Beren and Luthien would do well if adapted properly -- it would take a deft touch to really do it right. Also Akallabeth would work out quite nicely althought you'd have to compress the time frame a little bit and essentially have it run from Sauron's arrival on Numenor.
I like The Hobbit, but it's not an epic like The Lord of the Rings is. It's not supposed to be an epic. It's a self-contained, medium-sized story, with a fairly classic narrative arc. It makes no sense to tell the story in installments. The first 1/3 of the Hobbit isn't a film! There is one fairly straightforward journey, a climax, a denouement. The book is circa 300 pages, not circa 1000 like LoTR is.
I think the key is that they are going outside the pages of the Hobbit to get a third film. Which is not to say they're going outside Tolkien's writings, it's just that they're mining the appendices of The Lord of the Rings and the last chapter of the Silmarillion on the War of the Rings which covers Sauron's early rise as the Necromancer of Dol Guldur and the battles fought by Gandlaf, Saruman, Elrond and Galadriel against him at that time. This is very tangentially touched upon in the Hobbit -- but it is a narrow story told from Bilbo's point of view -- but there's plenty of story there if they wish to fill it in as a separate part that helps fill the gap between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
You just need non-conforming inheritance, or composition, or whatever you want to call it. Essentially its just the ability to "inherit" without also making the result a subtype of what you are inheriting from. Multiple non-conforming inheritance allows easy composition of classes and can be pretty powerful.
It's easier to write object oriented code if the compiler supports syntactic sugar around the pillars of object oriented code (inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, message passing, etc.) but such syntactic sugar is not strictly needed.
More importantly, most of that can be handled well by a little bit of background plumbing at the beginning -- after that it takes a trivial amount of extra boilerplate for each you new class you care to add. See GObject, for example. And you can certainly go far with less plumbing work than GObject: inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism can all be handled easily with structs and macros and 5 minutes to write a base object class.
Enforecement of public private can be done: simply have your base object struct have a void pointer field called private and declare and allocate a private data struct as static in the.c implementation of the class. Voila, private fields and methods as needed.
I have well over 2000 books -- not sure how many, I don't keep count. What is the magical system that causes all those books to appear on an ebook reader (or other media player) without me having to: a) scan well over 2000 books by hand; b) repurchase well over 2000 books in eReader format at significant cost; or c) illegally torrent shitty scan versions of well over 200 books?
The power of C is - and always has been - that it is a shorthand for assembly.
Except it really isn't -- at least not for a great many modern processors. Compile C on x86-64 for a project of any decent size (as opposed to simple code snippets) and witness all sorts of subtley different things get produced depending on exactly what you've written; the optimizer for the compiler, combined with SSE instructions etc. produce all sots of things that are a long way from a direct translation of the C you wrote. That is, of course, good because your code runs much faster, but it makes it a long way from a short hand for assembly.
It compiles very small and runs very fast, making it ideal for embedded systems.
It compiles small and runs fast often precisely because it is not a short hand for assembler -- the compiler does all sorts of fun and interesting things. There are lots of other languages that compile small and run fast (Ada, Eiffel, BitC, SML, Pascal, Modula, Fortran) and many of them survive well to this day with many updates and new features (honestly, look at the latest Fortran specs; it's now an OO language with generics and all manner of other stuff if you want). Some, such as Ada are better suited for embedded development than C. What C has is an early foothold and being "good enough" (though just barely good enough). It's not going anywhere soon, but that's not exactly a good thing.
P.S. For reference I do almost all my programming in C and dialects thereof.
FORTH and C++ are used to the same means, but I do not hear much about other tools being used for this kind of development.
Actually I think Ada gets a lot of use for this sort of thing, particularly in the embedded realm. It has a whole host of "close to the metal" features, some better than C, and a whole lot more safety than C, even for "unsafe" features (such as strictly controlled pointers for direct memory addressing that are much safer than what C provides). Now that Ada2012 is out the language has continued to improve, with far more improvements and features than the meagre offerings of C11.
If you are trying to save time you can always use a DbC system for some of your "documentation" of what the function is intended to do and have that become an actual error check on your code. You can even use the contracts to automatically generate unit tests for you. It's also harder for documentation to fall out of sync with code since it is part of the testing and flags an error if it isn't kept up to date.
Well it could get interesting when the red states have to bail out the blue states (see California for example). I mean, bail them out with what exactly? It's not like the red states have any money...
Do you see more or less competence at the federal level?
With states, at least, one can vote with one's feet.
Sure, but in the end you'll get stuck footing the bill anyway. See Greece and the EU, and multiply by the degree of concentrated political and economic insanity that exists in many states.
A lot of the early founders of this country cared deeply about religious freedom, and wanted to do everything in their power to keep church's hands off the government.
As far as I'm aware the 128 "qubits" aren't entangled at all, which means it is useless for any of the quantum algorithms that one generally thinks of (Shor's algorithm for factoring, for example). It simply has 128 separate "qubits" that are queried individually, and is, essentially an augmented classical computer that gains a few minor advantages in some very specific algorithms (i.e. the quantum annealing algorithm) due to this qubit querying, but is otherwise indistinguishable from a really expensive classical computer for any other purpose.
I think it's a matter of taste and need. Many people who want static typing will cry foul if I suggest they use either a language that has sufficiently powerful static types (such as Coq) to allow proper theorem proving with automated theorem provers, or that they annotate their code with an appropriate specification language (Frama-C for C, JML for Java, SPARK for Ada, HasCASL for Haskell) that will allow automated theorem provers to (at the very least) catch whole classes of errors that are impossible to find with static types alone (even with, say, Haskell's type system) or (at best) formally prove correctness up the specification. They feel those would be too much work for too little gain. And the reality is that, for the sort of code they write and the sort of problems they tackle, they may well be right. And, of course, for the sort of problems fans of dynamic typing tackle and the sort of code they write, static typing is similarly too much overhead for too little gain. It really depends on how badly you need to be absolutely correct, and how mcuh work you're willing to put in to get there -- and there's a very big slope of different options.
Personally I like my languages strongly typed, with as much idiot proofing and compile time checking as I can get and still have a usable language.
So I take it you use SPARK/Ada, or Java with JML and ESC/Java2, or C/C++ with Frama-C? I mean there's way more static compile time checking you can do with a little bit more comprehensive annotations than just types (say a nice formal language with appropriate first order logic quantifiers).
Try "Shattered Glass"; Christiansen's actually quite decent in that -- not the greatetst acting display ever, but perfectly respectable and shows enough acting talent to beliebe that, given a decent director, he can do just fine in a wide range of roles.
The dilemma with "publish or perish" is that the metric is stupid. Saying its "Do your job or get fired" is all well and good, but it is more akin to being a programmer and the sole measure of "doing your job" is "number of lines of code written (including comments)" -- it's frustrating because it encourages and rewards what most would consider "doing your job badly".
It's my opinion that if you work in academia and don't publish at least one paper a year you should probably be doing something else(either to another field which leads to results, not just food for thought or to another job).
Yeah, I hear that guy Andrew Wiles spent 7 years not publishing any papers. Oxford stupidly put up with that instead of canning has ass at year 2, and they've gotten nothing but disrepute ever since. I mean has anyone ever heard of Wiles? Has he published anything of note at all? Oxford definitely would have been better off without him.
I've heard that part of the reason that UoT and Western signed on to this is that they found the working sufficiently ambiguous in the actual contract and have their own interpretation of it that differs vastly from what Access Copyright intends. In other words, they think they have some "interpretation" loopholes big enough to drive a truck through and win big on this in the long run. I suspect the issue you point out here is exactly suhc a loophole.
Good bit warmer than now. We can tell because in Greenland receding glaciers are exposing Viking settlements, where beech tree stumps can be found in permafrost.
Can you provide a reference for "receding glaciers... exposing Viking settlements"? All the historical documentation of Vikings referred only two Greenland settlements -- the Eastern ad Western settlements. You can look at Googlemaps images of the sites for the Western and Eastern Settlements:
They are a long way from receding glaciers, and quite green in summer. So again, at least some reference for these newly discovered Viking settlements that were underneath glaciers would be appreciated, because otherwise I'll just have to assume you are making shit up.
I mean, can you actually give a good logical reason why the order or placement should be anywhere else?
Because destructive operations (like close) should be kept separated from non-destructive ones (like maximise/minimise). NeXT (and by inheritance WindowMaker) get this right. Fortunately most window managers also make it easy enough to change, which I usually do.
To customise Gnome Shell you need to write javascript. I do not have the time or the inclination to write code to re-add functionality that was available with a right-click in the last release.
How someone who shies away from writing some simple javascript against well defined and well documented interfaces can call themselves a "power user" is beyond me.
Functionality changed. Some things were removed and replaced with other ways of doing things. There still exist perfectly good and very powerful ways to extend the system to do whatever you want if you are an expert user (I despair to think that "knowledge of javascript" now qualifies one as an "expert user"); in fact far more ability to customise has been exposed -- there was little you could do to make some things happen in GNOME2 without hacking around in the C -- with pretty nice javascript bindings for, well, pretty much anything you could want to do. Quit whining and actually customise your system. Or is a text editor instead of a pointy-clicky interface too daunting for a "power user" like yourself?
Yes, I mean DBUS. It has nice bindings for many languages, but python works well enough for simple scripting. Here are some simple examples to get you started, but it should be easy to write some scripts and have FVWM2 call those to populate whatever you need populated.
There's nothing wrong with ignoring the needs of individual users to tailor a generally good experience, _so long as power-users are still given the ability to pick the option best for them as individuals_.
The standards for people calling themselves "power users" really seems to have dropped. The people I think of as power users would have no problem hacking together a nice custom FVWM2 configuration that integrates all the GNOME3 libraries (including the internal notification and messaging systems -- they do have nice exposed interfaces after all) and applications while giving them exactly the custom experience they desire. I mean GNOME3 is pretty damn modular and broken into a myriad of different libraries and components after all; it's just the shell that they've stuck on top as gloss that lacks some customidability. But no, these days people that call themselves "power users" seem to run scared at the mere mention of hand-writing their own FVWM2 or xmonad configuration from scratch; or indeed, of bothering to actually have to get their hands dirty to create a custom environment at all. Today "power users" need to be able to "customise" their environment via pretty GUIs and checkboxes. Heck, I've heard people calling themselves power users who called GConf complicated.
Look, there's still plenty of extensive customisation and configurability inherent in these systems, they just require you actually be a power user and know what the hell you're doing, and not be scared of getting your hands a little messy and stepping outside pretty candy coated "configuration" utilities.
You do realise Ctrl-Alt-up/down work for desktop switching in GNOME3? In fact, while being very mouse focussed in some ways, they have shortcut alternatives for almost everything, and you can drive GNOME3 surprisingly easily and efficiently from keyboard only.
Slashdot Mirror
Beren and Luthien would do well if adapted properly -- it would take a deft touch to really do it right. Also Akallabeth would work out quite nicely althought you'd have to compress the time frame a little bit and essentially have it run from Sauron's arrival on Numenor.
I like The Hobbit, but it's not an epic like The Lord of the Rings is. It's not supposed to be an epic. It's a self-contained, medium-sized story, with a fairly classic narrative arc. It makes no sense to tell the story in installments. The first 1/3 of the Hobbit isn't a film! There is one fairly straightforward journey, a climax, a denouement. The book is circa 300 pages, not circa 1000 like LoTR is.
I think the key is that they are going outside the pages of the Hobbit to get a third film. Which is not to say they're going outside Tolkien's writings, it's just that they're mining the appendices of The Lord of the Rings and the last chapter of the Silmarillion on the War of the Rings which covers Sauron's early rise as the Necromancer of Dol Guldur and the battles fought by Gandlaf, Saruman, Elrond and Galadriel against him at that time. This is very tangentially touched upon in the Hobbit -- but it is a narrow story told from Bilbo's point of view -- but there's plenty of story there if they wish to fill it in as a separate part that helps fill the gap between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
You just need non-conforming inheritance, or composition, or whatever you want to call it. Essentially its just the ability to "inherit" without also making the result a subtype of what you are inheriting from. Multiple non-conforming inheritance allows easy composition of classes and can be pretty powerful.
It's easier to write object oriented code if the compiler supports syntactic sugar around the pillars of object oriented code (inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, message passing, etc.) but such syntactic sugar is not strictly needed.
More importantly, most of that can be handled well by a little bit of background plumbing at the beginning -- after that it takes a trivial amount of extra boilerplate for each you new class you care to add. See GObject, for example. And you can certainly go far with less plumbing work than GObject: inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism can all be handled easily with structs and macros and 5 minutes to write a base object class.
Enforecement of public private can be done: simply have your base object struct have a void pointer field called private and declare and allocate a private data struct as static in the .c implementation of the class. Voila, private fields and methods as needed.
I have well over 2000 books -- not sure how many, I don't keep count. What is the magical system that causes all those books to appear on an ebook reader (or other media player) without me having to: a) scan well over 2000 books by hand; b) repurchase well over 2000 books in eReader format at significant cost; or c) illegally torrent shitty scan versions of well over 200 books?
The power of C is - and always has been - that it is a shorthand for assembly.
Except it really isn't -- at least not for a great many modern processors. Compile C on x86-64 for a project of any decent size (as opposed to simple code snippets) and witness all sorts of subtley different things get produced depending on exactly what you've written; the optimizer for the compiler, combined with SSE instructions etc. produce all sots of things that are a long way from a direct translation of the C you wrote. That is, of course, good because your code runs much faster, but it makes it a long way from a short hand for assembly.
It compiles very small and runs very fast, making it ideal for embedded systems.
It compiles small and runs fast often precisely because it is not a short hand for assembler -- the compiler does all sorts of fun and interesting things. There are lots of other languages that compile small and run fast (Ada, Eiffel, BitC, SML, Pascal, Modula, Fortran) and many of them survive well to this day with many updates and new features (honestly, look at the latest Fortran specs; it's now an OO language with generics and all manner of other stuff if you want). Some, such as Ada are better suited for embedded development than C. What C has is an early foothold and being "good enough" (though just barely good enough). It's not going anywhere soon, but that's not exactly a good thing.
P.S. For reference I do almost all my programming in C and dialects thereof.
FORTH and C++ are used to the same means, but I do not hear much about other tools being used for this kind of development.
Actually I think Ada gets a lot of use for this sort of thing, particularly in the embedded realm. It has a whole host of "close to the metal" features, some better than C, and a whole lot more safety than C, even for "unsafe" features (such as strictly controlled pointers for direct memory addressing that are much safer than what C provides). Now that Ada2012 is out the language has continued to improve, with far more improvements and features than the meagre offerings of C11.
If you are trying to save time you can always use a DbC system for some of your "documentation" of what the function is intended to do and have that become an actual error check on your code. You can even use the contracts to automatically generate unit tests for you. It's also harder for documentation to fall out of sync with code since it is part of the testing and flags an error if it isn't kept up to date.
Well it could get interesting when the red states have to bail out the blue states (see California for example). I mean, bail them out with what exactly? It's not like the red states have any money ...
Do you see more or less competence at the federal level?
With states, at least, one can vote with one's feet.
Sure, but in the end you'll get stuck footing the bill anyway. See Greece and the EU, and multiply by the degree of concentrated political and economic insanity that exists in many states.
A lot of the early founders of this country cared deeply about religious freedom, and wanted to do everything in their power to keep church's hands off the government.
FTFY.
As far as I'm aware the 128 "qubits" aren't entangled at all, which means it is useless for any of the quantum algorithms that one generally thinks of (Shor's algorithm for factoring, for example). It simply has 128 separate "qubits" that are queried individually, and is, essentially an augmented classical computer that gains a few minor advantages in some very specific algorithms (i.e. the quantum annealing algorithm) due to this qubit querying, but is otherwise indistinguishable from a really expensive classical computer for any other purpose.
I think it's a matter of taste and need. Many people who want static typing will cry foul if I suggest they use either a language that has sufficiently powerful static types (such as Coq) to allow proper theorem proving with automated theorem provers, or that they annotate their code with an appropriate specification language (Frama-C for C, JML for Java, SPARK for Ada, HasCASL for Haskell) that will allow automated theorem provers to (at the very least) catch whole classes of errors that are impossible to find with static types alone (even with, say, Haskell's type system) or (at best) formally prove correctness up the specification. They feel those would be too much work for too little gain. And the reality is that, for the sort of code they write and the sort of problems they tackle, they may well be right. And, of course, for the sort of problems fans of dynamic typing tackle and the sort of code they write, static typing is similarly too much overhead for too little gain. It really depends on how badly you need to be absolutely correct, and how mcuh work you're willing to put in to get there -- and there's a very big slope of different options.
Personally I like my languages strongly typed, with as much idiot proofing and compile time checking as I can get and still have a usable language.
So I take it you use SPARK/Ada, or Java with JML and ESC/Java2, or C/C++ with Frama-C? I mean there's way more static compile time checking you can do with a little bit more comprehensive annotations than just types (say a nice formal language with appropriate first order logic quantifiers).
Try "Shattered Glass"; Christiansen's actually quite decent in that -- not the greatetst acting display ever, but perfectly respectable and shows enough acting talent to beliebe that, given a decent director, he can do just fine in a wide range of roles.
The dilemma with "publish or perish" is that the metric is stupid. Saying its "Do your job or get fired" is all well and good, but it is more akin to being a programmer and the sole measure of "doing your job" is "number of lines of code written (including comments)" -- it's frustrating because it encourages and rewards what most would consider "doing your job badly".
It's my opinion that if you work in academia and don't publish at least one paper a year you should probably be doing something else(either to another field which leads to results, not just food for thought or to another job).
Yeah, I hear that guy Andrew Wiles spent 7 years not publishing any papers. Oxford stupidly put up with that instead of canning has ass at year 2, and they've gotten nothing but disrepute ever since. I mean has anyone ever heard of Wiles? Has he published anything of note at all? Oxford definitely would have been better off without him.
I've heard that part of the reason that UoT and Western signed on to this is that they found the working sufficiently ambiguous in the actual contract and have their own interpretation of it that differs vastly from what Access Copyright intends. In other words, they think they have some "interpretation" loopholes big enough to drive a truck through and win big on this in the long run. I suspect the issue you point out here is exactly suhc a loophole.
Good bit warmer than now. We can tell because in Greenland receding glaciers are exposing Viking settlements, where beech tree stumps can be found in permafrost.
Can you provide a reference for "receding glaciers ... exposing Viking settlements"? All the historical documentation of Vikings referred only two Greenland settlements -- the Eastern ad Western settlements. You can look at Googlemaps images of the sites for the Western and Eastern Settlements:
Eastern settlement area, and Eastern settlement map
Western settlement area, and Western settlement map.
Just for reference, here is a zoom of the area of the Brattahlid and Gardar farms (two of the largest/richest farms), and a zoom of the Sandnes farm area from the Western settlement.
Want more? How about on the ground photos of the ruins?
Gardar ruins
Bratthlid ruins
Hvalsey church
They are a long way from receding glaciers, and quite green in summer. So again, at least some reference for these newly discovered Viking settlements that were underneath glaciers would be appreciated, because otherwise I'll just have to assume you are making shit up.
I mean, can you actually give a good logical reason why the order or placement should be anywhere else?
Because destructive operations (like close) should be kept separated from non-destructive ones (like maximise/minimise). NeXT (and by inheritance WindowMaker) get this right. Fortunately most window managers also make it easy enough to change, which I usually do.
No
To customise Gnome Shell you need to write javascript. I do not have the time or the inclination to write code to re-add functionality that was available with a right-click in the last release.
How someone who shies away from writing some simple javascript against well defined and well documented interfaces can call themselves a "power user" is beyond me.
Functionality changed. Some things were removed and replaced with other ways of doing things. There still exist perfectly good and very powerful ways to extend the system to do whatever you want if you are an expert user (I despair to think that "knowledge of javascript" now qualifies one as an "expert user"); in fact far more ability to customise has been exposed -- there was little you could do to make some things happen in GNOME2 without hacking around in the C -- with pretty nice javascript bindings for, well, pretty much anything you could want to do. Quit whining and actually customise your system. Or is a text editor instead of a pointy-clicky interface too daunting for a "power user" like yourself?
Yes, I mean DBUS. It has nice bindings for many languages, but python works well enough for simple scripting. Here are some simple examples to get you started, but it should be easy to write some scripts and have FVWM2 call those to populate whatever you need populated.
There's nothing wrong with ignoring the needs of individual users to tailor a generally good experience, _so long as power-users are still given the ability to pick the option best for them as individuals_.
The standards for people calling themselves "power users" really seems to have dropped. The people I think of as power users would have no problem hacking together a nice custom FVWM2 configuration that integrates all the GNOME3 libraries (including the internal notification and messaging systems -- they do have nice exposed interfaces after all) and applications while giving them exactly the custom experience they desire. I mean GNOME3 is pretty damn modular and broken into a myriad of different libraries and components after all; it's just the shell that they've stuck on top as gloss that lacks some customidability. But no, these days people that call themselves "power users" seem to run scared at the mere mention of hand-writing their own FVWM2 or xmonad configuration from scratch; or indeed, of bothering to actually have to get their hands dirty to create a custom environment at all. Today "power users" need to be able to "customise" their environment via pretty GUIs and checkboxes. Heck, I've heard people calling themselves power users who called GConf complicated.
Look, there's still plenty of extensive customisation and configurability inherent in these systems, they just require you actually be a power user and know what the hell you're doing, and not be scared of getting your hands a little messy and stepping outside pretty candy coated "configuration" utilities.
You do realise Ctrl-Alt-up/down work for desktop switching in GNOME3? In fact, while being very mouse focussed in some ways, they have shortcut alternatives for almost everything, and you can drive GNOME3 surprisingly easily and efficiently from keyboard only.