Science will never present us with a peer-reviewed study proving once and for all that you should be good to your fellow man, and treat him like a brother. Particle accelerator runs will never hint that we all have it within us to put an end to petty bickering, violence, and even earth-shattering wars.
Which is all fine and well, except that this is the realm of philosophy every bit as much as it is the realm of religion, and oddly philosophy manages to fit well with science. Philosophy also doesn't have large entrenched hierarchical organisations that rule by fiat, but insyead runs as a meritocracy like science. Philosophy doesn't need to quibble over questions it can't answer (like the existence of God).
It was enlightenment philosphy that brought us the morals of freedom, of equality among men, that we practice today. Religions have preached such things in the past, but it was the philosophers that managed to actually get some uptake of the idea. And at the same time many of the more interesting religions (usually the eastern ones) are closer to philosophy than religion as the west knows it - oh they still have their religious trappings, but it isn't quite so fundamental.
I think what you're really calling for is philosphy not religion. What you really want is for people to actually think, which is what religion often tells them not to do.
So what's the alternative? Either you argue for an eternal Creator that set everything in motion - or you argue for an eternal Universe that just happened.
If you want to pose questions that don't make sense and can't be answered in any rational way, then yes that's what you would say. It's a meaningless question though - you may as well ask what comes after the end of time, or what lies beyond the bounds of the universe. Reducing down to the sort of paradox we're dealing with here: does the set of all sets that don't contain themselves contain itself?
If I say "Unicorns don't exist" I could, if I want to get trapped in the language game, dig myself a hole: by naming unicorns I'm referring to a concept with a name and that concept must then exist - that contradicts the rest of my statement that the thing I names doesn't exist. Either I can wallow in the internal contradictions, or I can admit that language has quirks and move on.
As best our understanding runs, time is not some independent quantity, it is part of spacetime, part of the universe. Time was created when the universe began. Asking what came before that is just a quirk of our language. How can anything come before the existence of time when the concept of "before" requires time to make sense?
You're just getting trapped in a language game, and rather than suggesting you simply don't want to play you're trying to answer a question that makes no sense.
Perhaps this is all a sign that Debian needs to change their naming policy, and just call the next stable distribution "hell", that way we can have accurate headlines.
But the environment in which the software operates changes, and that change is analagous to weather corroding a pieces of physical equipment.... The interesting part is that you can know that software is decaying, but I don't know of any effective way to measure that decay.
There's a relatively easy way to measure such "decay". When first designing to software do proper requirements gathering and write a full formal requirements specification (there are specification languages specifically for this purpose). As a maintenance check you run a new requirements gathering process and develop a new formal specification of requirements. If you used the right tools (that is the right specification language) to do this you will actually be able to compare the requirements used to develop the software with the requirements now in a precise way, getting a very specific measure of how requirements have deviated over time.
If you're really good you developed the software by refining the requirements specification and retained the the specification refinements as documentation of the code. Thus you will be able to get a complete measure of how much the change in requirements effects the code, and thus if you update the code (similarly updating the refinement specifiations) you can be sure you've properly covered all changes that need to be made, and no effects have gone unnoticed.
All of this is, of course, work. It is not dissimilar work to bothering to have a proper specification of your plane, having regular complete maintenance checks to make sure parts aren't worn beyond their tolerances, and fixing them if they are. People are willing to do that work on the planes, but aren't willing to do the similar work for software. This is mostly a matter of expectations, and the general perceptions of software.
Yes a plane crashing is a lot worse than your booking and ticketing system crashing, so you want to take care. Then again the software caused an awful lot of trouble and lost the company a remarkably large amount of money, so maybe that care was worth taking after all.
the Orcs shouting "Grond!" in the Return of the King was done by getting a football stadium's worth of people to do so
Not that I recall. The chanting in The Two Towers was done that way, along with some of the marching noises, but I don't believe there was any chanting of "Grond". They did record everyone whispering queitly, but I don't know if that was used anywhere (I think not).
For reference, yes I was at said ground (the "Caketin" in Wellington during the NZ/England ODI) when the recording was done.
Also, the acting was some of the worst I've seen. EVER. Period. And I go out of my way to see nototiously bad movies, when the mood strikes me.
I don't think you go very far out of your way to watch bad films if that is the worst acting you've ever seen. Just head along to your local equivalent of the Incredibly Strange FIlm Festival - I reccomend the marathon sessions with a suitably alternately intoxicated and caffeinated audience. For bad films I suggest you check out some Troma classics like
Which poses and interesting dilemma: How do we refer to someone who simply doesn't care whether or not God exists? The need for such a term simply wasn't required for a long time - it was assumed you cared and had a particular stance: either you believed God existed, believed God didn't exist, or believe you couldn't know. Not caring wasn't an option. These days it is an increasingly common stance on the subject and deserves a proper term.
I have run into various proposed terms like "apatheist" or some such, but they're nt formally recognised anywhere.
That's a nice theory, and has some merit in terms of motivation, but in terms of practical results it just isn't working. Check the statistics as http://www.bea.gov/ with respect to international transactions. The US saw a rise in the trade balance on services through the late 90's, but since then imports of services (particularly in the royalties category) have been growing at least as fast as exports. Strange as it may sound the US trade balance in terms of copyright licenses is flattening out, and possibly even starting to sink a little. At a time when the trade balance in goods is completely blowing out that's not a good sign.
Unfortunately the USA is doing a remarkably good job of fucking itself. Right now the US economy is walking a rather fine line. Let me explain:
The US has been living beyond its means - that is, it has a huge current account deficit: net capital inflow to the US far outweighs capital outflow. In and of itself that isn't necessarily bad, and is certainly no reason to panic: it has happened before, and will likely happen again. The issue is more about the reasons for the current account deficit. In a large part it is due the continued budget deficits of the current government, but is also due to US consumers appetite for imported goods without a similar growth in US exports. In theory this situation is naturally correcting via a falling US Dollar: imports become more expensive, and exports become cheaper more attractive to foreign buyers. The US Dollar has been falling (quite significantly) against world currencies for the last year or more. This drop hasn't yet caused a turn around in the current account deficit - it has continued to grow apace.
Mix a falling Dollar (via pressure from the current account) with the current growing demand for oil from China and the resulting increase in oil prices, and you have a powerful recipe for inflation. Again, this is an issue that can be dealt with: the Fed can raise interest rates to combat inflation, as they have been doing very steadily for the last 6 months or more. The risk is that raising interest rates too high will put serious pressure on an already slowing economy, and has risks for the (rather bubble like) US Housing market.
US consumers, and the US government, have been abusing the line of credit offered on the strength of the US economy (and the expectation that the US can grow its way out of the debt). Things are beginning to look a little tight, and the Fed is now walking a very fine line trying to combat inflation without killing the economy in the process.
The nest year or two could be very interesting indeed.
Sounds similar to what the confluence of HAL, DBUS and Seth Nickell's replacement for the init system was promising 2 years ago. Of course while HAL and DBUS have come along nicely I can find nothing about the mythical SystemServices stuff Seth blogged about 2 years ago. It seems it went the same way as storage... nowhere.
I think launchd sounds great. This is something the desktop Linux people have been aware of (they were discussing doing something about it over 2 years ago) but have failed to get around to actually doing. The devil, of course, is in the details, but from what I've read launchd looks like a good effort to bring some sanity and unity to the cruft that has built up in UNIX systems over the years. Hopefully this will be the kick in the ass needed to get Linux to do the same.
It's not a Sin City style take on it however - it's not doing the whole "the comic book is the storyboard, we just frame each shot similarly" approach, not the visual style which hews very close to the visual style of black and white comic.
At least they actually chose some decent stories to work from however, instead of making up random crap as they have in the past.
There will be lots in this movie* that doesn't line up with the other 4 flicks, because it's in a completely different continuity line. The director wanted everything in this movie to be believable and realistic. It's going to be darker and more real than even the first Batman in 1989.
All I can say is "good!". After the last two debacles the only tenable option was to his the big red PANIC!/RESTART! button in the corner, ignore the existence of anything else and try again.
I kind of appreciated Burton's take on Batman. While I didn't really like the films that much (for reasons relating to poor plots and a little too much humour) I do think he had an interesting and worthwhile vision for Batman. After Burton left so did any last semblance of sanity. We lost the strong vision, the plots and attempted humour only got worse, and well... How to sink a franchise really.
I must say, though, that given the success of Sin City it would be interesting to see a similarly styled take on The Dark Knight Returns. I guess that really depends on how much money Sin City makes.
If you want to see a change watch The Machinist. Bale is literally nothng but skin and bone - he apparently lost fully 1/3 his weight for the film. A pretty good performance as a man on the edge of losing his mind as well. I can definitely picture Bale as Wayne/Batman, hopefully bringing a little more of the psychological edge to the character than previous films attempted.
To be frank I think the previews look uninspiring. I just keep looking at the cast (which is for the most part great) and the director (Christopher Nolan) who while new has some decent films under his belt already. Surely they can't make too much of a mess - hopefully the previews are just badly put together. At the very least it looks like it will be far and away superior to the last couple of Batman films.
Additionally it would have been nice to see any sign that Darth Maul was really evil. Oh sure, he LOOKED evil enough, but other than fighting when Obi Wan and Qui Gon attacked him, he really didn't do much that showed us who he was... unlike how the character of Darth Vader was built in the first movie.
That's because the prequels have a weird "rent-a-villain" mentality. From what I gather we kill off Dooku in the first act of Ep III, and introduce "General Grievous". So for the 3 films we have as the "major villain" Darth Maul, Jango Fett (sort of), Count Dooku, General Grievous, and Darth Vader (presumably). It's hard to develop much real sense of impending threat when one "major" villain after another gets knocked off before he has actually managed to do much of anything.
Was Maul a very imposing villain? Hell, considering his actions he could almost have been a good guy. He did nothing except have one very impressive light sabre duel. He provided a fantastic action set piece, but completely failed to provide anything resembling a villain. Likewise for Dooku and Fett - they each got a short introduction in which they didn't do much of anything, an action set piece, and then were (presumably for Dooku) unceremoniously killed.
These characters were not villains they were simply supporting props to try and hold the plot up and stick out glaringly as such.
The biggest problem with Ep I and II is that they fail to get us involved and invested in the travails and fates of the main characters. We simply don't really care what happens to them - not in the same way that we were interested in what became of Luke and Han and Leia. In a large part this is because the villains have been, realistically, so artificial - we don't want the heors to win, because they haven't actually been given anything to struggle against that we really care about. The menace has never been properly established, and the "villain-of-the-week" approach certainly doesn't help.
Fair enough, but they have to fall in love somehow and without turning the whole movie into a romance it had to be rushed. It's unfortunate that their love is so pivotal to the story, yet not interesting enough to be its own movie so it can be properly told.
They had the better part of an hour to tell the love story (half of the film was devoted to that story arc) that's not a small amount of time. The real question is why was it not interesting enough to be the better part of the film? Surely if they bothered to write an interesting love story instead of ther hackneyed and forced one that they did, they could have devoted more time to it without issue.
What you're really saying is: it is a shame that the love story was so badly concieved and written that even the limited time they spent on it seemed like a waste.
My views of the first two prequels is not based on the repeated prevailing opinion. I didn't really like them that much, and I have my own reasons for thinking that.
I felt the first film was rather fractured with 3 surprisingly disjoint acts - yes that has been the general pattern for Star Wars films, but Ep IV was much more continuous in its flow, Ep V had the second act split to two stories that were interleaved before bringing everything back together for a final conclusion (a trick often used in "epic" storytelling) and kept a consistent focus on the small set of main characters (Luke, Han and Leia) and their difficulties. Ep VI, the weakest of the originals was also the most disjoint with a muddled second act trying to stitch together the grand set pieces of the first and third. Ep I is similar, but worse: we are introduced to main characters and given an interesting looking first act, but then essentially disregard Obi Wan and Qui Gon for a largely unrelated second act involving Anakin and pod racing which seems more of a distraction and contrivance before being thrown back quickly into a set piece finale. Yes the light sabre battle was great. Yes the opening act was fun. The film felt fractured and incomplete however.
As for Ep II - it was definitely an improvement, but essentially amounted to two story arcs with limited convergence: Obi Wan trying to find out what was going on with the assasination attempt, and the Anakin/Padme love story. Of those two I thought Obi Wan was by far the more interesting and entertaining character. His arc was, I thought, quite good. In the meantime I felt Anakin was poorly developed as a character. He went from an innocent child to a brattish dark youth with little explanation. The love story was very stilted and lacked anything resembling chemistry (compare to the Luke/Han/Leia interactions of Ep IV - VI). That is to say, half of the film felt like a distraction.
There are plenty of other nit picks I could make: midichlorians, Yoda having to resort to light sabres etc. but those are just that - little nit picks. The overarching point is that the films were poorly paced and disconnected and failed to get me decently involved with the characters whose journey I am supposed to be following. Quite simply, the movies simply weren't terribly involving.
That's nice to know. I wasn't meaning to diss Java - I think it's a nice language. I was more interested in the fact that it's (relatively speaking) a young language and doesn't have all the tools and additions available for it that something with a long history in high integrity software like Ada does.
I do expect Java to get there soon. That's for the reference, it looks like they were closer than I had previously thought.
Aside from the compulsory Slashdot Java FUD, it's really not a joke. Java has a big advantage in that the the bytes codes produced can be verified, and so the program tested, without any concerns of the final deployment platform. This is a major advantage for an organisation like NASA which most likely has a wide range of hardware on which software is deployed.
Which is nice, but when it comes to serious mission critical software where faults can't be tolerated Ada has some advantages. Call me when Java has anything equivalent to SPARK for validating code.
This Metro format will have the same benifits on Windows as PDF does on OSX, Metro is based on Avalon and XAML, which will be built into Windows as the presentation model.
Except I recall reading a while ago that MS was using some proprietary SVG derivative as their moel for Avalon. Now it is Metro? Are they the same thing? Perhaps yes. At that rate and interesting extra issue is Cairo. Cairo is multiplatform (just plug in your backend of choice) and runs on Windows, X11, Quartz, and a variety of other platforms. Cairo has the same sort of rendering model as Quartz and Avalon, but again has nice pluggability - you can render out to SVG, or PDF or Postscript or presumably even Metro if the specs are made available as it is presumably very similar to SVG. If Cairo can live up to it's promises it could be a very powerful system indeed.
It's probably worth noting that even specs written in formal languages like CASL or Z typically include a certain amount of expository natural language to help the reader understand what's going on.
Certainly you still need comments and exposition. The point is that the bulk of this can reside in the documentation of requirements and specifications which is the logical place for it.
The code itself will still benefit from comments as well, but it will require a lot less because the important points will be properly documented by the specification already - you will only need comments to help elucidate soe of the more complex tangles in the implementation.
Comments are a good idea, but maybe not the best idea. Other posters have pointed out that it is hard to keep comments synced with code that's evolving... and I'm bitten by this all of the time. The more detailed my comments are, the _harder_ it is for me to maintain my code. The compiler and unit tests will tell me if my code is correct, but it is very time consuming to make sure the comments are correct.
One of the things I like about doctest for python and contract python is that it helps with this: you function documentation (which is to say comments) can be used to test the code. Sure, it's not perfect, but it is nice to be able to have something resembling debuggable comments.
Mathematicians will spend an inordinate amount of time and space defining what all the compact symbols they use mean. Grab any decent math paper and note how much of it involves phrases like "Where G is finite group of prime power order", or "Given two vectors in R^3 v_1, and v_2, we can...". Yes the equations are dense. That's acfter a lot of effort has been put in (usually immediately before, but occasionally immediately after) to carefully explicitly define what the symbols used mean.
1. Comment each function - Function name - what it does - parameters parameter name - what is is for and any restrictions on it (i.e., must not be null) - return value (all possible return values)...
3. Add ASSERT() like comments and ASSERT() or equivalent to your code
Or you could use a language that has Design by Contract and simply use the function contracts to do all of that for you - better yet you get the resulting effects of inherited contracts and so on.
Or, to put it another way: That's such a good idea that we ought to be doing it all the time, in the code, and using the documented specification as something that can be compiled in for debugging purposes.
If you learned Ada then you may want to spend the little extra time required to learn SPARK and learn how to write useful comments that can actually be used to reduce errors by (based on case studies) a factor of about 100 over C code.
Document your application, requirements, constraints, and system interactions (what the engineer does). Then write the code (what the coder does). What you will quickly learn is that it's better to be the engineer than the coder.
Interestingly there are a number of formal languages to do this, some of them rather similar to programming languages. For example you can use an algebraic specification language like CASL - it provides a structured way to define datatypes, operations on datatypes, and the axioms that the types and operations need to obey for the requirements to be met (For the mathematicians out there: an implementation is then a (many-sorted) universal algebra, and a specification is a presentation). There are things like refinement calculus and theorem provers to help you refine your requirements into an ever more specific specifications. Once that is done the actual programming is pretty much monkey work: there are extremely specific bounds on every datatype, every function, to the point where it is merely a matter just doing what you're told. The interesting part happen with the initial requirements specification and the refinement and design of the specification.
I happen to like CASL, and chose it here because the the syntax is similar to programming languages, but it is far from the only, or even the most popular specification language. You could try Z, or VDM, or B-method, or OBJ3, or any of the myriad other languages out there. Formal specification languages ought to be far more widely used than they apparently are. Isn't it about time more "software engineers" started paying attention to them?
Slashdot Mirror
Science will never present us with a peer-reviewed study proving once and for all that you should be good to your fellow man, and treat him like a brother. Particle accelerator runs will never hint that we all have it within us to put an end to petty bickering, violence, and even earth-shattering wars.
Which is all fine and well, except that this is the realm of philosophy every bit as much as it is the realm of religion, and oddly philosophy manages to fit well with science. Philosophy also doesn't have large entrenched hierarchical organisations that rule by fiat, but insyead runs as a meritocracy like science. Philosophy doesn't need to quibble over questions it can't answer (like the existence of God).
It was enlightenment philosphy that brought us the morals of freedom, of equality among men, that we practice today. Religions have preached such things in the past, but it was the philosophers that managed to actually get some uptake of the idea. And at the same time many of the more interesting religions (usually the eastern ones) are closer to philosophy than religion as the west knows it - oh they still have their religious trappings, but it isn't quite so fundamental.
I think what you're really calling for is philosphy not religion. What you really want is for people to actually think, which is what religion often tells them not to do.
Jedidiah.
So what's the alternative? Either you argue for an eternal Creator that set everything in motion - or you argue for an eternal Universe that just happened.
If you want to pose questions that don't make sense and can't be answered in any rational way, then yes that's what you would say. It's a meaningless question though - you may as well ask what comes after the end of time, or what lies beyond the bounds of the universe. Reducing down to the sort of paradox we're dealing with here: does the set of all sets that don't contain themselves contain itself?
If I say "Unicorns don't exist" I could, if I want to get trapped in the language game, dig myself a hole: by naming unicorns I'm referring to a concept with a name and that concept must then exist - that contradicts the rest of my statement that the thing I names doesn't exist. Either I can wallow in the internal contradictions, or I can admit that language has quirks and move on.
As best our understanding runs, time is not some independent quantity, it is part of spacetime, part of the universe. Time was created when the universe began. Asking what came before that is just a quirk of our language. How can anything come before the existence of time when the concept of "before" requires time to make sense?
You're just getting trapped in a language game, and rather than suggesting you simply don't want to play you're trying to answer a question that makes no sense.
Jedidiah.
Perhaps this is all a sign that Debian needs to change their naming policy, and just call the next stable distribution "hell", that way we can have accurate headlines.
Jedidiah.
But the environment in which the software operates changes, and that change is analagous to weather corroding a pieces of physical equipment. ... The interesting part is that you can know that software is decaying, but I don't know of any effective way to measure that decay.
There's a relatively easy way to measure such "decay". When first designing to software do proper requirements gathering and write a full formal requirements specification (there are specification languages specifically for this purpose). As a maintenance check you run a new requirements gathering process and develop a new formal specification of requirements. If you used the right tools (that is the right specification language) to do this you will actually be able to compare the requirements used to develop the software with the requirements now in a precise way, getting a very specific measure of how requirements have deviated over time.
If you're really good you developed the software by refining the requirements specification and retained the the specification refinements as documentation of the code. Thus you will be able to get a complete measure of how much the change in requirements effects the code, and thus if you update the code (similarly updating the refinement specifiations) you can be sure you've properly covered all changes that need to be made, and no effects have gone unnoticed.
All of this is, of course, work. It is not dissimilar work to bothering to have a proper specification of your plane, having regular complete maintenance checks to make sure parts aren't worn beyond their tolerances, and fixing them if they are. People are willing to do that work on the planes, but aren't willing to do the similar work for software. This is mostly a matter of expectations, and the general perceptions of software.
Yes a plane crashing is a lot worse than your booking and ticketing system crashing, so you want to take care. Then again the software caused an awful lot of trouble and lost the company a remarkably large amount of money, so maybe that care was worth taking after all.
Jedidiah.
the Orcs shouting "Grond!" in the Return of the King was done by getting a football stadium's worth of people to do so
Not that I recall. The chanting in The Two Towers was done that way, along with some of the marching noises, but I don't believe there was any chanting of "Grond". They did record everyone whispering queitly, but I don't know if that was used anywhere (I think not).
For reference, yes I was at said ground (the "Caketin" in Wellington during the NZ/England ODI) when the recording was done.
Jedidiah.
Also, the acting was some of the worst I've seen. EVER. Period. And I go out of my way to see nototiously bad movies, when the mood strikes me.
I don't think you go very far out of your way to watch bad films if that is the worst acting you've ever seen. Just head along to your local equivalent of the Incredibly Strange FIlm Festival - I reccomend the marathon sessions with a suitably alternately intoxicated and caffeinated audience. For bad films I suggest you check out some Troma classics like
A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell
Curse of the Cannibal Confederates
But if you want to see truly bad film making you'll need to go for things like
Raiders of the Living Dead
Or, what is quite possibly the worst film ever made (and is quite legitimately notorious as such):
The Roller Blade Seven
I don't think you've really seen many bad films at all. I don't think you were even trying.
Jedidiah.
Which poses and interesting dilemma: How do we refer to someone who simply doesn't care whether or not God exists? The need for such a term simply wasn't required for a long time - it was assumed you cared and had a particular stance: either you believed God existed, believed God didn't exist, or believe you couldn't know. Not caring wasn't an option. These days it is an increasingly common stance on the subject and deserves a proper term.
I have run into various proposed terms like "apatheist" or some such, but they're nt formally recognised anywhere.
Jedidiah.
That's a nice theory, and has some merit in terms of motivation, but in terms of practical results it just isn't working. Check the statistics as http://www.bea.gov/ with respect to international transactions. The US saw a rise in the trade balance on services through the late 90's, but since then imports of services (particularly in the royalties category) have been growing at least as fast as exports. Strange as it may sound the US trade balance in terms of copyright licenses is flattening out, and possibly even starting to sink a little. At a time when the trade balance in goods is completely blowing out that's not a good sign.
Jedidiah.
Unfortunately the USA is doing a remarkably good job of fucking itself. Right now the US economy is walking a rather fine line. Let me explain:
The US has been living beyond its means - that is, it has a huge current account deficit: net capital inflow to the US far outweighs capital outflow. In and of itself that isn't necessarily bad, and is certainly no reason to panic: it has happened before, and will likely happen again. The issue is more about the reasons for the current account deficit. In a large part it is due the continued budget deficits of the current government, but is also due to US consumers appetite for imported goods without a similar growth in US exports. In theory this situation is naturally correcting via a falling US Dollar: imports become more expensive, and exports become cheaper more attractive to foreign buyers. The US Dollar has been falling (quite significantly) against world currencies for the last year or more. This drop hasn't yet caused a turn around in the current account deficit - it has continued to grow apace.
Mix a falling Dollar (via pressure from the current account) with the current growing demand for oil from China and the resulting increase in oil prices, and you have a powerful recipe for inflation. Again, this is an issue that can be dealt with: the Fed can raise interest rates to combat inflation, as they have been doing very steadily for the last 6 months or more. The risk is that raising interest rates too high will put serious pressure on an already slowing economy, and has risks for the (rather bubble like) US Housing market.
US consumers, and the US government, have been abusing the line of credit offered on the strength of the US economy (and the expectation that the US can grow its way out of the debt). Things are beginning to look a little tight, and the Fed is now walking a very fine line trying to combat inflation without killing the economy in the process.
The nest year or two could be very interesting indeed.
Jedidiah.
Sounds similar to what the confluence of HAL, DBUS and Seth Nickell's replacement for the init system was promising 2 years ago. Of course while HAL and DBUS have come along nicely I can find nothing about the mythical SystemServices stuff Seth blogged about 2 years ago. It seems it went the same way as storage... nowhere.
I think launchd sounds great. This is something the desktop Linux people have been aware of (they were discussing doing something about it over 2 years ago) but have failed to get around to actually doing. The devil, of course, is in the details, but from what I've read launchd looks like a good effort to bring some sanity and unity to the cruft that has built up in UNIX systems over the years. Hopefully this will be the kick in the ass needed to get Linux to do the same.
Jedidiah.
It's not a Sin City style take on it however - it's not doing the whole "the comic book is the storyboard, we just frame each shot similarly" approach, not the visual style which hews very close to the visual style of black and white comic.
At least they actually chose some decent stories to work from however, instead of making up random crap as they have in the past.
Jedidiah.
There will be lots in this movie* that doesn't line up with the other 4 flicks, because it's in a completely different continuity line. The director wanted everything in this movie to be believable and realistic. It's going to be darker and more real than even the first Batman in 1989.
All I can say is "good!". After the last two debacles the only tenable option was to his the big red PANIC!/RESTART! button in the corner, ignore the existence of anything else and try again.
I kind of appreciated Burton's take on Batman. While I didn't really like the films that much (for reasons relating to poor plots and a little too much humour) I do think he had an interesting and worthwhile vision for Batman. After Burton left so did any last semblance of sanity. We lost the strong vision, the plots and attempted humour only got worse, and well... How to sink a franchise really.
I must say, though, that given the success of Sin City it would be interesting to see a similarly styled take on The Dark Knight Returns. I guess that really depends on how much money Sin City makes.
Jedidiah.
If you want to see a change watch The Machinist. Bale is literally nothng but skin and bone - he apparently lost fully 1/3 his weight for the film. A pretty good performance as a man on the edge of losing his mind as well. I can definitely picture Bale as Wayne/Batman, hopefully bringing a little more of the psychological edge to the character than previous films attempted.
To be frank I think the previews look uninspiring. I just keep looking at the cast (which is for the most part great) and the director (Christopher Nolan) who while new has some decent films under his belt already. Surely they can't make too much of a mess - hopefully the previews are just badly put together. At the very least it looks like it will be far and away superior to the last couple of Batman films.
Jedidiah.
Additionally it would have been nice to see any sign that Darth Maul was really evil. Oh sure, he LOOKED evil enough, but other than fighting when Obi Wan and Qui Gon attacked him, he really didn't do much that showed us who he was... unlike how the character of Darth Vader was built in the first movie.
That's because the prequels have a weird "rent-a-villain" mentality. From what I gather we kill off Dooku in the first act of Ep III, and introduce "General Grievous". So for the 3 films we have as the "major villain" Darth Maul, Jango Fett (sort of), Count Dooku, General Grievous, and Darth Vader (presumably). It's hard to develop much real sense of impending threat when one "major" villain after another gets knocked off before he has actually managed to do much of anything.
Was Maul a very imposing villain? Hell, considering his actions he could almost have been a good guy. He did nothing except have one very impressive light sabre duel. He provided a fantastic action set piece, but completely failed to provide anything resembling a villain. Likewise for Dooku and Fett - they each got a short introduction in which they didn't do much of anything, an action set piece, and then were (presumably for Dooku) unceremoniously killed.
These characters were not villains they were simply supporting props to try and hold the plot up and stick out glaringly as such.
The biggest problem with Ep I and II is that they fail to get us involved and invested in the travails and fates of the main characters. We simply don't really care what happens to them - not in the same way that we were interested in what became of Luke and Han and Leia. In a large part this is because the villains have been, realistically, so artificial - we don't want the heors to win, because they haven't actually been given anything to struggle against that we really care about. The menace has never been properly established, and the "villain-of-the-week" approach certainly doesn't help.
Jedidiah.
Fair enough, but they have to fall in love somehow and without turning the whole movie into a romance it had to be rushed. It's unfortunate that their love is so pivotal to the story, yet not interesting enough to be its own movie so it can be properly told.
They had the better part of an hour to tell the love story (half of the film was devoted to that story arc) that's not a small amount of time. The real question is why was it not interesting enough to be the better part of the film? Surely if they bothered to write an interesting love story instead of ther hackneyed and forced one that they did, they could have devoted more time to it without issue.
What you're really saying is: it is a shame that the love story was so badly concieved and written that even the limited time they spent on it seemed like a waste.
Jedidiah.
My views of the first two prequels is not based on the repeated prevailing opinion. I didn't really like them that much, and I have my own reasons for thinking that.
I felt the first film was rather fractured with 3 surprisingly disjoint acts - yes that has been the general pattern for Star Wars films, but Ep IV was much more continuous in its flow, Ep V had the second act split to two stories that were interleaved before bringing everything back together for a final conclusion (a trick often used in "epic" storytelling) and kept a consistent focus on the small set of main characters (Luke, Han and Leia) and their difficulties. Ep VI, the weakest of the originals was also the most disjoint with a muddled second act trying to stitch together the grand set pieces of the first and third. Ep I is similar, but worse: we are introduced to main characters and given an interesting looking first act, but then essentially disregard Obi Wan and Qui Gon for a largely unrelated second act involving Anakin and pod racing which seems more of a distraction and contrivance before being thrown back quickly into a set piece finale. Yes the light sabre battle was great. Yes the opening act was fun. The film felt fractured and incomplete however.
As for Ep II - it was definitely an improvement, but essentially amounted to two story arcs with limited convergence: Obi Wan trying to find out what was going on with the assasination attempt, and the Anakin/Padme love story. Of those two I thought Obi Wan was by far the more interesting and entertaining character. His arc was, I thought, quite good. In the meantime I felt Anakin was poorly developed as a character. He went from an innocent child to a brattish dark youth with little explanation. The love story was very stilted and lacked anything resembling chemistry (compare to the Luke/Han/Leia interactions of Ep IV - VI). That is to say, half of the film felt like a distraction.
There are plenty of other nit picks I could make: midichlorians, Yoda having to resort to light sabres etc. but those are just that - little nit picks. The overarching point is that the films were poorly paced and disconnected and failed to get me decently involved with the characters whose journey I am supposed to be following. Quite simply, the movies simply weren't terribly involving.
Jedidiah.
That's nice to know. I wasn't meaning to diss Java - I think it's a nice language. I was more interested in the fact that it's (relatively speaking) a young language and doesn't have all the tools and additions available for it that something with a long history in high integrity software like Ada does.
I do expect Java to get there soon. That's for the reference, it looks like they were closer than I had previously thought.
Jedidiah.
Aside from the compulsory Slashdot Java FUD, it's really not a joke. Java has a big advantage in that the the bytes codes produced can be verified, and so the program tested, without any concerns of the final deployment platform. This is a major advantage for an organisation like NASA which most likely has a wide range of hardware on which software is deployed.
Which is nice, but when it comes to serious mission critical software where faults can't be tolerated Ada has some advantages. Call me when Java has anything equivalent to SPARK for validating code.
Jedidiah
This Metro format will have the same benifits on Windows as PDF does on OSX, Metro is based on Avalon and XAML, which will be built into Windows as the presentation model.
Except I recall reading a while ago that MS was using some proprietary SVG derivative as their moel for Avalon. Now it is Metro? Are they the same thing? Perhaps yes. At that rate and interesting extra issue is Cairo. Cairo is multiplatform (just plug in your backend of choice) and runs on Windows, X11, Quartz, and a variety of other platforms. Cairo has the same sort of rendering model as Quartz and Avalon, but again has nice pluggability - you can render out to SVG, or PDF or Postscript or presumably even Metro if the specs are made available as it is presumably very similar to SVG. If Cairo can live up to it's promises it could be a very powerful system indeed.
Jedidiah.
It's probably worth noting that even specs written in formal languages like CASL or Z typically include a certain amount of expository natural language to help the reader understand what's going on.
Certainly you still need comments and exposition. The point is that the bulk of this can reside in the documentation of requirements and specifications which is the logical place for it.
The code itself will still benefit from comments as well, but it will require a lot less because the important points will be properly documented by the specification already - you will only need comments to help elucidate soe of the more complex tangles in the implementation.
Jedidiah.
Comments are a good idea, but maybe not the best idea. Other posters have pointed out that it is hard to keep comments synced with code that's evolving... and I'm bitten by this all of the time. The more detailed my comments are, the _harder_ it is for me to maintain my code. The compiler and unit tests will tell me if my code is correct, but it is very time consuming to make sure the comments are correct.
One of the things I like about doctest for python and contract python is that it helps with this: you function documentation (which is to say comments) can be used to test the code. Sure, it's not perfect, but it is nice to be able to have something resembling debuggable comments.
Jedidiah
You don't write muc mathematics then huh?
Mathematicians will spend an inordinate amount of time and space defining what all the compact symbols they use mean. Grab any decent math paper and note how much of it involves phrases like "Where G is finite group of prime power order", or "Given two vectors in R^3 v_1, and v_2, we can...". Yes the equations are dense. That's acfter a lot of effort has been put in (usually immediately before, but occasionally immediately after) to carefully explicitly define what the symbols used mean.
Jedidiah.
1. Comment each function ...
- Function name
- what it does
- parameters parameter name - what is is for and any restrictions on it (i.e., must not be null)
- return value (all possible return values)
3. Add ASSERT() like comments and ASSERT() or equivalent to your code
Or you could use a language that has Design by Contract and simply use the function contracts to do all of that for you - better yet you get the resulting effects of inherited contracts and so on.
Or, to put it another way: That's such a good idea that we ought to be doing it all the time, in the code, and using the documented specification as something that can be compiled in for debugging purposes.
Jedidiah.
If you learned Ada then you may want to spend the little extra time required to learn SPARK and learn how to write useful comments that can actually be used to reduce errors by (based on case studies) a factor of about 100 over C code.
Jedidiah.
Document your application, requirements, constraints, and system interactions (what the engineer does). Then write the code (what the coder does). What you will quickly learn is that it's better to be the engineer than the coder.
Interestingly there are a number of formal languages to do this, some of them rather similar to programming languages. For example you can use an algebraic specification language like CASL - it provides a structured way to define datatypes, operations on datatypes, and the axioms that the types and operations need to obey for the requirements to be met (For the mathematicians out there: an implementation is then a (many-sorted) universal algebra, and a specification is a presentation). There are things like refinement calculus and theorem provers to help you refine your requirements into an ever more specific specifications. Once that is done the actual programming is pretty much monkey work: there are extremely specific bounds on every datatype, every function, to the point where it is merely a matter just doing what you're told. The interesting part happen with the initial requirements specification and the refinement and design of the specification.
I happen to like CASL, and chose it here because the the syntax is similar to programming languages, but it is far from the only, or even the most popular specification language. You could try Z, or VDM, or B-method, or OBJ3, or any of the myriad other languages out there. Formal specification languages ought to be far more widely used than they apparently are. Isn't it about time more "software engineers" started paying attention to them?
Jedidiah.