Bruce Schneier has written about this sort of thing several times. He expresses concern that technology is shifting the balance of power between police powers and citizen rights in favor of the police.
In some cases, the solution is to legislate limits (such as requiring warrants for wiretaps). In others, the solution is to lower penalties for crimes, since the penalty was high when prevention (detection) was hard. Now that technology makes a crime easy to detect (such as aerial surveillance to detect building code violations), high penalties are unnecessary.
Xavier Leroy is one of the authors of Ocaml, an efficient (within 2x of C) variant of the ML functional programming language. In the Caml-list mailing list recently, he had this to say about scheduling:
The 2.6 Linux kernels changed the behavior of sched_yield() in a way
that causes the unfairness you observed. Other threaded applications
are affected, including Open Office (!). My belief is that it's
really a bug in 2.6 kernels and that the new behavior of sched_yield(),
while technically conformant to the POSIX specs, lowers the quality of
implementation quite a lot.
(I seem to remember from my LinuxThreads development days that this
isn't the first time the kernel developers broke sched_yield(), then
realized their error.)
The question I'm currently investigating is whether the call to
sched_yield() can be omitted, as it's just a scheduling hint. Initial
experiments suggested that this would hurt fairness (in Caml thread
scheduling) quite a lot on all platforms other than Linux 2.6.
More careful experiments that I'm currently conducting suggest that it
might not be so bad. One can also play games where sched_yield()
isn't called if there are no other Caml threads waiting for the global
Caml mutex.
So at least one class of user is forced to be aware of the scheduler, to refer to another poster's assertion that users shouldn't even need to know...
N.E.A.T.
This is a meeting format acronym I learned in a process class in grad school. It really helps, so long as you can get buy-in from any bigwigs in the meeting.
N - Nature of the meeting. What is the meeting supposed to be about. Any other topics arising should be seriously questioned.
E - Expecations. What do we hope to accomplish by the time the meeting is finished. If we aren't converging, the solution is not to let the meeting drag on forever (see T).
A - Agenda. Specific items we are going to cover in the meeting, all related to N. No useless riders attached at the last minute by a party with an unrelated interest.
T - Time. Or rather Time Limit. At the end of the meeting's specified time, call "Time" and assign action items to individuals to resolve unanswered questions.
Of course you have to decide whether another meeting is needed, that's probably one of the action items. But if you choose the right individuals, then much of the action moves to email and one-to-one conversation...
I might just buy a Gamecube to play this, as I'd really love to see the cutscenes by Ryuhei Kitamura. In case you're not familiar with him, he is the director of Versus. Not all my friends liked it, and it is an uneven movie, but I thought it was tons of fun.
But last I heard, the most effecient way to make hydrogen is from coal, which is a dirty nasty process.
To be fair, the article says:
Hydrogen fuel cells and other ways of storing and distributing energy are no longer a distant dream but a foreseeable reality.
They also refer to fuel cells as 'batteries' by way of analogy, and state:
Hydrogen is a fuel that, like electricity, can be made from a variety of sources: fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, renewables, even nuclear power.
So they know that fuel cells themselves are neutral, but suggest that they open the way to choice of fuel for cars and the like.
I decided to search for a single sentence in a book, chosen thusly:
Go to All Consuming, a website that tracks book commentary on weblogs.
Grab their 'First Line Trivia' for the day, which is a quote of the first line from some book featured on a weblog that day. Today's example was "The Professor sat behind his desk, dwarfed by his vast red leather armchair."
Plug the line into Amazon's search field
The correct answer is "Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love" by Dan Rhodes. Did Amazon match it? I don't know, as I didn't have the patience to page through the 963 'matches'.
Note: I didn't actually expect this to work, but it would have been cool!
I miss the simplicity of side scrollers, bottom shooters, etc.... it would be cool to see what could be done with this genre using today's technology and wizardry.
If you're willing to count console games, the bottom shooter, or top-down scroller, is getting another look, as Ikaruga is being ported to the Gamecube. Having fond memories of Zaxxon from my youth, I could almost be convinced to buy a Gamecube for this (and for Zelda the Windwalker!;^)~ ).
If you're less than strict about what constitutes a side-scroller ("what could be done with this genre using today's technology"), then Panzer Dragoon Orta is actually a good example (Xbox only).
Borrowing from Sci Fi Lit, Larry Niven's Protectors were a lot more intelligent than us 'breeders', but between their biological imperatives, and their extreme ability to extrapolate chains of events from current data, they were said to have little free will.
So at least to another Protector with the same data, they would be very predictable indeed. Just a thought experiment, but it makes sense to me...
This is known as "attacking a straw man". Lasser asserts "[programmers believe] that real coders, like fighter pilots, work as close as possible to the bare metal" then shows the number of ways that fighter pilots are in fact aided by high-level tools (fly-by-wire), and are more careful, trained and security conscious than the hypothetical boob programmer is aware of. Stoopeed programmer!
If he'd confined himself to making the case for higher level languages, and avoided this classical ad hominen attack, I'd take his thesis more seriously.
By the way, I work on one of those performance intensive applications, but have taken every opportunity to push for use of Python, where appropriate. In the end, it was too difficult to justify, not because of the attitudes of hotdog codin' cowboys, but due to pragmatic logistic reasons, such as forcing customers to download an additional 40-50 MB of binaries to guarantee that they had GTK+, PyGTK, Python 1.5.2 and so on (our customers are on older Solaris and HP-UX as well as Linux platforms).
Slashdot Mirror
Therefore, there's only one option open to me.
Do without?
Bruce Schneier has written about this sort of thing several times. He expresses concern that technology is shifting the balance of power between police powers and citizen rights in favor of the police.
In some cases, the solution is to legislate limits (such as requiring warrants for wiretaps). In others, the solution is to lower penalties for crimes, since the penalty was high when prevention (detection) was hard. Now that technology makes a crime easy to detect (such as aerial surveillance to detect building code violations), high penalties are unnecessary.
You mean it's Dead Alive?
Nothing beats the Brady Bunch lyrics!
Here's a link:
IRODORIXavier Leroy is one of the authors of Ocaml, an efficient (within 2x of C) variant of the ML functional programming language. In the Caml-list mailing list recently, he had this to say about scheduling:
So at least one class of user is forced to be aware of the scheduler, to refer to another poster's assertion that users shouldn't even need to know...
image of a LASH rig here.
Lucas should replace whatever actor played the Emperor in ESB
According to Internet Movie Database, it was:
- N - Nature of the meeting. What is the meeting supposed to be about. Any other topics arising should be seriously questioned.
- E - Expecations. What do we hope to accomplish by the time the meeting is finished. If we aren't converging, the solution is not to let the meeting drag on forever (see T).
- A - Agenda. Specific items we are going to cover in the meeting, all related to N. No useless riders attached at the last minute by a party with an unrelated interest.
- T - Time. Or rather Time Limit. At the end of the meeting's specified time, call "Time" and assign action items to individuals to resolve unanswered questions.
Of course you have to decide whether another meeting is needed, that's probably one of the action items. But if you choose the right individuals, then much of the action moves to email and one-to-one conversation...And of course it doesn't hurt to review Mark Jason Dominus' Conference Presentation Judo, linked to here previously.
I might just buy a Gamecube to play this, as I'd really love to see the cutscenes by Ryuhei Kitamura. In case you're not familiar with him, he is the director of Versus. Not all my friends liked it, and it is an uneven movie, but I thought it was tons of fun.
Truly. My wife, confronted with some monumentally non sequitur statement, said it all:
"What?!? That--that's not even ... stupid!"
But last I heard, the most effecient way to make hydrogen is from coal, which is a dirty nasty process.
To be fair, the article says:
Hydrogen fuel cells and other ways of storing and distributing energy are no longer a distant dream but a foreseeable reality.
They also refer to fuel cells as 'batteries' by way of analogy, and state:
Hydrogen is a fuel that, like electricity, can be made from a variety of sources: fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, renewables, even nuclear power.
So they know that fuel cells themselves are neutral, but suggest that they open the way to choice of fuel for cars and the like.
I decided to search for a single sentence in a book, chosen thusly:
The correct answer is "Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love" by Dan Rhodes. Did Amazon match it? I don't know, as I didn't have the patience to page through the 963 'matches'.
Note: I didn't actually expect this to work, but it would have been cool!
You're thinking of the single most popular cartoon ever created by Sydney Harris. It's currently showcased on his gallery page. The line goes:
"I think you should be more explicit here in step two."
This Four DVD set will include:
Lots of nice stuff, but what I want to see is the shot by shot remake of Raiders created over six years by a group of kids.
"Spielberg was astonished at the ingenuity and imagination with which these kids recaptured the magic of his, arguably, greatest film."
If so, why not let the rest of us see it?
I miss the simplicity of side scrollers, bottom shooters, etc. ... it would be cool to see what could be done with this genre using today's technology and wizardry.
If you're willing to count console games, the bottom shooter, or top-down scroller, is getting another look, as Ikaruga is being ported to the Gamecube. Having fond memories of Zaxxon from my youth, I could almost be convinced to buy a Gamecube for this (and for Zelda the Windwalker! ;^)~ ).
If you're less than strict about what constitutes a side-scroller ("what could be done with this genre using today's technology"), then Panzer Dragoon Orta is actually a good example (Xbox only).
Borrowing from Sci Fi Lit, Larry Niven's Protectors were a lot more intelligent than us 'breeders', but between their biological imperatives, and their extreme ability to extrapolate chains of events from current data, they were said to have little free will.
So at least to another Protector with the same data, they would be very predictable indeed. Just a thought experiment, but it makes sense to me...
This is known as "attacking a straw man". Lasser asserts "[programmers believe] that real coders, like fighter pilots, work as close as possible to the bare metal" then shows the number of ways that fighter pilots are in fact aided by high-level tools (fly-by-wire), and are more careful, trained and security conscious than the hypothetical boob programmer is aware of. Stoopeed programmer!
If he'd confined himself to making the case for higher level languages, and avoided this classical ad hominen attack, I'd take his thesis more seriously.
By the way, I work on one of those performance intensive applications, but have taken every opportunity to push for use of Python, where appropriate. In the end, it was too difficult to justify, not because of the attitudes of hotdog codin' cowboys, but due to pragmatic logistic reasons, such as forcing customers to download an additional 40-50 MB of binaries to guarantee that they had GTK+, PyGTK, Python 1.5.2 and so on (our customers are on older Solaris and HP-UX as well as Linux platforms).