I mean it's possible that the old joke about the intelligence of Irish terrorists is true ("one tried to blow up my car once, but he burnt his lips on the exhaust pipe") has some truth to it, but still
I never heard jokes about thick Paddies from the Royal Engineers bomb squad guys, because the guys who made the bombs most certainly were not...
Very good point - I'd forgotten about that. It would be embarrassing if a patented technique could be shown to be straight out of Foley and Van Dam or predated by some independent source.
It would be a brave company indeed that threatens GPLed code with patent lawsuits these days. The landscape has changed enormously in the last six months, and almost right under our noses. I can imagine a few things happening:
1. The developers laughing at the threats, something along the lines of "So sorry, but US patent law doesn't apply to me since I don't live there. Go stick your patent claims in the nearest available orifice."
Even *if* one was filed in *Europe* and *if* it was upheld, the Blender Foundation would just make sure that all development happened in patent-free jurisdictions. A patent lawsuit would be a sufficiently strong attack to warrant such a radical move.
2. A PR disaster. Tens of thousands of people have got their start in 3D graphics thanks to Blender and the backlash would be extreme.
3. IBM or some other large pro-Linux patent holder coming down like a ton of bricks on the plaintiffs. Does Max draw menus along the top? Sorry, we have a patent on that. Does your text flow algorithm do such and such? Sorry, we have a patent on that. Either you can drop your lawsuit against Blender or we'll be after you.
4. Accusations of hypocrisy. If Alias or SoftImage or Discreet see GPLed software as a threat to their businesses, then they better be able to prove that no GPLed software has helped their businesses in the past. Tricky.
You're right. I meant to refute the GP's assertion that computers will one day beat the best Go players by brute force, not drag in a discussion about solvability:)
I think you misunderstand me. I am not advocating running around adding up the letters in people's names to try and find the anti-christ. I agree that to do so today is ridiculous and is probably missing the point of the passage and the book.
I am just pointing out that doing so was a common cultural practice at the time of writing, and that Nero Caesar fits the two different numbers we find in the MSS (as well as being at the right time in history).
So in the end, computers will be able to break the best go player - if only you give them enough computing power.
Go is not practically solvable by throwing computing power at it, mainly because there aren't atoms enough in the observable universe to construct the computers to do the job.
Computer Go players will only get better if there's some kind of breakthrough in traditional AI or learning algorithms. Neither seems likely in the near future.
There are manuscripts where it quite clearly says 616. You're absolutely right about the superlative symbolism but the point of most numbers in apocalyptic visions is that they contain multiple meanings packed up into a single number. Non-Roman readers of Revelation would have had an "aha" moment at the tripling of the 6s, Roman readers would have spotted that 616 is the result of adding up the letters of "Nero Caesar." Both are canonical.
And it's probably a mistake to rely on adding up the letters of a person's name to find out if they're the Beast.
No it's not a mistake. The Romans did it all the time. Archaeologists have even found graffiti from the time which says "I love her whose name is 545." It was an extremely common practice.
The point of the passage is that there will always be corrupt leaders who will persecute the church and currently this is exemplified by You-Know-Who (Nero).
Godel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Google for it or check your favourite bookstore. It's impossible to describe in a few words but let me try: the author attempts to answer the question "what is a self?" by describing what the music of J.S. Bach, the art of M.C. Escher and the mathematics of K. Godel have in common, particularly the problems and paradoxes that arise from the concept of indirect self-reference in formal systems.
It's a marvellous and stimulating read, littered with easter eggs and self-referential jokes, and has inspired more than a few people (myself included) to learn more about music, art, number theory and programming. I discovered it aged 13 and can trace back many of my current interests to reading it then.
Didn't know that, thanks for pointing it out. I should do that more often with my own writing - I tend to begin at the beginning, go on to the end and then stop instead of using flow.
That wouldn't really work with this book. The authors have assumed that much of their readership is very interested in Rails but don't know much Ruby yet, so they've put in a lot of cross-references between where some Ruby construct is first used and an Appendix which describes its whys and wherefores.
I'm enjoying it as a way of learning Ruby (I bought the PDF last week). Learn a bit of Rails, hmmm, what does this mean? Click - aha.
You're absolutely right and I think I misunderstood the GP. I thought he was saying the whole of the Creative Commons movement was a waste of time because of the capability of existing copyright law - not that it isn't that helpful to start a new webcomics movement when the laws work as they are.
Hmmmm, let's see. You could start a cultural sharing movement based on either a) mass education of people as to the capabilities of the existing law or b) acknowledge the capabilities of the traditional law and use them to encourage sharing through a specific set of licenses that emphasise that only *some* rights are reserved.
One of these movements has a future and one of them does not.
Re:I think it's Beta because...
on
Ajax On Rails
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· Score: 1
Good point:) They do warn you though: 1.4 Stuff in Flux Rails is changing. Before this book gets printed, we should be up-to-date with Rails 1.0. In the meantime, this book doesn't yet cover:
Named routes
At least by the time Rails gets to 1.0 I will (thanks to the book) have a firm grasp of MVC and why it does things the way it does. Any improvements or additions to the API are unlikely to be major deviations in philosophy.
Re:Rails book from the Pragmatic Bookshelf
on
Ajax On Rails
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Agreed 100%. I bought it last week. Don't be fooled by its "beta" status - it's a thoroughly well written introduction to Rails that takes you through everything you need to know - including building a REAL application (a shopping cart) from start to finish.
I also bought Programming Ruby by the same author because I want to do more with Ruby than just Rails, but this isn't necessary for those who just need Rails - all Ruby constructs and idioms are cross-referenced with an included introduction to the language.
It still seems to me that Microsoft was at least even with all the other developers at the time in regards to their attitude to the Internet, and quite possibly ahead.
I don't think so. For two whole years, Microsoft didn't even have a Web browser, letting Netscape gobble 90% market share. It was only Q1 1996 (iirc) that the company realised that it better hitch up to the Internet wagon after which it moved amazingly quickly to catch up.
(After all, Windows *did* let you dial-up to a PPP account before any other commercial OS I know about. Even if they thought MSN was the future, they left the option open for direct Internet access... Apple didn't.)
The proprietary Unices and Linux had PPP connections long before Windows and besides, the presence of a dial-up utility that speaks PPP is hardly a sign of an Internet strategy (as can be seen quite clearly with Microsoft). You originally asked where the claim "Microsoft ignoring the Internet" came from - I'm telling you it was true and must be seen as a whole lot more encompassing than the availability of PPP dialers.
What are you talking about, "Microsoft ignoring the Internet?" Where does that claim come from?
From history. Microsoft initally bet the farm on MSN, saying it would make the Internet irrelevant. When the execs realised that the Internet was the future and no-one was bothering with MSN, they abruptly turned the entire business around and refocused it on the Internet in record time.
it told me that everyone in that room lacked any sense of responsibility associated with their intelligence, capabilities, and the opportunities that their education and environment had presented them.
Or perhaps just that they didn't want to be sharecroppers. Plenty of good software has been written because people didn't feel the need to co-operate with Microsoft.
if you HAVE the ability, ACCEPT the responsibility.
I have a bi-di sat connection and use Skype all the time. Strangely enough (or perhaps not) my international calls have low-enough latency to speak normally, especially after hours, but calling friend Nick who lives three blocks away is terrible - we've had to resort to using radio protocol. "Yes I can hear you - over." "OK over" Annoying but still usable:)
Number one in the low number of exploits. How many J2ME worms are out there? How many Java applet hijacks are reported each year? Close to zero, if not zero.
It is secure. However there are also no Python or Lisp worms so I don't really know what your point is.
Also, there are plenty of benchmarks showing Java is as fast or faster than C and C++ on large datasets and long-running applications, when the environment initialization isn't a hit on performance.
I'd love to see them. I work with gigabytes of video data every day and Java didn't even come close to cutting it. Python with a bit of C handles it happily though.
Java isn't perfect, but it is so complete that it would be easier to use than most alternatives.
It's not complete. It's not even nearly complete. It's only just getting stuff that Python and LISP programmers take for granted. A couple of examples:
foreach - a fine and useful construct. For each item in this sequence do something. To get that into Java required years of painful approval process and even then, it still doesn't work with the existing installed base. Python already has it, and you can write a Lisp foreach in two minutes using a macro. So a simple language construct taken for granted by other programmers has to be worked around until Sun gets its A into G.
Latent typing. I can write a Python or C++ or Lisp class called Speaker (to pinch Bruce Eckel's example) that takes an object of any type and calls its talk() method. No problem. Can't do it in Java.
Java's threads (up until 1.5) were BROKEN. Subtly and mysteriously but nevertheless broken.
Lisp quickly becomes non-portable once the project is large enough (contrary to popular belief).
Java is the non-portable one here. I know Solaris Java apps that won't work on Linux or FreeBSD, Windows apps that break on everything else, and Linux apps in Java that won't work on Windows. Common Lisp on the other hand has a standard which has been around for nearly fifteen years. It is highly portable.
Re:Zzzzzz. Wake me up
on
Open source Java?
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· Score: 2, Informative
LOL. Yes. Lisp. How about APL? or some other equally retarded language only mathematicians, washed-up AI people & other various people who never got past just being a programmer (vs designer vs software engineer) could love...
I love people who don't know what on earth they're talking about. Lisp has little to do with AI except as an accident of history. Today people use Lisp to write 3D games for the Playstation, complex business applcations, robot controllers for NASA and just about anything in between.
Because LISP scales *so* well.
Well spotted - it does. Steel Bank Common Lisp on my AMD64 compiles to wickedly fast native x86_64 code - actually faster than gcc in some cases.
And has all kinds of useful features like... eval!!!!
(Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem. The story of the Remote Agent bug is an interesting one in and of itself.)
Yes! the way of the future! RPN & expressing yourself in syntax trees!
Yeah Lisp is the way of the future actually - heh. All other actively-developed languages have only recently added things that have been in Lisp for decades: closures, GC, macros et al. Lisp isn't RPN by the way which shows me how much you really know about Lisp. And you don't typcially write code in syntax trees - you write a domain-specific language in Lisp and then write your problem in that. Reply as yourself if you feel the need - I'd like a good laugh at your previous cluelessness.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean it's possible that the old joke about the intelligence of Irish terrorists is true ("one tried to blow up my car once, but he burnt his lips on the exhaust pipe") has some truth to it, but still
I never heard jokes about thick Paddies from the Royal Engineers bomb squad guys, because the guys who made the bombs most certainly were not...
Glad I'm not the only one who wondered what on earth he was talking about. I know Wikipedia is "unreliable" and all that but still...
Very good point - I'd forgotten about that. It would be embarrassing if a patented technique could be shown to be straight out of Foley and Van Dam or predated by some independent source.
It would be a brave company indeed that threatens GPLed code with patent lawsuits these days. The landscape has changed enormously in the last six months, and almost right under our noses. I can imagine a few things happening:
1. The developers laughing at the threats, something along the lines of "So sorry, but US patent law doesn't apply to me since I don't live there. Go stick your patent claims in the nearest available orifice."
Even *if* one was filed in *Europe* and *if* it was upheld, the Blender Foundation would just make sure that all development happened in patent-free jurisdictions. A patent lawsuit would be a sufficiently strong attack to warrant such a radical move.
2. A PR disaster. Tens of thousands of people have got their start in 3D graphics thanks to Blender and the backlash would be extreme.
3. IBM or some other large pro-Linux patent holder coming down like a ton of bricks on the plaintiffs. Does Max draw menus along the top? Sorry, we have a patent on that. Does your text flow algorithm do such and such? Sorry, we have a patent on that. Either you can drop your lawsuit against Blender or we'll be after you.
4. Accusations of hypocrisy. If Alias or SoftImage or Discreet see GPLed software as a threat to their businesses, then they better be able to prove that no GPLed software has helped their businesses in the past. Tricky.
You're right. I meant to refute the GP's assertion that computers will one day beat the best Go players by brute force, not drag in a discussion about solvability :)
I think you misunderstand me. I am not advocating running around adding up the letters in people's names to try and find the anti-christ. I agree that to do so today is ridiculous and is probably missing the point of the passage and the book.
I am just pointing out that doing so was a common cultural practice at the time of writing, and that Nero Caesar fits the two different numbers we find in the MSS (as well as being at the right time in history).
So in the end, computers will be able to break the best go player - if only you give them enough computing power.
Go is not practically solvable by throwing computing power at it, mainly because there aren't atoms enough in the observable universe to construct the computers to do the job.
Computer Go players will only get better if there's some kind of breakthrough in traditional AI or learning algorithms. Neither seems likely in the near future.
In other words, it's not 616. :)
There are manuscripts where it quite clearly says 616. You're absolutely right about the superlative symbolism but the point of most numbers in apocalyptic visions is that they contain multiple meanings packed up into a single number. Non-Roman readers of Revelation would have had an "aha" moment at the tripling of the 6s, Roman readers would have spotted that 616 is the result of adding up the letters of "Nero Caesar."
Both are canonical.
And it's probably a mistake to rely on adding up the letters of a person's name to find out if they're the Beast.
No it's not a mistake. The Romans did it all the time. Archaeologists have even found graffiti from the time which says "I love her whose name is 545." It was an extremely common practice.
The point of the passage is that there will always be corrupt leaders who will persecute the church and currently this is exemplified by You-Know-Who (Nero).
Godel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Google for it or check your favourite bookstore. It's impossible to describe in a few words but let me try: the author attempts to answer the question "what is a self?" by describing what the music of J.S. Bach, the art of M.C. Escher and the mathematics of K. Godel have in common, particularly the problems and paradoxes that arise from the concept of indirect self-reference in formal systems.
It's a marvellous and stimulating read, littered with easter eggs and self-referential jokes, and has inspired more than a few people (myself included) to learn more about music, art, number theory and programming. I discovered it aged 13 and can trace back many of my current interests to reading it then.
Didn't know that, thanks for pointing it out. I should do that more often with my own writing - I tend to begin at the beginning, go on to the end and then stop instead of using flow.
That wouldn't really work with this book. The authors have assumed that much of their readership is very interested in Rails but don't know much Ruby yet, so they've put in a lot of cross-references between where some Ruby construct is first used and an Appendix which describes its whys and wherefores.
I'm enjoying it as a way of learning Ruby (I bought the PDF last week). Learn a bit of Rails, hmmm, what does this mean? Click - aha.
You're absolutely right and I think I misunderstood the GP. I thought he was saying the whole of the Creative Commons movement was a waste of time because of the capability of existing copyright law - not that it isn't that helpful to start a new webcomics movement when the laws work as they are.
Hmmmm, let's see. You could start a cultural sharing movement based on either a) mass education of people as to the capabilities of the existing law or b) acknowledge the capabilities of the traditional law and use them to encourage sharing through a specific set of licenses that emphasise that only *some* rights are reserved.
One of these movements has a future and one of them does not.
1.4 Stuff in Flux
Rails is changing. Before this book gets printed, we should be up-to-date with Rails 1.0. In the meantime, this book doesn't yet cover:
At least by the time Rails gets to 1.0 I will (thanks to the book) have a firm grasp of MVC and why it does things the way it does. Any improvements or additions to the API are unlikely to be major deviations in philosophy.
Agreed 100%. I bought it last week. Don't be fooled by its "beta" status - it's a thoroughly well written introduction to Rails that takes you through everything you need to know - including building a REAL application (a shopping cart) from start to finish.
I also bought Programming Ruby by the same author because I want to do more with Ruby than just Rails, but this isn't necessary for those who just need Rails - all Ruby constructs and idioms are cross-referenced with an included introduction to the language.
It still seems to me that Microsoft was at least even with all the other developers at the time in regards to their attitude to the Internet, and quite possibly ahead.
I don't think so. For two whole years, Microsoft didn't even have a Web browser, letting Netscape gobble 90% market share. It was only Q1 1996 (iirc) that the company realised that it better hitch up to the Internet wagon after which it moved amazingly quickly to catch up.
(After all, Windows *did* let you dial-up to a PPP account before any other commercial OS I know about. Even if they thought MSN was the future, they left the option open for direct Internet access... Apple didn't.)
The proprietary Unices and Linux had PPP connections long before Windows and besides, the presence of a dial-up utility that speaks PPP is hardly a sign of an Internet strategy (as can be seen quite clearly with Microsoft). You originally asked where the claim "Microsoft ignoring the Internet" came from - I'm telling you it was true and must be seen as a whole lot more encompassing than the availability of PPP dialers.
What are you talking about, "Microsoft ignoring the Internet?" Where does that claim come from?
From history. Microsoft initally bet the farm on MSN, saying it would make the Internet irrelevant. When the execs realised that the Internet was the future and no-one was bothering with MSN, they abruptly turned the entire business around and refocused it on the Internet in record time.
And Python geeks know there is one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it.
Here is a pretty cool article on a similar project, but from the software development point of view.
Is there a point D? Just for the Mr Prossers among us :)
You misspelled gnus, and it's too late - he's already loose :)
it told me that everyone in that room lacked any sense of responsibility associated with their intelligence, capabilities, and the opportunities that their education and environment had presented them.
Or perhaps just that they didn't want to be sharecroppers. Plenty of good software has been written because people didn't feel the need to co-operate with Microsoft.
if you HAVE the ability, ACCEPT the responsibility.
Responsibility to whom?
I have a bi-di sat connection and use Skype all the time. Strangely enough (or perhaps not) my international calls have low-enough latency to speak normally, especially after hours, but calling friend Nick who lives three blocks away is terrible - we've had to resort to using radio protocol. "Yes I can hear you - over." "OK over" Annoying but still usable :)
It is secure. However there are also no Python or Lisp worms so I don't really know what your point is.
Also, there are plenty of benchmarks showing Java is as fast or faster than C and C++ on large datasets and long-running applications, when the environment initialization isn't a hit on performance.
I'd love to see them. I work with gigabytes of video data every day and Java didn't even come close to cutting it. Python with a bit of C handles it happily though.
Java isn't perfect, but it is so complete that it would be easier to use than most alternatives.
It's not complete. It's not even nearly complete. It's only just getting stuff that Python and LISP programmers take for granted. A couple of examples:
Lisp quickly becomes non-portable once the project is large enough (contrary to popular belief).
Java is the non-portable one here. I know Solaris Java apps that won't work on Linux or FreeBSD, Windows apps that break on everything else, and Linux apps in Java that won't work on Windows. Common Lisp on the other hand has a standard which has been around for nearly fifteen years. It is highly portable.
LOL. Yes. Lisp. How about APL? or some other equally retarded language only mathematicians, washed-up AI people & other various people who never got past just being a programmer (vs designer vs software engineer) could love...
... eval!!!!
I love people who don't know what on earth they're talking about. Lisp has little to do with AI except as an accident of history. Today people use Lisp to write 3D games for the Playstation, complex business applcations, robot controllers for NASA and just about anything in between.
Because LISP scales *so* well.
Well spotted - it does. Steel Bank Common Lisp on my AMD64 compiles to wickedly fast native x86_64 code - actually faster than gcc in some cases.
And has all kinds of useful features like
From http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html:
(Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem. The story of the Remote Agent bug is an interesting one in and of itself.)
Yes! the way of the future! RPN & expressing yourself in syntax trees!
Yeah Lisp is the way of the future actually - heh. All other actively-developed languages have only recently added things that have been in Lisp for decades: closures, GC, macros et al. Lisp isn't RPN by the way which shows me how much you really know about Lisp. And you don't typcially write code in syntax trees - you write a domain-specific language in Lisp and then write your problem in that. Reply as yourself if you feel the need - I'd like a good laugh at your previous cluelessness.