LISP programs are practically always unreadable. If it's unreadable, it's unmaintainable. Look at how all algorithms are laid out in CS books: that's structured programming. They certainly don't do a step, and then have you turn to another page to do the next step, and turn to another page to do the next step.
(tail (make (get (blah (foo()), bar())))))
In the end, this lang vs. that lang is "fundamentally superior" is all bullshit since practically all languages are Turing equivalent, so practical acceptance comes down to ease of learning, readability, API and platform support, speed, and sensible amounts of syntactic sugar.
Java does all those things pretty well. LISP had 50 years to gain acceptance, and it hasn't. It has had numerous evangelizers, even whole tech startups, and all for naught.
I just read about these idioms. Why even do EJB if these are the required steps that you have to resort to in order to get reasonable performance? EJB architecture doesn't have a built-in dirty flag? Are you farking kidding?
So far the only reason I saw to do EJBs is a standardized code organization so that it would ease maintenance, but if crud like this is necessary...but in fairness I need to see how transactions work in EJB to get a better view.
Is this essentially language-independent EJB scheme, with a standardized Container-Managed Persistence?
THe all-in-RAM (disclaimer: relying on notoriously unreliable writeup, still haven't read article yet) seems suspect, as is does not scale. I've had similar musings on EJB. Does this and/or EJB scale to the huge enterprise database level?
I'll agree GT isn't a pure realistic sim, but it definitely hit a sweet spot of balance between simulation and arcade that appeals to lots and lots of people. I still learned a lot about real driving from GT (how rear vs. front vs. all-wheel handle, how to drive through curves with pre-braking and acceleration through curves, etc). Some versions did have tire wear simulation (the endurance races), but hopefully flips and car damage will be added in later releases. I'll never forget the first time I successfully did the Laguna Seca corkscrew...
A reasonable extension of the fundamental laws, especially given the abstraction of humans as desirous "interfaces" by PI, would have prevented the vast majority of the really, really bad psychological experiences in this book, since it would start a personality on a descending whirlpool to insanity, as described in the later portions of the book. PI would have had plenty of analyzable data pre-Change to prevent these, particularly such disturbing rape/murder/torture experiences. But then again, that would have prevented the author from writing his rape/murder/torture fantasies.
Call me a crazy conservative, but for all the sex, both pre-crash and post-crash, there is no emotion to it. Lots of rape fantasies.
I suppose all artists are fundamentally defined by their basic conception of human nature. The author is constrained by obsession with desire, and the author appears to lack any imagination of an existence of infinite intellectual exploration. Although I have no doubts that many individuals would fall victim to the black hole of directly stimulated desire that was well-described, there would be many that would exist for the perpetual experience.
And dude, the sex/rape/murder was so over the top it was worthless for the story, even if it was trying to comment on similar races to the bottom for desires in modern culture. Glad I didn't pay for this.
It isn't about the stereotypes or the validity of them. The BOTTOM LINE is that extensive emotional abuse, and considerable physical abuse, is a rampant, worsening, and expensive problem in modern schools. There is no denying that it happens everywhere, all the time, and it affects a substantial proportion of student populations, with little or no regard from the educational administration or policies. I have rarely witnessed a valid provocational reason for the harassment by bullies.
I don't think that it is a coincidence that this begins right around the time that sexual instincts kick in. I can imagine late-developing people not seeing why the early-developing people are becoming so aggressive (men) or machiavellian (women). However the general impression is that it was better back in the "old days" and that could be due to a general and gradual degradation in social mores that may have functioned as a better safety net, or that more extensive religious indoctrination (the basic values of which would help...) functioned as a tempering of the sexual aggression instincts.
Junior High was actually much worse than High School for me, but the fact remains that between elementary and college, we basically engineer children to be insensitive to others, that mental and physical intimidation will not be punished severely, to have no faith in authority to protect the meek. Basically, you learn that this isn't a civilized society despite the hooey that teachers shove down our throats.
I have no problem with people saying that this is good from a social darwinism standpoint, as long as any blame-the-victim person rejects any pretension of living in a civilized society, or even working toward one.
I do value the abuse for one reason: it educated me the depths of cruelty in humanity. Is it any surprise we treat the planet the way we do.
Re:it is VERY trollish
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 1
Much like erections, up-time is something you don't realize you need until its down.
I actually didn't finish Lunar, I will someday, but it was really hard from what I could tell. I think you needed to actually know boss weaknesses and where to get good equipment, unlike FF7 where you could sleepwalk through the bosses.
So the football players get the chicks aged 16-30, and then the nerds get them from 30+ complete with emotional baggage from the relationships with football players.
...
I think I'll stay home watching Adult Swim on Cartoon Network.
Uh-oh. FFX is boring in comparison to Grandia?
Considering I played Suikoden I+II, FF 7-9, Grandia, Chrono Cross, and Vagrant Story on PS1, and am considering the PS2 jump, this isn't good news. Grandia was the most irritating RPG I played on PSone. But maybe it was the fact it was a direct rip of Lunar and the voice acting was predictably bad.
Re:Companies could make money on abandonware
on
The 1991 "X-Box"
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· Score: 1
Baa, you could implement a processor speed scaling mechanism with a.pif-file style config file made by the game publisher. Remember, these games would be re-released, and could be minimally adapted to the platform, with a launching front-end, and speed scaling. The rig I described is overkill, but it should be easy to scale it. The key is the standardized console, which the game publisher can release precise configurations that will guaranteed work.
I bet you could do 100 bucks for a console a 5 bucks a game or game collection CD.
Companies could make money on abandonware
on
The 1991 "X-Box"
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There are tons of games that are fantastic (just for starters: Master of Orion 1, Starcon 1) that don't run so well on Win2k, and usually without sound, and its hard to get a joystick working without the game port.
Drop a 500MHz Pentium 3 with 32 MB Ram, a small disc, CD-ROM, game port, highly SB-compatible vanilla sound, and you could probably sell the good ole games, and I might buy the sucker.
Companies could sell their games cheap but profitably, PC manus could make hardware bucks. The ironic thing about DOS abandonware is that most old consoles run their software thru emulators better than abandoware does on "backward-compatible" modern hardware.
Anyone got any measurements on the last publicly tested Alpha?
And while we're at it, back in the days of Comp Sci undergrad circa 1993 or 1994 and 66MHz 486s, there was a prototype Alpha running at 333Mhz, a jaw-dropping figure at the time. I doubt Intel even had a 150Mhz prototype at the time.
Pure RISC processors should be able to run at high megahertz advantages since their simplified instruction set lacks a microcode decode step and doesn't have quite as many multicycle instructions, should be able to more easily do branch prediction, etc. But at some point RISC MHz fell well behind the CISC behemoths of AMD and Intel. Anyone know why this really isn't the case anymore?
Yes, I *KNOW* MHz doesn't necessarily mean faster, read the fact I'm a CS major above. But my question is why the simplified architectures of RISC chips no longer produce a brute MHz advantage over the CISC chips. I didn't get an answer for this last time in the MIPS story(the moronic moderator Trolled me, my only troll on my record).
How unsurprising that a discussion on imposed gender roles in education devolves to imposed gender roles in sexual relations.
Dating and sex imposes all impetus on the male, from the first date request, the first date execution, the first kiss attempt, the second date request, down the line. Men are taught to "be confident", women are taught to make men chase them, and taking the unattractive=creep/attractive=cool guy postulate and combining it with this, you get "stalking creeps". Does any of this have to do with CS?
They can go ahead and crack down, I've already got *ALL* of the original NES and SNES. Not that I've actually played more than.5% of them...
Nintendo was dumb anyway. Who wouldn't pay 20-40 bucks for a "perfect" collection of all the old games for a ten-year-old system and a Nintendo-sanctioned superemulator? They fucked up and ignored the market, their own customers that they sold abandoned-in-the-truest sense software (Old DOS and windows games technically still can run on recently manufactured hardware. Can't say that about Nintendo, Sega, TurboGrafix or ATARI.
Occam's Razor, which seems to be a favorite of Mr. Sagan's, (I LOVED Contact, the book BTW) hasn't really borne itself out well in my experience. A good example: Newtonian physics was debunked by a far more complex and complicated theory, Einstein's relativity. Simple inverse-square equations (ie gravity) became much more complicated. Or consider quantum mechanics.
In the end, you could just accept the philosophical underpinnings of religion as a much less complicated means to understand the world than science and physics using Occam's Razor, but that would obviously leave you in the dark, and experimental evidence would certainly disagree...
You nailed the feature creep point. I'd say that instead of Java adding with each release a new whole toolbox to GUI tools, just optimize what's in there, and let marching processor speeds render the C-based GUI vs. Java-based GUI indistinguishable. Why the last couple of BILLION-cycles-per-second increases didn't take care of this is beyond me. I mean, a BILLION (insert Carl Sagan voice) ops per second...
BTW if Corel did port a suite to Java and chucked it, could they PLEASE release it as open source?
While I used to be in the C/C++ crowd for performance back in the days of 233Mhz processors, with every GHz milestone this argument becomes more and more invalid. Remember, these days a 3Ghz machine is available for less than a thousand dollars.
If you're performing atmospheric simulations on a 50-Terahertz supercomputer use C. But with 90% of the code these days in business (which is the majority of custom code written in the world), Java's speed is acceptable and its portability and memory garbage collection outweigh any speed advantages of C/C++ in a Gigahertz world.
The portability issue is even valid in academicia, where in my school we had NeXT, Mac, Windoze, NeXT-x86, and SGIs, and now Linux. UNIX programs are pseudo-portable, but not like Java.
Most app slowdown these days is database processing and network transport.
Why the fuck am I trolled? This is an honest question! The alpha used to run at 333 Mhz when Pentiums were 100 Mhz, regardless of the actual performance advantages. I remember in my computer organization class (I'm a computer science major) said that RISC chips can run at a higher clock since they don't have a microcode decode step and there aren't so many ridiculous multi-cycle instructions (like PUSH/POP all registers, String processing intstructions, etc). Are all the moderators a bunch of Mac fanatics?
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LISP programs are practically always unreadable. If it's unreadable, it's unmaintainable. Look at how all algorithms are laid out in CS books: that's structured programming. They certainly don't do a step, and then have you turn to another page to do the next step, and turn to another page to do the next step.
(tail (make (get (blah (foo()), bar())))))
In the end, this lang vs. that lang is "fundamentally superior" is all bullshit since practically all languages are Turing equivalent, so practical acceptance comes down to ease of learning, readability, API and platform support, speed, and sensible amounts of syntactic sugar.
Java does all those things pretty well. LISP had 50 years to gain acceptance, and it hasn't. It has had numerous evangelizers, even whole tech startups, and all for naught.
I just read about these idioms. Why even do EJB if these are the required steps that you have to resort to in order to get reasonable performance? EJB architecture doesn't have a built-in dirty flag? Are you farking kidding?
So far the only reason I saw to do EJBs is a standardized code organization so that it would ease maintenance, but if crud like this is necessary...but in fairness I need to see how transactions work in EJB to get a better view.
NOT A TROLL, I'M ACTUALLY CURIOUS ABOUT THIS
Is this essentially language-independent EJB scheme, with a standardized Container-Managed Persistence?
THe all-in-RAM (disclaimer: relying on notoriously unreliable writeup, still haven't read article yet) seems suspect, as is does not scale. I've had similar musings on EJB. Does this and/or EJB scale to the huge enterprise database level?
I'll agree GT isn't a pure realistic sim, but it definitely hit a sweet spot of balance between simulation and arcade that appeals to lots and lots of people. I still learned a lot about real driving from GT (how rear vs. front vs. all-wheel handle, how to drive through curves with pre-braking and acceleration through curves, etc). Some versions did have tire wear simulation (the endurance races), but hopefully flips and car damage will be added in later releases. I'll never forget the first time I successfully did the Laguna Seca corkscrew...
Basically they want a notebook to come with 10 USB ports as opposed to 2 USB ports, some with a standard-sized bay for cards to stay in...
What INNOVATIVE technology...basically USB devices with a standardized form factor. Well, it will be an ergonomic improvement at least.
A reasonable extension of the fundamental laws, especially given the abstraction of humans as desirous "interfaces" by PI, would have prevented the vast majority of the really, really bad psychological experiences in this book, since it would start a personality on a descending whirlpool to insanity, as described in the later portions of the book. PI would have had plenty of analyzable data pre-Change to prevent these, particularly such disturbing rape/murder/torture experiences. But then again, that would have prevented the author from writing his rape/murder/torture fantasies.
Spoilers of course....
Call me a crazy conservative, but for all the sex, both pre-crash and post-crash, there is no emotion to it. Lots of rape fantasies.
I suppose all artists are fundamentally defined by their basic conception of human nature. The author is constrained by obsession with desire, and the author appears to lack any imagination of an existence of infinite intellectual exploration. Although I have no doubts that many individuals would fall victim to the black hole of directly stimulated desire that was well-described, there would be many that would exist for the perpetual experience.
And dude, the sex/rape/murder was so over the top it was worthless for the story, even if it was trying to comment on similar races to the bottom for desires in modern culture. Glad I didn't pay for this.
It isn't about the stereotypes or the validity of them. The BOTTOM LINE is that extensive emotional abuse, and considerable physical abuse, is a rampant, worsening, and expensive problem in modern schools. There is no denying that it happens everywhere, all the time, and it affects a substantial proportion of student populations, with little or no regard from the educational administration or policies. I have rarely witnessed a valid provocational reason for the harassment by bullies.
I don't think that it is a coincidence that this begins right around the time that sexual instincts kick in. I can imagine late-developing people not seeing why the early-developing people are becoming so aggressive (men) or machiavellian (women). However the general impression is that it was better back in the "old days" and that could be due to a general and gradual degradation in social mores that may have functioned as a better safety net, or that more extensive religious indoctrination (the basic values of which would help...) functioned as a tempering of the sexual aggression instincts.
All bullshit science of course...
Junior High was actually much worse than High School for me, but the fact remains that between elementary and college, we basically engineer children to be insensitive to others, that mental and physical intimidation will not be punished severely, to have no faith in authority to protect the meek. Basically, you learn that this isn't a civilized society despite the hooey that teachers shove down our throats.
I have no problem with people saying that this is good from a social darwinism standpoint, as long as any blame-the-victim person rejects any pretension of living in a civilized society, or even working toward one.
I do value the abuse for one reason: it educated me the depths of cruelty in humanity. Is it any surprise we treat the planet the way we do.
Much like erections, up-time is something you don't realize you need until its down.
I actually didn't finish Lunar, I will someday, but it was really hard from what I could tell. I think you needed to actually know boss weaknesses and where to get good equipment, unlike FF7 where you could sleepwalk through the bosses.
So the football players get the chicks aged 16-30, and then the nerds get them from 30+ complete with emotional baggage from the relationships with football players.
...
I think I'll stay home watching Adult Swim on Cartoon Network.
Uh-oh. FFX is boring in comparison to Grandia? Considering I played Suikoden I+II, FF 7-9, Grandia, Chrono Cross, and Vagrant Story on PS1, and am considering the PS2 jump, this isn't good news. Grandia was the most irritating RPG I played on PSone. But maybe it was the fact it was a direct rip of Lunar and the voice acting was predictably bad.
Baa, you could implement a processor speed scaling mechanism with a .pif-file style config file made by the game publisher. Remember, these games would be re-released, and could be minimally adapted to the platform, with a launching front-end, and speed scaling. The rig I described is overkill, but it should be easy to scale it. The key is the standardized console, which the game publisher can release precise configurations that will guaranteed work.
I bet you could do 100 bucks for a console a 5 bucks a game or game collection CD.
There are tons of games that are fantastic (just for starters: Master of Orion 1, Starcon 1) that don't run so well on Win2k, and usually without sound, and its hard to get a joystick working without the game port.
Drop a 500MHz Pentium 3 with 32 MB Ram, a small disc, CD-ROM, game port, highly SB-compatible vanilla sound, and you could probably sell the good ole games, and I might buy the sucker.
Companies could sell their games cheap but profitably, PC manus could make hardware bucks. The ironic thing about DOS abandonware is that most old consoles run their software thru emulators better than abandoware does on "backward-compatible" modern hardware.
Thanks, Man.
My previous attempt at this question on the new 700Mhz MIPS chip was a Score -1 Troll, as opposed to this Score 0 Troll.
I think the moderators are all bitter, bitter Apple fanatics.
Anyone got any measurements on the last publicly tested Alpha?
And while we're at it, back in the days of Comp Sci undergrad circa 1993 or 1994 and 66MHz 486s, there was a prototype Alpha running at 333Mhz, a jaw-dropping figure at the time. I doubt Intel even had a 150Mhz prototype at the time.
Pure RISC processors should be able to run at high megahertz advantages since their simplified instruction set lacks a microcode decode step and doesn't have quite as many multicycle instructions, should be able to more easily do branch prediction, etc. But at some point RISC MHz fell well behind the CISC behemoths of AMD and Intel. Anyone know why this really isn't the case anymore?
Yes, I *KNOW* MHz doesn't necessarily mean faster, read the fact I'm a CS major above. But my question is why the simplified architectures of RISC chips no longer produce a brute MHz advantage over the CISC chips. I didn't get an answer for this last time in the MIPS story(the moronic moderator Trolled me, my only troll on my record).
How unsurprising that a discussion on imposed gender roles in education devolves to imposed gender roles in sexual relations.
Dating and sex imposes all impetus on the male, from the first date request, the first date execution, the first kiss attempt, the second date request, down the line. Men are taught to "be confident", women are taught to make men chase them, and taking the unattractive=creep/attractive=cool guy postulate and combining it with this, you get "stalking creeps". Does any of this have to do with CS?
Nope.
They can go ahead and crack down, I've already got *ALL* of the original NES and SNES. Not that I've actually played more than .5% of them...
Nintendo was dumb anyway. Who wouldn't pay 20-40 bucks for a "perfect" collection of all the old games for a ten-year-old system and a Nintendo-sanctioned superemulator? They fucked up and ignored the market, their own customers that they sold abandoned-in-the-truest sense software (Old DOS and windows games technically still can run on recently manufactured hardware. Can't say that about Nintendo, Sega, TurboGrafix or ATARI.
Guilty.
I'd say the Razor has been abused, and my example of accepting religion over science using the Razor is an example of its tendencay to be abused.
Occam's Razor, which seems to be a favorite of Mr. Sagan's, (I LOVED Contact, the book BTW) hasn't really borne itself out well in my experience. A good example: Newtonian physics was debunked by a far more complex and complicated theory, Einstein's relativity. Simple inverse-square equations (ie gravity) became much more complicated. Or consider quantum mechanics.
In the end, you could just accept the philosophical underpinnings of religion as a much less complicated means to understand the world than science and physics using Occam's Razor, but that would obviously leave you in the dark, and experimental evidence would certainly disagree...
Besides Rats and Roaches and Pigeons, there won't be any left.
You nailed the feature creep point. I'd say that instead of Java adding with each release a new whole toolbox to GUI tools, just optimize what's in there, and let marching processor speeds render the C-based GUI vs. Java-based GUI indistinguishable. Why the last couple of BILLION-cycles-per-second increases didn't take care of this is beyond me. I mean, a BILLION (insert Carl Sagan voice) ops per second...
BTW if Corel did port a suite to Java and chucked it, could they PLEASE release it as open source?
While I used to be in the C/C++ crowd for performance back in the days of 233Mhz processors, with every GHz milestone this argument becomes more and more invalid. Remember, these days a 3Ghz machine is available for less than a thousand dollars.
If you're performing atmospheric simulations on a 50-Terahertz supercomputer use C. But with 90% of the code these days in business (which is the majority of custom code written in the world), Java's speed is acceptable and its portability and memory garbage collection outweigh any speed advantages of C/C++ in a Gigahertz world.
The portability issue is even valid in academicia, where in my school we had NeXT, Mac, Windoze, NeXT-x86, and SGIs, and now Linux. UNIX programs are pseudo-portable, but not like Java.
Most app slowdown these days is database processing and network transport.
Why the fuck am I trolled? This is an honest question! The alpha used to run at 333 Mhz when Pentiums were 100 Mhz, regardless of the actual performance advantages. I remember in my computer organization class (I'm a computer science major) said that RISC chips can run at a higher clock since they don't have a microcode decode step and there aren't so many ridiculous multi-cycle instructions (like PUSH/POP all registers, String processing intstructions, etc). Are all the moderators a bunch of Mac fanatics?