When I first played Halo I was amazed at how natural the controls were. A few minutes later I realised that the reason they felt natural is that they figured out how to approximate the feeling of a mouse and keyboard with a control pad. Yes, it took 8 years since Doom was first released on a console (Atari Jaguar?) for the gameplay of a FPS on PC to be approximated. (The sensitivity still isn't to the point where you can be trusted to aim entirely on your own.)
The XBox's LAN features are a step in the right direction, but when can we expect some real controller hardware? I'm tired of buying videocards every month and dual-booting to Windows when I want to play (I can't beat Linux's final boss: Wine). I want a console that offers more than Playskool-level video games.
If only there weren't so many chumps buying the current shit on the market, maybe somebody'd listen to me.
At first I thought you were just a misguided troll, as Robertson's patent was filed 28 years before Phillips'. However it turns out that Robertson rigorously defended his patent including refusing to sell it to Ford whereas Phillips patent violations were so numerous that the patent was declared void in 1949. So I guess you're right, thanks for illuminating me.
Apparently the multi-tool manufacturers have yet to catch up to Canadian screw technology, so I find myself unable to buy a multi-tool equipped with the obiquitous Robertson bit. Does anyone know of a multi-tool that does away with that stupid slot in favour of a real screwdriver?
Many pattern critics point out that some of the Gang of Four Design Patterns are ways of adding features from some languages to Java (or other OO languages that are lacking?). There is even a paper out there (don't ask me, ask Google) that goes through the list and finds that a significant percentage are trivial in functional languages. So I propose a language design principle: create a language that makes as many popular patterns trivial/obsolete as possible.
If its a common enough occurence to be worth including in a book on patterns, then it's common enough to design for. Programmers learning the language will feel joy because rather than figuring out how to translate their memorised patterns into the new language, they will be able to forget them completely. And since you can't just stick a solve_pattern_foo keyword in the language, I believe that designing the language to solve these problems will have a side-effect of making it very powerful and expressive.
Some of the people at my school (Queen's) came up with a language many years ago called Turing. It was designed to be an educational replacement for Pascal and so had a straight-forward syntax, etc. So that it would be suitable for both lower- and higher-level courses it supposedly is designed so that language features can be added as modules.
I haven't really looked into it (just told about it by one of the designers of Turing), but this seems like a really good way to satisfy people like you, especially since some of those features are mutually exclusive as other posters have suggested.
I've heard things about Lua being modular -- anyone know more?
I am writing this post in case you read the parent's wise comments and decide that to know mathematics you must know proofs. Proof theory is part of logic, a discipline that is sometimes slotted under math, sometimes philosophy, and sometimes by itself. Unfortunately, the proofs of logicians are nothing at all like the proofs of mathematicians.
Logical proofs are rigorous -- they can be checked mechanically for accuracy and even generated through largely automatic means. Mathematical proofs are known by the technical term "hand-waving" and are actually an informal argument for other mathematicians (just as legal arguments are intended for other lawyers and judges). If the "proofs" of mathematics were as rigorous as the proofs of logic, then how could we ever run into problems where proofs are later found to be incorrect? Some nutcase who thinks he's proved Goldbach's Conjecture would be turned away by the journal's oracle (to borrow an idea from programming competitions) if they were too lazy to check the proof on their own computer.
And don't go smoke a bunch of Hofstadter and think that mathematics is too undecidable for automated proof tools: if mathematicians were serious about producing rigorous proofs they'd simply have to assist their theorem provers at choice moments with the necessary insight. As a result, every mathematics paper would be a long serious of simple, incremental steps which can be examined by a layman or even a computer. Instead, they perpetuate their own job security by writing in tongues.
If you ever hope to do mathematics, don't make the mistake I did: avoid learning symbolic logic at all costs.
Thank you, it's praise like that which gives me the energy to continue producing such works. And apparently at least two moderators know good Flamebait when they see it and modded me up* accordingly.
* You do have your modifiers set correctly, don't you?
And what about the people whose job it is to make those radio copies? Do you feel okay screwing them in the ass?
It's not like bleeps grow on trees, you know. Either the artist has to produce a second version of the song, which requires time that they could be using to produce another song (and thereby generate more revenue if it doesn't suck), or some underpaid smuck at the record company has to do it. As you no-doubt know, it's not just a matter of listening through the song and hitting a button whenever you hear something naughty: a censor has to decide whether to replace "fuck" with a whip sound or silence; bring the artist back into the studio to record them saying "frig"; or in a worst-case scenario audition and hire a voice-double if the artist is too expensive or not available. Doing this without completely ruining the song requires creativity ability.
Don't forget the exhorbant costs to the record company from producing a second CD. First they have to pay someone to design packaging that clearly and attractively expresses the nature of the album. Then they have the logistical cost of distributing it, with a significant danger of getting confused and accidentally sending the PA copies to Walmart. Finally there is the lost revenue from kids returning their grandmother's mistaken purchase and simple brand confusion from having two nearly identical items.
Thinking that you deserve access to the edited copy of a recording is like walking into a store and stealing the latest Merriam-Webster dictionary on CD because you own the 1913 copy.
IANAE, but what I do remember from micro is that the opportunity cost theory of value was a damn powerful idea: the value of a pair of shears is what you can get for the shears.
This is a relative measure of value, and as long as you can only trade the shears for other virtual items it is very difficult to pin down a specific cost. However controlling a character with shears or some other virtual item is presumably more fun than controlling a character without, so the shears have some entertainment value. (It might be so low as to be unmeasurable, though.)
This makes it sound like opportunity cost is also a subjective measure of value. And, indeed, it is if you cannot trade the shears for something non-virtual. However I've heard that you can sell MMORPG items on eBay for real money, thereby giving the shears a non-virtual value. Money would also have a subjective value, except you can use it to buy things you objectively need, like calories, thereby objectifying it.
So the value of the shears is the amount of real money you can get for transferring their virtual possession. And the value of the real money is the physical needs you can satisfy with it:
Planting bombs beneath buildings is orthodox: Guy Fawks thought of it first. Terrorists crashing planes into buildings is orthodox: Tom Clancy thought of it first. Biological warfare is orthodox: the monkey in Outbreak thought of it first.
The US intelligence community is no longer about getting the bad guys: it's about making Lord Rumsfeld and Emperor Bush look right. In brainstorming you're not supposed to criticise suggestions -- every idea is valid. Since the CIA and FBI did so well in preventing 9-11, there's obviously no need to be unorthodox.
TIA and PAM were brilliant approaches. It's understandable that politicians would have vetoed TIA in response to their constituents' wishes, but that doesn't make it any less of a good idea. And please stop to consider whether PAM was so offensive next time you're duct-taping your windows close.
Poindexter is dangerously underappreciated by the people who need him most.
In order to be really useful, the wire from the HD would have to be connected to a USB port, preferrably on the front of the machine. This would be a great use for those goofy computers that come with "gaming" ports on the front, and a minor mod to mount a port in a front-panel drive bay.
Actually I think I'd feel sufficiently secure if they're using XOR encryption.
Since there is exactly one key capable of decrypting the data, the obvious thing to do is place on the key a one-time pad. A USB storage keychain holds 128MB, which we can assume is XOR'd against each 128MB block on the hard drive. Even assuming that the one-time pads are being generated using a truly random method (which they're probably not), this is still crackable. However it's be no means easily crackable and yet is very convenient and fast.
Do you really want your CPU factoring primes every time you read a sector of your hard drive?!
Is it just me, or is Perl 6 so different from Perl 5 that they probably should have given it another name? Especially since Perl 5 will continue to be updated after Perl 6 becomes stable?
Perl 6 has so little backwards compatibility, it'd probably be better if they just through out all the legacy syntax and started from scratch with a new language. Not that Perl ever was elegant, but I'm starting to worry that things are getting out of hand...
In the denotational semantics community it was long ago decided that real programming languages are too messy and too much of moving targets for serious theoretical research. As a result, the most popular language is known as Idealised Algol which is a simplified and cleaned-up version of Algol-60 (I'm told Algol-W is the closest implementation).
Now that Perl 6 has a rich operator definition system*, we can look forward to Idealised Perl (IP). IP would be a version of Perl stripped down to only the necessary syntactic building-blocks. Even if much of Perl 6 were implemented in C, it'd be possible to define all the syntax in terms of IP. If you're writing code for maintainability instead of prototyping, using IP as much as possible will ensure a smaller learning curve for non-gurus. IP will be simple enough to actually allow teaching Perl in universities.
IP could be the elegant yet expressive language we all (whether we like Perl or not) wish Perl would be.
* This is, IMO, the only really neat and elegant thing to come out of Perl 6 so far. If operators can be defined to the point where most mathematical formulae are executable, Perl will become a revolutionary tool.
One more thing: I'm really happy to see Perl include currying, I can't think of a programming language that I would be completely happy using without it.
A disclaimer: I used to program Perl for a living, but we had a falling out some years ago (around 5.0?). So if you don't think there's any merit to what I'm saying, then feel free to consider this a troll:
Shortly after I started reading Exegesis 6 I was somewhat frightened by how complex Perl had become since I stopped keeping track of updates. Of course scripting languages have always been known for borrowing the best from other programming languages, so I kept reading in the hopes that I'd recognise something. I saw some features like the is constant declaration and started worrying that maybe they'd decided to borrow some features from the very popular but insanely evil Visual Basic. But then I saw this:
type Selector::= Code | Class | Rule | Hash;
and realised that, just as Python is (alleged to be?) adding Lisp-like features, Perl is adding ML-like features! That line above is (minus the '::' and ';') straight out of a Haskell program. Then I started to notice more Haskell-like syntax:
Anonymous function declaration syntax: -> $animal { $animal.size < $breadbox } would be (\animal -> animal.size < breadbox) in Haskell
Multisubs are like pattern matching: multi sub feed(Cat $c) {...}
multi sub feed(Lion $l) {...} would be feed (Cat c) =... feed (Lion l) =...
New infix operator definitions: infix:~|_|~ would be the function named (~|_|~)
Junctions are like list comprehensions: all(newvals) would be [x | x <- newvals] (it almost seems like junctions are lazy from the way Damian talks about them?!)
And I'm sure a more thorough reading would turn up even more. (For example, the smart-match operator reminds me of the type inferences done in a Hindley-Milner type system.) So it appears that any sufficiently advanced language contains an implementation of a purely functional language, not specifically Scheme.:) Has Damian (who certainly has Haskell exposure) or Larry ever mentioned any of these influences?
Oh yeah, Mono'd be great...if only it worked or something.
The sad fact is that Nat is one of only a handful of people in the world who can actually get his Dashboard demo, or any other Windows.Forms application working. Why? Because Mono's Windows.Forms implementation requires an obscure patch to a two-month old version of Wine. IOW, Mono has become "write once, run on Miguel's computer".
There are two things they could do to fix this:
Work a bit harder to get the patch accepted to the Wine source tree or at least keep it updated for more recent versions of Wine (and package it nicely?).
Stop screwing around with an amature implementation and put some more effort into the Gtk+-gateway that has been promised from the start.
Obviously Microsoft is getting exactly what they want from Mono: a tool that lets developers stay with Linux (which they really want to do and isn't a big market anyway) while forcing customers to use Windows. Oh well, is anybody really surprised?
Specifically Panasonic claims that the Toughbook is built (and tested) to comply with US military standard MIL-STD 810F, which specifies (operating, not storage):
MIL-STD 810F 501.3 II: 71 C
MIL-STD 810F 507.3: 95% humidity
Of course we all know that the bullet resistance is the coolest requirement.
There are plenty of other laptops that meet those specifications -- but I assume they all have similar price tags.:(
It's nice of you to tell us how much you love your favourite little laptop and all, but the poster wasn't just asking what made you cream your pants: fortunately Apple publishes the TiBook's environmenal specifications, unfortunately they're insufficient for this job:
10 to 35 C
20% to 80% relative humidity
I know TiBooks are very nice and all, but they're not the panacea that many owners seem to think they are.
The problem today is that people are living longer and longer, effectively running their organs into the ground. Most people who die today either have a disease too wacky for them to be donors or most of their organs have already failed long ago. The better a medical system gets, the less people you have dying from something so trivial that their organs are still working. (Take Star Trek: how many of the redshirts left enough of a corpse for harvesting?)
It's time that our society got over its antiquated ethical qualms and let bioengineering catch up with medicine. You don't need donated organs if you can just clone your own, now do you? Personally I refuse to donate organs in order to incrase demand and thereby increase the financial benefit to companies working on alternatives.
Dude, if the donated kidney is just going to get destroyed all over again, what's the point of wasting it on them? If the patient has a disease such that every organ in the body is being destroyed, then why not just put them out of their misery and implant their brainwaves in a giant robot?
I know this is hard for you money-grubbing Americans to understand, but in other parts of the world we believe that there are non-economic advantages to having a university education.
For example, it may make you a better citizen. Most university degree programs require the student to display some amount of critical thinking skills -- the hope is that this will prevent people from voting for people like Bush. University degree holders often have hobbies other than watching reality television and have even been known to produce societal benefits in their time off.
If university educations were just for getting ahead, then why don't we multilaterally agree to stop going to university and we can all save ourselves some time and money? At the very least, we might be able to keep asshats like you out of the classroom.
I guess we'll have to put all the people needing organs in a priority queue instead of just tossing out those who don't donate. Gee, that was really hard, wasn't it? Especially when you consider that all the people needing organs are already in a priority queue.
The answers to your questions are so obvious, I'm half expecting the "YHBT"...
Slashdot Mirror
The XBox's LAN features are a step in the right direction, but when can we expect some real controller hardware? I'm tired of buying videocards every month and dual-booting to Windows when I want to play (I can't beat Linux's final boss: Wine). I want a console that offers more than Playskool-level video games.
If only there weren't so many chumps buying the current shit on the market, maybe somebody'd listen to me.
So pretty much all IP wants to be free, right? And we can't compete on manufacturing. So it has to be a service -- any suggestions?
At first I thought you were just a misguided troll, as Robertson's patent was filed 28 years before Phillips'. However it turns out that Robertson rigorously defended his patent including refusing to sell it to Ford whereas Phillips patent violations were so numerous that the patent was declared void in 1949. So I guess you're right, thanks for illuminating me.
Apparently the multi-tool manufacturers have yet to catch up to Canadian screw technology, so I find myself unable to buy a multi-tool equipped with the obiquitous Robertson bit. Does anyone know of a multi-tool that does away with that stupid slot in favour of a real screwdriver?
Many pattern critics point out that some of the Gang of Four Design Patterns are ways of adding features from some languages to Java (or other OO languages that are lacking?). There is even a paper out there (don't ask me, ask Google) that goes through the list and finds that a significant percentage are trivial in functional languages. So I propose a language design principle: create a language that makes as many popular patterns trivial/obsolete as possible.
If its a common enough occurence to be worth including in a book on patterns, then it's common enough to design for. Programmers learning the language will feel joy because rather than figuring out how to translate their memorised patterns into the new language, they will be able to forget them completely. And since you can't just stick a solve_pattern_foo keyword in the language, I believe that designing the language to solve these problems will have a side-effect of making it very powerful and expressive.
Some of the people at my school (Queen's) came up with a language many years ago called Turing. It was designed to be an educational replacement for Pascal and so had a straight-forward syntax, etc. So that it would be suitable for both lower- and higher-level courses it supposedly is designed so that language features can be added as modules.
I haven't really looked into it (just told about it by one of the designers of Turing), but this seems like a really good way to satisfy people like you, especially since some of those features are mutually exclusive as other posters have suggested.
I've heard things about Lua being modular -- anyone know more?
I am writing this post in case you read the parent's wise comments and decide that to know mathematics you must know proofs. Proof theory is part of logic, a discipline that is sometimes slotted under math, sometimes philosophy, and sometimes by itself. Unfortunately, the proofs of logicians are nothing at all like the proofs of mathematicians.
Logical proofs are rigorous -- they can be checked mechanically for accuracy and even generated through largely automatic means. Mathematical proofs are known by the technical term "hand-waving" and are actually an informal argument for other mathematicians (just as legal arguments are intended for other lawyers and judges). If the "proofs" of mathematics were as rigorous as the proofs of logic, then how could we ever run into problems where proofs are later found to be incorrect? Some nutcase who thinks he's proved Goldbach's Conjecture would be turned away by the journal's oracle (to borrow an idea from programming competitions) if they were too lazy to check the proof on their own computer.
And don't go smoke a bunch of Hofstadter and think that mathematics is too undecidable for automated proof tools: if mathematicians were serious about producing rigorous proofs they'd simply have to assist their theorem provers at choice moments with the necessary insight. As a result, every mathematics paper would be a long serious of simple, incremental steps which can be examined by a layman or even a computer. Instead, they perpetuate their own job security by writing in tongues.
If you ever hope to do mathematics, don't make the mistake I did: avoid learning symbolic logic at all costs.
* You do have your modifiers set correctly, don't you?
And what about the people whose job it is to make those radio copies? Do you feel okay screwing them in the ass?
It's not like bleeps grow on trees, you know. Either the artist has to produce a second version of the song, which requires time that they could be using to produce another song (and thereby generate more revenue if it doesn't suck), or some underpaid smuck at the record company has to do it. As you no-doubt know, it's not just a matter of listening through the song and hitting a button whenever you hear something naughty: a censor has to decide whether to replace "fuck" with a whip sound or silence; bring the artist back into the studio to record them saying "frig"; or in a worst-case scenario audition and hire a voice-double if the artist is too expensive or not available. Doing this without completely ruining the song requires creativity ability.
Don't forget the exhorbant costs to the record company from producing a second CD. First they have to pay someone to design packaging that clearly and attractively expresses the nature of the album. Then they have the logistical cost of distributing it, with a significant danger of getting confused and accidentally sending the PA copies to Walmart. Finally there is the lost revenue from kids returning their grandmother's mistaken purchase and simple brand confusion from having two nearly identical items.
Thinking that you deserve access to the edited copy of a recording is like walking into a store and stealing the latest Merriam-Webster dictionary on CD because you own the 1913 copy.
This is a relative measure of value, and as long as you can only trade the shears for other virtual items it is very difficult to pin down a specific cost. However controlling a character with shears or some other virtual item is presumably more fun than controlling a character without, so the shears have some entertainment value. (It might be so low as to be unmeasurable, though.)
This makes it sound like opportunity cost is also a subjective measure of value. And, indeed, it is if you cannot trade the shears for something non-virtual. However I've heard that you can sell MMORPG items on eBay for real money, thereby giving the shears a non-virtual value. Money would also have a subjective value, except you can use it to buy things you objectively need, like calories, thereby objectifying it.
So the value of the shears is the amount of real money you can get for transferring their virtual possession. And the value of the real money is the physical needs you can satisfy with it:
Planting bombs beneath buildings is orthodox: Guy Fawks thought of it first. Terrorists crashing planes into buildings is orthodox: Tom Clancy thought of it first. Biological warfare is orthodox: the monkey in Outbreak thought of it first.
The US intelligence community is no longer about getting the bad guys: it's about making Lord Rumsfeld and Emperor Bush look right. In brainstorming you're not supposed to criticise suggestions -- every idea is valid. Since the CIA and FBI did so well in preventing 9-11, there's obviously no need to be unorthodox.
TIA and PAM were brilliant approaches. It's understandable that politicians would have vetoed TIA in response to their constituents' wishes, but that doesn't make it any less of a good idea. And please stop to consider whether PAM was so offensive next time you're duct-taping your windows close.
Poindexter is dangerously underappreciated by the people who need him most.
Was it the fact that the keynote speaker cross-dresses as a 25-year-old rock star that tipped you off?
In order to be really useful, the wire from the HD would have to be connected to a USB port, preferrably on the front of the machine. This would be a great use for those goofy computers that come with "gaming" ports on the front, and a minor mod to mount a port in a front-panel drive bay.
Since there is exactly one key capable of decrypting the data, the obvious thing to do is place on the key a one-time pad. A USB storage keychain holds 128MB, which we can assume is XOR'd against each 128MB block on the hard drive. Even assuming that the one-time pads are being generated using a truly random method (which they're probably not), this is still crackable. However it's be no means easily crackable and yet is very convenient and fast.
Do you really want your CPU factoring primes every time you read a sector of your hard drive?!
Is it just me, or is Perl 6 so different from Perl 5 that they probably should have given it another name? Especially since Perl 5 will continue to be updated after Perl 6 becomes stable?
Perl 6 has so little backwards compatibility, it'd probably be better if they just through out all the legacy syntax and started from scratch with a new language. Not that Perl ever was elegant, but I'm starting to worry that things are getting out of hand...
In the denotational semantics community it was long ago decided that real programming languages are too messy and too much of moving targets for serious theoretical research. As a result, the most popular language is known as Idealised Algol which is a simplified and cleaned-up version of Algol-60 (I'm told Algol-W is the closest implementation).
Now that Perl 6 has a rich operator definition system*, we can look forward to Idealised Perl (IP). IP would be a version of Perl stripped down to only the necessary syntactic building-blocks. Even if much of Perl 6 were implemented in C, it'd be possible to define all the syntax in terms of IP. If you're writing code for maintainability instead of prototyping, using IP as much as possible will ensure a smaller learning curve for non-gurus. IP will be simple enough to actually allow teaching Perl in universities.
IP could be the elegant yet expressive language we all (whether we like Perl or not) wish Perl would be.
* This is, IMO, the only really neat and elegant thing to come out of Perl 6 so far. If operators can be defined to the point where most mathematical formulae are executable, Perl will become a revolutionary tool.
One more thing:
I'm really happy to see Perl include currying, I can't think of a programming language that I would be completely happy using without it.
Shortly after I started reading Exegesis 6 I was somewhat frightened by how complex Perl had become since I stopped keeping track of updates. Of course scripting languages have always been known for borrowing the best from other programming languages, so I kept reading in the hopes that I'd recognise something. I saw some features like the is constant declaration and started worrying that maybe they'd decided to borrow some features from the very popular but insanely evil Visual Basic. But then I saw this:
and realised that, just as Python is (alleged to be?) adding Lisp-like features, Perl is adding ML-like features! That line above is (minus the '::' and ';') straight out of a Haskell program. Then I started to notice more Haskell-like syntax:
feed (Cat c) =
feed (Lion l) =
And I'm sure a more thorough reading would turn up even more. (For example, the smart-match operator reminds me of the type inferences done in a Hindley-Milner type system.) So it appears that any sufficiently advanced language contains an implementation of a purely functional language, not specifically Scheme. :) Has Damian (who certainly has Haskell exposure) or Larry ever mentioned any of these influences?
The sad fact is that Nat is one of only a handful of people in the world who can actually get his Dashboard demo, or any other Windows.Forms application working. Why? Because Mono's Windows.Forms implementation requires an obscure patch to a two-month old version of Wine. IOW, Mono has become "write once, run on Miguel's computer".
There are two things they could do to fix this:
Obviously Microsoft is getting exactly what they want from Mono: a tool that lets developers stay with Linux (which they really want to do and isn't a big market anyway) while forcing customers to use Windows. Oh well, is anybody really surprised?
Of course we all know that the bullet resistance is the coolest requirement.
There are plenty of other laptops that meet those specifications -- but I assume they all have similar price tags. :(
I know TiBooks are very nice and all, but they're not the panacea that many owners seem to think they are.
The problem today is that people are living longer and longer, effectively running their organs into the ground. Most people who die today either have a disease too wacky for them to be donors or most of their organs have already failed long ago. The better a medical system gets, the less people you have dying from something so trivial that their organs are still working. (Take Star Trek: how many of the redshirts left enough of a corpse for harvesting?)
It's time that our society got over its antiquated ethical qualms and let bioengineering catch up with medicine. You don't need donated organs if you can just clone your own, now do you? Personally I refuse to donate organs in order to incrase demand and thereby increase the financial benefit to companies working on alternatives.
Dude, if the donated kidney is just going to get destroyed all over again, what's the point of wasting it on them? If the patient has a disease such that every organ in the body is being destroyed, then why not just put them out of their misery and implant their brainwaves in a giant robot?
I know this is hard for you money-grubbing Americans to understand, but in other parts of the world we believe that there are non-economic advantages to having a university education.
For example, it may make you a better citizen. Most university degree programs require the student to display some amount of critical thinking skills -- the hope is that this will prevent people from voting for people like Bush. University degree holders often have hobbies other than watching reality television and have even been known to produce societal benefits in their time off.
If university educations were just for getting ahead, then why don't we multilaterally agree to stop going to university and we can all save ourselves some time and money? At the very least, we might be able to keep asshats like you out of the classroom.
The answers to your questions are so obvious, I'm half expecting the "YHBT"...