If I wanted to know what kind of procedures were useful and necessary, I'd ask the people in charge of security in airports or other public places in Israel, or somewhere with a similarly high chance of terrorism. From what I've heard, they're not too shy about invading privacy in Israel, but they probably know what they're doing too.
Well I've been seeing the war mostly through my mind's eye, since I don't get TV news. I've been reading news articles on the web. The loss of life and hardship of the people in Iraq troubles me greatly and I'm not sure the US and UK were right to invade. No matter how high-tech the weapons, how good the training, how powerful the force, or how you look at it, war is horrible and something to avoided unless absolutely necessary.
However, I'm sure the UN and US treatment of Iraq during the last 12 years was wrong, as it left Saddam in power to keep oppressing the Iraqis, yet didn't treat Iraq as a sovereign nation or help any rebels kick out Saddam themselves (though rebel groups understood that the US would support them after the 1991 Gulf War).
Though I'm still unsure about all the reasons we're in this mess, I think it's too late to argue about whether the US and UK were right to invade; it can't be undone. Now, anarchy has to be averted and the Iraqi people have to be given the chance to build their own government. It's worked after US and British occupation before (at least in post-WWII Germany and Japan), so I hope we can get it right this time.
I have no illusions of the perfect intentions of US foreign policy, but as a US citizen, I really hope we can prove wrong those that claim the US is building an empire or declaring war on Islam.
Very good point. It sounds like the reason people are complaining about the Harry Potter books being censored is because it wasn't done based on a specific policy. I doubt there would be much objection to the school library banning stuff like Penthouse, but that would be based on a specific set of criteria (naked humans in sexually suggestive poses or something like that). If an official organization like a school board does censoring (which obviously they have some power to do), it should be based on clearly stated and agreed-on policies. The government is supposed to be for and of the people, which doesn't mean that it has no power, but that it has only the power given it by the people.
I didn't even notice the icon until someone mentioned it. I had to stare at the page for a minute or two until I saw what you were talking about. I know, I'm not very observant, but you're right that the icon doesn't fit. The green characters would be much better. I even have a the green falling characters for my animated icon in Galeon.
Is it really necessary to think of the market as a war? You talk about the provider and customer as if they were enemies on the battlefield. Remember that different companies are competing with each other as well and may even try to serve the customers in order to get ahead. I think it's the battlefield mentality that results in customers getting screwed.
The best example of this is Microsoft. They consider anything in competition with them as an enemy that must be destroyed. Though I dislike them intensely and prefer Free Software, I don't see Microsoft as an enemy, but as a company in competition with other sources of software. I don't think it's necessary for Microsoft to be destroyed, just for it to lose its deathgrip on the market. If there's competition, it's best for everyone.
During the good old Cold War, things were more clear. The bad guys all had AK-47's and PKM's and MiG's. Only the friendlies (well friendly at the time; never mind about Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran) had M-16's and Stingers and Hueys. What we need now is another superpower to rise as our mortal enemy so we can have another arms race. That way we'll always know what side everyone's on by what weapons they have.
No, you misunderstood me. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I agree with you 100% that using XML is very useful for interoperability, which I also explained in my post. What I mean is that many people seem to say things like "this tool can export to XML" just for the buzzword compliance, without understanding what XML really is. If someone says "we can export to XML grammar Y" or "we have designed and specified XML application Z," then the person understands what XML is: not one particular data format, but a tool for designing data formats.
I was merely saying that it bothers me when people talk about using XML just because it's all the rage instead of using a tool because it's appropriate.
I couldn't agree with you more. I cringe every time someone says "We can export to XML," or "tool X can convert from Y to XML." This seems to be the biggest misunderstanding about the whole issue. I guess many people see the word language and think it's in the same category as C++ or SQL or HTML (each of which is in a different category, by the way). XML is really in a higher level category than all of them (nicely evidenced by the current version of HTML being an application of XML and that languages like C++ and SQL are generated from templates written in XML languages).
Maybe part of the problem is the name itself. Maybe it would be slightly less confusing if it were called the Extensible Meta Language.
I think of XML being in a similar category as ASCII. I know it's not a successor to ASCII (the best one is the Unicode family) and I know it's higher level than ASCII, but it can be used to accomplish previously unknown heights of interoperability, like ASCII allowed people to use the same data on different computers for the first time.
No one complains that ASCII doesn't check for valid data, because you can express any kind of data using ASCII. Maybe an even better metaphor for XML would be English. English is one human language, not ideal by any stretch of the imagination. Most of the world doesn't speak English, and there are many things that can be better expressed in another language. But, English is the closest human language to being universal (with the exception of math, but that's not flexible enough for most of human knowledge).
English is flexible enough to allow someone to express most human thoughts and be understood by a huge number of other people. It is very free form, allowing the same idea to be expressed a myriad of different ways. When knowledge has to more structured, like on a college application, a form is used to constrain it.
Well, this post was just a meandering trail of thought and brainstorming, not very well structured. Using XML metaphor, it was well formed (correct spelling and grammar AFAIK), but not validated (I didn't try to adhere to a particular logical structure, like an essay, treatise, or proof). I'm not trying to say that English should be universal or that other languages have less value, so don't flame me on that. English is just the language I know best and the one which can reach the greatest part of the world (unless, perhaps, you wanted to reach China).
Indeed! That's the only game I've bought for Linux and I wasn't sorry. I heard good things about Myth from a Mac user, then saw that Loki had ported it, so I went down the mall and there it was!
By the way, the Linux version has had OpenGL support for a long time, though on my hardware, it didn't look or perform much better than the software rendering.
Amazon and other retailer sites are good, but a free, non-comercial one is better. Amazon won't bother having entries for books they don't sell, which excludes many old and obscure ones.
Most people seem to ignore the fact that the USA was never intended to be a Democracy, but a Republic. A Democracy is a government of all the citizens, while a Republic is government by representatives of the citizens. By the way, the Republican and Democratic parties have little, if anything, to do with the definitions of Democracy and Republic.
I hope the poster's comment about all communications going through lobbyists was intended as a troll, but unfortunately, that may be the way it actually works. If so, the system is somewhere between a Republic and a Plutocracy, as someone has already mentioned.
Neither of those were defeats for the US, but they did both involve extremely bad decisions by US policy makers. Bay of Pigs was a defeat for the Cuban rebels, largely because the US backed out of their promised support, kind of like what happened in Iraq in the Gulf War. Somalia was yet another politically motivated military action without good military objectives.
Yeah, the idea of patenting this is ridiculous. I invented the idea of Evacuated Tube Transport when I was a kid. I remember thinking about the Maglev trains I had read about and thinking how cool it was to remove all rolling friction. Then, I thought about how the rest of the friction could be removed: take out the air.
Of course, it may be that I had read about the idea in a SciFi story or something instead. The point is that it is a trivial idea to invent with modern knowledge.
There most definitely are Lisp implementations (both Common Lisp and Scheme) that compile to machine code. Two examples are CMUCL and Bigloo. It seems clear from some benchmarks that they easily outperform the likes of Perl, Python, and Java. Note that the previous link won't work if you just click on it, but if you copy it, then put it in the location bar of a new window, it will. It seems the author of the page doesn't much like Slashdot.
You're absolutely right about the power of being able to generate source at runtime and evaluate (run) it. That's one of the things I like about Python as well. In fact, I don't think any language can be considered high-level if it doesn't have that. Guess where this concept originated? In the early implementation (around 1960) of Lisp, a function called "eval" was invented to be the definition of the Lisp interpreter. The details are in "The implementation of LISP".
The nice thing about the compiled lisps is that you also have the compiler available at runtime, which means that you can generate source code dynamically, then compile it. You are no longer bound by the traditional code/compile/run cycle.
I don't know of compilers/interpreters that can make such high level decisions about when to bind and evaluate, but I believe that Lisp allows a lot more flexibility in that area than C-like languages. Also, it looks like Self might offer something in that area. Another class of languages I have yet to explore, but may be far superior on these issues is that of pure functional languages, especially the lazily evaluated ones. I plan to learn one of the ML's eventually, like OCaml.
Unfortunately, as you pointed out, the best tools can't always be used because of external requirements like programmer or user familiarity. In fact, that's the main reason I haven't really gotten into using Lisp yet: I'm comfortable with languages I already know. But, I'm determined to try new things, especially when there's evidence that there are better tools available.
I only know the rudiments of Lisp, so I can't speak authoritatively, but I believe that all of what you're describing is there. I think that Lisp's macros and syntax forms are useful for doing all the things that templates can and then some. Unlike C++, they are expressed in the same syntax as the core language, so extensions to the language (like templates or control structures or other mini languages) are better integrated with the language.
It's interesting that you mention dialects, since Lisp is one of the few languages that is generally recognized as having them. Its flexibility lends itself to specialization, such as implementing new dialects of itself or completely new mini languages. For instance, Scheme was originally implemented in an already existing Lisp.
As far as serialization of objects and manipulation of data and code, few languages can boast the power of Lisp's S-expressions. Their power is in their simplicity and allows all Lisp code and data structures to be expressed in the same simple syntax. Also, the entire language is available all the time, meaning that you don't have to make a design decision about whether to use a compiled or an interpreted language.
As far as performance, there are Common Lisp and Scheme implementations that outperform many other modern high level languages and even get close to C++ in some cases (http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/).
Now I am ashamed for not using Lisp more after giving it such a glowing image. Mainly, it's just momentum. I continue to use the tools I'm comfortable with (mainly Python, Java and some C). I think this is the main reason people continue to use relatively low level languages like C and C++ for application programming. I do intend to try new tools, though. I don't want to stagnate.
Of course the fact that I haven't used Lisp much yet means I haven't experienced its downsides. However, I am confident that Lisp's lack of popularity does not reflect its power.
if (locktype & (LOCKING_ANDX_CANCEL_LOCK | LOCKING_ANDX_CHANGE_LOCKTYPE)) {/* we don't support these - and CANCEL_LOCK makes w2k
and XP reboot so I don't really want to be
compatible! (tridge) */
return ERROR_NT(NT_STATUS_NOT_SUPPORTED);
}
I have just used the form to get the password for two of my accounts; one at mailandnews.com and one at a small domain. Both worked immediately. As the previous replier said, perhaps mail from Seti@Home is being filtered by some mail services.
Of course, there's nothing stopping someone from writing a Java compiler for the CLI, but then again, the class libraries would have to be there for it to be useful.
I am not interested in.NET because of M$'s clout, but I am somewhat interested in CLR and the standard libraries because it may be a genuinely useful technology. I'm not interested much in C#, as it appears to be quite similar to Java with some C++-like stuff, but if the promise of easy cross-language development is true, that is interesting. Of course, that is possible with a JVM and standard Java libraries, but the CLR may be superior in that respect. Let's wait and see.
I don't really have any experience with Scheme yet. I have been going through a tutorial and have been very impressed with the language's simplicity and mathematical nature compared to the languages I know: '(Pascal C C++ Java Python). I have seen references to CLOS-like object systems for Scheme, such as tiny CLOS and GOOPS, though I haven't tried them yet.
Slashdot Mirror
If I wanted to know what kind of procedures were useful and necessary, I'd ask the people in charge of security in airports or other public places in Israel, or somewhere with a similarly high chance of terrorism. From what I've heard, they're not too shy about invading privacy in Israel, but they probably know what they're doing too.
Well I've been seeing the war mostly through my mind's eye, since I don't get TV news. I've been reading news articles on the web. The loss of life and hardship of the people in Iraq troubles me greatly and I'm not sure the US and UK were right to invade. No matter how high-tech the weapons, how good the training, how powerful the force, or how you look at it, war is horrible and something to avoided unless absolutely necessary.
However, I'm sure the UN and US treatment of Iraq during the last 12 years was wrong, as it left Saddam in power to keep oppressing the Iraqis, yet didn't treat Iraq as a sovereign nation or help any rebels kick out Saddam themselves (though rebel groups understood that the US would support them after the 1991 Gulf War).
Though I'm still unsure about all the reasons we're in this mess, I think it's too late to argue about whether the US and UK were right to invade; it can't be undone. Now, anarchy has to be averted and the Iraqi people have to be given the chance to build their own government. It's worked after US and British occupation before (at least in post-WWII Germany and Japan), so I hope we can get it right this time.
I have no illusions of the perfect intentions of US foreign policy, but as a US citizen, I really hope we can prove wrong those that claim the US is building an empire or declaring war on Islam.
Very good point. It sounds like the reason people are complaining about the Harry Potter books being censored is because it wasn't done based on a specific policy. I doubt there would be much objection to the school library banning stuff like Penthouse, but that would be based on a specific set of criteria (naked humans in sexually suggestive poses or something like that). If an official organization like a school board does censoring (which obviously they have some power to do), it should be based on clearly stated and agreed-on policies. The government is supposed to be for and of the people, which doesn't mean that it has no power, but that it has only the power given it by the people.
I didn't even notice the icon until someone mentioned it. I had to stare at the page for a minute or two until I saw what you were talking about. I know, I'm not very observant, but you're right that the icon doesn't fit. The green characters would be much better. I even have a the green falling characters for my animated icon in Galeon.
Is it really necessary to think of the market as a war? You talk about the provider and customer as if they were enemies on the battlefield. Remember that different companies are competing with each other as well and may even try to serve the customers in order to get ahead. I think it's the battlefield mentality that results in customers getting screwed.
The best example of this is Microsoft. They consider anything in competition with them as an enemy that must be destroyed. Though I dislike them intensely and prefer Free Software, I don't see Microsoft as an enemy, but as a company in competition with other sources of software. I don't think it's necessary for Microsoft to be destroyed, just for it to lose its deathgrip on the market. If there's competition, it's best for everyone.
During the good old Cold War, things were more clear. The bad guys all had AK-47's and PKM's and MiG's. Only the friendlies (well friendly at the time; never mind about Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran) had M-16's and Stingers and Hueys. What we need now is another superpower to rise as our mortal enemy so we can have another arms race. That way we'll always know what side everyone's on by what weapons they have.
No, you misunderstood me. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I agree with you 100% that using XML is very useful for interoperability, which I also explained in my post. What I mean is that many people seem to say things like "this tool can export to XML" just for the buzzword compliance, without understanding what XML really is. If someone says "we can export to XML grammar Y" or "we have designed and specified XML application Z," then the person understands what XML is: not one particular data format, but a tool for designing data formats.
I was merely saying that it bothers me when people talk about using XML just because it's all the rage instead of using a tool because it's appropriate.
I couldn't agree with you more. I cringe every time someone says "We can export to XML," or "tool X can convert from Y to XML." This seems to be the biggest misunderstanding about the whole issue. I guess many people see the word language and think it's in the same category as C++ or SQL or HTML (each of which is in a different category, by the way). XML is really in a higher level category than all of them (nicely evidenced by the current version of HTML being an application of XML and that languages like C++ and SQL are generated from templates written in XML languages).
Maybe part of the problem is the name itself. Maybe it would be slightly less confusing if it were called the Extensible Meta Language.
I think of XML being in a similar category as ASCII. I know it's not a successor to ASCII (the best one is the Unicode family) and I know it's higher level than ASCII, but it can be used to accomplish previously unknown heights of interoperability, like ASCII allowed people to use the same data on different computers for the first time.
No one complains that ASCII doesn't check for valid data, because you can express any kind of data using ASCII. Maybe an even better metaphor for XML would be English. English is one human language, not ideal by any stretch of the imagination. Most of the world doesn't speak English, and there are many things that can be better expressed in another language. But, English is the closest human language to being universal (with the exception of math, but that's not flexible enough for most of human knowledge).
English is flexible enough to allow someone to express most human thoughts and be understood by a huge number of other people. It is very free form, allowing the same idea to be expressed a myriad of different ways. When knowledge has to more structured, like on a college application, a form is used to constrain it.
Well, this post was just a meandering trail of thought and brainstorming, not very well structured. Using XML metaphor, it was well formed (correct spelling and grammar AFAIK), but not validated (I didn't try to adhere to a particular logical structure, like an essay, treatise, or proof). I'm not trying to say that English should be universal or that other languages have less value, so don't flame me on that. English is just the language I know best and the one which can reach the greatest part of the world (unless, perhaps, you wanted to reach China).
Indeed! That's the only game I've bought for Linux and I wasn't sorry. I heard good things about Myth from a Mac user, then saw that Loki had ported it, so I went down the mall and there it was!
By the way, the Linux version has had OpenGL support for a long time, though on my hardware, it didn't look or perform much better than the software rendering.
Amazon and other retailer sites are good, but a free, non-comercial one is better. Amazon won't bother having entries for books they don't sell, which excludes many old and obscure ones.
Most people seem to ignore the fact that the USA was never intended to be a Democracy, but a Republic. A Democracy is a government of all the citizens, while a Republic is government by representatives of the citizens. By the way, the Republican and Democratic parties have little, if anything, to do with the definitions of Democracy and Republic.
I hope the poster's comment about all communications going through lobbyists was intended as a troll, but unfortunately, that may be the way it actually works. If so, the system is somewhere between a Republic and a Plutocracy, as someone has already mentioned.
Neither of those were defeats for the US, but they did both involve extremely bad decisions by US policy makers. Bay of Pigs was a defeat for the Cuban rebels, largely because the US backed out of their promised support, kind of like what happened in Iraq in the Gulf War. Somalia was yet another politically motivated military action without good military objectives.
Yeah, the idea of patenting this is ridiculous. I invented the idea of Evacuated Tube Transport when I was a kid. I remember thinking about the Maglev trains I had read about and thinking how cool it was to remove all rolling friction. Then, I thought about how the rest of the friction could be removed: take out the air.
Of course, it may be that I had read about the idea in a SciFi story or something instead. The point is that it is a trivial idea to invent with modern knowledge.
There most definitely are Lisp implementations (both Common Lisp and Scheme) that compile to machine code. Two examples are CMUCL and Bigloo. It seems clear from some benchmarks that they easily outperform the likes of Perl, Python, and Java. Note that the previous link won't work if you just click on it, but if you copy it, then put it in the location bar of a new window, it will. It seems the author of the page doesn't much like Slashdot.
You're absolutely right about the power of being able to generate source at runtime and evaluate (run) it. That's one of the things I like about Python as well. In fact, I don't think any language can be considered high-level if it doesn't have that. Guess where this concept originated? In the early implementation (around 1960) of Lisp, a function called "eval" was invented to be the definition of the Lisp interpreter. The details are in "The implementation of LISP".
The nice thing about the compiled lisps is that you also have the compiler available at runtime, which means that you can generate source code dynamically, then compile it. You are no longer bound by the traditional code/compile/run cycle.
I don't know of compilers/interpreters that can make such high level decisions about when to bind and evaluate, but I believe that Lisp allows a lot more flexibility in that area than C-like languages. Also, it looks like Self might offer something in that area. Another class of languages I have yet to explore, but may be far superior on these issues is that of pure functional languages, especially the lazily evaluated ones. I plan to learn one of the ML's eventually, like OCaml.
Unfortunately, as you pointed out, the best tools can't always be used because of external requirements like programmer or user familiarity. In fact, that's the main reason I haven't really gotten into using Lisp yet: I'm comfortable with languages I already know. But, I'm determined to try new things, especially when there's evidence that there are better tools available.
I only know the rudiments of Lisp, so I can't speak authoritatively, but I believe that all of what you're describing is there. I think that Lisp's macros and syntax forms are useful for doing all the things that templates can and then some. Unlike C++, they are expressed in the same syntax as the core language, so extensions to the language (like templates or control structures or other mini languages) are better integrated with the language.
It's interesting that you mention dialects, since Lisp is one of the few languages that is generally recognized as having them. Its flexibility lends itself to specialization, such as implementing new dialects of itself or completely new mini languages. For instance, Scheme was originally implemented in an already existing Lisp.
As far as serialization of objects and manipulation of data and code, few languages can boast the power of Lisp's S-expressions. Their power is in their simplicity and allows all Lisp code and data structures to be expressed in the same simple syntax. Also, the entire language is available all the time, meaning that you don't have to make a design decision about whether to use a compiled or an interpreted language.
As far as performance, there are Common Lisp and Scheme implementations that outperform many other modern high level languages and even get close to C++ in some cases (http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/).
Now I am ashamed for not using Lisp more after giving it such a glowing image. Mainly, it's just momentum. I continue to use the tools I'm comfortable with (mainly Python, Java and some C). I think this is the main reason people continue to use relatively low level languages like C and C++ for application programming. I do intend to try new tools, though. I don't want to stagnate.
Of course the fact that I haven't used Lisp much yet means I haven't experienced its downsides. However, I am confident that Lisp's lack of popularity does not reflect its power.
A quick grep of Samba 2.2.5 reveals this:
/* we don't support these - and CANCEL_LOCK makes w2k
if (locktype & (LOCKING_ANDX_CANCEL_LOCK | LOCKING_ANDX_CHANGE_LOCKTYPE)) {
and XP reboot so I don't really want to be
compatible! (tridge) */
return ERROR_NT(NT_STATUS_NOT_SUPPORTED);
}
I have just used the form to get the password for two of my accounts; one at mailandnews.com and one at a small domain. Both worked immediately. As the previous replier said, perhaps mail from Seti@Home is being filtered by some mail services.
Of course, there's nothing stopping someone from writing a Java compiler for the CLI, but then again, the class libraries would have to be there for it to be useful.
I am not interested in .NET because of M$'s clout, but I am somewhat interested in CLR and the standard libraries because it may be a genuinely useful technology. I'm not interested much in C#, as it appears to be quite similar to Java with some C++-like stuff, but if the promise of easy cross-language development is true, that is interesting. Of course, that is possible with a JVM and standard Java libraries, but the CLR may be superior in that respect. Let's wait and see.
I don't really have any experience with Scheme yet. I have been going through a tutorial and have been very impressed with the language's simplicity and mathematical nature compared to the languages I know: '(Pascal C C++ Java Python). I have seen references to CLOS-like object systems for Scheme, such as tiny CLOS and GOOPS, though I haven't tried them yet.