The sad part is that a large number of slashdotters will convince themselves that this type of thing is good despite the fact that the site is very clearly engaged in theft.
You must be new here. Write this on the blackboard 100 times: "Copyright infringement is not theft."
That would be an epithet most commonly heard in a barnyard, like "Moo!" or perhaps "Bah!"
h4rm0ny, these would be more familiar to you as "m00" and "B44", as said by 1337 c0w5 and 5h33p.
It is important in understanding the CIA to recognize that they use barnyard epithets like "bah" where other professionals would be more open in their communications and just say "bullsh*t".
It has come to my attention that you are having some difficulty with the maths involved in determining the theoretical sea level increase, if all the ice on Greenland and Antarctica were to melt.
Let me help you understand this unfortunate but unlikely situation.
The most commonly used model assumes that there would be no increase in the surface area of existing oceans. Estimates of sea level rise from this model vary from about 65 m to about 80 m.
Another, equally wrong, model is to assume that all the Earth's continents are insignificantly above current sea level. Under this assumption, the increase in sea level would be spread over 30% more surface area, resulting in an estimate of increase of 45 m to 60 m.
For the purposes of most discussions, it would be reasonable to combine these two extreme models and simply say that if all the ice in Greenland and Antartica were melted or floated, the sea level would rise by more than 40 m and less than 80 m.
I applaud your height and weight, and no I don't think you look fat. But I do suggest that when you shop for a beachfront condo, you limit yourself to looking at suites above the 15th floor.
Sincerely,
MysticGoat
PS: It appears more likely that sometime in the next 25 years we will see a sudden increase in sea level, of perhaps 0.5 to 20 m, from the exponentially increasing rate of glacial movement and calving from the bigger ice sheets (e.g., Greenland and Antarctica). This will be a short term thing, since the aggregate effect of all the small burgs produced will significantly increase the albedo of the high latitude oceans and thus effectively shut down the warming mechanisms on a regional level. This will also result in peripolar cooling. When combined with continued low latitude warming from existing mechanisms, we will see a much more powerful global weather engine than anything we've encountered in written history. I predict a large benefit for those who invest early in snowmobile companies and ski equipment manufacturers, and an interest in plans for bunker style housing in the hurricane belt (from the Florida Archipelago to the beaches of Fort Worth TX and Philadelphia PA).
I've just replaced my much valued and often abused Palm Vx with a Palm Z22. The Vx continues to work but the screen has become too dim for me to read well. The Palm Z22 is in some ways a step down but it has all the features I need, and adequate space. Plus its cost is low enough that I'm willing to use it without protection. I really got to hate the Palm Vx clamshell.
I've used Palms since 1995 as address books, portable procedure manuals (the memos are excellent for that) and some reference works. I've just loaded the _Perl Desktop Reference_ and _PHP Manual_ on the Z22 but I haven't really tested their usefulness as yet.
I can't see how a combined cell phone and PDA would be useful to me. Too often I'm using the PDA to look up something while I'm on the phone-- I don't know how I could do that with a combination unit.
What you are (apparently) unaware-of is that around the world, population growth is slowing
While this is true if you are simply comparing birth and death rates, it is very much false in terms of the impact of the human species upon our global environment. Consider that an average individual's weight increases 16 fold from birth (3.5 kg) to maturity (56 kg). Consider that 40% of the world population is not yet mature. Recognize that from this perspective, even if zero population growth became fact at midnight tonight, the amount of human biomass would continue to increase at an exponential rate well beyond 2020 (assuming no limiting factors).
With so much of the population as young as it is, this kind of discussion makes no sense unless one talks of kilograms of biomass. There are about 288 billion kg of human biomass on this planet at this moment, and even with zpg, this would increase by at least 30% to 375 billion kg in the next 15 years.
In contrast, in the 1950s with a more stable world population of about 2 billion, the amount of human biomass was roughly 75 billion kg.
I challenge your assumption. A world population of less than 2 billion survived for tens of thousands of years before the use of petroleum products. That doesn't say diddlely about the current situation, where the population exceeds 6 billion. This recent increase in population (all of it within living memory: go talk to somebody in their 80s about their childhood) has been powered by fossil fuels. The continuing population growth is unsustainable without a continued increase in energy production and will probably follow the classic pattern of a short plateau (as increasing die-offs balance new births) followed by a catastrophic drop to sustainable levels.
I suggest that you review Economics 101, giving special attention to the reasonings of Malthus, and the reasons why his dismal predictions have not yet come true. You will find that his equations are correct and that his predictions have failed because new sources of energy have occasionally been added to the mix. Now for the first time an energy source is being gradually subtracted from the mix.... This is indeed dismal science.
I keep seeing statements like this, and I wonder what they mean.
I have used Perl fairly extensively in data mining and format conversion work, sometimes using the Tk extension to provide a GUI front end, but I don't do real time applications or games. However I expect Perl would be adequate for many games, because I think that a lot of people are not recognizing the difference between a scripted language and an interpreted language.
Perl is a script language that is compiled on the fly, before processing starts: there is no Perl interpreter. My understanding is that the resulting code runs at the same speed as an executable from a C compiler: that it is in fact an executable from a specialized C compiler. My experience is that large, complex Perl scripts will exhibit a noticeable delay on start-up (during the compilation phase), but are indistinguishable in performance from any other executable once data crunching begins.
IME, any noticeably slow performance in Perl scripts can be traced to inefficient uses of regular expressions or string evals (both of which see heavy usage in the kind of work I've been doing). But these are program design issues, not inherent in the Perl implementation itself, and I doubt that either of these techniques would be used much in games. Obviously Perl isn't a good choice for 3D games with Shrek level animations, but I don't think you could do that kind of thing with any of the common C or C++ packages.
So am I missing something here? Is Perl really too slow for game development, or are people thinking that since it is scripted, it must be implemented like a Basic interpreter? Or are people overly concerned about the start-up delay of the compilation phase (which can be gotten around for Windoze/Wine by using something like perl2exe to precompile an executable for distribution).
This probably explains why we keep doing really stupid things...
Such as jogging alone in mountain lion country in California, with head phones blasting pounding rhythms into a toxoplasmosed brain... seems like the feline predator / prey model for taxoplasmosis could hold up even in human secondary host situations.
Here's an idea for all you health-related grad students looking for a thesis topic: lets see some comparisons of toxoplasma antibody titers between participants of extreme sports and the "normal" population.
If the intelligent designer gave our ancestors toxoplasmosis as a way of assuring that the lions, pumas, leopards, sabre tooth tigers and other predators had plenty to eat, then that pretty clearly contradicts a number of bible passages concerning God's love, His giving Man dominion over the animals, and so on and so on.
Or maybe it doesn't. A designer capable of a subtle, sneaky, dirty trick like toxoplasma gondii is certainly capable of lying about it and a lot of other things in his documentation.
Seems to me that there is no way reconcile toxoplasmosis with both Intelligent Design and a fundamentalist belief in the Bible as God's Word, without concluding that God is not a nice guy and does not play by the rules he says we should all play by.
This is not one of the gods that I would choose to follow, that's for damn sure. I'd prefer to take my chances with someone like Kali or Hekate-- at least with those girls you sort of know where you stand.
Perhaps I make too much of a jump here. To spell it out, there was a time when our ancestors were an important food source for feline predators. This is still true where old or injured big cats become maneaters, and are able to live and reproduce long after they are no longer able to pursue the prey that younger, healthier big cats go after.
I once read somewhere (But don't ask me to substantiate this remark because I can't!) that Microsoft has enough cash on hand that it could stop selling all of its products and keep going for five years without firing anyone.
Assuming that this is true or nearly true (and I believer that is the case), it is in fact an indicator of Microsoft management's failure to make the transition from a small time entrepreneural shop to a major international corporation. Microsoft high level management Just Doesn't Get It when it comes to big business, and th company's growth trajectory is ballistic-- with a durned sudden stop at the end. In any major company with a vision of the future, those billions in short term assets would have been moved to long term investments or returned to stockholders by now.
Bill Gates seems to understand this on some level, which I think is part of his motivation for distancing himself from Microsoft Corporation and becoming increasingly involved with his Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation work. That will be very satisfying to his ego no matter how big a crater MS Corp makes when it completes its trajectory.
As further corroborating evidence, I offer for your amusement the antics of the world's only foul mouthed, chair throwing, monkey dancing, Executive Officer of a Multibillion Dollar Enterprise. There is a reason why you don't hear of this kind of behavior from heads of Mitsubishi, Ford Motor Company, or the Bank of England: a certain maturity of emotional control and mature behavior is generally considered necessary to properly manage huge assets.
We won't wander or meander out into space. We will only go for a purpose or a reason. That reason will be very specific and will be very goal oriented. Another space race (think China), an opportunity for significant profits (think tourism or mining), survival (think ELE).
The article naming Malapert Mountain as a uniquely valuable piece of real estate, combined with the exposure this article just got on Slashdot, has now provided the USA with the necessary and sufficient reason to Go Out There, In A Hurry. For if the USA doesn't get to Malapert Mountain first, then China, India, or Japan will have possession of this piece of high ground, and be able to capitalize on whatever advantages it provides. Such as cheap power for exploiting other lunar resources.
We simply can't have that now, can we?
I wonder what international treaties exist, or should be written, that would assure peaceful and equitable development of lunar resources? It is probably time to start thinking about that kind of thing, maybe using the Antartic treaties as a starting point.
It would seem like a bigger deal if there were a serious problem with document compatibility, but it doesn't feel to me like there is. The main reason given for the ODF switch is to ensure that documents will be readable indefinitely
No.
The primary immediate and future reason for the switch to ODF is to be able to find pertinent documents in the archives using search techniques that are thorough and efficient. The archives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are not static things: there is a constant need to refer to old legislation, case law, and agency policies and procedures when evaluating new situations or considering policy or procedure changes. A deliberately obfuscated and proprietary set of formats like the Word.doc formats do not serve this function well, especially when the owner of the formats insists that they remain black boxes. An open format like ODF will allow MA state agencies, and people who have to deal with MA state agencies, to develop efficient and thorough search techniques with tools that already exist. Such as Perl, Python, etc.
Going to ODF will result in an immediate decrease in the costs of accessing the MA archives when you don't know exactly which documents are pertinent to your current need. That is a savings for MA government, and also for every citizen or business that needs to deal with MA.
In the next few weeks... fairly simple application... program needs to be fairly small and easy to install... Perl/tk isn't a valid option. What options do I have to build a small application on Windows, without a large learning curve?"
Take another look at Perl/Tk, with the use of a compiler like perl2exe to produce a binary as the final product.
Since you have Perl experience, this will be a shallow learning curve. The conversion to exe removes Perl's only significant performance limitation. The installation can be as simple as setting a desktop shortcut to the executable (Perl does not need to be resident on the target machine). The executable will be comparable in size to any executable a C programmer is likely to produce for the 1.xx series of revisions. Figure roughly a megabyte for the compiled Perl and Tk libraries and a couple of kilobytes for your own code.
I have had good success with precompiled Perl/Tk where the goal was to get efficient executables onto a machine that we did not want to have Perl itself on (for security reasons). We needed a tool for clerical staff to convert Word 97 documents to clean HTML4.0 that would work with our style sheets. Perl's pattern recognition made this easy to do; perl2exe gave us a sane way of implementing the solution.
And Jesus is coming back in the year 2010. Seriously, people don't trust the weather report 5 days from now, and yet they're perfectly willing to impose an economic cost on the USA amounting to trillions of dollars, for what is (in effect) a weather report ONE-FREAKIN'-HUNDRED years out? Where has the skepticism, gone, people?!? This isn't science, it's fear mongering based on the personal moral agenda of those who view humans as a sinful stain on God's pure earth---and the irony is, these people don't even believe in God. Welcome your new puritanical atheist overlords.
Translation (short form):
"La la la la la I can't hear you!"
Please mod parent down into oblivion. There is no substance the words; it is simply an ad hominem attack painted with the broadest possible brush and lacking in any wit or other redeeming value.
I've done RTFA, giving it more than twice as much attention as it deserves, since it deserves less than half as much attention as it has received*. My conclusion is that a paper on the proper use of parenthetical constructions when writing Lisp code to solve differential equations in thermodynamic fluxes would have been more appropriate to ALL our lives. In oh so many ways.
Graham is proposing a lifestyle of directed hedonism and to some extent implying that there is a rational basis for such an approach.
There are several problems with directed hedonism. One of the basic ones is that if you are a human being in this universe, by definition you are not going to ever know what you would really enjoy doing before you are doing it. There is no way that the five year old on his first two wheeled bike could know whether he will enjoy bicycling; he has to go through a hellish period of embarrassing and often painful falls before he has trained his body in the art of balancing on his bike. We've all of us been there: investing time, sweat, tears, and often skin and blood into something that maybe, just maybe, might become "fun" if we keep at it long enough. At most this kid on his first bike might be imagining the freedom of being able to ride all the way down to the corner store. But more than likely he is imagining in some nebulous way that being able to ride a bike will somehow help him transform from being a "little kid" into being a "big kid".
That transformation, from "little kid" to "big kid", is a Big Mystery. All little kids know of it; and all of us have by now been through some kind of transformative passage and can remember when we were pining so badly for the unguessable rights, privileges, responsibilities and opportunities that would be ours as soon as we broke through to the other side. Being human is to want very badly to be at a different place where we can turn around and look back at our old life and say "I'm not a little kid any more". Being human is to be working at confronting the next Big Mystery-- for there is always another one ahead, as soon as we turn forward and look at where we might go next.
That is what defines us as humans; that is a common theme throughout all the myths of all the different cultures. Being human is to be able to dream of changing into something that is so much greater than who we are right now that we cannot imagine what it will be like to be living that way. Having a good life has to do with the pursuit of these transformative moments, not with any happiness that may or may not ensue afterward.
Hedonism of any kind is pretty limiting: of itself it will only lead to a more comfortable rut that in its comfort just gets deeper and deeper until its dank and dark walls start to close in. A life based on the challenges of self-transformation is just the opposite: it is all about breaking out of ruts; becoming somebody different with new and far horizons.
The trick is to acknowledge the fear, pain, embarrassment, and hard work that are necessary to preparing for the challenge of the next Big Mystery, while not letting these negatives get in the way of having fun and enjoying yourself. Guide your life according to its challenges, both those thrown at you and those that you set up for yourself: let those determine the content of your life. Then apply "hedonistic" principles to your life's style: approach each challenge in a way that is fun and enjoyable.
Don't confuse style with substance. Happiness is a matter of your personal style sheet and working on a good myLife.css certainly deserves some of your attention. But the substance of your life is expressed in the mysteries myLife.xml, and the end result is not likely to be satisfying if you allow your CSS to limit what you do in your XML.
*Thanks to JRRT for such a delightfully expressive formula!
To this date, I have not seen one piece of evidence supporting those accusations [of MS using undocumented API features to obtain a market advantage for Windows].
To be honest, I haven't seen ANY of the evidence that was brought to court in the Microsoft trials. I have simply taken the word of others that the MS conviction was indeed based on evidence.
And to be totally fair, the prosecutors at MS antitrust trials chose to use a different argument to demonstrate MS's illegal, monopolistic business practices, iirc. And since MS settled the civil claims out of court rather than allowing its internal practices to be put in public view, I suppose we'll never know just how strong Borland's or WordPerfect's evidence was. We can only surmise that the evidence they held was strong enough that MS preferred to pay them off rather than allow the world to see the truth.
I do have a copy of Undocumented DOS stored away somewhere-- it is pretty dog eared because I used it a lot back in the day. Even when just writing DOS batch files, I found it very useful to use the same tools that MS programmers used, rather than the weaker tool set that carried MS's "Official" label. It really wasn't hard for any of us back then to recognize what MS had done with the Win3.x API: we had been seeing this behavior in their DOS products for several years.
Corporate policy makers at Microsoft have a long history of making a very fine distinction between what is criminal and what is simply unethical. I really do think that it would be a good idea for a Grand Jury to investigate whether the Microsoft policy makers have always drawn that line in the right place. Purposefully perpetuating a backdoor into Windows that could be used to install a keyboard logger is at least criminally negligent, on the face of it. In all the banter of whether this and how come that, let's not lose sight of that fact.
What the bleep... is neither solid science nor science fiction. It is a very entertaining collection of short excerpts from interviews and brief pieces of explanatory material that jumps around between a number of different disciplines, including quantum mechanics, anesthesia, and perceptual psychology. It is presented in an MTV kind of style that guarrantees that the first time viewer will miss many interesting details. It is not an accurate portrayal of the universe nor is it constructed as a piece of fiction. It could be described as a series of mind teasers.
When followed by a couple of hours in a quiet bar or coffeehouse, it is extremely good entertainment for most people, leading to some very fun and interesting discussions. It would probably suck to see it alone. I've seen it 6 or 8 times with different groups, and each time I've seen it, I've picked up on something new. Each time has led to some very enjoyable post viewing discussions.
It is an excellent choice for the Geeks' First Date. I can vouch for that.
It does matter (was Re:it doesn't matter)
on
WMF Flaw not a Backdoor
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· Score: 3, Informative
Conspiracy theories don't need reasons backing them up.
There is no way to disagree with that, if one accepts the anthropomorphism. s/theories/theorists/ would make this a stronger statement.
But whatever... At the time this particular exploit was introduced into Windows, there was definitely a conspiracy within Microsoft that involved at the very least mucking about with the documentation of the Windows API.
One of the reasons that Win30 and Win31 succeeded in capturing the market so quickly was because MS made the Windows API available to application competitors, notably Quattro Pro, then from Borland, and WordPerfect, then from WordPerfect. MS presented Windows as being a Good Thing for the entire software industry and got a lot of needed buy-in on that basis. During the development process for Win31, it was highly significant to the marketplace that Borland, WordPerfect, and other industry leaders of DOS software were writing native Windows versions of their applications, and urging their customers to upgrade from the DOS versions to the Windows versions. (The DOS versions ran better under OS/2 than they did under Windows since OS/2 had preemptive multitasking; moving the market to Windows versions of these products was critical to MS if Windows with its cooperative multitasking was going to survive the OS/2 challenge).
But MS wasn't playing fair: when Win31 came out, Excel and Word danced rings around Quattro Pro and WordPerfect. And when people started to look at how MS was able to get such better performance out of the same API, they found that the MS application coders were not using the same API at all: they were relying on undocumented features and features that were documented in misleading ways.
This and similar shenanigans from MS are matters of historic record, vetted by the courts. There can be no question that MS is a company that has used conspiracy tactics to gain market share. There can be no question that MS was doing this at the time it implemented the WMF structure under Windows.
Where does the WMF vulnerability fit in, in light of this background? Obviously it was not written initially as an internet backdoor.
But consider an MS application that used a trademarked WMF graphic on its splash screen. That graphic could run a small bit of code that would unlock hidden capabilities in the Windows API. For example, it could set DEBUG=TRUE in some low level part of the task scheduler, turning off chunks of code that other applications would have to wade through, and thus making the MS app so much more efficient in a way that would be undetectable even on dissassembling the code. There is no technical reason why the WMF vulnerability could not have been used in this way. There is no question that the MS corporate culture of that time would have celebrated and rewarded this kind of cleverness. In view of this background, and the fact that this vulnerability managed to survive the intense scrutiny of several major code revisions, the only reasonable assumption is that the WMF vulnerability is a deliberate backdoor and has been kept around because MS has thought it would be useful to them.
MS has always been a company that has put more value on cleverness than on ethics.
So the questions now are what has MS used this backdoor for, and what has been their plans for future use? Anyone who has used a Windows machine recently should be wondering what information MS has gathered from them and what MS is doing with that information-- the ability to swap a keyboard logger in and out as different graphics or icons are presented while an application is running is a disturbing thought.
I continue to think that there is cause here to consider a Grand Jury investigation. I don't see any other way in which MS employees could demonstrate that their unethical business practices haven't transgressed over the fine line and become criminal behaviors.
One of the interesting points made in What the bleep do we know is that human retinas are bombarded with millions of data bits each millisecond, and somehow the brain reduces this to a few tens of thousands of bits in the process of forming a conscious image, which happens pretty quickly. So these questions arise:
What are these processes that filter all this data before we actually experience "reality"?
To what extent do these very fast working processes control what we think we are seeing?
So in terms of web sites, it seems that even though I might not know how to define it, I can recognize quality before I see it. Yeah, that fits my experience: I'll google for something, open up a dozen of the most promising links in new tabs, then run through most of them at full click speed because I can instantly tell that they aren't the ones I'm looking for.
It seems that the better working definitions of "geek" and "nerd" are third party definitions that cross a gender line:
A "geek" is someone that your GF doesn't want to sit at the same table with because the experience would ruin her lunch.
A "nerd" is someone that your GF doesn't want to sit at the same table with because the experience would ruin her appetite.
Those here who don't have a minimal working understanding of "GF" don't yet have a need to know what distinguishes a "geek" from a "nerd". For them it is a useless distinction unless and until they evolve into one of those Higher Life Forms whose attributes include a ProbabilityOfGfAttachment that is neither unassigned nor void.
I thought I had answered your question, albeit between the lines.
The Wine team's orientation has been to create a precision, functional duplicate of the Windows API. Not to judge the correctness of that API. They would not have the tools or time, and perhaps neither the experience nor the orientation needed to critique the design documents-- which is in essence what you are suggesting they do. They would not be looking for vulnerabilities and their tools would not be the type that would demonstrate vulnerabilities.
Look, there should be no expectation that a translator tasked with creating a Russian version of the Origin of the Species would correct any errors of fact or false arguments that Darwin authored. The translation will be good only if what Darwin actually wrote is accurately reflected in the Russian version, with complete preservation of any errors, fallacies, or ambiguities found in the English version. Similarly, Wine should reflect all the behaviors of the Windows API, without regard to anyone's feelings about the desirability of those behaviors.
The goal of the Wine team has been to develop a body of code whose API precisely matches the behaviors expected of the Windows API. Since the wmf vulnerability is designed into Windows, Wine would be deficient if it did not provide similar behaviors. Whether the design has flaws or not is immaterial-- what is important is whether binaries written under one API will perform the same exact behaviors when run under the other API.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up. He's done a good job of stating the position of a large number of the high energy physicist and cosmologist communities.
The sad part is that a large number of slashdotters will convince themselves that this type of thing is good despite the fact that the site is very clearly engaged in theft.
You must be new here. Write this on the blackboard 100 times: "Copyright infringement is not theft."
What is a "barnyard epithet" ?
That would be an epithet most commonly heard in a barnyard, like "Moo!" or perhaps "Bah!"
h4rm0ny, these would be more familiar to you as "m00" and "B44", as said by 1337 c0w5 and 5h33p.
It is important in understanding the CIA to recognize that they use barnyard epithets like "bah" where other professionals would be more open in their communications and just say "bullsh*t".
Dear Mr. PapayaSF,
It has come to my attention that you are having some difficulty with the maths involved in determining the theoretical sea level increase, if all the ice on Greenland and Antarctica were to melt.
Let me help you understand this unfortunate but unlikely situation.
The most commonly used model assumes that there would be no increase in the surface area of existing oceans. Estimates of sea level rise from this model vary from about 65 m to about 80 m.
Another, equally wrong, model is to assume that all the Earth's continents are insignificantly above current sea level. Under this assumption, the increase in sea level would be spread over 30% more surface area, resulting in an estimate of increase of 45 m to 60 m.
For the purposes of most discussions, it would be reasonable to combine these two extreme models and simply say that if all the ice in Greenland and Antartica were melted or floated, the sea level would rise by more than 40 m and less than 80 m.
I applaud your height and weight, and no I don't think you look fat. But I do suggest that when you shop for a beachfront condo, you limit yourself to looking at suites above the 15th floor.
Sincerely,
MysticGoat
PS: It appears more likely that sometime in the next 25 years we will see a sudden increase in sea level, of perhaps 0.5 to 20 m, from the exponentially increasing rate of glacial movement and calving from the bigger ice sheets (e.g., Greenland and Antarctica). This will be a short term thing, since the aggregate effect of all the small burgs produced will significantly increase the albedo of the high latitude oceans and thus effectively shut down the warming mechanisms on a regional level. This will also result in peripolar cooling. When combined with continued low latitude warming from existing mechanisms, we will see a much more powerful global weather engine than anything we've encountered in written history. I predict a large benefit for those who invest early in snowmobile companies and ski equipment manufacturers, and an interest in plans for bunker style housing in the hurricane belt (from the Florida Archipelago to the beaches of Fort Worth TX and Philadelphia PA).
I've just replaced my much valued and often abused Palm Vx with a Palm Z22. The Vx continues to work but the screen has become too dim for me to read well. The Palm Z22 is in some ways a step down but it has all the features I need, and adequate space. Plus its cost is low enough that I'm willing to use it without protection. I really got to hate the Palm Vx clamshell.
I've used Palms since 1995 as address books, portable procedure manuals (the memos are excellent for that) and some reference works. I've just loaded the _Perl Desktop Reference_ and _PHP Manual_ on the Z22 but I haven't really tested their usefulness as yet.
I can't see how a combined cell phone and PDA would be useful to me. Too often I'm using the PDA to look up something while I'm on the phone-- I don't know how I could do that with a combination unit.
What you are (apparently) unaware-of is that around the world, population growth is slowing
While this is true if you are simply comparing birth and death rates, it is very much false in terms of the impact of the human species upon our global environment. Consider that an average individual's weight increases 16 fold from birth (3.5 kg) to maturity (56 kg). Consider that 40% of the world population is not yet mature. Recognize that from this perspective, even if zero population growth became fact at midnight tonight, the amount of human biomass would continue to increase at an exponential rate well beyond 2020 (assuming no limiting factors).
With so much of the population as young as it is, this kind of discussion makes no sense unless one talks of kilograms of biomass. There are about 288 billion kg of human biomass on this planet at this moment, and even with zpg, this would increase by at least 30% to 375 billion kg in the next 15 years.
In contrast, in the 1950s with a more stable world population of about 2 billion, the amount of human biomass was roughly 75 billion kg.
Numbers derived from the world population pyramid from the US Census Bureau's http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idbagg.html IDB Aggregations page.
Is there not a non-zero probability that Duke Nukem Forever is an existing program (for very small values of "existance")?
I challenge your assumption. A world population of less than 2 billion survived for tens of thousands of years before the use of petroleum products. That doesn't say diddlely about the current situation, where the population exceeds 6 billion. This recent increase in population (all of it within living memory: go talk to somebody in their 80s about their childhood) has been powered by fossil fuels. The continuing population growth is unsustainable without a continued increase in energy production and will probably follow the classic pattern of a short plateau (as increasing die-offs balance new births) followed by a catastrophic drop to sustainable levels.
I suggest that you review Economics 101, giving special attention to the reasonings of Malthus, and the reasons why his dismal predictions have not yet come true. You will find that his equations are correct and that his predictions have failed because new sources of energy have occasionally been added to the mix. Now for the first time an energy source is being gradually subtracted from the mix.... This is indeed dismal science.
Perl compiles a script's source into a parse-tree.... See chaper 18 of Programming Perl.
Thanks for the reference! I now understand why Perl is slower than C: the text has answered my questions very well.
Perl itself is slow....
I keep seeing statements like this, and I wonder what they mean.
I have used Perl fairly extensively in data mining and format conversion work, sometimes using the Tk extension to provide a GUI front end, but I don't do real time applications or games. However I expect Perl would be adequate for many games, because I think that a lot of people are not recognizing the difference between a scripted language and an interpreted language.
Perl is a script language that is compiled on the fly, before processing starts: there is no Perl interpreter. My understanding is that the resulting code runs at the same speed as an executable from a C compiler: that it is in fact an executable from a specialized C compiler. My experience is that large, complex Perl scripts will exhibit a noticeable delay on start-up (during the compilation phase), but are indistinguishable in performance from any other executable once data crunching begins.
IME, any noticeably slow performance in Perl scripts can be traced to inefficient uses of regular expressions or string evals (both of which see heavy usage in the kind of work I've been doing). But these are program design issues, not inherent in the Perl implementation itself, and I doubt that either of these techniques would be used much in games. Obviously Perl isn't a good choice for 3D games with Shrek level animations, but I don't think you could do that kind of thing with any of the common C or C++ packages.
So am I missing something here? Is Perl really too slow for game development, or are people thinking that since it is scripted, it must be implemented like a Basic interpreter? Or are people overly concerned about the start-up delay of the compilation phase (which can be gotten around for Windoze/Wine by using something like perl2exe to precompile an executable for distribution).
This probably explains why we keep doing really stupid things...
Such as jogging alone in mountain lion country in California, with head phones blasting pounding rhythms into a toxoplasmosed brain... seems like the feline predator / prey model for taxoplasmosis could hold up even in human secondary host situations.
Here's an idea for all you health-related grad students looking for a thesis topic: lets see some comparisons of toxoplasma antibody titers between participants of extreme sports and the "normal" population.
Perhaps this is all by design
An invocation of ID? hmmm...
If the intelligent designer gave our ancestors toxoplasmosis as a way of assuring that the lions, pumas, leopards, sabre tooth tigers and other predators had plenty to eat, then that pretty clearly contradicts a number of bible passages concerning God's love, His giving Man dominion over the animals, and so on and so on.
Or maybe it doesn't. A designer capable of a subtle, sneaky, dirty trick like toxoplasma gondii is certainly capable of lying about it and a lot of other things in his documentation.
Seems to me that there is no way reconcile toxoplasmosis with both Intelligent Design and a fundamentalist belief in the Bible as God's Word, without concluding that God is not a nice guy and does not play by the rules he says we should all play by.
This is not one of the gods that I would choose to follow, that's for damn sure. I'd prefer to take my chances with someone like Kali or Hekate-- at least with those girls you sort of know where you stand.
Perhaps I make too much of a jump here. To spell it out, there was a time when our ancestors were an important food source for feline predators. This is still true where old or injured big cats become maneaters, and are able to live and reproduce long after they are no longer able to pursue the prey that younger, healthier big cats go after.
I once read somewhere (But don't ask me to substantiate this remark because I can't!) that Microsoft has enough cash on hand that it could stop selling all of its products and keep going for five years without firing anyone.
Assuming that this is true or nearly true (and I believer that is the case), it is in fact an indicator of Microsoft management's failure to make the transition from a small time entrepreneural shop to a major international corporation. Microsoft high level management Just Doesn't Get It when it comes to big business, and th company's growth trajectory is ballistic-- with a durned sudden stop at the end. In any major company with a vision of the future, those billions in short term assets would have been moved to long term investments or returned to stockholders by now.
Bill Gates seems to understand this on some level, which I think is part of his motivation for distancing himself from Microsoft Corporation and becoming increasingly involved with his Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation work. That will be very satisfying to his ego no matter how big a crater MS Corp makes when it completes its trajectory.
As further corroborating evidence, I offer for your amusement the antics of the world's only foul mouthed, chair throwing, monkey dancing, Executive Officer of a Multibillion Dollar Enterprise. There is a reason why you don't hear of this kind of behavior from heads of Mitsubishi, Ford Motor Company, or the Bank of England: a certain maturity of emotional control and mature behavior is generally considered necessary to properly manage huge assets.
We won't wander or meander out into space. We will only go for a purpose or a reason. That reason will be very specific and will be very goal oriented. Another space race (think China), an opportunity for significant profits (think tourism or mining), survival (think ELE).
The article naming Malapert Mountain as a uniquely valuable piece of real estate, combined with the exposure this article just got on Slashdot, has now provided the USA with the necessary and sufficient reason to Go Out There, In A Hurry. For if the USA doesn't get to Malapert Mountain first, then China, India, or Japan will have possession of this piece of high ground, and be able to capitalize on whatever advantages it provides. Such as cheap power for exploiting other lunar resources.
We simply can't have that now, can we?
I wonder what international treaties exist, or should be written, that would assure peaceful and equitable development of lunar resources? It is probably time to start thinking about that kind of thing, maybe using the Antartic treaties as a starting point.
It would seem like a bigger deal if there were a serious problem with document compatibility, but it doesn't feel to me like there is. The main reason given for the ODF switch is to ensure that documents will be readable indefinitely
No.
The primary immediate and future reason for the switch to ODF is to be able to find pertinent documents in the archives using search techniques that are thorough and efficient. The archives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are not static things: there is a constant need to refer to old legislation, case law, and agency policies and procedures when evaluating new situations or considering policy or procedure changes. A deliberately obfuscated and proprietary set of formats like the Word .doc formats do not serve this function well, especially when the owner of the formats insists that they remain black boxes. An open format like ODF will allow MA state agencies, and people who have to deal with MA state agencies, to develop efficient and thorough search techniques with tools that already exist. Such as Perl, Python, etc.
Going to ODF will result in an immediate decrease in the costs of accessing the MA archives when you don't know exactly which documents are pertinent to your current need. That is a savings for MA government, and also for every citizen or business that needs to deal with MA.
In the next few weeks... fairly simple application... program needs to be fairly small and easy to install... Perl/tk isn't a valid option. What options do I have to build a small application on Windows, without a large learning curve?"
Take another look at Perl/Tk, with the use of a compiler like perl2exe to produce a binary as the final product.
Since you have Perl experience, this will be a shallow learning curve. The conversion to exe removes Perl's only significant performance limitation. The installation can be as simple as setting a desktop shortcut to the executable (Perl does not need to be resident on the target machine). The executable will be comparable in size to any executable a C programmer is likely to produce for the 1.xx series of revisions. Figure roughly a megabyte for the compiled Perl and Tk libraries and a couple of kilobytes for your own code.
I have had good success with precompiled Perl/Tk where the goal was to get efficient executables onto a machine that we did not want to have Perl itself on (for security reasons). We needed a tool for clerical staff to convert Word 97 documents to clean HTML4.0 that would work with our style sheets. Perl's pattern recognition made this easy to do; perl2exe gave us a sane way of implementing the solution.
And Jesus is coming back in the year 2010. Seriously, people don't trust the weather report 5 days from now, and yet they're perfectly willing to impose an economic cost on the USA amounting to trillions of dollars, for what is (in effect) a weather report ONE-FREAKIN'-HUNDRED years out? Where has the skepticism, gone, people?!? This isn't science, it's fear mongering based on the personal moral agenda of those who view humans as a sinful stain on God's pure earth---and the irony is, these people don't even believe in God. Welcome your new puritanical atheist overlords.
Translation (short form):
"La la la la la I can't hear you!"
Please mod parent down into oblivion. There is no substance the words; it is simply an ad hominem attack painted with the broadest possible brush and lacking in any wit or other redeeming value.
It isn't even a good troll.
Fah.
I've done RTFA, giving it more than twice as much attention as it deserves, since it deserves less than half as much attention as it has received*. My conclusion is that a paper on the proper use of parenthetical constructions when writing Lisp code to solve differential equations in thermodynamic fluxes would have been more appropriate to ALL our lives. In oh so many ways.
Graham is proposing a lifestyle of directed hedonism and to some extent implying that there is a rational basis for such an approach.
There are several problems with directed hedonism. One of the basic ones is that if you are a human being in this universe, by definition you are not going to ever know what you would really enjoy doing before you are doing it. There is no way that the five year old on his first two wheeled bike could know whether he will enjoy bicycling; he has to go through a hellish period of embarrassing and often painful falls before he has trained his body in the art of balancing on his bike. We've all of us been there: investing time, sweat, tears, and often skin and blood into something that maybe, just maybe, might become "fun" if we keep at it long enough. At most this kid on his first bike might be imagining the freedom of being able to ride all the way down to the corner store. But more than likely he is imagining in some nebulous way that being able to ride a bike will somehow help him transform from being a "little kid" into being a "big kid".
That transformation, from "little kid" to "big kid", is a Big Mystery. All little kids know of it; and all of us have by now been through some kind of transformative passage and can remember when we were pining so badly for the unguessable rights, privileges, responsibilities and opportunities that would be ours as soon as we broke through to the other side. Being human is to want very badly to be at a different place where we can turn around and look back at our old life and say "I'm not a little kid any more". Being human is to be working at confronting the next Big Mystery-- for there is always another one ahead, as soon as we turn forward and look at where we might go next.
That is what defines us as humans; that is a common theme throughout all the myths of all the different cultures. Being human is to be able to dream of changing into something that is so much greater than who we are right now that we cannot imagine what it will be like to be living that way. Having a good life has to do with the pursuit of these transformative moments, not with any happiness that may or may not ensue afterward.
Hedonism of any kind is pretty limiting: of itself it will only lead to a more comfortable rut that in its comfort just gets deeper and deeper until its dank and dark walls start to close in. A life based on the challenges of self-transformation is just the opposite: it is all about breaking out of ruts; becoming somebody different with new and far horizons.
The trick is to acknowledge the fear, pain, embarrassment, and hard work that are necessary to preparing for the challenge of the next Big Mystery, while not letting these negatives get in the way of having fun and enjoying yourself. Guide your life according to its challenges, both those thrown at you and those that you set up for yourself: let those determine the content of your life. Then apply "hedonistic" principles to your life's style: approach each challenge in a way that is fun and enjoyable.
Don't confuse style with substance. Happiness is a matter of your personal style sheet and working on a good myLife.css certainly deserves some of your attention. But the substance of your life is expressed in the mysteries myLife.xml, and the end result is not likely to be satisfying if you allow your CSS to limit what you do in your XML.
*Thanks to JRRT for such a delightfully expressive formula!
To this date, I have not seen one piece of evidence supporting those accusations [of MS using undocumented API features to obtain a market advantage for Windows].
To be honest, I haven't seen ANY of the evidence that was brought to court in the Microsoft trials. I have simply taken the word of others that the MS conviction was indeed based on evidence.
And to be totally fair, the prosecutors at MS antitrust trials chose to use a different argument to demonstrate MS's illegal, monopolistic business practices, iirc. And since MS settled the civil claims out of court rather than allowing its internal practices to be put in public view, I suppose we'll never know just how strong Borland's or WordPerfect's evidence was. We can only surmise that the evidence they held was strong enough that MS preferred to pay them off rather than allow the world to see the truth.
I do have a copy of Undocumented DOS stored away somewhere-- it is pretty dog eared because I used it a lot back in the day. Even when just writing DOS batch files, I found it very useful to use the same tools that MS programmers used, rather than the weaker tool set that carried MS's "Official" label. It really wasn't hard for any of us back then to recognize what MS had done with the Win3.x API: we had been seeing this behavior in their DOS products for several years.
Corporate policy makers at Microsoft have a long history of making a very fine distinction between what is criminal and what is simply unethical. I really do think that it would be a good idea for a Grand Jury to investigate whether the Microsoft policy makers have always drawn that line in the right place. Purposefully perpetuating a backdoor into Windows that could be used to install a keyboard logger is at least criminally negligent, on the face of it. In all the banter of whether this and how come that, let's not lose sight of that fact.
What the bleep... is neither solid science nor science fiction. It is a very entertaining collection of short excerpts from interviews and brief pieces of explanatory material that jumps around between a number of different disciplines, including quantum mechanics, anesthesia, and perceptual psychology. It is presented in an MTV kind of style that guarrantees that the first time viewer will miss many interesting details. It is not an accurate portrayal of the universe nor is it constructed as a piece of fiction. It could be described as a series of mind teasers.
When followed by a couple of hours in a quiet bar or coffeehouse, it is extremely good entertainment for most people, leading to some very fun and interesting discussions. It would probably suck to see it alone. I've seen it 6 or 8 times with different groups, and each time I've seen it, I've picked up on something new. Each time has led to some very enjoyable post viewing discussions.
It is an excellent choice for the Geeks' First Date. I can vouch for that.
Conspiracy theories don't need reasons backing them up.
There is no way to disagree with that, if one accepts the anthropomorphism. s/theories/theorists/ would make this a stronger statement.
But whatever... At the time this particular exploit was introduced into Windows, there was definitely a conspiracy within Microsoft that involved at the very least mucking about with the documentation of the Windows API.
One of the reasons that Win30 and Win31 succeeded in capturing the market so quickly was because MS made the Windows API available to application competitors, notably Quattro Pro, then from Borland, and WordPerfect, then from WordPerfect. MS presented Windows as being a Good Thing for the entire software industry and got a lot of needed buy-in on that basis. During the development process for Win31, it was highly significant to the marketplace that Borland, WordPerfect, and other industry leaders of DOS software were writing native Windows versions of their applications, and urging their customers to upgrade from the DOS versions to the Windows versions. (The DOS versions ran better under OS/2 than they did under Windows since OS/2 had preemptive multitasking; moving the market to Windows versions of these products was critical to MS if Windows with its cooperative multitasking was going to survive the OS/2 challenge).
But MS wasn't playing fair: when Win31 came out, Excel and Word danced rings around Quattro Pro and WordPerfect. And when people started to look at how MS was able to get such better performance out of the same API, they found that the MS application coders were not using the same API at all: they were relying on undocumented features and features that were documented in misleading ways.
This and similar shenanigans from MS are matters of historic record, vetted by the courts. There can be no question that MS is a company that has used conspiracy tactics to gain market share. There can be no question that MS was doing this at the time it implemented the WMF structure under Windows.
Where does the WMF vulnerability fit in, in light of this background? Obviously it was not written initially as an internet backdoor.
But consider an MS application that used a trademarked WMF graphic on its splash screen. That graphic could run a small bit of code that would unlock hidden capabilities in the Windows API. For example, it could set DEBUG=TRUE in some low level part of the task scheduler, turning off chunks of code that other applications would have to wade through, and thus making the MS app so much more efficient in a way that would be undetectable even on dissassembling the code. There is no technical reason why the WMF vulnerability could not have been used in this way. There is no question that the MS corporate culture of that time would have celebrated and rewarded this kind of cleverness. In view of this background, and the fact that this vulnerability managed to survive the intense scrutiny of several major code revisions, the only reasonable assumption is that the WMF vulnerability is a deliberate backdoor and has been kept around because MS has thought it would be useful to them.
MS has always been a company that has put more value on cleverness than on ethics.
So the questions now are what has MS used this backdoor for, and what has been their plans for future use? Anyone who has used a Windows machine recently should be wondering what information MS has gathered from them and what MS is doing with that information-- the ability to swap a keyboard logger in and out as different graphics or icons are presented while an application is running is a disturbing thought.
I continue to think that there is cause here to consider a Grand Jury investigation. I don't see any other way in which MS employees could demonstrate that their unethical business practices haven't transgressed over the fine line and become criminal behaviors.
"Nothing to see here..."
One of the interesting points made in What the bleep do we know is that human retinas are bombarded with millions of data bits each millisecond, and somehow the brain reduces this to a few tens of thousands of bits in the process of forming a conscious image, which happens pretty quickly. So these questions arise:
So in terms of web sites, it seems that even though I might not know how to define it, I can recognize quality before I see it. Yeah, that fits my experience: I'll google for something, open up a dozen of the most promising links in new tabs, then run through most of them at full click speed because I can instantly tell that they aren't the ones I'm looking for.
Viva tabbed browsing!
It seems that the better working definitions of "geek" and "nerd" are third party definitions that cross a gender line:
A "geek" is someone that your GF doesn't want to sit at the same table with because the experience would ruin her lunch.
A "nerd" is someone that your GF doesn't want to sit at the same table with because the experience would ruin her appetite.
Those here who don't have a minimal working understanding of "GF" don't yet have a need to know what distinguishes a "geek" from a "nerd". For them it is a useless distinction unless and until they evolve into one of those Higher Life Forms whose attributes include a ProbabilityOfGfAttachment that is neither unassigned nor void.
I thought I had answered your question, albeit between the lines.
The Wine team's orientation has been to create a precision, functional duplicate of the Windows API. Not to judge the correctness of that API. They would not have the tools or time, and perhaps neither the experience nor the orientation needed to critique the design documents-- which is in essence what you are suggesting they do. They would not be looking for vulnerabilities and their tools would not be the type that would demonstrate vulnerabilities.
Look, there should be no expectation that a translator tasked with creating a Russian version of the Origin of the Species would correct any errors of fact or false arguments that Darwin authored. The translation will be good only if what Darwin actually wrote is accurately reflected in the Russian version, with complete preservation of any errors, fallacies, or ambiguities found in the English version. Similarly, Wine should reflect all the behaviors of the Windows API, without regard to anyone's feelings about the desirability of those behaviors.
The goal of the Wine team has been to develop a body of code whose API precisely matches the behaviors expected of the Windows API. Since the wmf vulnerability is designed into Windows, Wine would be deficient if it did not provide similar behaviors. Whether the design has flaws or not is immaterial-- what is important is whether binaries written under one API will perform the same exact behaviors when run under the other API.