Well the art of sending a rocket up has been long mastered by thousands of amateur around the world. I'd say the hard part is more about following a price tragectory (like going to orbit), maintaining life conditions aboard, etc...
This guy is not trying to do anything like that - he just want to go as high as possible, then get back alive. He isn't aiming for a precise tragectory ("up" is the flying plan) and isn't planning on staying in space either. Doesn't sound all that impossible to do. Remember we are not in the 60s anymore, a lots of modern technology and materials are available for cheap and in quantity.
Being a PHP coder I'd really love an OODBMS but then, amongst the few that exists, none of them can be interfaced with PHP. Most of them are geared at Java or C++ (which are much better OO languages than PHP) but then, that's not what many web developper use for their apps !
How about reverse-engineering randomness ? Make a file of random datas, then compress it using various algorithm, then try to make it less compressable, and repeat. Then call the results "pure randomness" (whatever that can be;)
Maybe because he has a lot of code written for MySQL and PostgreSQL lacks some basic features MySQL has ?
Last time I checked (a few months ago) :
- PostgreSQL doesn't has any AUTO_INCREMENT attribute. You can make external counters and then attach them to a column, but what a complex way of doing something simple
- PostgreSQL use "large object interface" to handle blob columns. It really really sucks, as you can't just put your binary datas into your SQL query and have to deal with complex and proprietary API calls.
- PostgreSQL severly lacks documentation. No one will want to read the source code to know how to write his queries
and so one... so far I've looked myself at migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL, and came to the conclusion that both are severely crippled, but in very different ways.
The problem of MySQL is not bad admins, the real problem of MySQL is that it's lacking a lot of very basic features that every other DB out there have. You still can't even make a simple nested SELECT in this thing !
Beside, Sleepycat DB isn't really competing with Oracle, DB2, Informix or even MySQL. It doesn't have any SQL query language, so one needs to use the proprietary API to access it, which is a turn off for many programmers (me included).
Although MySQL is nice - if one really wants a free database today he ought to check Interbase. It's free - but has much more important functionnalities that MySQL totally lack (consistency, triggers, etc...).
Actually Delphi programs runs as fast as any good C++ compiler (the compiler backend is the same as Borland C++). As for the compile times, they are A LOT SHORTERr with Pascal/Delphi than any C++ compiler (takes 1 or 2 second to rebuild entirely a large project, as oppososed to the minutes (hours) required for any large C++ program compilation). Developping is fast too (that's what RAD stands for)
Delphi does compile everything to native - and bundles all required components into the executable (no necessary.dll lying around like with Microsoft products). Delphi and C++ Builder have a common compilation backend which is fed by either a Object Pascal or C++ interpreter, and they come bundled with a full set of components written in Object Pascal (and that C++ Builder can interface with C++). Quite a big demonstration of how Object Pascal and C++ are similar in capabilities and concept.
Also, there are social implications - unemployment and the death of an industry.
The industry ? Well it will have to give up on polluting the planet with all this nice C02 the US electic industry seems to love so much. As for the workers, well, someone will have to make and operate those fusion reactor... last time I checked, they don't use people anymore to grow cotton in Alabama... an industry always has to die or change somehow, and it's not always so bad for its workers.
You got a good point here. But C++ Builder is really just "Delphi with an extra C++ interpreter". But it's really Delphi and Pascal under the hood (it compiles and mix Pascal and C++ into the same programs and the components are those of Delphi)
Indeed - although I always been wondering about the sanity of writing Windows apps in C++ when a RAD tool like Delphi offer as much power without the hassle of dealing with the ugly and painfull MFC or other low level API calls. Why bother coding every fuc* event for every widget when you can just drag and drop said widget with a RAD tool ?
Only reason I can see is portability... and then, it would be wiser to code the logic in C++ into a DLL and link it against a GUI in Delphi or even (gasp!)Visual Basic.
Does anyone knows a free PHP-compatible object database ? I'm fed up to death with SQL transactions which are bulky and inefficient when interfacing with Web pages. A persistent-transactionnal object database is my wet dream...
Just seems there'll finally be a PalmOS PDA that isn't totally retarded compared to the PocketPC. I've always thought the 160x160 pixel screen of PalmOS devices was really lame compared to 320x240/16 bits screen of PocketPCs.
Oddly enough, as times pass and IE gains market share, it gets MORE standard compliant than it ever was. The new IE 6 even goes as far as not being compatible with IE 5.5 and below so that it is more strictly compliant with HTML 4.0, XHTML and CSS 1 & 2 (don't worry, there's a switch to drop the compatibility mode and use the strict standard mode, the compatibily mode being run by default).
One good thing with the lack of competition in browsers is that Microsoft doesn't feel the need to divert from the standard and introduce new funky tags. I'm not saying this won't change to something worse, or that we won't see "Windows only" functions spring back to life, but for now IE 6 is the most standard compliant browser ever, while being the one who face the smallest competition ever.
Please before flaming me go read the IE 6 preview papers first...
You can play ultima VII (and Serpent Isle) with Exult : http://exult.sourceforge.net/
As the original executable required a pure blank DOS boot, they have rewritten the whole engine from scratch and it now works on a lots of different platforms (MacOS included). You still need the original datafiles...
Unless there's a leak somewhere in a pipe or something get stuck.
Well you are probably commuting on a horse, as you wouldn't trust your life to a car that suddently won't have any breaks. Face it, you can't go against progress, so like it or not fly-by-wire is here to stay, they use on modern jet fighters too (and even Boing is retiring the old hydraulic system on its civil planes).
Actually, as a whole, the European economy (in GNP) is slightly higher than the US, and hence the world's biggest economy (depending if you treat it as a meta-country or just country by country). And the US trade balance is way way negative, while Europe one is positive. US is just surviving because of the huge debt it can build. You can't live forever with a negative trade balance. Airbus vs Boing is just the perfect example of this : an old US company, surviving with a decaying catalog of planes designed in the 70s, fighting a 20 yo company with brand new designs and concepts.
java : well plenty of sites use java for usefull apps (although I'm not fond of them), or it's used on banners. If the banner makes the browser crash, then bye bye slashdot and all the sites with java banners
javascript : quite usefull in forms
flash : same as java, often used for banners... and banners are everywhere
I have the same configuration (IE5.5/W2K), but when it crashes it's only once or twice a month, and I use it 10 hours a day ! Compare that to Mozilla or Netscape 4.x on Linux that was crashing on me every 20 to 30 minutes (basically as soon as a java/javascript/flash code would appear)...
Slashdot Mirror
where do you think the electricity to run it came from
...
Over here it comes from a nuclear power plant. Oh yeah, I forgot Bush Jr was in the pocket of the oil industry
That's what the horse said. (very private joke for fellow Ultima fans :)
Well the art of sending a rocket up has been long mastered by thousands of amateur around the world. I'd say the hard part is more about following a price tragectory (like going to orbit), maintaining life conditions aboard, etc...
This guy is not trying to do anything like that - he just want to go as high as possible, then get back alive. He isn't aiming for a precise tragectory ("up" is the flying plan) and isn't planning on staying in space either. Doesn't sound all that impossible to do. Remember we are not in the 60s anymore, a lots of modern technology and materials are available for cheap and in quantity.
Nice troll. You'd be surprised at what people (me included) do with PHP. But then you are probably a bitter CF or ASP developper...
Being a PHP coder I'd really love an OODBMS but then, amongst the few that exists, none of them can be interfaced with PHP. Most of them are geared at Java or C++ (which are much better OO languages than PHP) but then, that's not what many web developper use for their apps !
How about reverse-engineering randomness ? Make a file of random datas, then compress it using various algorithm, then try to make it less compressable, and repeat. Then call the results "pure randomness" (whatever that can be ;)
Maybe because he has a lot of code written for MySQL and PostgreSQL lacks some basic features MySQL has ?
Last time I checked (a few months ago) :
- PostgreSQL doesn't has any AUTO_INCREMENT attribute. You can make external counters and then attach them to a column, but what a complex way of doing something simple
- PostgreSQL use "large object interface" to handle blob columns. It really really sucks, as you can't just put your binary datas into your SQL query and have to deal with complex and proprietary API calls.
- PostgreSQL severly lacks documentation. No one will want to read the source code to know how to write his queries
and so one... so far I've looked myself at migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL, and came to the conclusion that both are severely crippled, but in very different ways.
The problem of MySQL is not bad admins, the real problem of MySQL is that it's lacking a lot of very basic features that every other DB out there have. You still can't even make a simple nested SELECT in this thing !
Beside, Sleepycat DB isn't really competing with Oracle, DB2, Informix or even MySQL. It doesn't have any SQL query language, so one needs to use the proprietary API to access it, which is a turn off for many programmers (me included).
Although MySQL is nice - if one really wants a free database today he ought to check Interbase. It's free - but has much more important functionnalities that MySQL totally lack (consistency, triggers, etc...).
Actually Delphi programs runs as fast as any good C++ compiler (the compiler backend is the same as Borland C++). As for the compile times, they are A LOT SHORTERr with Pascal/Delphi than any C++ compiler (takes 1 or 2 second to rebuild entirely a large project, as oppososed to the minutes (hours) required for any large C++ program compilation). Developping is fast too (that's what RAD stands for)
Delphi does compile everything to native - and bundles all required components into the executable (no necessary .dll lying around like with Microsoft products). Delphi and C++ Builder have a common compilation backend which is fed by either a Object Pascal or C++ interpreter, and they come bundled with a full set of components written in Object Pascal (and that C++ Builder can interface with C++). Quite a big demonstration of how Object Pascal and C++ are similar in capabilities and concept.
Also, there are social implications - unemployment and the death of an industry.
The industry ? Well it will have to give up on polluting the planet with all this nice C02 the US electic industry seems to love so much. As for the workers, well, someone will have to make and operate those fusion reactor... last time I checked, they don't use people anymore to grow cotton in Alabama... an industry always has to die or change somehow, and it's not always so bad for its workers.
You got a good point here. But C++ Builder is really just "Delphi with an extra C++ interpreter". But it's really Delphi and Pascal under the hood (it compiles and mix Pascal and C++ into the same programs and the components are those of Delphi)
Indeed - although I always been wondering about the sanity of writing Windows apps in C++ when a RAD tool like Delphi offer as much power without the hassle of dealing with the ugly and painfull MFC or other low level API calls. Why bother coding every fuc* event for every widget when you can just drag and drop said widget with a RAD tool ?
Only reason I can see is portability... and then, it would be wiser to code the logic in C++ into a DLL and link it against a GUI in Delphi or even (gasp!)Visual Basic.
Cost 2xOracle ? Ugh. I think I'll keep writing object wrappers around SQL queries for now.
Does anyone knows a free PHP-compatible object database ? I'm fed up to death with SQL transactions which are bulky and inefficient when interfacing with Web pages. A persistent-transactionnal object database is my wet dream...
Just seems there'll finally be a PalmOS PDA that isn't totally retarded compared to the PocketPC. I've always thought the 160x160 pixel screen of PalmOS devices was really lame compared to 320x240/16 bits screen of PocketPCs.
Oddly enough, as times pass and IE gains market share, it gets MORE standard compliant than it ever was. The new IE 6 even goes as far as not being compatible with IE 5.5 and below so that it is more strictly compliant with HTML 4.0, XHTML and CSS 1 & 2 (don't worry, there's a switch to drop the compatibility mode and use the strict standard mode, the compatibily mode being run by default).
One good thing with the lack of competition in browsers is that Microsoft doesn't feel the need to divert from the standard and introduce new funky tags. I'm not saying this won't change to something worse, or that we won't see "Windows only" functions spring back to life, but for now IE 6 is the most standard compliant browser ever, while being the one who face the smallest competition ever.
Please before flaming me go read the IE 6 preview papers first...
It was indeed a fantastic game, except for one thing : the UI sucks big time. Using the inventory system is a real pain in a**.
You can play ultima VII (and Serpent Isle) with Exult : http://exult.sourceforge.net/
As the original executable required a pure blank DOS boot, they have rewritten the whole engine from scratch and it now works on a lots of different platforms (MacOS included). You still need the original datafiles...
Unless there's a leak somewhere in a pipe or something get stuck.
Well you are probably commuting on a horse, as you wouldn't trust your life to a car that suddently won't have any breaks. Face it, you can't go against progress, so like it or not fly-by-wire is here to stay, they use on modern jet fighters too (and even Boing is retiring the old hydraulic system on its civil planes).
Actually, as a whole, the European economy (in GNP) is slightly higher than the US, and hence the world's biggest economy (depending if you treat it as a meta-country or just country by country). And the US trade balance is way way negative, while Europe one is positive. US is just surviving because of the huge debt it can build. You can't live forever with a negative trade balance. Airbus vs Boing is just the perfect example of this : an old US company, surviving with a decaying catalog of planes designed in the 70s, fighting a 20 yo company with brand new designs and concepts.
java : well plenty of sites use java for usefull apps (although I'm not fond of them), or it's used on banners. If the banner makes the browser crash, then bye bye slashdot and all the sites with java banners
javascript : quite usefull in forms
flash : same as java, often used for banners... and banners are everywhere
I have the same configuration (IE5.5/W2K), but when it crashes it's only once or twice a month, and I use it 10 hours a day ! Compare that to Mozilla or Netscape 4.x on Linux that was crashing on me every 20 to 30 minutes (basically as soon as a java/javascript/flash code would appear)...