Moral factors are relative, and it is fairly easy to picture a society in which inbreeding would be accepted as par-for-the-course, similar to the way extramarital children are now par-for-the-course in european society...
In fact, logic dictates the opposite, if both Einstein and his cousin were of above average intelligence (There is a proven genetic component to several different aptitudes that fall under the ill-defined umbrella of "intelligence").
Inbreeding enhances particular traits, by increasing the chances that offspring get two copies of the sets of genes supplying those traits. This holds for beneficial just as much as damaging traits - a point often missed in the "inbreeding is bad, mmmkay" dogma taught in schools.
Inbreeding does not automatically mean less fit offspring - fitness is relative to the environment, enhancement of a particular trait, even at the expense of other traits, may make an organism fitter in a particular environment.
Enhancing particular traits by selective inbreeding is (a) common practice on farms worldwide and (b) (used to be?) common practice among european noble families.
This "PDA" (and like the iPAQ) is faster than my desktop machine brefore last at everything but floating point. A Palm (Pilot) is a PDA, the Zaurus (and the iPAQ) aren't very good PDAs, but they're great pocket "desktop" computers.
If you want a PDA, buy a Palm.
(the iPAQ, in particular has a horrendously complicated UI in PDA terms (MS Pocket PC), that's even worse than the Zaurus. Pocket PC looks a little like windows - but most of the controls behave differently. After 5 minutes, the famous MS "out of box" experience fades, and you realise how _unlike_ Windows Pocket PC is - and how much worse it is than PalmOS at being a PDA. Pocket PC's fine for running cut-down "desktop-style" apps though.)
And one of the nicest things about Maxima is than you can seamlessly drop down into Common Lisp if you want to. too. It really is very good: extensible, mature, and well designed. Since it is GPL, it is living on despite the death of its original author.
Essentially, a/. article bemoaning the lack of an open source computer algebra system is an article that has had no background research done.
Perhaps they included only software that ships on a linux distro CD, or something...
With Maxima coupled with Texmacs, very high-quality mathematical work is possible.
I was thinking of longevity of completion of the entire game - i.e. it would take you more time/quarters to complete because of the handicap. An individual "go" of the game would presumably tend to be shorter.
As a totally irrelevant coincidence, in the 80s I used the handle "vidviper"...
One thing - I grew up in the 1980s, using joystick input devices for computer games. I used the stick with my right hand.
Even keyboard-weenies use the cursor keys, which are usually on the right!
These days, all the games consoles have joypads, with the directional controller pad on the left.
In a species where 90% of the population is right-handed, why are joypad d-pads on the left?
Is it the same reason as those annoying arcade machine joysticks, a cheap-ass way to make the game last a bit longer by making it harder to play for most of the population?
I sometimes "play a tune" on the keyboard, using the old Amiga OctaMED or Protracker music software keyboard mapping (sometimes shifted to the left or right for variety's sake).
So even I can't immediately tell what my password is, since I'm not using the "remembering words" bit of my mind. The fastest way for me to find out the password as a series of letters and numbers is to retype it in a shell window...
Alternatively, I mentally superimpose a simple outline image of something onto the keyboard, and trace that outline, pressing keys...
Microsoft uses pretty generic words for most of their products. It's quite clever, because the uninformed non-computing masses seem to assume that the Microsoft one with the genricish name came first and/or is the market leading product and other products are ripoffs, regardless of the actual situation and history. Just for laughs, I got their product listing (the dropdown box here):
A few examples - there's Microsoft:
Office
Word
Access
SQL Server
Pocket PC
Project
Money
Flight Simulator
Small Business Server
Reader
Windows
CRM (probably, anyway, to come...)
Internet Explorer (I know a couple of (very stupid) people who think that Microsoft literally owns the internet because of this one.)
And let's not forget MSDOS - "Microsoft Disk Operating System"... which was _far_ from the first DOS, and pretty nearly the worst DOS...
On the other hand, there's a few ones they seemed to have pulled out of their backside, like any other software company:
Powerpoint (A program for managing electrical sockets???)
Excel
Sharepoint
Encarta
Xbox
Outlook
Visio (they bought it, I suppose it doesn't count...)
I'm sure there are lots of other examples in both categories.
When you think about it, the amount of arrogance displayed by use some of those product names is quite astounding... I mean: "SQL Server" ??? All they did was take Sybase and pervert it a bit....
I really don't know which of their products are trademarked as "Microsoft + $name" and which are just "$name", but it's still a good example of their "Elite Marketing Skillz"...
Almost true, but much truer of Scheme than Common Lisp.
Common Lisp is emphatically not a purely functional language, its proponents will tell you it's "multiparadigm", and it's not all that unusual to see explicit loop constructs and other imperative stuff in production code. Sometimes the imperative form really is the more natural way to express something.
CL really gives you the best of most worlds in programming.
Scheme isn't purely functional either, but does tend to steer you toward functional programming more than CL, but largely through dropping stuff than Common Lisp programmers tend to find useful...
Well, Lisp has a reputation for use in AI programming, so games programmers often think of it when considering scripting languages for enemy control - e.g. Abuse. (though, of course, there's nothing magic about Lisp that will make your enemies behave more intelligently, a dumb loop in lisp is still a dumb loop.)
Java has a reputation as a rather pedestrian C++ variant (though due to its dynamic features, javais actually more like a cut down smalltalk with C++-like syntax), and really is a pretty boring and ordinary language. "21st Century COBOL" is how it's been treated in the corporate environment.
We have another good component architecture - Xt. It's just a shame a lot of young whippersnapper open source developers these days don't take the time to understand the X window system before plunging into wheel-reinvention, then complain how "X is slow", when they've just gone and effectively "misprogrammed" it, treating it like the dumb framebuffer that it isn't.
Your memory fails you. Amigas were the ones that multitasked fully (preemptively, like a modern system, where system interrupts periodically tell different processes to run),
Archies only had cooperative multitasking, like old macs and most Forths, where each task has to yield the CPU.
The Archie's font antialiasing was a joy to behold, though.
Not that I like motif in particular , but one thing that it gets right and that Qt and Gtk suck at is using the X Window System to its full advantage.
Motif apps, like netscape 4.x, tend to support established X mechanisms for things - like the X resource database (a very good generalised application preferences database, somewhat akin to the windows registry, but less sucky and more human-readable) - they tend to support the editres protocol, they generally integrate better with the X window system Xt infrastructure. Qt and Gtk go off and implement their own half-assed preferences systems and ignore the solid work that exists in X (presumably because Qt and to some extent Gtk are intended to work well on non-X platforms)
It's almost as if the toolkit authors went off and started implementing their toolkits without bothering to study how X had already solved 3/4 of their problems...
If you still have ns 4.x or other motif applications around, fire it up, fire up editres, and have a play around - the end-user dynamic configuation abilities are more still more advanced than either Qt or Gtk, and the only other toolkit that I can think of that is comparably easily end-user configurable at runtime is amiga MUI (and xaw, but that starts out looking quite crappy.)
If you don't like the proprietary java runtimes, there's nothing stopping you using an open-source one (kaffe), or coding another one yourself. You just won't be allowed use the Java trademark if you don't pass a load of strict compliance tests. Hint: This is very similar to the situation with Mesa/OpenGL or Linux/POSIX...
Java is a standard, and it is pretty much as open as postscript or pdf. The standards publishing body for Java is Sun, and for ps/pdf, Adobe. Note the presence of an open-source implementation of postscript, cunningly called "ghostscript"...
You can download extensive java specifications from Sun - and not just a nearly-useless core yet-another-c-family-language and some system libraries specification like MS's for-show C#/CLR ECMA submission, with java, in addition to the VM and language, there's full and voluminous specifications for all those add-on java packages like Java3D, JAXP and whatnot - MS makes a point of NOT standardising the.net equivalents.
They are all downloadable documents. Sun can't reach onto your harddrive and mutate them once you've downloaded them. Sure, they could release a new version of the spec, but the hypothetical version you coded could still be fully compliant with the old spec.
This is in marked contrast to MS, which doesn't even bother fully specifying most of it's APIs, in fact, is reknowned for such behaviour.
There are multiple independent implementations of Java and its very extensive addon libraries (like the J2EE environment).
So, which would you prefer - a mature de-facto standard with multiple competing, yet interoperable, implementations, or an "official" standard with no finished implementations from a company that's well known for breaking compatibility whenever it suits? Given that MS will still contorl the only full implementation of.net for the near term, I predict a situation similar to Netscape and the HTML spec, back when Netscape was the only major web browser - they'll just embrace/extend it whenever they want...
Sure the standard has ECMA's rubber stamp on it - but what matters for implementation is freely available specifications, not the rubber stamp... Witness the popularity of R5RS scheme, or internet RFCs or I'm-not-officialy-opengl-but-who-cares Mesa.
Anyway, when I last checked, C# didn't even have mandatory-checked exceptions. That alone is enough to reomve it from consideration for a large swathe of corporate development mixed-ability team projects....
The permssions security model of any modern JVM is pretty damn fine-grained, more than enough for my needs. Don't confuse it with the primitive sandbox of early java.
What I really hate (and this is a general remark, not accusing the parent post or anything), is people who judge Java by Microsoft's antiquated and incomplete implementation of it. For god's sake, install the Sun Java2 1.3.1 or 1.4 JRE, don't judge Java's by MS's (presumably deliberately) shitty implementation.
Personally, I'll just keep on using Lisp for my development work, but there's millions of corporate drones who'll be told to use either Java/JVM or C#/CLR.
If real3d was your fave app you might be interested to know that its direct descendant, Realsoft 3D is available on Windows and (just about - working beta) Linux.
Becasue they could inadvertently improve gcc's output on non-intel architectures, perhaps? - GCC compiles to an intermediate tree form called "RTL" first, and thus some of intel's higher-level optimisations could end up imporving gcc PPC code, say. And that would be a bad thing for Intel, in the same way as you don't see Microsoft coders adding completion ports to linux to improve linux server I/O.
(although, a lot of intel's optimizing is probably due to their knowledge of the arcane, baroque, and just plain stupid x86 architecture, and thus would not be applicable to saner CPUs archs like... virtually anything else currently available.)
Mozilla sorta supports favicon.ico, but it _also_ supports using the html tag to set the image in a much more generic fashion, it can be a png, gif, whatever, and can be at any url.
Code, television shows and some works of art are ALL different to most forms of property!
Most forms of property have a physical existence and are not infinitely copyable. They are called "naturally scarce" in the jargon. If I take your car, you don't have it anymore.
Code, television shows, music, films, and the written word, are all simply patterns of information, that ARE infinitely copyable. They are "non-scarce".
Our current social structure sometimes creates "artificial scarcity" out of certain "non-scarce" abstact things like patterns of information - one such artificially scarce social construct is (mis)named "intellectual property".
Unlike real, physical property, you can give me a copy of the underlying information pattern without destroying your own copy, at what is practially near-zero energy/cost. Thus, it is FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT to most things contemporary society badges "property".
One of the things that is happening now is that Joe Soap on the street has non-scarce access to increasing numbers of goods that are currently of merely artificially scarce statys, such as: digital music, films, etc., as well as program code.
The old megacorporations which relied on keeping such patterns of information artificially scarce for their business model are now fighting desperately to keep them that way, while millions of Joe Soaps move to bypass them in copying the non-scarce information patterns.
Remember, intellectual property is only a societal convention - if millions upon millions of people start to ignore it, then bulk society has changed, and the very concept of I.P. is obsolete in its current form - Would you have sided with the scribes when the printing press was invented? Will you side with the factory workers when/if nanotech renders physical items effectively non-scarce, and the factories become obsolete? How about when/if the march of programs effectively eliminates energy/matter scarcity altogether, and things like money and present-day economic systems like communism and capitalism all become obsolete? It could happen, and lots of people are already thinking about it - see Iain Banks' "Culture" novels.
Yes, the abandonment of the profit motive might result in less code/music/films. But personally, having seen the quality of today's code/music/films, I'm one of those people of the view that the best ones will still be made - since the best ones tend not to be made solely for profit.
I dunno about that, different societies have different attitudes toward "augmentation" - the Japanese, for example, seem to be embracing the idea enthusiastically, with government-sanctioned cloning, biomech, and genetics research. The minds of the younger generation there have been prepared for the idea of augments for a long time, thanks to Anime - international example would be Ghost in the Shell. Similar situation in many urban centres in northern europe. Could american society be left behind, as a race of transhumans springs up out of Japan?
Slashdot Mirror
Or just Xft on X. No need to subject yourself to the nightmare of running a Mickeyshaft "O"S
Moral factors are relative, and it is fairly easy to picture a society in which inbreeding would be accepted as par-for-the-course, similar to the way extramarital children are now par-for-the-course in european society...
Viewsonic VP201mb and VP230mb are the some nicest LCD monitors. I've no idea how good their color-fidelity is, though.
In fact, logic dictates the opposite, if both Einstein and his cousin were of above average intelligence (There is a proven genetic component to several different aptitudes that fall under the ill-defined umbrella of "intelligence").
Inbreeding enhances particular traits, by increasing the chances that offspring get two copies of the sets of genes supplying those traits. This holds for beneficial just as much as damaging traits - a point often missed in the "inbreeding is bad, mmmkay" dogma taught in schools.
Inbreeding does not automatically mean less fit offspring - fitness is relative to the environment, enhancement of a particular trait, even at the expense of other traits, may make an organism fitter in a particular environment.
Enhancing particular traits by selective inbreeding is (a) common practice on farms worldwide and (b) (used to be?) common practice among european noble families.
This "PDA" (and like the iPAQ) is faster than my desktop machine brefore last at everything but floating point. A Palm (Pilot) is a PDA, the Zaurus (and the iPAQ) aren't very good PDAs, but they're great pocket "desktop" computers.
If you want a PDA, buy a Palm.
(the iPAQ, in particular has a horrendously complicated UI in PDA terms (MS Pocket PC), that's even worse than the Zaurus. Pocket PC looks a little like windows - but most of the controls behave differently. After 5 minutes, the famous MS "out of box" experience fades, and you realise how _unlike_ Windows Pocket PC is - and how much worse it is than PalmOS at being a PDA. Pocket PC's fine for running cut-down "desktop-style" apps though.)
And one of the nicest things about Maxima is than you can seamlessly drop down into Common Lisp if you want to. too. It really is very good: extensible, mature, and well designed. Since it is GPL, it is living on despite the death of its original author.
/. article bemoaning the lack of an open source computer algebra system is an article that has had no background research done.
Essentially, a
Perhaps they included only software that ships on a linux distro CD, or something...
With Maxima coupled with Texmacs, very high-quality mathematical work is possible.
Yes, if you want to look at it that way :-)
I was thinking of longevity of completion of the entire game - i.e. it would take you more time/quarters to complete because of the handicap. An individual "go" of the game would presumably tend to be shorter.
As a totally irrelevant coincidence, in the 80s I used the handle "vidviper"...
One thing - I grew up in the 1980s, using joystick input devices for computer games. I used the stick with my right hand.
Even keyboard-weenies use the cursor keys, which are usually on the right!
These days, all the games consoles have joypads, with the directional controller pad on the left.
In a species where 90% of the population is right-handed, why are joypad d-pads on the left?
Is it the same reason as those annoying arcade machine joysticks, a cheap-ass way to make the game last a bit longer by making it harder to play for most of the population?
Want "line noise"-looking passwords ?
I sometimes "play a tune" on the keyboard, using the old Amiga OctaMED or Protracker music software keyboard mapping (sometimes shifted to the left or right for variety's sake).
So even I can't immediately tell what my password is, since I'm not using the "remembering words" bit of my mind. The fastest way for me to find out the password as a series of letters and numbers is to retype it in a shell window...
Alternatively, I mentally superimpose a simple outline image of something onto the keyboard, and trace that outline, pressing keys...
A few examples - there's Microsoft:
On the other hand, there's a few ones they seemed to have pulled out of their backside, like any other software company:
I'm sure there are lots of other examples in both categories.
When you think about it, the amount of arrogance displayed by use some of those product names is quite astounding... I mean: "SQL Server" ??? All they did was take Sybase and pervert it a bit....
I really don't know which of their products are trademarked as "Microsoft + $name" and which are just "$name", but it's still a good example of their "Elite Marketing Skillz"...
Almost true, but much truer of Scheme than Common Lisp.
Common Lisp is emphatically not a purely functional language, its proponents will tell you it's "multiparadigm", and it's not all that unusual to see explicit loop constructs and other imperative stuff in production code. Sometimes the imperative form really is the more natural way to express something.
CL really gives you the best of most worlds in programming.
Scheme isn't purely functional either, but does tend to steer you toward functional programming more than CL, but largely through dropping stuff than Common Lisp programmers tend to find useful...
Well, Lisp has a reputation for use in AI programming, so games programmers often think of it when considering scripting languages for enemy control - e.g. Abuse. (though, of course, there's nothing magic about Lisp that will make your enemies behave more intelligently, a dumb loop in lisp is still a dumb loop.)
Java has a reputation as a rather pedestrian C++ variant (though due to its dynamic features, javais actually more like a cut down smalltalk with C++-like syntax), and really is a pretty boring and ordinary language. "21st Century COBOL" is how it's been treated in the corporate environment.
We have another good component architecture - Xt. It's just a shame a lot of young whippersnapper open source developers these days don't take the time to understand the X window system before plunging into wheel-reinvention, then complain how "X is slow", when they've just gone and effectively "misprogrammed" it, treating it like the dumb framebuffer that it isn't.
Your memory fails you. Amigas were the ones that multitasked fully (preemptively, like a modern system, where system interrupts periodically tell different processes to run),
Archies only had cooperative multitasking, like old macs and most Forths, where each task has to yield the CPU.
The Archie's font antialiasing was a joy to behold, though.
That's a singularly horrible sounding disease - "Killer fungus ate my face."
Shiver.
Not that I like motif in particular , but one thing that it gets right and that Qt and Gtk suck at is using the X Window System to its full advantage.
Motif apps, like netscape 4.x, tend to support established X mechanisms for things - like the X resource database (a very good generalised application preferences database, somewhat akin to the windows registry, but less sucky and more human-readable) - they tend to support the editres protocol, they generally integrate better with the X window system Xt infrastructure. Qt and Gtk go off and implement their own half-assed preferences systems and ignore the solid work that exists in X (presumably because Qt and to some extent Gtk are intended to work well on non-X platforms)
It's almost as if the toolkit authors went off and started implementing their toolkits without bothering to study how X had already solved 3/4 of their problems...
If you still have ns 4.x or other motif applications around, fire it up, fire up editres, and have a play around - the end-user dynamic configuation abilities are more still more advanced than either Qt or Gtk, and the only other toolkit that I can think of that is comparably easily end-user configurable at runtime is amiga MUI (and xaw, but that starts out looking quite crappy.)
If you don't like the proprietary java runtimes, there's nothing stopping you using an open-source one (kaffe), or coding another one yourself. You just won't be allowed use the Java trademark if you don't pass a load of strict compliance tests. Hint: This is very similar to the situation with Mesa/OpenGL or Linux/POSIX...
.net equivalents.
.net for the near term, I predict a situation similar to Netscape and the HTML spec, back when Netscape was the only major web browser - they'll just embrace/extend it whenever they want...
Java is a standard, and it is pretty much as open as postscript or pdf. The standards publishing body for Java is Sun, and for ps/pdf, Adobe. Note the presence of an open-source implementation of postscript, cunningly called "ghostscript"...
You can download extensive java specifications from Sun - and not just a nearly-useless core yet-another-c-family-language and some system libraries specification like MS's for-show C#/CLR ECMA submission, with java, in addition to the VM and language, there's full and voluminous specifications for all those add-on java packages like Java3D, JAXP and whatnot - MS makes a point of NOT standardising the
They are all downloadable documents. Sun can't reach onto your harddrive and mutate them once you've downloaded them. Sure, they could release a new version of the spec, but the hypothetical version you coded could still be fully compliant with the old spec.
This is in marked contrast to MS, which doesn't even bother fully specifying most of it's APIs, in fact, is reknowned for such behaviour.
There are multiple independent implementations of Java and its very extensive addon libraries (like the J2EE environment).
So, which would you prefer - a mature de-facto standard with multiple competing, yet interoperable, implementations, or an "official" standard with no finished implementations from a company that's well known for breaking compatibility whenever it suits? Given that MS will still contorl the only full implementation of
Sure the standard has ECMA's rubber stamp on it - but what matters for implementation is freely available specifications, not the rubber stamp... Witness the popularity of R5RS scheme, or internet RFCs or I'm-not-officialy-opengl-but-who-cares Mesa.
Anyway, when I last checked, C# didn't even have mandatory-checked exceptions. That alone is enough to reomve it from consideration for a large swathe of corporate development mixed-ability team projects....
The permssions security model of any modern JVM is pretty damn fine-grained, more than enough for my needs. Don't confuse it with the primitive sandbox of early java.
What I really hate (and this is a general remark, not accusing the parent post or anything), is people who judge Java by Microsoft's antiquated and incomplete implementation of it. For god's sake, install the Sun Java2 1.3.1 or 1.4 JRE, don't judge Java's by MS's (presumably deliberately) shitty implementation.
Personally, I'll just keep on using Lisp for my development work, but there's millions of corporate drones who'll be told to use either Java/JVM or C#/CLR.
If real3d was your fave app you might be interested to know that its direct descendant, Realsoft 3D is available on Windows and (just about - working beta) Linux.
The java equivalent of COM is JavaBeans, not Swing. Swing is just a GUI toolkit.
Becasue they could inadvertently improve gcc's output on non-intel architectures, perhaps? - GCC compiles to an intermediate tree form called "RTL" first, and thus some of intel's higher-level optimisations could end up imporving gcc PPC code, say. And that would be a bad thing for Intel, in the same way as you don't see Microsoft coders adding completion ports to linux to improve linux server I/O.
(although, a lot of intel's optimizing is probably due to their knowledge of the arcane, baroque, and just plain stupid x86 architecture, and thus would not be applicable to saner CPUs archs like... virtually anything else currently available.)
Mozilla sorta supports favicon.ico, but it _also_ supports using the html tag to set the image in a much more generic fashion, it can be a png, gif, whatever, and can be at any url.
s/march of programs/march of progress/
Bah!
Code, television shows and some works of art are ALL different to most forms of property!
Most forms of property have a physical existence and are not infinitely copyable. They are called "naturally scarce" in the jargon. If I take your car, you don't have it anymore.
Code, television shows, music, films, and the written word, are all simply patterns of information, that ARE infinitely copyable. They are "non-scarce".
Our current social structure sometimes creates "artificial scarcity" out of certain "non-scarce" abstact things like patterns of information - one such artificially scarce social construct is (mis)named "intellectual property".
Unlike real, physical property, you can give me a copy of the underlying information pattern without destroying your own copy, at what is practially near-zero energy/cost. Thus, it is FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT to most things contemporary society badges "property".
One of the things that is happening now is that Joe Soap on the street has non-scarce access to increasing numbers of goods that are currently of merely artificially scarce statys, such as: digital music, films, etc., as well as program code.
The old megacorporations which relied on keeping such patterns of information artificially scarce for their business model are now fighting desperately to keep them that way, while millions of Joe Soaps move to bypass them in copying the non-scarce information patterns.
Remember, intellectual property is only a societal convention - if millions upon millions of people start to ignore it, then bulk society has changed, and the very concept of I.P. is obsolete in its current form - Would you have sided with the scribes when the printing press was invented? Will you side with the factory workers when/if nanotech renders physical items effectively non-scarce, and the factories become obsolete? How about when/if the march of programs effectively eliminates energy/matter scarcity altogether, and things like money and present-day economic systems like communism and capitalism all become obsolete? It could happen, and lots of people are already thinking about it - see Iain Banks' "Culture" novels.
Yes, the abandonment of the profit motive might result in less code/music/films. But personally, having seen the quality of today's code/music/films, I'm one of those people of the view that the best ones will still be made - since the best ones tend not to be made solely for profit.
I dunno about that, different societies have different attitudes toward "augmentation" - the Japanese, for example, seem to be embracing the idea enthusiastically, with government-sanctioned cloning, biomech, and genetics research. The minds of the younger generation there have been prepared for the idea of augments for a long time, thanks to Anime - international example would be Ghost in the Shell. Similar situation in many urban centres in northern europe. Could american society be left behind, as a race of transhumans springs up out of Japan?
Bah! netbeans