Excuse my ignorance, but I've never understood why radically different techniques seem to be necessary for rendering outdoor scenes. I would've thought that an outdoor space is just like an indoor space, minus the ceiling. Could anyone explain this to me?
Re:Spread of US "culture"
on
The Last Place
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· Score: 2
As for the locals themselves, there seemed to be no benefit whatsoever for them having "Coke" soft drinks compared to the local ones before them.
I find this hard to believe. If they decided to give up their local soft drinks to buy coke instead, they must have had a reason.
As much as everybody hates big corporations, we still buy from them. Having no large brand sucks, because you can never be sure you're going to get something of good quality. With coke, you're always certain to get exactly the same drink.
If I was asked "what is the most harmful programming construct", I would choose type casts every time - yes, even over gotos and pointers.
Sure, we've all seen programs where casts were horribly abused (in my case, from one of my CS profs:). But casting is a necessary feature: I'm sure that, as much as you hate it, every so often you've been forced to do a dynamic_cast, because it's the only reasonable solution. Casting should be discouraged, but I don't see how it can be removed from a language like C++ or Java. As for gotos and pointer arithmetic, they can be eliminated completely (and indeed, Java did so).
Careful, I think you mean "abstract" base class, not "virtual". A "virtual base class" is a strange and obscure feature of C++ a lot of people don't know about: look it up. It's used to have only one copy of class A in class D when you have a situation where B inherits A, C inherits A, and D inherits B and C.
Anyway, if you meant abstract base classes, I agree with you:).
I don't know about arcades in general, but my local arcade is doing quite well. I estimate (based on points) that their Dance Dance Revolution machine earned something like 20K$ this summer, at 50 cents a pop.
I've heard that there's been a revival in arcades lately. Modern arcades have the huge advantage over normal games that they can provide all sorts of wacky controllers you don't have at home: dance pads, drums, soccer balls, sniper rifles, etc. "Big deal," you might say, but that's if you haven't tried one. As Tycho on penny-arcade.com said recently, it's kind of a blinding revelation to actually try a game on one of them. Dance Dance Revolution is fun, far more than it has any right to be. It kept me addicted for the past 4 months: I can count video games that did that to me on one hand. The controller makes all the difference.
Trouble is that even the most talented of us make errors in judgement pretty often (what new code doesn't have bugs?). And a lot of experienced programmers have found that even if it seems like a good idea at first, using goto is one of those things that always seems to turn out to be an error in the long run.
I would make an analogy with multiple inheritance in C++. Now if you've reached the point where you're considering using MI, you've already got some modicum of experience and judgement. I used MI maybe 3 times in my code (all of which seemed eminently reasonable), considering the situation carefully before making the decision. And guess what: one of those 3 times it unexpectedly blew up in my face horribly, just like the anti-MI people always said. (I hit a bug in GCC that left me baffled for 2 days.) Somehow MI seems to be intrinsically evil, although it seems so tempting and useful sometimes.
I've learned my lesson, and now I have a strong anti-MI bias in my coding. Using goto is the same kind of thing for me, although it isn't nearly as serious a problem.
I'm not an "anti-goto fanatic" (I don't really care that much either way), I just like arguing about it:).
Funny, I use return to break out of nested loops. If your functions are so huge you feel the need to use goto, that's a sign they need to be split up. I've found it pays off to do this, because I often end up reusing the new, smaller subfunction. There's really no justification for using goto in human-written C code.
Google answers was a nice idea, but it's a failure. There have been only 4000 questions since the project started a month ago -- even though for some time it was advertised on every google search result! At an average of (say) 5$ a question, that equates to 20,000$ of total cash transactions, only a fraction of that being revenue for Google. The buying market is obviously too small for this to work. If they have an ounce of business sense, they'll drop the thing soon.
Lots of similar services have popped up in the past, and they all failed. The problem is that although you have plenty of sellers with too much time on their hands and looking for a cheap ego-boost, there are very few people willing to dish out any money to random people for information they could just as well find themselves.
Mocking fundamentalist Christians is not bigotry, no more than laughing at believers in astrology or alien conspiracies. Ridiculous ideas shouldn't go unopposed for the sake of political correctness. Nobody's suggesting we censor or discriminate against them, but we're certainly entitled to discredit their absurd beliefs.
Besides, some Christians really are that crazy. Ever see this guy? Check especially his hilarious South Park review.
(Note: I'm agnostic, myself, but I still can't stand fundamentalists who take every word in the Bible literally.)
Nah, bipolar disorder is really a chemical thing. I know a bipolar person who was quite normal for the first 20 years of her life, and one year it just struck suddenly for no special reason. It's a disease like any other: it shouldn't be blamed on the victim.
I agree, Microsoft's CJK IME absolutely reigns over all. It's unified across most Windows applications, uses a very smart heuristic based on word frequency and grammar analysis (!), is highly configurable and even provides a box to draw characters with your mouse if you've forgotten their reading (which, amazingly, gives the correct result 99% of the time, even if I draw it really sloppily).
I use it for my Japanese text editing and I was extremely impressed by the quality of their IME. I'm no big fan of MS in general, but I have to say that this is one place where their software is simply Right. I try to avoid using Japanese in unix so I haven't explored all the possibilities there, but the solutions I've seen have been comparatively weak and ad hoc. This is one place where Linux might have to catch up to MS, but they'll never do better.
Bah. TeX dates back to the early eighties and I still prefer it to Word for most common tasks. (Yes, it does tables.) Admittedly, TeX was programmed by Knuth so the ordinary laws of nature probably don't apply to it:).
These "ideograms" are Chinese characters (aka kanji in Japanese).
I know. I've gotten into the habit of saying "ideogram" because when I say "Chinese character" people go "wha? weren't you talking about Japanese?" and when I say "kanji" they go just "wha?":). The Chinese characters are anyway an ideographic writing system, so there's nothing wrong with calling them ideograms.
Personally, I like to use the Japanese system in my own personal notes. In Japanese, you rarely use slashes: the language a very nice system to avoid confusion. They have easy-to-write ideograms meaning "year", "month" and "day". E.g. to write july 4th, 2002, you would write:
2002 <year> 07 <month> 04 <day>
(where <year> is the ideogram meaning "year", etc.) They also have characters for the days of the week which can be written much faster than English words. I can't write Japanese in a slashdot post, but check out for example the "old stories" sidebar on the right on slashdot.jp to see what it looks like.
This is so neat that I wish English would adopt a similar system. If we introduced a few simple symbols that meant "year", "month" and "day" and appended them to the numbers, there would never be a problem. Unfortunately, because our writing system is so glyph-starved, and it never even occurs to anybody that characters outside our 40 or so symbols could exist, this will probably never happen.
He was obviously trolling. When someone literate says something mind-bogglingly stupid and irrational, a little alarm should go off in your head. This is slashdot: your hoax detector should always be on full alert.
Just a note on your last point: Japan may be small geographically, but its population is almost half that of the US, around 125M if I recall correctly.
Indeed. I'm very pissed off when Amazon calls me by name and gives spooky "suggestions" based on tracking of past visits. Does this actually improve their business?
IMHO, the majority of scientists are driven by ego, not by "love of science". There's a whole culture of scientific hero-worship: it serves a purpose, to push scientists to strive for eternal fame. You can make a great show of humility and claim to want to help humanity, but that won't keep you slaving in a lab for 10 years. The real motivation is the dream of having your name enounced worshipfully centuries from now.
I don't disagree with your main points, but I think we shouldn't kid ourselves about the true motivations of respected scientists. They follow the altruistic conventions of the scientific community because they know it will afford them respect and goodwill. A lot of our top scientists are really egomaniacs like Wolfram at heart.
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse my ignorance, but I've never understood why radically different techniques seem to be necessary for rendering outdoor scenes. I would've thought that an outdoor space is just like an indoor space, minus the ceiling. Could anyone explain this to me?
I find this hard to believe. If they decided to give up their local soft drinks to buy coke instead, they must have had a reason.
As much as everybody hates big corporations, we still buy from them. Having no large brand sucks, because you can never be sure you're going to get something of good quality. With coke, you're always certain to get exactly the same drink.
Bah. IMHO, the original GTA was (somewhat) better than GTA3. Not to say that GTA3 doesn't rule, though.
Sure, we've all seen programs where casts were horribly abused (in my case, from one of my CS profs :). But casting is a necessary feature: I'm sure that, as much as you hate it, every so often you've been forced to do a dynamic_cast, because it's the only reasonable solution. Casting should be discouraged, but I don't see how it can be removed from a language like C++ or Java. As for gotos and pointer arithmetic, they can be eliminated completely (and indeed, Java did so).
Hmm ... you're right, GNU is still worse.
Try reading his post more attentively. He referred to java interfaces, which are analogous to abstract classes, not virtual ones.
Anyway, if you meant abstract base classes, I agree with you :).
I've heard that there's been a revival in arcades lately. Modern arcades have the huge advantage over normal games that they can provide all sorts of wacky controllers you don't have at home: dance pads, drums, soccer balls, sniper rifles, etc. "Big deal," you might say, but that's if you haven't tried one. As Tycho on penny-arcade.com said recently, it's kind of a blinding revelation to actually try a game on one of them. Dance Dance Revolution is fun, far more than it has any right to be. It kept me addicted for the past 4 months: I can count video games that did that to me on one hand. The controller makes all the difference.
I would make an analogy with multiple inheritance in C++. Now if you've reached the point where you're considering using MI, you've already got some modicum of experience and judgement. I used MI maybe 3 times in my code (all of which seemed eminently reasonable), considering the situation carefully before making the decision. And guess what: one of those 3 times it unexpectedly blew up in my face horribly, just like the anti-MI people always said. (I hit a bug in GCC that left me baffled for 2 days.) Somehow MI seems to be intrinsically evil, although it seems so tempting and useful sometimes.
I've learned my lesson, and now I have a strong anti-MI bias in my coding. Using goto is the same kind of thing for me, although it isn't nearly as serious a problem.
I'm not an "anti-goto fanatic" (I don't really care that much either way), I just like arguing about it :).
Funny, I use return to break out of nested loops. If your functions are so huge you feel the need to use goto, that's a sign they need to be split up. I've found it pays off to do this, because I often end up reusing the new, smaller subfunction. There's really no justification for using goto in human-written C code.
Lots of similar services have popped up in the past, and they all failed. The problem is that although you have plenty of sellers with too much time on their hands and looking for a cheap ego-boost, there are very few people willing to dish out any money to random people for information they could just as well find themselves.
Besides, some Christians really are that crazy. Ever see this guy? Check especially his hilarious South Park review.
(Note: I'm agnostic, myself, but I still can't stand fundamentalists who take every word in the Bible literally.)
Nah, bipolar disorder is really a chemical thing. I know a bipolar person who was quite normal for the first 20 years of her life, and one year it just struck suddenly for no special reason. It's a disease like any other: it shouldn't be blamed on the victim.
I use it for my Japanese text editing and I was extremely impressed by the quality of their IME. I'm no big fan of MS in general, but I have to say that this is one place where their software is simply Right. I try to avoid using Japanese in unix so I haven't explored all the possibilities there, but the solutions I've seen have been comparatively weak and ad hoc. This is one place where Linux might have to catch up to MS, but they'll never do better.
Bah. TeX dates back to the early eighties and I still prefer it to Word for most common tasks. (Yes, it does tables.) Admittedly, TeX was programmed by Knuth so the ordinary laws of nature probably don't apply to it :).
I know. I've gotten into the habit of saying "ideogram" because when I say "Chinese character" people go "wha? weren't you talking about Japanese?" and when I say "kanji" they go just "wha?" :). The Chinese characters are anyway an ideographic writing system, so there's nothing wrong with calling them ideograms.
Or you could just use CVS and save yourself the trouble of making those zips altogether :).
(where <year> is the ideogram meaning "year", etc.) They also have characters for the days of the week which can be written much faster than English words. I can't write Japanese in a slashdot post, but check out for example the "old stories" sidebar on the right on slashdot.jp to see what it looks like.
This is so neat that I wish English would adopt a similar system. If we introduced a few simple symbols that meant "year", "month" and "day" and appended them to the numbers, there would never be a problem. Unfortunately, because our writing system is so glyph-starved, and it never even occurs to anybody that characters outside our 40 or so symbols could exist, this will probably never happen.
He was obviously trolling. When someone literate says something mind-bogglingly stupid and irrational, a little alarm should go off in your head. This is slashdot: your hoax detector should always be on full alert.
Just a note on your last point: Japan may be small geographically, but its population is almost half that of the US, around 125M if I recall correctly.
That isn't holographic at all. It's just 4 huge 2d screens and good ol' 3d glasses. Still kinda neat, though.
You mean like this?
I like the Twilight Zone one better. I've seen way too much of that kind of predictable and tacky "poetic justice".
Indeed. I'm very pissed off when Amazon calls me by name and gives spooky "suggestions" based on tracking of past visits. Does this actually improve their business?
I don't disagree with your main points, but I think we shouldn't kid ourselves about the true motivations of respected scientists. They follow the altruistic conventions of the scientific community because they know it will afford them respect and goodwill. A lot of our top scientists are really egomaniacs like Wolfram at heart.