Is this a lottery on whether you get charged or not?
No, the customer get's charged.
But the term lottery is very good in this context.
Let's look at the scheme from that point:
If a state organizes a lottery (at least here in Germany) it is obliged to pay out at least 50% of the money that came in from selling the lottery tickets.
This payment occurs in the same random fashion like the pepper coins.
In reverse, a customer of a lottery can roughly except to win back about 50% percent of what he shells out (it depends on the time frame and how all the win money is distributed among different winning ranks).
The same holds for the merchants participating in that peppercoin scheme. Statistics is on their side. The more transactions, the smaller the error margins.
I would call the scheme a reverse lottery.
The critical point is of course the tuning of the propabilities in the win/loss one time pads that Rivest's company is likely to distribute to the client software.
He can make money by having to low win probabilities.
As a participating merchant I would perhaps insist on a contractual margin - if I have N zillion transactions there should be guarantieed error margin. If my pepper coins are below that margin, I should get compensated by Rivests company, if I'm above I should pay back.
The general idea, to use statistics to neglect expensive detail, seems very good to me.
My results showed Evangelion volume 1 to be $11.17 (down from $15.95 list) on Amazon.com vs. 6,00 euro on Amazon.de. That's the stuff I was talking about.
Oh, I thought you hit on one of the old Akira, 3x3 Eyes or Alita editions, which were rereleased later.
Yes know the Evangelion pricing. I bought the first US volume via Amazon.de for about 16 Euro. Of course I bought all 7 available volumes again from the German publisher for 6 Euro each, when they were issued (a bit later than in the US).
I had the same pleasure with about 13 US Ranma editions, now all 36 or so volumes are available in Germany for around 6 Euro each. And with Inu Yasha, where I bought the first 5 volumes from Viz, now it is coming out here..
And of course I got one of the few GITS2 hard copies (cant remember the price - 30 Euros?) which (expect for the usual censorship) maps to Japanese luxury version, it also contained a mouse pad and a small booklet with pages that are different in the non luxury japanese edition.
BTW I read GITS2 two times now, and still have no clue about the ending. I suspect that it was not possible to translate Shirows abstract Japanese into proper abstract German. And of course I don't grok the references to Buddhism/Shintoism which seem to show up here as much as in his earlier Orion.
I don't know if they also sell them in France, since there's deffinate interest in comics there.
If you look into the impressum information in the German manga books, you will often see, that the book is translated from the French.
Carlsen first published manga like the US publisher VIZ or Marvel (Akira) and it was not a big success, because they squeezed the Japanese Editions into the US/Euro format (expensive, 48 pages, colour, high quality paper, reversed artwork, changed soundwords).
Then someone in France had the idea to publish Dragon Ball there under the Japanese format (cheap, 200 pages, black and white, low quality paper, Japanese orientation of pages - back to front reading). And it was a success there.
Luckily Carlsen noticed that success in France and tried the same over here in Germany.
The rest is history and illustrates that a cheaper price can result in more total sales.
Even at the risk of being modded down for saying this, I think one of the reasons might be that us-american comics simply lack quality.
Don't forget productivity. The Japanese are able to draw an awful amount of pages in short time.
OK, for this they specialize and have assistants for backgrounds and other minor drawing tasks. (Some Europeans like the Smurfs creator Peyo did the same:)
I guess the only US comic book artist who can meet productivity with the Japanese is Sergio Aragones (Groo, the tiny drawings in Mad magazine).:-)
One thing I noticed in Germany while visiting is the difference in price of manga between here and there. The same manga tended to be half the price in Germany...the cover price, not on sale or whatnot. It's more palatable to go pick up a couple black and white 6X8" manga for $6 rather than a single one for $12.
That is a misconception. The expensive, coloured, thin ones were published before the manga explosion (triggered by publishing Dragon Ball under the Japanese formula, like it was discovered in France before - thick, black and white, low quality paper, cheap!).
These are unsold artefacts.
The cheap thick ones were published after the manga explosion. And many series was relaunched (Akira, Alita, 3x3 eyes) under the Japanese formula, instead of the US/Euro formula and became hits.
There are 3 pulp style magazines around now in Germany, with serialized series:
This is true, but European comics are much different from their American and Japanese counterparts.
Yes, US, Europe and Japan are three different schools.
My own small collection contains such books as the Yoko Tsuno series (ironically about the adventures of a Japanese woman living in Europe),
To be honest I like the Yoko Zuno books most, where she deals with the extra terrestials from the Vinea planet.
The creator Roger LeLoup has a very cute and believable vision of future technology here.
the Gaston series (which are not stories but collections of often hilarious jokes, somewhat like Dilbert but with a different theme),
Uhm yes. But don't forget Franquin's masterpiece, his issues in the multi artist series Spirou/Robbedoes. His book "Nest of the Marsupilamis" is one of my all time favourites. It is sooo kawaii!!
a few Storm albums (about an astronaut who accidentally ends up in the far future), and
Before that, the English artist Don Lauwrence drew the Trigan series which featured the "Romans in Space theme" with unbelievable cute drawings but alas quite a hang for fascist architecture.
It was his luck that he later met Martijn Lodewijk as briliant scenario writer (and an artist himself with the great Agent 321 series). Who created the fantastic Pandarve scenario. That was true art!
most of the Luc Orient books (who is a scientific James Bond-type figure).
I liked them too. Alas nothing new came out the last decades, as far as I know.
Again the Terrango extra terrestial adventures excelled, like with Yoko Zuno.
The Storm books in particular are extremely well drawn. I don't know how many hours the artist spends on each page but it must be considerable - each and every panel is like an oil painting.
.
I don't know. I had a look at portrait painters in Florence, and these guys draw in that style quite quick. I guess the excellent part of Don Lawrence are his phantastic designs of technique and life forms. I love his monsters and green guys.
I also used to read a lot of X-men and Spiderman, but I find that these comics do not age nearly as well as the European versions.
Except for some exceptions, like the Frank Miller stuff or the Dark Phoenix saga or Watchmen, the US super hero stories are of too low quality to be interesting over years.
In fact the only American comics I still read on a regular basis are Dilbert, Fox Trot, and the Far Side books.
In my case its Dilbert and Luann, thanks to the Internet.
And honorable mention should go to Agent 327 - it is a totally brilliant James Bond parody. Unfortunately it will be 100% incomprehensible for non-Dutch readers due to the many political jokes and local references.
Yes. One of my all time favourites. I thanked god when I discovered the new flock of albums, including the hilarious adventure in the Antwerp Zoo, when I was in Holland recently.
And besides Agent 321 was published in Germany, in quite a good translation.
It was still very funy.
For my part, I collected the original US Akira adaptations as monthly comics when they came out in the 80s.
Ok, we all were thankful when the Marvel edition came in the US. But its Art was reversed, the sound effects (vertical rows of characters) changed into Western sound words (with horizontal orientation) plus it was cut into 30+ pieces for an obscence total price.
The same happened in Germany, before the manga explosion happened there, they first published that edition and found its die hard buyers.
But, after the manga explosion, the publisher finally published Akira in the Japanese edition. Six thick black and white tomes (except for the colour intro pages) and each for a silly cheap price.
And guess what, it beats the US adaption several times. It is simply better.
It is my strong belief that the US should try the Japanese publishing formula instead of that crappy US/Euro style formula (thin, full color, high quality paper, exorbitant price).
The golden era of European comic was in the 60ies and 70ies with giants like Andre Franquin (creator of the Marsupilami) mostly from France and Belgium and very few from the Netherlands (Franka from Kuipers, Doorzon from de Jaeger).
I guess there was not much exciting good stuff recently except the exceptional XIII series by Vance & Van Hamme
and if there is a new Valerian et Veronique from Christin/Mezieres I buy it anytime.
The US comics had a good revival in the 80ies, thanks to Frank Miller (Daredevil, Batman) and the astonishing "Watchmen" from Moore/Gibbons.
But Marvel and the cute drawers like McFarlane and Lee plus a zillion different covers for #1 editions overdid it and ruined the market.
Since the 90ies the Manga rule. While at least in Europe the 80ies changed the love for technology into fear for technology, the Japanese seemed unaffected and thus were able to create great science fiction like Appleseed which opened the door first to the US market and then to Europe.
The article is misleading in that it equals the US with the western world. Maybe manga are not a big success in the US but they are a enormous success in France and Germany and probably some other European countries.
In Germany the breakthrough came via the price.
The first attempts to sell manga here was to cut down the 200plus page sized japanese books into colored 48page Euro/US styled books.
In fact they took the US edition of Akira to market it in Germany. If you bought all 30+ titles you spent an awful lot of cash and waited too long. It was not a big success.
But then someone in France had the idea to sell manga in Europe under Japanese conditions. Thick books, black and white, cheap paper, low price. He did it with Dragon ball and it was a huge success!
The main manga publisher in Germany noticed this and tried the same recipe in Germany.
In fact he used the french translation as base for a german translation.
And Dragon Ball became a hit in Germany too.
So cutting the price and increasing the page number was the secret formula!
Manga sold enormous in Germany and the publisher stopped several series, which were published under the old Euro/US formula and relaunched them as cheap Japanese formula books.
And guess what, Battleangel Alita or 3x3 Eyes became hits as well, while they lay dormant before.
So it is nothing cultural. It is purly economic. Make it cheap and thick. Give much choice!
This year we have three monthly periodicals,
similiar to "shonen jump":
Banzai for boys, Manga power mostly for boys with a bit girl stuff and recently Daisuki with girl content.
You missed my point. I can live with Swing being a resource hog.
Sorry in that case.:-)
What I can't live with in Swing is the bugs, the poor desktop integration, and the platform-dependent behavior.
Yes, there are bugs. One really has to use the latest VM to get rid of them (and perhaps get some new ones). But I at least had none, which was a show stopper.
Yes, the desktop integration is an issue.
Drag and drop is not perfect and the present state of printing is a joke.
And the "kinks" I was referring to weren't just Swing problems, they were lots and lots of Java language, library, and runtime problems. Take a look at Sun's own bug tracker.
Perhaps I was just more lucky, covering less buggy parts of the system.
My biggest enemy was Web Start, which was ported very sloppy from Solaris to Windows by Sun.
I stumbled on many, many bugs here (some are documented in the unofficial JWS FAQ:)
The first few years, it looked like Sun was going to make it work and work out the kinks.
I believe that Sun's Java managers had a big poster on their office wall, showing a graph of Moore's law for the growth of the average PC's power with some red line around 1 GHz/256 MB.:-)
Swing is a hog. On the other hand it is a powerful graphics API which allows the easy creation of modern nice looking GUIs.
Every PC bought in the last two years should be sufficient to run SWING applications. As the typical business app just shovels data between the GUI and some database that needs to presented in a nice way, SWING is now probably just OK thanks to Moore's law.
My last experience with SWING, coding a data viewer for bioinformatics data, was that you have less reserve with SWING than what you would have if you used Qt or GTK+. You can't allow yourself to programm sloppy because then you hit the performance barrier with SWING immediatley.
Interestingly enough, it seems it is not the code execution that sucks with Java, but memory waste and the related cycle waste when allocating/copying it.
Yes, indeed, what about fp (functional programming) and numerics?:)
Funny thing is that the fp people have invested lots of brainpower into advanced functional programming techniques. Symbolic and logics math, yes I have seen software for it. But numerics?
Is it possible that a functional language beats FORTRAN eg in eigenvector calculations?
It would be more appropriate to say each of them has their advantages and disadvantages.
if u wanna do it at all then do it properly.. and not be stuck in the sort of jam that wings3d for xample is right now.. www wings.com it's used some really totally garbage ericssons ERLANG language..
Erlang is quite cool. However it is a high level language, and thus the programmer has to grasp some advanced concepts before he can reap the benefits.
and tho it may be easy to port.. and use.. its SLOW AND CRAPPY
Then improve it. I remember this being the work a few individuals only.
and WHO in their right minds thinks its OK to having to install 50mb (4000+ files) of Erlang Runtime libraries to use a 800kb application?
It is possible to create compact stand alone binaries form Erlang code.
Besides the virtual machine, there is a native compiler (HIPE) which might improve speed.
C++/C ASM.. something like that.. thats what you need!
Each tool has its uses. Manual ASM coding should only be done for a few hot spots which can't be done in C or C++.
From Erlangs's perspective, C and C++ are low level languages.:) So one should do the complex stuff as much as possible in Erlang.
> Wingz3d, a modeling app based on Nendo, is very
> capable, and its current UI is very clean.
> It's based on erlang, a runtime environment (like
> java), that seems well-suited to handle a 3D app.
Both names are used to reference a programming language, a large library and a run-time system that is based on a virtual machine.
Java is (depending on your view and mode) either a dumbed down version of C++ or a version of C++ adapted for use with a virtual machine.
Erlang however is not an imperative language (where you state the control flow explictly) but a functional language (where the focus is on function evaluation) and a concurrent one too
(which means the language system makes it easy for you to work with parallel processes on different CPU nodes).
Both systems come with large libraries.
However Erlangs focus is rather concurrency and high availibility while client side Java provides much GUI support.
It is not unusual to do the high level programming in Erlang while interfacing to Java GUI code or to C++ performance intensive stuff.
Hm, I am not 100% sure, but isn't this the third time this article was featured on Slashdot?
But it is still a nice article, illustrating Knuth's advice simply to plot random numbers to visually quickly judge the quality of a pseudo random number generator.
It may be easy for you, because you live in a nice comfy, stable world.
Stable times?
I had one grandfather who was in the German army, the other grandfather in the Dutch resistance (with 7 brothers killed by the Germans), my father fought Indonesians in Nieuw Guinea.
Guess I was just lucky so far.
For those of us who realize that all countries go through times of civil unrest, don't try to dictate how we can protect ourselves and our families
If you were Swiss, a rather rich society with folks of a certain phlegmatic temper and not those trigger happy cowboys, I might have less stomach pains with the all those guns around.
My experience is that you won't find a more polite or upstanding group of people than at the gun range. Since everybody is in possession of firearms of varying degrees of potential lethality, people tend to be on their best behavior--an illustration of the axiom that "an armed society is a polite society."
Sure, exactly the same reason why
porcupines
make love veeerrry cautiously.
Given what happened the last time all the guns were rounded up in your country, I would think you would've learned your lesson by now.
You probably hint on the founding myth of the United States, where an armed militia fought the English colonial army.
I don't see how armed people would have fought the nazi regime, when that regime was supported by a majority of those people of that time.
And a
recent event, where someone got his training and weapons via a shooting club, rather speaks against the general availibilty of guns.
The typical physicists or engineers use computers a lot, employing the exact or approximative methods that yield results in his field.
Ask them if something is not computable, and you will probably get the answer that it is only a matter of available speed and memory.
This is because computers work so damn well for them.
But a computer scientist thinks about the nature of computing itself. Only recently, physicists have joined and thought about the physical nature of computation and helped to enhance it by formulating a computation theory that maps to the strange world of quantumn physics.
The big news from theoretical computer science was the realization of limits to what can be computed!
You can write down functions that are not computable, there are sets that are not computable, there are real number whose digits can't be computed and so on.
This is a counter intuitive result. Especially for people who use computers with so much success
in their field.
It is not because the uncomputable problem is somehow poorly defined. No it is a fundamental problem. The deep reason for this is, that there are only countable many different programs (programs = finite strings of symbols chosen from a finite set of symbols), while there are uncountably many different functions. Which leaves us with a lot of functions for which there is no program left and thus have to be uncomputable.
The claim of Wolfram that outrages me most is that programs should be more expressive than equations.
Let's demonstrate the expressiveness of the mathematical framework:
Let phi_i the i-th computable function from the natural numbers into the natural numbers.
Then the function "f(i) = (1 if phi_i(0) is a natural number) or (0 otherwise)"
is uncomputable.
Not computable, but I can write it down nicely, eh?:)
The big mystery to me is that Wolfram or at least his buddy Chaitan know that computation theory very well.
Why does he write such crap?
I want to finish with a remark given by someone in the last Wolfram debate:
Wolfram is great with the math, and has a strong physics background. However, he seems stupid to me on this subject, because he believes in a free-ride that gives great complexity from great simplicity. My own background is computer science (PhD), and there are no free-rides like that in computer science.
What if you wrote a simple program that filled a 1000x1000 pixel matrix of 24-bit RGB values with every possible combination?
(..)
What are the implications? Forget how long it would take or the fact that perhaps 99% of the resulting images would be apparent garbage (could be looking at every square meter of sidewalk on earth), isn't it possible that every conceivable image in the entire universe would eventually get drawn?
Not every image, but only every possible 1000x1000x(2^24) image would get rendered.
But how can that be, since although the number of possible combinations (64^1000000) is unfathomably large it is still finite,
There are (2^24)^1000000 = 2^(2,4 x 10^7) = an insane large mumber.
Help me out here because I'm trying to figure out what's missing in my logic - there's no way the limited number of permutations of 2x2 pixel grids is sufficient to express every image in the universe, but by zooming and tiling it seems like its possible. Or not?
You should be more careful, when calculating.
And have more respect for the combinatorical explosion. You underestimated the size of the number.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the customer get's charged.
But the term lottery is very good in this context. Let's look at the scheme from that point:
If a state organizes a lottery (at least here in Germany) it is obliged to pay out at least 50% of the money that came in from selling the lottery tickets. This payment occurs in the same random fashion like the pepper coins.
In reverse, a customer of a lottery can roughly except to win back about 50% percent of what he shells out (it depends on the time frame and how all the win money is distributed among different winning ranks).
The same holds for the merchants participating in that peppercoin scheme. Statistics is on their side. The more transactions, the smaller the error margins.
I would call the scheme a reverse lottery.
The critical point is of course the tuning of the propabilities in the win/loss one time pads that Rivest's company is likely to distribute to the client software. He can make money by having to low win probabilities.
As a participating merchant I would perhaps insist on a contractual margin - if I have N zillion transactions there should be guarantieed error margin. If my pepper coins are below that margin, I should get compensated by Rivests company, if I'm above I should pay back.
The general idea, to use statistics to neglect expensive detail, seems very good to me.
Regards,
Marc
They probably sold an inhouse version of Google to the NSA.
It's sure even more fun to use than the Dejagnus archive of Usenet. :)
My results showed Evangelion volume 1 to be $11.17 (down from $15.95 list) on Amazon.com vs. 6,00 euro on Amazon.de. That's the stuff I was talking about.
Oh, I thought you hit on one of the old Akira, 3x3 Eyes or Alita editions, which were rereleased later.
Yes know the Evangelion pricing. I bought the first US volume via Amazon.de for about 16 Euro. Of course I bought all 7 available volumes again from the German publisher for 6 Euro each, when they were issued (a bit later than in the US).
I had the same pleasure with about 13 US Ranma editions, now all 36 or so volumes are available in Germany for around 6 Euro each.
And with Inu Yasha, where I bought the first 5 volumes from Viz, now it is coming out here..
And of course I got one of the few GITS2 hard copies (cant remember the price - 30 Euros?) which (expect for the usual censorship) maps to Japanese luxury version, it also contained a mouse pad and a small booklet with pages that are different in the non luxury japanese edition.
BTW I read GITS2 two times now, and still have no clue about the ending. I suspect that it was not possible to translate Shirows abstract Japanese into proper abstract German.
And of course I don't grok the references to Buddhism/Shintoism which seem to show up here as much as in his earlier Orion.
Regards,
Marc
You should really check out Larry Gonicks comic books, BTW I believe to remember he is a physicist.
I have two of his books:
and both are really funny comic books which transfer hard science facts. Amazing.
Regards,
Marc
If you look into the impressum information in the German manga books, you will often see, that the book is translated from the French.
Carlsen first published manga like the US publisher VIZ or Marvel (Akira) and it was not a big success, because they squeezed the Japanese Editions into the US/Euro format (expensive, 48 pages, colour, high quality paper, reversed artwork, changed soundwords).
Then someone in France had the idea to publish Dragon Ball there under the Japanese format (cheap, 200 pages, black and white, low quality paper, Japanese orientation of pages - back to front reading). And it was a success there.
Luckily Carlsen noticed that success in France and tried the same over here in Germany. The rest is history and illustrates that a cheaper price can result in more total sales.
Regards,
Marc
Don't forget productivity. The Japanese are able to draw an awful amount of pages in short time.
OK, for this they specialize and have assistants for backgrounds and other minor drawing tasks. (Some Europeans like the Smurfs creator Peyo did the same :)
I guess the only US comic book artist who can meet productivity with the Japanese is Sergio Aragones (Groo, the tiny drawings in Mad magazine). :-)
Regards,
Marc
That is a misconception. The expensive, coloured, thin ones were published before the manga explosion (triggered by publishing Dragon Ball under the Japanese formula, like it was discovered in France before - thick, black and white, low quality paper, cheap!). These are unsold artefacts.
The cheap thick ones were published after the manga explosion. And many series was relaunched (Akira, Alita, 3x3 eyes) under the Japanese formula, instead of the US/Euro formula and became hits.
There are 3 pulp style magazines around now in Germany, with serialized series:
Regards,
Marc
Yes, US, Europe and Japan are three different schools.
My own small collection contains such books as the Yoko Tsuno series (ironically about the adventures of a Japanese woman living in Europe),
To be honest I like the Yoko Zuno books most, where she deals with the extra terrestials from the Vinea planet. The creator Roger LeLoup has a very cute and believable vision of future technology here.
the Gaston series (which are not stories but collections of often hilarious jokes, somewhat like Dilbert but with a different theme),
Uhm yes. But don't forget Franquin's masterpiece, his issues in the multi artist series Spirou/Robbedoes. His book "Nest of the Marsupilamis" is one of my all time favourites. It is sooo kawaii!!
a few Storm albums (about an astronaut who accidentally ends up in the far future), and
Before that, the English artist Don Lauwrence drew the Trigan series which featured the "Romans in Space theme" with unbelievable cute drawings but alas quite a hang for fascist architecture.
It was his luck that he later met Martijn Lodewijk as briliant scenario writer (and an artist himself with the great Agent 321 series). Who created the fantastic Pandarve scenario. That was true art!
most of the Luc Orient books (who is a scientific James Bond-type figure).
I liked them too. Alas nothing new came out the last decades, as far as I know. Again the Terrango extra terrestial adventures excelled, like with Yoko Zuno.
The Storm books in particular are extremely well drawn. I don't know how many hours the artist spends on each page but it must be considerable - each and every panel is like an oil painting. .
I don't know. I had a look at portrait painters in Florence, and these guys draw in that style quite quick. I guess the excellent part of Don Lawrence are his phantastic designs of technique and life forms. I love his monsters and green guys.
I also used to read a lot of X-men and Spiderman, but I find that these comics do not age nearly as well as the European versions.
Except for some exceptions, like the Frank Miller stuff or the Dark Phoenix saga or Watchmen, the US super hero stories are of too low quality to be interesting over years.
In fact the only American comics I still read on a regular basis are Dilbert, Fox Trot, and the Far Side books.
In my case its Dilbert and Luann, thanks to the Internet.
And honorable mention should go to Agent 327 - it is a totally brilliant James Bond parody. Unfortunately it will be 100% incomprehensible for non-Dutch readers due to the many political jokes and local references.
Yes. One of my all time favourites. I thanked god when I discovered the new flock of albums, including the hilarious adventure in the Antwerp Zoo, when I was in Holland recently.
And besides Agent 321 was published in Germany, in quite a good translation. It was still very funy.
Regards,
Marc
Ok, we all were thankful when the Marvel edition came in the US. But its Art was reversed, the sound effects (vertical rows of characters) changed into Western sound words (with horizontal orientation) plus it was cut into 30+ pieces for an obscence total price.
The same happened in Germany, before the manga explosion happened there, they first published that edition and found its die hard buyers.
But, after the manga explosion, the publisher finally published Akira in the Japanese edition. Six thick black and white tomes (except for the colour intro pages) and each for a silly cheap price.
And guess what, it beats the US adaption several times. It is simply better.
It is my strong belief that the US should try the Japanese publishing formula instead of that crappy US/Euro style formula (thin, full color, high quality paper, exorbitant price).
Regards,
Marc
I guess there was not much exciting good stuff recently except the exceptional XIII series by Vance & Van Hamme and if there is a new Valerian et Veronique from Christin/Mezieres I buy it anytime.
The US comics had a good revival in the 80ies, thanks to Frank Miller (Daredevil, Batman) and the astonishing "Watchmen" from Moore/Gibbons.
But Marvel and the cute drawers like McFarlane and Lee plus a zillion different covers for #1 editions overdid it and ruined the market.
Since the 90ies the Manga rule. While at least in Europe the 80ies changed the love for technology into fear for technology, the Japanese seemed unaffected and thus were able to create great science fiction like Appleseed which opened the door first to the US market and then to Europe.
The article is misleading in that it equals the US with the western world. Maybe manga are not a big success in the US but they are a enormous success in France and Germany and probably some other European countries.
In Germany the breakthrough came via the price. The first attempts to sell manga here was to cut down the 200plus page sized japanese books into colored 48page Euro/US styled books. In fact they took the US edition of Akira to market it in Germany. If you bought all 30+ titles you spent an awful lot of cash and waited too long. It was not a big success.
But then someone in France had the idea to sell manga in Europe under Japanese conditions. Thick books, black and white, cheap paper, low price. He did it with Dragon ball and it was a huge success! The main manga publisher in Germany noticed this and tried the same recipe in Germany. In fact he used the french translation as base for a german translation. And Dragon Ball became a hit in Germany too.
So cutting the price and increasing the page number was the secret formula!
Manga sold enormous in Germany and the publisher stopped several series, which were published under the old Euro/US formula and relaunched them as cheap Japanese formula books. And guess what, Battleangel Alita or 3x3 Eyes became hits as well, while they lay dormant before.
So it is nothing cultural. It is purly economic. Make it cheap and thick. Give much choice!
This year we have three monthly periodicals, similiar to "shonen jump": Banzai for boys, Manga power mostly for boys with a bit girl stuff and recently Daisuki with girl content.
Guess what - it sells like crazy.
Regards,
Marc
http://www.sics.se/~joe/tutorials/robust_server/ro bust_server.html.
Regards,
Marc
Sorry in that case. :-)
What I can't live with in Swing is the bugs, the poor desktop integration, and the platform-dependent behavior.
Yes, there are bugs. One really has to use the latest VM to get rid of them (and perhaps get some new ones). But I at least had none, which was a show stopper. Yes, the desktop integration is an issue. Drag and drop is not perfect and the present state of printing is a joke.
And the "kinks" I was referring to weren't just Swing problems, they were lots and lots of Java language, library, and runtime problems. Take a look at Sun's own bug tracker.
Perhaps I was just more lucky, covering less buggy parts of the system. My biggest enemy was Web Start, which was ported very sloppy from Solaris to Windows by Sun. I stumbled on many, many bugs here (some are documented in the unofficial JWS FAQ :)
Regards,
Marc
I believe that Sun's Java managers had a big poster on their office wall, showing a graph of Moore's law for the growth of the average PC's power with some red line around 1 GHz/256 MB. :-)
Swing is a hog. On the other hand it is a powerful graphics API which allows the easy creation of modern nice looking GUIs.
Every PC bought in the last two years should be sufficient to run SWING applications. As the typical business app just shovels data between the GUI and some database that needs to presented in a nice way, SWING is now probably just OK thanks to Moore's law.
My last experience with SWING, coding a data viewer for bioinformatics data, was that you have less reserve with SWING than what you would have if you used Qt or GTK+. You can't allow yourself to programm sloppy because then you hit the performance barrier with SWING immediatley.
Interestingly enough, it seems it is not the code execution that sucks with Java, but memory waste and the related cycle waste when allocating/copying it.
Regards,
Marc
Yes, indeed, what about fp (functional programming) and numerics? :)
Funny thing is that the fp people have invested lots of brainpower into advanced functional programming techniques. Symbolic and logics math, yes I have seen software for it. But numerics?
Is it possible that a functional language beats FORTRAN eg in eigenvector calculations?
Regards,
Marc
It would be more appropriate to say each of them has their advantages and disadvantages.
if u wanna do it at all then do it properly.. and not be stuck in the sort of jam that wings3d for xample is right now.. www wings.com it's used some really totally garbage ericssons ERLANG language..
Erlang is quite cool. However it is a high level language, and thus the programmer has to grasp some advanced concepts before he can reap the benefits.
and tho it may be easy to port.. and use.. its SLOW AND CRAPPY
Then improve it. I remember this being the work a few individuals only.
and WHO in their right minds thinks its OK to having to install 50mb (4000+ files) of Erlang Runtime libraries to use a 800kb application?
It is possible to create compact stand alone binaries form Erlang code. Besides the virtual machine, there is a native compiler (HIPE) which might improve speed.
C++/C ASM.. something like that.. thats what you need!
Each tool has its uses. Manual ASM coding should only be done for a few hot spots which can't be done in C or C++. From Erlangs's perspective, C and C++ are low level languages. :) So one should do the complex stuff as much as possible in Erlang.
Regards,
Marc
> capable, and its current UI is very clean.
> It's based on erlang, a runtime environment (like
> java), that seems well-suited to handle a 3D app.
Comparing Java and Erlang/OTP?
Both names are used to reference a programming language, a large library and a run-time system that is based on a virtual machine.
Java is (depending on your view and mode) either a dumbed down version of C++ or a version of C++ adapted for use with a virtual machine.
Erlang however is not an imperative language (where you state the control flow explictly) but a functional language (where the focus is on function evaluation) and a concurrent one too (which means the language system makes it easy for you to work with parallel processes on different CPU nodes).
Both systems come with large libraries. However Erlangs focus is rather concurrency and high availibility while client side Java provides much GUI support.
It is not unusual to do the high level programming in Erlang while interfacing to Java GUI code or to C++ performance intensive stuff.
Regards,
Marc
But it is still a nice article, illustrating Knuth's advice simply to plot random numbers to visually quickly judge the quality of a pseudo random number generator.
Did they actually send out those copies?
Or is it because I live in Germany?
Regards,
Marc
Stable times?
I had one grandfather who was in the German army, the other grandfather in the Dutch resistance (with 7 brothers killed by the Germans), my father fought Indonesians in Nieuw Guinea.
Guess I was just lucky so far.
For those of us who realize that all countries go through times of civil unrest, don't try to dictate how we can protect ourselves and our families
If you were Swiss, a rather rich society with folks of a certain phlegmatic temper and not those trigger happy cowboys, I might have less stomach pains with the all those guns around.
Regards,
Marc
Sure, exactly the same reason why porcupines make love veeerrry cautiously.
You probably hint on the founding myth of the United States, where an armed militia fought the English colonial army. I don't see how armed people would have fought the nazi regime, when that regime was supported by a majority of those people of that time.
And a recent event, where someone got his training and weapons via a shooting club, rather speaks against the general availibilty of guns.
Regards,
Marc
McVoy managed to piss off ESR, who is, as you all know a strange mix of valuable open source contributor and condemnable weapons idiot.
Regards, Marc
It is a genie (oriental daemon).
The typical physicists or engineers use computers a lot, employing the exact or approximative methods that yield results in his field.
Ask them if something is not computable, and you will probably get the answer that it is only a matter of available speed and memory.
This is because computers work so damn well for them.
But a computer scientist thinks about the nature of computing itself. Only recently, physicists have joined and thought about the physical nature of computation and helped to enhance it by formulating a computation theory that maps to the strange world of quantumn physics.
The big news from theoretical computer science was the realization of limits to what can be computed!
You can write down functions that are not computable, there are sets that are not computable, there are real number whose digits can't be computed and so on.
This is a counter intuitive result. Especially for people who use computers with so much success in their field.
It is not because the uncomputable problem is somehow poorly defined. No it is a fundamental problem. The deep reason for this is, that there are only countable many different programs (programs = finite strings of symbols chosen from a finite set of symbols), while there are uncountably many different functions. Which leaves us with a lot of functions for which there is no program left and thus have to be uncomputable.
The claim of Wolfram that outrages me most is that programs should be more expressive than equations.
Let's demonstrate the expressiveness of the mathematical framework:
Let phi_i the i-th computable function from the natural numbers into the natural numbers.
Then the function "f(i) = (1 if phi_i(0) is a natural number) or (0 otherwise)" is uncomputable.
Not computable, but I can write it down nicely, eh? :)
The big mystery to me is that Wolfram or at least his buddy Chaitan know that computation theory very well.
Why does he write such crap?
I want to finish with a remark given by someone in the last Wolfram debate:
Wolfram is great with the math, and has a strong physics background. However, he seems stupid to me on this subject, because he believes in a free-ride that gives great complexity from great simplicity. My own background is computer science (PhD), and there are no free-rides like that in computer science.
In short: you shouldn't have given it a 10
(..)
What are the implications? Forget how long it would take or the fact that perhaps 99% of the resulting images would be apparent garbage (could be looking at every square meter of sidewalk on earth), isn't it possible that every conceivable image in the entire universe would eventually get drawn?
Not every image, but only every possible 1000x1000x(2^24) image would get rendered.
But how can that be, since although the number of possible combinations (64^1000000) is unfathomably large it is still finite,
There are (2^24)^1000000 = 2^(2,4 x 10^7) = an insane large mumber.
Help me out here because I'm trying to figure out what's missing in my logic - there's no way the limited number of permutations of 2x2 pixel grids is sufficient to express every image in the universe, but by zooming and tiling it seems like its possible. Or not?
You should be more careful, when calculating. And have more respect for the combinatorical explosion. You underestimated the size of the number.