VMWare, for the most part, runs x86 code natively on the processor. It traps and emulates some instructions, and scans executables before loading for the occasional non-virtualisable x86 instruction - The x86 PC-AT architecture is not fully virtualisable, unlike both many more modern architectures, and older archtectures that were better designed.
The x86 chip itself is a strange mixture of kludges, that have grown up over the past couple of decades. However, 486+ family chips can virtualise 8086 code, and there's "only" a "few" 80386+ instructions that the VMWare authors had to sacn out and deal with specially, so VMWare is NOT a PC emulator like bochs.
However, one also has to deal with device I/O, since none of the PC support chipset is customarily designed for virtualisation either - and this is what IS for the most part emulated in VMWare, hence the virtual BIOS, HD and gfx card.
For more information, consult the blurb about VMWare, and the documentation for Plex86, an open-source clone of VMWare
Well, not to poke a hole in your conspiracy theory or anything, but I think it's far more likely that they just replaced a handful of expletives with something less "offensive"
Yeah, I wasn't all that seriously suggesting it was a deliberate christian plot, of course - especially since real christians should be more offended, according to their religion, by swearing on God, than by swearing on a mere bodily function...
It just irritated me, really - I've never really understood what makes a word "bad" or "shameful" - I was punished for using certain words as a child, so I learned not to use them - but I never really did learn why I was not to use them.
So this would mean that if you run a blocking proxy, you can't let other people use it?
Yes, quite possibly. I'm unaware of a ruling either way on it, though.
However, since American law defines corporations as people, even if it was serving your entire office during work hours, you'd probably get away with it, since it wouldn't be distributing to the public as such - this is similar to the way corporations (including Microsoft) are allowed use, modify, and distribute within the company, GPL software, so long as they don't publish it!
Oh! the labyrinths of hot air we humans build!
Note however, that all the above is based on pre-DMCA, pre-UCITA, law. The problem is, the new laws and pending international treaties make things much less sensible, more confusing, and often just plain wrong.
In such situations it is important to remember that the legal system we humans have cooked up is not the law of nature - it is merely a convention adopted by the bulk of humanity in order to allow society to function smoothly. While the legal system is currently being perverted into a weapon that fiefdoms^H^H^Hcorporations use against eachother, the moment it gets too silly/harmful, all the populace does is ignore the law. This has happened countless times in the past - anti-witchcraft (and anti-welshmen) laws are still on the books in parts of the British Isles, but you don't get people burnt at the stake there for using blenders, televisions, and so on. (which would technically make them witches according to the criteria in the laws),
or shot at 40 paces with a longbow (for being welsh).
> But modification is one of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner.
NO. NO. NO. NO.
Modification, followed by subsequent redistribution is restricted by copyright law.
The mainstream media giants have managed to socially engineer this knowledge out of the vast majoirty of the sheep^H^H^H^H^Hpeople.
If I, upon legitimately obtaining copyrighted material, screw around with it, I'm not breaking the law unless I give a copy of it or the modified version to someone else.
Think about it - if I buy a painting from you, I'm free to draw a silly moustache and glasses on it, but, according to societal conventions currently enshrined in our legal system, I can't (a) sell copies of the painting without your permission or (b) sell copies of the modified painting without permsission. (I'm also usually allowed sell the original painting to someone else (this area is much murkier, and the reason behind the legal blurb at the start of european books about "may not be sold on without imposing similar conditions on the buyer" stuff)- that's the freedom that UCITA and software EULAs try to fight)
That's all pretty much a mixture of common sense and courstesy - but what the lawyers and media giants have done, is, via tricky wording and paying for new laws, is destroy all that.
Via assinine laws like the DMCA, and WIPO treaty provisions, our feudal overlords / corporate masters have managed to erode such "fair use" rights of the average person.
One wierd thing I think I noticed (but which I can't prove - never made tapes), was that the soundtracks of the camcorder-footage of the attacks was dubbed - the first few times Sky News (via Fox) here in Europe showed the videos, people were shouting "Shit! Fuck! Fuck!", but then, later the same footage had different people (with a higher proportion of female voices in the mix) going "Oh my God, Lord Help us" and crap like that.
I think that's appalling, if it's true. Much of western society is on the path to finally freeing itself from the shackles of religion, and the empty promises of religion were most likely the means used by the leaders of the terrorists to motivate the idiots carrying out the attack to commit suicide.
The original sounds more accurately reflected the current mindset of the vast majority of westerners - there weren't appeals to nebulous higher powers, just exclamations expressing shock.
Those currently in power, however, would have you believe that many more people follow irrational old belief systems than in reality - in reality, the religious nutters, in both Western and Muslim society, are a small, but vocal and powerful, minority.
I'm not entirely against massive invasions of privacy... provided they're not one-sided.
i.e. if the police have a CCTV network, (a) it should be public access and (b) there should be public-access cameras on the police too.
This somewhat trite example generalises to more other domains too - e.g. no branch of government should not be allowed use crypto if the citizens aren't.
The answer to the quesion "Who will watch the Watchers?" should always be "The Watched".
*Asymmetric* flow of information increases one person's power over another. To preserve the balance of power in the event of anti-crypto legislation, it would be neccessary to further increase the transparency of governmental security operations.
David Brin (well known hard sci-fi writer, among other things) has analysed this is in an easy-to-read manner in his book "The Transparent Society", the first chapter of which is available on-line here
I strongly recommend reading it, it illustrates problems with the logic of both some privacy advocating positions and some privacy invasion advocating positions.
So start pushing NOW for Reciprocal Transparency - e.g. if the police have a CCTV network, make sure it's public access, and that there are cameras in the police stations too, so that the watched may watch the watchers.
This is the only practical way to avoid the emergence of a 1984-style hell, and is a natural extension of current democratic systems.
David Brin, acclaimed hard sci-fi author covers this in detail in an approachable manner in his book "The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?", chapter one of which is available on his web page here
And lots of people were happy with horse+carts. Lots of people were happy with gas mantles. Lots of people were happy with manual spinning wheels.
In fact, lots of those people actively resisted the introduction of new and better technology, because it meant that their investment in time and effort in the old technology was devalued, and sometimes it meant they were out of a job.
That's the situation I encounter with IT "professionals" a lot. They won't switch from labour-intensive, inefficient, windows-based systems, because the windows based systems allow them to appear to be worth much more, since more people have to work flat out to maintain them.
This phenomenon is not limited to the computer industry - you'll often get manufactory workers' unions opposing upgrades to systems because it renders the workers obsolete.
Take LISP, make the syntax twice as annoying, and hey presto, XML!
XML is just an annoyingly verbose way of representing s-expressions, data structures that lisp was designed around.
So much so, in fact, that it's possible to do a 1:1 mapping of XML into Scheme - see this site for the most sensible way of processing XML - translate it into the equivalent scheme representation.
This allows you to use all the LISPy tricks in the book to munge your XML data.
Feeding a troll, but anyway. I REALLY have programmed robots (CNC machining stations, to be precise) to move in quite complex paths. It's piss easy, like programming a turtle (for those of you who remember primary-school computing in the 1980s), only the robot holds a rapidly rotating cutting tool instead of a pencil. Likle I said, easy. You program the robot once, and it does it 100s of times, thus turning out metal doohickeys for whatever reason you wanted them for.
They don't want you to use the command line. They want to maintain their relationship with the customers with them the developers and the customers the users.
They don't want those lines all blurry, like on Linux/BSD, or the way it used to be on AmigaOS - that would means the users are less dependent on "professional developers"
When I've used MS platforms, I'm always struck by how difficult it is to learn anything beyond a certain basic level compared to other systems - you end up having to pay for this, pay for that. There's also lack of freely available information where it really counts (MSDN is silent on huge swathes of interesting stuff) and powerful development tools. People don't even become interested in programming, because it's actively made more difficult for them to program for themselves than pay someone else to do it.
When I were a lad in the 8-bit days, computers ALWAYS came with a full language interpreter of one form or another, that always allowed access to the full power of the machine (however puny that power was:-). One of the main reasons people had computers was to write their own programs to do things only they had imagined. That creative power is concealed by default installs of microsoft OSes.
These days, many PCs have been perverted into some sort of click-and-drool substitute for TV, rather than a tool to augment human's thought processes.
Hey, I never claimed to be objective. But cognitive dissonance effects are common, and people who haven't studied psychology often aren't aware of the phenomenon (or at least don't know there's a name for it). I've caught myself exhibiting such behaviour - but I'm aware of it, and can therefore attempt to self-correct.
Lisp syntax is, pretty obviously, simple - one only needs to look at it compared to the huge BNF grammars for some other languages to illustrate this.
Fastest Java-like VM I've seen is the Tao/ Amiga one. It's an interesting architecture, since the virtual CPU has no particular upper limit on the number of registers you use, rather than the stack-machine approach used by most VMs.
Naah - it's that outsiders learned other language's bizarre syntaxes first.
I find LISP easier to read than most other languages (but I'm an irish speaker (verbs come first in sentences), and there's a theory that programming language comprehension depends on natural language comprehension), and the purity of the syntax means that writing programs that operate on programs is very easy (hence its popularity with AI researchers).
Then again, it could just that I'm wierd. I like APL and Forth too....
One thing worth noting is that XML is just an annoyingly verbose way of writing LISP.
While the world seems to have standardised on Java for XML work, the most clear, easy and natural way I have seen to process XML is in Scheme. This site has the details, defining an equivalent representation of everything XMLy in Scheme, and providing a cool parser implementation.
The fabled "scripting language in XML" could turn out to be pretty-printed scheme s-expressions...
Remember - when you're downloading XML, you're downloading communism^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HLISP !
Personally, I love LISP and Scheme. Their simple syntax makes far more sense to me than other languages.
I think it's a classic cognitive dissonance effect that causes programmers of other languages to complain - they've spent so much time learning their pet language's wierd syntax that to admit that lisp is easier is to devalue all that effort - and no-one likes to admit they've been wasting their own time, just like windows programmers who've wasted 2 years of thier life learning the intricacies of win32, or x86 asm coders who can't admit how awful x86 asm is compared to PPC or m68k asm.
Then again, there's a theory somewhere on the net that programming language preferences are influenced by the programmer's native natural language - I was raised partly in an Irish-speaking environment, so lisp may just naturally make more sense to me, due to the different structure of irish sentences.
AmigaDOS 0.x and 1.x were originally written in BCPL, the precursor to C. It was a quick port of "cambridge TriPOS", when the planned DOS, CAOS, wasn't finished in time (which is a shame, because it would have given the Amiga a more UNIX-like filesystem, and proper resource tracking, and it had a cool name). The rest of the OS was C and assembler for time-critical parts.
That's where all the BPTR wierdness originated when you programmed to dos.library in C.
AmigaDOS 2.x and above were re-written in C and hand-optimized assembler.
Assembly programming on the Amiga was more popular than on the PC, not only because of the performance benefits, but because the M68k is a much nicer and better-designed architecture than the x86 at the time- you don't have to fight insane register starving, and you can use easily use any address register as a stack pointer, since they can all be auto-decremented, and doing matrices/arrays is easier, thanks to various nice indexed addressing modes. There's very little of the "only put operands for this instrcution in this register" nonsense - the only distinctions are data, floating point, and address registers, and address registers allowed lots of arithmetic anyway. Thus, M68k asm is a lot easier than x86 - generally when people say "asm is really difficult", it's because they learnt x86 first. (By the way, the PowerPC, with a decent macro assembler, is even nicer to program in assembly than M68k)
The amiga also had a sweet set of standard asm system includes, that made programming in asm pretty much like programming in C anyway - i.e. it had structs and such, which were all autogenerated from the.h in.i files that were the asm analogue of the.h files.
Since amiga dynamic libraries had a really simple and logical structure, it was possible to easily define calls to all library functions as macro preprocessor constants too - so opening a window in assembly was "CALLGFX OpenWindow", for example. (It was also possible, and comonplace to "theme" the UI by patching grpahics.library on a per-function basis at run-time - the "SetPatch" command in your S:startup-sequence fixed bugs in the core system libraries in the same way)
Personally, I've found that the only reason I needed to go to University was to prove to other people I knew lots of things, so I could get a day job to support my hobbies.
(University was also nice for the social life, and the high-speed internet access (10 Base T LAN, then a fibre hop or two away from the UK JANET backbone in Manchester - bloody fast!), but they're hardly necessary...)
The stuff I was interested in myself I learnt anyway, by getting books/ online docs and reading them, experimenting myself, and talking to people.
If there was some way to print a verifiable listing of the stuff peoples' brains contain (like a guaranteed-true CV), it would save a lot of people the hassle of paying for a University to rubberstamp knowledge they have anyway.
There's some cool electricity experiments on amasci
Lots of other cool stuff too, lots of build-it-yourself things that actually work (and lots that probably don't, like electrical rockets, but they're in a separate category )
Huh? I am Irish, born and reared, too. My point was not that people don't value material wealth to some extent, just that they don't value it above everything else, and that excessive accumulation thereof is not considered particularly commendable - the people who get most praise seem to be those who share their gains around with the community, not those who accumulate vast fortunes and don't do much with them. And in Ireland, somewhat like in Japan, people consider respect earned from their peers more important than most other things. Accumulation of money does not automatically lead to that respect, although it is one possible means to an end if you want to do things that will earn you said respect.
Most people I know consider their reputation and their family more important than material wealth. A significant proportion still think that the peculiarly Irish brand of catholicism is more important (although I disagree, being an atheist).
I live Dublin, avoid coffee (because I went cold turkey and went through two days of blinding withdrawal headaches - either drink lots of coffee or drink none - In between is painful!), watch anime, and talk about sports.
I wouldn't consider an interest in sport to be exactly materialistic - in fact, athletic prowess is one of those "other than money" things that people hold in high esteem, along with artistic/creative talent and writing ability.
I certainly didn't say we were a third world country. We haven't been since the 1980s;-) (I remember when we "officially" stopped being one, when our GDP exceeded the sum of the interest payments on our various loans.)
A disdain for the glorification of capital gain above all else does not mean that one automatically poor, just that one realises that there's more to life. This is an attitude I have picked up from a fair proportion of people I know here in Ireland (and Australia), to a lesser extent in Britain, and much more rarely from Americans, whether they be rich or poor.
The thing is, property and material wealth are much more solid concepts in other cultures - in early Ireland, there was a concept of ownership, but it was transient. People were always stealing eachothers cows, lands, etc. It kept them occupied and made for interesting sagas.
The Irish language doesn't have a verb "To Have", you say "It is with me" - "Tá sé agam". This kindof expresses the transience of the situation of ownership in the Irish psyche, which still persists today, despite British and the current American cultural imperialism.
Ahh... but the very fact that you recognise it as a new and abnormal phenomenon, and one that you don't sound particularly happy about, means that "Romantic Ireland" is not dead and gone. Rest assured that there's plenty of people left who have feelings between hate and pity for those drivers of immaculate, mud-free 4x4s who certainly don't need a 4x4 to get around off-road on the farm.
Now that the economy's slowing down to saner levels, thanks to it's intimate dependence on currently recessional high-tech industries, there's been a bit of a media backlash against the nouveaux riches, at least in a goodly proportion of newspapers. Depends on what circles you move in, of course.
I'm pretty confident her father didn't develop the algorithm, based on experience with other teacher's children here - the teacher's children tend to be the ones who are treated most harshly by the teachers themselves, often having to do at least 2x amount of work for same levels of recognition. I would say that she was motivated to work extra hard and do something outstanding because her father would have been much harder to please - and children tend to automatically want to please their parents (At least until the parent falls from grace by some demonstration of fallibility).
Slashdot Mirror
Er.... no. That's just plain wrong.
VMWare, for the most part, runs x86 code natively on the processor. It traps and emulates some instructions, and scans executables before loading for the occasional non-virtualisable x86 instruction - The x86 PC-AT architecture is not fully virtualisable, unlike both many more modern architectures, and older archtectures that were better designed.
The x86 chip itself is a strange mixture of kludges, that have grown up over the past couple of decades. However, 486+ family chips can virtualise 8086 code, and there's "only" a "few" 80386+ instructions that the VMWare authors had to sacn out and deal with specially, so VMWare is NOT a PC emulator like bochs.
However, one also has to deal with device I/O, since none of the PC support chipset is customarily designed for virtualisation either - and this is what IS for the most part emulated in VMWare, hence the virtual BIOS, HD and gfx card.
For more information, consult the blurb about VMWare, and the documentation for Plex86, an open-source clone of VMWare
Well, not to poke a hole in your conspiracy theory or anything, but I think it's far more likely that they just replaced a handful of expletives with something less "offensive"
Yeah, I wasn't all that seriously suggesting it was a deliberate christian plot, of course - especially since real christians should be more offended, according to their religion, by swearing on God, than by swearing on a mere bodily function...
It just irritated me, really - I've never really understood what makes a word "bad" or "shameful" - I was punished for using certain words as a child, so I learned not to use them - but I never really did learn why I was not to use them.
So this would mean that if you run a blocking proxy, you can't let other people use it?
Yes, quite possibly. I'm unaware of a ruling either way on it, though.
However, since American law defines corporations as people, even if it was serving your entire office during work hours, you'd probably get away with it, since it wouldn't be distributing to the public as such - this is similar to the way corporations (including Microsoft) are allowed use, modify, and distribute within the company, GPL software, so long as they don't publish it!
Oh! the labyrinths of hot air we humans build!
Note however, that all the above is based on pre-DMCA, pre-UCITA, law. The problem is, the new laws and pending international treaties make things much less sensible, more confusing, and often just plain wrong.
In such situations it is important to remember that the legal system we humans have cooked up is not the law of nature - it is merely a convention adopted by the bulk of humanity in order to allow society to function smoothly. While the legal system is currently being perverted into a weapon that fiefdoms^H^H^Hcorporations use against eachother, the moment it gets too silly/harmful, all the populace does is ignore the law. This has happened countless times in the past - anti-witchcraft (and anti-welshmen) laws are still on the books in parts of the British Isles, but you don't get people burnt at the stake there for using blenders, televisions, and so on. (which would technically make them witches according to the criteria in the laws),
or shot at 40 paces with a longbow (for being welsh).
> But modification is one of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner.
NO. NO. NO. NO.
Modification, followed by subsequent redistribution is restricted by copyright law.
The mainstream media giants have managed to socially engineer this knowledge out of the vast majoirty of the sheep^H^H^H^H^Hpeople.
If I, upon legitimately obtaining copyrighted material, screw around with it, I'm not breaking the law unless I give a copy of it or the modified version to someone else.
Think about it - if I buy a painting from you, I'm free to draw a silly moustache and glasses on it, but, according to societal conventions currently enshrined in our legal system, I can't (a) sell copies of the painting without your permission or (b) sell copies of the modified painting without permsission. (I'm also usually allowed sell the original painting to someone else (this area is much murkier, and the reason behind the legal blurb at the start of european books about "may not be sold on without imposing similar conditions on the buyer" stuff)- that's the freedom that UCITA and software EULAs try to fight)
That's all pretty much a mixture of common sense and courstesy - but what the lawyers and media giants have done, is, via tricky wording and paying for new laws, is destroy all that.
Via assinine laws like the DMCA, and WIPO treaty provisions, our feudal overlords / corporate masters have managed to erode such "fair use" rights of the average person.
One wierd thing I think I noticed (but which I can't prove - never made tapes), was that the soundtracks of the camcorder-footage of the attacks was dubbed - the first few times Sky News (via Fox) here in Europe showed the videos, people were shouting "Shit! Fuck! Fuck!", but then, later the same footage had different people (with a higher proportion of female voices in the mix) going "Oh my God, Lord Help us" and crap like that.
I think that's appalling, if it's true. Much of western society is on the path to finally freeing itself from the shackles of religion, and the empty promises of religion were most likely the means used by the leaders of the terrorists to motivate the idiots carrying out the attack to commit suicide.
The original sounds more accurately reflected the current mindset of the vast majority of westerners - there weren't appeals to nebulous higher powers, just exclamations expressing shock.
Those currently in power, however, would have you believe that many more people follow irrational old belief systems than in reality - in reality, the religious nutters, in both Western and Muslim society, are a small, but vocal and powerful, minority.
FAITH IS NOT A VIRTUE.
I'm not entirely against massive invasions of privacy... provided they're not one-sided.
i.e. if the police have a CCTV network, (a) it should be public access and (b) there should be public-access cameras on the police too.
This somewhat trite example generalises to more other domains too - e.g. no branch of government should not be allowed use crypto if the citizens aren't.
The answer to the quesion "Who will watch the Watchers?" should always be "The Watched".
*Asymmetric* flow of information increases one person's power over another. To preserve the balance of power in the event of anti-crypto legislation, it would be neccessary to further increase the transparency of governmental security operations.
David Brin (well known hard sci-fi writer, among other things) has analysed this is in an easy-to-read manner in his book "The Transparent Society", the first chapter of which is available on-line here
I strongly recommend reading it, it illustrates problems with the logic of both some privacy advocating positions and some privacy invasion advocating positions.
There are efforts underway to get the team reassembled at another organization, but that is still very up in the air
I very much hope that that happens - you're doing great work, and I hope you can continue to do so.
So start pushing NOW for Reciprocal Transparency - e.g. if the police have a CCTV network, make sure it's public access, and that there are cameras in the police stations too, so that the watched may watch the watchers.
This is the only practical way to avoid the emergence of a 1984-style hell, and is a natural extension of current democratic systems.
David Brin, acclaimed hard sci-fi author covers this in detail in an approachable manner in his book "The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?", chapter one of which is available on his web page here
And lots of people were happy with horse+carts. Lots of people were happy with gas mantles. Lots of people were happy with manual spinning wheels.
In fact, lots of those people actively resisted the introduction of new and better technology, because it meant that their investment in time and effort in the old technology was devalued, and sometimes it meant they were out of a job.
That's the situation I encounter with IT "professionals" a lot. They won't switch from labour-intensive, inefficient, windows-based systems, because the windows based systems allow them to appear to be worth much more, since more people have to work flat out to maintain them.
This phenomenon is not limited to the computer industry - you'll often get manufactory workers' unions opposing upgrades to systems because it renders the workers obsolete.
Take LISP, make the syntax twice as annoying, and hey presto, XML!
XML is just an annoyingly verbose way of representing s-expressions, data structures that lisp was designed around.
So much so, in fact, that it's possible to do a 1:1 mapping of XML into Scheme - see this site for the most sensible way of processing XML - translate it into the equivalent scheme representation.
This allows you to use all the LISPy tricks in the book to munge your XML data.
Feeding a troll, but anyway. I REALLY have programmed robots (CNC machining stations, to be precise) to move in quite complex paths. It's piss easy, like programming a turtle (for those of you who remember primary-school computing in the 1980s), only the robot holds a rapidly rotating cutting tool instead of a pencil. Likle I said, easy. You program the robot once, and it does it 100s of times, thus turning out metal doohickeys for whatever reason you wanted them for.
YOU are talking out of your arse.
Touché :-)
Dunno about that, it surely is irritating when Microsoft abuse the term "innovation", when IP-nazis abuse the term "piracy", etc...
They don't want you to use the command line. They want to maintain their relationship with the customers with them the developers and the customers the users.
:-). One of the main reasons people had computers was to write their own programs to do things only they had imagined. That creative power is concealed by default installs of microsoft OSes.
They don't want those lines all blurry, like on Linux/BSD, or the way it used to be on AmigaOS - that would means the users are less dependent on "professional developers"
When I've used MS platforms, I'm always struck by how difficult it is to learn anything beyond a certain basic level compared to other systems - you end up having to pay for this, pay for that. There's also lack of freely available information where it really counts (MSDN is silent on huge swathes of interesting stuff) and powerful development tools. People don't even become interested in programming, because it's actively made more difficult for them to program for themselves than pay someone else to do it.
When I were a lad in the 8-bit days, computers ALWAYS came with a full language interpreter of one form or another, that always allowed access to the full power of the machine (however puny that power was
These days, many PCs have been perverted into some sort of click-and-drool substitute for TV, rather than a tool to augment human's thought processes.
Hey, I never claimed to be objective. But cognitive dissonance effects are common, and people who haven't studied psychology often aren't aware of the phenomenon (or at least don't know there's a name for it). I've caught myself exhibiting such behaviour - but I'm aware of it, and can therefore attempt to self-correct.
Lisp syntax is, pretty obviously, simple - one only needs to look at it compared to the huge BNF grammars for some other languages to illustrate this.
Fastest Java-like VM I've seen is the Tao/ Amiga one. It's an interesting architecture, since the virtual CPU has no particular upper limit on the number of registers you use, rather than the stack-machine approach used by most VMs.
Naah - it's that outsiders learned other language's bizarre syntaxes first.
I find LISP easier to read than most other languages (but I'm an irish speaker (verbs come first in sentences), and there's a theory that programming language comprehension depends on natural language comprehension), and the purity of the syntax means that writing programs that operate on programs is very easy (hence its popularity with AI researchers).
Then again, it could just that I'm wierd. I like APL and Forth too....
gaah... I mean this site, ssax.sourceforge.net
this is the master site, and also contains lots of other cool stuff.
One thing worth noting is that XML is just an annoyingly verbose way of writing LISP.
While the world seems to have standardised on Java for XML work, the most clear, easy and natural way I have seen to process XML is in Scheme. This site has the details, defining an equivalent representation of everything XMLy in Scheme, and providing a cool parser implementation.
The fabled "scripting language in XML" could turn out to be pretty-printed scheme s-expressions...
Remember - when you're downloading XML, you're downloading communism^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HLISP !
Personally, I love LISP and Scheme. Their simple syntax makes far more sense to me than other languages.
I think it's a classic cognitive dissonance effect that causes programmers of other languages to complain - they've spent so much time learning their pet language's wierd syntax that to admit that lisp is easier is to devalue all that effort - and no-one likes to admit they've been wasting their own time, just like windows programmers who've wasted 2 years of thier life learning the intricacies of win32, or x86 asm coders who can't admit how awful x86 asm is compared to PPC or m68k asm.
Then again, there's a theory somewhere on the net that programming language preferences are influenced by the programmer's native natural language - I was raised partly in an Irish-speaking environment, so lisp may just naturally make more sense to me, due to the different structure of irish sentences.
AmigaDOS 0.x and 1.x were originally written in BCPL, the precursor to C. It was a quick port of "cambridge TriPOS", when the planned DOS, CAOS, wasn't finished in time (which is a shame, because it would have given the Amiga a more UNIX-like filesystem, and proper resource tracking, and it had a cool name). The rest of the OS was C and assembler for time-critical parts.
.h in .i files that were the asm analogue of the .h files.
That's where all the BPTR wierdness originated when you programmed to dos.library in C.
AmigaDOS 2.x and above were re-written in C and hand-optimized assembler.
Assembly programming on the Amiga was more popular than on the PC, not only because of the performance benefits, but because the M68k is a much nicer and better-designed architecture than the x86 at the time- you don't have to fight insane register starving, and you can use easily use any address register as a stack pointer, since they can all be auto-decremented, and doing matrices/arrays is easier, thanks to various nice indexed addressing modes. There's very little of the "only put operands for this instrcution in this register" nonsense - the only distinctions are data, floating point, and address registers, and address registers allowed lots of arithmetic anyway. Thus, M68k asm is a lot easier than x86 - generally when people say "asm is really difficult", it's because they learnt x86 first. (By the way, the PowerPC, with a decent macro assembler, is even nicer to program in assembly than M68k)
The amiga also had a sweet set of standard asm system includes, that made programming in asm pretty much like programming in C anyway - i.e. it had structs and such, which were all autogenerated from the
Since amiga dynamic libraries had a really simple and logical structure, it was possible to easily define calls to all library functions as macro preprocessor constants too - so opening a window in assembly was "CALLGFX OpenWindow", for example. (It was also possible, and comonplace to "theme" the UI by patching grpahics.library on a per-function basis at run-time - the "SetPatch" command in your S:startup-sequence fixed bugs in the core system libraries in the same way)
Personally, I've found that the only reason I needed to go to University was to prove to other people I knew lots of things, so I could get a day job to support my hobbies.
(University was also nice for the social life, and the high-speed internet access (10 Base T LAN, then a fibre hop or two away from the UK JANET backbone in Manchester - bloody fast!), but they're hardly necessary...)
The stuff I was interested in myself I learnt anyway, by getting books/ online docs and reading them, experimenting myself, and talking to people.
If there was some way to print a verifiable listing of the stuff peoples' brains contain (like a guaranteed-true CV), it would save a lot of people the hassle of paying for a University to rubberstamp knowledge they have anyway.
There's some cool electricity experiments on amasci
Lots of other cool stuff too, lots of build-it-yourself things that actually work (and lots that probably don't, like electrical rockets, but they're in a separate category )
Huh? I am Irish, born and reared, too. My point was not that people don't value material wealth to some extent, just that they don't value it above everything else, and that excessive accumulation thereof is not considered particularly commendable - the people who get most praise seem to be those who share their gains around with the community, not those who accumulate vast fortunes and don't do much with them. And in Ireland, somewhat like in Japan, people consider respect earned from their peers more important than most other things. Accumulation of money does not automatically lead to that respect, although it is one possible means to an end if you want to do things that will earn you said respect.
;-) (I remember when we "officially" stopped being one, when our GDP exceeded the sum of the interest payments on our various loans.)
Most people I know consider their reputation and their family more important than material wealth. A significant proportion still think that the peculiarly Irish brand of catholicism is more important (although I disagree, being an atheist).
I live Dublin, avoid coffee (because I went cold turkey and went through two days of blinding withdrawal headaches - either drink lots of coffee or drink none - In between is painful!), watch anime, and talk about sports.
I wouldn't consider an interest in sport to be exactly materialistic - in fact, athletic prowess is one of those "other than money" things that people hold in high esteem, along with artistic/creative talent and writing ability.
I certainly didn't say we were a third world country. We haven't been since the 1980s
A disdain for the glorification of capital gain above all else does not mean that one automatically poor, just that one realises that there's more to life. This is an attitude I have picked up from a fair proportion of people I know here in Ireland (and Australia), to a lesser extent in Britain, and much more rarely from Americans, whether they be rich or poor.
The thing is, property and material wealth are much more solid concepts in other cultures - in early Ireland, there was a concept of ownership, but it was transient. People were always stealing eachothers cows, lands, etc. It kept them occupied and made for interesting sagas.
The Irish language doesn't have a verb "To Have", you say "It is with me" - "Tá sé agam". This kindof expresses the transience of the situation of ownership in the Irish psyche, which still persists today, despite British and the current American cultural imperialism.
Ahh... but the very fact that you recognise it as a new and abnormal phenomenon, and one that you don't sound particularly happy about, means that "Romantic Ireland" is not dead and gone. Rest assured that there's plenty of people left who have feelings between hate and pity for those drivers of immaculate, mud-free 4x4s who certainly don't need a 4x4 to get around off-road on the farm.
Now that the economy's slowing down to saner levels, thanks to it's intimate dependence on currently recessional high-tech industries, there's been a bit of a media backlash against the nouveaux riches, at least in a goodly proportion of newspapers. Depends on what circles you move in, of course.
I'm pretty confident her father didn't develop the algorithm, based on experience with other teacher's children here - the teacher's children tend to be the ones who are treated most harshly by the teachers themselves, often having to do at least 2x amount of work for same levels of recognition. I would say that she was motivated to work extra hard and do something outstanding because her father would have been much harder to please - and children tend to automatically want to please their parents (At least until the parent falls from grace by some demonstration of fallibility).