I think your psychology professor may be a Scientologist in disguise. Are you learning about Thetans or clearing? If so, run!
(First sentence is a joke. Rest of paragraph is not!)
Re:""X is dying" is dying" shouldn't die
on
TiVo Will Die
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· Score: 1
I disagree; there's way too much relevant content in that post, oddly as I may have written it for fun. Half the point of a troll is taking itself seriously and I disclaimed taking it seriously in the phrase "some schmoe with an opinion and the ability to publish to some degree or other"; trolls don't work if they label themselves as "some schmoe".;-)
Also, the constant negativity is a serious topic I've been thinking about the last couple of days, in preparation for a blog post. As the new media comes online, the negativity is much, much worse and much more unrelenting then it ever was ten years ago. I'd almost rather go back to the "all disaster, all the time" TV reporting era; they still did happy stories sometimes, and it was usually just local news. Now you can't hardly spit online without hitting someone saying something negative about something. Maybe it's all for the best somehow, but it's damned depressing too.
Under the sustained assault of the on-line community, "X Is Dying" stories are taking a serious beating and are likely to decrease over the next few months.
Can we take this as anything but a sign that the "X is dying" genre of story is, itself, ironically, dying? (Although isn't irony dead, itself having been killed by "Irony Is Dead" stories post-9/11, immediately following the "The World Trade Center Is Dead" which at least had the virtue of being true.)
Sure, they're still being written, but the important criterion for an "X Is Dying" story has been met, namely some schmoe with an opinion and the ability to publish to some degree or other (in this case, Jerf) thinks that "X Is Dying". What more evidence do you really need? History? Thought? Intelligence? All extraneous and unnecessary. "Intelligent Thought is Dying."
You know, the posting of this sort of meta-meta-message is really a sign that Slashdot is dying, don't you think? Once upon a time it was the home of something that was somehow nebulously better then what we have now, but now we have what, 1,000 comments per story and like three times the stories per day we used to have? Surely this growth somehow implies Slashdot Is Dying and should be considered "beleagured".
Best of all, the author doesn't believe a word of this: "Jerf's Belief In His Postings Is Dying." We're just seeing the beginning of this sort of writing, as the fashion of writing "X Is Dying" is just really getting going lately. Seems everything is dying; the economy, the Republican party, the Democrat party, hope for the future, etc. For as many things as are dying, things seem to be going pretty OK, if not great. Good news just can't compete with bad news. "Good News Stories Are Dying"; the trend is pretty clear.
I agree, but recall this is a kid's movie. People who are still forming their understanding of how the world works don't really get helped by things that contradict and undermine it. (It can be hard to remember how literally true that is, too; I'm not talking ethics, I'm talking the mechanics of things like "conservation of volume" type of things, if you've studied child development. I wouldn't mind challenging a 12-year-olds ethics, and I'm sure isolated 12-year-olds could handle having their geometry-sense challenged, but as a whole, it would be neither a good nor a profitable aspect of a movie.)
Try to come up with a copy of Cube 2; maybe the Sci-Fi channel will re-run it sometime. I don't guarentee it will have the same effect on you that it did on me, but it sound like it would be worth a time. (I haven't seen the first one yet but based on my reading of the summaries it wouldn't challenge me in the same way.) AFAIK, neither are "Hollywood" movies, they are both relatively low-budget independent affairs. (Could be wrong, but it certainly doesn't feel Hollywood.)
I really believe the part should go to someone with a lighter touch, who could be more believable in the role. Like Pauly Shore or maybe Rob Schneider.
De derp de derp de derp-i doo Martians. De derp de derp! Derp-de-derpidoo! Uh-oh! A carrot! Derp derp derp derp-i derp-i-do! A-choo! Derp derp derp derp do!
And then there's those moving staircases. In the books, people keep getting lost because all the rooms and corridors at Hogwarts are mysteriously enchanted. Cool! (And crucial to the plot in the latest book.) But in the movie, they explain the same thing by showing the staircases moving back and forth for no obvious reason. Lame.
Probably a good thing, considering the alternatives. Ever seen Cube 2: Hypercube? The only movie in ten years to give me legitimate nightmares, because they really did a great job on "this door doesn't ever open on the same thing twice", along with a lot of other wierd stuff that gives your limbic system fits.
Reading in a book about corridors that don't seem to go to the same place twice is OK, but actually seeing it would give the target viewing age nightmares. Seriously. The way they did it may not be as cool, but it's a lot easier on the mind.
There is no "single point of failure" like with the US president.
The US President is not a single point of failure. He would be completely hamstrung if he did not have the backing of Congress, and the Court has been moderating some of the worse liberty abuses, though at Court speeds, which is unfortunately "pretty damn slow".
Hate Bush, love Bush, whatever. But don't fool yourself into thinking that some vast majority of Americans hate him, too. When the vast majority of Americans hate a President, it seriously constrains him; see history. Some Presidents were so weak they were almost powerless.
The propensity of the left lately to engage in wishful thinking like "most people really hate Bush, they just aren't, you know, actually hating Bush or loudly hating Bush" is seriously weakening their cause. The Right went through the same thing in the 90's, secretly believing that everybody really hated Clinton. Bush doesn't have an overwhelming majority but it is clearly a mandate, and as such, can not be called a "point of failure" in the system. All you can hope for from a political system is that it represents its people adequately, and in that, even now, the Presidency would seem to be a success.
A few weeks of hearing "THE SERVER IS DOWN!!" at 120 decibels ought to make them reconsider.
That's an amazingly bad plan, because what they'll really hear at 120 decibels is
digitalvengeance is not doing his job!
Me, I try to avoid systems announcing that sort of thing to all and sundry. (One of the major risks of an IT job is extremely high visibility when things go wrong, from the top to the bottom.)
Clarification: By "The.torrent file is distributed in the RSS file", I should have said "a URL to the.torrent file is distributed in the RSS file". See this example RSS+BitTorrent file to see what I mean.
The RSS file itself is not distributed over BitTorrent. As you say, no gain for small files.
(I've noodled around trying to distribute RSS loads but it's hard to make it worthwhile.)
The.torrent file is distributed in the RSS file, and your BitTorrent+RSS enabled feed-reader downloads the file the torrent represents, which may be of course huge. The idea is that this allows normal folks like you and me to distribute honkin' files with the best of them.
Other comments in the replies decrying corporate involvement are off-base; corporations aren't the ones who need this. This is so Joe Schmoe can "video blog", "high-quality audio blog", or distribute some other large file without breaking the bank. If this were purely a corporate issue, "throw more money at the problem" would probably continue to be the preferred solution.
(The semi-check is because I'm not 100% certain the python modules match the JDBC completely.)
The only advantage Java offers is when it has an actual library that you can't get in Python (or likely anywhere else); capability for capability the languages and libraries are pretty close to the same. I mean, we have "Web Application Servers" for Python (like Zope), but maybe you absolutely need some Java thing for some other reason. There's no one language that meets all needs. But there's no reason Python can't be used in very large scale projects successfully, as evidenced by the fact that it has been so used.
Personally, I'd much rather use Python for the larger scale projects since for a variety of reasons I think it scales better then Java; Java projects IMHO survive because they get a lot more resources thrown at them, not because the language does very much to hold large projects together. But that's just my opinion.
(Oh, and Jython, though I know it's been mentioned elsewhere.)
I don't watch Street Smarts, but I was intruiged by the premise so I did watch one show.
The conclusion I came to is that it is totally scripted, because IIRC, the use the same groups of people over and over again, of the three people always precisely one is correct (odds of that are atrocious), and those who are wrong are wrong in ways that are too humorous, too often, to be coincidence.
Now, if they interviewed lots of people and they always pulled the funniest and always only pulled one correct answer, then maybe there would be some versimilitude. Then you'd see a lot of different people, some of whom are honestly mistaken. But as it stands, it's pretty much as scripted as the WWF.
Like I said, I was intrigued by the premise, but since it's obviously faked I lost all interest. That, and the stupidity of the contestants was breathtaking.... and again, that's gotta be deliberate. All in all, a show that ought to be insulting to the viewer's intelligence, but given who must watch it, probably isn't.
On-topic point? Well, remember that half of the population is below average*. That leaves a lot of people who will fall for stuff like the DHM foolery, and ironically, they will do it because they are trying to look intelligent and concerned.
*: Pedants note: On a population the size of Earth, with a normal distribution of intelligence virtually a given thanks to the Central Limit Theorum, there's no need to confuse people by talking about the "median"; the difference between median and average intelligence on the planet would be far below the measurement error.
One would hope that they could still play something else that wasn't copyrighted so we would have clips.
It is faintly possible that that would have taken too long, but that would tend to imply the robot is scripted, move-for-move, and I have to admit that if that is the case, I wouldn't call that "playing the trumpet".
Music is unavailable in accordance with copyright protection.
I smell a cop-out. Trumpets aren't exactly new, there's plenty of public-domain works they could have used. I'm partial to Purcell's "Trumpet Tune and Air" myself, which if the robot was competent would have been perfectly doable. (It has other instruments too, but they could be added or just dropped; the pieces is a glorified trumpet solo from 1685.)
This makes me wonder if maybe it doesn't sound as good as it looks. I have no idea either way, I'm just saying this makes me suspicious.
I'm not Godwin, but I wrote an essay on that topic, which requires branching out a lot. (Which is to say, it isn't always 100% about copyright law all the time, but it's always related.)
It's easy to be against something, it's a lot harder to come up with something you're for, and I felt I had to do that before I could feel good about opining on this topic.
Summary version: It can't be summarized well, because you pretty much have to toss out copyright as you know it and start from nearly scratch. Even things like the concept of "Expression" have to be tossed out. Communication has fundamentally changed and old conceptions of copyright are wrong after centuries of refinement in a now-obsolete technological paradigm.
Not necessarily a popular view but I believe that sooner or later we're going to have to face up to the contradictions in the law head on, as I outline.
Mannheim Steamroller is a great example of a successful music group that can't live on concerts, IMHO. I love Chip Davis' work and own all the Fresh Aire and Christmas CDs. But I don't like going to their performances.
I've been to a couple, but the problem is, they sound just like the CD. One, the Ice-Capades-alike, I honestly didn't realize the band was there until the end, when they stood up for applause. I thought they were just playing a CD. Thanks to synthesizors, amplifications, click tracks, and a few other technology bits, the performances are indistinguishable from playing the CD.
If the CD can stand in that well, I don't know why they perform at all. I'd rather just have the CD, thanks.
I know they aren't the only group who does this. I know I've also seen a lot of things like Superbowl performance or Emmy performances that are indistinguishable from the CD (and I don't think they were all lipsynching, though maybe I'm wrong). Living on performances isn't a good idea for a lot of groups who make good music, but don't really gain any benefit from giving a "concert".
Spell checkers are *not* a substitute for knowing how words are spelled.
Of course not. But using a spell checker means having time to learn about the homonyms, instead of endlessly playing catch up.
You still predicated your post on "relying" on spell checkers; I'm saying that people learn from good spell checkers. That people can't learn everything from a spell checker is hardly a reason to throw the baby out with the bath water and insist that people use inferior learning techniques anyhow!
A kid that can spell accurately is in a much better position to learn about homonyms then one for whom spelling is still a mysterious, abstract art that involves guessing at things.
Spell checkers discourage people from learning to spell.
Done correctly, spellcheckers can be the best spelling-learning tool there is.
"Correctly" here means the spell-checkers that give you red underlines when you've finished typing the word and it's wrong. Right-clicking lets you see suggestions, add it to your personal dict, etc.
"Incorrectly" is when you have to run the spell-checker manually at the "end" of typing. That's when people lean on it.
The reason, of course, is feedback; feedback is absolutely vital to learning and spell-checkers that highlight are the only thing I know of that cuts the feedback loop down to zero seconds. Compared to this, spelling tests in school where the teacher hands back the test three days from now are a complete waste of time. (This is one of many places where out of the box thinking with computers would greatly improve the education process but nobody has the guts to say, "We need to stop 'testing' spelling and start using proper spell-checkers, and come up with some way to encourage kids to use words they don't necessarily know how to spell instead of punishing them." The primary use of computers in education is to cut the feedback loop down to no time at all. But I digress...)
'gaim' is pretty close but it really ticks me off how it always spellchecks a word immediately, so if you're typing along and you're going to send the word "unfortunately", but you've only typed as far as "unfortun", it highlights it as a misspelled word. Bad program! Wait until I've left the word!
Right after your presentation on how one company can grow exponentially forever.
Actually, that's illegal, because it's a scam. See "Multi-Level Marketing" on Google. Anybody promising eternal exponential growth for a company is trying to con you. I'd watch out if I were you, sounds like you might be susceptible to this fraud.
(In other words, no, I was not talking about the entire world. Go learn some economics. Heck, go learn some physics.)
Why don't you explain to the shareholders this philosophy of yours,
You misunderstand. "Eternal exponential growth is impossible, you will eventually top out and be limited to the growth of the external economy" isn't a "philosophy", it's a fact. It doesn't matter what the shareholders think.
The only way around this is to engage in a form of the Broken Window fallacy and continuously burn down the successful companies for the sole purpose of allowing other companies to exponentially grow, which has the same basic issues as the Broken Window Fallacy.
If the shareholders don't understand reality, it's their own damned problem. It won't change the ultimate outcomes.
The answer to your questions is to use extensions. If you want to handle graphics, don't bit-bang in Python, grap the Python interface to SDL or something. If you want to bit-bang, do it in C or Pyrex or something.
I mean no disrespect, but when comparing languages it is important to see each language in terms of itself. There is an old saying "You can write Pascal in any language" (where Pascal can be any language); this means that while any language can generally support any paradigm, it's better to work with the language then against it.
Python deliberately ties in to C very well, and this is one of its great strengths. If you force it to bit-bang like Java, you'll never get the speed you're looking for.
I've done some GUI programming in Python with dynamically generated bit-maps, and I've always used the TkCanvas stuff (partially because my app is in Python/Tk, but even when I tried out wxWindows I ended up sticking with the TkCanvas-based code in PIL (Python Imaging Library)); unless you're writing Gimp-like code that generally does everything you need.
I wonder if these aren't more echos of pre-Crash 1990's thinking. "If it's not growing exponentially, it must be dying." Well, given that any subset of the human population (including the population as a whole) is only growing geometrically, for any given industry like Video Games there are only so many customers to be tapped and you will eventually top out.
This is the only explanation I can think of, persistently viewing everything in extreme terms of "total success or total failure", and since nothing ever hits "total success"... well, I guess it's dying. Video games aren't exponentially growing, they're dying. TV is losing ground instead of holding constant, it's dying. Our economy isn't exponentially growing, it's dying. Anti-drug programs aren't 100% effective, thus they are useless. Crime isn't zero, therefore all anti-crime measures are totally ineffective and all hell will soon break loose. (Extends beyond entertainment too, you see.)
This is the normal state of affairs, though; exponential growth is unsustainable; the tech industry growth, and more specifically the continuing success of Moore's Law, are the exceptions, not the rule. Perhaps if we didn't have such unrealistic expectations, or perhaps more accurately if our sick, diseased journalistic process didn't have such unrealistic expectations, we wouldn't feel the need to panic so often.
Slashdot Mirror
I think your psychology professor may be a Scientologist in disguise. Are you learning about Thetans or clearing? If so, run!
(First sentence is a joke. Rest of paragraph is not!)
I disagree; there's way too much relevant content in that post, oddly as I may have written it for fun. Half the point of a troll is taking itself seriously and I disclaimed taking it seriously in the phrase "some schmoe with an opinion and the ability to publish to some degree or other"; trolls don't work if they label themselves as "some schmoe". ;-)
Also, the constant negativity is a serious topic I've been thinking about the last couple of days, in preparation for a blog post. As the new media comes online, the negativity is much, much worse and much more unrelenting then it ever was ten years ago. I'd almost rather go back to the "all disaster, all the time" TV reporting era; they still did happy stories sometimes, and it was usually just local news. Now you can't hardly spit online without hitting someone saying something negative about something. Maybe it's all for the best somehow, but it's damned depressing too.
Under the sustained assault of the on-line community, "X Is Dying" stories are taking a serious beating and are likely to decrease over the next few months.
Can we take this as anything but a sign that the "X is dying" genre of story is, itself, ironically, dying? (Although isn't irony dead, itself having been killed by "Irony Is Dead" stories post-9/11, immediately following the "The World Trade Center Is Dead" which at least had the virtue of being true.)
Sure, they're still being written, but the important criterion for an "X Is Dying" story has been met, namely some schmoe with an opinion and the ability to publish to some degree or other (in this case, Jerf) thinks that "X Is Dying". What more evidence do you really need? History? Thought? Intelligence? All extraneous and unnecessary. "Intelligent Thought is Dying."
You know, the posting of this sort of meta-meta-message is really a sign that Slashdot is dying, don't you think? Once upon a time it was the home of something that was somehow nebulously better then what we have now, but now we have what, 1,000 comments per story and like three times the stories per day we used to have? Surely this growth somehow implies Slashdot Is Dying and should be considered "beleagured".
Best of all, the author doesn't believe a word of this: "Jerf's Belief In His Postings Is Dying." We're just seeing the beginning of this sort of writing, as the fashion of writing "X Is Dying" is just really getting going lately. Seems everything is dying; the economy, the Republican party, the Democrat party, hope for the future, etc. For as many things as are dying, things seem to be going pretty OK, if not great. Good news just can't compete with bad news. "Good News Stories Are Dying"; the trend is pretty clear.
many people will be even *more* confused, since "Life On Mars" claims have already been "debunked".
No, specific Life on Mars claims have been debunked. Later claims may be made and backed up with real evidence.
I agree, but recall this is a kid's movie. People who are still forming their understanding of how the world works don't really get helped by things that contradict and undermine it. (It can be hard to remember how literally true that is, too; I'm not talking ethics, I'm talking the mechanics of things like "conservation of volume" type of things, if you've studied child development. I wouldn't mind challenging a 12-year-olds ethics, and I'm sure isolated 12-year-olds could handle having their geometry-sense challenged, but as a whole, it would be neither a good nor a profitable aspect of a movie.)
Try to come up with a copy of Cube 2; maybe the Sci-Fi channel will re-run it sometime. I don't guarentee it will have the same effect on you that it did on me, but it sound like it would be worth a time. (I haven't seen the first one yet but based on my reading of the summaries it wouldn't challenge me in the same way.) AFAIK, neither are "Hollywood" movies, they are both relatively low-budget independent affairs. (Could be wrong, but it certainly doesn't feel Hollywood.)
I really believe the part should go to someone with a lighter touch, who could be more believable in the role. Like Pauly Shore or maybe Rob Schneider.
De derp de derp de derp-i doo Martians. De derp de derp! Derp-de-derpidoo! Uh-oh! A carrot! Derp derp derp derp-i derp-i-do! A-choo! Derp derp derp derp do!
(A hint to the mods: South Park.)
And then there's those moving staircases. In the books, people keep getting lost because all the rooms and corridors at Hogwarts are mysteriously enchanted. Cool! (And crucial to the plot in the latest book.) But in the movie, they explain the same thing by showing the staircases moving back and forth for no obvious reason. Lame.
Probably a good thing, considering the alternatives. Ever seen Cube 2: Hypercube? The only movie in ten years to give me legitimate nightmares, because they really did a great job on "this door doesn't ever open on the same thing twice", along with a lot of other wierd stuff that gives your limbic system fits.
Reading in a book about corridors that don't seem to go to the same place twice is OK, but actually seeing it would give the target viewing age nightmares. Seriously. The way they did it may not be as cool, but it's a lot easier on the mind.
There is no "single point of failure" like with the US president.
The US President is not a single point of failure. He would be completely hamstrung if he did not have the backing of Congress, and the Court has been moderating some of the worse liberty abuses, though at Court speeds, which is unfortunately "pretty damn slow".
Hate Bush, love Bush, whatever. But don't fool yourself into thinking that some vast majority of Americans hate him, too. When the vast majority of Americans hate a President, it seriously constrains him; see history. Some Presidents were so weak they were almost powerless.
The propensity of the left lately to engage in wishful thinking like "most people really hate Bush, they just aren't, you know, actually hating Bush or loudly hating Bush" is seriously weakening their cause. The Right went through the same thing in the 90's, secretly believing that everybody really hated Clinton. Bush doesn't have an overwhelming majority but it is clearly a mandate, and as such, can not be called a "point of failure" in the system. All you can hope for from a political system is that it represents its people adequately, and in that, even now, the Presidency would seem to be a success.
That's an amazingly bad plan, because what they'll really hear at 120 decibels is Me, I try to avoid systems announcing that sort of thing to all and sundry. (One of the major risks of an IT job is extremely high visibility when things go wrong, from the top to the bottom.)
Clarification: By "The .torrent file is distributed in the RSS file", I should have said "a URL to the .torrent file is distributed in the RSS file". See this example RSS+BitTorrent file to see what I mean.
The RSS file itself is not distributed over BitTorrent. As you say, no gain for small files.
.torrent file is distributed in the RSS file, and your BitTorrent+RSS enabled feed-reader downloads the file the torrent represents, which may be of course huge. The idea is that this allows normal folks like you and me to distribute honkin' files with the best of them.
(I've noodled around trying to distribute RSS loads but it's hard to make it worthwhile.)
The
Other comments in the replies decrying corporate involvement are off-base; corporations aren't the ones who need this. This is so Joe Schmoe can "video blog", "high-quality audio blog", or distribute some other large file without breaking the bank. If this were purely a corporate issue, "throw more money at the problem" would probably continue to be the preferred solution.
such as JDBC drivers, XML parsers, SOAP tools and 3rd party components
Semi-check, built-in, check, and check (including a lot of real winners, particularly including multiple cross-platform GUIs).
(The semi-check is because I'm not 100% certain the python modules match the JDBC completely.)
The only advantage Java offers is when it has an actual library that you can't get in Python (or likely anywhere else); capability for capability the languages and libraries are pretty close to the same. I mean, we have "Web Application Servers" for Python (like Zope), but maybe you absolutely need some Java thing for some other reason. There's no one language that meets all needs. But there's no reason Python can't be used in very large scale projects successfully, as evidenced by the fact that it has been so used.
Personally, I'd much rather use Python for the larger scale projects since for a variety of reasons I think it scales better then Java; Java projects IMHO survive because they get a lot more resources thrown at them, not because the language does very much to hold large projects together. But that's just my opinion.
(Oh, and Jython, though I know it's been mentioned elsewhere.)
Read more carefully. The answer to your question lies in my post, since I anticipated that point.
I don't watch Street Smarts, but I was intruiged by the premise so I did watch one show.
The conclusion I came to is that it is totally scripted, because IIRC, the use the same groups of people over and over again, of the three people always precisely one is correct (odds of that are atrocious), and those who are wrong are wrong in ways that are too humorous, too often, to be coincidence.
Now, if they interviewed lots of people and they always pulled the funniest and always only pulled one correct answer, then maybe there would be some versimilitude. Then you'd see a lot of different people, some of whom are honestly mistaken. But as it stands, it's pretty much as scripted as the WWF.
Like I said, I was intrigued by the premise, but since it's obviously faked I lost all interest. That, and the stupidity of the contestants was breathtaking.... and again, that's gotta be deliberate. All in all, a show that ought to be insulting to the viewer's intelligence, but given who must watch it, probably isn't.
On-topic point? Well, remember that half of the population is below average*. That leaves a lot of people who will fall for stuff like the DHM foolery, and ironically, they will do it because they are trying to look intelligent and concerned.
*: Pedants note: On a population the size of Earth, with a normal distribution of intelligence virtually a given thanks to the Central Limit Theorum, there's no need to confuse people by talking about the "median"; the difference between median and average intelligence on the planet would be far below the measurement error.
One would hope that they could still play something else that wasn't copyrighted so we would have clips.
It is faintly possible that that would have taken too long, but that would tend to imply the robot is scripted, move-for-move, and I have to admit that if that is the case, I wouldn't call that "playing the trumpet".
Ah well, a marketer I am not.
Music is unavailable in accordance with copyright protection.
I smell a cop-out. Trumpets aren't exactly new, there's plenty of public-domain works they could have used. I'm partial to Purcell's "Trumpet Tune and Air" myself, which if the robot was competent would have been perfectly doable. (It has other instruments too, but they could be added or just dropped; the pieces is a glorified trumpet solo from 1685.)
This makes me wonder if maybe it doesn't sound as good as it looks. I have no idea either way, I'm just saying this makes me suspicious.
I'm not Godwin, but I wrote an essay on that topic, which requires branching out a lot. (Which is to say, it isn't always 100% about copyright law all the time, but it's always related.)
It's easy to be against something, it's a lot harder to come up with something you're for, and I felt I had to do that before I could feel good about opining on this topic.
Summary version: It can't be summarized well, because you pretty much have to toss out copyright as you know it and start from nearly scratch. Even things like the concept of "Expression" have to be tossed out. Communication has fundamentally changed and old conceptions of copyright are wrong after centuries of refinement in a now-obsolete technological paradigm.
Not necessarily a popular view but I believe that sooner or later we're going to have to face up to the contradictions in the law head on, as I outline.
Mannheim Steamroller is a great example of a successful music group that can't live on concerts, IMHO. I love Chip Davis' work and own all the Fresh Aire and Christmas CDs. But I don't like going to their performances.
I've been to a couple, but the problem is, they sound just like the CD. One, the Ice-Capades-alike, I honestly didn't realize the band was there until the end, when they stood up for applause. I thought they were just playing a CD. Thanks to synthesizors, amplifications, click tracks, and a few other technology bits, the performances are indistinguishable from playing the CD.
If the CD can stand in that well, I don't know why they perform at all. I'd rather just have the CD, thanks.
I know they aren't the only group who does this. I know I've also seen a lot of things like Superbowl performance or Emmy performances that are indistinguishable from the CD (and I don't think they were all lipsynching, though maybe I'm wrong). Living on performances isn't a good idea for a lot of groups who make good music, but don't really gain any benefit from giving a "concert".
Spell checkers are *not* a substitute for knowing how words are spelled.
Of course not. But using a spell checker means having time to learn about the homonyms, instead of endlessly playing catch up.
You still predicated your post on "relying" on spell checkers; I'm saying that people learn from good spell checkers. That people can't learn everything from a spell checker is hardly a reason to throw the baby out with the bath water and insist that people use inferior learning techniques anyhow!
A kid that can spell accurately is in a much better position to learn about homonyms then one for whom spelling is still a mysterious, abstract art that involves guessing at things.
Spell checkers discourage people from learning to spell.
Done correctly, spellcheckers can be the best spelling-learning tool there is.
"Correctly" here means the spell-checkers that give you red underlines when you've finished typing the word and it's wrong. Right-clicking lets you see suggestions, add it to your personal dict, etc.
"Incorrectly" is when you have to run the spell-checker manually at the "end" of typing. That's when people lean on it.
The reason, of course, is feedback; feedback is absolutely vital to learning and spell-checkers that highlight are the only thing I know of that cuts the feedback loop down to zero seconds. Compared to this, spelling tests in school where the teacher hands back the test three days from now are a complete waste of time. (This is one of many places where out of the box thinking with computers would greatly improve the education process but nobody has the guts to say, "We need to stop 'testing' spelling and start using proper spell-checkers, and come up with some way to encourage kids to use words they don't necessarily know how to spell instead of punishing them." The primary use of computers in education is to cut the feedback loop down to no time at all. But I digress...)
'gaim' is pretty close but it really ticks me off how it always spellchecks a word immediately, so if you're typing along and you're going to send the word "unfortunately", but you've only typed as far as "unfortun", it highlights it as a misspelled word. Bad program! Wait until I've left the word!
Right after your presentation on how one company can grow exponentially forever.
Actually, that's illegal, because it's a scam. See "Multi-Level Marketing" on Google. Anybody promising eternal exponential growth for a company is trying to con you. I'd watch out if I were you, sounds like you might be susceptible to this fraud.
(In other words, no, I was not talking about the entire world. Go learn some economics. Heck, go learn some physics.)
"Begs the question" is a technical term, not a solecism.
Why don't you explain to the shareholders this philosophy of yours,
You misunderstand. "Eternal exponential growth is impossible, you will eventually top out and be limited to the growth of the external economy" isn't a "philosophy", it's a fact. It doesn't matter what the shareholders think.
The only way around this is to engage in a form of the Broken Window fallacy and continuously burn down the successful companies for the sole purpose of allowing other companies to exponentially grow, which has the same basic issues as the Broken Window Fallacy.
If the shareholders don't understand reality, it's their own damned problem. It won't change the ultimate outcomes.
The answer to your questions is to use extensions. If you want to handle graphics, don't bit-bang in Python, grap the Python interface to SDL or something. If you want to bit-bang, do it in C or Pyrex or something.
I mean no disrespect, but when comparing languages it is important to see each language in terms of itself. There is an old saying "You can write Pascal in any language" (where Pascal can be any language); this means that while any language can generally support any paradigm, it's better to work with the language then against it.
Python deliberately ties in to C very well, and this is one of its great strengths. If you force it to bit-bang like Java, you'll never get the speed you're looking for.
I've done some GUI programming in Python with dynamically generated bit-maps, and I've always used the TkCanvas stuff (partially because my app is in Python/Tk, but even when I tried out wxWindows I ended up sticking with the TkCanvas-based code in PIL (Python Imaging Library)); unless you're writing Gimp-like code that generally does everything you need.
I wonder if these aren't more echos of pre-Crash 1990's thinking. "If it's not growing exponentially, it must be dying." Well, given that any subset of the human population (including the population as a whole) is only growing geometrically, for any given industry like Video Games there are only so many customers to be tapped and you will eventually top out.
This is the only explanation I can think of, persistently viewing everything in extreme terms of "total success or total failure", and since nothing ever hits "total success"... well, I guess it's dying. Video games aren't exponentially growing, they're dying. TV is losing ground instead of holding constant, it's dying. Our economy isn't exponentially growing, it's dying. Anti-drug programs aren't 100% effective, thus they are useless. Crime isn't zero, therefore all anti-crime measures are totally ineffective and all hell will soon break loose. (Extends beyond entertainment too, you see.)
This is the normal state of affairs, though; exponential growth is unsustainable; the tech industry growth, and more specifically the continuing success of Moore's Law, are the exceptions, not the rule. Perhaps if we didn't have such unrealistic expectations, or perhaps more accurately if our sick, diseased journalistic process didn't have such unrealistic expectations, we wouldn't feel the need to panic so often.