The Republic of China has diplomatic relations with 27 (mostly tiny) nations. It also has no mutual defense treaties with the US. The closest one is a US law called the Taiwan Relations Act that requires the US to help protect Taiwan. The law is much weaker than a mutual defense treaty, mainly because it does not require the US to send its own forces under any circumstances.
Re:Bring back procedural languages
on
Holub on Patterns
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Just because code isn't object-oriented doesn't mean it's bad code, and anybody who tells you otherwise is just being dogmatic. However, there's a good chance that such code is less well-isolated from the rest of the system, and your one-liner fixes can more easily introduce unintended consequences.
One common pattern with maintained code is the cancerous growth of special cases to deal with new requirements. Over time, the special cases dwarf the original code, and it becomes very hard to even figure out what it's supposed to be doing.
Yes, OO doesn't solve all problems, yet "procedural languages"* are also well-known to have many problems of its own. OO is also easy to get wrong, as evidenced by your "have to throw them away periodically" observation. However, I can't help but feel that you're making conclusions based on limited and anecdotal evidence of failures.
if you create your game using cross platform tools you get 2-3% more market share (your figures, I'd expect it to be closer to 5-10%) at no extra cost.
For something to be actually cross-platform (instead of theoretically cross-platform), it would have to be actually tested on all those various platforms. This testing, not to mention the additional hardware and software, is not even close to free.
Which is not to say designing something so it'll even just theoretically work across platforms is a bad thing at all. It will likely be slightly more expensive, but probably pays off as good design alone even if you never actually port it anywhere. You just should not be under the illusion that better code will come for free.
Also, just because MacOS and Linux combine for 10% of the market, for example, doesn't mean that your MacOS and Linux versions will account for 10% of your revenue. These are obviously users for whom games are not the all-important thing.
I, for one, do not understand why Pixar is given such a vaunted status. The origibal Toy Story was something new and they deserved praise, but ever since they have just been re-jigging the formula.
What formula? A Bug's Life was about friendship, but it was also about fitting into the ultimate socialist society of ants. Monster's Inc. was about friendship, but it was also about people not being who they seem to be, even when they look like monsters. Finding Nemo is about the power of a parent's love for their children. The Incredibles is also about fitting in, but it is a much sharper social commentary against mediocrity than any previous movie. Even Toy Story II was a sobering reminder of how fleeting "happily ever after" can be. None of these are profound concepts, but neither are they obvious rehashes of previous work. With every movie Pixar pushes the state of the art in technique.
Want to talk formula? Consider the scenario of a downtrodden character destined for greatness, and see it repeated in Cinderella, The Lion King, Aladdin, and perhaps other more recent ones I can't even bear to watch anymore. In most cases their transformations were more a gift from heaven than the result of personal effort.
It seems a shame to stop the 2D stuff, but kids obviously prefer the 3D stuff.
I disagree. I think kids today are simply more exposed to complex human relationships earlier in life, and don't care for Disney's traditional oversimplified fantasies long enough. Spirited Away, for example, seems to have done okay both financially and critically.
I can build a much more powerful pc for my price range (usually 900-1200 USD) Mac's prices are just too high even if they supported games.
The up-front cost of a Mac is undoubted higher than a PC. However, consider:
the value of the iLife suite, which would be worth additional money on the PC side.
the resale value of Macs, which you can look up on eBay. A 900 MHz G3 iBook is going for an unbelievable $775.50 in 11 minutes, and a 500 MHz G3 iBook is going for $405 in 21 minutes.
the value of your time saved.
Have yo actually considered the TCO, or just the up-front cost?
you're an artist, and if wandering the countryside in search of scraps was good enough for artists of the 13th century, it's good enough for you. In short -- know your place. A farmer gets to leave a legacy for his children. You don't.
Sorry, what stops an artist from selling art and buying some land to pass on to his or her children?
I like the black model but I really wish it didn't come with all that U2 crap on it. Yes, they had several classic, groundbreaking albums, but they haven't been very relevant since what - the late 80s?
"The album debuted in #1 in sales in 28 countries; however, in the United States it only reached #3. All That You Can't Leave Behind was the third-highest-selling U2 album, with total sales of over 10 million." WordIQ.com
As of three days ago, the new single Vertigo is at the top of four separate charts.
Something tells me they managed to overlook Gapless Playback and OGG/FLAC support again.
The iPod supports Apple Lossless, which satisfies the technical need for FLAC except for folks who need the actual format. FLAC and Ogg Vorbis constitute too small a market to cater to (which includes porting, testing, space, and tech support for both iPod and iTunes, the former on two separate platforms). How hard is that to understand?
Get some pledges together, and pay Apple upfront for all that cost plus some profit to justify any threats to AAC and Apple Lossless (and therefore to the iTMS), and then I would expect Apple to be more receptive.
You need to buy an expensive yet crappy belkin adapter for that? No thank you.
I agree that both the media reader and the digital camera link adapters are "crappy", but the latter is priced about the same as a 256 MB memory stick. For the several GB that you then have access to, it is not expensive. Compared to dedicated digital camera storage, it is not expensive when you already own an iPod.
It would've been cooler had it been able to display keynote presentations to VGA...
It would also be cool if it could display 3-D holograms of the band performing the song to you. Nobody can change the world with every product announcement, you know.
The question, though, is how many Keynote users really need to leave their laptop behind?
I say it's another cube for apple.
"Another" cube? The cube was released in 2000. How many such mistakes have you counted since, and how many have you successfully predicted at launch?
it should be able to pass a turing test with time thrown at the window.
No, it cannot, because the Turing Test is interactive. What you've done instead is to weaken the Test so it is more easily passed. If something cannot instantly answer "what's your name?" you would not think it is human (without any other input). On the other hand, if it instantly answers "what is the square root of 19378189237123?" you may also realize that it's not human. Time is very much a factor.
It's not a pissing contest, by which I presume you mean a pointless pursuit. Apple was faced with an important market segment - audio and graphics professionals - jumping ship both because PC software are beginning to catch up and because PC hardware are not only cheaper but actually perform much better. For many of these customers, render time is money.
If you don't need that kind of power, you should stay on the lower end. The G5 iMac or the eMac don't seem to run all that hot.
As for fan count, presumably you're referring to the PowerMac G5. Apple preferred more low-speed fans over a few high-speed fans as a noise reduction measure. What was your complaint?
What's the fastest a 2.5GHz G5 could run with a traditional cooling system, like a fan and heatsink?
That is most likely not Apple's only design criteria. They are asking, instead, "what's the fastest we can push this G5 chip without making too much noise?"
This is what drives me crazy about feminists. They'll rant and rave about a model making $50K for appearing in a swimsuit in a beer ad being "exploited", but are *silent* about the so-dehuminizing-its-absurd treatment of women in most Islamic socities, including those subgroups in the U.S.
People - not just feminists or any other political subgroup - rant and rave more about things they see everyday. You might complain more about the traffic than world hunger or the AIDS epidemic, but does that mean you care more about your driving convenience than human lives? I wouldn't presume so, and I think neither should you.
If you want to learn programming, go to DeVry. If you want to learn computer science, learn Scheme.
Because the world is full of either "scientists" who never have to write real code, and "programmers" who never have to write good code? Your oversimplification ignores all the ones who actually understand the science and can express their designs in real world computer languages.
It's not. It will, at that rate, get you about $190 in take-home pay a week, or just under $10k/yr. You can QUITE EASILY afford to pay all your bills with that if you live frugally and don't have dependents.
The key phrase is at the end. Many people cannot choose to not have dependents (and I'm not talking about teenage pregnancy). The poor kid might have younger siblings who need some money for school, or a sick parent. And then add those who are paying for a hormonal mistake of pregnancy at 16.
The fundamental difference seems to be that you cannot imagine a circumstance where willpower and hardwork alone will not break the cycle of poverty, while I think it is common enough to be a concern.
Note also that we can far more easily achieve what we can see. It all likelihood, neither of us aspire to the riches of Bill Gates, while we probably both have the willpower to work for $100,000. Similarly, when you live on a month-to-month existence, saving up $20 a week (a tenth of that take-home pay you cited) so you can go to college in ten years can be downright quixotic.
Finally, there's a matter of whether you want to solve poverty as a problem or just explain why people are poor. We can conclude that they're just all lazy, or we can find a way that doesn't require willpower that few (even those who aren't poor) seem to have.
If you want above-average wages, go to college. Start a business. DO something.
If you're just going to show up to work when you're told and do a job *ANYONE* can do, you deserve the crap pay you're getting.
I hope you realize you haven't correctly classified everybody in the world (or even just in the US) with these two categories. There are plenty of people who cannot afford to go to college, much less start a business. How do you go to college if you are working minimum wage, already living in the cheapest place in the city, and eating the cheapest things you can find?
Sure, there are people with no ambition in life who shouldn't be whining, but there are also plenty of those for whom poverty deprives them of any choice.
And, Americans agree with me, based on how they vote with their wallets.
The same Americans who consistently pick the taller candidate for president? Seriously, democracy is a great form of government, precisely because it avoids both extremely smart and extremely stupid choices. Having the average decision skill based on average knowledge is nothing to be proud of.
Pardon me if I don't really care how a company's business model depends on how I use their product.
You could stroll down that road, but don't whine when record labels don't care if they trample on your fair use rights, because their business model requires that they prevent copying.
If you don't care to support a company that's trying to do something cool (assuming you agree it's a cool thing), then don't be surprised if one day they're no longer around to do anything at all.
If you really believe in your statement, why aren't you taking your showers at a nearby fastfood restaurant bathroom, so you can save on your water bill? Most will even have free soap, and paper towels to dry yourself off with.
grandiose proclamations like "I believe GMail is the logical next step in how we all do e-mail", well, that's just liturgical bullshit.
I happen to hold a similar opinion. GMail is the first real web application, and while it's a shame they can't get the same code working well on all browsers, they've done an admirable job making a web page feel a lot like a local application.
Threading of messages has been around for decades. Searching is easy and fast on modern hardware.
How many of these traditional mail applications work on Windows, Mac, and Linux? How many of them can let you view email "received" on a different machine? (Yes, there are solutions... such as GMail.)
The only benefit of gmail is that it's accessible anywhere you can access the WWW. That's cool, but personally I much prefer to SSH into my home machine.
Anybody who prefers ssh to a web browser should not be commenting on the popular impact of technology. You're overqualified, and apparently able to find ssh clients whereever you go, which probably puts you in a 1% niche of computer users.
Let me put it this way. I'm competent enough to set up any ISP-based email solution or my own email server if I wanted to, but my wife wouldn't use any of that, and prefers web-based email. The major downside of all prior webmail was the lackluster UI, and GMail fulfilled that beautifully. The only real issue remaining seems to be occasional availability problems before she will entrust important things to it.
Of course the best alternative would be some sort of sport.
...where you learn that while adults like to talk about playing fair and doing your best, they really mean for you to beat the other team however you can.
Engineers know how to say, "The Space Shuttle will blow up if you launch below a certain temperature."
No, this is a highly biased view, making the manager who overrode this concern look not only stupid, but murderous. The problem is that engineers are not able to state these risks as certainties, because they are risks. Far more likely, the manager will hear "this abnormal temperature is beyond design specs, so I don't know what will happen. It might explode, or it might just work." and have to make a decision along with other pressure factors.
I'm not saying it never happens. I'm just saying that management would be a lot smarter if they had perfect engineers who were always right. As it is, both engineers and managers have to deal with what we got.
From a scientific standpoint you'd have to show how genetically modifying somthing is unsafe. It's something called the "scientific method".
You are wrong. A new food or drug is not assumed to be safe pending evidence that it isn't, because of the potentially dangerous consequences. In this case, a GMO crop may not be recallable the way a bad drug can be, so even more care should be taken before introduction into the wild.
This post is VERY insightful. The idea that genetically modified foods are in some way fundamentally unsafe, wrong, or whathaveyou is, IMHO, without merit.
The idea that GMO foods are inherently (meaning, without any evidence one way or the other) risky is entirely founded. The industry must offer proof that it is safe, both to consume and to let loose in the wild (not destroy an endangered species, etc.)
The truth is that we've been doing genetic manipulation on our crops for hundreds, probably thousands, of years; a cow, tomato, or watermellon that we consume today is about the most unnatural thing i could think of to eat.
There is one important distinction: before genetic engineering we've never mated a frog with corn. Today, some GMO crops contain genes from another species. Again, that's not inherently unsafe, but inherently risky until proven safe.
Slashdot Mirror
The Republic of China has diplomatic relations with 27 (mostly tiny) nations. It also has no mutual defense treaties with the US. The closest one is a US law called the Taiwan Relations Act that requires the US to help protect Taiwan. The law is much weaker than a mutual defense treaty, mainly because it does not require the US to send its own forces under any circumstances.
One common pattern with maintained code is the cancerous growth of special cases to deal with new requirements. Over time, the special cases dwarf the original code, and it becomes very hard to even figure out what it's supposed to be doing.
Yes, OO doesn't solve all problems, yet "procedural languages"* are also well-known to have many problems of its own. OO is also easy to get wrong, as evidenced by your "have to throw them away periodically" observation. However, I can't help but feel that you're making conclusions based on limited and anecdotal evidence of failures.
* Many OO languages are procedural.
For something to be actually cross-platform (instead of theoretically cross-platform), it would have to be actually tested on all those various platforms. This testing, not to mention the additional hardware and software, is not even close to free.
Which is not to say designing something so it'll even just theoretically work across platforms is a bad thing at all. It will likely be slightly more expensive, but probably pays off as good design alone even if you never actually port it anywhere. You just should not be under the illusion that better code will come for free.
Also, just because MacOS and Linux combine for 10% of the market, for example, doesn't mean that your MacOS and Linux versions will account for 10% of your revenue. These are obviously users for whom games are not the all-important thing.
What formula? A Bug's Life was about friendship, but it was also about fitting into the ultimate socialist society of ants. Monster's Inc. was about friendship, but it was also about people not being who they seem to be, even when they look like monsters. Finding Nemo is about the power of a parent's love for their children. The Incredibles is also about fitting in, but it is a much sharper social commentary against mediocrity than any previous movie. Even Toy Story II was a sobering reminder of how fleeting "happily ever after" can be. None of these are profound concepts, but neither are they obvious rehashes of previous work. With every movie Pixar pushes the state of the art in technique.
Want to talk formula? Consider the scenario of a downtrodden character destined for greatness, and see it repeated in Cinderella, The Lion King, Aladdin, and perhaps other more recent ones I can't even bear to watch anymore. In most cases their transformations were more a gift from heaven than the result of personal effort.
It seems a shame to stop the 2D stuff, but kids obviously prefer the 3D stuff.
I disagree. I think kids today are simply more exposed to complex human relationships earlier in life, and don't care for Disney's traditional oversimplified fantasies long enough. Spirited Away, for example, seems to have done okay both financially and critically.
The up-front cost of a Mac is undoubted higher than a PC. However, consider:
- the value of the iLife suite, which would be worth additional money on the PC side.
- the resale value of Macs, which you can look up on eBay. A 900 MHz G3 iBook is going for an unbelievable $775.50 in 11 minutes, and a 500 MHz G3 iBook is going for $405 in 21 minutes.
- the value of your time saved.
Have yo actually considered the TCO, or just the up-front cost?Sorry, what stops an artist from selling art and buying some land to pass on to his or her children?
"The album debuted in #1 in sales in 28 countries; however, in the United States it only reached #3. All That You Can't Leave Behind was the third-highest-selling U2 album, with total sales of over 10 million." WordIQ.com
As of three days ago, the new single Vertigo is at the top of four separate charts.
Many artists would love to be so irrelevant.
The iPod supports Apple Lossless, which satisfies the technical need for FLAC except for folks who need the actual format. FLAC and Ogg Vorbis constitute too small a market to cater to (which includes porting, testing, space, and tech support for both iPod and iTunes, the former on two separate platforms). How hard is that to understand?
Get some pledges together, and pay Apple upfront for all that cost plus some profit to justify any threats to AAC and Apple Lossless (and therefore to the iTMS), and then I would expect Apple to be more receptive.
I agree that both the media reader and the digital camera link adapters are "crappy", but the latter is priced about the same as a 256 MB memory stick. For the several GB that you then have access to, it is not expensive. Compared to dedicated digital camera storage, it is not expensive when you already own an iPod.
It would've been cooler had it been able to display keynote presentations to VGA...
It would also be cool if it could display 3-D holograms of the band performing the song to you. Nobody can change the world with every product announcement, you know.
The question, though, is how many Keynote users really need to leave their laptop behind?
I say it's another cube for apple.
"Another" cube? The cube was released in 2000. How many such mistakes have you counted since, and how many have you successfully predicted at launch?
No, it cannot, because the Turing Test is interactive. What you've done instead is to weaken the Test so it is more easily passed. If something cannot instantly answer "what's your name?" you would not think it is human (without any other input). On the other hand, if it instantly answers "what is the square root of 19378189237123?" you may also realize that it's not human. Time is very much a factor.
If you don't need that kind of power, you should stay on the lower end. The G5 iMac or the eMac don't seem to run all that hot.
As for fan count, presumably you're referring to the PowerMac G5. Apple preferred more low-speed fans over a few high-speed fans as a noise reduction measure. What was your complaint?
That is most likely not Apple's only design criteria. They are asking, instead, "what's the fastest we can push this G5 chip without making too much noise?"
People - not just feminists or any other political subgroup - rant and rave more about things they see everyday. You might complain more about the traffic than world hunger or the AIDS epidemic, but does that mean you care more about your driving convenience than human lives? I wouldn't presume so, and I think neither should you.
The song refers to irony of situation.
Because the world is full of either "scientists" who never have to write real code, and "programmers" who never have to write good code? Your oversimplification ignores all the ones who actually understand the science and can express their designs in real world computer languages.
Or just buy the printer with a stolen credit card.
I wouldn't be surprised if it violates local law. After all, using those counterfeit dollars will almost certainly violate local law, too.
The key phrase is at the end. Many people cannot choose to not have dependents (and I'm not talking about teenage pregnancy). The poor kid might have younger siblings who need some money for school, or a sick parent. And then add those who are paying for a hormonal mistake of pregnancy at 16.
The fundamental difference seems to be that you cannot imagine a circumstance where willpower and hardwork alone will not break the cycle of poverty, while I think it is common enough to be a concern.
Note also that we can far more easily achieve what we can see. It all likelihood, neither of us aspire to the riches of Bill Gates, while we probably both have the willpower to work for $100,000. Similarly, when you live on a month-to-month existence, saving up $20 a week (a tenth of that take-home pay you cited) so you can go to college in ten years can be downright quixotic.
Finally, there's a matter of whether you want to solve poverty as a problem or just explain why people are poor. We can conclude that they're just all lazy, or we can find a way that doesn't require willpower that few (even those who aren't poor) seem to have.
If you're just going to show up to work when you're told and do a job *ANYONE* can do, you deserve the crap pay you're getting.
I hope you realize you haven't correctly classified everybody in the world (or even just in the US) with these two categories. There are plenty of people who cannot afford to go to college, much less start a business. How do you go to college if you are working minimum wage, already living in the cheapest place in the city, and eating the cheapest things you can find?
Sure, there are people with no ambition in life who shouldn't be whining, but there are also plenty of those for whom poverty deprives them of any choice.
And, Americans agree with me, based on how they vote with their wallets.
The same Americans who consistently pick the taller candidate for president? Seriously, democracy is a great form of government, precisely because it avoids both extremely smart and extremely stupid choices. Having the average decision skill based on average knowledge is nothing to be proud of.
You could stroll down that road, but don't whine when record labels don't care if they trample on your fair use rights, because their business model requires that they prevent copying. If you don't care to support a company that's trying to do something cool (assuming you agree it's a cool thing), then don't be surprised if one day they're no longer around to do anything at all.
If you really believe in your statement, why aren't you taking your showers at a nearby fastfood restaurant bathroom, so you can save on your water bill? Most will even have free soap, and paper towels to dry yourself off with.
I happen to hold a similar opinion. GMail is the first real web application, and while it's a shame they can't get the same code working well on all browsers, they've done an admirable job making a web page feel a lot like a local application.
Threading of messages has been around for decades. Searching is easy and fast on modern hardware.
How many of these traditional mail applications work on Windows, Mac, and Linux? How many of them can let you view email "received" on a different machine? (Yes, there are solutions... such as GMail.)
The only benefit of gmail is that it's accessible anywhere you can access the WWW. That's cool, but personally I much prefer to SSH into my home machine.
Anybody who prefers ssh to a web browser should not be commenting on the popular impact of technology. You're overqualified, and apparently able to find ssh clients whereever you go, which probably puts you in a 1% niche of computer users.
Let me put it this way. I'm competent enough to set up any ISP-based email solution or my own email server if I wanted to, but my wife wouldn't use any of that, and prefers web-based email. The major downside of all prior webmail was the lackluster UI, and GMail fulfilled that beautifully. The only real issue remaining seems to be occasional availability problems before she will entrust important things to it.
Just half-kidding.
No, this is a highly biased view, making the manager who overrode this concern look not only stupid, but murderous. The problem is that engineers are not able to state these risks as certainties, because they are risks. Far more likely, the manager will hear "this abnormal temperature is beyond design specs, so I don't know what will happen. It might explode, or it might just work." and have to make a decision along with other pressure factors.
I'm not saying it never happens. I'm just saying that management would be a lot smarter if they had perfect engineers who were always right. As it is, both engineers and managers have to deal with what we got.
You are wrong. A new food or drug is not assumed to be safe pending evidence that it isn't, because of the potentially dangerous consequences. In this case, a GMO crop may not be recallable the way a bad drug can be, so even more care should be taken before introduction into the wild.
The idea that GMO foods are inherently (meaning, without any evidence one way or the other) risky is entirely founded. The industry must offer proof that it is safe, both to consume and to let loose in the wild (not destroy an endangered species, etc.)
The truth is that we've been doing genetic manipulation on our crops for hundreds, probably thousands, of years; a cow, tomato, or watermellon that we consume today is about the most unnatural thing i could think of to eat.
There is one important distinction: before genetic engineering we've never mated a frog with corn. Today, some GMO crops contain genes from another species. Again, that's not inherently unsafe, but inherently risky until proven safe.