Gatto said something in one of his writings IIRC to the effect of, "So you take 25-35 four or five year old children, throw them together in an environment with minimal meaningful adult supervision (especially at recess), and you expect them to form any sort of healthy society? Why on Earth would you get anything but a horribly disfunctional, destructive, fundamentally childish society?"
Which matches my experience pretty well. It is this society the non-homeschoolers are claiming is so wonderful that it is somehow vital that we all grow up in it, on which I call "Bullshit". It is so easy to graft higher levels of society down on children that just about the only way to raise the uncivilized hellions that we do is to segregate them the way we do.
I've talked to several homeschooled children, well socialized, and had actual conversations with them, despite a ten-year gap. I've only rarely had that kind of luck with public-schooled children... sometimes, certainly, but a lot of them are so stuck in their school culture they are unreachable.
The home schoolers are almost immune to television culture manipulation, too, from what I've seen. Tied to a real, adult culture (suitable adjusted for children), instead of an isolated peer culture, leaves them a lot more able to think for themselves; I'd bet even the religiously raised ones do better in the "thinking for themselves" department.
This is one of those books you have to let percolate a bit before passing (negative) judgement against it; I first read the book just as I was getting my Master's degree and it is hard to come to grips with the idea of just how much of your life has been wasted by the system. A lot of you are still in school and the cognitive dissonance can still be bad for you.
And I was even one of those who would attack the schools on other grounds, mind; I was open to the idea it was flawed, hell, I knew it was flawed, but just how deeply and how deliberately sent me into shock.
Give it a try; more of my opinion in the above link, though I won't trouble Slashdot with it. Gatto really puts his case together well.
Also, I observe there are a lot of Slashdotters who reflexively assume home schooling is some sort of evil. Make sure you first satisfy yourself that the institutional schooling we now have is not itself a form of evil, perhaps even worse. Having read both sides of both issues, at this point I consider not home schooling borderline child abuse. Most of the homeschooling flaws pointed out by people, such as the ever popular (and unfounded in my experience) "lack of socialization" is correctable, with parental effort. The flaws in institutional schooling are not; indeed, they are assumed "beyond reproach". What amazes me about the human spirit is how many escape the system as I did without a crushed spirit, not how well it works.
Which actually brings up an interesting point in my mind. How can we defend ourselves against accusations that we broke the secret law, if we don't know what the law is or what arguments are being used against us?
By no stretch of the imagination is this a "fair trial". Part of the ancient definition of "fair trial" is the right to meet your accuser.
There is precedent to seal the records of a case, though I am not familiar with the details of when it is acceptable. But to tell one side of the lawsuit that it can not hear its arguments? Absurdity!
I think the EFF ought to argue this is unconstitutional.
Well, maybe you decide you understand what's going on, and therefore that particular variable can't possibly be important, or you overlook it, or the variable isn't reported correctly etc.
A commonly-used example: Send a simple solar powered, 4-funtion calculator (or a thousand) back to 1800. They'll figure out what it does in nothing flat. Send them enough and they can put them to immediate use.
But when they go to analyse it, they will be completely baffled. They'll probably be able to peg the chips as where the magic happens, and they might be able to see the traces on the chips, but their best chemical analysis of the day will tell them that the chips are pure silicon. Which will most likely result in some highly fallacious theories about the potential properties of pure silicon crystals... which will only be put to rest hundreds of years later when someone finally replicates doped-silicon transistors.
It has always been a viable theory that cold fusion is possible, that P&F were onto something, but that we didn't have the technology to know what to look for, or if we did have the tech, we had no clue what to apply to the problem. Nano-scale properties of the metals could have been in play, and people attempting to replicate the experiment may have been nowhere near in the ways that matter.
The burden of proof remains on those who claim to have it, and I remain skeptical. But I'm the real kind of skeptical, the "show me the evidence and I'll believe", not the "I tried your experiment once and it failed, now I will publically mock you, make sure you never work in science ever again, and never again even consider trying another experiment of this type" kind. I have always been uncomfortable with the deeply unscientific way the cold fusion incident was handled, and I don't mean by P&F. Scientists need to be able to have a fluke in their experiments that may not be immediately replicable without running them out of town on a rail.
Crime-obsessed South Africans have a powerful new weapon with which to stop likely criminals: the car flamethrower....
The Blaster squirts liquefied gas from a bottle in the automobile's trunk through two nozzles, located under the front doors. The gas is then ignited by an electric spark, with fiery consequences.
Note the source, CNN. This is not a joke. Apparently, at least as of 1998, neither was the crime level in South Africa. Lots of corrobation, including an IgNobel Peace Prize Award (truly an honor!).
No one understands the mind to any substantive degree--we have a hard time just figuring out how an ant's neurons fire when it walks.
Irrelevant. We don't have to "understand the mind to any substantive degree" to "understand how the mind is performing".
(Common mistake. Same reason people still were mechanical engineers before we even had the theory of the atom, and many modern mechanical engineers still only understand outdated theories. You don't have to "understand matter to any substantiave degree" to design and build with it, you only need know how it performs.)
I don't think it's fair to place this solely on music. There are many things far louder than your average concert.
While we'd have to wait for the science to be sure, I think attributing it on the music is fair. Your other loud sounds are noisy, in the spectrum sense. Only music (that I can plausibly think of as a routine occurance) will blast all the energy into a relatively tight frequency distribution. It is very plausible that this could have an effect.
While the global volume of a drag racer and a loud rock concert maybe the same, I would imagine that the rock concert could have a lot more energy right at, say, 30Hz, and if you're an unlucky smoker who happens to have a resonance frequency in your lungs there, well, that could be a problem.
(Remember, folks, Star Trek to the contrary most things do not have a strong resonance frequency, especially soft things. However, as you pump more and more energy into some object, even a very weak resonance that would normally never be noticed could be enough to tip you over the edge. Your lungs won't have any strong resonance frequency that someone could play to "tear your lungs apart" at a really low volume level, but if you've already compromised them by smoking you might just rip something in there. Eventually, loud sound starts to look like an explosion from an instantaneous perspective...)
Yes you do. Otherwise you might just as well say "it is decided by the flip of this coin", without specifying whether heads or tails means it will halt.
No he doesn't; Welpa explicitly said one program, and he is right in that case. The Halting Problem is that you can't create a program that does it in all cases. Any finite number of cases can be solved by a lookup table. Populating it may take some work in the real world but in the math world we can just assert its existance confidently.
Some people then take this to mean since computers are finite, the halting problem is not an issue in real life. These people miss that the lookup table will be exponentially larger then the machine the table works for, which means it is still a real problem, since the problem is always larger than the machine, for any size machine.
(I do think he was wrong about the Riemann hypothesis, though; it is possible that it is undecidable. You might have to take it as a axiom.)
Let's say you're using a regular (ie: unicast) connection to link everyone to everyone else. For N players, you need N * (N-1) connections to link every player's machine to everyone else's.
Yes, it's a real pity this is true, or we could create massive IM networks with millions of simultaneous users. That would be so cool.
Wait a minute...
Hey, I've got an idea! Let's designate one of the machines as a server, and have it collect and transmit all the data from a centralized source! Then the overall bandwidth needed still goes up effectively linearly, and only one machine needs a lot of bandwidth! That just might work!
Oh damn, looks like somebody already came up with that general idea.
</sarcasm>
Multicast is cool and all, but let's not overstate the problem it is solving. People play 64-player games of Quake 2 or 3 or various Unreals all the time, today (and I'm not into that scene so there may be even more), because a 64-player game of Unreal is a mere 64 bi-directional connections, not the 4,032 (unidirectional) you are claiming. I think you need to spend some more time studying real networking before pitching obscure solutions that by and large have yet to be needed by the common man. (You do realize that Quake et al doesn't ship the entire graphics load over the network, right? Your last paragraph seems to strongly hint otherwise...)
The point of the article completely went over your head.
No, it didn't. You are magically invoking parrallelism, and hoping the magic of the brain lies there, rather than in how the nueral networks work. Which betrays a serious lack of comprehension of how the brain works, and as a result, your fancy scheme falls down from axiom one.
If you pursue this, I personally guarentee you will have more "algorithm-based" problems than those of us in the mainstream.
I understand how your scheme works. I've seen other graphical languages that differ primarily by the fact they will solve real-world problems better.
Like I said, wake me when you have a better solution to a problem. With your comprehension of biology and computer science, I'm not holding my breath. For instance, this rather breathtaking claim:
In COSA, there is only one algorithm... at the application development level, it is all synchronous software objects.
Yes, I saw that, but your objects are algorithmic. I saw AND gates and OR gates and other gates, built up into more complicated objects. Welcome to the world of algorithms. That is not how the brain works. This is why I said that you may have hidden the algorithms from yourself, but I still see them, plain as day. Parallel graphical languages have been done, and they weren't a magical path to bug-free programming.
Put another way, your objects trivially serialize into LISP programs, with a small handful of custom functions.
BTW, I am very open to alternative formulations that solve fundamental problems in new ways, so you really shouldn't discount this as some close-minded person desperately clinging to what they know. I know software sucks. However, I see every reason to believe that your scheme will be a massive net negative. You've created another scheme that avoids problems as long as you stick to the simple samples but won't scale into even the simplest real-world problem, which is the same problem all of the previous general-purpose graphical languages fell into. You see there's a problem, like the rest of us, but you have only a vague and fuzzy sense of what it is, and as a result your solution doesn't even begin to make progress.
Wow, that was almost a sad experience, reading that (and also you must read this). They go on and on about how bad algorithms are... and create an alternate system that still runs on algorithms, only instead of concentrating on a clean implementation they have this amazingly obscured one that will guarentee the impossibility of any human ever understanding a COSA "program", by taking componentization to truly absurd levels. They have successfully hidden the algorithms from themselves, perhaps, but I still see them, and they will still be bitten by them.
It would be funny if it weren't also sad.
Brooks still reigns and there remains no Silver Bullet. Wake me when these guys have a decently complex program that is better than anything I can come up with in Python. (Don't miss that second clause; making a program do something in 2004 is nothing special. It needs to be better. Handwaving is not an OS.)
Worse; the sound is dissapating into the environment at your belt buckle, but will be directed into your ear if you have it at your ear when it goes off. You can probably tack on another 3-10 dB for that, depending on the phone's construction. (Wide range there because I don't know the numbers, just the effect; for that matter it may come out over 10, I'm just not confident about it.)
The inverse square law is for a perfectly spherical emitter in an obstacle-free environment (a sea of air), in reality it can be a bad over- or under-estimate, depending on whether the sound is being directed toward or away from you. This is one of those cases where it an under-estimate, possibly a very bad one, because the sound is fairly directional by design, and when held to your ear, it is directed right into it.
As the sound gets more and more directional, the drop-off approaches 0; you can never reach that, but if you've heard about those ultra-sound based speakers that use non-linearity in the air to create audible sound, one of several reasons they are cool is their ability to be highly directional (higher frequencies can be more directional), so you can beam sound across a football field if you want, since the sound's directionality borrows the characteristics of the ultra-sonic frequencies. Cute trick.
Which reminds me, ever tried to open a Gnumeric spreadsheet in Excel or an OOo document in Word?
Ah, but you see, when OO can't open a Word file, that is a strike against OO. And when Word can't open an OO file, that is a strike against OO.
(You'll have to come back to me later on how when Word can't open a Word file it isn't a strike against Word. Forget Teflon Presidents, Microsoft has created Teflon Software. Damn, and here I thought that was an original metaphor...)
No. Based on what I've heard, I do hope to get to that and Snow Crash sometime. I also liked "In the Beginning was the Command Line".
(It's not like I hate the guy personally:-) I just don't like where he is going. I feel the same about Michael Crichton; early stuff is cool, but later works come off too much like movie novelizations. Actually they aren't too bad, I'd just rather see the movie itself.:-) Hmmm... nope, nothing yet... I'm sure it is just a matter of time.)
Ignore the other two replies to your post as of this writing; they fall into the trap of "countering the opponent at all costs", even if it isn't the best idea.
The real problem with your post is that nothing in it is specific to Java. A lot of other modern languages do those things without the other weaknesses of Java, like Python. The only difference is Python doesn't have checked exceptions but that's a good thing.
Like the Fine Article seems to be (I can't read it, server hosed), that's a fine defense of Java in general, but it only reinforces Paul's attack, IMHO, by listing the "good things" about Java that are in no way unique to it. Paul didn't compare Java to K&R C like you implicitly do, he compared it to Python. You're going to have to work a lot harder to defend Java against Python... in fact I don't think it can be done as I'm basically with Paul here, but if you want to try, that is the real challenge, not defending Java as "better than C". (What isn't? If it isn't better than C somehow, it's dead.)
On that topic, I also love the Dune series, and my favorites are the last two books, which really ought to be considered one book (much like the last two Ender books by Card though their names escape me; I lost the third a long time ago and never actually owned the fourth, got it from the library). Had it been one book I still would have loved it.
See my cousin post to this about A Deepness in the Sky. Same story with the Foundation series; stuff has happened, actually well before page 500 because most of the stories are shorter than that.
You should revise your understanding of my post to take that into account; I think you jumped to the same wrong conclusion the other guy did.
More like 5, unless they are really sparse. A lot of hardcovers are getting that way; soon large print editions will be redundant.
Anyway, for being such patient a patient reader, your tastes are much more geared to Hollywood movies.
Oh fuck off. 4 or 5 hours is plenty of time to give a guy (or girl) to do something. If you can't make something happen by then you're a hack. Or you're editor is a hack.
I think you misunderstand. I'm not asking for the story to be resolved; hell, I'll follow you through a decology if it's worth it. I'm asking that something happen, something that if somebody asked what the book was about I could tell them. I got 500 pages into the Cryponomicon and by that standard, nothing had happened. Literally all I remember today is that the main character had moved to the Phillipines. 500 pages into "A Deepness In the Sky", the story was nowhere near resolved, but we've found Pham Nuwen, travelled to the site of the main story, watched the aliens develop parity with ~20th century technology, had a major battle which set up the main conflict between the humans, discovered why the humans on one side are despicable (by our standards), and that's not even a complete list. Stuff happens, even with the rare computer science diversion.
I've never read the Baroque cycle and based on the reviews have no plan to do so.
But in the case of the Crypotonomicon, consider a (small) third category: "Too smart". I put that in quotes because it ought to be "too knowledgeable", really. I read it near the end of my last semester of my Master's degree in computer science. Thus, the numerous diversions into computer science weren't anywhere near as cool as they would have been for me in high school, they were tedious distractions from the plot, except that I didn't find much plot left if you remove the tedious distractions.
That said, mega-kudos to Neal for getting the computer science right; it of course isn't a formal introduction but it is heads and shoulders above most attempts to convey a real science in a novel form. But if the material is old hat, it isn't going to be much fun.
If you like the diversions in Cryptonomicon, that is as good a sign as any that you might genuinely enjoy a computer science education. Certainly a better sign then the more common "I like to play computer games", which I saw far too much of (no joke).
But I don't think it is too much to ask that by page 500, something happen.
I'm not referring specifically to Neal here, though I will refer specifically to the Cryptonomicon. (Please don't try to "correct" me; up to that point in the Cryptonomicon, as far as I'm concerned all that had occured was a belabored explanation of several concepts I had learned about in more detail several years ago in school and that opinion of mine isn't about to change.)
But there is an opportunity cost here; 500 pages is several hours and if you're still building up, I have to ask myself whether my time is better spent on something that may pay off a little faster. Books are not a scarce resource, and while I don't demand wham-bang-boom by page 3, how much do you expect me to wade through?
My point here, I guess, is that I can't really find it in myself to care whether "The Confusion" is any good, if I have to wade through an entire bloated dull book to get there. I don't want to say everybody should feel that way (unfortunately I can think of no clear way in English to express this; it is the nature of a declatory sentence to sound like, well, a declaration of fact), but it is a viewpoint I think authors should consider. If you're going too slow for me, who considers a 600 page, densely printed book like "A Deepness in the Sky" to be "a bit on the short side", you really need to consider getting your ass into gear and letting the editor do a bit more cutting.
If "Star Wars" is a rip-off of "Mars" (and I presume you mean the main title theme?), then what isn't? I mean, just because you have a song which is martial and warlike doesn't mean that it was "ripped off" from a random previous song that was meant to sound martial and warlike. (By those standards, Mars is a rip off of any number of other tunes.)
We like to bitch about software patents (and IMHO rightly so) but musicians have it even worse: There are only so many ways to make a martial, warlike song. If you insist on interpreting things broadly like this, everything is a "rip off"... in which case, who cares?
I defy you to submit an original song for Star Wars that isn't, by the same standards, a "rip off" of some other song from the millions of hours of composed and recorded music.
The reality is that the tonalities, the harmonies, the basic instrumentations have all been done, and unless you want people to just stop writing new music, you're doing modern composers a serious disservice to accuse them of "ripping something off". Unless the huge chunks of the exact harmony or melody are ripped off wholesale (neither of which apply in this case), you really shouldn't accuse anybody of ripping anything off.
I've dabbled with composition, but a sum total of perhaps 10 people have ever heard most of it. (It's tolerable, but nothing great.) Nevertheless, I've heard my melodies and harmonies, which I know I wrote from scratch, in other pieces of a more popular variety, some of which I know were written years after my pieces. That's just the nature of music. (I know I wasn't ripped off!)
Remember that one of their biggest parties is for when somebody failed to blow something up in a big way: Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot. I don't think this guy would get a holiday of his own here in the States.
(Ha! Take that all you Brits who think all us Yanks are uncultured swine! A topical British cultural reference from an American! On behalf of my countrymen, Neener neener neener!)
Slashdot Mirror
Gatto said something in one of his writings IIRC to the effect of, "So you take 25-35 four or five year old children, throw them together in an environment with minimal meaningful adult supervision (especially at recess), and you expect them to form any sort of healthy society? Why on Earth would you get anything but a horribly disfunctional, destructive, fundamentally childish society?"
Which matches my experience pretty well. It is this society the non-homeschoolers are claiming is so wonderful that it is somehow vital that we all grow up in it, on which I call "Bullshit". It is so easy to graft higher levels of society down on children that just about the only way to raise the uncivilized hellions that we do is to segregate them the way we do.
I've talked to several homeschooled children, well socialized, and had actual conversations with them, despite a ten-year gap. I've only rarely had that kind of luck with public-schooled children... sometimes, certainly, but a lot of them are so stuck in their school culture they are unreachable.
The home schoolers are almost immune to television culture manipulation, too, from what I've seen. Tied to a real, adult culture (suitable adjusted for children), instead of an isolated peer culture, leaves them a lot more able to think for themselves; I'd bet even the religiously raised ones do better in the "thinking for themselves" department.
python -c "import this"
seems appropriate, though it is not well indented.
I think the Attorney General should say it!
Excellent point.
This is one of those books you have to let percolate a bit before passing (negative) judgement against it; I first read the book just as I was getting my Master's degree and it is hard to come to grips with the idea of just how much of your life has been wasted by the system. A lot of you are still in school and the cognitive dissonance can still be bad for you.
And I was even one of those who would attack the schools on other grounds, mind; I was open to the idea it was flawed, hell, I knew it was flawed, but just how deeply and how deliberately sent me into shock.
Give it a try; more of my opinion in the above link, though I won't trouble Slashdot with it. Gatto really puts his case together well.
Also, I observe there are a lot of Slashdotters who reflexively assume home schooling is some sort of evil. Make sure you first satisfy yourself that the institutional schooling we now have is not itself a form of evil, perhaps even worse. Having read both sides of both issues, at this point I consider not home schooling borderline child abuse. Most of the homeschooling flaws pointed out by people, such as the ever popular (and unfounded in my experience) "lack of socialization" is correctable, with parental effort. The flaws in institutional schooling are not; indeed, they are assumed "beyond reproach". What amazes me about the human spirit is how many escape the system as I did without a crushed spirit, not how well it works.
Which actually brings up an interesting point in my mind. How can we defend ourselves against accusations that we broke the secret law, if we don't know what the law is or what arguments are being used against us?
By no stretch of the imagination is this a "fair trial". Part of the ancient definition of "fair trial" is the right to meet your accuser.
There is precedent to seal the records of a case, though I am not familiar with the details of when it is acceptable. But to tell one side of the lawsuit that it can not hear its arguments? Absurdity!
I think the EFF ought to argue this is unconstitutional.
Well, maybe you decide you understand what's going on, and therefore that particular variable can't possibly be important, or you overlook it, or the variable isn't reported correctly etc.
A commonly-used example: Send a simple solar powered, 4-funtion calculator (or a thousand) back to 1800. They'll figure out what it does in nothing flat. Send them enough and they can put them to immediate use.
But when they go to analyse it, they will be completely baffled. They'll probably be able to peg the chips as where the magic happens, and they might be able to see the traces on the chips, but their best chemical analysis of the day will tell them that the chips are pure silicon. Which will most likely result in some highly fallacious theories about the potential properties of pure silicon crystals... which will only be put to rest hundreds of years later when someone finally replicates doped-silicon transistors.
It has always been a viable theory that cold fusion is possible, that P&F were onto something, but that we didn't have the technology to know what to look for, or if we did have the tech, we had no clue what to apply to the problem. Nano-scale properties of the metals could have been in play, and people attempting to replicate the experiment may have been nowhere near in the ways that matter.
The burden of proof remains on those who claim to have it, and I remain skeptical. But I'm the real kind of skeptical, the "show me the evidence and I'll believe", not the "I tried your experiment once and it failed, now I will publically mock you, make sure you never work in science ever again, and never again even consider trying another experiment of this type" kind. I have always been uncomfortable with the deeply unscientific way the cold fusion incident was handled, and I don't mean by P&F. Scientists need to be able to have a fluke in their experiments that may not be immediately replicable without running them out of town on a rail.
Flamethrower now an option on S. African cars (December 11, 1998):Note the source, CNN. This is not a joke. Apparently, at least as of 1998, neither was the crime level in South Africa. Lots of corrobation, including an IgNobel Peace Prize Award (truly an honor!).
No one understands the mind to any substantive degree--we have a hard time just figuring out how an ant's neurons fire when it walks.
Irrelevant. We don't have to "understand the mind to any substantive degree" to "understand how the mind is performing".
(Common mistake. Same reason people still were mechanical engineers before we even had the theory of the atom, and many modern mechanical engineers still only understand outdated theories. You don't have to "understand matter to any substantiave degree" to design and build with it, you only need know how it performs.)
I don't think it's fair to place this solely on music. There are many things far louder than your average concert.
While we'd have to wait for the science to be sure, I think attributing it on the music is fair. Your other loud sounds are noisy, in the spectrum sense. Only music (that I can plausibly think of as a routine occurance) will blast all the energy into a relatively tight frequency distribution. It is very plausible that this could have an effect.
While the global volume of a drag racer and a loud rock concert maybe the same, I would imagine that the rock concert could have a lot more energy right at, say, 30Hz, and if you're an unlucky smoker who happens to have a resonance frequency in your lungs there, well, that could be a problem.
(Remember, folks, Star Trek to the contrary most things do not have a strong resonance frequency, especially soft things. However, as you pump more and more energy into some object, even a very weak resonance that would normally never be noticed could be enough to tip you over the edge. Your lungs won't have any strong resonance frequency that someone could play to "tear your lungs apart" at a really low volume level, but if you've already compromised them by smoking you might just rip something in there. Eventually, loud sound starts to look like an explosion from an instantaneous perspective...)
Yes you do. Otherwise you might just as well say "it is decided by the flip of this coin", without specifying whether heads or tails means it will halt.
No he doesn't; Welpa explicitly said one program, and he is right in that case. The Halting Problem is that you can't create a program that does it in all cases. Any finite number of cases can be solved by a lookup table. Populating it may take some work in the real world but in the math world we can just assert its existance confidently.
Some people then take this to mean since computers are finite, the halting problem is not an issue in real life. These people miss that the lookup table will be exponentially larger then the machine the table works for, which means it is still a real problem, since the problem is always larger than the machine, for any size machine.
(I do think he was wrong about the Riemann hypothesis, though; it is possible that it is undecidable. You might have to take it as a axiom.)
Let's say you're using a regular (ie: unicast) connection to link everyone to everyone else. For N players, you need N * (N-1) connections to link every player's machine to everyone else's.
Yes, it's a real pity this is true, or we could create massive IM networks with millions of simultaneous users. That would be so cool.
Wait a minute...
Hey, I've got an idea! Let's designate one of the machines as a server, and have it collect and transmit all the data from a centralized source! Then the overall bandwidth needed still goes up effectively linearly, and only one machine needs a lot of bandwidth! That just might work!
Oh damn, looks like somebody already came up with that general idea.
</sarcasm>
Multicast is cool and all, but let's not overstate the problem it is solving. People play 64-player games of Quake 2 or 3 or various Unreals all the time, today (and I'm not into that scene so there may be even more), because a 64-player game of Unreal is a mere 64 bi-directional connections, not the 4,032 (unidirectional) you are claiming. I think you need to spend some more time studying real networking before pitching obscure solutions that by and large have yet to be needed by the common man. (You do realize that Quake et al doesn't ship the entire graphics load over the network, right? Your last paragraph seems to strongly hint otherwise...)
In COSA there is only one algorithm.
Your saying it does not make it true.
Good luck.
The point of the article completely went over your head.
No, it didn't. You are magically invoking parrallelism, and hoping the magic of the brain lies there, rather than in how the nueral networks work. Which betrays a serious lack of comprehension of how the brain works, and as a result, your fancy scheme falls down from axiom one.
If you pursue this, I personally guarentee you will have more "algorithm-based" problems than those of us in the mainstream.
I understand how your scheme works. I've seen other graphical languages that differ primarily by the fact they will solve real-world problems better.
Like I said, wake me when you have a better solution to a problem. With your comprehension of biology and computer science, I'm not holding my breath. For instance, this rather breathtaking claim:
In COSA, there is only one algorithm... at the application development level, it is all synchronous software objects.
Yes, I saw that, but your objects are algorithmic. I saw AND gates and OR gates and other gates, built up into more complicated objects. Welcome to the world of algorithms. That is not how the brain works. This is why I said that you may have hidden the algorithms from yourself, but I still see them, plain as day. Parallel graphical languages have been done, and they weren't a magical path to bug-free programming.
Put another way, your objects trivially serialize into LISP programs, with a small handful of custom functions.
BTW, I am very open to alternative formulations that solve fundamental problems in new ways, so you really shouldn't discount this as some close-minded person desperately clinging to what they know. I know software sucks. However, I see every reason to believe that your scheme will be a massive net negative. You've created another scheme that avoids problems as long as you stick to the simple samples but won't scale into even the simplest real-world problem, which is the same problem all of the previous general-purpose graphical languages fell into. You see there's a problem, like the rest of us, but you have only a vague and fuzzy sense of what it is, and as a result your solution doesn't even begin to make progress.
2004 and you just now figured out the Dot-Com plan? :-)
Wow, that was almost a sad experience, reading that (and also you must read this). They go on and on about how bad algorithms are... and create an alternate system that still runs on algorithms, only instead of concentrating on a clean implementation they have this amazingly obscured one that will guarentee the impossibility of any human ever understanding a COSA "program", by taking componentization to truly absurd levels. They have successfully hidden the algorithms from themselves, perhaps, but I still see them, and they will still be bitten by them.
It would be funny if it weren't also sad.
Brooks still reigns and there remains no Silver Bullet. Wake me when these guys have a decently complex program that is better than anything I can come up with in Python. (Don't miss that second clause; making a program do something in 2004 is nothing special. It needs to be better. Handwaving is not an OS.)
Worse; the sound is dissapating into the environment at your belt buckle, but will be directed into your ear if you have it at your ear when it goes off. You can probably tack on another 3-10 dB for that, depending on the phone's construction. (Wide range there because I don't know the numbers, just the effect; for that matter it may come out over 10, I'm just not confident about it.)
The inverse square law is for a perfectly spherical emitter in an obstacle-free environment (a sea of air), in reality it can be a bad over- or under-estimate, depending on whether the sound is being directed toward or away from you. This is one of those cases where it an under-estimate, possibly a very bad one, because the sound is fairly directional by design, and when held to your ear, it is directed right into it.
As the sound gets more and more directional, the drop-off approaches 0; you can never reach that, but if you've heard about those ultra-sound based speakers that use non-linearity in the air to create audible sound, one of several reasons they are cool is their ability to be highly directional (higher frequencies can be more directional), so you can beam sound across a football field if you want, since the sound's directionality borrows the characteristics of the ultra-sonic frequencies. Cute trick.
Which reminds me, ever tried to open a Gnumeric spreadsheet in Excel or an OOo document in Word?
Ah, but you see, when OO can't open a Word file, that is a strike against OO. And when Word can't open an OO file, that is a strike against OO.
(You'll have to come back to me later on how when Word can't open a Word file it isn't a strike against Word. Forget Teflon Presidents, Microsoft has created Teflon Software. Damn, and here I thought that was an original metaphor...)
No. Based on what I've heard, I do hope to get to that and Snow Crash sometime. I also liked "In the Beginning was the Command Line".
:-) I just don't like where he is going. I feel the same about Michael Crichton; early stuff is cool, but later works come off too much like movie novelizations. Actually they aren't too bad, I'd just rather see the movie itself. :-) Hmmm... nope, nothing yet... I'm sure it is just a matter of time.)
(It's not like I hate the guy personally
Ignore the other two replies to your post as of this writing; they fall into the trap of "countering the opponent at all costs", even if it isn't the best idea.
The real problem with your post is that nothing in it is specific to Java. A lot of other modern languages do those things without the other weaknesses of Java, like Python. The only difference is Python doesn't have checked exceptions but that's a good thing.
Like the Fine Article seems to be (I can't read it, server hosed), that's a fine defense of Java in general, but it only reinforces Paul's attack, IMHO, by listing the "good things" about Java that are in no way unique to it. Paul didn't compare Java to K&R C like you implicitly do, he compared it to Python. You're going to have to work a lot harder to defend Java against Python... in fact I don't think it can be done as I'm basically with Paul here, but if you want to try, that is the real challenge, not defending Java as "better than C". (What isn't? If it isn't better than C somehow, it's dead.)
(The only other major point to make that I am aware of is the so-called "benefits" of static typing, which are also dubious if you actually examine the issue instead of swallowing what the theorists have pounded into your head. Both of the links to Eckel are only samples, there's a lot more on both topics; "eckel " + "static typing" or "checked exceptions" will bring up a lot more in the Google hits below #1.)
I love the Foundation series.
On that topic, I also love the Dune series, and my favorites are the last two books, which really ought to be considered one book (much like the last two Ender books by Card though their names escape me; I lost the third a long time ago and never actually owned the fourth, got it from the library). Had it been one book I still would have loved it.
See my cousin post to this about A Deepness in the Sky. Same story with the Foundation series; stuff has happened, actually well before page 500 because most of the stories are shorter than that.
You should revise your understanding of my post to take that into account; I think you jumped to the same wrong conclusion the other guy did.
You can read 500 pages in three hours?
More like 5, unless they are really sparse. A lot of hardcovers are getting that way; soon large print editions will be redundant.
Anyway, for being such patient a patient reader, your tastes are much more geared to Hollywood movies.
Oh fuck off. 4 or 5 hours is plenty of time to give a guy (or girl) to do something. If you can't make something happen by then you're a hack. Or you're editor is a hack.
I think you misunderstand. I'm not asking for the story to be resolved; hell, I'll follow you through a decology if it's worth it. I'm asking that something happen, something that if somebody asked what the book was about I could tell them. I got 500 pages into the Cryponomicon and by that standard, nothing had happened. Literally all I remember today is that the main character had moved to the Phillipines. 500 pages into "A Deepness In the Sky", the story was nowhere near resolved, but we've found Pham Nuwen, travelled to the site of the main story, watched the aliens develop parity with ~20th century technology, had a major battle which set up the main conflict between the humans, discovered why the humans on one side are despicable (by our standards), and that's not even a complete list. Stuff happens, even with the rare computer science diversion.
I've never read the Baroque cycle and based on the reviews have no plan to do so.
But in the case of the Crypotonomicon, consider a (small) third category: "Too smart". I put that in quotes because it ought to be "too knowledgeable", really. I read it near the end of my last semester of my Master's degree in computer science. Thus, the numerous diversions into computer science weren't anywhere near as cool as they would have been for me in high school, they were tedious distractions from the plot, except that I didn't find much plot left if you remove the tedious distractions.
That said, mega-kudos to Neal for getting the computer science right; it of course isn't a formal introduction but it is heads and shoulders above most attempts to convey a real science in a novel form. But if the material is old hat, it isn't going to be much fun.
If you like the diversions in Cryptonomicon, that is as good a sign as any that you might genuinely enjoy a computer science education. Certainly a better sign then the more common "I like to play computer games", which I saw far too much of (no joke).
I am a very patient reader.
But I don't think it is too much to ask that by page 500, something happen.
I'm not referring specifically to Neal here, though I will refer specifically to the Cryptonomicon. (Please don't try to "correct" me; up to that point in the Cryptonomicon, as far as I'm concerned all that had occured was a belabored explanation of several concepts I had learned about in more detail several years ago in school and that opinion of mine isn't about to change.)
But there is an opportunity cost here; 500 pages is several hours and if you're still building up, I have to ask myself whether my time is better spent on something that may pay off a little faster. Books are not a scarce resource, and while I don't demand wham-bang-boom by page 3, how much do you expect me to wade through?
My point here, I guess, is that I can't really find it in myself to care whether "The Confusion" is any good, if I have to wade through an entire bloated dull book to get there. I don't want to say everybody should feel that way (unfortunately I can think of no clear way in English to express this; it is the nature of a declatory sentence to sound like, well, a declaration of fact), but it is a viewpoint I think authors should consider. If you're going too slow for me, who considers a 600 page, densely printed book like "A Deepness in the Sky" to be "a bit on the short side", you really need to consider getting your ass into gear and letting the editor do a bit more cutting.
If "Star Wars" is a rip-off of "Mars" (and I presume you mean the main title theme?), then what isn't? I mean, just because you have a song which is martial and warlike doesn't mean that it was "ripped off" from a random previous song that was meant to sound martial and warlike. (By those standards, Mars is a rip off of any number of other tunes.)
We like to bitch about software patents (and IMHO rightly so) but musicians have it even worse: There are only so many ways to make a martial, warlike song. If you insist on interpreting things broadly like this, everything is a "rip off"... in which case, who cares?
I defy you to submit an original song for Star Wars that isn't, by the same standards, a "rip off" of some other song from the millions of hours of composed and recorded music.
The reality is that the tonalities, the harmonies, the basic instrumentations have all been done, and unless you want people to just stop writing new music, you're doing modern composers a serious disservice to accuse them of "ripping something off". Unless the huge chunks of the exact harmony or melody are ripped off wholesale (neither of which apply in this case), you really shouldn't accuse anybody of ripping anything off.
I've dabbled with composition, but a sum total of perhaps 10 people have ever heard most of it. (It's tolerable, but nothing great.) Nevertheless, I've heard my melodies and harmonies, which I know I wrote from scratch, in other pieces of a more popular variety, some of which I know were written years after my pieces. That's just the nature of music. (I know I wasn't ripped off!)
Remember that one of their biggest parties is for when somebody failed to blow something up in a big way: Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot. I don't think this guy would get a holiday of his own here in the States.
(Ha! Take that all you Brits who think all us Yanks are uncultured swine! A topical British cultural reference from an American! On behalf of my countrymen, Neener neener neener!)