Oz, Mercury...used both. Oz is quite expressive and interesting; Mercury is easier to learn and more efficient. Both are from a family of languages (concurrent logic programming languages) that has some interesting potential, but not much of a user base. Strand had a brief heyday, and is much like the KL1 FGHC language from the Japanese FGCP that I did my master's work on. Erlang is fairly popular in certain circles, but has evolved away from CLP.
If I could do formatted equations and vector graphics (reliably) in HTML, I would move everything over in an instant. Until then, I'm stuck with PDF for much of what I do.
On Wed 24 Mar 10:59AM PST, Anonymous Coward wrote:
RT Whole FA, dumbass.
As you so eloquently pointed out, I managed to miss the Cairo paragraph in the main article. My apologies.
I'll be quite interested to understand the difficulties in using Cairo for SVG rendering referred to in the original article. I'll have to admit to being a bit puzzled, having watched Cairo do a nice job of rendering SVG in various places.
Again, thanks very much for your prompt correction! I only wish that you had identified yourself, so that I could credit you properly.
What makes SVG even cooler is that we have the perfect rendering technology for it: Cairo. Cairo renders perfectly stroked and antialiased SVG for a variety of backends including bitmaps, PostScript, and X11.
Hopefully the SVG projects will either adopt the existing Cairo SVG code or use the Cairo rendering code as a backend for their SVG libraries.
My Siemens S46 does both GSM bands and both TDMA bands. It gets pretty good AT&T coverage in rural Oregon, which is saying something. Cheap, too, and works as a dataphone and web browser. Unfortunately, no high-end functionality: camera, etc. are lacking, and it's monochrome.
Part of what we're trying to do is establish a methodology for semi-automatically building good benchmark corpora. So ideally, if we think the spam stream has changed substantially, we should eventually be able to mostly just stuff in more messages, push a button and get a good current benchmark corpus. At least, that's the ideal.
In any case, we believe that everyone should be running filters customized for their personal current ham and spam streams. Our corpora are not intended to be used as training data for your filter. However, they should help you estimate generic properties of that filter, such as quality of its learner.
Good question! We're working on this problem, among other things, at the PSAM project. We have a project to produce high-quality benchmark corpora for spam filter testing. Watch that space for ongoing work, or e-mail us an offer to pitch in and help---we could use it!
Will Harvey is quite the genius. We were briefly graduate students together before he got his Ph.D. His thesis on a method for complete combinatorial search (with advisor Matt Ginsberg) is still widely cited in the AI literature.
I knew he'd done some game stuff before reading this interview, but never how much. With Will at the helm, I'd take There very seriously.
I've found that one of the hardest things in running Paranoia campaigns with die-hard RPGers is to convince them to plot against one another. There's a certain group where, no matter what you try, they are bound and determined to cooperate.
For players who can get it, though, it is quite hilarious. A friend and I ran a game at a con once where I brought in a guitar amp and a bunch of effects boxes for the voice of the computer, and built a bunch of prop R&D items. Everybody had a great time.
Does the fact that Diomidis Spinellis has repeated won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) make him more or less qualified to write such a book:-)? Check out his "best abuse of the rules" entry from 1988 that is my all-time favorite. BTW, the contest is currently open.
For a guitar with only 6 pegs (vs a piano, with 3*88) the mechanism for actually turning the pegs is lily-gilding. I would guess that any competent/.er should be able to build a nice GUI on top of an FFT so that they can manually tune their guitar to an alternate tuning in seconds by looking at the screen of their laptop.
Maybe on your planet. Name a recent case where it has actually happened in the case of a major deep-pockets corporation vs a random middle-class citizen. The same factors that allow the corp to prolong (and eventually win, if necessary) the suit make the corp de facto immune to this result.
In any case, it's no big risk for the corp: citizen's lawyer fees are peanuts (and the subject of further legal argument), and getting the case thrown out is no worse than if they'd never brought it...
As long as lawyers are the lawmakers, don't expect to see any laws that will make it harder for them to wield power.
The short version: the GPL is "incompatible" with licenses that require you to include extra text and restrict all other advertising. Thus, you cannot legally include both GPL'ed code and New XFree86 licensed code in the same program.
As I pointed out, we survived for hundreds of thousands of years before even the telephone, nevermind cell phones, came into existance.
I'm not sure who "we" is, but if you're a survivor from hundreds of thousands of years before telephones, I want to belong to whatever group you belong to.
In other news...
on
Cell-Phone Wars
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
According to a story in Modern Luddite,
folks annoyed with the constant noise, danger, pollution and clutter of those damned horseless carriages are arming themselves with sugar for gas tanks, spike strips, and similar means of improving their lot in life.
Also, moving beyond the portable, folks annoyed with the whirring and buzzing, bright lights, heat and refrigeration of electrical devices in general are using wire cutters, shorting busbars, and plowing cars into power poles in an attempt to regain the peace, sanity, and universal happiness of a pre-electrical world.
Jerks like this should go live in Colonial Williamsburg. Let the rest of us get on with the 21st Century, where we can talk to our friends and business associates anytime with just the push of a button. Not that it's a Utopia or anything, but...well, yeah, in at least this one aspect it kind of is.
Re:Charles de Lint - if you liked Neverwhere
on
King Rat
·
· Score: 1
If you want a book in which "it seems the line between the fairy world and ours is a bit blurred. Many of the stories involve everyday normal humans coming into their first contact with the little bit of magic all around them. Some believe immediately while others take convincing. Many characters recur through the books and short stories and eventually you may find yourself wrapped up into his little world.", I would highly recommend Sylvie and Bruno. It is quite a Christian novel, which may be off-putting to some, but it is a remarkable piece of writing...
So the one that sounds like it's derived from the word "chart" is the encyclopedia, and the one that looks like it's a short form of the word "encyclopedia" is a travel service?
IOException is something that needs to be checked. It can occur because of low disk space, broken network connections (including NFS mounts), bad character coding, etc. Even FileNotFoundException is a subclass of it.
An exception only needs to be checked if you have some plan for how to handle it. In general, if my Java program loses a network connection, fills up its disk, etc., I just want my program to crash. Failing to handle the exception and letting it propagate to top level will do that.
Too many Java programs catch IOExceptions, print some message that completely obscured what happened, and then exit anyway. I wish they would just let the IOException propagate up, but the status of IOException discourages doing that.
Checked Exceptions
on
How C# Was Made
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, Java supports both checked and unchecked throwables: the latter with the class Error. My programming style is to make throws that I don't expect to be "routinely" caught throw Errors rather than Exceptions. An Error can still be caught, but since you don't expect it, you needn't declare it.
The checked exceptions are still useful for the case where it would probably be a bug not to handle the exception, e.g. "search found no element" or "file not found". The reason for the two kinds of throwables is exactly this: you don't want to declare that every method doing division throws DivideByZero. Unfortunately, the Java library designers don't seem to have gotten it, and so there's a bunch of things like IOException that IMHO should have been Errors.
The solution described seems clumsy. Why not just let the "knock" be a UDP packet addressed to a well-known port, containing a signed, encrypted challenge for the target port? The UDP server could provide a signed, encrypted response consisting of a TCP SYN cookie to legitimate challengers, and ignore everyone else.
AFAIK, this will achieve all the goals of the fancy knocking scheme, with no enforced delays, no need to have servers listening on multiple ports for coded knock sequences, etc...
If you want crypto authentication, just implement crypto authentication.
And to end this off, the basic premise of C/R is that the return address is valid. Even if spammers break these visual tests, in order to do that, they must have a valid return address - ergo, making them traceable.
But why do "captcha"-style visual puzzles, then? If your big concern is traceability, it seems that any old challenge/response, including a 3 digit ASCII number, would do.
IMHO the news here is that the visual puzzles don't add anything for a clever and determined adversary. It's apparently old news to you, but I hadn't heard of this technique until now; I find it fascinating and am glad the/. editors passed it on.
Maybe it's just me, but boy was that a lousy review IMHO!
The scores appear largely random: since nothing bad was said about three of the four distros, giving them a score below 10 seems completely arbitrary. Some of the minor negatives of live CDs are well-known, such as impact of low reliability and speed of typical consumer CD drives. None of this was ever mentioned.
The distros were evaluated on exactly one machine, whose characteristics were never specified. The article missed the whole class of biz-card and 8cm live CD distros, which while not appropriate for newbies are of great interest to others. The article didn't talk about Morphix or any of the specialized distros derived from it.
Bleah. Somebody pay me: I'll write a much better review.
Slashdot Mirror
Oz, Mercury...used both. Oz is quite expressive and interesting; Mercury is easier to learn and more efficient. Both are from a family of languages (concurrent logic programming languages) that has some interesting potential, but not much of a user base. Strand had a brief heyday, and is much like the KL1 FGHC language from the Japanese FGCP that I did my master's work on. Erlang is fairly popular in certain circles, but has evolved away from CLP.
I guess I'm not a "real hardcore nerd"...
If I could do formatted equations and vector graphics (reliably) in HTML, I would move everything over in an instant. Until then, I'm stuck with PDF for much of what I do.
As you so eloquently pointed out, I managed to miss the Cairo paragraph in the main article. My apologies.
I'll be quite interested to understand the difficulties in using Cairo for SVG rendering referred to in the original article. I'll have to admit to being a bit puzzled, having watched Cairo do a nice job of rendering SVG in various places.
Again, thanks very much for your prompt correction! I only wish that you had identified yourself, so that I could credit you properly.
What makes SVG even cooler is that we have the perfect rendering technology for it: Cairo. Cairo renders perfectly stroked and antialiased SVG for a variety of backends including bitmaps, PostScript, and X11.
Hopefully the SVG projects will either adopt the existing Cairo SVG code or use the Cairo rendering code as a backend for their SVG libraries.
My Siemens S46 does both GSM bands and both TDMA bands. It gets pretty good AT&T coverage in rural Oregon, which is saying something. Cheap, too, and works as a dataphone and web browser. Unfortunately, no high-end functionality: camera, etc. are lacking, and it's monochrome.
Part of what we're trying to do is establish a methodology for semi-automatically building good benchmark corpora. So ideally, if we think the spam stream has changed substantially, we should eventually be able to mostly just stuff in more messages, push a button and get a good current benchmark corpus. At least, that's the ideal.
In any case, we believe that everyone should be running filters customized for their personal current ham and spam streams. Our corpora are not intended to be used as training data for your filter. However, they should help you estimate generic properties of that filter, such as quality of its learner.
Good question! We're working on this problem, among other things, at the PSAM project. We have a project to produce high-quality benchmark corpora for spam filter testing. Watch that space for ongoing work, or e-mail us an offer to pitch in and help---we could use it!
Will Harvey is quite the genius. We were briefly graduate students together before he got his Ph.D. His thesis on a method for complete combinatorial search (with advisor Matt Ginsberg) is still widely cited in the AI literature.
I knew he'd done some game stuff before reading this interview, but never how much. With Will at the helm, I'd take There very seriously.
I've found that one of the hardest things in running Paranoia campaigns with die-hard RPGers is to convince them to plot against one another. There's a certain group where, no matter what you try, they are bound and determined to cooperate.
For players who can get it, though, it is quite hilarious. A friend and I ran a game at a con once where I brought in a guitar amp and a bunch of effects boxes for the voice of the computer, and built a bunch of prop R&D items. Everybody had a great time.
Does the fact that Diomidis Spinellis has repeated won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) make him more or less qualified to write such a book :-)? Check out his "best abuse of the rules" entry from 1988 that is my all-time favorite. BTW, the contest is currently open.
For a guitar with only 6 pegs (vs a piano, with 3*88) the mechanism for actually turning the pegs is lily-gilding. I would guess that any competent /.er should be able to build a nice GUI on top of an FFT so that they can manually tune their guitar to an alternate tuning in seconds by looking at the screen of their laptop.
Maybe on your planet. Name a recent case where it has actually happened in the case of a major deep-pockets corporation vs a random middle-class citizen. The same factors that allow the corp to prolong (and eventually win, if necessary) the suit make the corp de facto immune to this result.
In any case, it's no big risk for the corp: citizen's lawyer fees are peanuts (and the subject of further legal argument), and getting the case thrown out is no worse than if they'd never brought it...
As long as lawyers are the lawmakers, don't expect to see any laws that will make it harder for them to wield power.
The short version: the GPL is "incompatible" with licenses that require you to include extra text and restrict all other advertising. Thus, you cannot legally include both GPL'ed code and New XFree86 licensed code in the same program.
As I pointed out, we survived for hundreds of thousands of years before even the telephone, nevermind cell phones, came into existance.
I'm not sure who "we" is, but if you're a survivor from hundreds of thousands of years before telephones, I want to belong to whatever group you belong to.
Jerks like this should go live in Colonial Williamsburg. Let the rest of us get on with the 21st Century, where we can talk to our friends and business associates anytime with just the push of a button. Not that it's a Utopia or anything, but...well, yeah, in at least this one aspect it kind of is.
If you want a book in which "it seems the line between the fairy world and ours is a bit blurred. Many of the stories involve everyday normal humans coming into their first contact with the little bit of magic all around them. Some believe immediately while others take convincing. Many characters recur through the books and short stories and eventually you may find yourself wrapped up into his little world.", I would highly recommend Sylvie and Bruno . It is quite a Christian novel, which may be off-putting to some, but it is a remarkable piece of writing...
..by Lewis Carroll. In 1893.
So the one that sounds like it's derived from the word "chart" is the encyclopedia, and the one that looks like it's a short form of the word "encyclopedia" is a travel service?
My bad.
I always confuse Expedia with the Microsoft encyclopedia whose name I forget. Great branding.
IOException is something that needs to be checked. It can occur because of low disk space, broken network connections (including NFS mounts), bad character coding, etc. Even FileNotFoundException is a subclass of it.
An exception only needs to be checked if you have some plan for how to handle it. In general, if my Java program loses a network connection, fills up its disk, etc., I just want my program to crash. Failing to handle the exception and letting it propagate to top level will do that.
Too many Java programs catch IOExceptions, print some message that completely obscured what happened, and then exit anyway. I wish they would just let the IOException propagate up, but the status of IOException discourages doing that.
Actually, Java supports both checked and unchecked throwables: the latter with the class Error. My programming style is to make throws that I don't expect to be "routinely" caught throw Errors rather than Exceptions. An Error can still be caught, but since you don't expect it, you needn't declare it.
The checked exceptions are still useful for the case where it would probably be a bug not to handle the exception, e.g. "search found no element" or "file not found". The reason for the two kinds of throwables is exactly this: you don't want to declare that every method doing division throws DivideByZero. Unfortunately, the Java library designers don't seem to have gotten it, and so there's a bunch of things like IOException that IMHO should have been Errors.
The solution described seems clumsy. Why not just let the "knock" be a UDP packet addressed to a well-known port, containing a signed, encrypted challenge for the target port? The UDP server could provide a signed, encrypted response consisting of a TCP SYN cookie to legitimate challengers, and ignore everyone else.
AFAIK, this will achieve all the goals of the fancy knocking scheme, with no enforced delays, no need to have servers listening on multiple ports for coded knock sequences, etc...
If you want crypto authentication, just implement crypto authentication.
YHBT. Check out the author's nick, for heaven's sake, not to mention the author's previous postings.
Who the heck is modding these things?
Insert your own joke here.
And to end this off, the basic premise of C/R is that the return address is valid. Even if spammers break these visual tests, in order to do that, they must have a valid return address - ergo, making them traceable.
But why do "captcha"-style visual puzzles, then? If your big concern is traceability, it seems that any old challenge/response, including a 3 digit ASCII number, would do.
IMHO the news here is that the visual puzzles don't add anything for a clever and determined adversary. It's apparently old news to you, but I hadn't heard of this technique until now; I find it fascinating and am glad the /. editors passed it on.
Maybe it's just me, but boy was that a lousy review IMHO!
The scores appear largely random: since nothing bad was said about three of the four distros, giving them a score below 10 seems completely arbitrary. Some of the minor negatives of live CDs are well-known, such as impact of low reliability and speed of typical consumer CD drives. None of this was ever mentioned.
The distros were evaluated on exactly one machine, whose characteristics were never specified. The article missed the whole class of biz-card and 8cm live CD distros, which while not appropriate for newbies are of great interest to others. The article didn't talk about Morphix or any of the specialized distros derived from it.
Bleah. Somebody pay me: I'll write a much better review.