Re:It's just that fewer girls are religions loons
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...but _everybody knows_ that Bjarne is a flaming idiot who should be shot on sight.
<rant> If people are going to try to do OOP, at least try to do something which vaguely resembles real OOP. Smalltalk. Common Lisp with CLOS. Self. BETA. Objective C. Heck, even Java will do. But C++... yuck. Thus, I hold Bjarne personally guilty for causing enormous grief to entire generations of professional programmers, who are made to suffer in the bowels of statically-typed hell. Bjarne, if you are reading this, know that I own a copy of TECO on tape and am not afraid to use it. </rant>
I'm sorry if this offends any of you, but I've always felt that Slashdot shouldn't be allowed to become a mere mouthpiece for announcements and press releases pertaining to the Linux world. We're a tech site, and we should stick to that. Seeing this shameless plug for a game - a proprietary game, even - on the index page really sickens me, and goes to show how times change.
If michael and the gang really want to post this kind of crap, the least they can do is put them into a "Press releases" category so that I can uncheck it in the preferences page.
I agree, of course; Apple _is_ very stupid about this kind of thing. I hope that, as more non-Apple PPC systems start to come out, using IBM's CHRP reference designs or whatever, Apple will finally realise that it's no longer viable to remain a proprietary company in an open world. (And then Woz will come back and we'll all be happy again. Amen.)
You conveniently leave out the fact that, for a long time, a team from Apple developed and maintained the first Linux distribution for the Mac, the Mach-based MkLinux.
The world isn't black-and-white like you make it out to be. Tough luck.
Okay. As cool as this whole shebang sounds (and it does sound pretty damn cool), aren't we usually the ones who starts yelling "benchmarks are meaningless" whenever the guys in the Microsoft trenches pull off another one from their files? I say, stick with that position. Better a false negative than a false positive. So I'm sorry, but I don't care about these benchmarks anymore than I care about any of the Mindcraft series, and that's that.
(Not that I wouldn't like a nice cluster of Macs, mind you. Ummm. Tasty.)
Aiiiiiirgh. Not the Camel book. God damn it. Would someone care to explain to me how it is that the Camel book, of use only to Perl hackers, is a better Open Source-Related Book than The Art of Computer Programming, the quintessential tomes containing over thirty years of wisdom invaluable to programmer-kind? God damn it, you evil Perl-hacking Slash-weenies.
At the Beanie Awards, Alan Cox, who won the Unsung Hero Award, gave his $10,000 towards the defense fund - and we had a fundraiser later on in the evening.
Waitaminnit!!! Am I missing something?!? The Beanies have already been awarded?!?!? Why didn't I receive the memo?!?!?!?!? God damn it.
In any event... I hope that Knuth won the Best Open Source-Related Book Beanie. Any other result would be just preposterous.
yes and you'll note i prefaced the whole thing with a big IMHO,..:)
Musta missed that.:)
i don't, i don't think about it at all.. no more than i do turning a page in a book.
Only when you're doing the most trivial things that are already stored in your cortex's "instruction cache", like browsing and clicking around.
and who said i cared about 'most people',.. Joe Q. Public can bite me:) i'm only concerned about me, and geeks like me,....;)
Wow. I just hope you're not the next head of Apple's HCI Engineering Department...:)
in all seriousness, though, i think you're wrong. keyboards are much more efficient. find me someone who can write graffiti at 100 wpm:) you'd break the li'l palm.
Still, direct neural interfaces are far superior. (Do I hear "mind control"?):) I can see a combination of speech recognition and a better, non-QWERTY keyboard system gaining popularity in the near future.
while CRTs are large and cumbersome, once flat-screens become cheaper, using a desktop won't be quite as annoying (or brain-cancer inducing:)
Yes, but all the other disadvantages remain...
just because you hate desktops don't assume everyone else does:)
Yeah, but knowing that everyone else hates desktop gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I guess I'm not a real individualist after all, then. Buggers:)
I was expecting a Lego-sized machine gun, to fit into those little hands. It'd be perfect for playing "LMI vs. Symbolics" (for the clue-impaired amongst you, an ancestral version of "BSD vs. GPL") with my Lego set.
Anyway... does anyone remember that program that built Lego bridges using a genetic algorithm? Why not put it to use improving this machine gun? I bet in a few thousand generations it'd turn out a real weapon of mass destruction. Hell yeah!
sitting down in front of a nice 17-19" screen, and typing on a responsive keyboard, using a nice, accurate mouse to click on little pictures is just an aesthetic and ergonomically pleasing experience, and i don't think it will ever just go away. (well, at least not for a long while.)
That's your opinion. Most people consider what you just described to not be aesthetically or ergonomically pleasing at all. In fact, most people hate it. They hate having to read from a computer screen, and like books better. They don't like the desktop PC's immobility. Sitting around is definitely not ergonomically pleasing. The fact that you have to consciously interact with the computer is in itself an indication of the failure of the PC human interface. All in all, I'd have to say that the desktop PC experience is something of which we should get rid altogether.
The good news is, it seems that at least somewhere in Scandinavia, there are places where the general populace won't let itself be taken by the mass hysteria regarding "hackers" and "piracy". However, I can't help but ask myself, considering the hegemony of the US in the global media, how long will it last - how much corporate effort will it take to make it so that all you know is what AOL-TimeWarner-EMI-WhoEverElse tells you - all over the world? If you ask me (and I know you didn't), this is a scary thought.
And please don't try to tell me that the answer is more government regulation. Any sentence with "more government" in it is automatically evil:) Seriously, government control is, in the end, no better than corporate control, democratically elected or not. The real question is, are there any other means to try and preserve our freedoms from a certain group, that do not involve giving more power to another group that - history has taught us - will eventually turn around to stab us on the back and push an even more opressive regime upon us? Or is it by definition impossible (Individualists unite! and all that)?
(Yes, I am aware that Slashdot is hardly the right place for this kind of discussion. If I have interrupted your daydreaming about chipping Natalie Portman's underwear off, forgive me.)
How hard would it be to port Darwin to Crusoe, anyway? Not much, I suppose... not to mention that they'll be able to take advantage of the experience with Mobile Linux. OTOH, given that it's been months since Darwin was released and it still hasn't been ported even to Intel, maybe there's a catch involved.
Anyway, I'm not really sure about what this means for Apple. Will they be opening their architecture - and furthermore, will they do it the right way this time around? Speculation, speculation. All I know is that I want my quad-G4 box!!!!:)
Re. Haskell: Well, kinda. Haskell uses a static typing system, wherein you have to declare symbol types as well as definitions. The first line can be read as "'factors' is of type 'mapping (function) from Integer to list of Integers'". The second line defines the lambda-expression to which the symbol 'factors' is bound; in fact, it's syntactic sugar for "factors = \large-prime -> [large-prime 1]" (read "\" as "lambda"). It's interesting to note that Haskell implements lists as monads, and that "[large-prime 1]" is itself syntactic sugar for "large-prime:(1:[])" (wherein ":" is the cons operator and "[]" is the empty list).
Re. Scheme: 'values' is just a special form for returning multiple values. No biggie.
Re. Perl: when a Perl subroutine is called, its arguments are pushed into the argument stack, which is accessible through the array '@_' (array variables in Perl start with '@'). shift is a function that treats an array as a FIFO queue, shifting the first element off and returning its value. Perl has many "shortcut" versions of functions, and this is one; when called without any arguments, shift is applied to the array '@_'.
And to think I almost posted this article, but then I figured, "naah, it must have been posted already...":P
Anyway, Stallman is, as usual, the best at what he does - which is, being preachy, but in a good way. However, he's evidently preaching to the choir: I'd wager that most of the people who read TLJ already know that UCITA is eeeeevil, and must not be allowed to pass. Meanwhile, outside the established community, very few people even know who Stallman is, let alone read his stuff.
So the foremost priority is to get him published somewhere big. Wired. Any of the big fancy Times-style newspapers. Heck, even a cover story on CNN.com would do.
Until that happens, Stallman will remain in obscurity, and maybe UCITA will be allowed to pass through with little complaint... in which case I'll promptly withdraw all my applications to American colleges.
I'll finish off with a haiku:
Dick watches with grief Over the frozen water A bird's lost its wings
Well, I've always liked the idea of a "shared pool" of patents that does for the patent system what the GPL does for copyright. In this case, I think an actual organisation would be appropriate - the Open Patent Organisation, or the Prior Art Organisation. Another option is to do as in the bugroff license, which establishes a World-Wide Bugroff Association of which everyone who acquires the software is a member.
These are all interesting ideas... but I can't really do much, not being in the US and all.
A procedure for replacing not only a human brain but a whole body with the far superior nanoengineered equivalent is described in the fanatical but excellent Beyond Humanity (by Earl and Cox). Basically, it involves simply administering to the patient a dose of assemblers and specialised nanites, which are programmed, a priori, to, in a span of days, weeks or months, replace every functional unit of your body with a custom-built synthetic replacement, built mostly out of cannibalized carbon found in the original cells (along with some additional materials administered from the outside, if need be).
It's not a cell-for-cell replacement; it doesn't have to be. It alters the nervous system gradually, without requiring a "shutdown", and without terminating the illusion of identity experienced by the mind that "owns" the body. Thus, the philosophical problems of "is my uploaded consciousness really me" are avoided. You are still you; it's just that your body has been upgraded.
I'm glad to see such a clueful article... you don't get many of these around here anymore!
I'd like to see Tim explain just how it is that functional languages are confined to the realm of theory, considering the infinity of real-world applications in which they have been used since Lisp's inception in the late 1950's. (You do remember that Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages still in use, don't you?) Even more so when you consider the roots of the thing that Tim touts as one of the next big things: "parametric polymorphism", which is nothing but a (poor) adaptation to the imperative paradigm of a subset of Haskell's type system.
Perhaps this is a matter of taste, but I tend to dislike strawmen, especially when attempted by this kind of engineer, who, for some reason, seem to have a dislike of anyone who even sounds like a computer scientist (the keyword here being "scientist"). Face it, Tim: simply sweeping all which doesn't conform to the New Jersey mindframe under a blanket of "purely theoretical languages that have no use in the real world" won't make it true. The fact is that, as long as we're discussing what programming will be like in the future, functional languages are far beyond the state-of-the-art from New Jersey. (Even other game developers recognize this, as evidenced in a mid-1999 article on Gama Sutra about Haskell and other languages in gaming.)
For a glimpse of the real future of programming (as well as computing in general), I suggest the TUNES project, of which I am a member.
(By the way, Tim would have you believe that C was the very first structured programming language. I laughed especially hard when I read that part of the article.)
Thank you! I've been looking all over for this URL, to illustrate my point - that which the Gamasutra article sees and Tim obviously doesn't: that functional languages are not only extremely useful but conceptually far more advanced than anything that ever came out of New Jersey. I'll write a more complete post about this right away.
Slashdot Mirror
...but _everybody knows_ that Bjarne is a flaming idiot who should be shot on sight.
<rant>
If people are going to try to do OOP, at least try to do something which vaguely resembles real OOP. Smalltalk. Common Lisp with CLOS. Self. BETA. Objective C. Heck, even Java will do. But C++... yuck. Thus, I hold Bjarne personally guilty for causing enormous grief to entire generations of professional programmers, who are made to suffer in the bowels of statically-typed hell. Bjarne, if you are reading this, know that I own a copy of TECO on tape and am not afraid to use it.
</rant>
I'm sorry if this offends any of you, but I've always felt that Slashdot shouldn't be allowed to become a mere mouthpiece for announcements and press releases pertaining to the Linux world. We're a tech site, and we should stick to that. Seeing this shameless plug for a game - a proprietary game, even - on the index page really sickens me, and goes to show how times change.
If michael and the gang really want to post this kind of crap, the least they can do is put them into a "Press releases" category so that I can uncheck it in the preferences page.
I agree, of course; Apple _is_ very stupid about this kind of thing. I hope that, as more non-Apple PPC systems start to come out, using IBM's CHRP reference designs or whatever, Apple will finally realise that it's no longer viable to remain a proprietary company in an open world. (And then Woz will come back and we'll all be happy again. Amen.)
You conveniently leave out the fact that, for a long time, a team from Apple developed and maintained the first Linux distribution for the Mac, the Mach-based MkLinux.
The world isn't black-and-white like you make it out to be. Tough luck.
Okay. As cool as this whole shebang sounds (and it does sound pretty damn cool), aren't we usually the ones who starts yelling "benchmarks are meaningless" whenever the guys in the Microsoft trenches pull off another one from their files? I say, stick with that position. Better a false negative than a false positive. So I'm sorry, but I don't care about these benchmarks anymore than I care about any of the Mindcraft series, and that's that.
(Not that I wouldn't like a nice cluster of Macs, mind you. Ummm. Tasty.)
Quid quid Latine dictum sit, altum viditur!
Uh, I'm no Latinist, so feel free to correct me... "If it was said in Latin, it came from above"?
Aiiiiiirgh. Not the Camel book. God damn it. Would someone care to explain to me how it is that the Camel book, of use only to Perl hackers, is a better Open Source-Related Book than The Art of Computer Programming, the quintessential tomes containing over thirty years of wisdom invaluable to programmer-kind? God damn it, you evil Perl-hacking Slash-weenies.
*sigh*
Dammit. I remember the Parrot Sketch, but the Penguin Sketch doesn't ring a bell. Guess I'm not good enough for a license! :P
(I would have moderated you up if I could.)
At the Beanie Awards, Alan Cox, who won the Unsung Hero Award, gave his $10,000
towards the defense fund - and we had a fundraiser later on in the evening.
Waitaminnit!!! Am I missing something?!? The Beanies have already been awarded?!?!? Why didn't I receive the memo?!?!?!?!? God damn it.
In any event... I hope that Knuth won the Best Open Source-Related Book Beanie. Any other result would be just preposterous.
yes and you'll note i prefaced the whole thing with a big IMHO,.. :)
:)
:) i'm only concerned about me, and geeks like me,.... ;)
:)
:) you'd
:) I can see a combination of speech recognition and a better, non-QWERTY keyboard system gaining popularity in the near future.
:)
:)
:)
Musta missed that.
i don't, i don't think about it at all.. no more than i do turning a page in a book.
Only when you're doing the most trivial things that are already stored in your cortex's "instruction cache", like browsing and clicking around.
and who said i cared about 'most people',.. Joe Q. Public can bite me
Wow. I just hope you're not the next head of Apple's HCI Engineering Department...
in all seriousness, though, i think you're wrong. keyboards are much more efficient. find me someone who can write graffiti at 100 wpm
break the li'l palm.
Still, direct neural interfaces are far superior. (Do I hear "mind control"?)
while CRTs are large and cumbersome, once flat-screens become cheaper, using a desktop won't be quite as annoying (or brain-cancer inducing
Yes, but all the other disadvantages remain...
just because you hate desktops don't assume everyone else does
Yeah, but knowing that everyone else hates desktop gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I guess I'm not a real individualist after all, then. Buggers
I was expecting a Lego-sized machine gun, to fit into those little hands. It'd be perfect for playing "LMI vs. Symbolics" (for the clue-impaired amongst you, an ancestral version of "BSD vs. GPL") with my Lego set.
Anyway... does anyone remember that program that built Lego bridges using a genetic algorithm? Why not put it to use improving this machine gun? I bet in a few thousand generations it'd turn out a real weapon of mass destruction. Hell yeah!
sitting down in front of a nice 17-19" screen,
;)
and typing on a responsive keyboard, using a
nice, accurate mouse to click on little pictures
is just an aesthetic and ergonomically pleasing
experience, and i don't think it will ever just
go away. (well, at least not for a long while.)
That's your opinion. Most people consider what you just described to not be aesthetically or ergonomically pleasing at all. In fact, most people hate it. They hate having to read from a computer screen, and like books better. They don't like the desktop PC's immobility. Sitting around is definitely not ergonomically pleasing. The fact that you have to consciously interact with the computer is in itself an indication of the failure of the PC human interface. All in all, I'd have to say that the desktop PC experience is something of which we should get rid altogether.
Then again, that's just my opinion as well.
The good news is, it seems that at least somewhere in Scandinavia, there are places where the general populace won't let itself be taken by the mass hysteria regarding "hackers" and "piracy". However, I can't help but ask myself, considering the hegemony of the US in the global media, how long will it last - how much corporate effort will it take to make it so that all you know is what AOL-TimeWarner-EMI-WhoEverElse tells you - all over the world? If you ask me (and I know you didn't), this is a scary thought.
:) Seriously, government control is, in the end, no better than corporate control, democratically elected or not. The real question is, are there any other means to try and preserve our freedoms from a certain group, that do not involve giving more power to another group that - history has taught us - will eventually turn around to stab us on the back and push an even more opressive regime upon us? Or is it by definition impossible (Individualists unite! and all that)?
And please don't try to tell me that the answer is more government regulation. Any sentence with "more government" in it is automatically evil
(Yes, I am aware that Slashdot is hardly the right place for this kind of discussion. If I have interrupted your daydreaming about chipping Natalie Portman's underwear off, forgive me.)
How hard would it be to port Darwin to Crusoe, anyway? Not much, I suppose... not to mention that they'll be able to take advantage of the experience with Mobile Linux. OTOH, given that it's been months since Darwin was released and it still hasn't been ported even to Intel, maybe there's a catch involved.
:)
Anyway, I'm not really sure about what this means for Apple. Will they be opening their architecture - and furthermore, will they do it the right way this time around? Speculation, speculation. All I know is that I want my quad-G4 box!!!!
Re. Haskell: Well, kinda. Haskell uses a static typing system, wherein you have to declare symbol types as well as definitions. The first line can be read as "'factors' is of type 'mapping (function) from Integer to list of Integers'". The second line defines the lambda-expression to which the symbol 'factors' is bound; in fact, it's syntactic sugar for "factors = \large-prime -> [large-prime 1]" (read "\" as "lambda"). It's interesting to note that Haskell implements lists as monads, and that "[large-prime 1]" is itself syntactic sugar for "large-prime:(1:[])" (wherein ":" is the cons operator and "[]" is the empty list).
Re. Scheme: 'values' is just a special form for returning multiple values. No biggie.
Re. Perl: when a Perl subroutine is called, its arguments are pushed into the argument stack, which is accessible through the array '@_' (array variables in Perl start with '@'). shift is a function that treats an array as a FIFO queue, shifting the first element off and returning its value. Perl has many "shortcut" versions of functions, and this is one; when called without any arguments, shift is applied to the array '@_'.
Happy hacking!
And to think I almost posted this article, but then I figured, "naah, it must have been posted already..." :P
Anyway, Stallman is, as usual, the best at what he does - which is, being preachy, but in a good way. However, he's evidently preaching to the choir: I'd wager that most of the people who read TLJ already know that UCITA is eeeeevil, and must not be allowed to pass. Meanwhile, outside the established community, very few people even know who Stallman is, let alone read his stuff.
So the foremost priority is to get him published somewhere big. Wired. Any of the big fancy Times-style newspapers. Heck, even a cover story on CNN.com would do.
Until that happens, Stallman will remain in obscurity, and maybe UCITA will be allowed to pass through with little complaint... in which case I'll promptly withdraw all my applications to American colleges.
I'll finish off with a haiku:
Dick watches with grief
Over the frozen water
A bird's lost its wings
I guess this'll qualify me for a Fields Medal, then...
:: Integer -> [Integer]
(Haskell)
factors
factors large-prime = [large-prime 1]
(Scheme)
(define (factors large-prime) (values large-prime 1))
(Perl)
sub factors { return (shift(), 1); }
Well, I've always liked the idea of a "shared pool" of patents that does for the patent system what the GPL does for copyright. In this case, I think an actual organisation would be appropriate - the Open Patent Organisation, or the Prior Art Organisation. Another option is to do as in the bugroff license, which establishes a World-Wide Bugroff Association of which everyone who acquires the software is a member.
These are all interesting ideas... but I can't really do much, not being in the US and all.
A procedure for replacing not only a human brain but a whole body with the far superior nanoengineered equivalent is described in the fanatical but excellent Beyond Humanity (by Earl and Cox). Basically, it involves simply administering to the patient a dose of assemblers and specialised nanites, which are programmed, a priori, to, in a span of days, weeks or months, replace every functional unit of your body with a custom-built synthetic replacement, built mostly out of cannibalized carbon found in the original cells (along with some additional materials administered from the outside, if need be).
It's not a cell-for-cell replacement; it doesn't have to be. It alters the nervous system gradually, without requiring a "shutdown", and without terminating the illusion of identity experienced by the mind that "owns" the body. Thus, the philosophical problems of "is my uploaded consciousness really me" are avoided. You are still you; it's just that your body has been upgraded.
I'm glad to see such a clueful article... you don't get many of these around here anymore!
Yes, the guy who originally submitted the question got it right. It was Cliff that didn't. That's why I addressed Cliff.
Cliff said: "What technologies developed in the last century do you think are important?"
The telephone.
It was developed in the 19th century. In the last century.
Because the 20th century isn't over yet, Cliff. We still have a full year ahead.
(I'm sorry, but I just had to say it.)
Damn, you're right!!! Stupid me! :P
OTOH, I've yet to meet someone who, at the mention of New Jersey, thinks of SML/NJ (as opposed to Bell Labs)...
(Also posted to GameSpy's forum)
I'd like to see Tim explain just how it is that functional languages are confined to the realm of theory, considering the infinity of real-world applications in which they have been used since Lisp's inception in the late 1950's. (You do remember that Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages still in use, don't you?) Even more so when you consider the roots of the thing that Tim touts as one of the next big things: "parametric polymorphism", which is nothing but a (poor) adaptation to the imperative paradigm of a subset of Haskell's type system.
Perhaps this is a matter of taste, but I tend to dislike strawmen, especially when attempted by this kind of engineer, who, for some reason, seem to have a dislike of anyone who even sounds like a computer scientist (the keyword here being "scientist"). Face it, Tim: simply sweeping all which doesn't conform to the New Jersey mindframe under a blanket of "purely theoretical languages that have no use in the real world" won't make it true. The fact is that, as long as we're discussing what programming will be like in the future, functional languages are far beyond the state-of-the-art from New Jersey. (Even other game developers recognize this, as evidenced in a mid-1999 article on Gama Sutra about Haskell and other languages in gaming.)
For a glimpse of the real future of programming (as well as computing in general), I suggest the TUNES project, of which I am a member.
(By the way, Tim would have you believe that C was the very first structured programming language. I laughed especially hard when I read that part of the article.)
Thank you! I've been looking all over for this URL, to illustrate my point - that which the Gamasutra article sees and Tim obviously doesn't: that functional languages are not only extremely useful but conceptually far more advanced than anything that ever came out of New Jersey. I'll write a more complete post about this right away.
Not even the Slashdot editors themselves read the Science section!