sure it would be nice. All sorts of things are unrealistic in GTA. You can speed, run red lights, smash into cars and buildings, run over pedestrians (if there's not a cop right there, without becoming the target of a police manhunt. You can shoot someone dead, in full view of a policeman, and if you can hide in an alleyway for a few minutes, they'll forget you ever existed.
All of this is in the service of creating a fun game.
A mode of operation in which you can "come quietly" doesn't add to the fun.
(Although in earlier GTAs there was the "Busted" option, where a cop touches you. Instead of respawning at a hospital, poorer, you respawn outside a police station, poorer.)
You could probably run MythTV on a series 1 TiVo. It would probably perform like a dog.
One of the closed-source proprietary pieces TiVo put into the software, was their filesystem optimised for PVR use patterns. The system could write a compressed SD stream to disk, while reading another, only with the help of a filesystem designed for the purpose.
Within about a year of the first TiVos coming out, commodity HDDs were fast enough to do the same job using an ordinary ext2 filesystem.
I don't think it's DRM that's stopping you from running MythTV on a TiVo.
Energy and mass (and also time) are phenomena associated with this universe. God isn't part of this universe. So your question isn't valid.
Some forms of Christianity like to emphasise the trancendence of God - he is unknowable and independent of the material universe. There is an abstract canopy above one of the altars at St Paul's Cathedral which is, apparently, supposed to remind us of this.
Having said that, Christianity also likes to emphasis God's immanence - a complete contradiction of the above. Still, if you can grok the Trinity, you can grok that contradiction too.
Just completely hypothetically, imagine you had a computer program that ran a massive physics simulation. And imagine your lifespan is such that you can observe it for massive periods of time. So you set up the starting conditions for a Big Bang, and hit the 'run simulation' button, and watch it go. And eventually, as you knew they would (because of the physics you programmed, and because of statistical likelihoods), some of the matter clusters into solar systems and planets, then on one planet some primitive proteins come about in some inorganic process, then prokaryotes, then an evolutionary process that eventually results in humans.
At that point, you could conceivably think, OK, these interesting entities in a remote corner of my simulation are doing some weird things. They seem to be controlling themselves in this structure in their heads. Perhaps I can put some hooks into the simulation so that I can observe what's happening in those brains. If I can reverse-engineer the structure that's evolved, I guess I could read their thoughts - and even write their thoughts.
And there's a mechanism, whereby "the guy running the simulation" can appear in visions, hear "prayer", and, if he also manipulates the rest of the simulation, perform "acts of god".
I thing somewhere there's a calculation that indicates that, if Moore's Law continues, the probability that this universe is a simulation running on a computer is greater than the probability we're in "real life". But I can't help but instinctively think it's fanciful.
You speak as if "monkeys on a floating rock" is absurd.
But we can see the monkeys. We can see the rock. We can poke at them both, collaboratively, and agree "yep, that's a monkey alright. On a floating rock. No doubt about it." There's nothing absurd about it at all.
1. It is not a fact that human beings evolved from primordial goo. That would be an unsubstantiated assertion based on an extreme extrapolation of limited evidence of small-scale phenomena.
I assume by "primordial goo", you mean a mass of single-celled living organisms.
Given what we know about mutation and selection, if prokaryotes existed 3.6 billion years ago, it's pretty much inevitable that they would have evolved into something as complex as humans by now (and fungi, and trees, and birds, and slugs, whales, and all that other stuff...)
Now, we can look at fossil prokaryotes in the form of Stromatolite.
So if you're going to state that our evolution from these isn't the most likely explanation for our existence, you have to explain what prevented evolution from taking its natural course. Perhaps God did some intervention to suppress mutation, or to distort the effects of natural selection?
But humans are very good at maintaining two conflicting views at the same time. Frankly, if we couldn't we'd go mad.
So it's quite possible for an evolutionary scientist to do his job based on a firm assumption that all life on earth evolved from a single-celled organism -- and yet go to church on Sunday and sincerely praise God for creating Adam and Eve in His own image. We just compartmentalise our conflicting sides.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite.
"Every day I find my bike tyre has gone flat, and my crappy pump takes 10 minutes to inflate it. So I'm getting a better pump."
Both rate-limiting and captchas protect against brute force password attacks.
Whether you need both (or either) is up for discussion, and probably depends on your application.
Security is often annoying. Entering passwords is annoying. Getting RSA keyfobs out of your pocket is annoying.
When it's used to protect against brute force password attacks, a captcha is definitely a security mechanism.
When it's used to discourage spam, well, it's on the edge of the fuzzy area most people understand by "security". It's protecting the availability of a service, against the threat of spam making it unusable.
Fine. Add that to the criteria.
"Just" get an API and some SLAs standardised, and it's fungible.
You don't care whether it's hosted in Elbonia or next door. You don't care how it's stored. You care about measurable things like transfer speed and disaster recovery performance.
I find it pretty easy to imagine fungible cloud services. Define some standard APIs. Define some standard measurements of quality/quantity. Done.
For corn it's more complicated than "corn is mostly corn no matter which farm you buy it from" - there are standards for grades.
But it is like coal -- or it can be made to be like coal.
You can't buy as much coal as you like at an arbitrary point in time - because there's only so much coal already mined, and it takes time and money to mine more.
If lots of people want coal at the same time, the price goes up. If you buy coal at a time when few other people want it, it will be cheaper.
Make computing resource fungible enough - by standardising the API and the measurements of quality/quantity, and you can certainly treat computing resource like coal. "I could chew through this dataset on Amazon's servers for £10, or on IBM's servers for £9."
Pointer arithmetic is missing (good).
I worked in Rexx on MVS and OS/2 in the early 90s. I'm astonished it's not dead and buried.
The smart thing to do is use Jython, JRuby, Groovy.
Then you can write in Java when the problem demands it, and in something more expressive when you're gluing it together. And you have access to all the thousands of libraries Java has.
I saw a JRuby presentation in which they said they expected JRuby to outperform native Ruby -- because the Ruby runtime is written by a few guys, whereas the JVM has half a campus full of incredibly clever people, just working on making it run Java Bytecode as fast as possible.
... and as OP said "If I want to develop games, I have all the tools necessary as well." -- there are cheaper ways to code games.
If you specifically find entertainment in programming within limitations - low RAM etc, then this could be a fun environment to play around in. You'd have to live with the fact that the potential audience for a game on this platform would be tiny.
If you want to to produce something for your portfolio - to show to potential employers - I guess this could be an option. "Look I wrote this game. I wrote it to be portable to demonstrate that I can do that. Here it is running on a PC. Here it is running on Android. Here it is running on Arduino. The last one shows that I can code for systems with limited resources."
I'm not sure it would be nice. All sorts of things are unrealistic in GTA. You can speed, run red lights, smash into cars and buildings, run over pedestrians (if there's not a cop right there, without becoming the target of a police manhunt. You can shoot someone dead, in full view of a policeman, and if you can hide in an alleyway for a few minutes, they'll forget you ever existed.
All of this is in the service of creating a fun game.
A mode of operation in which you can "come quietly" doesn't add to the fun.
(Although in earlier GTAs there was the "Busted" option, where a cop touches you. Instead of respawning at a hospital, poorer, you respawn outside a police station, poorer.)
SNES and Gamecube are two generations apart.
You could probably run MythTV on a series 1 TiVo. It would probably perform like a dog.
One of the closed-source proprietary pieces TiVo put into the software, was their filesystem optimised for PVR use patterns. The system could write a compressed SD stream to disk, while reading another, only with the help of a filesystem designed for the purpose.
Within about a year of the first TiVos coming out, commodity HDDs were fast enough to do the same job using an ordinary ext2 filesystem.
I don't think it's DRM that's stopping you from running MythTV on a TiVo.
I don't know where you're going with this. I think economics is a valid area of study. Whether it's a "science" or not is a matter of semantics.
Exponential economic growth has happened. I'm not sure it's sustainable. What does it have to do with anything?
Surely if he has the computer skills to maintain a BC wallet, he's capable of doing something that pays more than clicking linkfarms.
It's not "I could do better than that". It's "an omnipotent super-being could do better than that".
Well, greater minds than mine have spent more time on it than I'm inclined to.
Lots of exhilarating reading on Wikipedia about the Simulation Hypothesis. ... and an article about the probability thing.
Obviously we haven't observed evolution from single-celled organism to mammal -- although the fossil evidence is strong.
We have observed evolution in the wild and in the lab, because organisms with short reproductive cycles can evolve in observable timescales.
One example is the wing colouration of the Peppered Moth.
(Playing Devil's Advocate here)
where did the energy/mass come from to make god?
Energy and mass (and also time) are phenomena associated with this universe. God isn't part of this universe. So your question isn't valid.
Some forms of Christianity like to emphasise the trancendence of God - he is unknowable and independent of the material universe. There is an abstract canopy above one of the altars at St Paul's Cathedral which is, apparently, supposed to remind us of this.
Having said that, Christianity also likes to emphasis God's immanence - a complete contradiction of the above. Still, if you can grok the Trinity, you can grok that contradiction too.
I think you're underestimating infant mortality rates in prehistory -- and even, say, 400 years ago.
Just completely hypothetically, imagine you had a computer program that ran a massive physics simulation. And imagine your lifespan is such that you can observe it for massive periods of time. So you set up the starting conditions for a Big Bang, and hit the 'run simulation' button, and watch it go. And eventually, as you knew they would (because of the physics you programmed, and because of statistical likelihoods), some of the matter clusters into solar systems and planets, then on one planet some primitive proteins come about in some inorganic process, then prokaryotes, then an evolutionary process that eventually results in humans.
At that point, you could conceivably think, OK, these interesting entities in a remote corner of my simulation are doing some weird things. They seem to be controlling themselves in this structure in their heads. Perhaps I can put some hooks into the simulation so that I can observe what's happening in those brains. If I can reverse-engineer the structure that's evolved, I guess I could read their thoughts - and even write their thoughts.
And there's a mechanism, whereby "the guy running the simulation" can appear in visions, hear "prayer", and, if he also manipulates the rest of the simulation, perform "acts of god".
I thing somewhere there's a calculation that indicates that, if Moore's Law continues, the probability that this universe is a simulation running on a computer is greater than the probability we're in "real life". But I can't help but instinctively think it's fanciful.
You speak as if "monkeys on a floating rock" is absurd.
But we can see the monkeys. We can see the rock. We can poke at them both, collaboratively, and agree "yep, that's a monkey alright. On a floating rock. No doubt about it." There's nothing absurd about it at all.
1. It is not a fact that human beings evolved from primordial goo. That would be an unsubstantiated assertion based on an extreme extrapolation of limited evidence of small-scale phenomena.
I assume by "primordial goo", you mean a mass of single-celled living organisms.
Given what we know about mutation and selection, if prokaryotes existed 3.6 billion years ago, it's pretty much inevitable that they would have evolved into something as complex as humans by now (and fungi, and trees, and birds, and slugs, whales, and all that other stuff ...)
Now, we can look at fossil prokaryotes in the form of Stromatolite.
So if you're going to state that our evolution from these isn't the most likely explanation for our existence, you have to explain what prevented evolution from taking its natural course. Perhaps God did some intervention to suppress mutation, or to distort the effects of natural selection?
But humans are very good at maintaining two conflicting views at the same time. Frankly, if we couldn't we'd go mad.
So it's quite possible for an evolutionary scientist to do his job based on a firm assumption that all life on earth evolved from a single-celled organism -- and yet go to church on Sunday and sincerely praise God for creating Adam and Eve in His own image. We just compartmentalise our conflicting sides.