I remember reading an article in Dr. Dobbs journal from something like 1993 about how Adleman used DNA computation to solve an instance of the travelling salesman problem. How is this work really revolutionary then, aside from demonstrating the use of molecular computation techniques on a more complex problem. As far as I can tell this isn't 'news' so much as it has already been done, published and publicised before, by the same physicist/mathematician/biochemist.
I hear a lot of people describing Slashdot as a community, a term that would to me suggest an group of individuals who know one another on a personal basis and regularly communicate in a structured environment. Truly, how many of you out there actually know other posters as friends or even associates? If you are like me the people here are just a collection of strangers that I can only identify based upon their verbal ability and interest in a specific topic. I would be interested if anyone else has a different take on the/. experience, but to me it is just a source for the opinions of strangers, albeit perhaps largely well educated and articulate ones. Do any of you out there regard other posters as friends? Would you interact with them socially or in any other context as this forum?
Fear and Loathing in Vegas to Harry Potter...
on
Review: Harry Potter
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Hunter S. Thompson and Oscar Ascosta running around in an drug frenzy trashing Vegas hotel rooms to Harry Potter and Hogwarts. That would be a rather broad recent career arc for Mr. Gilliam wouldn't it? Though I suppose whatshisname of LoTR fame (Pete Jackson?) did 'Meet the Feebles' so I suppose its not without preceedent that directors can do both very 'ugly' works and mass marketable blockbuster fantasy style material. However if Jackson did upleasant works it was more to do a self parodying exploitation type film - there really wasn't much creative or thought provoking in that movie, it was just the new path down exploitation film making that you probably weren't expecting.
I think there is maybe the impression that because Gilliam did well known 'fantasy' films like Munchausen and Time Bandits that he is a superb fantasist. However despite those accomplishments I think the type of movies he tends to gravitate towards are generally too dark and unsettling and overly cerebral to be commercial grade fantasy. Though he nearly exclusively deals with fantastic subjects the flow of his movies generally don't follow an escapist mold at all, rather they tend to dwell on the absurdity of escapism and the plots tend emphasis how unromantic and far from the 'fantastic' mold actual life can be. For instance, look at how much trouble he went to showing how arbitrary and upoetic most of the deaths in Time Bandits were, and Munchausen only stayed afloat by constantly emphasising its own absurdity and the complete unreality of the events it described - the fact that the story of Munchausen was not real but nonetheless emotionally appealing was one of the main thrusts of that movie. In fact in every one of his films it is the psychology of fantasy and how it is used to get along in life rather than an exploration of the actually fantastic that is of primary thematic importance. Most of Gilliam's work is more about dealing with the fact that people's dreams and fantastic notions are by nature almost always contrary to what will actually happen in their lives rather than just reiterating the rather trite stereotypes of escapism. There is a reason that Brazil is considered his cornerstone work, and its not because his baroque visual style was first fully realized in a movie with that film, rather it was because the movie was about the nightmare of being psychologically dependant on fantasy that will never come true.
So I agree that Gilliam would not be a good director for this film any more than he would be a good director for Star Wars and LoTR even though Harry Potter is a little more self consciously surrealistic in nature. The simple fact is that Gilliam does not do fantasy for its own sake, rather what he does tends to usually gravitates more towards drama where the primary tension resides in the disparity between character's fantastic notions and the more unromantic situations of their actual lives.
i honestly I think if there was a major director who would be good on this project it would be Tim Burton. He is much adept at doing atmospheric fantasy while staying much more true to mainstream entertainment values than Gilliam.
What ever happened to Construx (sp)? Those little boxes of beams and corner pieces were pretty much the ultimate combination of easy plastic tangibility and sophisticated looking coolness. Much better than anything else on the market for the serious child prototype designing prodigy
Object oriented Glagolithic
on
ACM vs. RIAA
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
I don't know anything about the shakespeare programming language or why I can't post comments about it or for what reason it makes Slashdot's color scheme go all funky, but I remember clearly the great programming leaps from before my time.
** GLAGOL 61 **
GLAGOL 61 was the forerunner of several undeservedly obscure computer languages, such as Barfy, SNET, and %++. Inspired by an incident (recorded in a humorous note in the Journal of the ACM by Dr. Harry Buttle) in which a moth was squashed by the print head of a primitive Sperry "wrecking-ball" teletype, Buttle invented the insect-oriented programming paradigm and created a language for the representation of algebraic and algorithmic formulae whose symbols consisted exclusively of
vowels, used as reserved key-letters, and
bugs squashed on the page.
GLAGOL (short for GeneraL AlGOrithmic Language) used a specially designed terminal whose printing element was a modified flyswatter. Used in a bug-filled room (the prototype was set up in a dormitory shower room at William and Mary that had a broken window), it required the use of rubber type to set vowels. Later, the rubber-type mechanism was abandoned in favor of a carriage-mounted Dymo labelmaker. GLAGOL 61 also required special processing hardware for optimized execution. Source code was represented internally by larval grubs, and executable code by pupae, nestled in a unique "honeycomb store" on a rotating surface of uniform negative Gaussian curvature, which doubled as an element in the machine's analog differential analyzer, and as an occasional dressmaker's dummy, eventually leading to a grotesque incident which I shall not offend the reader's sensibilities by recounting.
GLAGOL 61's economy of expression may be glimpsed in the following two-line decimation algorithm for a fast Fourier transform [I have translated the insect splotches to ASCII as best I can]:
(see ' http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/ ' for algorithm text)
Rarely has the essence of an algorithm shone through so clearly on the printed page; of modern languages, only APL is comparable.
(tip of the pin to Matt McIrvin for actually writing this stuff -- I am merely the scribe who happened to get lost one day in the oldest, deepest vaults of obscurity to learn about it.)
Never fear, slashdotties. I am, as always, compelled to explain the joke for those lacking your encyclopedic knowledge of computer science.
GLAGOL 61 was the forerunner of several undeservedly obscure computer languages, such as Barfy, SNET, and %++. Inspired by an incident (recorded in a humorous note in the Journal of the ACM by Dr. Harry Buttle) in which a moth was squashed by the print head of a primitive Sperry "wrecking-ball" teletype, Buttle invented the insect-oriented programming paradigm and created a language for the representation of algebraic and algorithmic formulae whose symbols consisted exclusively of
vowels, used as reserved key-letters, and
bugs squashed on the page.
GLAGOL (short for GeneraL AlGOrithmic Language) used a specially designed terminal whose printing element was a modified flyswatter. Used in a bug-filled room (the prototype was set up in a dormitory shower room at William and Mary that had a broken window), it required the use of rubber type to set vowels. Later, the rubber-type mechanism was abandoned in favor of a carriage-mounted Dymo labelmaker. GLAGOL 61 also required special processing hardware for optimized execution. Source code was represented internally by larval grubs, and executable code by pupae, nestled in a unique "honeycomb store" on a rotating surface of uniform negative Gaussian curvature, which doubled as an element in the machine's analog differential analyzer, and as an occasional dressmaker's dummy, eventually leading to a grotesque incident which I shall not offend the reader's sensibilities by recounting.
GLAGOL 61's economy of expression may be glimpsed in the following two-line decimation algorithm for a fast Fourier transform [I have translated the insect splotches to ASCII as best I can]:
(random stream of Glagol doesn't pass Slashdot's "lameness filter." Its painful but true
Rarely has the essence of an algorithm shone through so clearly on the printed page; of modern languages, only APL is comparable.
Didn't Steven hawking propose that the reason that you have 3 dimensions instead of 2 is because if we had two dogs would fall apart owing to their digestive systems cutting them in half? I personally much prefer the theory that with three dimensions its possible to be lost, ala the measure theoretic probability of an infinite random walk returning to the origin infinitely often in two dimensions (1), versus the similar probability of returning to the origin infinitely often in 3 dimensions (0). Makes good sense to me.
you know worm holes and time travel aren't really accepted as such outside the minds of Jack Sarfatti, Rudy Rucker, bored middleschool kids and science fiction writers. Quantum computation, on the other hand, has something behind it, but I don't think the superposition of q-bit values for hard combinatoric problems will be quite what most people are looking for in the term "supercomputer", as supercomputers are generally regarded as things that perform operations incredibly fast whereas the quantum computers specialize in attacking problems that under traditional methods exhibit explosive complexity as the size of the problem increases. Finally, snake oil is entirely real and has been duping the gullible masses since the beginning of human civilization.
I remember they had a big plastic thing that looked like a Twister board that you had to stomp on really fast such as to simulate 'running' so that you may play "Track and Field" (which shipped w/ the original NES with). Quite a nightmare for anyone with their children's bedroom upstairs and squeaky floors.
C# is, if I am not mistaken, a blend of Visual Basic Elements with C (++?) syntax, minus pointers and other potential "disaster-engine" type constructs, all stirred into a bland Windows Only framework. Mono, if I am not mistaken, is the disease that makes you miss 4 months of school for kissing someone.
Boy this is such a fun game, especially because once you start writing in this mindset it generates the very real possibility of never ending. Though if this topic caused Slashdot to degenerate into a slapfest straight out of the third grade that in and of itself would probably prove somebody's point about us, though I have no idea whose or to what end.
This may have worked for the first hundred, or first 1,000 perhaps. But alas, we peons of the world seemingly will not be able to download 600 megabytes of OS crap over our 56k connections. Alas. Also its illegal, and if you really want to download close to a gigabyte of OS binaries onto your hard disk, why not just go for Linux-Mandrake?
I think you are off topic. Strange though, as almost nobody here seems to be actually on topic, aside from the basic pondering of concrete rowboats and wondering if the propulsion mechanism has anything to do wih harnessing the energy of polarized repressed crutons and why talking about physics that one has only a very vague conception on an internet discussion forum shouldn't itself violate any major conservation laws. I personally think the that the theory that the flexible concrete resonance boat works by propelling itself forward against the magnetic field is the best hypothesis so far since it succinctly describes why this conversation tends to spin around in tiny little circles (vortices of magnetic flux) rather than moving forward. For extra credit, I will accept a full page explanation of why the Heisenberg uncertanty principle prevents one from citing an exact reference for anything.
CSS - yet another language vaguely like everything you already know yet just incompatable enough to generate a million incomprehensible compile errors from even the simplest of tasks. Don't even THINK of trying to port anything to this. Also, we are running out of acronyms. Help
Owen Sellwood
Official Maintainer : "C--" and "Idio-C" -- for when the languages that already work perfectly for everything just aren't enough
Slashdot Mirror
I remember reading an article in Dr. Dobbs journal from something like 1993 about how Adleman used DNA computation to solve an instance of the travelling salesman problem. How is this work really revolutionary then, aside from demonstrating the use of molecular computation techniques on a more complex problem. As far as I can tell this isn't 'news' so much as it has already been done, published and publicised before, by the same physicist/mathematician/biochemist.
I hear a lot of people describing Slashdot as a community, a term that would to me suggest an group of individuals who know one another on a personal basis and regularly communicate in a structured environment. Truly, how many of you out there actually know other posters as friends or even associates? If you are like me the people here are just a collection of strangers that I can only identify based upon their verbal ability and interest in a specific topic. I would be interested if anyone else has a different take on the /. experience, but to me it is just a source for the opinions of strangers, albeit perhaps largely well educated and articulate ones. Do any of you out there regard other posters as friends? Would you interact with them socially or in any other context as this forum?
Hunter S. Thompson and Oscar Ascosta running around in an drug frenzy trashing Vegas hotel rooms to Harry Potter and Hogwarts. That would be a rather broad recent career arc for Mr. Gilliam wouldn't it? Though I suppose whatshisname of LoTR fame (Pete Jackson?) did 'Meet the Feebles' so I suppose its not without preceedent that directors can do both very 'ugly' works and mass marketable blockbuster fantasy style material. However if Jackson did upleasant works it was more to do a self parodying exploitation type film - there really wasn't much creative or thought provoking in that movie, it was just the new path down exploitation film making that you probably weren't expecting.
I think there is maybe the impression that because Gilliam did well known 'fantasy' films like Munchausen and Time Bandits that he is a superb fantasist. However despite those accomplishments I think the type of movies he tends to gravitate towards are generally too dark and unsettling and overly cerebral to be commercial grade fantasy. Though he nearly exclusively deals with fantastic subjects the flow of his movies generally don't follow an escapist mold at all, rather they tend to dwell on the absurdity of escapism and the plots tend emphasis how unromantic and far from the 'fantastic' mold actual life can be. For instance, look at how much trouble he went to showing how arbitrary and upoetic most of the deaths in Time Bandits were, and Munchausen only stayed afloat by constantly emphasising its own absurdity and the complete unreality of the events it described - the fact that the story of Munchausen was not real but nonetheless emotionally appealing was one of the main thrusts of that movie. In fact in every one of his films it is the psychology of fantasy and how it is used to get along in life rather than an exploration of the actually fantastic that is of primary thematic importance. Most of Gilliam's work is more about dealing with the fact that people's dreams and fantastic notions are by nature almost always contrary to what will actually happen in their lives rather than just reiterating the rather trite stereotypes of escapism. There is a reason that Brazil is considered his cornerstone work, and its not because his baroque visual style was first fully realized in a movie with that film, rather it was because the movie was about the nightmare of being psychologically dependant on fantasy that will never come true.
So I agree that Gilliam would not be a good director for this film any more than he would be a good director for Star Wars and LoTR even though Harry Potter is a little more self consciously surrealistic in nature. The simple fact is that Gilliam does not do fantasy for its own sake, rather what he does tends to usually gravitates more towards drama where the primary tension resides in the disparity between character's fantastic notions and the more unromantic situations of their actual lives.
i honestly I think if there was a major director who would be good on this project it would be Tim Burton. He is much adept at doing atmospheric fantasy while staying much more true to mainstream entertainment values than Gilliam.
What ever happened to Construx (sp)? Those little boxes of beams and corner pieces were pretty much the ultimate combination of easy plastic tangibility and sophisticated looking coolness. Much better than anything else on the market for the serious child prototype designing prodigy
I don't know anything about the shakespeare programming language or why I can't post comments about it or for what reason it makes Slashdot's color scheme go all funky, but I remember clearly the great programming leaps from before my time.
** GLAGOL 61 **
GLAGOL 61 was the forerunner of several undeservedly obscure computer languages, such as Barfy, SNET, and %++. Inspired by an incident (recorded in a humorous note in the Journal of the ACM by Dr. Harry Buttle) in which a moth was squashed by the print head of a primitive Sperry "wrecking-ball" teletype, Buttle invented the insect-oriented programming paradigm and created a language for the representation of algebraic and algorithmic formulae whose symbols consisted exclusively of
vowels, used as reserved key-letters, and
bugs squashed on the page.
GLAGOL (short for GeneraL AlGOrithmic Language) used a specially designed terminal whose printing element was a modified flyswatter. Used in a bug-filled room (the prototype was set up in a dormitory shower room at William and Mary that had a broken window), it required the use of rubber type to set vowels. Later, the rubber-type mechanism was abandoned in favor of a carriage-mounted Dymo labelmaker. GLAGOL 61 also required special processing hardware for optimized execution. Source code was represented internally by larval grubs, and executable code by pupae, nestled in a unique "honeycomb store" on a rotating surface of uniform negative Gaussian curvature, which doubled as an element in the machine's analog differential analyzer, and as an occasional dressmaker's dummy, eventually leading to a grotesque incident which I shall not offend the reader's sensibilities by recounting.
GLAGOL 61's economy of expression may be glimpsed in the following two-line decimation algorithm for a fast Fourier transform [I have translated the insect splotches to ASCII as best I can]:
(see ' http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/ ' for algorithm text)
Rarely has the essence of an algorithm shone through so clearly on the printed page; of modern languages, only APL is comparable.
(tip of the pin to Matt McIrvin for actually writing this stuff -- I am merely the scribe who happened to get lost one day in the oldest, deepest vaults of obscurity to learn about it.)
Never fear, slashdotties. I am, as always, compelled to explain the joke for those lacking your encyclopedic knowledge of computer science.
GLAGOL 61 was the forerunner of several undeservedly obscure computer languages, such as Barfy, SNET, and %++. Inspired by an incident (recorded in a humorous note in the Journal of the ACM by Dr. Harry Buttle) in which a moth was squashed by the print head of a primitive Sperry "wrecking-ball" teletype, Buttle invented the insect-oriented programming paradigm and created a language for the representation of algebraic and algorithmic formulae whose symbols consisted exclusively of
vowels, used as reserved key-letters, and
bugs squashed on the page.
GLAGOL (short for GeneraL AlGOrithmic Language) used a specially designed terminal whose printing element was a modified flyswatter. Used in a bug-filled room (the prototype was set up in a dormitory shower room at William and Mary that had a broken window), it required the use of rubber type to set vowels. Later, the rubber-type mechanism was abandoned in favor of a carriage-mounted Dymo labelmaker. GLAGOL 61 also required special processing hardware for optimized execution. Source code was represented internally by larval grubs, and executable code by pupae, nestled in a unique "honeycomb store" on a rotating surface of uniform negative Gaussian curvature, which doubled as an element in the machine's analog differential analyzer, and as an occasional dressmaker's dummy, eventually leading to a grotesque incident which I shall not offend the reader's sensibilities by recounting.
GLAGOL 61's economy of expression may be glimpsed in the following two-line decimation algorithm for a fast Fourier transform [I have translated the insect splotches to ASCII as best I can]:
(random stream of Glagol doesn't pass Slashdot's "lameness filter." Its painful but true
Rarely has the essence of an algorithm shone through so clearly on the printed page; of modern languages, only APL is comparable.
Didn't Steven hawking propose that the reason that you have 3 dimensions instead of 2 is because if we had two dogs would fall apart owing to their digestive systems cutting them in half? I personally much prefer the theory that with three dimensions its possible to be lost, ala the measure theoretic probability of an infinite random walk returning to the origin infinitely often in two dimensions (1), versus the similar probability of returning to the origin infinitely often in 3 dimensions (0). Makes good sense to me.
you know worm holes and time travel aren't really accepted as such outside the minds of Jack Sarfatti, Rudy Rucker, bored middleschool kids and science fiction writers. Quantum computation, on the other hand, has something behind it, but I don't think the superposition of q-bit values for hard combinatoric problems will be quite what most people are looking for in the term "supercomputer", as supercomputers are generally regarded as things that perform operations incredibly fast whereas the quantum computers specialize in attacking problems that under traditional methods exhibit explosive complexity as the size of the problem increases. Finally, snake oil is entirely real and has been duping the gullible masses since the beginning of human civilization.
I remember they had a big plastic thing that looked like a Twister board that you had to stomp on really fast such as to simulate 'running' so that you may play "Track and Field" (which shipped w/ the original NES with). Quite a nightmare for anyone with their children's bedroom upstairs and squeaky floors.
C# is, if I am not mistaken, a blend of Visual Basic Elements with C (++?) syntax, minus pointers and other potential "disaster-engine" type constructs, all stirred into a bland Windows Only framework. Mono, if I am not mistaken, is the disease that makes you miss 4 months of school for kissing someone.
I don't want to go to your CS department if the keyboards aren't broken like this guy's. Debugging inline assembly is no fun w/out a broken keyboard> This post is © Kyle.
Boy this is such a fun game, especially because once you start writing in this mindset it generates the very real possibility of never ending. Though if this topic caused Slashdot to degenerate into a slapfest straight out of the third grade that in and of itself would probably prove somebody's point about us, though I have no idea whose or to what end.
This may have worked for the first hundred, or first 1,000 perhaps. But alas, we peons of the world seemingly will not be able to download 600 megabytes of OS crap over our 56k connections. Alas. Also its illegal, and if you really want to download close to a gigabyte of OS binaries onto your hard disk, why not just go for Linux-Mandrake?
I think you are off topic. Strange though, as almost nobody here seems to be actually on topic, aside from the basic pondering of concrete rowboats and wondering if the propulsion mechanism has anything to do wih harnessing the energy of polarized repressed crutons and why talking about physics that one has only a very vague conception on an internet discussion forum shouldn't itself violate any major conservation laws. I personally think the that the theory that the flexible concrete resonance boat works by propelling itself forward against the magnetic field is the best hypothesis so far since it succinctly describes why this conversation tends to spin around in tiny little circles (vortices of magnetic flux) rather than moving forward. For extra credit, I will accept a full page explanation of why the Heisenberg uncertanty principle prevents one from citing an exact reference for anything.
CSS - yet another language vaguely like everything you already know yet just incompatable enough to generate a million incomprehensible compile errors from even the simplest of tasks. Don't even THINK of trying to port anything to this. Also, we are running out of acronyms. Help Owen Sellwood Official Maintainer : "C--" and "Idio-C" -- for when the languages that already work perfectly for everything just aren't enough