If pulling a whole tarball didn't kill a server's bandwith, it wouldn't be a bad practice. BitTorrent comes fairly close to that, although it is possible that kernel.org could overload even a bittorrent set-up. (Although if the bittorrents were mirrored, that would eliminate the issue.)
Of your two basic points, I don't agree with the first, the "October that Never Ended", though I agree it is at least arguable.
But your speil about Apple boggles the mind. It only makes sense in some kind of alternate universe where it is Apple machines that are causing the troubles. Last I checked, the total "rampaging Internet-destroying virus" count is still firmly at zero on the Macintoshes, to the Windows double-digits. (Linux has only one that I can even remotely imagine like that, the Apache worm, and even that was fairly contained compared to the virus loads that have taken down entire large companies.)
I have to conclude that you're one of the few trolls to make it to +5, Interesting. s/Apple/Microsoft/g and again, I don't agree, but it's at least arguable. But what problems are Apple users causing on the net? None.
This is exactly what French companies must do, and as a result, there is not much economic growth in France. When it costs so much to hire people and its so hard to fire them, not surprisingly companys don't want to hire unless absolutely necessary, which translates into double digit unemployment.
It's easy to do a knee-jerk reaction to the outsouring issues on Slashdot, but you dig deeper and the issue becomes much murkier. I mean, "obviously" I'm not in favor of losing my job, but just because I don't want that doesn't mean the ideal solution is something like "Make it illegal to outsource".
France (and from what I gather a lot of the western portion of the EU) highlights the kinds of things that can happen if you're not careful with your economic policy. We don't want that kind of thing.
If we try to block outsourcing, will it come back and bite us in the ass even harder later? Is there a better way to react to it? And what's the best way to handle this stuff personally? Damned if I know, all I know is that the easy solutions are wrong.
Meanwhile, I'm going with the old standby of trying to increase my value to employers, because it's the best idea I have. There's a lot of room for improvement in the efficiency of programmers right now, and most of it involves getting off the beaten path of stuff like Java. Hopefully, by the time people start outsourcing with the same techniques for improved productivity that I can bring to bear on things today, which conservatively will be at least a decade, it won't be so obviously economically advantageous to outsource to India.
Try it on a CRT, not an LCD. An LCD can't change that fast, so it'll only "blink" something much less then full strength, plus if you're talking a standard LCD, it will be a dark blink against a light background which is much harder; your eyes see light, not "darkness". A graphic-calculator LCD scrolling at full speed really is a meaningless blur, a CRT is not. (Snap passive (no-flash) photos of both with a quick shutter if you don't believe me.)
A CRT can do it because it can instantly go to full power on one cycle's worth of time, and between the phosphor decay time, and the somewhat-equivalent processes in your eye that turn a quick blink into something you perceive as lasting much longer for various reasons, 10 can be done, though just barely. (Basically, at the distance I was from the screen, in hindsight, ten digits was about the size of my fovea (look it up). Had I backed up a bit I might have gotten more, or not. Words are even easier, too.)
I actually did a research project back in high school (1992) where I made up a bunch of fake vocabulary words and flashed them on the computer screen for varying durations. While at the longest durations the flashing was somewhat noticeable, it was still too quick to read the words.
You can't flash words any faster then the computer screen updates. Back in the Commodore 64 days, I was able to read up to 10-digit sequences, no matter how "quickly" you flashed the digits, because the television works on a 24-Hz cycle, so you can't flash it for less then 1/24th of a second, and furthermore, if it's light text on a dark background, your eyes will still "see" the flash for longer then that.
You need much more sophisticated equipment then any modern computer monitor, let alone a reasonably-priced 1992 monitor, can provide you to test this reasonably.
If the military wants Mach 7 delivery, rest assured they already have it. I don't see any reason existing technology can't do it, it just can be done in a commercially sustainable manner right now.
If you can put a satellite into space, you can delivery things at Mach 7, which is much, much slower then orbital speeds.
Yeah, like I said, it's expensive, but it's doable.
The printed side is where the data is. If they scratch that, the data is for all useful purposes gone.
If you must put CDs or CD-like things down without putting them back in their case, always put them clear-side down, as scratches there aren't necessarily terminal.
Some people think they're being clever putting the printed side down but that's not true. (This is a general comment, not directed at your post specifically.)
I've done this on Stargate SG-1, and more recently my wife has as well.
A well done "alternate world" show (more general then sci-fi, and there are some sci-fi shows that IMHO wouldn't qualify, most notably Star Trek) benefits amazingly from the immersion you can do if you want.... if it doesn't scare you too much.
Television shows on DVD are two or three times better then TV shows on TiVo, which are themselves three or four times better then the TV show broken up by commercials all the time. The ability to watch, uninterrupted by more then a few seconds, three or four episodes in a row is awesome.
One particular Stargate arc that is really enhanced by this is the one that starts with Upgrades and ends with Divide and Conquer (3 episodes total). Much more compelling drama as a ~2 hour single event then three seperate episodes.
... if only I get a cut of the action. They are selling MY information which is deamed to have value so why am I not legally entitled to my cut of the profits?
This, incidentally, is the single best non-tin hat reason to support privacy reform, something that everybody ought to agree with. Your private information has value, as demonstrated by the fact that it is routinely sold, for more money then you probably realize. Why is it OK for people to effectively steal this value from you without compensating you fairly, and indeed, charging you in the form of the time you have to spend dealing with people who then use this data?
(In fact, you can boil all privacy arguments down to this point, but it's better for many people to state it nakedly as a monetary issue, even though IMHO the non-monetary concerns are more interesting and important in the long run.)
And since it has never been done to date, it never will be done? That's idiotic reasoning.
So is ripping one point out of context and thinking that proves anything. The real argument is that you can't abstract away enough details to make it visually useful to program visually any more then we do today. "Nobody has done it yet, despite lots of smart trying" is my evidence, not my argument. People trying and failing isn't proof, but it is indeed evidence, the only and best empirical evidence of the impossibility of something like this you can get. (As opposed to the reasoned argument I gave.)
Please learn to read the whole argument before thinking you're clever for pulling a point apart.
(This is a reply to an AC, but it's a good AC posting;-) )
IMHO, a blended approach is something feasible. Allow pictorial/iconic design for common, easily abstracted entities (threads, processors, screens, networks, etc.), then "drop in" to the logic needing abstract-to-instruction type mapping.
I agree with this, especially in well-mapped out domains. In a way, GUI design tools where you draw a dialog box are already a good example of this. I've written some Python libraries that could benefit from a graphical overview, even though they could never have been written purely graphically. Anything that can help a person fresh to the code get an overview of the system would be a good thing.
Although, to be fair, most people never put system overviews in their docs, which tends to significantly reduce the effectiveness of the docs as a whole, so graphical systems get an unfair advantage over current state of the art, since they get to improve on "nearly nothing at all", which is much easier to look good against then against "something"... anything...
To be clear, I'm speaking out against the idea then any more then 5-10% of the "code" can ever be this sort of graphical, though, not that it should be and always will be 0%. (Even now, it's not.) I like SquareOfS' "death of a thousand attributes" phrase; I'll have to remember that since I'm already a fan of "death by a thousand cuts" as a metaphor;-)
Let's see: pay a full orchestra or use a ~$500 synthesizer. I wonder how many entertainment companies do the latter.
Almost all of them. (Although they do use modern synths, not the same class as my own.) I can tell when the music is real and when it is synthesized, even fancy synthesis like the aforementioned Grandia II, and "real music" is exceedingly rare. In fact I am frequently disappointed by the music; even the much acclaimed FFX pretty much sucks to my ears. (The instruments are crappy and only a handful of tunes are compelling.)
I think "The Dig" got a real orchestra, and you should hear the Neverhood's sound track (not an orchestra, but interesting in its own way). But most people are definately using pure synths, or even copping out by licensing (usually inappropriate to my ears) music.
Visual programming is one of the canonical examples of "Gee, I have no clue how it works but wouldn't it be really cool if...". Nobody has a clue how to do significant programming in it; it's never even had a decent prototype, let alone any reason to think it will work in general.
Sure, there are isolated instances of it being useful, mostly in drawing flow diagrams for signal processing, but that's far from the general case.
Other then that, though, it's been a miserable failure. Software doesn't look like anything in real life, and real life metaphors are effectively useless for manipulating it. Every tried to use a multi-level UML diagram, where each box contains boxes that contain boxes? That's what visual programming looks like. A confusing, ultra-hyper-dimensional object, where every detail is critical (even the ones you can't see), where to understand a system requires hundreds of little abstract entities on the screen.
Software has more "moving parts", by factors of magnitude, then any other human endeavor; the largest software projects dwarf the complexity (in part count) of even the Space Shuttle. (We get away with it because we use effectively 100% reliable parts, whereas the Space Shuttle does not, the problems that causes and the solutions they require mean the Space Shuttle is still IMHO a superior engineering work to an office suite. Nevertheless, don't make the mistake of underestimating the complexity of software; even the smallest program can dwarf a small car in complexity.)
With a clearer understanding of what is being asked for, it is easy to see that visual programming has been a disaster for fundamental reasons, not ones that can be abstracted away. Imagine the Mozilla source code. It contains megabytes upon megabytes of code. Each and every line must be represented to understand the whole correctly (although no one person may need to understand the whole.) One way or another each line must be represented on the screen; if you're trying to do it "visually", then you're hosed. You can't abstract "(cutcrn*)DO_LOAD((void *)nm_mungl, andlefle->getLumpiness(MAX_LOAD_LUMP_COUNT, (int)uniQuad), USER_MACROS(LOAD));" visually, because you'll either lose critical information, or have an unusably cluttered screen.
There's just no way around it.
"But what if I design special modules that can be hooked together cleanly?" Then you'll have special modules that can be hooked together cleanly, as long as they do exactly what you need, which they won't. We also have tons of experience with such special modules, and they never work completely in general. You can build a DSP out of such things and that's about it... and even then, that's just compositing the existing DSPs together, I wouldn't want to build the insides in a visual language in the general case. (You could get some milage out of it, but you'd still be shelling out to text code.)
You think I'm wrong, you think you have some clever way to reduce the amount of necessary information on the screen without throwing away something the user needs, show me the code. To date, nobody else has managed that, despite a lot of trying by smart and dedicated people, and given that we clearly don't need faster computers to do "visual programming", I think you ought to consider that a damned big clue before you consider punching the "Reply" button and making vague, hand-wavy gestures to the effect that I'm wrong.
Consider the source: I think there's a reason you're hearing this from Bill Gates, who probably hasn't coded significantly in decades, and not the.Net team, who probably are also cringing and shaking their heads privately as well.
You should hear Star Wars: Tie Fighter or X-Wing on a real synthesizor. I had a Korg X-5, which you'd know if you heard it (its bigger brother with the identical sound module was quite popular for a while).
Believe me, even the latest versions of timidity aren't even in the ballpark. Not even close. And I'm talking a now 10-year old synth.
It wasn't until Grandia 2 on the DreamCast that I heard video game music that was comparable that (AFAIK) wasn't streamed off of a CD. Even FFX's music isn't as good as Tie Fighter on a real synthesizor.
Of course, with different synths, YMMV. Like I said, that was a popular synth in its day and given how good it sounded, I wouldn't be surprised that the music was originally composed on a X-5 equivalent (the 05/W IIRC, but I probably don't).
Quite a few other games were quite enjoyable; I actually missed the MIDI option when it went away because it meant inferior music.
So you know, invest $1000 into a MIDI rig and MIDI can sound unbelievably awesome. You shouldn't be surprised that even a hundred dollar sound card can't come close to that.
I wouldn't be surprised that even a modern computer going full-blast with fully-opimized software wouldn't be able to keep up with my 10-year-old synth, feature for feature and cycle for cycle. Synths get some serious benefit from custom hardware.
The problem with fusion-based power generation is that it is so utterly, completely safe that the Universe won't even seem to let us get it going, let alone blow anything up accidentally.
(As opposed to deliberately blowing things up, but that's not so useful for power generation.)
Wireless libraries? what wireless libraries? Wireless support is at the kernel level, the only user-space tool you might need is iwconfig which is included in every semi-recent distro. As for the config file, I strongly suspect you are making that up as well.
Unfortunately, your information is out of date in a bad way. About three months ago, I went to buy a wireless PCMCIA card for my laptop. I bought three of them, each with different chipsets, each entirely unsupported under Linux. After learning my lesson, I paid careful attention to the model numbers, and checked out each and every consumer-grade card from Best Buy, Circuit City, Amazon, CompUSA, and a couple of local retailers. Not a single one of them had cards with Linux drivers.
I found a couple of Cisco Aeronets (used) online, which have drivers, but they were massively more expensive then anything else, and the average consumer won't be able to find them.
The landscape is shifting rapidly, but AFAIK it's still wild luck if you walk into a store and buy a wireless card with any sort of Linux support. All of those cards are off the market now.
I finally ended up going with LinuxAnt's DriverLoader because I figured finding a new Linux-capable wireless card was hopeless. Wireless support for Linux is an absolute disaster zone, and the vendors are well and truly to blame here; I've heard their excuses and they don't ring true. (If you're so worried about FCC signal strength regulations, lock the relevant strengths out at the hardware level; software is always hackable and if you're worried about being liable for Linux drivers, you're equally liable for hacked Windows drivers...)
If you're willing to leave the world of RTS, Master of Magic, turn-based fantasy strategy in 1995 had a credible hero system, with at the very least, all of the characteristics cited in the grandparent (except only one hero unit could be "rebuilt", if I'm understanding that correctly; the rest are gone when they die).
Given the maturity of the system even then I'd be surprised if that was a first even then; I'm just saying I saw it back there, too.
Re:string theory *not* being tested here...
on
Testing Relativity
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· Score: 3, Interesting
String theory predicts deviations from General Relativity at very high energies and very small distances. I would be very surprised to read of a string theory model -- or class of models -- that predicted solar system scale effects in their basic framework.
I am an interested layman, so the following may not be entirely accurate. But it may give you an idea.
It is not entirely true that such small-scale effects can only appear on a small scale. If space is discrete, it can also affect the travel of light. Imagine a grid with 1 cm or 1 inch on a side. Now, draw a line from (0, 0) to (10, 1.1).
If space is discrete, the beam can't do that and it will do something else. Since space is most likely not a perfect grid, I don't feel like I can say exactly what it would do, but it would be impossible for the ray to be at (10,1.1) and as a result it would affect the direction it could travel.
If space is continuous, the ray can indeed be at (10, 1.1) and the ray will behave differently.
I have seen people talking about using light from extremely distant galaxies to try to detect this effect, seeing if the light shows "quantization" in certain parameters (not the traditional quantization, but seeing that only certain directions exist in the light), but since we can't source or control the light, my impression was we could not get enough info for it to matter.
The article did not say this is what they are trying to do, but based on my understanding it is plausible and would account for the article. Since we can source the light and even guarentee phase consistency (allowing us to use interference), we can make up for only having a handful of AU instead of billions of lightyears by controlling the light perfectly.
Even if this is not what they are doing, I hope it shows you a way that even ultra-microscopic effects can be magnified enough to be detected in this experiment.
I'm quite impressed; this is straightforward in a way, but audacious and excellent thinking out of the box.
Ladies and gentleman, witness now the other side of the coin. By the grandparent's author's own words, he is Australian, not American.
In a country of 300 million people or so, you can always find several million idiots and several million geniuses, not to mention hundreds of millions of people in between. With so many people jumping to conclusions about America based on samples as small as zero Americans, is it any surprise so many nasty things are said?
Why is it OK to judge America based on your small, self-selected sample when it isn't OK to judge anything else that way? I can find a million people in any significant country of your choice that also "can't see two feet beyond their borders, and conclude that there's nothing else out there". What does that prove?
Is believing any negative thing about the US and refusing to believe any positive thing ("But what about the negative things?!?!?!?!?!") rational thinking? Where is this sort of thing going to get us?
How does anyone ever prove skill? By doing things skillfully, of course. People who are half-baked, by definition, aren't skillful and can't do things skillfully.
Of course it takes time to develop skill, but I program far above some people who have invested as much time as I have, and far below others. I don't get to go up levels in programming just for putting another hour in, or finding some cheat; I develop skill and show it, or not. The same applies in games, too.
Time sinks have a purpose. I agree they shouldn't make the game unejoyable for those that don't want to partake (see EQ), but they need to be designed around just as much as the mid level players otherwise you will loose the uber elite (e.g. me)
Uber-eliteness should come from skill, not time. That can happen in both the games I've mentioned; if you're uber-elite, you can be playing at a high level in a matter of hours, instead of just putting in time.
Prothon is also an industrial-strength alternative to Python and Self...
followed by the phrase just four paragraphs later
As of 3/04 Prothon exists as a pre-alpha interpreter with minimum capabilites, just enough to try out the language.
I believe the correct phrase would be Prothon is intended to be an industrial-strength alternative to Python.
(Yes, I know others have said things similar to this, I just think this is more clear; I read all the comments before the site came up and this juxtaposition still struck me.)
Slashdot Mirror
If pulling a whole tarball didn't kill a server's bandwith, it wouldn't be a bad practice. BitTorrent comes fairly close to that, although it is possible that kernel.org could overload even a bittorrent set-up. (Although if the bittorrents were mirrored, that would eliminate the issue.)
Of your two basic points, I don't agree with the first, the "October that Never Ended", though I agree it is at least arguable.
But your speil about Apple boggles the mind. It only makes sense in some kind of alternate universe where it is Apple machines that are causing the troubles. Last I checked, the total "rampaging Internet-destroying virus" count is still firmly at zero on the Macintoshes, to the Windows double-digits. (Linux has only one that I can even remotely imagine like that, the Apache worm, and even that was fairly contained compared to the virus loads that have taken down entire large companies.)
I have to conclude that you're one of the few trolls to make it to +5, Interesting. s/Apple/Microsoft/g and again, I don't agree, but it's at least arguable. But what problems are Apple users causing on the net? None.
You can make a blanket statement that D->A->D will never improve the quality of a sound, and will almost inevitably degrade it.
This is exactly what French companies must do, and as a result, there is not much economic growth in France. When it costs so much to hire people and its so hard to fire them, not surprisingly companys don't want to hire unless absolutely necessary, which translates into double digit unemployment.
It's easy to do a knee-jerk reaction to the outsouring issues on Slashdot, but you dig deeper and the issue becomes much murkier. I mean, "obviously" I'm not in favor of losing my job, but just because I don't want that doesn't mean the ideal solution is something like "Make it illegal to outsource".
France (and from what I gather a lot of the western portion of the EU) highlights the kinds of things that can happen if you're not careful with your economic policy. We don't want that kind of thing.
If we try to block outsourcing, will it come back and bite us in the ass even harder later? Is there a better way to react to it? And what's the best way to handle this stuff personally? Damned if I know, all I know is that the easy solutions are wrong.
Meanwhile, I'm going with the old standby of trying to increase my value to employers, because it's the best idea I have. There's a lot of room for improvement in the efficiency of programmers right now, and most of it involves getting off the beaten path of stuff like Java. Hopefully, by the time people start outsourcing with the same techniques for improved productivity that I can bring to bear on things today, which conservatively will be at least a decade, it won't be so obviously economically advantageous to outsource to India.
There is no certain answer.
Try it on a CRT, not an LCD. An LCD can't change that fast, so it'll only "blink" something much less then full strength, plus if you're talking a standard LCD, it will be a dark blink against a light background which is much harder; your eyes see light, not "darkness". A graphic-calculator LCD scrolling at full speed really is a meaningless blur, a CRT is not. (Snap passive (no-flash) photos of both with a quick shutter if you don't believe me.)
A CRT can do it because it can instantly go to full power on one cycle's worth of time, and between the phosphor decay time, and the somewhat-equivalent processes in your eye that turn a quick blink into something you perceive as lasting much longer for various reasons, 10 can be done, though just barely. (Basically, at the distance I was from the screen, in hindsight, ten digits was about the size of my fovea (look it up). Had I backed up a bit I might have gotten more, or not. Words are even easier, too.)
I actually did a research project back in high school (1992) where I made up a bunch of fake vocabulary words and flashed them on the computer screen for varying durations. While at the longest durations the flashing was somewhat noticeable, it was still too quick to read the words.
You can't flash words any faster then the computer screen updates. Back in the Commodore 64 days, I was able to read up to 10-digit sequences, no matter how "quickly" you flashed the digits, because the television works on a 24-Hz cycle, so you can't flash it for less then 1/24th of a second, and furthermore, if it's light text on a dark background, your eyes will still "see" the flash for longer then that.
You need much more sophisticated equipment then any modern computer monitor, let alone a reasonably-priced 1992 monitor, can provide you to test this reasonably.
If the military wants Mach 7 delivery, rest assured they already have it. I don't see any reason existing technology can't do it, it just can be done in a commercially sustainable manner right now.
If you can put a satellite into space, you can delivery things at Mach 7, which is much, much slower then orbital speeds.
Yeah, like I said, it's expensive, but it's doable.
The military has all the transport it needs.
The printed side is where the data is. If they scratch that, the data is for all useful purposes gone.
If you must put CDs or CD-like things down without putting them back in their case, always put them clear-side down, as scratches there aren't necessarily terminal.
Some people think they're being clever putting the printed side down but that's not true. (This is a general comment, not directed at your post specifically.)
Chips is user 4885, and hasn't posted since May, 2002. You can't mod Chips up, all his posts are locked in the archives.
I've done this on Stargate SG-1, and more recently my wife has as well.
A well done "alternate world" show (more general then sci-fi, and there are some sci-fi shows that IMHO wouldn't qualify, most notably Star Trek) benefits amazingly from the immersion you can do if you want.... if it doesn't scare you too much.
Television shows on DVD are two or three times better then TV shows on TiVo, which are themselves three or four times better then the TV show broken up by commercials all the time. The ability to watch, uninterrupted by more then a few seconds, three or four episodes in a row is awesome.
One particular Stargate arc that is really enhanced by this is the one that starts with Upgrades and ends with Divide and Conquer (3 episodes total). Much more compelling drama as a ~2 hour single event then three seperate episodes.
... if only I get a cut of the action. They are selling MY information which is deamed to have value so why am I not legally entitled to my cut of the profits?
This, incidentally, is the single best non-tin hat reason to support privacy reform, something that everybody ought to agree with. Your private information has value, as demonstrated by the fact that it is routinely sold, for more money then you probably realize. Why is it OK for people to effectively steal this value from you without compensating you fairly, and indeed, charging you in the form of the time you have to spend dealing with people who then use this data?
It's only going to get worse.
(In fact, you can boil all privacy arguments down to this point, but it's better for many people to state it nakedly as a monetary issue, even though IMHO the non-monetary concerns are more interesting and important in the long run.)
And since it has never been done to date, it never will be done? That's idiotic reasoning.
So is ripping one point out of context and thinking that proves anything. The real argument is that you can't abstract away enough details to make it visually useful to program visually any more then we do today. "Nobody has done it yet, despite lots of smart trying" is my evidence, not my argument. People trying and failing isn't proof, but it is indeed evidence, the only and best empirical evidence of the impossibility of something like this you can get. (As opposed to the reasoned argument I gave.)
Please learn to read the whole argument before thinking you're clever for pulling a point apart.
(This is a reply to an AC, but it's a good AC posting ;-) )
;-)
IMHO, a blended approach is something feasible. Allow pictorial/iconic design for common, easily abstracted entities (threads, processors, screens, networks, etc.), then "drop in" to the logic needing abstract-to-instruction type mapping.
I agree with this, especially in well-mapped out domains. In a way, GUI design tools where you draw a dialog box are already a good example of this. I've written some Python libraries that could benefit from a graphical overview, even though they could never have been written purely graphically. Anything that can help a person fresh to the code get an overview of the system would be a good thing.
Although, to be fair, most people never put system overviews in their docs, which tends to significantly reduce the effectiveness of the docs as a whole, so graphical systems get an unfair advantage over current state of the art, since they get to improve on "nearly nothing at all", which is much easier to look good against then against "something"... anything...
To be clear, I'm speaking out against the idea then any more then 5-10% of the "code" can ever be this sort of graphical, though, not that it should be and always will be 0%. (Even now, it's not.) I like SquareOfS' "death of a thousand attributes" phrase; I'll have to remember that since I'm already a fan of "death by a thousand cuts" as a metaphor
Let's see: pay a full orchestra or use a ~$500 synthesizer. I wonder how many entertainment companies do the latter.
Almost all of them. (Although they do use modern synths, not the same class as my own.) I can tell when the music is real and when it is synthesized, even fancy synthesis like the aforementioned Grandia II, and "real music" is exceedingly rare. In fact I am frequently disappointed by the music; even the much acclaimed FFX pretty much sucks to my ears. (The instruments are crappy and only a handful of tunes are compelling.)
I think "The Dig" got a real orchestra, and you should hear the Neverhood's sound track (not an orchestra, but interesting in its own way). But most people are definately using pure synths, or even copping out by licensing (usually inappropriate to my ears) music.
Visual programming is one of the canonical examples of "Gee, I have no clue how it works but wouldn't it be really cool if...". Nobody has a clue how to do significant programming in it; it's never even had a decent prototype, let alone any reason to think it will work in general.
.Net team, who probably are also cringing and shaking their heads privately as well.
Sure, there are isolated instances of it being useful, mostly in drawing flow diagrams for signal processing, but that's far from the general case.
Other then that, though, it's been a miserable failure. Software doesn't look like anything in real life, and real life metaphors are effectively useless for manipulating it. Every tried to use a multi-level UML diagram, where each box contains boxes that contain boxes? That's what visual programming looks like. A confusing, ultra-hyper-dimensional object, where every detail is critical (even the ones you can't see), where to understand a system requires hundreds of little abstract entities on the screen.
Software has more "moving parts", by factors of magnitude, then any other human endeavor; the largest software projects dwarf the complexity (in part count) of even the Space Shuttle. (We get away with it because we use effectively 100% reliable parts, whereas the Space Shuttle does not, the problems that causes and the solutions they require mean the Space Shuttle is still IMHO a superior engineering work to an office suite. Nevertheless, don't make the mistake of underestimating the complexity of software; even the smallest program can dwarf a small car in complexity.)
With a clearer understanding of what is being asked for, it is easy to see that visual programming has been a disaster for fundamental reasons, not ones that can be abstracted away. Imagine the Mozilla source code. It contains megabytes upon megabytes of code. Each and every line must be represented to understand the whole correctly (although no one person may need to understand the whole.) One way or another each line must be represented on the screen; if you're trying to do it "visually", then you're hosed. You can't abstract "(cutcrn*)DO_LOAD((void *)nm_mungl, andlefle->getLumpiness(MAX_LOAD_LUMP_COUNT, (int)uniQuad), USER_MACROS(LOAD));" visually, because you'll either lose critical information, or have an unusably cluttered screen.
There's just no way around it.
"But what if I design special modules that can be hooked together cleanly?" Then you'll have special modules that can be hooked together cleanly, as long as they do exactly what you need, which they won't. We also have tons of experience with such special modules, and they never work completely in general. You can build a DSP out of such things and that's about it... and even then, that's just compositing the existing DSPs together, I wouldn't want to build the insides in a visual language in the general case. (You could get some milage out of it, but you'd still be shelling out to text code.)
You think I'm wrong, you think you have some clever way to reduce the amount of necessary information on the screen without throwing away something the user needs, show me the code. To date, nobody else has managed that, despite a lot of trying by smart and dedicated people, and given that we clearly don't need faster computers to do "visual programming", I think you ought to consider that a damned big clue before you consider punching the "Reply" button and making vague, hand-wavy gestures to the effect that I'm wrong.
Consider the source: I think there's a reason you're hearing this from Bill Gates, who probably hasn't coded significantly in decades, and not the
You should hear Star Wars: Tie Fighter or X-Wing on a real synthesizor. I had a Korg X-5, which you'd know if you heard it (its bigger brother with the identical sound module was quite popular for a while).
Believe me, even the latest versions of timidity aren't even in the ballpark. Not even close. And I'm talking a now 10-year old synth.
It wasn't until Grandia 2 on the DreamCast that I heard video game music that was comparable that (AFAIK) wasn't streamed off of a CD. Even FFX's music isn't as good as Tie Fighter on a real synthesizor.
Of course, with different synths, YMMV. Like I said, that was a popular synth in its day and given how good it sounded, I wouldn't be surprised that the music was originally composed on a X-5 equivalent (the 05/W IIRC, but I probably don't).
Quite a few other games were quite enjoyable; I actually missed the MIDI option when it went away because it meant inferior music.
So you know, invest $1000 into a MIDI rig and MIDI can sound unbelievably awesome. You shouldn't be surprised that even a hundred dollar sound card can't come close to that.
I wouldn't be surprised that even a modern computer going full-blast with fully-opimized software wouldn't be able to keep up with my 10-year-old synth, feature for feature and cycle for cycle. Synths get some serious benefit from custom hardware.
The problem with fusion-based power generation is that it is so utterly, completely safe that the Universe won't even seem to let us get it going, let alone blow anything up accidentally.
(As opposed to deliberately blowing things up, but that's not so useful for power generation.)
Wireless libraries? what wireless libraries? Wireless support is at the kernel level, the only user-space tool you might need is iwconfig which is included in every semi-recent distro. As for the config file, I strongly suspect you are making that up as well.
Unfortunately, your information is out of date in a bad way. About three months ago, I went to buy a wireless PCMCIA card for my laptop. I bought three of them, each with different chipsets, each entirely unsupported under Linux. After learning my lesson, I paid careful attention to the model numbers, and checked out each and every consumer-grade card from Best Buy, Circuit City, Amazon, CompUSA, and a couple of local retailers. Not a single one of them had cards with Linux drivers.
I found a couple of Cisco Aeronets (used) online, which have drivers, but they were massively more expensive then anything else, and the average consumer won't be able to find them.
The landscape is shifting rapidly, but AFAIK it's still wild luck if you walk into a store and buy a wireless card with any sort of Linux support. All of those cards are off the market now.
I finally ended up going with LinuxAnt's DriverLoader because I figured finding a new Linux-capable wireless card was hopeless. Wireless support for Linux is an absolute disaster zone, and the vendors are well and truly to blame here; I've heard their excuses and they don't ring true. (If you're so worried about FCC signal strength regulations, lock the relevant strengths out at the hardware level; software is always hackable and if you're worried about being liable for Linux drivers, you're equally liable for hacked Windows drivers...)
If you're willing to leave the world of RTS, Master of Magic, turn-based fantasy strategy in 1995 had a credible hero system, with at the very least, all of the characteristics cited in the grandparent (except only one hero unit could be "rebuilt", if I'm understanding that correctly; the rest are gone when they die).
Given the maturity of the system even then I'd be surprised if that was a first even then; I'm just saying I saw it back there, too.
String theory predicts deviations from General Relativity at very high energies and very small distances. I would be very surprised to read of a string theory model -- or class of models -- that predicted solar system scale effects in their basic framework.
I am an interested layman, so the following may not be entirely accurate. But it may give you an idea.
It is not entirely true that such small-scale effects can only appear on a small scale. If space is discrete, it can also affect the travel of light. Imagine a grid with 1 cm or 1 inch on a side. Now, draw a line from (0, 0) to (10, 1.1).
If space is discrete, the beam can't do that and it will do something else. Since space is most likely not a perfect grid, I don't feel like I can say exactly what it would do, but it would be impossible for the ray to be at (10,1.1) and as a result it would affect the direction it could travel.
If space is continuous, the ray can indeed be at (10, 1.1) and the ray will behave differently.
I have seen people talking about using light from extremely distant galaxies to try to detect this effect, seeing if the light shows "quantization" in certain parameters (not the traditional quantization, but seeing that only certain directions exist in the light), but since we can't source or control the light, my impression was we could not get enough info for it to matter.
The article did not say this is what they are trying to do, but based on my understanding it is plausible and would account for the article. Since we can source the light and even guarentee phase consistency (allowing us to use interference), we can make up for only having a handful of AU instead of billions of lightyears by controlling the light perfectly.
Even if this is not what they are doing, I hope it shows you a way that even ultra-microscopic effects can be magnified enough to be detected in this experiment.
I'm quite impressed; this is straightforward in a way, but audacious and excellent thinking out of the box.
Ladies and gentleman, witness now the other side of the coin. By the grandparent's author's own words, he is Australian, not American.
In a country of 300 million people or so, you can always find several million idiots and several million geniuses, not to mention hundreds of millions of people in between. With so many people jumping to conclusions about America based on samples as small as zero Americans, is it any surprise so many nasty things are said?
Why is it OK to judge America based on your small, self-selected sample when it isn't OK to judge anything else that way? I can find a million people in any significant country of your choice that also "can't see two feet beyond their borders, and conclude that there's nothing else out there". What does that prove?
Is believing any negative thing about the US and refusing to believe any positive thing ("But what about the negative things?!?!?!?!?!") rational thinking? Where is this sort of thing going to get us?
Have you tried Puzzle Pirates or Planetside?
How does anyone ever prove skill? By doing things skillfully, of course. People who are half-baked, by definition, aren't skillful and can't do things skillfully.
Of course it takes time to develop skill, but I program far above some people who have invested as much time as I have, and far below others. I don't get to go up levels in programming just for putting another hour in, or finding some cheat; I develop skill and show it, or not. The same applies in games, too.
Time sinks have a purpose. I agree they shouldn't make the game unejoyable for those that don't want to partake (see EQ), but they need to be designed around just as much as the mid level players otherwise you will loose the uber elite (e.g. me)
Uber-eliteness should come from skill, not time. That can happen in both the games I've mentioned; if you're uber-elite, you can be playing at a high level in a matter of hours, instead of just putting in time.
Time isn't a determinant of eliteness. Skill is.
(Yes, I know others have said things similar to this, I just think this is more clear; I read all the comments before the site came up and this juxtaposition still struck me.)
insert witty response here
(Well, at least equal in wittiness.)