The premise underlying this project is interesting: will different cultures create different programming languages? It's a popular idea that natural language and culture are very much intertwined. (Think 20 eskimo words for snow here.) However, a natural language is used to actually do things that make up culture. One wonders if the same goes for a programming language: the language will probably not as much influence a culture as the other way around.
Another way to look at a language is as an expression of certain believes. This seems to fit the bill better. Will, for instance, a programmer with anarchistical tendencies prefer a language like Perl?
This will probably get modded down as off-topic, but this is as good as almost any./ story to complain about redundant links.
So you've found a nice tidbit on the web and decided to drop slashdot a link. That's cool. We love you for that. So you found it on news.yahoo.com. Why provide another confusing link just to the homepage? I know where it is. If I wouldn't know where it is, I could easily deduce it from the article's url. Moreover, it distracts my attention. It forces me to actually read, parse and interpret the submission, something I try to avoid as much as possible.
Your submission is by no means an exception. It seems to be some sort of editorial policy. Slashdot submissions abound with redundant links to the homepages of "google.com", "cnn.com"... hell it wouldn't suprise me to see "slashdot.org" linked. I think we can assume that people know how to find their way to these sites.
Why am I so upset? Because I hate skimming slashdot in the morning and hitting the wrong links all the time. It costs me time. It spoils my mood. Which makes me yell at my cat.
Links are meant to stand out. Keep them that way by using them sparingly. Stick to the meat.
A company I used to work at experimented with a form of "preemptive" error-correction. They built a system that, instead of waiting for acknowledgemnt of a received packet, would resend a packet if the sender had not yet received an acknowledgement. The trick was that this resent packet would be XOR'ed with other packets (possibly a fresh packet). The probability that a packet was lost along the way was dynamically computed and used to determine which packets should be combined and resent in order to optimize the probability that all packets would be reconstructed. This computation could be done very fast, in a finite state machine, which could be implemented in hardware quite nicely.
Every medium has to find its "unique selling point", a way to
transcend its origins in older media, and this may take a while. For
instance, movies where long thought to be inferior to theatre, because
theatre was "the real thing", whereas movies where just a registration
of that. It took D.W. Griffith (and many others) to give film its own
vocabulary, and it essentially blew theatre away as an expressive
medium.
Of course not every medium under the sun has a unique selling point.
Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary" probably exhausts the total expressive
range of elephant dung. However I strongly believe (and I am sure
everybody in here agrees) that computers are more than a one-shot
medium.
The classical distinction between imitatio and aemulatio may be interesting here. Renaissance artists set out to imitate
classical art as closely as possible (imitatio) and then delibaretely
tried to surpass it while remaining true to the idea (aemulatio). In
the case of computer graphics this would mean you should set out to
reproduce "regular" media as close as possible, taking from it what
you need and focussing on that to take it a step further where the
other media simply cannot go. Which way it that? I don't know. That's
one of the thrills of being an artist. I do know you're by far not the
first to explore this subject. (You probably know the Dutch artist
Peter Struijken, who explored computer graphics way back in the 80's,
and who focussed on the ligh-emitting capacities of the screen as
opposed to the light-reflecting capacities of, say, paint.)
Sometimes however, a less structural approach can work miracles. It is
obvious that the true strengths of computers lie in the capability to
manipulate data in an autonomous fashion. Is it possible to derive
entertainment or even an aestethic experience from this unique
feature? Of course it is. Look at the computer-game industry. They
have been exploring this angle for decades now, and I personally think
they are in dire need of some real creative vision by now, mainly on
the graphics front. Nine out of ten computer games nowadays uses
high-res, bump-mapped, dynamically lighted textures mounted on
increasingly intricate 3d-structures, only to come out looking as a
flaky 80's movie with over-exposed colors and badly grimed actors
running around under black light. There obviously is an industry
crying there for some creative input.
So, yes, I think there is plenty of room for artistry in the
CG-department. The point is that to find it, you will have to stretch
not only your own imagination, but everybody else's too. And that,
my friend, is where the real challenge of art is...
--
How about portable Ogg-Vorbis players?
on
MP3Pro Released
·
· Score: 2
Don't you think that as long as there are no products like Creative Jukebox or the Rio players that play Ogg-Vorbis files, this format is going to have a really tough time gaining wide-spread use? Why would I want to store my music in two formats: Ogg-Vorbis at home because its cool, and MP3 because it's the only way to listen to it on the road? (Sure the manufacturers all promise support of future audio-formats, but will these include Ogg-Vorbis?) --
We Dutch tend to view our government in a totally different way than e.g. Americans. If we are to believe the movies and the internet, the average American Joe's view of his government is a strange mixture of pride and suspicion: pride of the government's ability to take on any country on earth and suspicion of the goverment's intentions towards it's own people. (The embodiment of this last sentiment, if we are to believe Hollywood on this one, is the FBI. Are there any movies at all where the Feds are the good guys?)
The Dutch tend to think about their government in another way: a bunch of rather likeable, idealistic people. (You have to be idealistic in The Netherlands to go into politics, for there is little money to be made and little personal prestige to be gained.) The same goes for the police. A gullible breed that won't come after you unless you do something very nasty. We like it that way, and that may be the reason why the ''digital safe deposit'' subject is not that big an issue around here.
We put a lot of trust in our government. Perhaps to much. But consider this: whereas in America appr. fifty per cent of the people has every reason to feel misrepresented by their government, the Dutch tend to think that their government is a reasonable reflection of the people, because the representatives are chosen from a wide range of parties and by popular vote. A powershift as tremendous as the one we have witnessed in the US last elections is unthinkable here. That makes it easier to put your trust in the government.
Lots and lots of very playable, very imaginative and often very addictive games that adhere to many of the dogma2000 rules are being made right here and right now. I am talking "online" games in Java / Flash / Shockwave.
Edge Magazine had a nice little article on this phenomenom. And here you can enough addictiveness to last you through the week. --
I used to work for a company that made compression software. They used static (i.e. non-adaptive) compression models that where carefully constructed by hand in a high level computer language that was specially designed for writing compressors. You could build compressors for *specific* data that blew all general-purpose compressors out of the water. As a proof of concept we squeezed the 4.2MB text version of the King James bible into 800KB, so that you could carry it around on your Magic Link (the Magic Cap PDA). It was a hell of a job (we even provided fast random access and free text search capabilities) and I really don't think a generic model can do better than that. --
> Here's the true version: 90% of programming bugs come from not reading Dijkstra.
It is one thing to read Dijkstra and know what programming is about, and another thing to build a hundred thousand line , multithreaded application. If you are right (and I wish you were) someone who has reached the stage of programming Enlightenment can type in a application like that and have it work from scratch, in any given decent language. Someone who is able to do that needs no debugger at all. I personally know of no-one like that, and even if these people exist, the vast majority of the programmer-population (inluding you and certainly me) is confronted with his own mistakes on a regular basis. It is irritating and humbling in a way, but a problem we have to deal with anyway. And debuggers can be a great help. --
Hmm, I suppose there are occassions in which the system cannot decide if a object is definitely dead and hence to be garbage collected, but the question is: do these occassions arise in each and every program of reasonable size? If so, then the concept of a garbage collector itself is fatally flawed. I find that hard to believe.
Given the fact that 90% of all C / C++ bugs are caused by memory related issues (buffer overruns and memleaks being the most notorious ones) it would probably be a wise choice to move to Java, if you don't mind the (minor) performance hit. My own experience is that when writing Java code you spend a lot less time in the debugger, because (a) the garbage collector prevents memleaks (b) buffer overflows generate very clear error messages instead of a stupid core dump. So the choice of debugger automatically becomes much less of a issue.
As to performance: if you're not writing a nuclear explosion simulator, Java's performance is probably adequate. (Think StarOffice here.) --
I find it highly unlikely that a company could be so naive as to allow a programmer to do something like that just on technical grounds.
I am an engineer with a Dutch search engine, and I had this discussion with my colleagues once: whether or not we should add link-redirection. We had a very good technical reason to do so, since the poularity of links can be used to improve the relevance ranking of the engine big time (cf. DirectHit). Now, this is a much better reason than just "adding another layer of abstraction". However, the proposal was immediately discarded by my superiors, on privacy grounds. They felt people were much too itchy about this stuff and we'd better leave it alone.
I am positive that Dejanews knew exactly what they were doing, and what the risks involved were.
It is not coincedence that a problem like this pops up at a company like Dejanews. Dejanews' core business has always been on the verge of privacy violation. We all love Dejanews because it helps us tame the mind boggling amount of information that flows through usenet every day. And DejaNews' value will only continue to increase as the years go by. Imagine what a valuable research tool it will be to the future anthropologist trying to trace the evolution of certain memes through the history of internet.
However, there is a darker side. The same power that we have all come to love allows us to trace individuals just as easy as those interesting memes. And you don't need a subpoena to do so. Imagine the amount of information you can find about yourself on DejaNews in fifty years! Even if you are a mildly active usenet personality, your whole life will be out there, ready to get datamined by any dirt-digger, biographer, stalker or power-hungry megacorporation.
Sure, it's possible to "trick" DejaNews by using different aliases or email addresses. But that is a major pain in the *ss (try teaching your mum just how to do that), and forces you to actively defend your privacy instead of being able to trust yourself to remain reasonably anonymous. (And besides that, you can pretty sure that within a couple of years there will be plenty computing power to recognize a poster just by her verbal fingerprint instead of her email address. Think spelling errors here: how many people know how to spell "potatoe"?)
Dejanews has been a mixed blessing right from the start. It feeds on semi-private information and offers us a great tool in return. What we witness with the mail-click thing, is that people are irritated at the fact that they don't get anything in return for this information, not at the bare fact that their privacy is violated. Their privacy has been systematically violated by Dejanews all along, and they didn't really care.
Maybe we should have something like robots.txt for usenet. That would help, at least a little bit. --
Even if you don't finish this book, it is bound to upset you. It resonates on a lot of levels and gets on your nerves in a positive sense. Even if you disagree wholly with its message (which is easy to do) it provokes you to think and talk about it. I think that is a hallmark of a great book (although I would refrain from calling it literature, as some folks do). In this respect it always reminds me of Pirsig's "Zen & the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance". --
Slashdot Mirror
The premise underlying this project is interesting: will different cultures create different programming languages? It's a popular idea that natural language and culture are very much intertwined. (Think 20 eskimo words for snow here.) However, a natural language is used to actually do things that make up culture. One wonders if the same goes for a programming language: the language will probably not as much influence a culture as the other way around.
Another way to look at a language is as an expression of certain believes. This seems to fit the bill better. Will, for instance, a programmer with anarchistical tendencies prefer a language like Perl?
This will probably get modded down as off-topic, but this is as good as almost any ./ story to complain about redundant links.
So you've found a nice tidbit on the web and decided to drop slashdot a link. That's cool. We love you for that. So you found it on news.yahoo.com. Why provide another confusing link just to the homepage? I know where it is. If I wouldn't know where it is, I could easily deduce it from the article's url. Moreover, it distracts my attention. It forces me to actually read, parse and interpret the submission, something I try to avoid as much as possible.
Your submission is by no means an exception. It seems to be some sort of editorial policy. Slashdot submissions abound with redundant links to the homepages of "google.com", "cnn.com"... hell it wouldn't suprise me to see "slashdot.org" linked. I think we can assume that people know how to find their way to these sites.
Why am I so upset? Because I hate skimming slashdot in the morning and hitting the wrong links all the time. It costs me time. It spoils my mood. Which makes me yell at my cat.
Links are meant to stand out. Keep them that way by using them sparingly. Stick to the meat.
http://www.linguafranca.com/print/0012/cover_pet.h tml
Take your pick...
A company I used to work at experimented with a form of "preemptive" error-correction. They built a system that, instead of waiting for acknowledgemnt of a received packet, would resend a packet if the sender had not yet received an acknowledgement. The trick was that this resent packet would be XOR'ed with other packets (possibly a fresh packet). The probability that a packet was lost along the way was dynamically computed and used to determine which packets should be combined and resent in order to optimize the probability that all packets would be reconstructed. This computation could be done very fast, in a finite state machine, which could be implemented in hardware quite nicely.
Gamasutra had a couple of articles on the subject of (real-time) procedural formation of planetary bodies. (Free login required.)
0 1.htm
0 1.htm
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010302/oneil_
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010810/oneil_
There is a nifty demo available for download. The same code is used in the glElite project.
Every medium has to find its "unique selling point", a way to
transcend its origins in older media, and this may take a while. For
instance, movies where long thought to be inferior to theatre, because
theatre was "the real thing", whereas movies where just a registration
of that. It took D.W. Griffith (and many others) to give film its own
vocabulary, and it essentially blew theatre away as an expressive
medium.
Of course not every medium under the sun has a unique selling point.
Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary" probably exhausts the total expressive
range of elephant dung. However I strongly believe (and I am sure
everybody in here agrees) that computers are more than a one-shot
medium.
The classical distinction between imitatio and aemulatio
may be interesting here. Renaissance artists set out to imitate
classical art as closely as possible (imitatio) and then delibaretely
tried to surpass it while remaining true to the idea (aemulatio). In
the case of computer graphics this would mean you should set out to
reproduce "regular" media as close as possible, taking from it what
you need and focussing on that to take it a step further where the
other media simply cannot go. Which way it that? I don't know. That's
one of the thrills of being an artist. I do know you're by far not the
first to explore this subject. (You probably know the Dutch artist
Peter Struijken, who explored computer graphics way back in the 80's,
and who focussed on the ligh-emitting capacities of the screen as
opposed to the light-reflecting capacities of, say, paint.)
Sometimes however, a less structural approach can work miracles. It is
obvious that the true strengths of computers lie in the capability to
manipulate data in an autonomous fashion. Is it possible to derive
entertainment or even an aestethic experience from this unique
feature? Of course it is. Look at the computer-game industry. They
have been exploring this angle for decades now, and I personally think
they are in dire need of some real creative vision by now, mainly on
the graphics front. Nine out of ten computer games nowadays uses
high-res, bump-mapped, dynamically lighted textures mounted on
increasingly intricate 3d-structures, only to come out looking as a
flaky 80's movie with over-exposed colors and badly grimed actors
running around under black light. There obviously is an industry
crying there for some creative input.
So, yes, I think there is plenty of room for artistry in the
CG-department. The point is that to find it, you will have to stretch
not only your own imagination, but everybody else's too. And that,
my friend, is where the real challenge of art is...
--
Don't you think that as long as there are no products like Creative Jukebox or the Rio players that play Ogg-Vorbis files, this format is going to have a really tough time gaining wide-spread use? Why would I want to store my music in two formats: Ogg-Vorbis at home because its cool, and MP3 because it's the only way to listen to it on the road? (Sure the manufacturers all promise support of future audio-formats, but will these include Ogg-Vorbis?)
--
We Dutch tend to view our government in a totally different way than e.g. Americans. If we are to believe the movies and the internet, the average American Joe's view of his government is a strange mixture of pride and suspicion: pride of the government's ability to take on any country on earth and suspicion of the goverment's intentions towards it's own people. (The embodiment of this last sentiment, if we are to believe Hollywood on this one, is the FBI. Are there any movies at all where the Feds are the good guys?)
The Dutch tend to think about their government in another way: a bunch of rather likeable, idealistic people. (You have to be idealistic in The Netherlands to go into politics, for there is little money to be made and little personal prestige to be gained.) The same goes for the police. A gullible breed that won't come after you unless you do something very nasty. We like it that way, and that may be the reason why the ''digital safe deposit'' subject is not that big an issue around here.
We put a lot of trust in our government. Perhaps to much. But consider this: whereas in America appr. fifty per cent of the people has every reason to feel misrepresented by their government, the Dutch tend to think that their government is a reasonable reflection of the people, because the representatives are chosen from a wide range of parties and by popular vote. A powershift as tremendous as the one we have witnessed in the US last elections is unthinkable here. That makes it easier to put your trust in the government.
--
Edge Magazine had a nice little article on this phenomenom. And here you can enough addictiveness to last you through the week.
--
I used to work for a company that made compression software. They used static (i.e. non-adaptive) compression models that where carefully constructed by hand in a high level computer language that was specially designed for writing compressors. You could build compressors for *specific* data that blew all general-purpose compressors out of the water. As a proof of concept we squeezed the 4.2MB text version of the King James bible into 800KB, so that you could carry it around on your Magic Link (the Magic Cap PDA). It was a hell of a job (we even provided fast random access and free text search capabilities) and I really don't think a generic model can do better than that.
--
And since when does freshmeat sport a dot com domain?
--
> Here's the true version: 90% of programming bugs come from not reading Dijkstra.
It is one thing to read Dijkstra and know what programming is about, and another thing to build a hundred thousand line , multithreaded application. If you are right (and I wish you were) someone who has reached the stage of programming Enlightenment can type in a application like that and have it work from scratch, in any given decent language. Someone who is able to do that needs no debugger at all. I personally know of no-one like that, and even if these people exist, the vast majority of the programmer-population (inluding you and certainly me) is confronted with his own mistakes on a regular basis. It is irritating and humbling in a way, but a problem we have to deal with anyway. And debuggers can be a great help.
--
Frank
--
As to performance: if you're not writing a nuclear explosion simulator, Java's performance is probably adequate. (Think StarOffice here.)
--
I am an engineer with a Dutch search engine, and I had this discussion with my colleagues once: whether or not we should add link-redirection. We had a very good technical reason to do so, since the poularity of links can be used to improve the relevance ranking of the engine big time (cf. DirectHit). Now, this is a much better reason than just "adding another layer of abstraction". However, the proposal was immediately discarded by my superiors, on privacy grounds. They felt people were much too itchy about this stuff and we'd better leave it alone.
I am positive that Dejanews knew exactly what they were doing, and what the risks involved were.
It is not coincedence that a problem like this pops up at a company like Dejanews. Dejanews' core business has always been on the verge of privacy violation. We all love Dejanews because it helps us tame the mind boggling amount of information that flows through usenet every day. And DejaNews' value will only continue to increase as the years go by. Imagine what a valuable research tool it will be to the future anthropologist trying to trace the evolution of certain memes through the history of internet.
However, there is a darker side. The same power that we have all come to love allows us to trace individuals just as easy as those interesting memes. And you don't need a subpoena to do so. Imagine the amount of information you can find about yourself on DejaNews in fifty years! Even if you are a mildly active usenet personality, your whole life will be out there, ready to get datamined by any dirt-digger, biographer, stalker or power-hungry megacorporation.
Sure, it's possible to "trick" DejaNews by using different aliases or email addresses. But that is a major pain in the *ss (try teaching your mum just how to do that), and forces you to actively defend your privacy instead of being able to trust yourself to remain reasonably anonymous. (And besides that, you can pretty sure that within a couple of years there will be plenty computing power to recognize a poster just by her verbal fingerprint instead of her email address. Think spelling errors here: how many people know how to spell "potatoe"?)
Dejanews has been a mixed blessing right from the start. It feeds on semi-private information and offers us a great tool in return. What we witness with the mail-click thing, is that people are irritated at the fact that they don't get anything in return for this information, not at the bare fact that their privacy is violated. Their privacy has been systematically violated by Dejanews all along, and they didn't really care.
Maybe we should have something like robots.txt for usenet. That would help, at least a little bit.
--
Even if you don't finish this book, it is bound to upset you. It resonates on a lot of levels and gets on your nerves in a positive sense. Even if you disagree wholly with its message (which is easy to do) it provokes you to think and talk about it. I think that is a hallmark of a great book (although I would refrain from calling it
literature, as some folks do). In this respect it always reminds me of Pirsig's "Zen & the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance".
--