In particular, the filename encodes information about the order in which the files need to be reassembled; so for each byte saved by the "compressor", several bytes are needed (on average) to encode the ordering as an ascii integer in the filename.
The challenger should have made it clear that these costs would be counted against the reconstructed filesize (or simply not allowed any deviation from the "one file" rule) The decompressor should operate by having all the files piped into stdin, thus eliminating filesystem state info entirely.
However, please note that it is not the parents of the kids who commited the shooting that are suing (at least, not according to the article). It is the families of the victims of the shooting. So, technically, counter-suing is probably not what you mean (unless you somehow think the victims should be held responsible for iD losing money...)
That is my point. The language DOES "incorporate" this feature. The blocking comments are perfectly valid python code, and you can run the tool automatically upon startup of python, if you wish (with.pythonrc or other means). Then you can program with bad blocking all you want.
Honestly, if you can't deal with simple problems like these, then I wouldn't be comfortable charging you with more complex tasks.
I like the clean simple syntax of Python; It allows me to concentrate on more important issues, like design, in an elegant way. To each his own.
In whitespace hostile environments, a tool such as pindent.py can be used. It adds commented block delimiters that preserve block structure when whitespace is messed with, and then converts back into executable Python source. The Emacs mode (and CVS, etc.) can be made to automatically apply these conversions, if desired.
So you see, in practice the use of indentation to delimit blocks is not impractical at all. It simply comes down to a matter of tastes, training, and preference.
I write a lot of C++ and Python code. I like both; the static vs. dynamic typing issues are HUGELY more relevant in determining which is better for a certain task, than block delimeters.
We are developing an application (graphical stimuli presented to a subject, with psychometrics being recorded), and are deciding on how to go about dealing with configuration files, etc.
XML seems like a fairly decent way to store our configuration info (and it will allow an overall configuration to link to other sub-configurations, which is nice for our app.)
But your comment on Guile got me thinking; probably it is overkill. But perhaps the flexibility of a full programming language would be beneficial for configuration, although it may not be meant to solve the same problems as XML.
Your post got me to (re-)look into Guile, but I was wondering if you (or anyone) had any more specific thoughts on what formats to use for configuration files, and what in particular you do with Guile that replaces what you would have done with XML.
There is a tool (whose name I've forgotton, unfortunately), that adds #{ and #} to python files as block delimiters (consider it as optional bracket syntax).
The tool can convert back and forth to allow for use in indentation hostile environments.:) Can anyone give the name of the tool I'm thinking of?
Now, I can sympathize with what you're saying, but only in the context of there being TRUE alternatives to corporate owned and controlled TV. "Frontline", in my opinion, puts on more hard edged news stories that any of the networks, or even the cable channels that I've seen; this is an example of PBS providing a type of programming that just isn't provided elsewhere. However, you are right that even they are swayed by the ways of the political winds in their programming, but are still more risky (in my view) than the networks.
"Frontline" was the show that dared to broadcast (soon after the Gulf War) a story that contradicted many of the sacred poodles that the press and politicians had been saying during the war (such as the Isreali Defense Minister saying that Patriot missles were of no use in destroying the warheads of the SCUD missles; or that the CIA essentially coerced Hosni Mubarak to spy on Saddam before the war started, in a supposed "negotiation"; or that Kuwait spent billions on advertising and lobbying in the U.S. before the war, including a highly deceitful propaganda campaign detailing Iraqi "attrocities")
They also recently played a series with interviews of DEA agents who admitted that all their efforts to control supply into the US during the 80's had utterly failed (much their own surprise), and that many now advocated an end to the "drug war", and some form of legalization with treatment regimes, etc.
I never saw anything like this on the networks, CNN, HBO, etc. To me that is riskier TV than anything outside of cable access (and I'm ignoring the issue of whether it is accurate reporting or not; I think it is, others may not. It is still risky)
So, you may want PBS to go belly up; but it would be sad if they did, and there was no loosening of control of the airwaves in other ways. If you think PBS is afraid of corporate sponsors, imagine how all the other channels feel who are paid exclusively by corporate sponsors.
Because, when you don't consider homosexual transmission, it is generally believed (and probably now proved via empirical tests) that women have a MUCH greater chance of getting HIV from a man, than a man does from a woman. Also, male promiscuity is considered to be higher than female, so a single male can infect several women over the course of time.
Therefore, in areas where non-homosexuals are the primary carriers of HIV, it often has a higher infection rate for women than men.
So, it is not an issue of symmetry. Women have a higher chance of getting AIDS from a man than vice versa.
Berlin, I believe, allows a client to upload extensions to the server (ala NeWS) so that the rendering can be done by the server (quickly), but the client still has control and can dictate policy, etc.
Very extensible, and efficient over networks. Very similar to how themes all used to be pixmap based, and can now use "engines" to render more efficiently, these extensions allow you to transfer your functionality to the display server when necessary.
Wasteful of main memory, wasteful of CPU data cache, wasteful of limited buffer memory on non-unified memory graphics boards, and VERY bad for people without graphics acceleration. The CPU will be doing a lot more rasterizing, even when it doesn't have to, and it generally isn't optimized for this. Basically, we can't yet be THAT inefficient.
Something like Rasterman's EVAS may be the right step towards this, though.
Re:Napster and users signed its own death warrant
on
Napster Traffic Drops
·
· Score: 2
Remember that Napster usage increased sales of CDs.
Correlation does not imply causation. And in fact, I'm not sure anyone has shown correlation.
That is a weak argument. As stated in the Constitution, Congress is the only branch of federal government that is allowed to make law. So it is implicit that if Congress shall make no law regading something, then no federal government branch or agency is allowed to make that law (or indeed any other law). Maybe you are just trolling; or else you went to a public school Civics class.
20 or so years ago Jerry Pournelle, writing in Byte, said that in the future (i.e. now) the money
wouldn't be in selling software, it would be in selling support (like Red Hat) and documentation
(like O'Reilly). He was right.
Yeah, Microsoft is just begging for a cash infusion from the Juggernauts that are O'Reilly and RedHat.
And furthermore (in regards to the original post) Debian packagers are slowly converting from/usr/doc to/usr/share/doc but many packages haven't yet been fixed in this regard. There is some debate as to how to handle this when relase time comes, since the rate of conversion (over 6000 packages now in Debian!) is somewhat lagging.
It also sounds very scalable. Use 4, 8, or 16 of these together and you may have a very good high end system.
Of course, in the mean time, no specs -> no free/open XFree drivers -> no sale for me
Re:Favorite lines of Space Quest series
on
Leisure Suit Unix
·
· Score: 3
This reminds me of what used to annoy me about the Infocom "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" game.
[paraphrased]
>n
The door is locked
>n
The door is locked
>n
Really, it's closed and locked
>n
There's nothing in there
>n
Come on, I'm serious, there is nothing behind that door
>n
>n
>n
>n
Okay... Maybe there is something behind that door. But it is locked.
>n
You can't open it
>n
Really there is no way to open it
>n
Hmmm, okay, maybe it opens just a bit
etc...
This isn't the actual text, but it is roughly in the spirit of it (although I remember having to be a LOT more persistent than even this, for a couple of the puzzles. That was one damned hard game as a kid)
The alternatives are to use Roddenberry's words (said at many conventions over the years) that are clearly biased against Ellison (on this matter), or try to make an informed middle-ground judgement. Sadly, many people spout off on this issue (on both sides) without any standing, other than trying to defend the person whom they like (even worship).
Ellison's book does editorialize, but also contains (among other factual material related to the story and the dispute) a version of the original script that caused so much fuss. It can be judged by fans as to whether it was "unfilmable", as someone said earlier.
Most interesting (I thought) was that the rubble, devastated planet, and Time Donut all came about over a simple misunderstanding by the set production department (they interpreted the word "runes" in the story to mean "ruins").
FWIW, the poster above was wrong. Harlan edited "Dangerous Visions", an anthology book from the 60's. He (most likely) had nothing to do with "Dark Visions".
He's somewhere between 5'2" and 5'4" inches, actually. (This is based both on what he says, and from standing next to him several times; my girlfriend is 5'2")
What if the "objects" are intersecting? How do you sort them in a meaningful way? And how do you properly render these intersecting objects if you've turned off z-buffering? (perhaps you draw intersecting objects separately, with the z-buffer on)
Slashdot Mirror
The challenger should have made it clear that these costs would be counted against the reconstructed filesize (or simply not allowed any deviation from the "one file" rule) The decompressor should operate by having all the files piped into stdin, thus eliminating filesystem state info entirely.
However, please note that it is not the parents of the kids who commited the shooting that are suing (at least, not according to the article). It is the families of the victims of the shooting. So, technically, counter-suing is probably not what you mean (unless you somehow think the victims should be held responsible for iD losing money...)
Honestly, if you can't deal with simple problems like these, then I wouldn't be comfortable charging you with more complex tasks.
I like the clean simple syntax of Python; It allows me to concentrate on more important issues, like design, in an elegant way. To each his own.
So you see, in practice the use of indentation to delimit blocks is not impractical at all. It simply comes down to a matter of tastes, training, and preference.
I write a lot of C++ and Python code. I like both; the static vs. dynamic typing issues are HUGELY more relevant in determining which is better for a certain task, than block delimeters.
Thanks for the response; It has given me some useful information, and things to think about.
We are developing an application (graphical stimuli presented to a subject, with psychometrics being recorded), and are deciding on how to go about dealing with configuration files, etc.
XML seems like a fairly decent way to store our configuration info (and it will allow an overall configuration to link to other sub-configurations, which is nice for our app.)
But your comment on Guile got me thinking; probably it is overkill. But perhaps the flexibility of a full programming language would be beneficial for configuration, although it may not be meant to solve the same problems as XML.
Your post got me to (re-)look into Guile, but I was wondering if you (or anyone) had any more specific thoughts on what formats to use for configuration files, and what in particular you do with Guile that replaces what you would have done with XML.
There is a tool (whose name I've forgotton, unfortunately), that adds #{ and #} to python files as block delimiters (consider it as optional bracket syntax).
:) Can anyone give the name of the tool I'm thinking of?
The tool can convert back and forth to allow for use in indentation hostile environments.
Now, I can sympathize with what you're saying, but only in the context of there being TRUE alternatives to corporate owned and controlled TV. "Frontline", in my opinion, puts on more hard edged news stories that any of the networks, or even the cable channels that I've seen; this is an example of PBS providing a type of programming that just isn't provided elsewhere. However, you are right that even they are swayed by the ways of the political winds in their programming, but are still more risky (in my view) than the networks.
"Frontline" was the show that dared to broadcast (soon after the Gulf War) a story that contradicted many of the sacred poodles that the press and politicians had been saying during the war (such as the Isreali Defense Minister saying that Patriot missles were of no use in destroying the warheads of the SCUD missles; or that the CIA essentially coerced Hosni Mubarak to spy on Saddam before the war started, in a supposed "negotiation"; or that Kuwait spent billions on advertising and lobbying in the U.S. before the war, including a highly deceitful propaganda campaign detailing Iraqi "attrocities")
They also recently played a series with interviews of DEA agents who admitted that all their efforts to control supply into the US during the 80's had utterly failed (much their own surprise), and that many now advocated an end to the "drug war", and some form of legalization with treatment regimes, etc.
I never saw anything like this on the networks, CNN, HBO, etc. To me that is riskier TV than anything outside of cable access (and I'm ignoring the issue of whether it is accurate reporting or not; I think it is, others may not. It is still risky)
So, you may want PBS to go belly up; but it would be sad if they did, and there was no loosening of control of the airwaves in other ways. If you think PBS is afraid of corporate sponsors, imagine how all the other channels feel who are paid exclusively by corporate sponsors.
md5sum linux-2.4.3.tar.gz
I get:
4675f8378b669436462f4297d03344c3
for both the above mirrored kernel (jbardin), and the one I downloaded from www.kernel.org (at ~5 MB/s, btw; Thanks VA Linux!)
Because, when you don't consider homosexual transmission, it is generally believed (and probably now proved via empirical tests) that women have a MUCH greater chance of getting HIV from a man, than a man does from a woman. Also, male promiscuity is considered to be higher than female, so a single male can infect several women over the course of time.
Therefore, in areas where non-homosexuals are the primary carriers of HIV, it often has a higher infection rate for women than men.
So, it is not an issue of symmetry. Women have a higher chance of getting AIDS from a man than vice versa.
The problem with this is that the space fungus would make its way down the tunnel to the nearest Russian spy center.
"As OPPOSED", not "As supposed"...
Berlin, I believe, allows a client to upload extensions to the server (ala NeWS) so that the rendering can be done by the server (quickly), but the client still has control and can dictate policy, etc.
Very extensible, and efficient over networks. Very similar to how themes all used to be pixmap based, and can now use "engines" to render more efficiently, these extensions allow you to transfer your functionality to the display server when necessary.
Very Cool (and if I'm wrong, flame away).
Wasteful of main memory, wasteful of CPU data cache, wasteful of limited buffer memory on non-unified memory graphics boards, and VERY bad for people without graphics acceleration. The CPU will be doing a lot more rasterizing, even when it doesn't have to, and it generally isn't optimized for this. Basically, we can't yet be THAT inefficient.
Something like Rasterman's EVAS may be the right step towards this, though.
Remember that Napster usage increased sales of CDs.
Correlation does not imply causation. And in fact, I'm not sure anyone has shown correlation.
That is a weak argument. As stated in the Constitution, Congress is the only branch of federal government that is allowed to make law. So it is implicit that if Congress shall make no law regading something, then no federal government branch or agency is allowed to make that law (or indeed any other law). Maybe you are just trolling; or else you went to a public school Civics class.
20 or so years ago Jerry Pournelle, writing in Byte, said that in the future (i.e. now) the money wouldn't be in selling software, it would be in selling support (like Red Hat) and documentation (like O'Reilly). He was right.
Yeah, Microsoft is just begging for a cash infusion from the Juggernauts that are O'Reilly and RedHat.
And furthermore (in regards to the original post) Debian packagers are slowly converting from /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc but many packages haven't yet been fixed in this regard. There is some debate as to how to handle this when relase time comes, since the rate of conversion (over 6000 packages now in Debian!) is somewhat lagging.
It also sounds very scalable. Use 4, 8, or 16 of these together and you may have a very good high end system.
Of course, in the mean time, no specs -> no free/open XFree drivers -> no sale for me
This reminds me of what used to annoy me about the Infocom "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" game.
[paraphrased]
>n
The door is locked
>n
The door is locked
>n
Really, it's closed and locked
>n
There's nothing in there
>n
Come on, I'm serious, there is nothing behind that door
>n
>n
>n
>n
Okay... Maybe there is something behind that door. But it is locked.
>n
You can't open it
>n
Really there is no way to open it
>n
Hmmm, okay, maybe it opens just a bit
etc...
This isn't the actual text, but it is roughly in the spirit of it (although I remember having to be a LOT more persistent than even this, for a couple of the puzzles. That was one damned hard game as a kid)
The alternatives are to use Roddenberry's words (said at many conventions over the years) that are clearly biased against Ellison (on this matter), or try to make an informed middle-ground judgement. Sadly, many people spout off on this issue (on both sides) without any standing, other than trying to defend the person whom they like (even worship).
Ellison's book does editorialize, but also contains (among other factual material related to the story and the dispute) a version of the original script that caused so much fuss. It can be judged by fans as to whether it was "unfilmable", as someone said earlier.
Most interesting (I thought) was that the rubble, devastated planet, and Time Donut all came about over a simple misunderstanding by the set production department (they interpreted the word "runes" in the story to mean "ruins").
"Dangerous Visions", not "Dark Visions"... An important distinction. :-)
FWIW, the poster above was wrong. Harlan edited "Dangerous Visions", an anthology book from the 60's. He (most likely) had nothing to do with "Dark Visions".
He's somewhere between 5'2" and 5'4" inches, actually. (This is based both on what he says, and from standing next to him several times; my girlfriend is 5'2")
What if the "objects" are intersecting? How do you sort them in a meaningful way? And how do you properly render these intersecting objects if you've turned off z-buffering? (perhaps you draw intersecting objects separately, with the z-buffer on)