1) I loved how Java has compile-time enforcement of exception handling. That is, if some code you called threw an exception, you HAD to handle it or else it wouldn't compile. This drastically reduced debugging needs. This idea should be greatly expanded upon!
2) I would use debuggers more, but often I find that getting a project prepped for debugging takes far too long. It gets too hard to configure the debugger to handle hoards of files, libraries and other things. Or when developing games, you're in full screen mode, and the last thing you want to be doing is popping back and forth to windowed mode.
I agree that we need a new paradigm which gives programmers control but without the heavy GUI.
If Jupiter's gravity provides the energy, then wouldn't this represent free, perpetual energy? Sounds too good to be true, though the costs to run an extension cord out there might not be worth it.
Back in Java JDK1.02 if you put the word 'Restart' as an element in a pull down box, it would restart the applet when you selected it! Gosh, it makes you wonder how many living rooms that event waltzed through on its way to your handler!
I'm still settling on my setup, but on my trusty P200 linux box I run samba and have 2 hard drives; one which gets accessed and the other that gets a copy of its brother every night. It's a great feeling knowing you're backed up.
I considered RAID, but remember that RAID doesn't help you if you accidently delete things.
Lastly, for storing pictures and text that I want access to, I run a Twiki server. It's http visible, searchable, fun, versions everything for you, and is accessible anywhere. I love it.
While I missed Tom Bombadil, it turns out that critics of LoTR >the Book complained that the Tom B. episode seemed incongruous when the book was released.
Spiderman has done so 'amazingly' well IMHO because it builds upon a known superb foundation - the original comic had one of the most compelling and successful story lines of all time. Plus I believe director Raimi wants to genuinely entertain people with the right mixture of action and comedy.
AoTC's story to me has some neat elements but the details get left out. (Spoilers) For instance, how can anyone explain a planet that somehow gets wiped out from all records and that no one has heard of. Like, I guess no one needs to exchange goods anymore in the Star Wars universe. Or, while the opening city chase sequence was pretty cool, I just couldn't make myself believe that they could continually locate the ship among thousands of ships using the force or not.
I also feel that AoTC crams I daresay too much action together (to the point where it's hard to take in a sequence) but then expands out the story to the point of boredom. I've noticed this too with James Bond flicks lately: they all kind of blend together with no distinctiveness. The action scenes should SOMEHOW tie in with the story in a meaningful way (the worst violation of this, is of course the pod race - gee lets see, a junk dealer won't take any of your money, so somehow we need to have this kid win the pod race to repair our ship and escape. Sigh.)
Last but not least, I believe Lucas' success reflects the pressure he wors under. ANH needed to prove a bunch of people wrong, and it did. At this point, with his money and influence he could show 2 hours of edited & dubbed Battlestar Galatica, call it Star Wars and make a hundred million dollars.
Re:Continued: Star Wars is not original anymore
on
The Empire Stumbles
·
· Score: 1
I have to agree that LoTR excited me as much or more as any movie I've ever seen, much less any movie recently. He's building on Tolkien's exquisite foundation and not whoring out to hollywood. I did feel that some of the fight scenes in LoTR used too much slow mo editing, though.
I think Wolfram found some fascinating things about CA but then gets carried away trying to make CA work where it probably doesn't. That's not science; it's nepotism for one's personal theory. Sure, I'm lured by the possibility of finding a kink in the armor of our understanding of entropy but I'm not holding my breath that there must be one since CA contradicts it.
Seems to me that any sufficiently complex system which has sufficiently flexible rules can model anything if you tweak the rules enough - including the universe. And indeed if I learned anything so far it's that CA is incredibly complex and flexible.
But that's a one-way statement: just because 'A' can model 'B', it doesn't mean that the inner workings of 'B' >are 'A'. That is, unless you can prove that no other systems exist which can model 'B'.
I mean, my monitor can display any image because any image can be broken into colored pixels. That doesn't mean the universe is made of pixels. It just means that from my monitor can create the illusion of creating any 2d image.
Another example: I can compute an integral to near infinite accuracy with numerical methods. But the true insight of what's going on only only comes from the mathematical solution of the integral.
So, I applaud the work and look forward to great new uses of CA as a tool, but have great skepticism that we've discovered the end-all method of understanding the universe.
Bowling ball holes receive your sweat as you pick up the ball. Not to mention the sweat of everyone else who's used the same 15 year old loaner. Within the dark finger chambers, bacteria thrive and multiply, unchecked by an entire absence of cleaning either by you or the alley personnel. The difficulty of cleansing the awkwardly shaped passages essentially guarantees free reign!
Then, as the ball traverses the lane it exchanges filth that pours from the finger holes onto the lane with the filth already there from countless prior bowlers. Undoubtedly, these bactieria interbreed and thrive especially on trace amounts of cheese curl particulate matter and beer from your fingers now delivered to the waiting alley micro dwellers.
Lastly, you pick up your newly bacterially diversified polyurethane orb, and transfer these microbes inside yourself as you subsequently ingest hot dogs, fries and other finger foods between frames.
Think about it. Don't bowl. Lick a toilet seat instead. It's healthier.
I felt the same way about Jar Jar and all those trade federation droids. Man, in the previews they looked threatening, thousands of them. But when they turn out to be comical bumbling idiots, it ruined everything. Amazing.
I dunno, Java never really make a bang with GUI apps anyway. It's server-side stuff that really carries that product.
I could rant all day on how a the crummy awt (GUI toolkit) design decisions forever crippled Java on the desktop, and how applet incompatibility problems ruined its chance as a force on the web, and how it's so incredibly ugly to install a java application because you end up shipping the whole runtime environment every time. But I won't.
I'm intolerant of people when they try and put the kuybash on facing truth by saying we need to 'tolerate things'.
It's wrong, deviant behavior to want to do these things, and I'm not tolerant nor empathetic. Whether it's real or virtual the pedophile expresses himself in a way which represents at best a latent danger to children, because the only reason he does the virtual version is because he goes to jail for doing the real thing.
But at the same time I can't say whether constitutionally I disagree with the decision...
Depends. Java Applet Viruses - those are tough. But Java Application Viruses? Piece of cake. I can open a file, write binary x86 opcode data, close the file, and execute it. Or just trash a bunch of files through ordinary file I/O calls.
Bravo to you! For the longest time during the.com heyday my gut instinct kept telling me this, but the hype possessed me too and shooed it away. It is my dream to succeed just like you did, not as a slave to the VCs and the stock market.
We can take one whallop of an earthquake here and survive just fine with some time to recover. You get earthquakes in the midwest too, except we're prepared for it - no brick buildings here, and strict construction codes. We have no tornadoes, hurricanes and we see lightning once a year.
Housing costs a lot here simply because more people want to live here than can afford to and because the average person makes more money here.
I lived in Chicago for 20+ years and would never go back. Compared to the bay area...
-the average brain power and sophistication of the person you meet is very high in the bay area. I'm not interested in hanging around 'Sports Bar Morons'. When you go to see Lord of the Rings, the audience has >allamazinghave to. Oh, the endless rows of orange barrels... And BTW, no toll roads in CA.
-better produce, beter fish, better food in general. Cheap sushi. Beef almost as good. I do miss Portillos and real pizza though.
-You're driving distance from the ocean, beaches, yosemite, tahoe, etc. I was at a 'business leader's breakfast' in Chicago and they lamented why with U of I, Northwestern, U of C, etc. why the talent base keeps crumbling. It's because young people want to do things, not hibernate inside.
-Lower crime.
-Things look cleaner. In general, people take care of the exterior of buildings and landscaping because you see it year round.
-Air is cleaner or at least a wash. That humidity plus smog in Chicago is a killer. Yeah, SJ's got smog too.
-The tech world centers around here and it always will. Do you think the high cost of living in Manhattan means the financial center will move to Cleveland? Maybe it's mystique, maybe it's geography, and maybe it's demographics. But I don't care why, except that there's no place like the bay area for high tech opportunity.
-Not to mention the weather! Who cares if I can get a mansion for cheap somewhere where I hate going outside?
Don't get me wrong, the bay area isn't for everyone. If you count on every paycheck to cover your bills, you'll go bankrupt or hate your flea circus apartment. If you have kids and have to send them to San Jose schools, you'll pull your hair out in most cases wondering why half the kids are being encouraged to remain in spanish speaking classes, and why your intelligent kid twiddles his thumb or is expected to spend his time helping the other kids get equalized rather than excelling. IMHO the liberal political views and huge government subsidization of immigrants in exchange for votes continues to erode California - hence after the biggest bumper tax year we've ever had we're now facing financical crises the year after (!!).
(I'm not sure after that whether I made CA more or less attractive!)
If consumers all wants to call is 'Ecks' then let them call it 'Ecks'. You'd think a marketing genius like Jobs would know that.
It's like when I was a kid - there was a letter included with a Lego catalog explaining we should not call them 'Legos' (which is the term every kid used), that instead we should refer to them as 'Lego Toys'. Oh give me a break.
Each videogame represented the programmer's version of how he/she could exploit computational technology to create a virtual 'test of skill' which had evolved from pinball and before that carnival games (three throws for a nickel, three balls for a quarter, three bases in space invaders).
Limitations in tools and the technology equally shaped those games. Often people create the greatest things when they have the fewest resources. It forces the designer to spend those resources on the most crucial pieces; namely the gameplay.
Soon, the advances in tools and increase in technological resources made it impossible for a programmer to do it all anymore. Real artists were needed. Short-sighted game 'producers' then try and use this artwork as the motivating force behind the game's success, especially when coupled with a movie/tv licensed theme.
Now you've got the movie/TV empire heads interested, and this emphasis on the aesthetic vs. the functional content increases as they bring in their funding, lawyers and distribution networks.
Underneath this dogpile of people who contribute nothing to gameplay lie a handful of people still practicing the original game design craft who keep the heartbeat beating in spite of the situation.
Will the trend reverse? If it's like the movie industry, the answer is probably 'no', though there will be pockets of innovation (i.e. Tarantino) - which quite honestly is fine by me. As an independent game developer, I could never compete with the big boys if they all got their act together.
Slashdot Mirror
1) I loved how Java has compile-time enforcement of exception handling. That is, if some code you called threw an exception, you HAD to handle it or else it wouldn't compile. This drastically reduced debugging needs. This idea should be greatly expanded upon!
2) I would use debuggers more, but often I find that getting a project prepped for debugging takes far too long. It gets too hard to configure the debugger to handle hoards of files, libraries and other things. Or when developing games, you're in full screen mode, and the last thing you want to be doing is popping back and forth to windowed mode.
I agree that we need a new paradigm which gives programmers control but without the heavy GUI.
If Jupiter's gravity provides the energy, then wouldn't this represent free, perpetual energy? Sounds too good to be true, though the costs to run an extension cord out there might not be worth it.
Uh, have you listened to much music lately? I tend to agree with the Rolling Stone prophet. Man, I feel like a cranky old grandad...
Back in Java JDK1.02 if you put the word 'Restart' as an element in a pull down box, it would restart the applet when you selected it! Gosh, it makes you wonder how many living rooms that event waltzed through on its way to your handler!
I'm still settling on my setup, but on my trusty P200 linux box I run samba and have 2 hard drives; one which gets accessed and the other that gets a copy of its brother every night. It's a great feeling knowing you're backed up.
I considered RAID, but remember that RAID doesn't help you if you accidently delete things.
Lastly, for storing pictures and text that I want access to, I run a Twiki server. It's http visible, searchable, fun, versions everything for you, and is accessible anywhere. I love it.
--matt
While I missed Tom Bombadil, it turns out that critics of LoTR >the Book complained that the Tom B. episode seemed incongruous when the book was released.
Spiderman has done so 'amazingly' well IMHO because it builds upon a known superb foundation - the original comic had one of the most compelling and successful story lines of all time. Plus I believe director Raimi wants to genuinely entertain people with the right mixture of action and comedy.
AoTC's story to me has some neat elements but the details get left out. (Spoilers) For instance, how can anyone explain a planet that somehow gets wiped out from all records and that no one has heard of. Like, I guess no one needs to exchange goods anymore in the Star Wars universe. Or, while the opening city chase sequence was pretty cool, I just couldn't make myself believe that they could continually locate the ship among thousands of ships using the force or not.
I also feel that AoTC crams I daresay too much action together (to the point where it's hard to take in a sequence) but then expands out the story to the point of boredom. I've noticed this too with James Bond flicks lately: they all kind of blend together with no distinctiveness. The action scenes should SOMEHOW tie in with the story in a meaningful way (the worst violation of this, is of course the pod race - gee lets see, a junk dealer won't take any of your money, so somehow we need to have this kid win the pod race to repair our ship and escape. Sigh.)
Last but not least, I believe Lucas' success reflects the pressure he wors under. ANH needed to prove a bunch of people wrong, and it did. At this point, with his money and influence he could show 2 hours of edited & dubbed Battlestar Galatica, call it Star Wars and make a hundred million dollars.
I have to agree that LoTR excited me as much or more as any movie I've ever seen, much less any movie recently. He's building on Tolkien's exquisite foundation and not whoring out to hollywood. I did feel that some of the fight scenes in LoTR used too much slow mo editing, though.
I think Wolfram found some fascinating things about CA but then gets carried away trying to make CA work where it probably doesn't. That's not science; it's nepotism for one's personal theory. Sure, I'm lured by the possibility of finding a kink in the armor of our understanding of entropy but I'm not holding my breath that there must be one since CA contradicts it.
Seems to me that any sufficiently complex system which has sufficiently flexible rules can model anything if you tweak the rules enough - including the universe. And indeed if I learned anything so far it's that CA is incredibly complex and flexible.
But that's a one-way statement: just because 'A' can model 'B', it doesn't mean that the inner workings of 'B' >are 'A'. That is, unless you can prove that no other systems exist which can model 'B'.
I mean, my monitor can display any image because any image can be broken into colored pixels. That doesn't mean the universe is made of pixels. It just means that from my monitor can create the illusion of creating any 2d image.
Another example: I can compute an integral to near infinite accuracy with numerical methods. But the true insight of what's going on only only comes from the mathematical solution of the integral.
So, I applaud the work and look forward to great new uses of CA as a tool, but have great skepticism that we've discovered the end-all method of understanding the universe.
Consider.
Bowling ball holes receive your sweat as you pick up the ball. Not to mention the sweat of everyone else who's used the same 15 year old loaner. Within the dark finger chambers, bacteria thrive and multiply, unchecked by an entire absence of cleaning either by you or the alley personnel. The difficulty of cleansing the awkwardly shaped passages essentially guarantees free reign!
Then, as the ball traverses the lane it exchanges filth that pours from the finger holes onto the lane with the filth already there from countless prior bowlers. Undoubtedly, these bactieria interbreed and thrive especially on trace amounts of cheese curl particulate matter and beer from your fingers now delivered to the waiting alley micro dwellers.
Lastly, you pick up your newly bacterially diversified polyurethane orb, and transfer these microbes inside yourself as you subsequently ingest hot dogs, fries and other finger foods between frames.
Think about it. Don't bowl. Lick a toilet seat instead. It's healthier.
I felt the same way about Jar Jar and all those trade federation droids. Man, in the previews they looked threatening, thousands of them. But when they turn out to be comical bumbling idiots, it ruined everything. Amazing.
I dunno, Java never really make a bang with GUI apps anyway. It's server-side stuff that really carries that product.
I could rant all day on how a the crummy awt (GUI toolkit) design decisions forever crippled Java on the desktop, and how applet incompatibility problems ruined its chance as a force on the web, and how it's so incredibly ugly to install a java application because you end up shipping the whole runtime environment every time. But I won't.
I'm intolerant of people when they try and put the kuybash on facing truth by saying we need to 'tolerate things'.
It's wrong, deviant behavior to want to do these things, and I'm not tolerant nor empathetic. Whether it's real or virtual the pedophile expresses himself in a way which represents at best a latent danger to children, because the only reason he does the virtual version is because he goes to jail for doing the real thing.
But at the same time I can't say whether constitutionally I disagree with the decision...
Actually you're right on but you're thinking Zork III.
Depends. Java Applet Viruses - those are tough. But Java Application Viruses? Piece of cake. I can open a file, write binary x86 opcode data, close the file, and execute it. Or just trash a bunch of files through ordinary file I/O calls.
Bravo to you! For the longest time during the .com heyday my gut instinct kept telling me this, but the hype possessed me too and shooed it away. It is my dream to succeed just like you did, not as a slave to the VCs and the stock market.
We can take one whallop of an earthquake here and survive just fine with some time to recover. You get earthquakes in the midwest too, except we're prepared for it - no brick buildings here, and strict construction codes. We have no tornadoes, hurricanes and we see lightning once a year.
Housing costs a lot here simply because more people want to live here than can afford to and because the average person makes more money here.
I lived in Chicago for 20+ years and would never go back. Compared to the bay area...
-the average brain power and sophistication of the person you meet is very high in the bay area. I'm not interested in hanging around 'Sports Bar Morons'. When you go to see Lord of the Rings, the audience has >allamazinghave to. Oh, the endless rows of orange barrels... And BTW, no toll roads in CA.
-better produce, beter fish, better food in general. Cheap sushi. Beef almost as good. I do miss Portillos and real pizza though.
-You're driving distance from the ocean, beaches, yosemite, tahoe, etc. I was at a 'business leader's breakfast' in Chicago and they lamented why with U of I, Northwestern, U of C, etc. why the talent base keeps crumbling. It's because young people want to do things, not hibernate inside.
-Lower crime.
-Things look cleaner. In general, people take care of the exterior of buildings and landscaping because you see it year round.
-Air is cleaner or at least a wash. That humidity plus smog in Chicago is a killer. Yeah, SJ's got smog too.
-The tech world centers around here and it always will. Do you think the high cost of living in Manhattan means the financial center will move to Cleveland? Maybe it's mystique, maybe it's geography, and maybe it's demographics. But I don't care why, except that there's no place like the bay area for high tech opportunity.
-Not to mention the weather! Who cares if I can get a mansion for cheap somewhere where I hate going outside?
Don't get me wrong, the bay area isn't for everyone. If you count on every paycheck to cover your bills, you'll go bankrupt or hate your flea circus apartment. If you have kids and have to send them to San Jose schools, you'll pull your hair out in most cases wondering why half the kids are being encouraged to remain in spanish speaking classes, and why your intelligent kid twiddles his thumb or is expected to spend his time helping the other kids get equalized rather than excelling. IMHO the liberal political views and huge government subsidization of immigrants in exchange for votes continues to erode California - hence after the biggest bumper tax year we've ever had we're now facing financical crises the year after (!!).
(I'm not sure after that whether I made CA more or less attractive!)
If consumers all wants to call is 'Ecks' then let them call it 'Ecks'. You'd think a marketing genius like Jobs would know that.
It's like when I was a kid - there was a letter included with a Lego catalog explaining we should not call them 'Legos' (which is the term every kid used), that instead we should refer to them as 'Lego Toys'. Oh give me a break.
Cave! Let it be ecks!
Each videogame represented the programmer's version of how he/she could exploit computational technology to create a virtual 'test of skill' which had evolved from pinball and before that carnival games (three throws for a nickel, three balls for a quarter, three bases in space invaders). Limitations in tools and the technology equally shaped those games. Often people create the greatest things when they have the fewest resources. It forces the designer to spend those resources on the most crucial pieces; namely the gameplay. Soon, the advances in tools and increase in technological resources made it impossible for a programmer to do it all anymore. Real artists were needed. Short-sighted game 'producers' then try and use this artwork as the motivating force behind the game's success, especially when coupled with a movie/tv licensed theme. Now you've got the movie/TV empire heads interested, and this emphasis on the aesthetic vs. the functional content increases as they bring in their funding, lawyers and distribution networks. Underneath this dogpile of people who contribute nothing to gameplay lie a handful of people still practicing the original game design craft who keep the heartbeat beating in spite of the situation. Will the trend reverse? If it's like the movie industry, the answer is probably 'no', though there will be pockets of innovation (i.e. Tarantino) - which quite honestly is fine by me. As an independent game developer, I could never compete with the big boys if they all got their act together.