The only time it is really an issue is with production servers, which most of us dont run.
I want and need for my kernel to magically just run. Yes, I'm a Debian maintainer running unstable on my own machines, but kernels are neither my forte nor my interest.
Even tho easter eggs in any kind of "app" are "neato", they take up too many resources.
What, a few K of hard drive space? If you run all your programs from CD and stripped all non-essential files from your computer, I might understand this complaint. But most take no resource besides hard drive space when not running, and unless the programmers went way overboard, the space requirements should be under the radar screen on any modern hard drive.
A much smaller one is happening with books produced in a specific timeframe in the early 20th century (I disremember which). Because of the acid in the paper, they'll deteriorate and fall apart rapidly. Luckily, project gutenberg is making an effort in getting the info out of books this old.
Not completely. Project Gutenberg can only use books printed before 1923. When I go looking for books for Project Gutenberg, a lot of the ones in really bad shape (include acid damage) were printed between 1940 and the mid 1960s. I fear for the typewritten stuff, especially, as it's appropaching unreadability even if it's only 30 years old.
The other major worry is films. They were produced largely on nitrate stock, which is highly volitile and wasn't even stored by the Library of Congress, and without immediate help in some cases (not forthcoming for copyrighted films) those left may be lost forever.
Why not add a standard clause to all licenses that says if you can't be located by email [...], we have the right to change your license to anything else we damn well please
If I wanted to do that, why didn't I just release it to the public domain to begin with? That has so many loopholes, it's not even funny.
(as long as it's less restrictive)
This is meaningless. If you can put it under a BSD license, you can then make it as proprietary as you want.
Maybe I am just being paranoid, but has any body consider that this game may contain spyware enabling the CIA to increase their spying powers?
Ever heard of plausible deniability? Ever heard of hiding a needle in a haystack? People snoop around in game binaries (for reverse engineering, for one) all the time, and anything that comes up will be immediately connected to the US government. Stick it in Windows, and you have it on a billion desktops, and it's very hard to definitively paste it on anyone.
I never said propoganda didn't work. I said hidden messages didn't work.
why would the millitary invest so much money in developing a game if they didn't anticipate a return?
Why do you treat that as evil, though? Yes, they expect a return. That doesn't mean that they're using nefarious mind control tricks; from what I've played, it looks like a large part is trying to calm people's fears about boot camp. You can choose how or whether it effects you.
Besides, who knows what kinds of hidden messages the Army could be putting in these games to influence the youth of America.
Who knows what type of hidden messages they're putting on the TV? Or on the radio? Or in the clouds? (they have complete control over the weather, you know.)
There's no solid evidence of any effective hidden messages. If you can survive the propoganda of school and TV and movies and radio and billboards, I'm sure you can survive the propaganda of America's Army.
I expect that it [Fortran] will continue to stagnate as the people who only know it retire.
My cousin, who got his PhD a few years back in Chemical Engineering, wrote his thesis in Fortran, I assume because he was most familiar with the language. Intro to Engineering Programming at OSU teaches Fortran 90. There are no other Engineering Programming classes at OSU. So there's both new writing in Fortran, and a body of new users.
Notwithstanding all the "Linux trolls" who post "search Google" and "Here's a Chinese input project, it must be good," Linux just can't do Chinese (or Japanese) now.
Right. Because Japanese is the 5th most well translated language for KDE 3.0, and has over 35,000 strings by magic. And Emacs-MULE (written by Japanese) was written by Windows users. And 4 MB of manpages for Japanese were also translated by Windows users. And the 34 Japanese Debian developers are just spies.
The reason is simple: the studios and TV stations will always flip the flag to "not allowed to record".
It's interesting that Tom7, who posted a utility to turn off the "do not embed" bit on fonts (and got a DMCA letter for his troubles), did so because his font maker always made fonts with the "do not embed" bit and had no option not to set it.
I could go on and on but I expect to find Perl in 2023 [...], I have doubts about any other current language but C
And what do you think is going to happen to Fortran? Millions of lines of code don't go away over night, and engineers and physicists who only know Fortran aren't going to bother learning anything else.
Part of the problem is that PDAs and pads are both much more expensive than the remote control; a microphone is unreliable, hearing what you didn't intend for it to hear and missing what you did. At the current time, both need large amounts of computer power and you either have to train the individual in artifical ways of writing or speaking, or the computer to recognize each person. They aren't good cheap interfaces at this point in time.
There's no reason in this day and age that a cheap TV attached to a VCR shouldn't be able to let me scribble or say aloud
Sure there is. The current UI is dirt cheap to produce; both of those methods require expensive hardware to work.
a handheld display like my PDA
Why do people seem to think PDA's are ubiquitious? I don't have one; I can only think of one person I know of who has one. Maybe affluent buisness men and system administrators all have them, but us college students and fast food workers don't.
What has changed from the days of the three-knob television
You can express a dozen channels as a knob. You can't express a thousand channels as a knob, and no one going to want to flip through a thousand channels - heck, no one wants to read through a thousand-channel listing. You forgot abount recording at a certain time, too.
The personal computer and the VCR trashed over 3,000 years of intuitive tool design. Before 1976, there was never a consumer product that needed a twenty-page instruction booklet (like a VCR), much less the shelf of books needed to operate a PC.
Really? Many people would buy their Model T's piece by piece and assemble it as they got the pieces. People automatically know how to assemble Model T's by instinct, I guess, just like their fathers were born knowing how to ride a horse. And a chess board, well that's just obvious.
User interfaces are more complex because products are more complex. If you want the simplicity of a 1950's TV, then you can have it - at the cost of being limited to a handful of channels that can't be time-shifted. If you want a modern entertainment system that can record and play DVD's and will let you watch anything from a thousand channels when you want it, you're going to need someway to express those options. It has a certain irreducable complexity.
you need to scale your applicaiton to multiple CPUs so that you can throw hardware at the problem instead of solving it the right way
"Solving it the right way"? If you know how to solve the travelling salesman problem, or chess, or simulate the world's weather without throwing hardware at the problem, you really ought to publish it for the good of mankind.
threads don't make a lot of sense
Some problems are conceptually parellel; it almost always easist to write a procedure in a way that mirrors the way it's conceptualized.
you have all this extra context switching overhead,
So your multitasking system does 1001 context switches a millisecond rather than 1000. Woo hoo.
It works perfectly fine in non-threaded code, which _should_ be the majority (99%+) of code out there.
When I'm running a graphical program, the UI must not lock up, no matter what processing is going on in the background. I don't care how you solve that problem, but a simple use of threads is one of the simplest methods.
MNG, an extension to PNG, supports all of the above
But not PNG. TIFF was designed as the ultimate all-purpose image format, and does that job well. PNG was designed as the ultimate web image format, and does that job well. Adding stuff to PNG until it can do everything doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
PNG, on the other hand, uses Phil Katz's Deflate (LZSS on a 32 KB window, followed by Huffman coding), which makes smaller files than any of TIFF's three algorithms.
TIFF has a deflate compression scheme too, though not everyone supports it. TIFF can be smaller; CCITT Fax, which is designed for bilevel text, actually works better than PNG for bilevel text.
What does TIFF do that PNG doesn't?
JPEG. Multiple images in one picture; libtiff's registered tags allow for a 3D scan to be stored in one file as a series of slices. Thumbnails can be included by the same mechanism. It can also be used like PDF, in holding an entire document in one file. It provides for anyone to register new tags, for arbitary extension. It's an extraordinarily flexible file format.
Because everyone has a wireless connection to the net, and those working minimum wage to try and feed their kids should have to pay for one just to keep themselves safe. As well as the difficulty of checking everytime you buy something.
Let the consumers research the products they want to by
That's exactly what I want to do; lug around a several thousand page guide to which products kill people whenever I go to buy something, and try to figure out whether the X1034b has the same flaws as the X1034, or if I want to be the first to try out the J1-17.
If you don't read the owners manual for the new lawnmower you just bought, fire it up and the blade flies through the wall of your house; guess what? It's your fault plain and simple.
Guess what? The lawnmower company will throw money at you to go away, because they know you can win easily in civil court. No one knows, and no one can know all the intricate details of all their appliances; nor can we know all the details. People will screw up, and stuff must not be unreasonably dangerous when they do.
Also, where's the user manual for Gator? Lawn mower's don't sneak into my garage and do nasty things without my knowledge.
Counterpoint: ever see the little "Darwin" car emblems, spoofing the christian fish
Sure. But they aren't clothing - in many ways, it's considerably more anonymous than clothing, as you're usually either hidden behind the wheel or no where near your car. In any case, a lot of cars have religious stickers on them, and the Darwin emblem is hardly a clear statement of your faith; one could be athiest, agnostic, Buddist or even Christain (say, a biology teacher) and have one on your care.
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The only time it is really an issue is with production servers, which most of us dont run.
I want and need for my kernel to magically just run. Yes, I'm a Debian maintainer running unstable on my own machines, but kernels are neither my forte nor my interest.
Even tho easter eggs in any kind of "app" are "neato", they take up too many resources.
What, a few K of hard drive space? If you run all your programs from CD and stripped all non-essential files from your computer, I might understand this complaint. But most take no resource besides hard drive space when not running, and unless the programmers went way overboard, the space requirements should be under the radar screen on any modern hard drive.
A much smaller one is happening with books produced in a specific timeframe in the early 20th century (I disremember which). Because of the acid in the paper, they'll deteriorate and fall apart rapidly. Luckily, project gutenberg is making an effort in getting the info out of books this old.
Not completely. Project Gutenberg can only use books printed before 1923. When I go looking for books for Project Gutenberg, a lot of the ones in really bad shape (include acid damage) were printed between 1940 and the mid 1960s. I fear for the typewritten stuff, especially, as it's appropaching unreadability even if it's only 30 years old.
The other major worry is films. They were produced largely on nitrate stock, which is highly volitile and wasn't even stored by the Library of Congress, and without immediate help in some cases (not forthcoming for copyrighted films) those left may be lost forever.
Why not add a standard clause to all licenses that says if you can't be located by email [...], we have the right to change your license to anything else we damn well please
If I wanted to do that, why didn't I just release it to the public domain to begin with? That has so many loopholes, it's not even funny.
(as long as it's less restrictive)
This is meaningless. If you can put it under a BSD license, you can then make it as proprietary as you want.
Maybe I am just being paranoid, but has any body consider that this game may contain spyware enabling the CIA to increase their spying powers?
Ever heard of plausible deniability? Ever heard of hiding a needle in a haystack? People snoop around in game binaries (for reverse engineering, for one) all the time, and anything that comes up will be immediately connected to the US government. Stick it in Windows, and you have it on a billion desktops, and it's very hard to definitively paste it on anyone.
If propoganda doesn't work
I never said propoganda didn't work. I said hidden messages didn't work.
why would the millitary invest so much money in developing a game if they didn't anticipate a return?
Why do you treat that as evil, though? Yes, they expect a return. That doesn't mean that they're using nefarious mind control tricks; from what I've played, it looks like a large part is trying to calm people's fears about boot camp. You can choose how or whether it effects you.
Besides, who knows what kinds of hidden messages the Army could be putting in these games to influence the youth of America.
Who knows what type of hidden messages they're putting on the TV? Or on the radio? Or in the clouds? (they have complete control over the weather, you know.)
There's no solid evidence of any effective hidden messages. If you can survive the propoganda of school and TV and movies and radio and billboards, I'm sure you can survive the propaganda of America's Army.
I expect that it [Fortran] will continue to stagnate as the people who only know it retire.
My cousin, who got his PhD a few years back in Chemical Engineering, wrote his thesis in Fortran, I assume because he was most familiar with the language. Intro to Engineering Programming at OSU teaches Fortran 90. There are no other Engineering Programming classes at OSU. So there's both new writing in Fortran, and a body of new users.
Notwithstanding all the "Linux trolls" who post "search Google" and "Here's a Chinese input project, it must be good," Linux just can't do Chinese (or Japanese) now.
Right. Because Japanese is the 5th most well translated language for KDE 3.0, and has over 35,000 strings by magic. And Emacs-MULE (written by Japanese) was written by Windows users. And 4 MB of manpages for Japanese were also translated by Windows users. And the 34 Japanese Debian developers are just spies.
The reason is simple: the studios and TV stations will always flip the flag to "not allowed to record".
It's interesting that Tom7, who posted a utility to turn off the "do not embed" bit on fonts (and got a DMCA letter for his troubles), did so because his font maker always made fonts with the "do not embed" bit and had no option not to set it.
I could go on and on but I expect to find Perl in 2023 [...], I have doubts about any other current language but C
And what do you think is going to happen to Fortran? Millions of lines of code don't go away over night, and engineers and physicists who only know Fortran aren't going to bother learning anything else.
Part of the problem is that PDAs and pads are both much more expensive than the remote control; a microphone is unreliable, hearing what you didn't intend for it to hear and missing what you did. At the current time, both need large amounts of computer power and you either have to train the individual in artifical ways of writing or speaking, or the computer to recognize each person. They aren't good cheap interfaces at this point in time.
There's no reason in this day and age that a cheap TV attached to a VCR shouldn't be able to let me scribble or say aloud
Sure there is. The current UI is dirt cheap to produce; both of those methods require expensive hardware to work.
a handheld display like my PDA
Why do people seem to think PDA's are ubiquitious? I don't have one; I can only think of one person I know of who has one. Maybe affluent buisness men and system administrators all have them, but us college students and fast food workers don't.
What has changed from the days of the three-knob television
You can express a dozen channels as a knob. You can't express a thousand channels as a knob, and no one going to want to flip through a thousand channels - heck, no one wants to read through a thousand-channel listing. You forgot abount recording at a certain time, too.
In that case... fork and use IPC. It's not substantially more expensive and you wont have to ensure your parallel code is thread safe.
But then you're forced to serialize and deserialize all the data you need to share.
The personal computer and the VCR trashed over 3,000 years of intuitive tool design. Before 1976, there was never a consumer product that needed a twenty-page instruction booklet (like a VCR), much less the shelf of books needed to operate a PC.
Really? Many people would buy their Model T's piece by piece and assemble it as they got the pieces. People automatically know how to assemble Model T's by instinct, I guess, just like their fathers were born knowing how to ride a horse. And a chess board, well that's just obvious.
User interfaces are more complex because products are more complex. If you want the simplicity of a 1950's TV, then you can have it - at the cost of being limited to a handful of channels that can't be time-shifted. If you want a modern entertainment system that can record and play DVD's and will let you watch anything from a thousand channels when you want it, you're going to need someway to express those options. It has a certain irreducable complexity.
you need to scale your applicaiton to multiple CPUs so that you can throw hardware at the problem instead of solving it the right way
"Solving it the right way"? If you know how to solve the travelling salesman problem, or chess, or simulate the world's weather without throwing hardware at the problem, you really ought to publish it for the good of mankind.
threads don't make a lot of sense
Some problems are conceptually parellel; it almost always easist to write a procedure in a way that mirrors the way it's conceptualized.
you have all this extra context switching overhead,
So your multitasking system does 1001 context switches a millisecond rather than 1000. Woo hoo.
It works perfectly fine in non-threaded code, which _should_ be the majority (99%+) of code out there.
When I'm running a graphical program, the UI must not lock up, no matter what processing is going on in the background. I don't care how you solve that problem, but a simple use of threads is one of the simplest methods.
Fighter pilots do it all the time for considerably less reward.
But fighter pilots are either glory seekers or patriots, and do it because authority tells them to - an entirely different cup of tea.
MNG, an extension to PNG, supports all of the above
But not PNG. TIFF was designed as the ultimate all-purpose image format, and does that job well. PNG was designed as the ultimate web image format, and does that job well. Adding stuff to PNG until it can do everything doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
PNG, on the other hand, uses Phil Katz's Deflate (LZSS on a 32 KB window, followed by Huffman coding), which makes smaller files than any of TIFF's three algorithms.
TIFF has a deflate compression scheme too, though not everyone supports it. TIFF can be smaller; CCITT Fax, which is designed for bilevel text, actually works better than PNG for bilevel text.
What does TIFF do that PNG doesn't?
JPEG. Multiple images in one picture; libtiff's registered tags allow for a 3D scan to be stored in one file as a series of slices. Thumbnails can be included by the same mechanism. It can also be used like PDF, in holding an entire document in one file. It provides for anyone to register new tags, for arbitary extension. It's an extraordinarily flexible file format.
Use your wireless PDA/Cellphone/laptop
Because everyone has a wireless connection to the net, and those working minimum wage to try and feed their kids should have to pay for one just to keep themselves safe. As well as the difficulty of checking everytime you buy something.
Let the consumers research the products they want to by
That's exactly what I want to do; lug around a several thousand page guide to which products kill people whenever I go to buy something, and try to figure out whether the X1034b has the same flaws as the X1034, or if I want to be the first to try out the J1-17.
I can't get around it.
Actually, people have shown you the right way to get around it. abs (X - 1.0) < epsilion.
If you're hung up on ==, I should also point out that we ran into this when doing boundary conditions such as >,<,>=, and <=.
Floating point numbers aren't exact. If you need something exact, then use fixed point (carefully) or integers.
If you don't read the owners manual for the new lawnmower you just bought, fire it up and the blade flies through the wall of your house; guess what? It's your fault plain and simple.
Guess what? The lawnmower company will throw money at you to go away, because they know you can win easily in civil court. No one knows, and no one can know all the intricate details of all their appliances; nor can we know all the details. People will screw up, and stuff must not be unreasonably dangerous when they do.
Also, where's the user manual for Gator? Lawn mower's don't sneak into my garage and do nasty things without my knowledge.
Counterpoint: ever see the little "Darwin" car emblems, spoofing the christian fish
Sure. But they aren't clothing - in many ways, it's considerably more anonymous than clothing, as you're usually either hidden behind the wheel or no where near your car. In any case, a lot of cars have religious stickers on them, and the Darwin emblem is hardly a clear statement of your faith; one could be athiest, agnostic, Buddist or even Christain (say, a biology teacher) and have one on your care.