I love Python, but it isn't right to compare it with Squeak. Squeak can be ported to bare hardware, it can be re-written in itself, and its speed is comparable with native C complied code even with the bytecode compilation. The author of this story was mistaken when he commented that it could be "slooow". It is fully possible to write an OS in Squeak without undue slowness, especially compared to the current breed of bloated OSes written primarily in C and C++. Add to this the superior portability and true, clean OO thanks to Squeak's Smalltalk heritage, and you'll agree that Squeak is what Java wants to be when it grows up.
It seems that more and more companies are looking at software licensing in order to see which peice of software is costing them the most. Educational institutions will start doing the same thing pretty soon, I'm thinking. The Cost to Company of MS Office is the most obvious. The last company I was moved all of their workstations over to OpenOffice/Win98, and my current company did the same last month. The fact is that it's ridiculous to pay for licenses to a product that is actually quite generic in nature. OpenOffice has all of the spreadsheet and word processing features that most people use, and what's more has most of the total features of MS Office too. The thing that made MS Office big was its widespread use in the office/corporate enviroment. OpenOffice is the Open Source Software killer app, not Linux. OpenOffice will be the app that really brings OSS to the desktop (is already starting to bring OSS to the desktop, in fact).
I'm surprised more didn't put down mcedit (Midnight Commander Edit) and GNU nano (a pure GPL clone for pico, with more advanced features). I don't like either vi or Emacs. I can assure that a lot of people feel the same. Unfortuantely I do end up doing a lot of things in vi since it's more accessible than Emacs and seems to come standard with more systems. But on my own systems, the first thing I do is mv vi -> vi1 and ln -fs nano vi. Sure, mark this as flamebait, but a lot of people don't like either vi OR Emacs. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
Excellent language, some drawbacks.
on
Why not Ruby?
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· Score: 2
First of all, let me say that I am very impressed with the Python language as well.
It is an ultra cool geek language. You can program and see results immediately. The syntax is ultra-clean. It's WORA. And the whole system is under an extremely liberal license.
It's almost perfect, but there are drawbacks to it.
Python is missing:
Native HTTPS support.
Good widget set (small, portable, and simple - preferably built in too).
Native compiler (bytecode is great...but for some things it's too slow. Gimme a binary).
Powerful graphics primitives.
Easier stack manipulation (hacked pushing and popping isn't a real stack, guys)
Some of these shortcomings are present in other languages, like REBOL and Java, and of course the incredible Squeak (add your own primitives and customize the entire VM in a subset of the language itself)!
But overall, Python is still my favourite language, and I know a few (Squeak/Smalltalk, C, tons of Basic variants, Java, Shell, and a bit of Perl)....but it WOULD be nice if the Python team addressed the concerns above.
I've mentioned this before, but it is quite an important point, so I'll summarize it again - EULAs are techincally illegal. The law states implicitly that a contract will be judged illegal if a reasonable man in a reasonable state of mind would not agree to that contract given reasonable conditions. What all this means is basically this: The contract must be reasonable. If it is not, it is illegal and cannot be used as grounds for prosecution.
There is already open source competition for.NET, and it's darn fine competition at that. It's called Squeak and it has a lot of neat features that.NET won't be able to emulate very easily.
Squeak's VM is written completely in Squeak for one thing, it is bit-compatible accross platforms and yields very good performance, has support for advanced networking, graphics (32-bit), sound (complex audio) and has a high-level 3D Morph API that is extremely easy to hack in and create complex morphic images.
.NET looks messy and slow comparitively (Yes, I have been following the pre-release notes and technical notices regarding.NET, so I do know a lot about it).
Of course, the GNU GPL is great for hardcore Free Software advocates, and admittedly, it has done well in this arena. But the more GPL code there is, the more things shift in the direction of mandatory code release. This may more may not be a good thing. Only time will tell that, but one thing is for sure: it spells disaster for commercial software companies like Microsoft and the aforementioned ISVs.
Essentially it means giving away control of their software to everybody...which, as I say, is probably a good idea in a lot of instances - but from the point of view of a commercial software company, this *isn't a good thing*. Of course, the designer of the GNU GPL and founder of the project, Richard Stallman, admits that he dislikes commercial licenses and will not tolerate companies designing propreitry software.
The aim of the GPL is to ensure that users have control over the software they are using. This is an excellent thing as far as individual rights go, but it desimates commerical viability for software in 99% of cases. That is why I suspect that if something like the ISV gang-up on MS was to happen, the system that they would focus on would most likely be a *BSD variant.
Microsoft's practice of abusing their position as the company controlling the most popular desktop operating system has been noted by major ISVs. It won't be long until we see ISVs pooling resources into boosting an open system.
It's widely suspected that Microsoft uses secret API calls and undocumented functions within the operating system to gain advantages over their competitors. The WINE developers admit that they are having trouble reimplementing the Win32 API because it is so poorly documented. ISVs realize that they only have one chance at gaining ground against Microsoft products, and that's a new operating system strategy.
Unfortunately this is unlikely to be a GNU/Linux variant, due to the restrictive GNU GPL, but I wouldn't be surprised to see major ISVs (Oracle, Corel, Imprise, PCSoft etc etc etc) who have all traditionally been Windows software vendors, announcing major support for something like FreeBSD. That will be the beginning of the end for Microsoft.
What a lot of people forget - and I'm surprised that more people don't pick up on this - is that EULAs are techincally illegal. The law states implicitly that a contract will be judged illegal if a reasonable man in a reasonable state of mind would not sign that contract given reasonable conditions. What all this means is basically this: The contract must be reasonable. If it is not, it is illegal and cannot be used as grounds for prosecution.
Sorry, but I think you're pretty much missing the Big Picture here. What proponents of this technology are arguing is that in a few years it could become so advanced that CGI characters would be indistinguishable from real actors.
Moore's Law and the current rate of software improvement, as well as increased uses of technology such as clustering/parallel processing and increased CGI skill amoung modern animators support this theory.
As for the "voice" argument, it's true that voice synthesis won't be mainstream anytime soon, due to the increased complexity of the the task - but voice actors are hardly in the same league as all-round actors money-wise. Let's face it, there are a lot of people with good voices that could do that kind of work - every third person you meet will at least have some aptitude for it.
Whether it's right or wrong to replace "real live actors" with CGI is a philosophical point, but your statement is rendered obsolete if in fact the technology does get to the point where CGI characters are indistiguishable from real actors - and that point in technology is not far off.
Now, perhaps for people who read gossip columns, or idolize actors/actresses, this will seem like a big deal, as you say:
jennifer aniston?..something like that. And from a girl's point of view, romance movies are a big box office draw every year- and you just don't replace Robert Redford or Freddie Prinz Jr. with a drawing, i don't care how good of a drawing it is.
Ok, granted that these are all "pretty people" (well, the females at least), but really, I have never been an MTV-like person who idolizes entertainers the way some people do - to me, a movie is good, it's good. I freely admit that I don't spend time memorizing names, roles, etc of famous actors and actresses, and I don't really care about who they are or what other movies they've been in - as long as the movie's good, it's good. CGI characters are getting very good, and if they did end up replacing these actors and actresses, I really wouldn't care - as long as the movie itself was still good. I don't even know who Robert Redford and Freddie Printz are, to be perfectly honest with you, and if that seems "sad", it seems equally sad to me that people would spend time memorizing and idolizing people that really don't give a damn about them in return.
I for one would like to see live actors replaced by CGI... Mainly for the sheer hacker potential of such an occurance. I mean, a technical feat such as that would truely be a thing to behold...
It probably won't happen within the next 2 years, but the next 3 or 4, who knows? I guess people who worship entertainment figures might protest and boycott these movies, but to be perfectly honest with you, I think there are more people who wouldn't really care that current actors/actresses were replaced, and would realize that in reality, they were watching a 2 hour movie to be entertained - nothing more, and when the movie was finished, they would go back to doing something constructive (hopefully).
The Win32 API is a monster. I've talked to several of the WINE folks, who know far more about the Win32 API than most, and they admit that the thing is certainly not a clean API. OO? I'm not sure what you mean by this. Certainly, you can make API calls from an OO language, but you can make API calls from a functional language too.
COM and DCOM only have advantages in that they've been implemented in MS-OS's for some time. The Bonobo spec is certainly far more advanced than the COM/DCOM specs. The functionality of DCOM can mostly be implemented in existing standards like XML-RPC and Sun's RMI.
ActiveSex? I'm assuming you're trying to be funny and really referring to ActiveX. ActiveX isn't really a feature that should be hyped to the point it has been. It's a suite of APIs to access hardware directly. Fot Direct3D, which is the main component used in this suite, there is a superior open (standard) spec available - OpenGL.
The rest of the components comprising ActiveX are not things that can't be acheived with equivalent standard C libraries.
X is ugly? This is purely a subjective statement. X is a protocol used for Windowing and Graphics. You can make it look like anything you want, if you make an ugly Window Manager, it will look ugly. I don't think many people could argue that 4DWM, the standard SGI Window Manager, is ugly. In fact, it's known as the most stylish GUI in the industry - preferred by most high-end 3D and graphics professionals.
If by Windows "programmers" you are referring to VB script kiddies, then yes, I guess ActiveX objects are important, and they really do believe that the Win32 API is amazing. Since 70% of the Windows programming world constitutes VB programmers, this might in fact be a sad truth.
However, the more advanced Win32 programmers usually have experience with other APIs and platforms, and few of those still prefer the Win32 API, most are forced into programming against it due to market concerns, or their management forcing them to.
Even Microsoft employees themselves say that they hate the Win32 API, for example, Vinod Valloppillil. Having said all that, though, I do hope that the work on WINE progresses further for the sake of Linux gaming. The fact that the programmers on the project have been struggling with it so long is a testament to how messy the Win32 API really is. In short, I don't believe that you are a programmer - you are merely a Microsoft apologist troll.
No amount of filters/lawsuits will stop the 31337 underground. I don't agree with them - but I feel a bit sorry for the RIAA - trying to take on the 31337 underground. They obviously don't know who they're messing with. These guys are the mafia of the internet. So get their ISPs to ban them, I hear you say. Sure, but when that was tried with one of the 31337 leaders, the 31337 group took out the ISP - DDoSed it to death. If they can't do that they'll attack the upstream.
They have literally thousands of automated vulnerability programs searching for open servers to build new platforms to attack again. You can't stop them - they are the 31337 underground. I know, I've tried to stop them. It's not their abilities (well, in most cases at least) but their sheer numbers that make them impossible to defeat. Also, they are not centralized, so law-based methods won't help - they are in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, UK, USA, Canada, Germany, France, Russia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Mexico...yet they all speak a common language - "31337 h4x0r 5p34k."
Their average conversation is this:
- y0...
- wh4t n3w sh1t y0 g0tz?
- k00l sh1t
- FTPx0r d4 1nf0...
Yes, you definitely don't know what you're messing with. I don't agree with what they're doing either, but trust me - there is no way to stop them. They are the 31337 - Elite in the 31337 speak....and that they are, Elite 31337 h4x0rs on the information superhighway...
A long term strategy to deal with them must be formulated - that I'll grant you. Because if they aren't stopped eventually, 31337 5p34k will be the world's official language. These guys make other terrorist groups look like the tooth fairy for one reason - all other dictators so far have done their work through military force - therefore they could be combatted with military force....but the new era will see increasingly complicated telecommunications systems taking over functions of the very human world. And the 31337 will control that, unless we formulate a plan to stop them within the next 5 years.
There is one man that needs to be targetted - the Dark Lord of the Internet, a 31337 h4x0r known as "Goatboy25". A 25-year old 31337 h4x0r who is the New Dark Lord. These are dangerous times on the Internet.
The MPAA doesn't own the DeCSS implementations that various people have written....the copyrighted material is the information that CSS is in place to protect. If the Slashdot comments in question contained links to DivX files containing copyrighted movies, then the MPAA could complain and try to get them to remove those comments. But as far as I know, DeCSS doesn't contravene the DMCA - it only does if you use the code to decrypt items containing copyrighted material. So no - if the code is posted to Slashdot 14,000 times, there's really no way that the MPAA could claim it was against the DMCA.
Python is a very good language to learn programming with. Yes, it's high-level, but that's good in that it allows you to experiment with the logic of algorithm and program design rather than waste time with learning language quirks.
Of course, if you want to get down to the MOST fundamental level of all, you wouldn't be citing C as an example of this - you'd be looking at things like binary, circuits/gates, logic, CPU structure, etc. After you'd studied those and were fully aware of the "fundamentals" of those, you'd move on to assembly language, to find out how to apply programming concepts at almost that level. That would be fundamental. Once you'd done that, then you'd repeat that process with several architectures and THEN you would learn C. That is bit a extreme though, don't you agree? Yes - Python IS a good language to learn programming with, all hyperbole aside. Typechecking is not a difficult concept to deal with after working in weakly typed languages.
You won't learn sloppy habits by programming in a language that is weakly typed, and you'll be able to concentrate more on algorithmic design with Python - unlike C, where you'll spend most of the time programming "around the language" - that is to say - the language will get in the way of what you're trying to program, instead of allowing you to program the logic efficiently.
Once you have a firm grasp of algorithms, and the mathematics behind good progam design, THEN you have the mindset for programming - this is easy to acheive using Python. Once you have these concepts and methodologies, the pure math side of things - down pat, then yes, move on to C, for it IS more powerful than Python. Your post is full of misconceptions though.
While your co-worker might have good intentions, I don't think that he's right by a long shot.
Actually, Python runs on MORE Platforms than Java - BeOS didn't have a Java VM the last time I checked, and hell, Python even runs on PalmOS.
A lot of people have stated that they believe that Python is merely an academic toy, and not industrial strength like Java. While both languages have their advantages, I would say that Python has a wider application scope than Java, and is better for rapid application development and prototyping - indeed, it could rival Visual Basic in ease of use and speed of prototyping, and yet retain its advantage of being a true OO, cross-platform, free and open source product. While the Java language does have some free VM implementations, they are not as complete as the commercial equivalents - Python does not have this problem.
To answer your question, Python is just as "cross-platform" as Java and has potential to be even more so (which it already is as far as I know) due to the open-source, fere-software nature of it.
There are several ways to limit the output of harmful pollution in the atmosphere caused by fossil-fuel power plants.
The simplest one of these is to plant more vegetation and plants, which, as you know, generate oxygen. Fact is, the more trees and vegetation there is in any given area, the air surrounding that area will improve improve at a ratio directly proportional to the amount of trees versus people in the area.
The second is one that's heavily overlooked - when you concentrate the source of the the pollution, like you have with fossil-fuel power plants, it makes it a lot easier and more feasible to introduce industrial strength filters...since the area is concentrated, the filters will be a lot more effective than trying to install filters on every single car that's omitting harmful pollutants. So the "longer chimney" theory is pretty much invalid considering those two factors.
So no - all in all, it will not "damage the surrounding real countryside(tm)".
It's great that more attention is being paid to Mars now, but the fact is that NASA could have already made Mars viable for at least semi-sustaining human life by now 20 years ago. It's a simple scientific process to convert CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) to Oxygen by removing the Carbon in a laboratory enviroment. Now, considering the mass and size of Mars, and the fact that the atmosphere is 95% CO2, it would have taken around 5 years to oxygenate the atmosphere. So if NASA had have got their act together in 1980, people could be living there by 2007, nevermind putting in internet links. No - don't get me wrong. I have the highest respect for NASA, but it seems that the American government is not giving them enough funds and is not allowing them to do half of what they should be allowed to do.
Hell, has American education deteriorated so much that degreed people use words such as "arrogantness" and terms such as "value them very high"? Moron, in South Africa you will not even earn your high school qualification without being literate.
It means that the air surrounding the source of the radiation becomes hypersensitive to all communications mediums, including mental/telepathical transmissions.
Indeed, this is also true in South Africa. The top researcher of dolphin life in South Africa, Dr Peter West, admitted this recently. In fact, not only do dolphins kill more people in South Africa and Mozambique than sharks, but they are also the leading cause of death in Plettenberg Bay, one of the key dolphin areas in South Africa. So I unfortunately have to agree with thogard about the "cute dolphin" theory. However, while I do believe that this research will be key in the next generation of anthropological science, I do not believe that dolphins will be able to comprehend complex languages such as English or any other Indo-European language.
I can't describe just how much I agree with these sentiments. I have described my feelings on the current mainstream offerings here and will not reiterate them yet again. You guys will undoubtedly go down in history as the men who revived the computing industry. Hopefully the Wintel/Lintel era will be an embarrassing yet learning-curve justified era shortly.
We need the Phoenix consortium to continue the spirit of great design and technical excellence that the Amiga produced.
90%+ of television studios still use Amigas for their graphics production. NASA still uses Amigas for their more advanced raytracing problems. Most aspects regarding actual graphical performance of the earliest Amigas was only matched on PCs in late 1999. Yet despite this, critical work is sometimes still better suited to Amigas than PCs, even in 2001. Why? Because PCs, despite having more powerful hardware, lack the overall performance of Amigas due to the combination of factors that make the Amiga a great platform. Lightweight, advanced OS, customized graphics chipset, clean hardware design.
This is why a 1993 Amiga can still outperform a 2001 PC in many mission critical tasks, and why NASA uses Amigas extensively for their more complicated raytracing tasks. From that point of view, the PC looks somewhat like an amusing joke - all that power with little effect. The main reasons for this? Incompatible hardware convergence - thousands of manufacturers all striving to lead the market - it makes for cheap hardware, but it also makes for "LCD" type mentality - no , not Liquid Crystal Display, but Lowest Common Denomenator - to remain compatible with eachother, the manufacterers must make
sacrifices from a technology point of view.
Second, software developer incompetence. Operating systems championed by the Americans such as UNIX, Windows, and BeOS are all really worth crapola when running on these machines, and I'm sorry to say that it's mostly due to a combination of difficult, unruly hardware design and poor software design. Face it, UNIX is an LSD-inspired mess....BSD comes the closest to being a usable platform, and certainly is for some tasks, but the tasks in question, certainly not. As far as network servers are concerned I can't argue that BSD is the best solution available...but not for mission criticial raytracing/video tasks... and Windows is a bloated peice of rubbish. BeOS comes the closest to being an American OS that is worth anything at all, but even it falls short horribly.
I ran low-level tests on BeOS R5, and it didn't perform as promised, while the performace was good, a lot better than the other OSen I've mentioned, it was not totally up to scratch and not even close to the performance acheived by AmigaDOS.. Now - the Canadian OS, QNX RTP, comes the closest to being an OS that is actually well designed and useful. Yet even that, while being a brilliant peice of CANADIAN software, cannot skirt around the fact that the crap hardware that is currently in mainstream use falls short of any sort of technical excellence. Intel's processing platform, the x86, is a prime example of this - it is, in a word, crap. the IA64 looks even worse from a instruction bloat perspective. Let's move on to another American platform: The Mac.
While the hardware might be better than PC/x86, the MacOS itself is a horrible peice of rubbish. It does not have the elegance or clean design of the the AmigaDOS, it is not by any means small or lightweight - and it has goofy memory management and still, ridiculously, uses cooperative multitasking. MacOS X might fix some of these problems, but it introduces new ones - it is, in essence, even more bloated and complicated than the platform from which it was derived - BSD. I've already raved about BSD and Unix, so I won't go into that again. But now we have even more complicated layers on top of that - propreitry APIs which add even more confusion and bloat to the operating system.
Mac OS X will suck heavily, it is a hyped peice of crap. The Beta version I evaluated confirms this. Let's move on to the next platform - Linux, this is a platform that shows promise, yet suffers many of the same problems as BSD, and has some additional problems, such as VM instability. In a previous post I mentioned problems with the kernel and I won't go over them again. It is a promising platform, but still falls flat. So what do we have? Crappy hardware, crappy software (for the most part), with one notable exception of the Canadian-written QNX.
I don't think that anyone can argue that any of the current computing platform choices are up to scratch.
No - we do need something like the Phoenix Consortium. The current state of computing is just, well, mediocre... compared to what it could have been if the Amiga route had not have been cut short. The Amiga platform wasn't perfect, it lacked multiuserism for one, but it certainly is still the best platform that computing has offered so far.
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I love Python, but it isn't right to compare it with Squeak. Squeak can be ported to bare hardware, it can be re-written in itself, and its speed is comparable with native C complied code even with the bytecode compilation. The author of this story was mistaken when he commented that it could be "slooow". It is fully possible to write an OS in Squeak without undue slowness, especially compared to the current breed of bloated OSes written primarily in C and C++. Add to this the superior portability and true, clean OO thanks to Squeak's Smalltalk heritage, and you'll agree that Squeak is what Java wants to be when it grows up.
Give Katz a break. Critique is not an easy job in the best of circumstances, let alone on Slashdot :-)
It seems that more and more companies are looking at software licensing in order to see which peice of software is costing them the most. Educational institutions will start doing the same thing pretty soon, I'm thinking. The Cost to Company of MS Office is the most obvious. The last company I was moved all of their workstations over to OpenOffice/Win98, and my current company did the same last month. The fact is that it's ridiculous to pay for licenses to a product that is actually quite generic in nature. OpenOffice has all of the spreadsheet and word processing features that most people use, and what's more has most of the total features of MS Office too. The thing that made MS Office big was its widespread use in the office/corporate enviroment. OpenOffice is the Open Source Software killer app, not Linux. OpenOffice will be the app that really brings OSS to the desktop (is already starting to bring OSS to the desktop, in fact).
I'm surprised more didn't put down mcedit (Midnight Commander Edit) and GNU nano (a pure GPL clone for pico, with more advanced features). I don't like either vi or Emacs. I can assure that a lot of people feel the same. Unfortuantely I do end up doing a lot of things in vi since it's more accessible than Emacs and seems to come standard with more systems. But on my own systems, the first thing I do is mv vi -> vi1 and ln -fs nano vi. Sure, mark this as flamebait, but a lot of people don't like either vi OR Emacs. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
It is an ultra cool geek language. You can program and see results immediately. The syntax is ultra-clean. It's WORA. And the whole system is under an extremely liberal license.
It's almost perfect, but there are drawbacks to it.Python is missing:
Native HTTPS support.
Good widget set (small, portable, and simple - preferably built in too).
Native compiler (bytecode is great...but for some things it's too slow. Gimme a binary).
Powerful graphics primitives.
Easier stack manipulation (hacked pushing and popping isn't a real stack, guys)
Some of these shortcomings are present in other languages, like REBOL and Java, and of course the incredible Squeak (add your own primitives and customize the entire VM in a subset of the language itself)!
But overall, Python is still my favourite language, and I know a few (Squeak/Smalltalk, C, tons of Basic variants, Java, Shell, and a bit of Perl)....but it WOULD be nice if the Python team addressed the concerns above.
I've mentioned this before, but it is quite an important point, so I'll summarize it again - EULAs are techincally illegal. The law states implicitly that a contract will be judged illegal if a reasonable man in a reasonable state of mind would not agree to that contract given reasonable conditions. What all this means is basically this: The contract must be reasonable. If it is not, it is illegal and cannot be used as grounds for prosecution.
There is already open source competition for .NET, and it's darn fine competition at that. It's called Squeak and it has a lot of neat features that .NET won't be able to emulate very easily.
Squeak's VM is written completely in Squeak for one thing, it is bit-compatible accross platforms and yields very good performance, has support for advanced networking, graphics (32-bit), sound (complex audio) and has a high-level 3D Morph API that is extremely easy to hack in and create complex morphic images.Essentially it means giving away control of their software to everybody...which, as I say, is probably a good idea in a lot of instances - but from the point of view of a commercial software company, this *isn't a good thing*. Of course, the designer of the GNU GPL and founder of the project, Richard Stallman, admits that he dislikes commercial licenses and will not tolerate companies designing propreitry software.
The aim of the GPL is to ensure that users have control over the software they are using. This is an excellent thing as far as individual rights go, but it desimates commerical viability for software in 99% of cases. That is why I suspect that if something like the ISV gang-up on MS was to happen, the system that they would focus on would most likely be a *BSD variant.It's widely suspected that Microsoft uses secret API calls and undocumented functions within the operating system to gain advantages over their competitors. The WINE developers admit that they are having trouble reimplementing the Win32 API because it is so poorly documented. ISVs realize that they only have one chance at gaining ground against Microsoft products, and that's a new operating system strategy.
Unfortunately this is unlikely to be a GNU/Linux variant, due to the restrictive GNU GPL, but I wouldn't be surprised to see major ISVs (Oracle, Corel, Imprise, PCSoft etc etc etc) who have all traditionally been Windows software vendors, announcing major support for something like FreeBSD. That will be the beginning of the end for Microsoft.What a lot of people forget - and I'm surprised that more people don't pick up on this - is that EULAs are techincally illegal. The law states implicitly that a contract will be judged illegal if a reasonable man in a reasonable state of mind would not sign that contract given reasonable conditions. What all this means is basically this: The contract must be reasonable. If it is not, it is illegal and cannot be used as grounds for prosecution.
Sorry, but I think you're pretty much missing the Big Picture here. What proponents of this technology are arguing is that in a few years it could become so advanced that CGI characters would be indistinguishable from real actors.
Moore's Law and the current rate of software improvement, as well as increased uses of technology such as clustering/parallel processing and increased CGI skill amoung modern animators support this theory.As for the "voice" argument, it's true that voice synthesis won't be mainstream anytime soon, due to the increased complexity of the the task - but voice actors are hardly in the same league as all-round actors money-wise. Let's face it, there are a lot of people with good voices that could do that kind of work - every third person you meet will at least have some aptitude for it.
Whether it's right or wrong to replace "real live actors" with CGI is a philosophical point, but your statement is rendered obsolete if in fact the technology does get to the point where CGI characters are indistiguishable from real actors - and that point in technology is not far off.Now, perhaps for people who read gossip columns, or idolize actors/actresses, this will seem like a big deal, as you say:
jennifer aniston?..something like that. And from a girl's point of view, romance movies are a big box office draw every year- and you just don't replace Robert Redford or Freddie Prinz Jr. with a drawing, i don't care how good of a drawing it is.Ok, granted that these are all "pretty people" (well, the females at least), but really, I have never been an MTV-like person who idolizes entertainers the way some people do - to me, a movie is good, it's good. I freely admit that I don't spend time memorizing names, roles, etc of famous actors and actresses, and I don't really care about who they are or what other movies they've been in - as long as the movie's good, it's good. CGI characters are getting very good, and if they did end up replacing these actors and actresses, I really wouldn't care - as long as the movie itself was still good. I don't even know who Robert Redford and Freddie Printz are, to be perfectly honest with you, and if that seems "sad", it seems equally sad to me that people would spend time memorizing and idolizing people that really don't give a damn about them in return.
I for one would like to see live actors replaced by CGIThe Win32 API is a monster. I've talked to several of the WINE folks, who know far more about the Win32 API than most, and they admit that the thing is certainly not a clean API. OO? I'm not sure what you mean by this. Certainly, you can make API calls from an OO language, but you can make API calls from a functional language too.
COM and DCOM only have advantages in that they've been implemented in MS-OS's for some time. The Bonobo spec is certainly far more advanced than the COM/DCOM specs. The functionality of DCOM can mostly be implemented in existing standards like XML-RPC and Sun's RMI.ActiveSex? I'm assuming you're trying to be funny and really referring to ActiveX. ActiveX isn't really a feature that should be hyped to the point it has been. It's a suite of APIs to access hardware directly. Fot Direct3D, which is the main component used in this suite, there is a superior open (standard) spec available - OpenGL. The rest of the components comprising ActiveX are not things that can't be acheived with equivalent standard C libraries.
X is ugly? This is purely a subjective statement. X is a protocol used for Windowing and Graphics. You can make it look like anything you want, if you make an ugly Window Manager, it will look ugly. I don't think many people could argue that 4DWM, the standard SGI Window Manager, is ugly. In fact, it's known as the most stylish GUI in the industry - preferred by most high-end 3D and graphics professionals.If by Windows "programmers" you are referring to VB script kiddies, then yes, I guess ActiveX objects are important, and they really do believe that the Win32 API is amazing. Since 70% of the Windows programming world constitutes VB programmers, this might in fact be a sad truth. However, the more advanced Win32 programmers usually have experience with other APIs and platforms, and few of those still prefer the Win32 API, most are forced into programming against it due to market concerns, or their management forcing them to.
Even Microsoft employees themselves say that they hate the Win32 API, for example, Vinod Valloppillil. Having said all that, though, I do hope that the work on WINE progresses further for the sake of Linux gaming. The fact that the programmers on the project have been struggling with it so long is a testament to how messy the Win32 API really is. In short, I don't believe that you are a programmer - you are merely a Microsoft apologist troll.No amount of filters/lawsuits will stop the 31337 underground. I don't agree with them - but I feel a bit sorry for the RIAA - trying to take on the 31337 underground. They obviously don't know who they're messing with. These guys are the mafia of the internet. So get their ISPs to ban them, I hear you say. Sure, but when that was tried with one of the 31337 leaders, the 31337 group took out the ISP - DDoSed it to death. If they can't do that they'll attack the upstream.
They have literally thousands of automated vulnerability programs searching for open servers to build new platforms to attack again. You can't stop them - they are the 31337 underground. I know, I've tried to stop them. It's not their abilities (well, in most cases at least) but their sheer numbers that make them impossible to defeat. Also, they are not centralized, so law-based methods won't help - they are in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, UK, USA, Canada, Germany, France, Russia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Mexico...yet they all speak a common language - "31337 h4x0r 5p34k."Their average conversation is this:
- y0...- wh4t n3w sh1t y0 g0tz?
- k00l sh1t- FTPx0r d4 1nf0...
Yes, you definitely don't know what you're messing with. I don't agree with what they're doing either, but trust me - there is no way to stop them. They are the 31337 - Elite in the 31337 speak....and that they are, Elite 31337 h4x0rs on the information superhighway...A long term strategy to deal with them must be formulated - that I'll grant you. Because if they aren't stopped eventually, 31337 5p34k will be the world's official language. These guys make other terrorist groups look like the tooth fairy for one reason - all other dictators so far have done their work through military force - therefore they could be combatted with military force....but the new era will see increasingly complicated telecommunications systems taking over functions of the very human world. And the 31337 will control that, unless we formulate a plan to stop them within the next 5 years.
There is one man that needs to be targetted - the Dark Lord of the Internet, a 31337 h4x0r known as "Goatboy25". A 25-year old 31337 h4x0r who is the New Dark Lord. These are dangerous times on the Internet.Dangerous times on the Internet indeed.
The MPAA doesn't own the DeCSS implementations that various people have written....the copyrighted material is the information that CSS is in place to protect. If the Slashdot comments in question contained links to DivX files containing copyrighted movies, then the MPAA could complain and try to get them to remove those comments. But as far as I know, DeCSS doesn't contravene the DMCA - it only does if you use the code to decrypt items containing copyrighted material. So no - if the code is posted to Slashdot 14,000 times, there's really no way that the MPAA could claim it was against the DMCA.
Python is a very good language to learn programming with. Yes, it's high-level, but that's good in that it allows you to experiment with the logic of algorithm and program design rather than waste time with learning language quirks.
Of course, if you want to get down to the MOST fundamental level of all, you wouldn't be citing C as an example of this - you'd be looking at things like binary, circuits/gates, logic, CPU structure, etc. After you'd studied those and were fully aware of the "fundamentals" of those, you'd move on to assembly language, to find out how to apply programming concepts at almost that level. That would be fundamental. Once you'd done that, then you'd repeat that process with several architectures and THEN you would learn C. That is bit a extreme though, don't you agree? Yes - Python IS a good language to learn programming with, all hyperbole aside. Typechecking is not a difficult concept to deal with after working in weakly typed languages. You won't learn sloppy habits by programming in a language that is weakly typed, and you'll be able to concentrate more on algorithmic design with Python - unlike C, where you'll spend most of the time programming "around the language" - that is to say - the language will get in the way of what you're trying to program, instead of allowing you to program the logic efficiently.Once you have a firm grasp of algorithms, and the mathematics behind good progam design, THEN you have the mindset for programming - this is easy to acheive using Python. Once you have these concepts and methodologies, the pure math side of things - down pat, then yes, move on to C, for it IS more powerful than Python. Your post is full of misconceptions though.
While your co-worker might have good intentions, I don't think that he's right by a long shot.Actually, Python runs on MORE Platforms than Java - BeOS didn't have a Java VM the last time I checked, and hell, Python even runs on PalmOS.
A lot of people have stated that they believe that Python is merely an academic toy, and not industrial strength like Java. While both languages have their advantages, I would say that Python has a wider application scope than Java, and is better for rapid application development and prototyping - indeed, it could rival Visual Basic in ease of use and speed of prototyping, and yet retain its advantage of being a true OO, cross-platform, free and open source product. While the Java language does have some free VM implementations, they are not as complete as the commercial equivalents - Python does not have this problem.To answer your question, Python is just as "cross-platform" as Java and has potential to be even more so (which it already is as far as I know) due to the open-source, fere-software nature of it.
There are several ways to limit the output of harmful pollution in the atmosphere caused by fossil-fuel power plants.
The simplest one of these is to plant more vegetation and plants, which, as you know, generate oxygen. Fact is, the more trees and vegetation there is in any given area, the air surrounding that area will improve improve at a ratio directly proportional to the amount of trees versus people in the area.The second is one that's heavily overlooked - when you concentrate the source of the the pollution, like you have with fossil-fuel power plants, it makes it a lot easier and more feasible to introduce industrial strength filters...since the area is concentrated, the filters will be a lot more effective than trying to install filters on every single car that's omitting harmful pollutants. So the "longer chimney" theory is pretty much invalid considering those two factors.
So no - all in all, it will not "damage the surrounding real countryside(tm)".