You're absolutely right. Until now, it wouldn't bother me at all to provide identification to a police officer, but now, I'll be more reluctant. Trust goes both ways. As long as I trust the government, I'm not going to ask about everything they try to do, but the less I do trust them, the more important anonymity is.
By relying entirely on procedure calls to express iteration, Scheme emphasized the fact that tail-recursive procedure calls are essentially goto's that pass arguments.
The "do" and "named let" syntaxes are called "library syntax" in R5RS because they are defined in terms of truly primitive syntax like procedure calls and lambda. Since Scheme's syntax is extensible, it needs a very small amount of truly primitive syntax.
It was tongue-in-cheek when I said "lunatic fringe." Maybe I should have put a ";)" since the written word lacks the subtleties of vocal speech.
I care a lot about freedom too and that's one of the main reasons I respect Debian more than many distributions. It's not as much of a priority in the Gentoo world, but every package specifies the license in a standard way. I don't think it exists yet, but it should be hard to implement the equivalent of Debian's VRMS.
You really shouldn't waste any more time responding, since Twirlip clearly is not interested in a reasonable discussion. You've been extremely patient and well-resoned (especially for Slashdot). By the way, I use Gentoo, which may be less lunatic fringe these days than Debian, but I used to use Debian and I may again in the future.
That it's possible to convert looping programs into recursive programs is trivially true, because recursive functions alone are Turing complete.
Indeed, any Scheme programmer knows this, since it is one of the foundation principles of the language. Unlike almost all other languages, Scheme has no primitive looping syntax. All looping is done with recursion and implementations must perform tail-call elimination.
Unfortunately, the grandparent wasn't talking about implementing looping as recursion, but vice-versa:
No, the compiler cannot guarantee the ability to transform a recursive solution to a non-recursive one.
Just out of curiosity, do you want to avoid using an MP3 decoder to avoid possible patent entaglement? I know there are issues with encoding, but I didn't think anyone was concerned about decoding with mpg123/XMMS.
I do know about Dimitri and I'm not inclined to trust Adobe with a "standard." Neither am I intimately familiar with all the features and misfeatures of recent versions of PDF. What I do know is that PDF is a useful format for exchanging print-ready documents. Specifically, I can generate PDFs using Free Software and view them using Free Software (or Adobe Reader).
I have rarely run into problems viewing PDFs with Free Software implementations like Xpdf and GhostScript, so maybe the evil features aren't that commonly used yet. I am pretty confident that generating PDFs with Ghostscript will cause few problems, so PDF (or whatever subset is implemented by Ghostscript and other Free implementations) is a useful defacto standard.
It seems that XSL-FO should be a truly standard replacement, but PDF has a lot of momentum. Currently, most XSL-FO implementations just generate PDFs.
Perhaps XHTML and CSS will eventually be able to do the things that word processor formats can do, like handling pages and columns.
The problem with all three things (PDF documents, Flash applets, and Java applets) is not the design as much as the misuse. PDFs are good for what they were designed to do, which is to allow easy exchange of laid-out text and graphics. The format may not be an open standard, but it is well enough documented by Adobe that there are high quality Free Software implementations.
However, most documents on the web don't need to be printed, especially not with press-ready precision. HTML is the native language of the web, so everything that can be should be provided as HTML. PDF versions should be considered supplementary to the HTML ones.
This document appears to be written in LaTeX, in which case someone could have easily used one of the many LaTeX to HTML converters like (surprise, surprise) LaTeX2HTML. I guess the person responsible for making it accessible from the Internet was just lazy.
Man, that guy is as silly as the googol people. He thinks that because he changed his name to Yahoo (a word invented by Jonathan Swift AFAIK), it's plagiarism for others to use it. Using that logic, Linus should just name his next child Sco and get back at those greedy corporate bastards.
I am not yet an expert in this area, which is why I appealed to someone who appears to be an expert in the realms of mail and DNS. However, I'm sure he's not always right.
Take EMail for example. If a MUA thinks your domain does not exist (because no NS exists can resolve it) then your EMail message will likely bounce. Try this experiment:
Usually, MUAs just pass mail off to the ISP's MTA. Did you mean to say MTA? I have not tested the behavior of MTAs in the event of various types of network failures and I took DJB's word that failure to lookup a name is usually no worse than failure to connect. Different MTAs may behave very differently.
Interestingly, I did just receive an immediate bounce from my ISP's (Alltel) MTA because it claimed not to be able to find an MX, so perhaps DJB is mistaken about this particular issue. I will try to discover what MTA they're running.
I'm not sure if it's worse to get an "unknown host" message from a browser or to watch it try to connect for a minute or two. At least a failed name lookup is quick. Failure of either DNS or HTTP is extremely undesirable, since both prevent the client from getting any useful information.
Secondary, off-site DNS doesn't gain you much if the real services (HTTP, SMTP, etc) aren't redundant as well. Read the section called "Erroneous arguments for third-party DNS service" in DJB's Costs and benefits of third-party DNS service.
Why be so proper? Why not just call them "underwear?" But, seriously, I'm not at all clear on what should be called "lower," "base," and "middle." Would you say that SDL and DirectX provide interfaces at a similar level of abstraction? I haven't used either of them myself yet, but what I've read suggests that they do.
Freshmeat lists a number of game frameworks, some of which are Free Software. I wonder if any of them provides capabilities similar to Renderware.
SDL is what you're looking for; it's been around for several years. It's mature and in use in many projects. I don't know everything that DirectX does, but I believe most of it can be handled by SDL combined with OpenGL. Not only does SDL run on many platforms (including Windoze), it has bindings for various high level languages, so one isn't stuck with C or C++.
I don't doubt that old cartridges become unusable for various reasons. It's just that "bit rot" is a tongue-in-cheek term, so it's especially funny to see someone using it so seriously.
I've also wondered why the F-111 has the F, when it was primarily (maybe exclusively) used in non-fighter roles, like ground attack, reconnaissance, and electronic warfare (jamming).
Nitpickers need to be precise and correct themselves. HURD is not a kernel (though the GNU site itself makes the mistake of calling it that). It is a replacement for a *nix kernel which consists of userspace servers (HIRD of Unix Replacing Daemons) running on a kernel (currently GNU Mach).
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You're absolutely right. Until now, it wouldn't bother me at all to provide identification to a police officer, but now, I'll be more reluctant. Trust goes both ways. As long as I trust the government, I'm not going to ask about everything they try to do, but the less I do trust them, the more important anonymity is.
The "do" and "named let" syntaxes are called "library syntax" in R5RS because they are defined in terms of truly primitive syntax like procedure calls and lambda. Since Scheme's syntax is extensible, it needs a very small amount of truly primitive syntax.
It was tongue-in-cheek when I said "lunatic fringe." Maybe I should have put a ";)" since the written word lacks the subtleties of vocal speech.
I care a lot about freedom too and that's one of the main reasons I respect Debian more than many distributions. It's not as much of a priority in the Gentoo world, but every package specifies the license in a standard way. I don't think it exists yet, but it should be hard to implement the equivalent of Debian's VRMS.
I wonder how hard it would be to just put existing MP3 streams into Oggs to avoid transcoding.
I meant to write "well-reasoned."
You really shouldn't waste any more time responding, since Twirlip clearly is not interested in a reasonable discussion. You've been extremely patient and well-resoned (especially for Slashdot). By the way, I use Gentoo, which may be less lunatic fringe these days than Debian, but I used to use Debian and I may again in the future.
Indeed, any Scheme programmer knows this, since it is one of the foundation principles of the language. Unlike almost all other languages, Scheme has no primitive looping syntax. All looping is done with recursion and implementations must perform tail-call elimination.
Unfortunately, the grandparent wasn't talking about implementing looping as recursion, but vice-versa:
Just out of curiosity, do you want to avoid using an MP3 decoder to avoid possible patent entaglement? I know there are issues with encoding, but I didn't think anyone was concerned about decoding with mpg123/XMMS.
Tux isn't stoned, he's just sated, according to THE MAN himself.
joelhayhurst uses gibberish from APG, so transforming that to l33t-speak can't be harmful unless it removes information.
I do know about Dimitri and I'm not inclined to trust Adobe with a "standard." Neither am I intimately familiar with all the features and misfeatures of recent versions of PDF. What I do know is that PDF is a useful format for exchanging print-ready documents. Specifically, I can generate PDFs using Free Software and view them using Free Software (or Adobe Reader).
I have rarely run into problems viewing PDFs with Free Software implementations like Xpdf and GhostScript, so maybe the evil features aren't that commonly used yet. I am pretty confident that generating PDFs with Ghostscript will cause few problems, so PDF (or whatever subset is implemented by Ghostscript and other Free implementations) is a useful defacto standard.
It seems that XSL-FO should be a truly standard replacement, but PDF has a lot of momentum. Currently, most XSL-FO implementations just generate PDFs.
Perhaps XHTML and CSS will eventually be able to do the things that word processor formats can do, like handling pages and columns.
The problem with all three things (PDF documents, Flash applets, and Java applets) is not the design as much as the misuse. PDFs are good for what they were designed to do, which is to allow easy exchange of laid-out text and graphics. The format may not be an open standard, but it is well enough documented by Adobe that there are high quality Free Software implementations.
However, most documents on the web don't need to be printed, especially not with press-ready precision. HTML is the native language of the web, so everything that can be should be provided as HTML. PDF versions should be considered supplementary to the HTML ones.
This document appears to be written in LaTeX, in which case someone could have easily used one of the many LaTeX to HTML converters like (surprise, surprise) LaTeX2HTML. I guess the person responsible for making it accessible from the Internet was just lazy.
Mmmmmmm! Breaded strong distrust. Frozen assets? D'oh!
Man, that guy is as silly as the googol people. He thinks that because he changed his name to Yahoo (a word invented by Jonathan Swift AFAIK), it's plagiarism for others to use it. Using that logic, Linus should just name his next child Sco and get back at those greedy corporate bastards.
I agree wholeheartedly. They both deserve to die.
Usually, MUAs just pass mail off to the ISP's MTA. Did you mean to say MTA? I have not tested the behavior of MTAs in the event of various types of network failures and I took DJB's word that failure to lookup a name is usually no worse than failure to connect. Different MTAs may behave very differently.
Interestingly, I did just receive an immediate bounce from my ISP's (Alltel) MTA because it claimed not to be able to find an MX, so perhaps DJB is mistaken about this particular issue. I will try to discover what MTA they're running.
I'm not sure if it's worse to get an "unknown host" message from a browser or to watch it try to connect for a minute or two. At least a failed name lookup is quick. Failure of either DNS or HTTP is extremely undesirable, since both prevent the client from getting any useful information.
Secondary, off-site DNS doesn't gain you much if the real services (HTTP, SMTP, etc) aren't redundant as well. Read the section called "Erroneous arguments for third-party DNS service" in DJB's Costs and benefits of third-party DNS service.
Why be so proper? Why not just call them "underwear?" But, seriously, I'm not at all clear on what should be called "lower," "base," and "middle." Would you say that SDL and DirectX provide interfaces at a similar level of abstraction? I haven't used either of them myself yet, but what I've read suggests that they do.
Freshmeat lists a number of game frameworks, some of which are Free Software. I wonder if any of them provides capabilities similar to Renderware.
SDL is what you're looking for; it's been around for several years. It's mature and in use in many projects. I don't know everything that DirectX does, but I believe most of it can be handled by SDL combined with OpenGL. Not only does SDL run on many platforms (including Windoze), it has bindings for various high level languages, so one isn't stuck with C or C++.
I don't doubt that old cartridges become unusable for various reasons. It's just that "bit rot" is a tongue-in-cheek term, so it's especially funny to see someone using it so seriously.
Perhaps you should look up the definition of bit rot yourself, especially the part about it being "quite rare."
Also, look on Ebay. That's where I got DOTT and Sam&Max cheap. They were Mac versions, but ScummVM running on Win2K and GNU/Linux doesn't care.
Yes, I agree completely. Batman Forever was pretty weak overall, but the Riddler was pretty funny.
I've also wondered why the F-111 has the F, when it was primarily (maybe exclusively) used in non-fighter roles, like ground attack, reconnaissance, and electronic warfare (jamming).
Nitpickers need to be precise and correct themselves. HURD is not a kernel (though the GNU site itself makes the mistake of calling it that). It is a replacement for a *nix kernel which consists of userspace servers (HIRD of Unix Replacing Daemons) running on a kernel (currently GNU Mach).