Default implementations for interfaces is something that I have really wanted in Java for a very long time. One problem that makes this hard is that two interfaces can define a method with the exact same signature, and one class can implement both interfaces with only one method. What if both interfaces have default implementations? Which one wins? The first or last interface listed in the implements clause? This seems a little hacky to me. Or perhaps we'd have to specify which implementation to use somewhere - probably on a method by method basis. It's tricky. If we go down that route, we might as well do MI, right? Actually, I haven't even convinced myself, really. I think there has to be a way for a language to support the idea that there is a chunk of code, common to two classes, where the relationship is not strong enough to be inheritance, but not weak enough to be simple aggregation. It's a composite. "Give me a class that does everything that this other class does, plus this extra stuff that I am adding, but in the end, treat this as simply a new class". We need this. What's the other language with Mixins? Those sound cool.
If the music publishers move to a system where all CDs they release are copy-protected, won't they just call them Enhanced CDs, or Compact Media Disks (CMDs) or something else? And won't these new disks be marketed as the next generation of music media, what we've all been waiting for? And won't the hardware manufacturers scramble to make the trivial change to support this "new" media format in their next generation CD players? And won't most consumers simply buy the new players if their new 'CDs' won't work?
Sometimes I think we need to remind ourselves that we, the geeks, are the minority - and even we are not immune. When I look at the piles of outdated computer equipment I have in my closet, I have to admit that I happily run on the consumption treadmill. "AGP? A new type of graphics card? I'll need a new motherboard? And the motherboard uses new RAM? Heck, I might as well get a new harddrive too!"
This article/proposal is one of the coolest things I've seen on the web in a very long time.
A million points to Gryffindor! Bold and daring, you get the Doritos!
/usr/local/waycool is full.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of marriage proposals...
"You've got my axe...and my bow...and my something borrowed..and MY something blue!"
First Pos^H^H^Hroposal!
But seriously, congratulations! Don't forget to try the chicken, I'll be here all week.
I have one of these boxes with an ASUS GeForce 2 MX400 PCI in the expansion slot. It took some work to get it to fit in the case around all of the cables, but it's in there and it works fine. I left the machine on for 36 hours straight and there were no problems. By the way, I use this as my lan gaming machine, and it works perfectly. Of course, I've had to tone down the graphic detail on Ghost Recon, but it is eminently playable. For non 3D or semi 3D games like D2 and Starcraft, this machine is awesome for convenience. I have mine set up with a P3-1G, 512M PC133CL2 SDRAM, and a WD 1000BB-SE hard drive. It's simply awesome.
Although I love it, there's always some downside: it is VERY loud. My "real" gaming machine is housed in a Lian-Li PC68 case (4 fans), runs Cheetah XL15 and Cheetah 73.4M 10k drives and it's running dual P3 1G, and the little Spacewalker is much louder than the big one! Also, the AC97 sound seems to click and pop in a couple of games - something to do with the interrupts, I hear (?). Putting it together is a bit of an adventure too. On the other hand, put the Lian Li next to the Spacewalker and it looks like a family reunion.
Whether you are working in a Real Job or in a Co-op situation, you'll have to do plenty of menial tasks. Your MO should be the same: figure out how to accomplish your assigned tasks very well, especially the ones you hate. Automate them, document them, create a script to get them down (whether in Perl or on a piece of paper for physical tasks). Free your mind from the meniality, get the work done fast, and then look around for cool things to get in on. Don't rely on management to give you cool things to do, find them and do them. As long as you get your work done, and don't disrupt the business in any way, you've got a high-tech playground to experiment in. If it's really horrible, look for alternatives next time around. Heck, one friend of mine actually worked at a software company as a lead developer while he was in school. Of course, he had loads of talent, a metric buttload of knowledge and went after what he wanted. And he rarely complained about the inevitable grunt work, he just got it out the way first, so he could have fun. I learned alot from him.
I have had good experiences with a Matrox Millenium 2 and an older ATI card (not sure on the model). Both of these were pretty close to plug and play. My Voodoo 2000 PCI took a little work, but ran fine once it was configured right. I had an old S3 card that took me a week to configure, complete nightmare (...challenge).
So, I'd put my vote in for late model (but not brand new) Matrox and ATI. $0.02
I'm with you on that one. For a good five years, Civ consumed almost all of my gaming time. I had my Amiga boot directly into Civ off the harddrive - which I bought primarily so I wouldn't have to run Civ off floppies anymore. And although I've bought every sequel or semi-sequel to the game (Colonization, CivNet, Civ2 (with every add on), Alpha Centauri, Call to Power, Call to Power 2), I have still played Civ more than all other games combined. There were earlier games that fascinated me, such as Seven Cities of Gold, MULE, Populous, SimCity and TradeWars, but Civilization brought together strategy, "god-mode", playability and REplayability in such a perfect package that I could barely put it down. I finally bought a 3D card last year so I could try FPS and RTS games and done a lot of this type of gaming, but it just doesn't compare to the total immersion of Civ. With Unreal Tournament, I am deeply into the game for about 10 minutes, and then it starts getting twitchy and mechanical and I'll lose interest after 30 minutes. With Civ, I would play the game for 12 hours straight, pumped up on caffeine, and when I finally had to stop from exhaustion, I'd have leg cramps and my back would crackle from sitting still for so long. I'm not saying the cramps and crackle are Good Things, but any game that can do that to you is doing something right. The stories I hear from EQer's sound the same, which is why I can never, ever play EQ. But EQ has nothing on Civ - Civ was 2D, single player, came on four floppies and the individual games were finite, and yet it is one of the best games ever made. If someone can capture the Civ magic and make it a massively multiplayer experience on the net, than EQ is done for.
Wasn't it a binary digit? Wouldn't that be 1 out of 2 people? Or is there some sort of cool statistical study out there that shows that people pick "0" 90% of the time when asked to pick between 1 and 0?
I have read every Lem book I've ever been able to get my hands on (in English). Solaris is a great book, deep and thought provoking. I can't pick a favorite Lem book, because they seem to all be pieces of a larger whole. Like Philip K Dick, there are themes that are visited over and over again and explored in different ways while still being entertaining without the larger picture. The big reward for me was seeing the bigger picture and related themes as I read his books. I also agree whole-heartedly with an earlier post that his books are infinitely re-readable. This is particularly true if you've read many Lem books.
I haven't found too many authors that have this kind of effect on me, so if anyone knows of any more, please let me know. (The list right now is Lem, Dick and Rudy Rucker - providing Rudy writes another dozen books:)
I already own two copies of the original trilogy: the "original" original, and the special edition. I almost bought the letterbox version of the special edition when I saw that later. I was in the checkout line, and I asked myself "How many times are you going to buy Star Wars?" Luckily, I escaped, and decided to stop emptying my pockets every time another version of the same movie comes out. I'll wait for the DVD version with tons of extra features. I'd even pay a premium to get it! But I simply won't bother spending money on a crappy VHS tape or a DVD that's devoid of features. On the other hand, I'd pay almost any amount to get the theoretical full-featured DVD. $100? No problem!
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haiku! god bless you
seventeen syllables is
nothing to sneeze at
Default implementations for interfaces is something that I have really wanted in Java for a very long time. One problem that makes this hard is that two interfaces can define a method with the exact same signature, and one class can implement both interfaces with only one method. What if both interfaces have default implementations? Which one wins? The first or last interface listed in the implements clause? This seems a little hacky to me. Or perhaps we'd have to specify which implementation to use somewhere - probably on a method by method basis. It's tricky. If we go down that route, we might as well do MI, right? Actually, I haven't even convinced myself, really. I think there has to be a way for a language to support the idea that there is a chunk of code, common to two classes, where the relationship is not strong enough to be inheritance, but not weak enough to be simple aggregation. It's a composite. "Give me a class that does everything that this other class does, plus this extra stuff that I am adding, but in the end, treat this as simply a new class". We need this. What's the other language with Mixins? Those sound cool.
If the music publishers move to a system where all CDs they release are copy-protected, won't they just call them Enhanced CDs, or Compact Media Disks (CMDs) or something else? And won't these new disks be marketed as the next generation of music media, what we've all been waiting for? And won't the hardware manufacturers scramble to make the trivial change to support this "new" media format in their next generation CD players? And won't most consumers simply buy the new players if their new 'CDs' won't work?
Sometimes I think we need to remind ourselves that we, the geeks, are the minority - and even we are not immune. When I look at the piles of outdated computer equipment I have in my closet, I have to admit that I happily run on the consumption treadmill. "AGP? A new type of graphics card? I'll need a new motherboard? And the motherboard uses new RAM? Heck, I might as well get a new harddrive too!"
This article/proposal is one of the coolest things I've seen on the web in a very long time.
A million points to Gryffindor!
Bold and daring, you get the Doritos!
/usr/local/waycool is full.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of marriage proposals...
"You've got my axe...and my bow...and my something borrowed..and MY something blue!"
First Pos^H^H^Hroposal!
But seriously, congratulations! Don't forget to try the chicken, I'll be here all week.
I'm glad some countries have some sense.
I have one of these boxes with an ASUS GeForce 2 MX400 PCI in the expansion slot. It took some work to get it to fit in the case around all of the cables, but it's in there and it works fine. I left the machine on for 36 hours straight and there were no problems. By the way, I use this as my lan gaming machine, and it works perfectly. Of course, I've had to tone down the graphic detail on Ghost Recon, but it is eminently playable. For non 3D or semi 3D games like D2 and Starcraft, this machine is awesome for convenience. I have mine set up with a P3-1G, 512M PC133CL2 SDRAM, and a WD 1000BB-SE hard drive. It's simply awesome.
Although I love it, there's always some downside: it is VERY loud. My "real" gaming machine is housed in a Lian-Li PC68 case (4 fans), runs Cheetah XL15 and Cheetah 73.4M 10k drives and it's running dual P3 1G, and the little Spacewalker is much louder than the big one! Also, the AC97 sound seems to click and pop in a couple of games - something to do with the interrupts, I hear (?). Putting it together is a bit of an adventure too. On the other hand, put the Lian Li next to the Spacewalker and it looks like a family reunion.
All hail Pico! I hope I never have to learn vi or emacs!
Whether you are working in a Real Job or in a Co-op situation, you'll have to do plenty of menial tasks. Your MO should be the same: figure out how to accomplish your assigned tasks very well, especially the ones you hate. Automate them, document them, create a script to get them down (whether in Perl or on a piece of paper for physical tasks). Free your mind from the meniality, get the work done fast, and then look around for cool things to get in on. Don't rely on management to give you cool things to do, find them and do them. As long as you get your work done, and don't disrupt the business in any way, you've got a high-tech playground to experiment in. If it's really horrible, look for alternatives next time around. Heck, one friend of mine actually worked at a software company as a lead developer while he was in school. Of course, he had loads of talent, a metric buttload of knowledge and went after what he wanted. And he rarely complained about the inevitable grunt work, he just got it out the way first, so he could have fun. I learned alot from him.
I have had good experiences with a Matrox Millenium 2 and an older ATI card (not sure on the model). Both of these were pretty close to plug and play. My Voodoo 2000 PCI took a little work, but ran fine once it was configured right. I had an old S3 card that took me a week to configure, complete nightmare (...challenge).
So, I'd put my vote in for late model (but not brand new) Matrox and ATI. $0.02
I'm with you on that one. For a good five years, Civ consumed almost all of my gaming time. I had my Amiga boot directly into Civ off the harddrive - which I bought primarily so I wouldn't have to run Civ off floppies anymore. And although I've bought every sequel or semi-sequel to the game (Colonization, CivNet, Civ2 (with every add on), Alpha Centauri, Call to Power, Call to Power 2), I have still played Civ more than all other games combined. There were earlier games that fascinated me, such as Seven Cities of Gold, MULE, Populous, SimCity and TradeWars, but Civilization brought together strategy, "god-mode", playability and REplayability in such a perfect package that I could barely put it down. I finally bought a 3D card last year so I could try FPS and RTS games and done a lot of this type of gaming, but it just doesn't compare to the total immersion of Civ. With Unreal Tournament, I am deeply into the game for about 10 minutes, and then it starts getting twitchy and mechanical and I'll lose interest after 30 minutes. With Civ, I would play the game for 12 hours straight, pumped up on caffeine, and when I finally had to stop from exhaustion, I'd have leg cramps and my back would crackle from sitting still for so long. I'm not saying the cramps and crackle are Good Things, but any game that can do that to you is doing something right. The stories I hear from EQer's sound the same, which is why I can never, ever play EQ. But EQ has nothing on Civ - Civ was 2D, single player, came on four floppies and the individual games were finite, and yet it is one of the best games ever made. If someone can capture the Civ magic and make it a massively multiplayer experience on the net, than EQ is done for.
Wasn't it a binary digit? Wouldn't that be 1 out of 2 people? Or is there some sort of cool statistical study out there that shows that people pick "0" 90% of the time when asked to pick between 1 and 0?
I have read every Lem book I've ever been able to get my hands on (in English). Solaris is a great book, deep and thought provoking. I can't pick a favorite Lem book, because they seem to all be pieces of a larger whole. Like Philip K Dick, there are themes that are visited over and over again and explored in different ways while still being entertaining without the larger picture. The big reward for me was seeing the bigger picture and related themes as I read his books. I also agree whole-heartedly with an earlier post that his books are infinitely re-readable. This is particularly true if you've read many Lem books. I haven't found too many authors that have this kind of effect on me, so if anyone knows of any more, please let me know. (The list right now is Lem, Dick and Rudy Rucker - providing Rudy writes another dozen books :)
I already own two copies of the original trilogy: the "original" original, and the special edition. I almost bought the letterbox version of the special edition when I saw that later. I was in the checkout line, and I asked myself "How many times are you going to buy Star Wars?" Luckily, I escaped, and decided to stop emptying my pockets every time another version of the same movie comes out. I'll wait for the DVD version with tons of extra features. I'd even pay a premium to get it! But I simply won't bother spending money on a crappy VHS tape or a DVD that's devoid of features. On the other hand, I'd pay almost any amount to get the theoretical full-featured DVD. $100? No problem!