1) My 9yr old nephew installed Mandrake on his computer without any adult supervision, got it on the net, and got his web server running. In an afternoon. Isn't that the very definition of easy?
One swallow doesn't make a summer.
Last time I tried installing Mandrake on my laptop, it crashed during the install and would go no further.
The same goes for SuSe 8.0.
Simon
[Reason? Oh, it just doesn't like the graphics chip. But it thinks it knows which one it is. Which it isn't. And it doesn't. So it hard crashes the machine.]
So is good news, not just for TV SF, but for the whole genre. As bad as the idea-deficient Hollywood SF writers are, they're easier to take than all those bloated-epic writers who think that a clever idea is all you need. Somebody needs to teach all these people the basics of good storytelling, and Whedon is just the person to do it.
Farscape follows a similar formula; that is; avoid formulas, and avoid cliches.
Joss Whedon ain't the only one changing the face of television.
Of course, his latest show smacks highly of Farscape... which is unsurprising, given how good Farscape was.
Interesting viewpoint. I was always under the impression that Pascal was designed as a language to teach computer programming fundamentals.
Was, past tense.
If you're going to teach programming fundamentals, either teach something that has real-world applicability (such as C or Basic), or teach assembly language (such as MIX).
I probably wouldn't mind the use of Pascal iff there was a widespread software engineering degree course that you could take, which would (instead of teaching, say, Pascal), would throw perl, C & C++, Java, C# and Visual Basic at you, while de-emphasizing aspects such as compiler writing in return for emphasizing algorithm selection and usage. Database implementation would be de-emphasized in favor of database design & normalization, plus the use of SQL.
And above all else, using set notation etc. is a waste of space.
Computer Science is great - for producing Computer Science teachers. The world needs more engineers than researchers.
Slashdot is celebrating that C# Programming isn't going to be taught, and yet nothing is said about Java Programming now being a required CS course in several universities.
I don't care about either of them.
ANYTHING that stops them teaching Pascal is a plus.:-)
A few of the test images from a near production foveon got released and someone did a noise measurement on it, it was about as bad as a $200 2MP camera.
Was that from the CCD chip? Or the circuitry talking to it?
Speaking as someone who is knee-deep in writing control software for CCD-like devices right now, you can get a *hell* of a lot of noise - and it ain't necessarily from the CCD itself. For a start, your clocks need to be very stable... and for another, your exposure can vary across the CCD, so you need to do a calibration pass... you get switching noise from the muxes that feed off the CCD matrix... and so on and so on.
The best compromise is still compression. A fast compression algorithm like LZO (or even gzip) can reduce bandwidth even more than twinking out your variable names and spaces AND still provides readability.
No, the best solution is to use ASN.1 encoding, with an editor that understands ASN.1 as its backend format.
This problem was solved years and years and years ago.
This is where Apple's implementation of the Dock is a bit better. The Taskbar shouldn't be showing open windows unless they are minimized. This is the way the Dock works, and even the Dock can get cluttered if you minimized a bunch of windows.
Sorry, but that just doesn't work. The moment you have more than about 6 open windows at once (say you're doing some work and researching multiple places), you NEED to be able to switch between them. And you don't want to have to minimize them to get that shortcut access.
No, what I refer to are the poor production values, cheesy sets, melodramatic acting, dreary lighting, and a cast of characters that spend all of their time scheming and double-crossing one another -- much like a daytime soap opera.
*POOR* Production values? They beat Star Trek hands down. Have you actually watched any episodes of Farscape or Enterprise and compared them side by side?
Enterprise is stale, boring, and MORE LIKE A SOAP OPERA THAN FARSCAPE.
You might be correct, but it is still irrelevant. You aren't circumventing any copyright or encryption by running standard linux and programs on your Xbox... Unless you are playing illegal MP3s, illegal DVDs, illegal games, etc.
Yes, you are. The boot-up sequence - which has to be circumvented to load Linux on the XBox - is encrypted.
Also, if you read M$'s job requirements, they're actively selecting for stable personalities who don't get their egos all tied up in their work.
What you read, and what you get are two very different things. Having worked there, I can tell you that they're selecting for stable work output, not stable personalities. Some of the nicest people I know work at Microsoft. And a lot of the most arrogant people I know work there too. The latter mostly seemed to arrive some time around 1995/1996, during the time when MS seemed to be a great place to make a lot of money and retire. A lot of those people don't care about software, or care about their end users -- they're just in it for what they can get.
You again. Why don't you crawl back in your dark little hole, and beat off to your pictures of Hitlary Rosen and Billy Gates, you MickySoft-worshipping, RIAA-loving freak?!
Sure, just as soon as you give them back. Don't forget to wipe the spooge off them first.
You know, if you really had a point, you would have the guts to post under your own name. Or perhaps that would take a certain modicum of intelligence and courage of your convictions that you don't have. Pussy.
You know, it amazes me how many popstars come out in favor of music-sharing after they've made their millions and millions of dollars, bought their flash cars, and the real nice mansion in Beverly Hills.
Why don't we hear the artists who aren't Top 20, platinum album, millions in the bank jumping up and down in favor of this?
Oh yeah.. that's right... because they actually want the chance to get up there themselves.
Since you're apparently too much of a wuss to post with a email address, and your website consists of the brilliant text: "Under reconstruction" I guess my only retort available is here in public.
Oooh. Did you take Debate 101 in Junior College? I'm stung to the core.
Mom doesn't have a basement at her new house, I'm nearly 40 and the best I own is a PS1. I find bugs in other peoples software. It's my job and I seem to be pretty good at it. Your point?
If you're as good at debugging software as you are at debugging your arguments, you may want to look for another career.
Just out of interest... any idea how I could get the VC++ 7.0 compiler to work with the VC++6.0 IDE? The.NET ide runs like molasses in january, and it's a major reason why I don't use it for any of my code.
Most of the arguments you'll see in this discussion have their start in Extreme Programming. Here's a good reference: Forty Hour Week [c2.com] on c2.com, which seems to be the best web authority for Extreme Programming discussions and patterns.
Give it a gander.
Actually, most of the arguments you'll see in this discussion have their start in Experienced Programmers.
These XPs have been there, worked the 80 hour weeks, asked their fellow coders to work for them for 80 hour weeks, and killed themselves to basically get no further than they would have done anyway.
It's quite simple:
If you're smart, you'll do an experiment. Do a single, small-scope project, and track it carefully. Work at a burn-out rate (eg. > 40 hours a week).
Pick another project, work at an easy rate. (eg. it works, and they've been there, done that and bought the T-Shirt.
No offence, but the XP guys didn't invent the wheel. Or work out how to make peanut butter. They just wrote down some things that people already knew.
I went from writing home productivity software to writing embedded control software and analysis tools for a company bringing to market a new design of mass spectrometer.
There's all the usual teething pains of any startup, but it's the most use I've gotten from my degree in Physics *ever*. And it's a lot of fun watching people when you tell them not to touch the circuitry because the high voltage could make the joints in their arms explode.:-)
Yeah. It's a wonderful way of giving each document a unique ID. The only problem is that the developer who put that into the spec didn't realize that the MAC address of the computer was part of the generated GUID.
If there was a better way of generating unique IDs on a computer, you can bet that it would have been used instead.
But hey, why look at it in a reasonable fashion when you can go off the deep end with conspiracy stories?
Actually, to gain access to the documentation of the API as well as development tools, you need to buy yearly kits that are priced at $1-2 thousand dollars a year. While it might be theoretically possible to program to the Win32 API without this, in practical circumstances no professional development house would ever write for a platform and not join their development program. It would be an irresponsible and fairly suicidal act.
Actually, you only have to buy the development tools once, and the documentation costs $100/year if you want a DVD (and it can be put on a server and duplicated company wide). For that you get 4 quarterly updates. Alternatively, you can get the documentation for free from msdn.microsoft.com. MSDN subscriptions in the 1-2 thousand dollar range are only for those who want to test their software on all versions of Windows (including the international ones), plus the latest versions of Office, Exchange etc. In which case, it's much much cheaper and easier.
Is it even possible for a game to shunt data around at 2.2Gb a second? Even adding up all the different kinds of RAM in my computer, it wouldn't come to any more than perhaps 250Mb. Even for the newest machines, the sum total of the volatile memory is perhaps 700Mb at the most. So do we really need this kind of hardware yet?
That would be about 37Mb of data per screen update, for a 60Hz refresh rate.
If you're using LOTS of high resolution textures, you need that speed.
Possibly the easiest way to get things going is this:
1. Plan the architecture. Sure, some things can be more difficult than others to get going from the start, but design as much as you can in one go, and iterate.
2. Design interfaces to match the architecture; whether it be pure virtual classes in C++, a slew of function prototypes in C, or a set of interfaces in Java.
3. Pass interfaces out to developers, based on functional areas of the code. Tell them that they're responsible for this chunk of the app, and that their job is to code up stuff behind the interfaces. If they're worried about not having other stuff to connect to (ie. it's not done yet), tell them to code up stubs that just return error codes in the right way for their own testing.
It helps if you ask everyone what areas they want to work on, and spread the load out that way. If they buy into it, then they'll work harder for you. But laying down the basic infrastructure and then delegating specific interfaces to code up is the easiest way to get others up to speed. At the very least, you can point to that person at the end of it and ask them why they haven't finished it.
Slashdot Mirror
Awe c'mon, Microsoft spends lots of time checking their STL code ... really [microsoft.com]! Truly scary stuff.
It wasn't their STL code. They licensed it from Dinkumware.
1) My 9yr old nephew installed Mandrake on his computer without any adult supervision, got it on the net, and got his web server running. In an afternoon. Isn't that the very definition of easy?
One swallow doesn't make a summer.
Last time I tried installing Mandrake on my laptop, it crashed during the install and would go no further.
The same goes for SuSe 8.0.
Simon
[Reason? Oh, it just doesn't like the graphics chip. But it thinks it knows which one it is. Which it isn't. And it doesn't. So it hard crashes the machine.]
So is good news, not just for TV SF, but for the whole genre. As bad as the idea-deficient Hollywood SF writers are, they're easier to take than all those bloated-epic writers who think that a clever idea is all you need. Somebody needs to teach all these people the basics of good storytelling, and Whedon is just the person to do it.
:-)
Farscape follows a similar formula; that is; avoid formulas, and avoid cliches.
Joss Whedon ain't the only one changing the face of television.
Of course, his latest show smacks highly of Farscape... which is unsurprising, given how good Farscape was.
Go to:
Save Farscape and support the show
Interesting viewpoint. I was always under the impression that Pascal was designed as a language to teach computer programming fundamentals.
Was, past tense.
If you're going to teach programming fundamentals, either teach something that has real-world applicability (such as C or Basic), or teach assembly language (such as MIX).
I probably wouldn't mind the use of Pascal iff there was a widespread software engineering degree course that you could take, which would (instead of teaching, say, Pascal), would throw perl, C & C++, Java, C# and Visual Basic at you, while de-emphasizing aspects such as compiler writing in return for emphasizing algorithm selection and usage. Database implementation would be de-emphasized in favor of database design & normalization, plus the use of SQL.
And above all else, using set notation etc. is a waste of space.
Computer Science is great - for producing Computer Science teachers. The world needs more engineers than researchers.
Simon
Slashdot is celebrating that C# Programming isn't going to be taught, and yet nothing is said about Java Programming now being a required CS course in several universities.
:-)
I don't care about either of them.
ANYTHING that stops them teaching Pascal is a plus.
A few of the test images from a near production foveon got released and someone did a noise measurement on it, it was about as bad as a $200 2MP camera.
Was that from the CCD chip? Or the circuitry talking to it?
Speaking as someone who is knee-deep in writing control software for CCD-like devices right now, you can get a *hell* of a lot of noise - and it ain't necessarily from the CCD itself. For a start, your clocks need to be very stable... and for another, your exposure can vary across the CCD, so you need to do a calibration pass... you get switching noise from the muxes that feed off the CCD matrix... and so on and so on.
Simon
html was developped on unix - we dont do binary ANYTHING....
Case in point: The original X Windows image format.
It's amazing what people come up with when all they have is a console window.
The best compromise is still compression. A fast compression algorithm like LZO (or even gzip) can reduce bandwidth even more than twinking out your variable names and spaces AND still provides readability.
No, the best solution is to use ASN.1 encoding, with an editor that understands ASN.1 as its backend format.
This problem was solved years and years and years ago.
Simon
This is where Apple's implementation of the Dock is a bit better. The Taskbar shouldn't be showing open windows unless they are minimized. This is the way the Dock works, and even the Dock can get cluttered if you minimized a bunch of windows.
Sorry, but that just doesn't work. The moment you have more than about 6 open windows at once (say you're doing some work and researching multiple places), you NEED to be able to switch between them. And you don't want to have to minimize them to get that shortcut access.
Simon
No, what I refer to are the poor production values, cheesy sets, melodramatic acting, dreary lighting, and a cast of characters that spend all of their time scheming and double-crossing one another -- much like a daytime soap opera.
*POOR* Production values? They beat Star Trek hands down. Have you actually watched any episodes of Farscape or Enterprise and compared them side by side?
Enterprise is stale, boring, and MORE LIKE A SOAP OPERA THAN FARSCAPE.
Simon
You might be correct, but it is still irrelevant. You aren't circumventing any copyright or encryption by running standard linux and programs on your Xbox... Unless you are playing illegal MP3s, illegal DVDs, illegal games, etc.
Yes, you are. The boot-up sequence - which has to be circumvented to load Linux on the XBox - is encrypted.
Simon
Also, if you read M$'s job requirements, they're actively selecting for stable personalities who don't get their egos all tied up in their work.
What you read, and what you get are two very different things. Having worked there, I can tell you that they're selecting for stable work output, not stable personalities. Some of the nicest people I know work at Microsoft. And a lot of the most arrogant people I know work there too. The latter mostly seemed to arrive some time around 1995/1996, during the time when MS seemed to be a great place to make a lot of money and retire. A lot of those people don't care about software, or care about their end users -- they're just in it for what they can get.
Simon
You again. Why don't you crawl back in your dark little hole, and beat off to your pictures of Hitlary Rosen and Billy Gates, you MickySoft-worshipping, RIAA-loving freak?!
Sure, just as soon as you give them back. Don't forget to wipe the spooge off them first.
You know, if you really had a point, you would have the guts to post under your own name. Or perhaps that would take a certain modicum of intelligence and courage of your convictions that you don't have. Pussy.
You know, it amazes me how many popstars come out in favor of music-sharing after they've made their millions and millions of dollars, bought their flash cars, and the real nice mansion in Beverly Hills.
Why don't we hear the artists who aren't Top 20, platinum album, millions in the bank jumping up and down in favor of this?
Oh yeah.. that's right... because they actually want the chance to get up there themselves.
Since you're apparently too much of a wuss to post with a email address, and your website consists of the brilliant text: "Under reconstruction" I guess my only retort available is here in public.
Blow me, schoolb0y. You have no skills.
Heh. Pathetic.
Oooh. Did you take Debate 101 in Junior College? I'm stung to the core.
Mom doesn't have a basement at her new house, I'm nearly 40 and the best I own is a PS1. I find bugs in other peoples software. It's my job and I seem to be pretty good at it. Your point?
If you're as good at debugging software as you are at debugging your arguments, you may want to look for another career.
Just out of interest... any idea how I could get the VC++ 7.0 compiler to work with the VC++6.0 IDE? The .NET ide runs like molasses in january, and it's a major reason why I don't use it for any of my code.
Si
Most of the arguments you'll see in this discussion have their start in Extreme Programming.
Here's a good reference: Forty Hour Week [c2.com] on c2.com, which seems to be the best web authority for Extreme Programming discussions and patterns.
Give it a gander.
Actually, most of the arguments you'll see in this discussion have their start in Experienced Programmers.
These XPs have been there, worked the 80 hour weeks, asked their fellow coders to work for them for 80 hour weeks, and killed themselves to basically get no further than they would have done anyway.
It's quite simple:
If you're smart, you'll do an experiment. Do a single, small-scope project, and track it carefully. Work at a burn-out rate (eg. > 40 hours a week).
Pick another project, work at an easy rate. (eg. it works, and they've been there, done that and bought the T-Shirt.
No offence, but the XP guys didn't invent the wheel. Or work out how to make peanut butter. They just wrote down some things that people already knew.
I mean what would you rather program in Cg or RenderMonkey.... it's a no brainer!
... what happens if you want to render anything else???
They are kind of causing problems for themselves. I mean...
If I've overlooked something with regards to copyright law regarding typefaces, I'll appreciate all corrections.
Truetype fonts also contain code for hinting purposes. So they're not purely font data - each one also contains a hand crafted computer program.
Thus, typically, font foundries copyright the hinting logic, but they can't currently copyright the shape of their font.
Simon
I went from writing home productivity software to writing embedded control software and analysis tools for a company bringing to market a new design of mass spectrometer.
:-)
There's all the usual teething pains of any startup, but it's the most use I've gotten from my degree in Physics *ever*. And it's a lot of fun watching people when you tell them not to touch the circuitry because the high voltage could make the joints in their arms explode.
Simon
Anyone remember the GUID in office docs?
Yeah. It's a wonderful way of giving each document a unique ID. The only problem is that the developer who put that into the spec didn't realize that the MAC address of the computer was part of the generated GUID.
If there was a better way of generating unique IDs on a computer, you can bet that it would have been used instead.
But hey, why look at it in a reasonable fashion when you can go off the deep end with conspiracy stories?
Actually, to gain access to the documentation of the API as well as development tools, you need to buy yearly kits that are priced at $1-2 thousand dollars a year. While it might be theoretically possible to program to the Win32 API without this, in practical circumstances no professional development house would ever write for a platform and not join their development program. It would be an irresponsible and fairly suicidal act.
Actually, you only have to buy the development tools once, and the documentation costs $100/year if you want a DVD (and it can be put on a server and duplicated company wide). For that you get 4 quarterly updates. Alternatively, you can get the documentation for free from msdn.microsoft.com. MSDN subscriptions in the 1-2 thousand dollar range are only for those who want to test their software on all versions of Windows (including the international ones), plus the latest versions of Office, Exchange etc. In which case, it's much much cheaper and easier.
Nice try at FUD though.
Is it even possible for a game to shunt data around at 2.2Gb a second? Even adding up all the different kinds of RAM in my computer, it wouldn't come to any more than perhaps 250Mb. Even for the newest machines, the sum total of the volatile memory is perhaps 700Mb at the most. So do we really need this kind of hardware yet?
That would be about 37Mb of data per screen update, for a 60Hz refresh rate.
If you're using LOTS of high resolution textures, you need that speed.
Simon
Possibly the easiest way to get things going is this:
1. Plan the architecture. Sure, some things can be more difficult than others to get going from the start, but design as much as you can in one go, and iterate.
2. Design interfaces to match the architecture; whether it be pure virtual classes in C++, a slew of function prototypes in C, or a set of interfaces in Java.
3. Pass interfaces out to developers, based on functional areas of the code. Tell them that they're responsible for this chunk of the app, and that their job is to code up stuff behind the interfaces. If they're worried about not having other stuff to connect to (ie. it's not done yet), tell them to code up stubs that just return error codes in the right way for their own testing.
It helps if you ask everyone what areas they want to work on, and spread the load out that way. If they buy into it, then they'll work harder for you. But laying down the basic infrastructure and then delegating specific interfaces to code up is the easiest way to get others up to speed. At the very least, you can point to that person at the end of it and ask them why they haven't finished it.
Simon