Hey, I can't help your being a dumbass, but please try to hide it in polite society.
The origins of the dwarf names is irrelevant, they were picked to be silly, as I said, which is appropriate for a book for kids, but not a more serious novel which is what I said. (The modern names Terry and Barry rhyme, but few books these days have a complement of characters whose names rhyme, despite it being possible.)
And it's not my fault that you can't google for something. Excerpts from Tolkien's letters are posted on many fan sites, take your pick.
And yes, I am arrogant, when everyone is like you, it's reasonable.
I think you miss the character building that you can do wordlessly in film. The 'Bilbo leaving' scene in the shire really established Bilbo and Galdalf. The 'Gandalf Arriving' scene established a bit of Frodo and Gandalf.
Pretty much all the non-battle scenes show characters interacting and as such, establish their characters. In fact, the movie (imho) did a better job of making Boromir's character understandable.
Not at all. If they wish to say "*I see* Tom Bombadil as a Safety Net..." they're justified in doing so. But if they state that he *is*, or that the ring *is* an analogy for technology, they're completely wrong.
They're free to see what they want, and to suggest it as an alternative view if they wish, but when they tell people *how it is*, they open themselves up for criticism. In this case, it's well documented that they're 100% wrong.
I just hate pretentious lit snobs who insist on telling people they don't understand something the proper way and proceed to lay down some insane trip about safety nets, or analogies to jesus, etc, etc. Make of it what you will, but realize it's just your opinion, especially when the official word contradicts you. Like art snobs who insist on finding freudian analogies in landscapes.
I didn't really mind Bombadil, but I don't think he added anything to LotR. If you've read the Silmarilion as well, you understand a bit more and the mystery of Tom is intriguing. If not, he's a non-plot point, and as such, best left out of a mass-market movie.
Tom, a safety net? You're right and truly cracked.
Tom was an accident and a toy's cameo, so says Tolkien himself. He started writing a more humorous book where Tom was appropriate (similar Bifur, Bofur, Bombur type naming in The Hobbit) and it gradually turned darker and more serious. He said he wouldn't have put him in, if he had it to do again.
Also, Bombadil is a name he'd given to one of his kid's toys, and he wanted basically to give the toy a cameo. He admit in his letters that Bombadil doesn't have anything to do with the story, but says that he liked the idea of the world having some mystery, so he never explained Tom's presense.
Making up some crap about how he represents the reader, etc... That's not only painfully wrong, but it's elitist, egotistical, and above all, against documented fact. Try lecturing about how the ring represents technology, that's another symbolism that Tolkien vehemently denied.
How about, for those who've read the book and decided that Old Man Willow and Bombadil were both best left unshot?
Tolkien started writing a children's book to follow The Hobbit and changed his focus towards the end of the first book (well, 1/4 of the way through the single book, as he was planning it) and it really shows.
The first part was silly, and not in a good way. Remember the dwarf names in tH? Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Dori, Nori, Ori, etc? Silly rhyming intended for children.
The first part of LotR was this way, with all the hobbit lineage and the sillyness of the party, of Bombadil, and so on.
At least the movie avoided this. They let events be funny without anything be ridiculous, which detracts from the overall feeling of seriousness the quest deserves.
Actually, Tolkien himself states that Bombadil was the name of a toy of his children, that he put in the book for a cameo because he thought they'd like it, not because it helped the story. (He later said that he thought the mystery of Bombadil helped the world, but only in context of someone who had read the Silmarilion as well.)
Woz wrote one basic interpreter (Integer Basic I think), and ended up buying the MS one because it was easier than writing a new one. But it's not like MS was the only choice or anything.
Yes, I had an Apple ][+, a//gs, a vic-20, a c-64, an old mac, and a few PCs, in the 80s.
The apple ][ was where they were trying to make a computer usable by everyone. Apple's office suite was pretty good and sold a ton of computers before they brought the mac out.
Amiga might have been a player if they'd been marketed better.
There were many companies trying to make computers usable by the masses, MS didn't do anything that other companies weren't trying to do.
Where do you get this load of bull about MS? It sounds like it's from Bill's book, and MS marketing material. Apple had a program of supplying computers to schools long before MS did. Apple also pointed people towards organizations that would offer grants/scolarships to buy home computers for people.
Had MS never existed, there'd be just as many PCs today, without the disturbing monoculture (email viruses that can infect 95% of computers are not fun) and without one company in a position to push crap like Palladium on us.
Stable refers to the interfaces, more than the product stability.
It's good when a "stable" kernel doesn't crash, but that's not actually what the word means. Look at Mozilla, it was stable, in that I often had 20 windows open for weeks at a time in Win2k (yeah, Win2k having an uptime of weeks, but really, it happened...) and Mozilla wouldn't crash once. But they didn't call it 1.0 until they stabilized the interfaces so you could use pluggins and addons without having to upgrade them for every minor update.
It just happens that when you're adding functionality you often break backwards compatibility (hence, unstable interfaces) and make things crash (unstable in the other sense.)
It's like 'Free', it's got multiple meanings. Linux 2.(even) releases are stable in the sense of unchanging. Releases that don't crash are stable in the meaning we normally use.
There's a difference between setting out to frustrate the competitors and setting out to offer a better product.
One is competing, the other is doing a Tonya Harding and smacking the competition on the knee just before the big game.
Microsoft has never competed in the boundaries of the market. It's never tried to bring a better product to market, or make a product cheaper. It's often dumped a product at well below cost, but only as a way of putting a competitor out of business.
Microsoft has done nothing for the market that other competitors wouldn't have, and hasn't begun to approach the benefit to the consumer of Compaq who reverse engineered IBM's PC, making the hardware a commodity.
It's interesting, people (mistakenly) applaud MS for making computers a commodity, but then also applaud their efforts to bring in proprietary protocols and system designed to remove the commodity nature. They should make up their minds on commodity parts being a good thing, and then research it a bit and see how MS has always been moving away from any sort of multi-company standard.
How many of us would be using a PC? Me for sure. And the Mac was a perfect newbie-friendly computer in '84 when it came out.
The industry would be doing just fine without MS. We owe them nothing. (Sure, they've done a few things, but they've also harmed the industry by trying to avoid standards bodies, and much/all of what they did would have been done by other companies.)
If there's any one company to thank for the modern PC world, it's Compaq and their reverse-engineering of an IBM-PC which made the hardware cheap.
I've seen those uptimes in Win2k, for small print servers, and the like, but in actual use? Doubtful.
Explorer.exe tends to crash around to 3-week mark on average, and you need to reboot everytime you apply critical updates which are needed for a public server.
If nVidia has secret code in their drivers, it's because it's third-party code they aren't allowed to release.
They aren't trying (in a serious fashion) to hide any tricks from ATI or Matrox. Binaries aren't that hard to disassemble, especially when you can feed known data to them over and over again. It's hard for a layman to understand, but to a driver programmer, this is part of the job.
Sedgewick's book is good, that I haven't actually read the C++ version.
But it's the "Algorithms for Busy Programmers" version that is more geared towards showing you a few choices of algorithms to use to solve your particular problem, instead of showing you algorithms and formal proofs like tAoCP does.
So I'd keep Sedgewick's book on my desk, but when I found something I wanted to really understand, I'd read more about it in Knuth's book.
I know what you mean. On a recent hack job I wrote a file util that indexed the directories specified (recursively) and in general use it often finds 300k+ files. I toss all these into a perl hash and then at the end, with a casual sort routine (with a custom compare) I toss them into an array.
Yikes, 5-25MB of data, indexed and sorted with a few casual commands. (I'm allowed to do this, the performance/coding time tradeoff was well justified and I understand the inefficiency of my choices.)
A far cry from my days of programming ASM on the Apple 2 where I could often fit what I was writing into the two-hundred or so bytes at 0x300 and without using more than a few 4k buffers for data.
But when I pointed this out to a co-worker I didn't get the "yeah, times have changed" that I expected. He didn't even really understand how much that sort routine was costing, or the overhead of using a hash. Ugh. Children these days. (And I'm only 27!)
I completely agree with the OP that new programmers should have to learn some ASM. Not to design an entire app in it, but just to understand how the machine sees things and why some operations are more expensive than others. Too many people are blaming the hardware for being too slow these days when writing things I've seen done quickly in 4k on a 6502. Much like that strcmp instead of integer compare thing...
It's not a free market in any fashion. There are a limited number of radio stations you can fit into the frequency allocated. They're all been assigned and are usually owned by the same few companies in all areas.
These companies are paid to play music by the record companies. Their entire program is basically a paid advertisement. The top 40 is simply a list of the 40 most-played songs; most played on the stations that get paid to play this music.
Some customer-feedback is used in determining the ratings. They aren't going to play a commercial that customer react badly to, but they also aren't going to play a commercial for a product they don't own. They manipulate the ratings to ensure that customers only hear their music, knowing that customers tend to buy only music they have heard samples of.
This is a monopoly. The airwaves are essentially controlled by the record companies, as are the distribution outlets and concert venues. The companies that control these resources make price-dumping type decisions, losing some money in the short term, to hurt potential competitors and/or force them to sign up for an exploitive deal.
This is the exact opposite of an open market, where all products are displayed and judged by a knowledgable consumer.
Python is a nice language, but it's not a quick as Perl. Python enforces a lot of stylistic and linguistic structure that isn't always appropriate outside of a teaching language.
For instance, a series of 'if' constructs in a row that all do a very simple thing (function call) are sometimes cleanest if they are all on one line...
example: if (foo) { bar(); }
instead of spread across three. It makes the relationship between the condition and the action very clear, and also makes it easier to see more of the overall structure by providing more context for the same ammount of lines.
Similarly, Perl will loop through an array with an implicit bounds check [foreach $var(@array) { }] which lets you do a common task very easily. Python is much more strict about making you check the array size and loop through, making sure not to test past the end. It's a good teaching function, to let people know what goes on behind the scenes in a high-level language so that they understand it better, but it's just as safe either way. Why make the programmer do it?
I like C, and even enjoy the odd bit of ASM, but when I need to code a text handling application, quickly, I don't reach for those, I go for Perl. Python seems like a good cross between C and Perl, but I don't think it's a replacement for either.
And, as for as having to switch to a new perl goes... Larry's realized that there's so much P5 code out there that will never be updated that P6 will be backward compatible. If you don't want to change, don't. Any Turing-complete language is capable of any task, there's nothing P6 does that P5 can't. If it's not worth learning, don't bother.
Does your frequent focus on nakedness and panties of your very young female characters indicate an attraction on your part, or is there a good reason for this? (Re: _The Color of Her Panties_ which pictures (among other things) two mostly-naked young women.)
Do you feel this is appropriate for books aimed at 10-14 year olds?
Check out this graph of access rates on a new 120GB 120GXP.
http://www.storagereview.com/benchimages/IC35L12 0A VVA07_str.png (Watch for extra spaces)
The spotty performance is likely caused by a ton of bad sectors which were moved to the end of the drive. If it's like that when it ships imagine what it'd be like in a few months. Check the STR graphs for other drives by Maxtor, WD, and Seagate. They aren't perfect smooth lines perhaps, but there's none of what you see on the IBM.
They don't really say that it doesn't work, just that isn't trivial and costs a lot for R. But so does trying to make it spin faster... Eventually the cost for one will be high enough that it'll make it worth pursuing the other.
That page mentions RAIDing the drives, but unless you RAID 1 the drives there aren't multiple heads seeking for the same information so it still takes as long, and up to twice as long as a normal seek, to read data off an array. (The more spindles, the more likely one is just past the data, requiring a full rotation to read it.)
You can fix this by upping the stripe size on a striped array but this decreases performance in the common small reads, right down to the single-drive level.
There are ways around this, some proprietary RAID levels are like 5, with much more redundancy. With results like 5+1. But the results are that you only need x, of y drives, where y is usually two or three times x, to recover the data. Not only are these very very safe, but with a smart controller and well optimized strip sizes you can fulfill read requests very quickly by using the 'x' drives closest to the data. This actually approaches the results of having multiple heads in a single spindle.
But, on the subject of wishful thinking... Why don't they make 5.25" disks anymore? They're about twice as tall as a 3.5 and have about 2.5 times the surface area. A 160mb drive could be 800mb in 5.25 form factor. Sure, the rotational speed would be low and the seeks would be comparatively terrible, but wow, what a ton of storage. It'd be great for long-term archival that didn't actually warrant burning or tape.
I've got 240GB in my computer now and I find it limiting. I wish I could simple throw a fast 80 in as my OS/temp drive and put everything else on a "slow" 800, moving it around when I needed to work on it.
Right. Except for putting small ammounts of ram at the end of a wire where it's comparatively slow to send to (IDE Cable, PCI Bus, CPU cache (compared to bus speeds)) you're almost always better off just giving the OS the ram and letting it assign it as needed. That's why ramdisks are almost always a bad idea.
Of course, this helps if your OS has a decent caching strategy. Win2k doesn't even reload apps from cache after playing a game until you use them - no pre-loading at all, even hours later.
Or do what they did in the old days... multiple heads per platter. By making a 3.5" drive a bit longer they could throw in another head on the other side and it'd basically halve the rotational latency, as well as doubling the transfer rate.
Recently (since they've shrunk to 5.25 and 3.5" disks) it's always been cheaper to up the RPMs, but sooner or later it'll be cheaper to add more heads because of the problems in trying to up the speed.
Nobody. The people who own MS stock are desperately praying that nothing happens to stop Microsofts stock price from rising.
The people who actively oppose Microsoft are hoping their stock price will plummet to punish the asses who support illegal activities simply because they own stock.
It is. See all the comments about the US's almost-elected leader, Dubya. In a time when the National Guard wasn't accepting any more applications, he managed to get accepted. He then supposedly didn't actually show up for most of it.
Compare that to all the draftees who got sent into a war zone.
And yes, he's pretty much thought of as a useless coward whose daddy bought him safety and runs him like a puppet now.
At least when leaders were warriors (even if only officers, which only somewhat counts) you knew that they understood war and what they were getting people into.
Well, the idea of requiring stations to show airtime for all candidates "for free" in trade for airtime could simply be changed to a requirement for all stations to accept paid political advertisement from all registered political parties, regardless of views. So Ted Turner's stations can't refuse to show ads for political parties he doesn't support, for instance. And then just use public money (some perhaps from the sale of airwaves) to purchase the airtime. That removes most of the differential treatment.
As for advertising, versus changing the laws to forbid cash donations... Yes, advertising would in the short term, and donations to my favorite parties, accomplish the goals of getting them publicity (especially in Canada where we don't have just two parties). And yeah, it's a lot easier to dip into my pockets for some cash than to convince enough people a new law is needed that it'll make a real difference.
The problem is that it falls into the trap of not really accomplishing anything. The next little party trying to be heard has the same problems. And I'd end up buying influence in this party by being a large supporter, which while nice for me isn't the idea.
I'd like to be able to change the laws (or work towards it at least) such that parties like that can get airtime on their own and perhaps also to reform the voting procedures such that they can actually get seats without having to beat the incumbents in any area.
You familiar with proportional voting? A party with 10% of the vote in all ridings now gets 0% of the representatives. Ideally they'd get 10%...
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Hey, I can't help your being a dumbass, but please try to hide it in polite society.
The origins of the dwarf names is irrelevant, they were picked to be silly, as I said, which is appropriate for a book for kids, but not a more serious novel which is what I said. (The modern names Terry and Barry rhyme, but few books these days have a complement of characters whose names rhyme, despite it being possible.)
And it's not my fault that you can't google for something. Excerpts from Tolkien's letters are posted on many fan sites, take your pick.
And yes, I am arrogant, when everyone is like you, it's reasonable.
I think you miss the character building that you can do wordlessly in film. The 'Bilbo leaving' scene in the shire really established Bilbo and Galdalf. The 'Gandalf Arriving' scene established a bit of Frodo and Gandalf.
Pretty much all the non-battle scenes show characters interacting and as such, establish their characters. In fact, the movie (imho) did a better job of making Boromir's character understandable.
Did the vikings walk around in parties of people with rhyming names?
Gerry and Terry, "modern" names, rhyme, but rarely do you meet a group of eight or nine people who all have rhyming names and hang out together.
So, those may be authentic names, but Tolkien picked them. Thus, if it's a silly rhyming game, it's his, not that of the Vikings.
Not at all. If they wish to say "*I see* Tom Bombadil as a Safety Net..." they're justified in doing so. But if they state that he *is*, or that the ring *is* an analogy for technology, they're completely wrong.
They're free to see what they want, and to suggest it as an alternative view if they wish, but when they tell people *how it is*, they open themselves up for criticism. In this case, it's well documented that they're 100% wrong.
I just hate pretentious lit snobs who insist on telling people they don't understand something the proper way and proceed to lay down some insane trip about safety nets, or analogies to jesus, etc, etc. Make of it what you will, but realize it's just your opinion, especially when the official word contradicts you. Like art snobs who insist on finding freudian analogies in landscapes.
I didn't really mind Bombadil, but I don't think he added anything to LotR. If you've read the Silmarilion as well, you understand a bit more and the mystery of Tom is intriguing. If not, he's a non-plot point, and as such, best left out of a mass-market movie.
Tom, a safety net? You're right and truly cracked.
Tom was an accident and a toy's cameo, so says Tolkien himself. He started writing a more humorous book where Tom was appropriate (similar Bifur, Bofur, Bombur type naming in The Hobbit) and it gradually turned darker and more serious. He said he wouldn't have put him in, if he had it to do again.
Also, Bombadil is a name he'd given to one of his kid's toys, and he wanted basically to give the toy a cameo. He admit in his letters that Bombadil doesn't have anything to do with the story, but says that he liked the idea of the world having some mystery, so he never explained Tom's presense.
Making up some crap about how he represents the reader, etc... That's not only painfully wrong, but it's elitist, egotistical, and above all, against documented fact. Try lecturing about how the ring represents technology, that's another symbolism that Tolkien vehemently denied.
How about, for those who've read the book and decided that Old Man Willow and Bombadil were both best left unshot?
Tolkien started writing a children's book to follow The Hobbit and changed his focus towards the end of the first book (well, 1/4 of the way through the single book, as he was planning it) and it really shows.
The first part was silly, and not in a good way. Remember the dwarf names in tH? Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Dori, Nori, Ori, etc? Silly rhyming intended for children.
The first part of LotR was this way, with all the hobbit lineage and the sillyness of the party, of Bombadil, and so on.
At least the movie avoided this. They let events be funny without anything be ridiculous, which detracts from the overall feeling of seriousness the quest deserves.
Actually, Tolkien himself states that Bombadil was the name of a toy of his children, that he put in the book for a cameo because he thought they'd like it, not because it helped the story. (He later said that he thought the mystery of Bombadil helped the world, but only in context of someone who had read the Silmarilion as well.)
Woz wrote one basic interpreter (Integer Basic I think), and ended up buying the MS one because it was easier than writing a new one. But it's not like MS was the only choice or anything.
//gs, a vic-20, a c-64, an old mac, and a few PCs, in the 80s.
Yes, I had an Apple ][+, a
The apple ][ was where they were trying to make a computer usable by everyone. Apple's office suite was pretty good and sold a ton of computers before they brought the mac out.
Amiga might have been a player if they'd been marketed better.
There were many companies trying to make computers usable by the masses, MS didn't do anything that other companies weren't trying to do.
Where do you get this load of bull about MS? It sounds like it's from Bill's book, and MS marketing material. Apple had a program of supplying computers to schools long before MS did. Apple also pointed people towards organizations that would offer grants/scolarships to buy home computers for people.
Had MS never existed, there'd be just as many PCs today, without the disturbing monoculture (email viruses that can infect 95% of computers are not fun) and without one company in a position to push crap like Palladium on us.
Stable refers to the interfaces, more than the product stability.
It's good when a "stable" kernel doesn't crash, but that's not actually what the word means. Look at Mozilla, it was stable, in that I often had 20 windows open for weeks at a time in Win2k (yeah, Win2k having an uptime of weeks, but really, it happened...) and Mozilla wouldn't crash once. But they didn't call it 1.0 until they stabilized the interfaces so you could use pluggins and addons without having to upgrade them for every minor update.
It just happens that when you're adding functionality you often break backwards compatibility (hence, unstable interfaces) and make things crash (unstable in the other sense.)
It's like 'Free', it's got multiple meanings. Linux 2.(even) releases are stable in the sense of unchanging. Releases that don't crash are stable in the meaning we normally use.
There's a difference between setting out to frustrate the competitors and setting out to offer a better product.
One is competing, the other is doing a Tonya Harding and smacking the competition on the knee just before the big game.
Microsoft has never competed in the boundaries of the market. It's never tried to bring a better product to market, or make a product cheaper. It's often dumped a product at well below cost, but only as a way of putting a competitor out of business.
Microsoft has done nothing for the market that other competitors wouldn't have, and hasn't begun to approach the benefit to the consumer of Compaq who reverse engineered IBM's PC, making the hardware a commodity.
It's interesting, people (mistakenly) applaud MS for making computers a commodity, but then also applaud their efforts to bring in proprietary protocols and system designed to remove the commodity nature. They should make up their minds on commodity parts being a good thing, and then research it a bit and see how MS has always been moving away from any sort of multi-company standard.
How many of us would be using a PC? Me for sure. And the Mac was a perfect newbie-friendly computer in '84 when it came out.
The industry would be doing just fine without MS. We owe them nothing. (Sure, they've done a few things, but they've also harmed the industry by trying to avoid standards bodies, and much/all of what they did would have been done by other companies.)
If there's any one company to thank for the modern PC world, it's Compaq and their reverse-engineering of an IBM-PC which made the hardware cheap.
Not bloody likely.
I've seen those uptimes in Win2k, for small print servers, and the like, but in actual use? Doubtful.
Explorer.exe tends to crash around to 3-week mark on average, and you need to reboot everytime you apply critical updates which are needed for a public server.
If nVidia has secret code in their drivers, it's because it's third-party code they aren't allowed to release.
They aren't trying (in a serious fashion) to hide any tricks from ATI or Matrox. Binaries aren't that hard to disassemble, especially when you can feed known data to them over and over again. It's hard for a layman to understand, but to a driver programmer, this is part of the job.
Sedgewick's book is good, that I haven't actually read the C++ version.
But it's the "Algorithms for Busy Programmers" version that is more geared towards showing you a few choices of algorithms to use to solve your particular problem, instead of showing you algorithms and formal proofs like tAoCP does.
So I'd keep Sedgewick's book on my desk, but when I found something I wanted to really understand, I'd read more about it in Knuth's book.
I know what you mean. On a recent hack job I wrote a file util that indexed the directories specified (recursively) and in general use it often finds 300k+ files. I toss all these into a perl hash and then at the end, with a casual sort routine (with a custom compare) I toss them into an array.
Yikes, 5-25MB of data, indexed and sorted with a few casual commands. (I'm allowed to do this, the performance/coding time tradeoff was well justified and I understand the inefficiency of my choices.)
A far cry from my days of programming ASM on the Apple 2 where I could often fit what I was writing into the two-hundred or so bytes at 0x300 and without using more than a few 4k buffers for data.
But when I pointed this out to a co-worker I didn't get the "yeah, times have changed" that I expected. He didn't even really understand how much that sort routine was costing, or the overhead of using a hash. Ugh. Children these days. (And I'm only 27!)
I completely agree with the OP that new programmers should have to learn some ASM. Not to design an entire app in it, but just to understand how the machine sees things and why some operations are more expensive than others. Too many people are blaming the hardware for being too slow these days when writing things I've seen done quickly in 4k on a 6502. Much like that strcmp instead of integer compare thing...
It's not a free market in any fashion. There are a limited number of radio stations you can fit into the frequency allocated. They're all been assigned and are usually owned by the same few companies in all areas.
These companies are paid to play music by the record companies. Their entire program is basically a paid advertisement. The top 40 is simply a list of the 40 most-played songs; most played on the stations that get paid to play this music.
Some customer-feedback is used in determining the ratings. They aren't going to play a commercial that customer react badly to, but they also aren't going to play a commercial for a product they don't own. They manipulate the ratings to ensure that customers only hear their music, knowing that customers tend to buy only music they have heard samples of.
This is a monopoly. The airwaves are essentially controlled by the record companies, as are the distribution outlets and concert venues. The companies that control these resources make price-dumping type decisions, losing some money in the short term, to hurt potential competitors and/or force them to sign up for an exploitive deal.
This is the exact opposite of an open market, where all products are displayed and judged by a knowledgable consumer.
Python is a nice language, but it's not a quick as Perl. Python enforces a lot of stylistic and linguistic structure that isn't always appropriate outside of a teaching language.
...
For instance, a series of 'if' constructs in a row that all do a very simple thing (function call) are sometimes cleanest if they are all on one line
example: if (foo) { bar(); }
instead of spread across three. It makes the relationship between the condition and the action very clear, and also makes it easier to see more of the overall structure by providing more context for the same ammount of lines.
Similarly, Perl will loop through an array with an implicit bounds check [foreach $var(@array) { }] which lets you do a common task very easily. Python is much more strict about making you check the array size and loop through, making sure not to test past the end. It's a good teaching function, to let people know what goes on behind the scenes in a high-level language so that they understand it better, but it's just as safe either way. Why make the programmer do it?
I like C, and even enjoy the odd bit of ASM, but when I need to code a text handling application, quickly, I don't reach for those, I go for Perl. Python seems like a good cross between C and Perl, but I don't think it's a replacement for either.
And, as for as having to switch to a new perl goes... Larry's realized that there's so much P5 code out there that will never be updated that P6 will be backward compatible. If you don't want to change, don't. Any Turing-complete language is capable of any task, there's nothing P6 does that P5 can't. If it's not worth learning, don't bother.
Does your frequent focus on nakedness and panties of your very young female characters indicate an attraction on your part, or is there a good reason for this? (Re: _The Color of Her Panties_ which pictures (among other things) two mostly-naked young women.)
Do you feel this is appropriate for books aimed at 10-14 year olds?
The XBox would be a great system for MAME. It's a DVD player. And hell, it's essentially a PC so it'd be easy to write software for.
It's also dirt cheap.
I'd pay $200 for a MAME box alone, a DVD player included in that would be gravy.
It seems the 120gxp line has problems too.
2 0A VVA07_str.png
Check out this graph of access rates on a new 120GB 120GXP.
http://www.storagereview.com/benchimages/IC35L1
(Watch for extra spaces)
The spotty performance is likely caused by a ton of bad sectors which were moved to the end of the drive. If it's like that when it ships imagine what it'd be like in a few months. Check the STR graphs for other drives by Maxtor, WD, and Seagate. They aren't perfect smooth lines perhaps, but there's none of what you see on the IBM.
They don't really say that it doesn't work, just that isn't trivial and costs a lot for R. But so does trying to make it spin faster... Eventually the cost for one will be high enough that it'll make it worth pursuing the other.
That page mentions RAIDing the drives, but unless you RAID 1 the drives there aren't multiple heads seeking for the same information so it still takes as long, and up to twice as long as a normal seek, to read data off an array. (The more spindles, the more likely one is just past the data, requiring a full rotation to read it.)
You can fix this by upping the stripe size on a striped array but this decreases performance in the common small reads, right down to the single-drive level.
There are ways around this, some proprietary RAID levels are like 5, with much more redundancy. With results like 5+1. But the results are that you only need x, of y drives, where y is usually two or three times x, to recover the data. Not only are these very very safe, but with a smart controller and well optimized strip sizes you can fulfill read requests very quickly by using the 'x' drives closest to the data. This actually approaches the results of having multiple heads in a single spindle.
But, on the subject of wishful thinking... Why don't they make 5.25" disks anymore? They're about twice as tall as a 3.5 and have about 2.5 times the surface area. A 160mb drive could be 800mb in 5.25 form factor. Sure, the rotational speed would be low and the seeks would be comparatively terrible, but wow, what a ton of storage. It'd be great for long-term archival that didn't actually warrant burning or tape.
I've got 240GB in my computer now and I find it limiting. I wish I could simple throw a fast 80 in as my OS/temp drive and put everything else on a "slow" 800, moving it around when I needed to work on it.
Right. Except for putting small ammounts of ram at the end of a wire where it's comparatively slow to send to (IDE Cable, PCI Bus, CPU cache (compared to bus speeds)) you're almost always better off just giving the OS the ram and letting it assign it as needed. That's why ramdisks are almost always a bad idea.
Of course, this helps if your OS has a decent caching strategy. Win2k doesn't even reload apps from cache after playing a game until you use them - no pre-loading at all, even hours later.
Or do what they did in the old days... multiple heads per platter. By making a 3.5" drive a bit longer they could throw in another head on the other side and it'd basically halve the rotational latency, as well as doubling the transfer rate.
Recently (since they've shrunk to 5.25 and 3.5" disks) it's always been cheaper to up the RPMs, but sooner or later it'll be cheaper to add more heads because of the problems in trying to up the speed.
Nobody. The people who own MS stock are desperately praying that nothing happens to stop Microsofts stock price from rising.
The people who actively oppose Microsoft are hoping their stock price will plummet to punish the asses who support illegal activities simply because they own stock.
I doubt there's much overlap at all.
It is. See all the comments about the US's almost-elected leader, Dubya. In a time when the National Guard wasn't accepting any more applications, he managed to get accepted. He then supposedly didn't actually show up for most of it.
Compare that to all the draftees who got sent into a war zone.
And yes, he's pretty much thought of as a useless coward whose daddy bought him safety and runs him like a puppet now.
At least when leaders were warriors (even if only officers, which only somewhat counts) you knew that they understood war and what they were getting people into.
Well, the idea of requiring stations to show airtime for all candidates "for free" in trade for airtime could simply be changed to a requirement for all stations to accept paid political advertisement from all registered political parties, regardless of views. So Ted Turner's stations can't refuse to show ads for political parties he doesn't support, for instance. And then just use public money (some perhaps from the sale of airwaves) to purchase the airtime. That removes most of the differential treatment.
As for advertising, versus changing the laws to forbid cash donations... Yes, advertising would in the short term, and donations to my favorite parties, accomplish the goals of getting them publicity (especially in Canada where we don't have just two parties). And yeah, it's a lot easier to dip into my pockets for some cash than to convince enough people a new law is needed that it'll make a real difference.
The problem is that it falls into the trap of not really accomplishing anything. The next little party trying to be heard has the same problems. And I'd end up buying influence in this party by being a large supporter, which while nice for me isn't the idea.
I'd like to be able to change the laws (or work towards it at least) such that parties like that can get airtime on their own and perhaps also to reform the voting procedures such that they can actually get seats without having to beat the incumbents in any area.
You familiar with proportional voting? A party with 10% of the vote in all ridings now gets 0% of the representatives. Ideally they'd get 10%...
Anyways, gotta run for now.