Grand Theft Auto clearly is attempting to replicate the reality of crime sprees, so why not just call it a crime sim?
That's right kids, if the police gun you down, in a few hours you'll pop out of the hospital! Make sure you have enough cash on you to cover expenses.
And if the police catch you after you've gunned down 10 or 20 of them, you'll be released in a few hours if you have enough money on you for a bribe!
Learn well, my padawans.
(Actually, I've come to the conclusion that GTA is actually not violent, since people don't really "die" unless you expliot something in the game, like tossing them into water. Doctors will arrive on the scene in minutes and "magically" resusitate victims, etc. It's just cartoon violence, because the victims are OK in the next scene; the only people to permenently die are the plot characters. The only wonder is that in the magical fantasy land of no significant consequences for crime or death, that everyone isn't engaged in a crime spree.)
I'm actually torn on whether to purchase Final Fantasy Tactics Advance; on the one hand I really enjoy that sort of game. On the other hand, when even the reviewers are commenting on how easy it is, you know it's going to be easy. And that's sad. I don't want a massacre, I want a challenge. Especially for something like FFTA, where the "challenge" is set by taking your party's level and adding some constant, and that's the opposition's level. (Or so I hear; Tactics Ogre was like that.) Is it so hard to add a difficulty level that consists of adding "4" instead of "1" or "2"? I mean, come on, that wouldn't have taken a full programmer-day, and the art is negligible.
Sigh.
And that's for the Japanese version. If I hear that they've dumbed it down even more for America, as they did in the past, I think I won't buy it.
OK, I admit I'm a little "old-skool" here without trying; being brought up on an Intellivision will do that to you. But are kids today really that incompetent at gaming?
(Well, I am 25 and can still whale on my cousins with any game I've played, and hold up even when I haven't played the game... maybe ~20 years of playing is hard to keep up with...)
I like the ideas behind this article (I couldn't immediately Google for a good replacement so there may be room on the web for an article like this) but the author (and there is no nice way to put this) is talking out of his ass. For instance, from the second page:
This is the Visual Cortex adding motion blur to perceived imagery so that rather than seeing everything in great detail, we are still able to perceive the effect of motion and direction as we ride by. The imagery is smoothly flowing from one point to the next and there are no jumps or flickering to be seen. If
the eye wasn't to add this motion blur, we would get to see all of the details still but the illusion of moving imagery would be lost on us, with the brick wall sort of fading in and out to different points. It's pretty simple to test this.
This is idiotically wrong. This entire paragraph is predicated on the false assumption that our eye somehow has a "framerate" itself. (Either that, or the false assumption that our eye is basically a CCD with infinite discrimination, also wrong.) It does not. Our eye is fully analog. (Go figure.) You get motion blur because the nerves and the chemical receptors can only react so quickly, and because nerves fire as light accumlates on the receptors. Since the receptors are moving quickly relative to the transmitting object, light rays from a given point are smeared across several cones/rods before the full processing of the image can take place. (Now, I'm simplifying because this isn't the place for a textbook on vision, but at least I know I'm simplifying.) In fact, there's nothing the visual cortex could do to remove the motion blur coming from our eyes, because the motion blur causes actual information loss! (It can (and does) do some reconstruction, but you can't fill in details that don't exist.)
(Note in the portion I italized how he jumps from the "vision cortex" to "the eye"; the two are NOT the same and can't be lumped together like that in this context.)
This simple error renders the entire second page actively wrong.
Here's another, referring to interlacing:
Using a succession of moving images, the two refreshes per frame fool us into believing there is two frames for every one frame. With the motion blur the eye believes we are watching a smoothly flowing picture.
Uh, wrong wrong wrong. Interlacing was a cheap hack to save bandwidth. "Progressive scan" is universally considered superior to interlacing (in terms of quality alone), and many (such as myself) consider keeping interlaced video modes in HDTV to be a serious long-term mistake. It has nothing to do with convincing you you are seeing motion, in fact it has a strongly deleterious effect because you can frequently see the "combing"; that's why TVs have "anti-comb" filters. You don't see it as "motion", you see it as wierd "tearing".
Like the TV, your Computer Monitor (if it's a Cathode Ray Tube) refreshes by drawing the screen line by line horizontally, but unlike the TV, a Monitor and Video Card doesn't add extra frames. If your screen draws at 30 fps, you will GET 30 fps.
ALSO wrong. The computer monitor and video card will pump out X frames per second, period. It has to. If the CRT is going at 60 fps and the video card (as in the 3D hardware) is only pumping at 30 fps, every frame will be shown for two CRT cycles. What else is the video card (as in the rasterizer) going to display? You'd notice if the screen were blank every other cycle!
CRT Monitors are considered 'Flicker Free' at about 72Hz for a reason, and simply put it's to compensate for the lack of motion blur, afterimages and other trickery we live with every day in TV and Films.
Wrong again. CRTs at that frequency are "flicker free" because they pass the frequency the parts of our eyes more sensitive to motion (actually the peripheral vision, not the "primary" vision we're us
-50: Essay too short (few arguments can be well-supported in nine words)
-50: Plagarism: It is 99.999% (MAX PROB) likely, based on the content of the essay, that it is plagarized from other sources.
-10: Grammar error: Phrase "I for one welcome" requires commas, as in "I, for one, welcome"*
-25: Missing key words: The essay grader was instructed to look for the following key words or phrases, which were not found in this essay: word: excellent, word: good, phrase: better then humans, word: lazy, phrase: java.lang.NullPointerException\nstacktrace\n\tat\n org.criteria.grading.phraseIterator.getNext(phrase Iterator.java:1023)...
Total: 65501
Grade: A+
(*: Jumping out of character: To forstall objections, this "error" is deliberately pointed out as the kind of mistake a computer can make if you use grammar checkers and trust them blindly. While an excessively formal style of English might 'require' commas in that phrase, an excellent case can be made that in a nine-word sentence such commas just make the sentence choppy.)
On re-reading my original post, I think I see what you were responding to. Note Perl does not have a "class" keyword; that's how bolted on the OO is. In fact I was thinking of Perl when I wrote that phrase.;-)
I honestly don't know whether I'd consider Perl OO easier or harder then Java; Java sure did fight me, tooth and nail, where Perl doesn't quite fight me that much. On the other hand, Perl is so kooky that that has to count against it.
I prefer languages that allow you to shoot yourself (like Python) because they're willing to trust the programmer, but Perl has the distinction of helping you shoot yourself, which goes a little too far. Somewhere on the Wild Wild Web there's a great article that describes how dangerous Perl is for allowing to layer quick hack on top of quick hack, until one day you can't layer another hack on top and you basically have to throw it out and start anew, instead of encouraging incremental refactoring along the way. ('Course, that summarizes it pretty well...)
C++ would be better for a grad level OO design course, because at the grad level, the emphasis should be on power, not protecting the programmer from themselves, which Java does too much. Like the man says: " It's hard to live with none of: lexically scoped local functions; a macro system; and inlined functions." Java is too negative. (Improving, but only because it's attracted enough attention that certain things need be fixed for the language to move on and continue to appeal to the Heavy Hackers; witness how many projects compile directly to Java Bytecode, instead of Java itself. That's a sign.)
I think a loosely typed language like Python would be even better for a grad-level OO class though, not because Python Is The Best Language Ever, but because for a grad class in OO-design, it's nice to use a language with enough power to rapidly and powerfully model an OO architecture, without getting in the way.
Speaking for my own Software Engineering class, which used Java, we all did our models for our project, and then discovered that Java wasn't really capable of implementing our model. So our programs silently differed from the models, since we knew the prof couldn't read them all. (At the very least, we'd have needed a lot of classes to implement Patterns which weren't on the class diagram.) I strongly suspect this happens in the real world too often. I do know that if we'd been using Python, I could have stuck to the object model in the diagram.
I think for educational purposes you need something that allows you to focus on what you're doing. I didn't post this before because if the title of the course is "An Introduction To Java", it's not relevant. But if I were in charge, I'd go Python, or maybe a type-inference-based OO language, so the students spend less time fighting the language and implementing the world's eight millionith Proxy class, and more time designing good OO designs.
Specifically, I would like to ground them in good Object Oriented principles,
Good idea; too many people get out of college even at the Masters/PhD level without really understanding OO. (Even if it's not the be-all, end-all technique it was initially promoted to be, it's still a darned useful way of organizing large programs.)
solid program design techniques,
Sounds like a plan.
and finally in the actual syntax of Java.
Whoops, you're using Java? How does that fit with the first two goals? I can't think of a language that makes good OO harder while still having a "class" keyword.
Oh well, guess you're stuck with it.
Alright, ignoring the potentially flamebait nature of the above (though I mean it quite seriously), if you can avoid it at all, I'd recommend not worrying about teaching syntax. Seriously. Speaking from my experiences at a Certain Other Large Michigan School, you should just be able to say at the beginning of the course, "Hey, we're going to do an assignment in the second half of this course that will be in Java. Know Java by then." and let that be the end of it; we did that in Software Engineering at the grad level and it worked fine.
Just throw them to the sharks; they'll manage.
If you were going to toss Prolog or a heavily functional language at them unexpectedly, that might be worth some in-class time, but in-class time is a scarce resource; it really should only be spent on important stuff either unobtainable, or significantly more difficult to obtain, outside of the class. Java syntax hardly qualifies.
I'd pay and download this, even if it's something I don't fully like. I figure supporting this distobution would be the best way to show the industry that it would actually work.
You really shouldn't do that. You'll make the first sales look big, convincing the producer to dump more money into it and produce a bigger/more expensive product next time, probably on loans obtained based on initial performance, but you won't be around to buy the next one. The product will do that much worse.
If you hadn't artifically propped up the first movie, it would have tanked, and the producer would have moved on.
Now, your contribution is small so modify this message to speak in (small) probabilities instead of absolutes. (Reading truly well-qualified probability-based arguments is mentally tiring, which is probably why people don't bother to understand them and tend to mentally convert them back to absolutes. Please go the other way for this message.)
It's best not to tweak the market mechanism; they need the honest feedback. Inaccurate feedback can be costly.
It depends *how* small you make the generators, of course - maybe joe bloggs with a little solar panel on his roof is not going to get a fantastically efficient system, but that does not mean it is not viable or desirable.
Wow, you missed the point big time. Making the generators smaller makes the system that is composed of lots of little things even worse then a comparable centralized system. Again, this is a fundamental economic fact of life.
You can't compare "decentralized system" against "no system at all", as you are doing; you have to compare against "centralized system", which thanks to the laws of economics and diminishing returns can always be more efficient and cleaner then a decentralized system can be. Period. Decentralized system's only advantage is being able survive some forms of damage better.
Joe Blow's solar panels may pay off in the long run, but they'd pay off even better if the same amount of money was put into a centralized solar facility, with professional maintenence, bulk discounts, and professional "solar panel" (wo)men working to maximize the output. Joe Blow can't compete against that. He won't even install equipment to move the panels over the course of the day (as is necessary to maximize output), because for him it's not economical.
Decentralizing power down to the "individual household" scale does not make economic sense; a dollar spent at that level will always be better spent at the central plant. No amount of wishing will change that.
In fact, this is one of those reasons I can't call myself an environmentalist. "Wishful thinking" like this makes people make bad decisions that hurt the environment more then they help it. You want to help the environment? Don't push for decentralized power, it will increase pollution and inefficiency. Push for reduced power usage and cleaner central plants. Anything else and you aren't really concerned about the environment, you're just being fooled into thinking you are.
to access your data, I have to know your publicly available ID and I have to have access to the phone in your (unlocked) cubicle. etc. etc. etc.
He didn't claim his security was perfect. There's always a way around security; mere existance of a way around it does not automatically mean its worthless. It raises the bar, I'd bet money it provides a paper trail, and as long as the employee isn't on vacation, the employee will detect it when they try to login next and can't because the password changed. (Detection isn't instant but should average less then a day.)
I post this because this is one of the common mistakes made in security, not doing a risk analysis and just assuming you need "more". I strongly suspect that unless the grandparent poster is working for the NSA, that they've successfully raised the bar past what anybody who cares can hurdle. Spending more on a more restrictive regime would just be a waste of money.
A fundemental weakness of the grid is its over-centralisation. Another argument for environmentally friendly local power generation schemes.
Actually, a fundamental strength of the grid is its centralization. A central facility generating gigawatts of power can afford to spend millions of dollars ekeing the last few percentage points of efficiency out, and wiping out the last few percent of emissions, because the economies of scale kick in.
Local power schemes, since they will be purchase by The General Public, can not and will not spend the money on these extra niceties, and as a result will necessarily be less efficient and more polluting per watt then centralized power. There is no way around this, there is no argument that can wipe it away, it's a fundamental economic fact of life.
Local power generation is one of the boondogles the bad environmentalists promote, without stopping for a moment to think that it's even worse then the alternative. (Altogether too many environmentalists aren't bothered by little things like "truth" or "evidence", which is why I can't call myself one, even though in theory I ought to be able to.)
- the feeling of 'never stepping in the same stream twice' -- go see artist X every year for 5 years, and each performance of any given song will 1) be different than the CD version, 2) be different than the previous year, 3) be different than the previous night!
This depends on the artist. I've stopped going to Mannheim Steamroller concerts because if you close your eyes, you can't tell it's not the CD. We went to this one Ice Skating thing with some friends, and I honestly thought they were just playing the music off of the CD until the end of the show where they lifted a curtain, and hey, there's a band there! Don't know why they bothered, honestly.
I think if you're deciding to go to a concert it's important to find out in advance whether you really are going to get something different then a CD, or if the performer uses so much technology and multimedia and other crap that they sound identical to the CD (due to needs to stay precisely in sync with the other effects). I know I'm using that as a criterion from now on!
That's a good question and the answer is "technology media coverage sucks".
Far-out technology ten or twenty years from plausible implementation makes a much better story then technology that's appearing on the shelf today, which is drowned out by the marketing message and if you're lucky, some semi-meaningful buzzwords.
However, the electronic industry is actually quite good about converting technology into actual products. It just isn't talked about as much because it's so "ho-hum". Let me remind you that 2,400,000,000,000 bits that fit in the palm of your hand is something so amazing that you really can't even understand it in any real way.
Look into the technologies in current use for hard drive manufacturing, processor manufacturing, and the other such hardware you use day to day (including non-computer stuff). You'll find enough stuff to make a 1970's sci-fi author wet their pants. It just doesn't make good copy.
While various Theories of Everything are being proposed, a lot of them are not based on observation. They are just complex mathematical magic created to explain reality.
Theories must be tested for science to progress. How do you propose that we obtain theories to test while skipping the part of the theory creation process where there isn't yet enough data to know whether they are true?
His "piece o'crap software" did something you thought nothing on the market did, and has for a long time. Your opinion is worthless to me, as you are obviously ignorant on this topic. Keep flaming, it's all you've got.
You miss a critical point. If one person publishes an RSS file, and 10 people subscribe to it, and that's everyone who subscribes with "RSS" on the planet, then those 10 people are happy.
If those same 10 people switch to IPv6, and perform normal activities, odds are they will never run into each other, and gain no benefit from the switch.
Aggregators grow in value directly proportional to the number of people who support it, linearly or quadratically, but people who don't support it do not harm the system in the slightest. This is true of all successful Internet technologies to date. (Except perhaps TCP/IP, which is the Internet and is sort of immune to this analysis; network protocols are sort of exceptional that way.)
IPv6 (more or less) also grows proportionally, but it grows very slowly until penetration starts to approach 100%. This is colloquially referred to as a "boil the ocean" plan, for reasons that should be obvious if you think about it. (Attempts are being made to mitigate this and I am not knowlegable enough about IPv6 deployment to know how successful those attempts are being in the real world.) Many dot-coms also had "boil the ocean" plans; all the "boil the ocean" business plans failed. If IPv4 wasn't going to be eventually fatal to the Internet, we'd never switch, no matter what the putative advantages of IPv6.
RSS is not a "boil the ocean" technology, therefore it does not need to achieve total penetration to be useful.
For instance, I found out this article was posted through my Radio Userland aggregator, via the Slashdot feed. Slashdot has literally had this feed for years. Its value to me has never been diminshed by the fact that it didn't help you any.
There's no reason RSS won't continue to grow; it's already a successful technology and is only hitting its stride now. We're already well past the "early adopter" phase and entering into the "general public" phase.
I (and some others) have looked into this; right now Jabber penetration isn't enough to make this worthwhile. People still see Jabber as an IM protocol, rather then a generalized messaging system with far-reaching applications.
People, this is why you need to support Jabber rather then AIM, MSN, or ICQ; sure, in the short term more of your buddies may be on those (closed, proprietary, evil) services, but in the long term, w/ Jabber everywhere, the apps get a lot, lot cooler!
and then go convince everyone to support it in their servers.
No, only people who want private RSS files need to support it in their servers. And it's not like HTTP autentication is some sort of mystery, all reasonable web servers support it out of the box. After all, guess what, it's part of HTTP/1.0.
But first, you might want to think about how auth will interfere with RSS discovery (which is already screwed up enough).
Easy, it doesn't. Either you can get to the RSS feed or you can't, either way the aggregator has to handle it (people type in wrong URLs all the time, for instance, so any real aggregator has to handle errors).
You seriously overestimate the difficulty of this. Unusual, usually people underestimate difficulties. I hope you aren't a professional coder.
Re:Good news for KDE users...
on
Aethera 1.0
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I've seen those.
Rap - the aptly-named program that takes a list of words and creates a random rap song out of them (default to/usr/bin/dict); a wide variety of command line options are available, including the ever-popular -P "Profanity" level
RUD (you miscapitalized it) - the Really Ugly Desktop, a fork of TWM that includes things like stipple-stacking of windows (faster then alpha blending, and almost one-hundredth as useful!)
Ringeworthy - a program to determine which Ringe family members are worthy of Alice Cooper, and which are not, through sophisticated biometric analysis. Not a generally useful program. (Probably somebody's Master's thesis.)
Rotch - an innovative ROT26 driver for encrypting loopback partitions. (ROT52 should be available in the next version, along with Unicode support.)
Ock - a language interpreter that interprets a language halfway between Ocaml and Awk, whatever that means. (The documentation is in poorly-translated Scottish (personally, I'dve translated it "Acchhhh!" or "Oooch!"), and I've never managed to read all the way through it.)
Litoris - a program that uses bayesian analysis on the text from Project Gutenburg, and based on which Project Gutenburg texts you have liked to date suggests which other you might like.
Unt - the opposite of the "t" command, takes in two pipes and combines them.
This makes even the copyright of programs a bit dubious.
Not really; you're taking the metaphor too literally. Software is like a recipe in many ways, but it is not absolutely identical to food recipes. For one thing, food recipes are short. Programs, by comparision, are gargantuan. In any reasonably analysis of the creativity required to create one versus the other, that factor alone is enough to render the similarity in this case irrelevant, and require you to analyse software on its own terms.
Software is safely covered under copyright and it would take a radical re-structuring of current copyright caselaw to undo that.
(Further, I think you're confusing fact vs. expression. "The Recipe" is not copyrightable, but the exact expression of the recipe may be, if it is written in a creative manner (and the standard of creativity is pretty low). That means I can write another expression containing the recipe freely, but that I can not copy your expression necessarily. Conflating "fact" vs. "expression" is similar to one of the problems that got us to Software Patents in the first place.)
One point I think I made more clearly, that should have been made in that piece and would have fit perfectly, is that to my knowledge, only software is covered by both Copyright and Patents; it should be no surprise that two systems that were never designed to work together, basically don't! Copyright fits software much better then patents; that's a sign it should be treated under the copyright system and not the patent system. IMHO, I also did a somewhat more thorough job of exploring that point.
Still, for a 1991 essay, that was pretty darned good.
Slashdot Mirror
Grand Theft Auto clearly is attempting to replicate the reality of crime sprees, so why not just call it a crime sim?
That's right kids, if the police gun you down, in a few hours you'll pop out of the hospital! Make sure you have enough cash on you to cover expenses.
And if the police catch you after you've gunned down 10 or 20 of them, you'll be released in a few hours if you have enough money on you for a bribe!
Learn well, my padawans.
(Actually, I've come to the conclusion that GTA is actually not violent, since people don't really "die" unless you expliot something in the game, like tossing them into water. Doctors will arrive on the scene in minutes and "magically" resusitate victims, etc. It's just cartoon violence, because the victims are OK in the next scene; the only people to permenently die are the plot characters. The only wonder is that in the magical fantasy land of no significant consequences for crime or death, that everyone isn't engaged in a crime spree.)
I'm actually torn on whether to purchase Final Fantasy Tactics Advance; on the one hand I really enjoy that sort of game. On the other hand, when even the reviewers are commenting on how easy it is, you know it's going to be easy. And that's sad. I don't want a massacre, I want a challenge. Especially for something like FFTA, where the "challenge" is set by taking your party's level and adding some constant, and that's the opposition's level. (Or so I hear; Tactics Ogre was like that.) Is it so hard to add a difficulty level that consists of adding "4" instead of "1" or "2"? I mean, come on, that wouldn't have taken a full programmer-day, and the art is negligible.
Sigh.
And that's for the Japanese version. If I hear that they've dumbed it down even more for America, as they did in the past, I think I won't buy it.
OK, I admit I'm a little "old-skool" here without trying; being brought up on an Intellivision will do that to you. But are kids today really that incompetent at gaming?
(Well, I am 25 and can still whale on my cousins with any game I've played, and hold up even when I haven't played the game... maybe ~20 years of playing is hard to keep up with...)
You probably want the Google weblog. (Note it is run by someone outside of Google. Just for the record.)
This is idiotically wrong. This entire paragraph is predicated on the false assumption that our eye somehow has a "framerate" itself. (Either that, or the false assumption that our eye is basically a CCD with infinite discrimination, also wrong.) It does not. Our eye is fully analog. (Go figure.) You get motion blur because the nerves and the chemical receptors can only react so quickly, and because nerves fire as light accumlates on the
receptors. Since the receptors are moving quickly relative to the transmitting object, light rays from a given point are smeared across several cones/rods before the full processing of the image can take place. (Now, I'm simplifying because this isn't the place for a
textbook on vision, but at least I know I'm simplifying.) In fact, there's nothing the visual cortex could do to remove the motion blur coming from our eyes, because the motion blur causes actual information loss! (It can (and does) do some reconstruction, but you can't fill in details that don't exist.)
(Note in the portion I italized how he jumps from the "vision cortex" to "the eye"; the two are NOT the same and can't be lumped together like that in this context.)
This simple error renders the entire second page actively wrong.
Here's another, referring to interlacing:
Uh, wrong wrong wrong. Interlacing was a cheap hack to save bandwidth. "Progressive scan" is universally considered superior to interlacing (in terms of quality alone), and many (such as myself) consider keeping interlaced video modes in HDTV to be a serious
long-term mistake. It has nothing to do with convincing you you are seeing motion, in fact it has a strongly deleterious effect because you can frequently see the "combing"; that's why TVs have "anti-comb" filters. You don't see it as "motion", you see it as wierd "tearing".
ALSO wrong. The computer monitor and video card will pump out X frames per second, period. It has to. If the CRT is going at 60 fps and the video card (as in the 3D hardware) is only pumping at 30 fps, every frame will be shown for two CRT cycles. What else is the video card (as in the rasterizer) going to display? You'd notice if the screen were blank every other cycle!
Wrong again. CRTs at that frequency are "flicker free" because they pass the frequency the parts of our eyes more sensitive to motion (actually the peripheral vision, not the "primary" vision we're us
ESSAY GRADING REPORT FOR: "Bueller 007" (ID: 535588)
n org.criteria.grading.phraseIterator.getNext(phrase Iterator.java:1023)...
BASE SCORE: 100
-50: Essay too short (few arguments can be well-supported in nine words)
-50: Plagarism: It is 99.999% (MAX PROB) likely, based on the content of the essay, that it is plagarized from other sources.
-10: Grammar error: Phrase "I for one welcome" requires commas, as in "I, for one, welcome"*
-25: Missing key words: The essay grader was instructed to look for the following key words or phrases, which were not found in this essay: word: excellent, word: good, phrase: better then humans, word: lazy, phrase: java.lang.NullPointerException\nstacktrace\n\tat\
Total: 65501
Grade: A+
(*: Jumping out of character: To forstall objections, this "error" is deliberately pointed out as the kind of mistake a computer can make if you use grammar checkers and trust them blindly. While an excessively formal style of English might 'require' commas in that phrase, an excellent case can be made that in a nine-word sentence such commas just make the sentence choppy.)
On re-reading my original post, I think I see what you were responding to. Note Perl does not have a "class" keyword; that's how bolted on the OO is. In fact I was thinking of Perl when I wrote that phrase. ;-)
I honestly don't know whether I'd consider Perl OO easier or harder then Java; Java sure did fight me, tooth and nail, where Perl doesn't quite fight me that much. On the other hand, Perl is so kooky that that has to count against it.
Yep... don't recall saying otherwise.
I prefer languages that allow you to shoot yourself (like Python) because they're willing to trust the programmer, but Perl has the distinction of helping you shoot yourself, which goes a little too far. Somewhere on the Wild Wild Web there's a great article that describes how dangerous Perl is for allowing to layer quick hack on top of quick hack, until one day you can't layer another hack on top and you basically have to throw it out and start anew, instead of encouraging incremental refactoring along the way. ('Course, that summarizes it pretty well...)
C++ would be better for a grad level OO design course, because at the grad level, the emphasis should be on power, not protecting the programmer from themselves, which Java does too much. Like the man says: " It's hard to live with none of: lexically scoped local functions; a macro system; and inlined functions." Java is too negative. (Improving, but only because it's attracted enough attention that certain things need be fixed for the language to move on and continue to appeal to the Heavy Hackers; witness how many projects compile directly to Java Bytecode, instead of Java itself. That's a sign.)
I think a loosely typed language like Python would be even better for a grad-level OO class though, not because Python Is The Best Language Ever, but because for a grad class in OO-design, it's nice to use a language with enough power to rapidly and powerfully model an OO architecture, without getting in the way.
Speaking for my own Software Engineering class, which used Java, we all did our models for our project, and then discovered that Java wasn't really capable of implementing our model. So our programs silently differed from the models, since we knew the prof couldn't read them all. (At the very least, we'd have needed a lot of classes to implement Patterns which weren't on the class diagram.) I strongly suspect this happens in the real world too often. I do know that if we'd been using Python, I could have stuck to the object model in the diagram.
I think for educational purposes you need something that allows you to focus on what you're doing. I didn't post this before because if the title of the course is "An Introduction To Java", it's not relevant. But if I were in charge, I'd go Python, or maybe a type-inference-based OO language, so the students spend less time fighting the language and implementing the world's eight millionith Proxy class, and more time designing good OO designs.
Specifically, I would like to ground them in good Object Oriented principles,
Good idea; too many people get out of college even at the Masters/PhD level without really understanding OO. (Even if it's not the be-all, end-all technique it was initially promoted to be, it's still a darned useful way of organizing large programs.)
solid program design techniques,
Sounds like a plan.
and finally in the actual syntax of Java.
Whoops, you're using Java? How does that fit with the first two goals? I can't think of a language that makes good OO harder while still having a "class" keyword.
Oh well, guess you're stuck with it.
Alright, ignoring the potentially flamebait nature of the above (though I mean it quite seriously), if you can avoid it at all, I'd recommend not worrying about teaching syntax. Seriously. Speaking from my experiences at a Certain Other Large Michigan School, you should just be able to say at the beginning of the course, "Hey, we're going to do an assignment in the second half of this course that will be in Java. Know Java by then." and let that be the end of it; we did that in Software Engineering at the grad level and it worked fine.
Just throw them to the sharks; they'll manage.
If you were going to toss Prolog or a heavily functional language at them unexpectedly, that might be worth some in-class time, but in-class time is a scarce resource; it really should only be spent on important stuff either unobtainable, or significantly more difficult to obtain, outside of the class. Java syntax hardly qualifies.
I'd pay and download this, even if it's something I don't fully like. I figure supporting this distobution would be the best way to show the industry that it would actually work.
You really shouldn't do that. You'll make the first sales look big, convincing the producer to dump more money into it and produce a bigger/more expensive product next time, probably on loans obtained based on initial performance, but you won't be around to buy the next one. The product will do that much worse.
If you hadn't artifically propped up the first movie, it would have tanked, and the producer would have moved on.
Now, your contribution is small so modify this message to speak in (small) probabilities instead of absolutes. (Reading truly well-qualified probability-based arguments is mentally tiring, which is probably why people don't bother to understand them and tend to mentally convert them back to absolutes. Please go the other way for this message.)
It's best not to tweak the market mechanism; they need the honest feedback. Inaccurate feedback can be costly.
It depends *how* small you make the generators, of course - maybe joe bloggs with a little solar panel on his roof is not going to get a fantastically efficient system, but that does not mean it is not viable or desirable.
Wow, you missed the point big time. Making the generators smaller makes the system that is composed of lots of little things even worse then a comparable centralized system. Again, this is a fundamental economic fact of life.
You can't compare "decentralized system" against "no system at all", as you are doing; you have to compare against "centralized system", which thanks to the laws of economics and diminishing returns can always be more efficient and cleaner then a decentralized system can be. Period. Decentralized system's only advantage is being able survive some forms of damage better.
Joe Blow's solar panels may pay off in the long run, but they'd pay off even better if the same amount of money was put into a centralized solar facility, with professional maintenence, bulk discounts, and professional "solar panel" (wo)men working to maximize the output. Joe Blow can't compete against that. He won't even install equipment to move the panels over the course of the day (as is necessary to maximize output), because for him it's not economical.
Decentralizing power down to the "individual household" scale does not make economic sense; a dollar spent at that level will always be better spent at the central plant. No amount of wishing will change that.
In fact, this is one of those reasons I can't call myself an environmentalist. "Wishful thinking" like this makes people make bad decisions that hurt the environment more then they help it. You want to help the environment? Don't push for decentralized power, it will increase pollution and inefficiency. Push for reduced power usage and cleaner central plants. Anything else and you aren't really concerned about the environment, you're just being fooled into thinking you are.
to access your data, I have to know your publicly available ID and I have to have access to the phone in your (unlocked) cubicle. etc. etc. etc.
He didn't claim his security was perfect. There's always a way around security; mere existance of a way around it does not automatically mean its worthless. It raises the bar, I'd bet money it provides a paper trail, and as long as the employee isn't on vacation, the employee will detect it when they try to login next and can't because the password changed. (Detection isn't instant but should average less then a day.)
I post this because this is one of the common mistakes made in security, not doing a risk analysis and just assuming you need "more". I strongly suspect that unless the grandparent poster is working for the NSA, that they've successfully raised the bar past what anybody who cares can hurdle. Spending more on a more restrictive regime would just be a waste of money.
A fundemental weakness of the grid is its over-centralisation. Another argument for environmentally friendly local power generation schemes.
Actually, a fundamental strength of the grid is its centralization. A central facility generating gigawatts of power can afford to spend millions of dollars ekeing the last few percentage points of efficiency out, and wiping out the last few percent of emissions, because the economies of scale kick in.
Local power schemes, since they will be purchase by The General Public, can not and will not spend the money on these extra niceties, and as a result will necessarily be less efficient and more polluting per watt then centralized power. There is no way around this, there is no argument that can wipe it away, it's a fundamental economic fact of life.
Local power generation is one of the boondogles the bad environmentalists promote, without stopping for a moment to think that it's even worse then the alternative. (Altogether too many environmentalists aren't bothered by little things like "truth" or "evidence", which is why I can't call myself one, even though in theory I ought to be able to.)
- the feeling of 'never stepping in the same stream twice' -- go see artist X every year for 5 years, and each performance of any given song will 1) be different than the CD version, 2) be different than the previous year, 3) be different than the previous night!
This depends on the artist. I've stopped going to Mannheim Steamroller concerts because if you close your eyes, you can't tell it's not the CD. We went to this one Ice Skating thing with some friends, and I honestly thought they were just playing the music off of the CD until the end of the show where they lifted a curtain, and hey, there's a band there! Don't know why they bothered, honestly.
I think if you're deciding to go to a concert it's important to find out in advance whether you really are going to get something different then a CD, or if the performer uses so much technology and multimedia and other crap that they sound identical to the CD (due to needs to stay precisely in sync with the other effects). I know I'm using that as a criterion from now on!
That's a good question and the answer is "technology media coverage sucks".
Far-out technology ten or twenty years from plausible implementation makes a much better story then technology that's appearing on the shelf today, which is drowned out by the marketing message and if you're lucky, some semi-meaningful buzzwords.
However, the electronic industry is actually quite good about converting technology into actual products. It just isn't talked about as much because it's so "ho-hum". Let me remind you that 2,400,000,000,000 bits that fit in the palm of your hand is something so amazing that you really can't even understand it in any real way.
Look into the technologies in current use for hard drive manufacturing, processor manufacturing, and the other such hardware you use day to day (including non-computer stuff). You'll find enough stuff to make a 1970's sci-fi author wet their pants. It just doesn't make good copy.
While various Theories of Everything are being proposed, a lot of them are not based on observation. They are just complex mathematical magic created to explain reality.
Theories must be tested for science to progress. How do you propose that we obtain theories to test while skipping the part of the theory creation process where there isn't yet enough data to know whether they are true?
See here.
His "piece o'crap software" did something you thought nothing on the market did, and has for a long time. Your opinion is worthless to me, as you are obviously ignorant on this topic. Keep flaming, it's all you've got.
You miss a critical point. If one person publishes an RSS file, and 10 people subscribe to it, and that's everyone who subscribes with "RSS" on the planet, then those 10 people are happy.
If those same 10 people switch to IPv6, and perform normal activities, odds are they will never run into each other, and gain no benefit from the switch.
Aggregators grow in value directly proportional to the number of people who support it, linearly or quadratically, but people who don't support it do not harm the system in the slightest. This is true of all successful Internet technologies to date. (Except perhaps TCP/IP, which is the Internet and is sort of immune to this analysis; network protocols are sort of exceptional that way.)
IPv6 (more or less) also grows proportionally, but it grows very slowly until penetration starts to approach 100%. This is colloquially referred to as a "boil the ocean" plan, for reasons that should be obvious if you think about it. (Attempts are being made to mitigate this and I am not knowlegable enough about IPv6 deployment to know how successful those attempts are being in the real world.) Many dot-coms also had "boil the ocean" plans; all the "boil the ocean" business plans failed. If IPv4 wasn't going to be eventually fatal to the Internet, we'd never switch, no matter what the putative advantages of IPv6.
RSS is not a "boil the ocean" technology, therefore it does not need to achieve total penetration to be useful.
For instance, I found out this article was posted through my Radio Userland aggregator, via the Slashdot feed. Slashdot has literally had this feed for years. Its value to me has never been diminshed by the fact that it didn't help you any.
There's no reason RSS won't continue to grow; it's already a successful technology and is only hitting its stride now. We're already well past the "early adopter" phase and entering into the "general public" phase.
I (and some others) have looked into this; right now Jabber penetration isn't enough to make this worthwhile. People still see Jabber as an IM protocol, rather then a generalized messaging system with far-reaching applications.
People, this is why you need to support Jabber rather then AIM, MSN, or ICQ; sure, in the short term more of your buddies may be on those (closed, proprietary, evil) services, but in the long term, w/ Jabber everywhere, the apps get a lot, lot cooler!
That's a good idea, now go write an RSS aggregator that supports HTTP auth,
You mean like this?
and then go convince everyone to support it in their servers.
No, only people who want private RSS files need to support it in their servers. And it's not like HTTP autentication is some sort of mystery, all reasonable web servers support it out of the box. After all, guess what, it's part of HTTP/1.0.
But first, you might want to think about how auth will interfere with RSS discovery (which is already screwed up enough).
Easy, it doesn't. Either you can get to the RSS feed or you can't, either way the aggregator has to handle it (people type in wrong URLs all the time, for instance, so any real aggregator has to handle errors).
You seriously overestimate the difficulty of this. Unusual, usually people underestimate difficulties. I hope you aren't a professional coder.
This makes even the copyright of programs a bit dubious.
Not really; you're taking the metaphor too literally. Software is like a recipe in many ways, but it is not absolutely identical to food recipes. For one thing, food recipes are short. Programs, by comparision, are gargantuan. In any reasonably analysis of the creativity required to create one versus the other, that factor alone is enough to render the similarity in this case irrelevant, and require you to analyse software on its own terms.
Software is safely covered under copyright and it would take a radical re-structuring of current copyright caselaw to undo that.
(Further, I think you're confusing fact vs. expression. "The Recipe" is not copyrightable, but the exact expression of the recipe may be, if it is written in a creative manner (and the standard of creativity is pretty low). That means I can write another expression containing the recipe freely, but that I can not copy your expression necessarily. Conflating "fact" vs. "expression" is similar to one of the problems that got us to Software Patents in the first place.)
Thanks, that'll do. Interesting looking.
My explanation of why Software Patents are oxymoronic.
One point I think I made more clearly, that should have been made in that piece and would have fit perfectly, is that to my knowledge, only software is covered by both Copyright and Patents; it should be no surprise that two systems that were never designed to work together, basically don't! Copyright fits software much better then patents; that's a sign it should be treated under the copyright system and not the patent system. IMHO, I also did a somewhat more thorough job of exploring that point.
Still, for a 1991 essay, that was pretty darned good.
(For those who don't recall, Melissa was distributed as a VBScript script, and as a result, was trivially easy to read the code to.)