Cultural differences. Many Irish, perhaps even most of them, don't value material wealth above all else, despite the usual cultural imperialism of imported hollywood trash. In fact, they tend to be rather disdainful of people who think that having material wealth makes one more worthy of admiration. Her father's just saving her from Evil Consumerist Brainwashing.
She is profiting massively from it, in Irish terms, not [insert derogatory term for materialistic rest of world] terms - lots of people who matter know her name, and know she's smart. In Ireland, reputation tends to be much more important than money.
Look to Java. There are J2EE implementations that run fine on Linux.
A lot of linux server rollouts these days are really Java rollouts. Java Beans are the component architecture, the component market is made up of Java Bean vendors.
You can get Beans that do anything from embedded 360-degree picture viewers to transactional EJBs for talking to mainframe datastores.
That's what MS is afraid of. Linux + Java leaves no room for them in the mid-range, since Java already does now what MS say.NET may one day do.
If your last experience of Java was the MS 1.1 JVM running some crappy applet in IE, I recommend you check out an up-to-date Java VM, such as IBM's 1.3 or Sun's 1.4 beta, both available on Linux. Also try the netbeans/forte development environment - It's very nice.
There are well defined, cross-platform Fortran and C bindings for OpenGL - so if they *were* doing CFD or heat flow visualisation, then OpenGL is the most likely choice. Also, all really high-end cards are OpenGL first, DirectX second - they tend to be geared towards very large numbers of triangles necessary for scientific visualisation and modelling work, not the big textures abnd relatively low poly counts found in games, anyway, so OpenGL is the logical choice.
Direct3D means you basically have to use MS VC++ and COM on windows. I know that, in theory, you can use the COM objects from other languages with COM bindings, but that's painful.
I've got one - they actually work quite well - much sturdier than normal beach balls, and their fabric finish improves grip, and means that they're easier to catch and hold. They also don't have that icky (well, depends what you're into) slimy plastic feel of an ordinary beach ball when they get wet.
yeah, I've done m68k, PPC, x86 (and er... 6502) asm coding, and with x86 you spend a fair amount of time wasting instructions fighting with register starving and stack operations.
People who learn x86 asm first do this automatically and think it's normal. Then there's a cognitive dissonance effect whereby they have spent so much time learning the messy intricacies of the x86 architecture, that when someone disses it, to agree with them that it sucks would be to devalue the investment of time and effort they spent learning it, so they defend it in spite of the evidence. A similar effect happens with most things people take time+effort to learn. The trick is to be aware of it and catch yourself at it.
Programming the m68k and PPC in macro assembler is reasonably painless and not that hard.
Programming the x86 is a bit of a pain in the arse compared to them, and feels much more like 6502 programming....
All in all, the x86 is pretty much the suckiest mainstream architecture still around today. It's funny, that - both the most common CPU (x86) and Operating system ( windos ) suck. My theory is that this is because most people are stupid.
Just to let you know, Amiga Inc. actually have a product available again, in conjunction with Tao - it's a language independent VM architecture that can run on x86 among other things, both native and hosted under linux or windows. It's actually pretty well-designed, sortof a cross between what Java or.NET should have been and a unixy system, and has some pretty sweet features (including being a very fast Java environment). It doesn't really have all that much to do with the original Amiga design except for the name, though (and the virtual processor assembly is very similar to the (already quite C-like, with structs and so on) Amiga-style M68k/PPC macro assembly).
I've actually got the SDK sitting on my desk, so, for once, it's not complete vaporware (unfortunately I've got the windows-hosted version, which is utterly useless to me with my linux-only PC).
It's also the OS for a product that/is/ currently vapor - a non-apple PPC computer from merlancia. Even without the new Amiga OS, the merlancia box'd be nice, if only to put LinuxPPC on. PPC is so much nicer than x86, it's a shame it's tricky to find anything but apple mobos...
It would hardly matter anymore, given the existence of a magic cloning ray. Its existence would mean that scarcity was no longer a factor in the physical world and current forms of economy (the distribution of limited resources), such as capitalism and communism, would be rendered obsolete - because there would be no limited resources. So you wouldn't have to work as a taxi driver anymore. If you want to continue being a taxi driver just because you enjoy it, then so be it, but if the only taxi drivers are doing because they enjoy it, they're not likely to want to copy your picture anyway.
The music-copying issue is only the tail end. Just wait until all factory workers are made redundant thanks to nanoreplication devices. It's already happened to the scribes, with the invention of the printing press - the scribes, at least in England, fought very hard _against_ the introduction of the printing press, and they had the ear of the King at the time. But look who won in the long run...
Re:Napster Fair Use? Give Me a Break!
on
The End of Innovation?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Copying copyrighted information is not stealing. Stealing would mean that if I took it, you know longer have it. This is blatantly false. Copyright infringement is a more accurate term, though far less emotive.
It is only human convention that keeps copyright around, not some law of nature. And, at present, the original motivations for copyright are being perverted in the current implementation, so civil disobedience is a valid response.
PNG's not superior in every way:
The other reason GIF is still around is AnimGIF. Yes, sane people hate the damn things, but porn sites and banner adders love them.
Now, I know mozilla and konqueror can be persuaded to support MNG, the PNG superset that's a worthy replacement of AnimGIFs, as well as being a decent lossless animation format, but, when I last used windows, IE didn't like 'em. So people still use AnimGIFs for cheap effects.
Re:It's all about perception of invincibility
on
Breaking Windows
·
· Score: 2
Not sure about that. Here (Ireland, Europe), Microsoft has ads plastered everywhere, sunday papers, t.v., all sorts of crap. There's a laughable one where they prate on about w2k's superior reliability.... when compared to previous MS products. In effect, "our previous product was shite, so you should buy our new one, which we say isn't shite, (just like we said our last one wasn't shite back when we released it.)".
Fortunately, at least some people over here are sensible enough not to fall for that crap. Plenty do, though, enough to keep MS in business, obviously.
They also do a lot of product placement - making sure the windows logo is displayed in the background of a t.v. broadcast about computers, etc.
Then again, they may be fighting harder in europe because they're less secure here - the european governments that matter (france, germany) want to get reduce E.U. dependency on american tech.
As usual, it is worth pointing out that if the GPL were ever found unenforceable, then you have NO right under copyright law and international treaty to use the code - it doesn't suddenly become public domain.
This is one of the reasons the GPL tends not to get challenged - it's a lose-lose situation for a GPL infringer who challenges it in court:
Scenario a: GPL challenge fails. Infringer has to GPL all derived work of original GPL code that he wants to distribute. Presumably he didn't want to do this, otherwise he wouldn't have taken it to court...
Scenario b: GPL challenge succeeds. Infringer has to stop distributing all derived work of original GPL code, as he now has no rights granted to him by the original copyright holder to use the code.
True solid modelling models solids. While marketers might abuse the term, people at SIGGRAPH tend not to. What you describe is "constructive solid geometry" (CSG), which may be used by both solid and surface modellers.
The transmissivity is a measure of how much a solid transmits incident light through it. It's mathematically related to the reflectance, so I'm not quite sure what the AC meant. chances are if you vary one you vary the other, as you (essentially) point out in your final line. See the lighting design knowledgebase.
wave mechanics dictates the transmissivity, reflectance, index of refraction, etc. properties of a particular medium - and they may be different for different frequencies of light (obviously, otherwise everything would be the same colour...).
The first AC has at least used Real3D before, you,however, seem to be coming from an exclusively surface modelling background...
Well I've never seen it done in Real3D. That's not to say it hasn't been. Do you have any evidence? I'm not dissing Real3D (in fact, I'm a long time fan, since 1.4 on the Amiga), but it has its limits, although anisotropic texturing is within its capabilities, I've only ever seen it used for "oily brushed metal" effects.
On the plus side, you can now get Real3D on linux! There's a minimal free download version, and a $300 beta version (:-( )
The thing is, burning oil is silly - you yourself give examples of much better uses it can be put to - making plastics and paints, for example.
It has been repeatedly demonstrated over the past 100 years that anytime anyone even claims to have invented anything that would effectively eliminate energy scarcity, that person is "disappeared".
Just to point out, there's a good functional XML parser/processor available for Scheme - as everyone here knows, XML is just a verbose way of writing certain Lisp S-Expressions. This software will allow you to load any XML in as a lump of Scheme, and it can then be treated like any other Scheme data structure you've been taught how to process in CS 101. See www.lh.com/~oleg/ftp/Scheme/xml.html
The whole western body-shame thing is a bit silly, really. The world would be a better place with more nudity.
A lot of the time, the point of prohibiting something is to make it _more_ desirable - personally, I believe this applies to nudity as well - if you spend some time in a naturist area, you quickly become desensitized.
I'm all for repealing archaic "decency" laws based on obsolete judeo-christian weirdness - if anyone was allowed get naked as and when they feel like it, the novelty would soon wear off.... and body shame is learnt by children, it's not natural, or upon any sensible analysis, healthy - I mean, your body is you, and being permanently ashamed of yourself is psychologically damaging, I'd say...
After all, clothes have their uses - warmth, decoration, etc... no need to mandate them, though.
Yeah, I think you may be right there, all right - that's why I just said "a bit off". AmigaBasic in itself was probably the best thought-out and cleanest Basic MS wrote, it's just a shame that Basic exists, corrupting the minds of programmers everywhere (they should really learn lisp/scheme first, in my opinion, or at least forth:-)
Your sig: The semantic content of XML is equivalent to S-expressions, the core data structure of Lisp --aLispGuru
Perhaps you would considering linking your sig to an implementation of the above that makes this very clear, as well as being a handy way of handling XML in Scheme:
www.lh.com/~oleg/ftp/Scheme/xml.html
Sorry, you're a bit off. AmigaBasic was written by MS, and persisted till AmigaOS 1.2.
Unfortunately, MS, in direct contravention of CBM Amiga development guidelines, used the upper 8-bits of the 32-bit M68k address space for type data (to acheive a typed-pointer effect a bit like a lisp machine) - since Amigas up to 1.2 only used 24-bits of the address space. However,
when Amigas went true 32-bit-clean, as CBM always said they would, every AmigaBasic application broke. Conspiracy theorists say that MS did this deliberately.
With AmigaOS 1.3, AmigaBasic was dropped, and with 2.0, the much more powerful ARexx was included as a standard system-wide scripting language. Pretty much every Amiga application after that had at least one ARexx message port for scripting support.
The third-party languages AMOS and Blitz Basic were particularly popular among games developers.
> You can't tell me any amount of engineering in the world can make those things "safe".
Safer than they were anyway - safer to the point of (almost:-) passing EU regulations in my case... but as I hinted I don't necessarily think that's a good thing...
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Cultural differences. Many Irish, perhaps even most of them, don't value material wealth above all else, despite the usual cultural imperialism of imported hollywood trash. In fact, they tend to be rather disdainful of people who think that having material wealth makes one more worthy of admiration. Her father's just saving her from Evil Consumerist Brainwashing.
She is profiting massively from it, in Irish terms, not [insert derogatory term for materialistic rest of world] terms - lots of people who matter know her name, and know she's smart. In Ireland, reputation tends to be much more important than money.
Mid range?
.NET may one day do.
Look to Java. There are J2EE implementations that run fine on Linux.
A lot of linux server rollouts these days are really Java rollouts. Java Beans are the component architecture, the component market is made up of Java Bean vendors.
You can get Beans that do anything from embedded 360-degree picture viewers to transactional EJBs for talking to mainframe datastores.
That's what MS is afraid of. Linux + Java leaves no room for them in the mid-range, since Java already does now what MS say
If your last experience of Java was the MS 1.1 JVM running some crappy applet in IE, I recommend you check out an up-to-date Java VM, such as IBM's 1.3 or Sun's 1.4 beta, both available on Linux. Also try the netbeans/forte development environment - It's very nice.
There are well defined, cross-platform Fortran and C bindings for OpenGL - so if they *were* doing CFD or heat flow visualisation, then OpenGL is the most likely choice. Also, all really high-end cards are OpenGL first, DirectX second - they tend to be geared towards very large numbers of triangles necessary for scientific visualisation and modelling work, not the big textures abnd relatively low poly counts found in games, anyway, so OpenGL is the logical choice.
Direct3D means you basically have to use MS VC++ and COM on windows. I know that, in theory, you can use the COM objects from other languages with COM bindings, but that's painful.
I've got one - they actually work quite well - much sturdier than normal beach balls, and their fabric finish improves grip, and means that they're easier to catch and hold. They also don't have that icky (well, depends what you're into) slimy plastic feel of an ordinary beach ball when they get wet.
yeah, I've done m68k, PPC, x86 (and er... 6502) asm coding, and with x86 you spend a fair amount of time wasting instructions fighting with register starving and stack operations.
People who learn x86 asm first do this automatically and think it's normal. Then there's a cognitive dissonance effect whereby they have spent so much time learning the messy intricacies of the x86 architecture, that when someone disses it, to agree with them that it sucks would be to devalue the investment of time and effort they spent learning it, so they defend it in spite of the evidence. A similar effect happens with most things people take time+effort to learn. The trick is to be aware of it and catch yourself at it.
Programming the m68k and PPC in macro assembler is reasonably painless and not that hard.
Programming the x86 is a bit of a pain in the arse compared to them, and feels much more like 6502 programming....
All in all, the x86 is pretty much the suckiest mainstream architecture still around today. It's funny, that - both the most common CPU (x86) and Operating system ( windos ) suck. My theory is that this is because most people are stupid.
Just to let you know, Amiga Inc. actually have a product available again, in conjunction with Tao - it's a language independent VM architecture that can run on x86 among other things, both native and hosted under linux or windows. It's actually pretty well-designed, sortof a cross between what Java or .NET should have been and a unixy system, and has some pretty sweet features (including being a very fast Java environment). It doesn't really have all that much to do with the original Amiga design except for the name, though (and the virtual processor assembly is very similar to the (already quite C-like, with structs and so on) Amiga-style M68k/PPC macro assembly).
/is/ currently vapor - a non-apple PPC computer from merlancia. Even without the new Amiga OS, the merlancia box'd be nice, if only to put LinuxPPC on. PPC is so much nicer than x86, it's a shame it's tricky to find anything but apple mobos...
I've actually got the SDK sitting on my desk, so, for once, it's not complete vaporware (unfortunately I've got the windows-hosted version, which is utterly useless to me with my linux-only PC).
It's also the OS for a product that
A solar furnace might do nicely on the beach, provided you didn't leave it too late to start the bonfire...
You can make a very cheap one using a few hundred small mirrors and lots of patience. See amasci for this and lots of other fun projects....
It would hardly matter anymore, given the existence of a magic cloning ray. Its existence would mean that scarcity was no longer a factor in the physical world and current forms of economy (the distribution of limited resources), such as capitalism and communism, would be rendered obsolete - because there would be no limited resources. So you wouldn't have to work as a taxi driver anymore. If you want to continue being a taxi driver just because you enjoy it, then so be it, but if the only taxi drivers are doing because they enjoy it, they're not likely to want to copy your picture anyway.
The music-copying issue is only the tail end. Just wait until all factory workers are made redundant thanks to nanoreplication devices. It's already happened to the scribes, with the invention of the printing press - the scribes, at least in England, fought very hard _against_ the introduction of the printing press, and they had the ear of the King at the time. But look who won in the long run...
Copying copyrighted information is not stealing. Stealing would mean that if I took it, you know longer have it. This is blatantly false. Copyright infringement is a more accurate term, though far less emotive.
It is only human convention that keeps copyright around, not some law of nature. And, at present, the original motivations for copyright are being perverted in the current implementation, so civil disobedience is a valid response.
PNG's not superior in every way:
The other reason GIF is still around is AnimGIF. Yes, sane people hate the damn things, but porn sites and banner adders love them.
Now, I know mozilla and konqueror can be persuaded to support MNG, the PNG superset that's a worthy replacement of AnimGIFs, as well as being a decent lossless animation format, but, when I last used windows, IE didn't like 'em. So people still use AnimGIFs for cheap effects.
Not sure about that. Here (Ireland, Europe), Microsoft has ads plastered everywhere, sunday papers, t.v., all sorts of crap. There's a laughable one where they prate on about w2k's superior reliability.... when compared to previous MS products. In effect, "our previous product was shite, so you should buy our new one, which we say isn't shite, (just like we said our last one wasn't shite back when we released it.)".
Fortunately, at least some people over here are sensible enough not to fall for that crap. Plenty do, though, enough to keep MS in business, obviously.
They also do a lot of product placement - making sure the windows logo is displayed in the background of a t.v. broadcast about computers, etc.
Then again, they may be fighting harder in europe because they're less secure here - the european governments that matter (france, germany) want to get reduce E.U. dependency on american tech.
As usual, it is worth pointing out that if the GPL were ever found unenforceable, then you have NO right under copyright law and international treaty to use the code - it doesn't suddenly become public domain.
This is one of the reasons the GPL tends not to get challenged - it's a lose-lose situation for a GPL infringer who challenges it in court:
Scenario a: GPL challenge fails. Infringer has to GPL all derived work of original GPL code that he wants to distribute. Presumably he didn't want to do this, otherwise he wouldn't have taken it to court...
Scenario b: GPL challenge succeeds. Infringer has to stop distributing all derived work of original GPL code, as he now has no rights granted to him by the original copyright holder to use the code.
Umph. Maybe he was just amusing himself, like the way an 8 year old boy will torment ants.
I'd have to differ with you there.
True solid modelling models solids. While marketers might abuse the term, people at SIGGRAPH tend not to. What you describe is "constructive solid geometry" (CSG), which may be used by both solid and surface modellers.
The transmissivity is a measure of how much a solid transmits incident light through it. It's mathematically related to the reflectance, so I'm not quite sure what the AC meant. chances are if you vary one you vary the other, as you (essentially) point out in your final line. See the lighting design knowledgebase.
wave mechanics dictates the transmissivity, reflectance, index of refraction, etc. properties of a particular medium - and they may be different for different frequencies of light (obviously, otherwise everything would be the same colour...).
The first AC has at least used Real3D before, you,however, seem to be coming from an exclusively surface modelling background...
Well I've never seen it done in Real3D. That's not to say it hasn't been. Do you have any evidence? I'm not dissing Real3D (in fact, I'm a long time fan, since 1.4 on the Amiga), but it has its limits, although anisotropic texturing is within its capabilities, I've only ever seen it used for "oily brushed metal" effects.
:-( )
On the plus side, you can now get Real3D on linux! There's a minimal free download version, and a $300 beta version (
The thing is, burning oil is silly - you yourself give examples of much better uses it can be put to - making plastics and paints, for example.
It has been repeatedly demonstrated over the past 100 years that anytime anyone even claims to have invented anything that would effectively eliminate energy scarcity, that person is "disappeared".
Just to point out, there's a good functional XML parser/processor available for Scheme - as everyone here knows, XML is just a verbose way of writing certain Lisp S-Expressions. This software will allow you to load any XML in as a lump of Scheme, and it can then be treated like any other Scheme data structure you've been taught how to process in CS 101. See www.lh.com/~oleg/ftp/Scheme/xml.html
for example: <WEIGHT unit="pound">
<NET certified="certified"> 67 </NET>
<GROSS> 95 </GROSS>
</WEIGHT>
becomes:
(WEIGHT (@ (unit "pound"))
(NET (@ (certified)) 67)
(GROSS 95)
)
There's a major difference - if I take your painting, you don't have it anymore - if I copy a file, we both have it.
The whole western body-shame thing is a bit silly, really. The world would be a better place with more nudity.
A lot of the time, the point of prohibiting something is to make it _more_ desirable - personally, I believe this applies to nudity as well - if you spend some time in a naturist area, you quickly become desensitized.
I'm all for repealing archaic "decency" laws based on obsolete judeo-christian weirdness - if anyone was allowed get naked as and when they feel like it, the novelty would soon wear off.... and body shame is learnt by children, it's not natural, or upon any sensible analysis, healthy - I mean, your body is you, and being permanently ashamed of yourself is psychologically damaging, I'd say...
After all, clothes have their uses - warmth, decoration, etc... no need to mandate them, though.
Yeah, I think you may be right there, all right - that's why I just said "a bit off". AmigaBasic in itself was probably the best thought-out and cleanest Basic MS wrote, it's just a shame that Basic exists, corrupting the minds of programmers everywhere (they should really learn lisp/scheme first, in my opinion, or at least forth :-)
Your sig: The semantic content of XML is equivalent to S-expressions, the core data structure of Lisp --aLispGuru
Perhaps you would considering linking your sig to an implementation of the above that makes this very clear, as well as being a handy way of handling XML in Scheme:
www.lh.com/~oleg/ftp/Scheme/xml.html
Sorry, you're a bit off. AmigaBasic was written by MS, and persisted till AmigaOS 1.2.
Unfortunately, MS, in direct contravention of CBM Amiga development guidelines, used the upper 8-bits of the 32-bit M68k address space for type data (to acheive a typed-pointer effect a bit like a lisp machine) - since Amigas up to 1.2 only used 24-bits of the address space. However,
when Amigas went true 32-bit-clean, as CBM always said they would, every AmigaBasic application broke. Conspiracy theorists say that MS did this deliberately.
With AmigaOS 1.3, AmigaBasic was dropped, and with 2.0, the much more powerful ARexx was included as a standard system-wide scripting language. Pretty much every Amiga application after that had at least one ARexx message port for scripting support.
The third-party languages AMOS and Blitz Basic were particularly popular among games developers.
Don't confuse illegality with impossibility...
:-).
There's lots of stuff that's illlegal. Doesn't stop you doing it - the trick is not to get caught
One way to get massive client-side deployment of the JRE would be for Sun, or a third party, to release a killer game that uses Java3D...
:-)
This would also be cool for Linux people, since the game would run unchanged on linux
> You can't tell me any amount of engineering in the world can make those things "safe".
:-) passing EU regulations in my case... but as I hinted I don't necessarily think that's a good thing...
Safer than they were anyway - safer to the point of (almost