I don't suppose you have any links to back that up? I suppose the failure of communism at the state level means we'll never be able enjoy the plethora of video games uncorrupted by capitalism.
"Rogers went on to license Tetris to Nintendo, though, so he did just fine." That's the most interesting part of the story - how the best video game product of communism got sidelined into the capitalist computer paradigm.
That's a very odd way to put it. Most of us would never have heard of Tetris if it hadn't been "sidelined." It's not as if the Soviets were exporting copies of Tetris all over the world to support the global struggle against oppressive capitalism. Also, the use of the word "best" implies there was some competition. Can you name any other "video game product of communism?"
I partly agree. I think he should be charged, convicted, then pardoned. Snowden should be charged and convicted because what he did should not be generally legal. He should be pardoned because he broke the law out of necessity, doing a great service to every citizen. I think the trial would be very informative. We would learn things like why the "official channels" Snowden didn't use wouldn't have produced the necessary result.
Yes, Oracle probably hasn't been as bad a Microsoft with regard to changing things that don't need to be changed. From what I understand, most of the frustration which resulted in LibreOffice forking from OpenOffice was because people didn't think Sun and then Oracle allowed contributions at a sufficient rate.
Everything you laud was there before Oracle got ahold of it and remains in both OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Are you saying that Oracle should be praised for not destroying OpenOffice? That seems like a pretty low bar.
Newer technology applied by one side in a conflict have cause important victories before throughout history. The ability to totally outclass an adversary is from a military point of view desirable.
I did skim the linked article, one issue is that of proportionality, but still, those who win do not really care.
That's exactly why the idea of rules for war has always been a bit silly. At most, they should be thought of as suggestions.
Wheat is corn Rice is corn Rye is Corn Millet is Corn
Maize is also corn
The term Corn used in supermarkets is actually slang....
If you are going to be a vocab critic then at least get the vocab right!
Though "corn" has meant any kind of grain for most its history, it has now come to mean "maize" in America. This has been standard usage and not just slang for well over 100 years. If someone says "corn" in the US, it never means "wheat," "rye," "barley," "rice," or "millet." In an international context, it is most clear to use "maize," but to call "maize" "corn" in America is no less correct than to call a fluffy wheat bun leavened with baking soda a "biscuit."
See also the Scandinavian languages, where "korn" means "grain(s)", and "mais" is yellow and comes on cobs. (Wheat is "hvete".)
I hate to burst your bubble, but the word for the plant in question, whether spelled "maize," "mais," or "maiz," comes from Spanish, which originally borrowed it from the language of the Caribbean Taíno people. All European languages got some form of that word via Spanish. The words "corn," "korn," and "grain" are related and much older in European tradition. Also, maize comes several colors, including white and purple.
After the processing they look quite unlike their source crop.
Are you saying it's reasonable to expect a grain product to look like the grain when it first came off the plant? By that logic, you should look more askance at bread as you do at corn flakes.
I call your "research" into question since you seem to have come to several conclusions which are completely incorrect. You are correct that two Kelloggs experimented with grains including wheat before trying maize. You are incorrect when you say that "corn flakes" were ever made of anything but maize. In America, "corn" never means wheat or any grain other than maize. The original flakes of wheat were called "granose."
You are also incorrect when you say that it was a non-Kellogg who added sugar. In fact, corn flakes were originally marketed by Will Keith Kellogg's Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company and contained added sugar from the beginning.
Will's brother John Harvey Kellogg, who was not part of the business, was not in favor of adding sugar. John's objection to adding sugar had little to do with modern ideas. He thought spicy or sweet foods would increase sexual urges.
When both parties work together toward a common goal, we can put a man on the moon.
When both parties work against each other, and try to stop each other every step of the way purely for their own political agenda, we can't even launch a damn website.
Don't forget that the common goal was not something lofty like scientific discovery, but to beat the commies. So, it may have not been a partisan issue in the US, but it was a political agenda.
Anyone who's eaten manioc (also known as cassava) and sweet potatoes knows that they're plants with starchy tubers and that's where the similiarities end. Not knowing the difference could be deadly since much cassava is of the "bitter" variety and must be carefully prepared to remove dangerous levels of cyanide.
Aaaand this is exactly the kind of thing that young-earth creationists and climate change deniers will jump on to show that science (and scientists) can't be trusted.
People who've made up their minds about something often jump on things they think support their position. If you'd read the article, you'd know that's one of the human tendencies that often leads leading to bad science. Science is a process and set of tools for avoiding such human mistakes but since it's humans implementing it, it's a constant struggle.
There are millions of replacements for make, which is part of the problem. I doubt there will ever be one canonical replacement, but Scons is a good choice for many projects IMHO. I'm trying to replace the use of make where I work with Scons, which especially makes sense we use Python for the application code. I think a Scheme-extensible replacement for make could be a very good thing, but adding more languages to the ugliness of Make is not the way to go.
From http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/: "In addition to Scheme, Guile includes compiler front-ends for ECMAScript and Emacs Lisp (support for Lua is underway),..."
So unless that page is inaccurate I guess that means it's still underway.
Where in the announcement of Make 4.0 is there any mention of Lua?
I thought the point of GPU's was to not only offload the rendering of 3D graphics but also the algorithms. Game developers don't want to have to program primary rendering algorithms with every game they create. Do they? Am I missing something?
Yes, you are missing something. The point of GPUs is to efficiently calculate pixel values to show on the screen. Specific algorithms can be implement in hardware or software and GPU hardware has been moving toward exposing more generic functionality for years, which WebCL can make available to Javascript code. It's the game engine or libraries used by the game engine that worry about low level details about how to talk to the GPU, whether that happens via OpenGL, WebGL, Direct3D, WebCL or something else.
Created my account in January 2010, used it for a lot of stuff.
Single sign-on turns into single point of failure... again.
I'm sure as hell not going to use Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Facebook or whomever for single sign on. I have enough trouble trying to prevent people from sucking me into Google+ and keeping my Youtube account separate from my Gmail account. LinkedIn and Facebook already want to get into my email to "build my social network" further. None of these are trustworthy companies.
I guess I'm going to have to add a dozen more passwords to my password database.
You're exactly right. When OpenID was getting started, I was quite hopeful that it would prevent lock-in and walled gardens. I used my myOpenID account. I also experimented with Google and Yahoo as providers. I was dismayed that while a number of small web sites were and are OpenID consumers, none of the big ones have allowed that. Eventually, I realized that's simply because it's not in the interest of a company with a large number of users to allow people to use outside accounts to log in. They know they can increase their power by restricting how users interact.
I was similarly dismayed when Facebook implemented an XMPP (Jabber) service but didn't federate, defeating the primary strength of the Jabber system. I was happy for many years that at least Google was interested in interoperability, but they've now shown they're little different from Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and all the other behemoths in that regard.
This isn't the same as OpenID, the one run by the OpenID foundation. This is a random for profit company that I would wager not to many people have heard of. The company is still providing user integration software.
OpenID is an open standard which has been implemented by many sites, one of which is myOpenID. myOpenID was one of the earliest OpenID services. Lots of companies now provide OpenIDs for anyone with an account. However, the overall vision of having one OpenID with which one can log in to all one's online accounts hasn't happened. You can't use your Google account to log in to Facebook or your Microsoft account to log in to Twitter. It's not really surprising janrain is giving up.
Dropbox is a service. Presumably, they're successful because they provide that service better than many competitors. What does that have to do with hiding the code of client software?
Though there seems to be a lot of good advice in this article, the author rants misguidedly against several things. As someone has pointed out already, he seems to be addressing the writing of tutorials, but labeling that "documentation for programming languages and libraries." While good tutorials are often sorely lacking, that is only one type of documentation for programming languages and libraries. API documentation is extremely important as well and literate programming and docstrings fit in a similar category. The author's rant against wikis is particularly funny, especially since he acknowledges that there are quite useful ones. Of course there are many wikis full of poor quality information, just as there are many essays and blog posts of poor quality. Blaming a wiki for the poor quality of its contents makes no more sense than blaming one's editor for the poor quality of one's code.
Does the NSA have access to our Dropbox contents, as is apparently the case with Microsoft Skydrive?
There's no need to ask Guido about this and there's no way the company's lawyers and/or the NSA would allow him to answer even if he knew any details. Simply assume that if you didn't encrypt your data on your own machine, the NSA can intercept it.
The first law of Robotics doesn't seem to be around either (just the opposite when you think of drones)
There isn't yet artificial intelligence anywhere close to the level for which the laws of robotics would make sense. However, even if there ever is such AI, it is naive in the extreme to think there could be universal agreement on how such AIs should be constrained. I doubt even Asimov thought that was realistic. I think his interest in the laws was for thought experiments and plot devices more than anything else. Notice that he doesn't mention them in this essay.
Slashdot Mirror
Gorodki, Konek-Gorbunok, Magistral, Balls.
I'm sure there are more.
I don't suppose you have any links to back that up? I suppose the failure of communism at the state level means we'll never be able enjoy the plethora of video games uncorrupted by capitalism.
"Rogers went on to license Tetris to Nintendo, though, so he did just fine." That's the most interesting part of the story - how the best video game product of communism got sidelined into the capitalist computer paradigm.
That's a very odd way to put it. Most of us would never have heard of Tetris if it hadn't been "sidelined." It's not as if the Soviets were exporting copies of Tetris all over the world to support the global struggle against oppressive capitalism. Also, the use of the word "best" implies there was some competition. Can you name any other "video game product of communism?"
I partly agree. I think he should be charged, convicted, then pardoned. Snowden should be charged and convicted because what he did should not be generally legal. He should be pardoned because he broke the law out of necessity, doing a great service to every citizen. I think the trial would be very informative. We would learn things like why the "official channels" Snowden didn't use wouldn't have produced the necessary result.
Yes, Oracle probably hasn't been as bad a Microsoft with regard to changing things that don't need to be changed. From what I understand, most of the frustration which resulted in LibreOffice forking from OpenOffice was because people didn't think Sun and then Oracle allowed contributions at a sufficient rate.
Everything you laud was there before Oracle got ahold of it and remains in both OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Are you saying that Oracle should be praised for not destroying OpenOffice? That seems like a pretty low bar.
Newer technology applied by one side in a conflict have cause important victories before throughout history.
The ability to totally outclass an adversary is from a military point of view desirable.
I did skim the linked article, one issue is that of proportionality, but still, those who win do not really care.
That's exactly why the idea of rules for war has always been a bit silly. At most, they should be thought of as suggestions.
Gan: Corn is defined as a small hard grain/seed
Wheat is corn
Rice is corn
Rye is Corn
Millet is Corn
Maize is also corn
The term Corn used in supermarkets is actually slang....
If you are going to be a vocab critic then at least get the vocab right!
Though "corn" has meant any kind of grain for most its history, it has now come to mean "maize" in America. This has been standard usage and not just slang for well over 100 years. If someone says "corn" in the US, it never means "wheat," "rye," "barley," "rice," or "millet." In an international context, it is most clear to use "maize," but to call "maize" "corn" in America is no less correct than to call a fluffy wheat bun leavened with baking soda a "biscuit."
See also the Scandinavian languages, where "korn" means "grain(s)", and "mais" is yellow and comes on cobs. (Wheat is "hvete".)
I hate to burst your bubble, but the word for the plant in question, whether spelled "maize," "mais," or "maiz," comes from Spanish, which originally borrowed it from the language of the Caribbean Taíno people. All European languages got some form of that word via Spanish. The words "corn," "korn," and "grain" are related and much older in European tradition. Also, maize comes several colors, including white and purple.
After the processing they look quite unlike their source crop.
Are you saying it's reasonable to expect a grain product to look like the grain when it first came off the plant? By that logic, you should look more askance at bread as you do at corn flakes.
I call your "research" into question since you seem to have come to several conclusions which are completely incorrect. You are correct that two Kelloggs experimented with grains including wheat before trying maize. You are incorrect when you say that "corn flakes" were ever made of anything but maize. In America, "corn" never means wheat or any grain other than maize. The original flakes of wheat were called "granose."
You are also incorrect when you say that it was a non-Kellogg who added sugar. In fact, corn flakes were originally marketed by Will Keith Kellogg's Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company and contained added sugar from the beginning.
Will's brother John Harvey Kellogg, who was not part of the business, was not in favor of adding sugar. John's objection to adding sugar had little to do with modern ideas. He thought spicy or sweet foods would increase sexual urges.
I'd never seen a statistic of 22%, which sounds high based on my experience. 12% sounds much more plausible to me.
When both parties work together toward a common goal, we can put a man on the moon.
When both parties work against each other, and try to stop each other every step of the way purely for their own political agenda, we can't even launch a damn website.
Don't forget that the common goal was not something lofty like scientific discovery, but to beat the commies. So, it may have not been a partisan issue in the US, but it was a political agenda.
Anyone who's eaten manioc (also known as cassava) and sweet potatoes knows that they're plants with starchy tubers and that's where the similiarities end. Not knowing the difference could be deadly since much cassava is of the "bitter" variety and must be carefully prepared to remove dangerous levels of cyanide.
Aaaand this is exactly the kind of thing that young-earth creationists and climate change deniers will jump on to show that science (and scientists) can't be trusted.
People who've made up their minds about something often jump on things they think support their position. If you'd read the article, you'd know that's one of the human tendencies that often leads leading to bad science. Science is a process and set of tools for avoiding such human mistakes but since it's humans implementing it, it's a constant struggle.
I still say it has nothing to do with Make. I guess I shouldn't have replied to a post responding to an AC.
There are millions of replacements for make, which is part of the problem. I doubt there will ever be one canonical replacement, but Scons is a good choice for many projects IMHO. I'm trying to replace the use of make where I work with Scons, which especially makes sense we use Python for the application code. I think a Scheme-extensible replacement for make could be a very good thing, but adding more languages to the ugliness of Make is not the way to go.
From http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/:
"In addition to Scheme, Guile includes compiler front-ends for ECMAScript and Emacs Lisp (support for Lua is underway),..."
So unless that page is inaccurate I guess that means it's still underway.
Where in the announcement of Make 4.0 is there any mention of Lua?
Checklist:
1. Is it glowing?
2. Is there a smoking, glowing crater where the plant used to be?
If both are no, the back to napping.
You're really overthinking things. This is all you need.
I thought the point of GPU's was to not only offload the rendering of 3D graphics but also the algorithms. Game developers don't want to have to program primary rendering algorithms with every game they create. Do they? Am I missing something?
Yes, you are missing something. The point of GPUs is to efficiently calculate pixel values to show on the screen. Specific algorithms can be implement in hardware or software and GPU hardware has been moving toward exposing more generic functionality for years, which WebCL can make available to Javascript code. It's the game engine or libraries used by the game engine that worry about low level details about how to talk to the GPU, whether that happens via OpenGL, WebGL, Direct3D, WebCL or something else.
Created my account in January 2010, used it for a lot of stuff.
Single sign-on turns into single point of failure... again.
I'm sure as hell not going to use Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Facebook or whomever for single sign on. I have enough trouble trying to prevent people from sucking me into Google+ and keeping my Youtube account separate from my Gmail account. LinkedIn and Facebook already want to get into my email to "build my social network" further. None of these are trustworthy companies.
I guess I'm going to have to add a dozen more passwords to my password database.
You're exactly right. When OpenID was getting started, I was quite hopeful that it would prevent lock-in and walled gardens. I used my myOpenID account. I also experimented with Google and Yahoo as providers. I was dismayed that while a number of small web sites were and are OpenID consumers, none of the big ones have allowed that. Eventually, I realized that's simply because it's not in the interest of a company with a large number of users to allow people to use outside accounts to log in. They know they can increase their power by restricting how users interact.
I was similarly dismayed when Facebook implemented an XMPP (Jabber) service but didn't federate, defeating the primary strength of the Jabber system. I was happy for many years that at least Google was interested in interoperability, but they've now shown they're little different from Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and all the other behemoths in that regard.
This isn't the same as OpenID, the one run by the OpenID foundation. This is a random for profit company that I would wager not to many people have heard of. The company is still providing user integration software.
OpenID is an open standard which has been implemented by many sites, one of which is myOpenID. myOpenID was one of the earliest OpenID services. Lots of companies now provide OpenIDs for anyone with an account. However, the overall vision of having one OpenID with which one can log in to all one's online accounts hasn't happened. You can't use your Google account to log in to Facebook or your Microsoft account to log in to Twitter. It's not really surprising janrain is giving up.
Dropbox is a service. Presumably, they're successful because they provide that service better than many competitors. What does that have to do with hiding the code of client software?
Though there seems to be a lot of good advice in this article, the author rants misguidedly against several things. As someone has pointed out already, he seems to be addressing the writing of tutorials, but labeling that "documentation for programming languages and libraries." While good tutorials are often sorely lacking, that is only one type of documentation for programming languages and libraries. API documentation is extremely important as well and literate programming and docstrings fit in a similar category. The author's rant against wikis is particularly funny, especially since he acknowledges that there are quite useful ones. Of course there are many wikis full of poor quality information, just as there are many essays and blog posts of poor quality. Blaming a wiki for the poor quality of its contents makes no more sense than blaming one's editor for the poor quality of one's code.
Does the NSA have access to our Dropbox contents, as is apparently the case with Microsoft Skydrive?
There's no need to ask Guido about this and there's no way the company's lawyers and/or the NSA would allow him to answer even if he knew any details. Simply assume that if you didn't encrypt your data on your own machine, the NSA can intercept it.
The first law of Robotics doesn't seem to be around either (just the opposite when you think of drones)
There isn't yet artificial intelligence anywhere close to the level for which the laws of robotics would make sense. However, even if there ever is such AI, it is naive in the extreme to think there could be universal agreement on how such AIs should be constrained. I doubt even Asimov thought that was realistic. I think his interest in the laws was for thought experiments and plot devices more than anything else. Notice that he doesn't mention them in this essay.