The Silmarillion (or, rather, Quenta Silmarillion[1]) was a work that was never definably "started" and never really "finished" in the sense of most books. Tolkien began writing the stories that *eventually became* the Quenta Silmarillion long before The Hobbit. There are several references in The Hobbit to places or events in Quenta Silmarillion (eg: Gondolin, Glamdring), but he didn't, at first, consider the two works as sharing the same "universe". Later, in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien merged the worlds of The Hobbit with that of Quenta Silmarillion. There are still some remaining inaccuracties/contradictions, though.
[1] While Quenta Silmarillion consists of the vast majority of the published work The Silmarillion, the book is actually a collection of several inependent works: The Ainulindale, The Valaquenta, Quenta Silmarillion, and Akallabeth.
I have read a lot of posts in this discussion (and similar discussions in the past) talk about how *nix is better than NT. Then, some of the more level-headed among us pipe up and remind us that no OS is truly secure, and that the difference lies not with the system itself but with the system administrators. Thus, it follows that *nix admins are better than NT admins.
I most heartily disagree. Sure, there are *some* *nix admins that mop the floor with NT admins... but the opposite is also true.
I think we are all forgetting exactly what an "admin" is. An admin is *not* any JoeBlow@aol.com that stands up a web server! A system administrator is an IT professional who researches his work and prides himself on keeping his machines running smoothly.
If you think about it a little, I believe that you'll agree that the major cause of the whole Code Red problem is not the NT admins out there, but rather the JoeBlow@aol.com's who really don't know what they're doing. Ignorance, people... ignorance is our enemy! Not Bill Gates, not MS, not closed source! It's ignorance and apathy.
Here's the pertinent FAQ over at EFF. It gives you links to a Paypal account set up for Dmitri as well as links to various mailing lists, web sites, et cetera.
But that's just my point. If the SERVER KNOWS that you can't see an enemy because it's hidden by a wall, then at that time, the server should not transmit any positional information to you about that enemy. Make the walls clear all you want, you will see nothing.
OK, now ask yourself this: "How does the server know whether or not you can see an object?" It doesn't. In order to find out, it would have to all but render your screen for you. You can't just assume that because he's behind a wall, you can't see him. What about holes in the wall? What about cases where the "wall" is really fog (or any other form of reduced visibility)... you want the server to do your anisotropic fog calculations for you and all twelve other people in the level?
If servers started doing that, it *could* effectively eliminate some forms of cheating. But it would mean a *huge* drain on the server. People spend up to $400 on 3D graphics cards these days (GeForce3, anyone?)... and it does the calculations for one client. You want the server to start doing the calculations for every single client on the server? Geez, man, what kind of equipment do you think these servers have?
__________________
Re:High Warp Restriction?
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
One of the fundamental ideas that relativity was derived from is that the ORDER of events is the same for all observers. FTL travel or backwards time travel violates this principle.
One of the fundamental ideas that relativity was derived from is, in fact, the exact opposite, the idea there is no such thing as the 'same time' for different observers or different events in a different place in space.
When did he say anything about events appearing to occur at the same time to observers in different reference frames? What he (correctly) stated was that, regardless of the reference frame, the *order* of the events will remain unchanged.
Not so much revolutionary as evolutionary. Just as keyboard shortcuts allow us to use the keyboard for much more than simply typing, gestures ("mouse shortcuts"?) allow us to use the mouse for much more than simply pointing.
I've been using Opera 5.1x for a few weeks now, and at first, I didn't use the gestures at all. But slowly, I'm incorporating them into the minutiae of my tasks. If I've already got my hand on the mouse, then often times a gesture is quicker than a keyboard shortcut (reload, new window, close). I still almost never use the forward and back gestures, but that may change in the future.
I'm not saying gestures should *replace* keyboard shortcuts, because they can't. I'm saying that they should be provided *in addition to* keyboard shortcuts. Any technique that helps me get my work (and play:-} done faster is welcome.
It's only trafficking in humans if the humans don't have a choice. Naivete and outright stupidity notwithstanding, porn stars *do* have a choice. They have a choice between doing something [they may not want to do] for $1000, or not doing it and not getting the $1000. I've *never* been a porn star, and I get by quite well (19 years old, living on my own, no college), so don't give me any crap about how they'll starve if they don't get the money.
_________
If I'm paying someone $800 or $1000 per day, they damn well better do whatever the hell I tell them. If the job *wasn't* worth the money, there wouldn't be "plenty more [actresses] waiting in the wings." That's supply and demand.
___________
I like the $, %, @, etc. They show me the type of a variable at a glance. Look at C variables - most people (should) use hungarian notation, and just look at the horrible result of that.
I most emphatically disagree. Hungarian notation is absolutely and completely evil for a strongly-typed language. The only reason it's at all popular in C is because of Micros~1 API code... and that's because they tried to defeat C's type system by using void*s all over the place (just about everything that starts with H is a void*).
In C and C++ (and any other strongly-typed language for that matter, such as Pascal or Ada), you should be able to determine the type of an object simply by how the object is used. [An aside... Generic programming takes that notion a step further by saying that it doesn't *matter* what the type of an object is... only the operations that can be applied to an object are important.]
Try doing that in Perl and see how far you get!
I'm not saying that makes C++ and better, per se, than Perl. But C++ is strongly typed while Perl is weakly typed... so from a C++ programmer's perspective, all that @%$ etc crap is unnecessary and horrible.
Of course, in Perl (a weakly typed language), they're necessary. Wondering why they're necessary in Perl is a bit like wondering why you have to mention the datatype in a C++ object declaration.
______
Either they're engaged in buck-passing or they're being pedants. Even if it's not the job, it comes with the job anyway, whether they like it or not.
I understand and appreciate that. I agree with you, that there is a certain minimum of morality that must necessarily be *enforced* by the schools. But those morals should be *taught* at home. That - among other reasons - is why there's home schooling: if a parent disagrees with the enforced morality of a school, then she is free to enforce her own morality during her child's education.
It is my opinion that the mandatory counseling sessions proposal that I responded to exceeds this "minimum moral enforcement" idea of mine. Some things are *necesary* to function in a society (and school is just that - a society)... other things are an ideal of behavior that is very subjective. Schools must, by necessity, enforce the former; they need not (and IMO should not) enforce the latter.
Again, IMO, the proposal crossed that very thin, very wavy line from necessary morality into idealistic morality.
____
Why suspend them for a long period of time and threaten them with jail when they can teach them right from wrong like any _school_ should do?
It is not the job of the schools to teach morality. It is the job of the schools to provide an *academic* education. If effectively providing this education to students means that one student must be (temporarily) removed from school, then so be it.
Unfortunately, in this case, the removal was not so temporary. IMO, this is not so much an issue of a troubled school district as it is an issue of a troubled little boy. I do agree with the previous poster that the child needed counseling... I just (strongly) disagree about who should be responsible for it.
____
35 keywords to the language. 35! That's it.
I agree... that's quite an accomplishment. C is a much smaller language than C++. Small is often desireable, but smaller != better.
There are too many ways to do the same thing.
You like C, but you complain of too many ways to do the same thing in C++?
The language was released while still being developed.
And C wasn't? There's K&R C. There's K&R2 C. There's C90. There's C90 with the 95 addendum. Now there's also C99.
"Every C program is a C++ program"? No one has *ever* said that (no one who knew what they were talking about anyway). A simple case is the C statement:
int* pi = malloc(sizeof(int));
That's an illegal C++ statement! In C++, it would look like:
int* pi = (int*)malloc(sizeof(int));
(Please forgive my lack of new-style cast and my lack of namespace specification). Now, that C++-version is legal C, but it is *poorly written* C code. Any C programmer worth his salt would frown on a program littered with such statements.
What *has* been said (accurately) is that all the C programs appearing in K&R2 were checked not with a C compiler, but with a C++ compiler.
C is a good language. I happen to prefer C++.
________
Unfortunately, that "fix" is illegal in ANSI C++. Further, no diagnostic is required by a compiler when parsing your "fix"; a conforming implementation may fail silently and horribly.
There are much more interesting errors in MSVC. Incorrect scoping of namespaces with a using declaration, incorrect template instantiation, and lack of support for template friends are just a few.
Hang out on the comp.lang.* newsgroups for a few days and I'm sure you'll come accross plenty of implementation bugs. It's true in comp.lang.c++, at least.
ya, sure void main(){printf("hello, world\n");} will run on everything
Damnit, I was gonna use some of my newly acquired mod points in this discussion, but I just couldn't let this one slide.
void main() {/*... */ } is not guaranteed to work ANYWHERE. In C and C++, main is REQUIRED to return ant int. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.
main() {/*... */ } ain't kosher either, even in C. As of C99, there is no such thing as implicit int.
Sorry... pet peave.
-- Curien "Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falshood when preceded by its quotation.
... but code isn't art. Art is paintings and drawings and being creative. Don't get me wrong, code is creative, but it also follows fixed rules. Art is a reflection of how one feels, it is emotive and personal. Code is not.
Obviously, you have never participated in a flame-war about coding style. If my code is not a reflection of my personality, then I don't know what is.
People describe code as "elegant", "beatiful", "utilitarian", "obfuscated", etc. Those terms are applied to code regardless of whether code is considered art. Now consider that those same words are used to describe artwork. Coincidence? I think not.
And about the "fixed rules" thing... Are you saying that sculpture doesn't follow fixed rules? Or architecture? Or painting? If nothing else, there are the "fixed rules" of physics (optics and gravity in particular). Is *all* code artistic? Certainly not. But modern artists have a misguided notion that something qualifies as "art" *only* if it has no other purpose. This just isn't so.
I am on the web team for a very large government agency. We, too, have had this dropped on our doorstep, and at first we freaked. We were told that our pages must comply with the Bobby Tool, and on a few test-runs, not a single page passed. We have thousands of pages... how the hell were we supposed to make them all comply with this tool? (Someone mentioned automated changes, but that was out of the question because our content is developed by over a hundred independent authors, some of which are thousands of miles away.)
So we did some checking up and found out that only publicly-accessible pages need to comply (~75% of our content is not accessible to the casual web-surfer). We did a little more research and found that only top-level pages need to comply. We still haven't received word on whether top-level means only the home page for the domain or whether it means every single index or default page out there. If the former, great! If the latter, then it'll be a bit more work, but nothing impossible.
Let's not blow this out of proportion, people.
Slashdot Mirror
The Silmarillion (or, rather, Quenta Silmarillion[1]) was a work that was never definably "started" and never really "finished" in the sense of most books. Tolkien began writing the stories that *eventually became* the Quenta Silmarillion long before The Hobbit. There are several references in The Hobbit to places or events in Quenta Silmarillion (eg: Gondolin, Glamdring), but he didn't, at first, consider the two works as sharing the same "universe". Later, in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien merged the worlds of The Hobbit with that of Quenta Silmarillion. There are still some remaining inaccuracties/contradictions, though.
[1] While Quenta Silmarillion consists of the vast majority of the published work The Silmarillion, the book is actually a collection of several inependent works: The Ainulindale, The Valaquenta, Quenta Silmarillion, and Akallabeth.
I have read a lot of posts in this discussion (and similar discussions in the past) talk about how *nix is better than NT. Then, some of the more level-headed among us pipe up and remind us that no OS is truly secure, and that the difference lies not with the system itself but with the system administrators. Thus, it follows that *nix admins are better than NT admins.
I most heartily disagree. Sure, there are *some* *nix admins that mop the floor with NT admins... but the opposite is also true.
I think we are all forgetting exactly what an "admin" is. An admin is *not* any JoeBlow@aol.com that stands up a web server! A system administrator is an IT professional who researches his work and prides himself on keeping his machines running smoothly.
If you think about it a little, I believe that you'll agree that the major cause of the whole Code Red problem is not the NT admins out there, but rather the JoeBlow@aol.com's who really don't know what they're doing. Ignorance, people... ignorance is our enemy! Not Bill Gates, not MS, not closed source! It's ignorance and apathy.
Here's the pertinent FAQ over at EFF. It gives you links to a Paypal account set up for Dmitri as well as links to various mailing lists, web sites, et cetera.
But that's just my point. If the SERVER KNOWS that you can't see an enemy because it's hidden by a wall, then at that time, the server should not transmit any positional information to you about that enemy. Make the walls clear all you want, you will see nothing.
OK, now ask yourself this: "How does the server know whether or not you can see an object?" It doesn't. In order to find out, it would have to all but render your screen for you. You can't just assume that because he's behind a wall, you can't see him. What about holes in the wall? What about cases where the "wall" is really fog (or any other form of reduced visibility)... you want the server to do your anisotropic fog calculations for you and all twelve other people in the level?
If servers started doing that, it *could* effectively eliminate some forms of cheating. But it would mean a *huge* drain on the server. People spend up to $400 on 3D graphics cards these days (GeForce3, anyone?)... and it does the calculations for one client. You want the server to start doing the calculations for every single client on the server? Geez, man, what kind of equipment do you think these servers have?
__________________
One of the fundamental ideas that relativity was derived from is that the ORDER of events is the same for all observers. FTL travel or backwards time travel violates this principle.
One of the fundamental ideas that relativity was derived from is, in fact, the exact opposite, the idea there is no such thing as the 'same time' for different observers or different events in a different place in space.
When did he say anything about events appearing to occur at the same time to observers in different reference frames? What he (correctly) stated was that, regardless of the reference frame, the *order* of the events will remain unchanged.
Not so much revolutionary as evolutionary. Just as keyboard shortcuts allow us to use the keyboard for much more than simply typing, gestures ("mouse shortcuts"?) allow us to use the mouse for much more than simply pointing.
:-} done faster is welcome.
I've been using Opera 5.1x for a few weeks now, and at first, I didn't use the gestures at all. But slowly, I'm incorporating them into the minutiae of my tasks. If I've already got my hand on the mouse, then often times a gesture is quicker than a keyboard shortcut (reload, new window, close). I still almost never use the forward and back gestures, but that may change in the future.
I'm not saying gestures should *replace* keyboard shortcuts, because they can't. I'm saying that they should be provided *in addition to* keyboard shortcuts. Any technique that helps me get my work (and play
My $0.02
___________
It's only trafficking in humans if the humans don't have a choice. Naivete and outright stupidity notwithstanding, porn stars *do* have a choice. They have a choice between doing something [they may not want to do] for $1000, or not doing it and not getting the $1000. I've *never* been a porn star, and I get by quite well (19 years old, living on my own, no college), so don't give me any crap about how they'll starve if they don't get the money.
_________
If I'm paying someone $800 or $1000 per day, they damn well better do whatever the hell I tell them. If the job *wasn't* worth the money, there wouldn't be "plenty more [actresses] waiting in the wings." That's supply and demand.
___________
I like the $, %, @, etc. They show me the type of a variable at a glance. Look at C variables - most people (should) use hungarian notation, and just look at the horrible result of that.
I most emphatically disagree. Hungarian notation is absolutely and completely evil for a strongly-typed language. The only reason it's at all popular in C is because of Micros~1 API code... and that's because they tried to defeat C's type system by using void*s all over the place (just about everything that starts with H is a void*).
In C and C++ (and any other strongly-typed language for that matter, such as Pascal or Ada), you should be able to determine the type of an object simply by how the object is used.
[An aside... Generic programming takes that notion a step further by saying that it doesn't *matter* what the type of an object is... only the operations that can be applied to an object are important.]
Try doing that in Perl and see how far you get!
I'm not saying that makes C++ and better, per se, than Perl. But C++ is strongly typed while Perl is weakly typed... so from a C++ programmer's perspective, all that @%$ etc crap is unnecessary and horrible.
Of course, in Perl (a weakly typed language), they're necessary. Wondering why they're necessary in Perl is a bit like wondering why you have to mention the datatype in a C++ object declaration.
______
Either they're engaged in buck-passing or they're being pedants. Even if it's not the job, it comes with the job anyway, whether they like it or not.
I understand and appreciate that. I agree with you, that there is a certain minimum of morality that must necessarily be *enforced* by the schools. But those morals should be *taught* at home. That - among other reasons - is why there's home schooling: if a parent disagrees with the enforced morality of a school, then she is free to enforce her own morality during her child's education.
It is my opinion that the mandatory counseling sessions proposal that I responded to exceeds this "minimum moral enforcement" idea of mine. Some things are *necesary* to function in a society (and school is just that - a society)... other things are an ideal of behavior that is very subjective. Schools must, by necessity, enforce the former; they need not (and IMO should not) enforce the latter.
Again, IMO, the proposal crossed that very thin, very wavy line from necessary morality into idealistic morality.
____
Why suspend them for a long period of time and threaten them with jail when they can teach them right from wrong like any _school_ should do?
It is not the job of the schools to teach morality. It is the job of the schools to provide an *academic* education. If effectively providing this education to students means that one student must be (temporarily) removed from school, then so be it.
Unfortunately, in this case, the removal was not so temporary. IMO, this is not so much an issue of a troubled school district as it is an issue of a troubled little boy. I do agree with the previous poster that the child needed counseling... I just (strongly) disagree about who should be responsible for it.
____
The C in CISC stands for complex. The R in RISC for reduced. Wouldn't the register rich chip have more then the register poor?
Yes, but the "IS" in both acronyms stands for "instruction set". The PowerPC registers far outnumber the i386 registers.
One would think, though, that someone would take these things into account when they do a port from one platform to another.
35 keywords to the language. 35! That's it.
I agree... that's quite an accomplishment. C is a much smaller language than C++. Small is often desireable, but smaller != better.
There are too many ways to do the same thing.
You like C, but you complain of too many ways to do the same thing in C++?
The language was released while still being developed.
And C wasn't? There's K&R C. There's K&R2 C. There's C90. There's C90 with the 95 addendum. Now there's also C99.
"Every C program is a C++ program"?
No one has *ever* said that (no one who knew what they were talking about anyway). A simple case is the C statement:
int* pi = malloc(sizeof(int));
That's an illegal C++ statement! In C++, it would look like:
int* pi = (int*)malloc(sizeof(int));
(Please forgive my lack of new-style cast and my lack of namespace specification). Now, that C++-version is legal C, but it is *poorly written* C code. Any C programmer worth his salt would frown on a program littered with such statements.
What *has* been said (accurately) is that all the C programs appearing in K&R2 were checked not with a C compiler, but with a C++ compiler.
C is a good language. I happen to prefer C++.
________
Unfortunately, that "fix" is illegal in ANSI C++. Further, no diagnostic is required by a compiler when parsing your "fix"; a conforming implementation may fail silently and horribly.
There are much more interesting errors in MSVC. Incorrect scoping of namespaces with a using declaration, incorrect template instantiation, and lack of support for template friends are just a few.
Hang out on the comp.lang.* newsgroups for a few days and I'm sure you'll come accross plenty of implementation bugs. It's true in comp.lang.c++, at least.
ya, sure void main(){printf("hello, world\n");} will run on everything
/* ... */ } is not guaranteed to work ANYWHERE. In C and C++, main is REQUIRED to return ant int. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.
/* ... */ } ain't kosher either, even in C. As of C99, there is no such thing as implicit int.
Damnit, I was gonna use some of my newly acquired mod points in this discussion, but I just couldn't let this one slide.
void main() {
main() {
Sorry... pet peave.
-- Curien
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falshood when preceded by its quotation.
... but code isn't art. Art is paintings and drawings and being creative. Don't get me wrong, code is creative, but it also follows fixed rules. Art is a reflection of how one feels, it is emotive and personal. Code is not. Obviously, you have never participated in a flame-war about coding style. If my code is not a reflection of my personality, then I don't know what is. People describe code as "elegant", "beatiful", "utilitarian", "obfuscated", etc. Those terms are applied to code regardless of whether code is considered art. Now consider that those same words are used to describe artwork. Coincidence? I think not. And about the "fixed rules" thing... Are you saying that sculpture doesn't follow fixed rules? Or architecture? Or painting? If nothing else, there are the "fixed rules" of physics (optics and gravity in particular). Is *all* code artistic? Certainly not. But modern artists have a misguided notion that something qualifies as "art" *only* if it has no other purpose. This just isn't so.
I am on the web team for a very large government agency. We, too, have had this dropped on our doorstep, and at first we freaked. We were told that our pages must comply with the Bobby Tool, and on a few test-runs, not a single page passed. We have thousands of pages... how the hell were we supposed to make them all comply with this tool? (Someone mentioned automated changes, but that was out of the question because our content is developed by over a hundred independent authors, some of which are thousands of miles away.) So we did some checking up and found out that only publicly-accessible pages need to comply (~75% of our content is not accessible to the casual web-surfer). We did a little more research and found that only top-level pages need to comply. We still haven't received word on whether top-level means only the home page for the domain or whether it means every single index or default page out there. If the former, great! If the latter, then it'll be a bit more work, but nothing impossible. Let's not blow this out of proportion, people.