Yeah, but if you want to write Perl code that many Perl programmers have trouble reading, you have to use functional programming techniques that you learn from the lisp/scheme programmers. Running the input through a map that returns a closure each iteration is a good place to start.
> When I was learning programming, I would obfuscate code so bad that even > the compiler couldn't understand it, let alone humans...
The trick is to write the code so that the compiler understands it in a completely different way from any human reader, so that, upon seeing the output, the poor human goes, "How does it DO that? This code shouldn't get that result... heck, it shouldn't even compile!"
Perl5's regular expressions have already had most of the influence they're going to have. Quite a number of languages and utilities have adopted bits and pieces of the Perl5 regex syntax and feature set. Many in the Perl community hope that Perl6 grammar rules will be equally influential.
As for XS, I certainly agree that it's ugly and bad and needs to die; the interlanguage call semantics of Parrot will hopefully make that stuff completely obsolete. If I understand correctly, using code that's written in Python from your Perl6 code will look something like this:
use Python::SomeModule; my $object = Python::SomeModule.new(); $object.somemethod(@arg uments);
(I may have some legacy Perl5 syntax in there by mistake; I spend a lot more time with Perl5 at this point than Perl6, so sometimes I lapse.)
> What does Perl6 offer a satisfied Perl5 user? Is it faster? Smaller?
It features better support for key paradigms, including object-oriented programming (finally, a real object model), functional programming (we're getting continuations), and even some improvements for contextual programming. In other words, Perl6 will be a substitute not just for Perl5 but also for Scheme and Smalltalk.
Also, the whole Parrot thingydoo is going to allow software written in one language to seamlessly use libraries written in another language, without all the ugly messing around you have to do to accomplish that in Perl5. You'll be able to construct a complete data structure in Perl code and pass it to a library written in Python, for example.
Read the Apocalypse articles twice. The first time you'll recoil in utter horror. (I did.) Then read them again, and you'll be very excited. I am. The bummer is that we're still a while off from the release of 6.0
> Man, you paint people who don't want to bother with setup in such a bad > light.
You read something from my post that I didn't write into it.
> Is there something wrong with wanting a simple self-contained binary which > requires no installation other than copying the file and can be de-installed > by deleting it?
No, but Cygwin doesn't provide this; that is not its purpose. If you want this, you need applications that have actually been ported to the OS you are using, and also, developers need to get rid of certain ideas about how development is done; for example, apps developed in C or C++ tend to result in lots of files, so the above won't work, and you need an installer. PAR or the equivalent is closer to what you're asking for but is not in widespread mainstream use by application developers at this time.
> On a separate note, so typical of open-sourc-y type people to choose some > snazzy but obscure format to distribute their stuff. Why not gif or png?:(
Thumbnails in PNG format are included for each image, but PNG is a _bitmapped_ format, so it's not appropriate for _vector_ graphics. (Converting a vector graphic to a bitmapped format is a lossy operation; you can't go back and change your mind about how big you wanted the image to be. The difference between PNG and SVG is like the difference between Photoshop and Illustrator.)
The only other widely supported vector formats I know about are WMF, Illustrator's format, or the source formats for various raytracers. The latter are mostly obscure (except maybe POV) and require specific software and usually quite a lot of CPU time to render. They're great for rendering wickedly cool 3D scenes, but they're not a good format choice for clipart.
WMF or Illustrator formats could have been used, but SVG was chosen because it is a W3C standard (so _theoretically_ should within a decade or thereabouts be supported directly by most browsers; there is little chance that WMF or Illustrator formats will ever be supported by browsers) and also because it supports embedded metadata for keeping track of the author and stuff.
If someone wants to distribute packages of rendered PNG versions at a larger size than the thumbnails, that would be acceptable. There are tools that can automatically batch-render the SVG images to PNGs -- the project uses such tools to generate the thumbnails. Long-term, we would prefer that applications develop support for SVG, since it is a W3C standard and also because the ability to resize images without having them pixelate is very useful -- and, indeed, many applications have this on their TODO lists and just haven't gotten around to it yet, or in some cases (such as Mozilla) haven't got it debugged enough to include in the main releases, although it's available as an option at compile time -- but packages of pre-rendered bitmapped graphics would be useful in the short term for use with apps that do not support SVG right now. However, those would only be just that -- prerendered bitmaps. We still need to keep the SVG source images, because those are the ones that can be scaled to any resolution and have the metadata.
> > I've already been hearing talk from people excited about electing Cheney > > next election. It would not surprise me at all. > > I don't think that'll happen. First, Cheney's too old. Second, he lacks > the proper charisma. He's fat, bald, and harsh. That won't fly.
If he chooses to run, he'll probably get the party nomination on the strength of eight years as VP. It would be hard to argue against it; statistically, the current VP has a significantly better chance of being elected President than anyone else the party could choose to nominate.
He might simply not run, though, due to age or whatever. In that case, it leaves open the question of whom the GOP could run. Will Liz Dole still be a viable candidate by then? I'd vote for her. I'd rather Dan Quayle, but that's not terribly likely. They could run Taft (the Ohio governor), but that scares me to death: the man's a weasel, and far more liberal than any Republican candidate ought to be. He'd be a shoe-in for Ohio, though, which would be a convenient advantage. They could run Jeb Bush, but I'm not fond of that notion either; two Presidents from the same family in as many decades is quite enough -- we don't want to start having Presidential dynasties. They could pick a relatively unknown senator or representative...
The scary thing is, my dad thinks (and has thought since 2000) that the Dems are gearing up to run Hillary at some point. I would prefer that she not be the first female US President.
> As a Green who voted for Kerry I am disappointed to see Bush re-elected. > But I'm really disappointed in the reasons why he was re-elected. Many Bush > supporters polled indicated that they believe Iraq had WMD.
Not sure about had; he was trying to develop them, but in any case WMD is a gross oversimplification for what Hussein's regime represented and was trying to accomplish. You surely cannot, however, honestly expect the overwhelming majority of voters to do realistic analysis of international politics.
> They further believe that Saddam was linked to al-Qaeda and supported the > 9/11 attacks.
I'm not sure about direct support, but I thought indirect support had been more-or-less established. Granted, al-Qaeda had little to do with the real reasons for ousting Hussein; it was an excuse.
> I don't mind folks who have informed opinions that differ from mine. But > it's depressing to see people who have been lied to acting on those lies > as if it were the right thing to do.
Welcome to Earth. Politics is ugly here, and most people don't have a lot of discernment. The tradition of electing US Presidents based on lies goes back to George Washington, whose campaign featured fictitious anecdotes to boost public opinion of his honesty and other character traits. I don't like it either, FWIW, but it's not unique to any particular party or candidate. People voted for Kerry because they believed he was going to simultaneously kill all the terrorists and bring all our soldiers home to the dinner table, vote for tax decreases (despite his well-established record), and so on. People are naive. Don't be one of them.
> What standards are you using for power? We've got the biggest military, > and that equates to what? Sure we could destroy the whole world, so could > several other countries, are we more powerful because we could nuke the > same area 7 times? What about diplomatic power, which is the way things > really get done in the modern world, we're certainly not #1 in that category.
No?
Name another *individual* country with more diplomatic influence and clout than the US. A single country, mind you; Europe is a continent.
> Most successful eh?
That one's a bit more on the dubious side, yeah. He probably meant we have the largest single GDP or somesuch, which is true as far as it goes; per capita is another matter, though -- and there are other measures of success than money, as far as that goes.
> He specifically put up the mirrors because his servers were getting > attacked before. It's not just from mass visitation.
It actually *could* be just from extreme mass visitation. The last time a news topic created as much public interest in up-to-the-minute news as this election has done was 9/11. CNN is sluggish. MSNBC is sluggish. The site we're talking about is the number one Google result for the phrase "electoral vote", and it's also one of the top results for several other relevant phrases.
We're talking about *WAY* more traffic than a slashdotting. For one thing, we're talking about millions of people, not a few hundred thousand geeks. For another thing, people are reloading the site every five minutes in hopes of an update. Tannenbaum was thinking "tracking the accuracy of polls", so he was anticipating mostly geek and academic traffic -- a normal, or perhaps somewhat larger than normal -- slashdotting or so. He was *not* prepared for his site to get more traffic than Yahoo and Hotmail combined for 36 hours, which is what is happening.
At this point, a slashdotting is *NOTHING* compared to the traffic this site is taking. I guess roughly a third of the schools in North America showed the site to their students yesterday or earlier last week, and it's one of the first hits in Google for what is right now an extremely hot topic. Voter turnout this election was very high -- unprecedently-high in Ohio given that it rained statewide all day. A lot of people are deeply interested in the outcome of this election. There are probably several million people reloading the site several times an hour or more. The guy who set it up intended it as a site to track the accuracy of pollsters, so he was anticipating mostly traffic from geeks and academics; what he got was the mother slashdotting of all time, because projections of the outcome of this election are, as of this moment, more popular than email.
It's raining in Ohio. All day. Statewide. So, the voter turnout among union workers will be pathetic, and Ohio is pretty much a lock for Bush, if past election turnouts in the rain are any indication.
That leaves Pennsylvania and Florida: Kerry needs them both; Bush needs one or the other of them. That's my analysis.
> Umm wouldn't windhisled that don't break cause more fatalities? I'd imagine > that doing a header through breakable glass is much more desirable than > through jaws of life proof brick wall like polycarbonate.
Statistically, if you go out through the windshield, you're pretty much dead, no matter what the windshield is made of. Even if the windshield were made of air, whatever you hit outside isn't bloody likely to be significantly softer than a brick wall. Asphalt is the most likely thing. The steel of another vehicle is second-most-likely. If you're worried about dying of deceleration trauma in this situation, there's a nifty safety device built into most newer-model vehicles called a "seatbelt", which if used properly will generally prevent you from going through the windshield. HTH.HAND.
(Yes, the glass of the windshield would slow you down a bit going through it, but since it doesn't have a lot of give, it doesn't do so gently. If we made windshields out of two-foot-thick foam rubber (SPF), that might help a bit, but it would also have the negative side-effect of reducing visibility too much. The airbag is an attempt at a compromise partial solution to this problem -- it only reduces visibility when it activates, and in those cases it presumbly is needed rather more than visibility, or so goes the theory.
The point of the unbreakable windshields is presumably to prevent injuries (or fatalities) from outside objects coming in through the windshield and whacking the occupants. If the occupants go out through the windshield, there isn't a great deal that can be done for them. That's a DOA scenerio. So instead of making soft windshields, it's better to _prevent_ people from going there in the first place -- hence seatbelts and airbags.
Agreed. In terms of _working_, cygwin is somewhat better than WINE (assuming you have the source of the app you want to run; it's not much good for running binaries, obviously). This is presumably because the POSIX API and stuff doesn't have to be reverse-engineered to be implemented.
But as you say, neither WINE nor Cygwin is really appropriate for the hurried, "Just run this _now_ and don't bug me with setup" user. Some distros claim to have WINE pre-set-up so that running popular Windows apps is almost that easy, but in practice it usually doesn't work out that way -- and Cygwin doesn't even attempt that, AFAIK, because it is squarely aimed at an audience of tech users who know *nix but are on a Win32 platform for other reasons.
I would think the solution for getting *nix apps running on Windows would in most cases be porting them over. Granted, this has to be done for each and every app, and end users can't do it... but the end results should be a lot better than with emulation. Using Gimp on Windows is a lot nicer than using a Windows app on Linux with WINE. Sure, the scrollbars are a bit funky (since Gimp uses GTK, not the native widgets), but that's minor.
> I do agree with your observation, though - I too have never seen a legit > business in the.biz namespace.
Some legit businessess register theirname.biz *in addition* to theirname.com (and sometimes also theirname.org and theirname.net), but they always use the.com domain as their primary domain, the one that they advertise and so forth.
I agree that.biz is more lame than.travel, because.biz is *exactly* redundant with.com, having mutual 100% overlap in terms of what logically belongs in them; whereas,.travel is redundant, but at least it's only a subset and therefore arguably more specialized or something, albeit still pointless and lame.
Have you ever tried to killall a program that's forking itself constantly?
Doesn't work. You end up killing all the processes that were active at the time you started the killall, but there were others forked before you got them killed, so _those_ processes continue to fork off more.
What you have to do is perl -e 'while(1){`killall -9 agent_smith`}' This geometrically reduces the number of offending processes each iteration, because it loops faster than the others can fork; you can then kill off your perl process easily once you're sure all the offending forking processes are all quite well and truly dead.
there is a number -1 there is a number 0 if you have two numbers, there is a third number which represents their sum.:. there is a number -1 + 0
> if you cannot prove there is a number -1 + 0, you cannot even get that far.
That's because you're approaching it from the wrong direction. You can't use the existence of negative numbers to prove the existence of negative numbers. You need to drop subtraction and -1 from your logic and build the demonstration on just addition and positive integers. Start by demonstrating zero, and proceed to negative numbers along the same lines.
> You're a hydroponics specialist? Can't grow root crops without soil, eh?
Okay, several meters of water, then. How does that solve the problem? Even if you could grow them with the roots suspended in air, a crop of dandelions is still going to have taproots -- long, straight taproots -- and you have to put them somewhere.
> I've never seen a dandelion with roots more than about two or three > decimeters deep, even in really good tilth.
My seventh-grade science teacher tried to dig up a dandelion once, to show us how long their roots are. He tried hard to get the whole root, but it broke off. So he brought the thing in and clipped the green part to the top of the chalkboard. The root trailed on the floor for a foot or so, so that's 6-7 feet... but the real clincher is that the root was almost exactly the same diameter where it was broken off as it was at the top.
Even if you could grow dandelions with roots only three feet deep, that's still quite impractically long for onboard an interplanetary spacecraft. You want something you can grow in an inch of rich soil, ideally.
> Would anybody know if there are any plants here on Earth that could survive > on Mars itself? Not in some closed dome but in the actual atmosphere?
I think they'd probably start with a dome initially.
It's an interesting question, though. The atmosphere on Mars isn't toxic; it's thin, and it's low on oxygen, but plants can _make_ oxygen if they have carbon dioxide and sunlight. There's *plenty* of carbon dioxide on Mars.
Nitrogen is in rather shorter supply compared to on Earth, which could be a problem for many plants; I'm not sure how *much* of a problem -- there *is* Nitrogen, just not the same copious extent as here. A botanist might be able to answer this question. In any event, if you use soil fertilizers or even bring along your soil, you might be able to work around that, at least in controlled areas.
Then we come to the real problem: climate. Specifically, temperature and humidity. The endolithic plants from the Dry Valleys of Antarctica might be right at home, but you're not exactly going to be growing bananas. There isn't an obvious solution for this one: Mars doesn't have enough mass to hold the kind of atmosphere that would be needed to get the surface temperature up to Earth-temperate-zone standards.
In a small controlled area, especially in a dome, you can compensate for that by a variety of means -- thicker air within the dome, one-side-transparent walls to let the sunlight in and trap it there, with a thin vacuum gap to stop too much heat from escaping, and if necessary a larger area of lenses and mirrors to collect extra sunlight and focus it on your greenhouse. And inside an enclosed dome you can have whatever humidity you want, if you bring some water with you to set it up.
So they'll go with the dome initially. We have the technology to make the dome work. We don't have the technology to terraform the planet, not at this time, and not in the near-term future either.
The idea of terraforming Mars is tantalizing, because it's so *close* to being livable. But it's just not quite there, and we don't have the kind of technology that would be needed to change that.
> Anyhow, they were supposed to cycle "forever?" in their closed, balanced > system.
A glass globe is only a closed system if you put it an opaque box (and even then heat gets in and out). I'm not sure what the right terminology is for this kind of eccological system that's not interdependent with the rest of the world -- "isolated" maybe? Dunno.
But anyway, yeah, that's the idea, except they were hoping for a system that would produce a net surplus of oxygen at least (given carbon dioxide -- i.e., to balance the respiration of the humans) and preferably also food. Sunlight would be a bit less plentiful than on Earth, but still available. The *amount* of sunlight available (per square whatever per time unit) on Mars no doubt is important to determining what plants are suited, as many plants would just die. Hardiness in general would be an important consideration also, I would think.
> Then there's the lowly weed. Do people know just how useful and healthful > dandelion is?
I don't know if you'd want to try to grow dandelion on a spaceship, though. You'd need soil several meters deep to accommodate the root system, and that doesn't seem like an efficient use of the very expensive space onboard. Something with shallower roots that branch out more might be better suited.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but if you want to write Perl code that many Perl programmers have
trouble reading, you have to use functional programming techniques that you
learn from the lisp/scheme programmers. Running the input through a map
that returns a closure each iteration is a good place to start.
> When I was learning programming, I would obfuscate code so bad that even
> the compiler couldn't understand it, let alone humans...
The trick is to write the code so that the compiler understands it in a
completely different way from any human reader, so that, upon seeing the
output, the poor human goes, "How does it DO that? This code shouldn't
get that result... heck, it shouldn't even compile!"
I prefer the which-time-and-date-module-is-best argument. I like DateTime.
> It appears that Perl 6 grammars are more powerful than CFGs. If they
> can simulate a Turing machine...
It's better/worse than that. Perl6 grammar rules can call arbitrary Perl6 code.
Perl5's regular expressions have already had most of the influence they're
g uments);
going to have. Quite a number of languages and utilities have adopted bits
and pieces of the Perl5 regex syntax and feature set. Many in the Perl
community hope that Perl6 grammar rules will be equally influential.
As for XS, I certainly agree that it's ugly and bad and needs to die; the
interlanguage call semantics of Parrot will hopefully make that stuff
completely obsolete. If I understand correctly, using code that's written
in Python from your Perl6 code will look something like this:
use Python::SomeModule;
my $object = Python::SomeModule.new();
$object.somemethod(@ar
(I may have some legacy Perl5 syntax in there by mistake; I spend a lot more
time with Perl5 at this point than Perl6, so sometimes I lapse.)
> What does Perl6 offer a satisfied Perl5 user? Is it faster? Smaller?
It features better support for key paradigms, including object-oriented
programming (finally, a real object model), functional programming (we're
getting continuations), and even some improvements for contextual programming.
In other words, Perl6 will be a substitute not just for Perl5 but also for
Scheme and Smalltalk.
Also, the whole Parrot thingydoo is going to allow software written in one
language to seamlessly use libraries written in another language, without all
the ugly messing around you have to do to accomplish that in Perl5. You'll
be able to construct a complete data structure in Perl code and pass it to
a library written in Python, for example.
Read the Apocalypse articles twice. The first time you'll recoil in utter
horror. (I did.) Then read them again, and you'll be very excited. I am.
The bummer is that we're still a while off from the release of 6.0
> Man, you paint people who don't want to bother with setup in such a bad
> light.
You read something from my post that I didn't write into it.
> Is there something wrong with wanting a simple self-contained binary which
> requires no installation other than copying the file and can be de-installed
> by deleting it?
No, but Cygwin doesn't provide this; that is not its purpose. If you want
this, you need applications that have actually been ported to the OS you
are using, and also, developers need to get rid of certain ideas about how
development is done; for example, apps developed in C or C++ tend to result
in lots of files, so the above won't work, and you need an installer. PAR
or the equivalent is closer to what you're asking for but is not in widespread
mainstream use by application developers at this time.
> The EU. It's not a continent, it's a Federal alliance not so dissimilar
> in structure to an early version of your United States.
The so-called "United" States before we had our constitution, perhaps. It
does not, however, function as a nation in any real sense.
> On a separate note, so typical of open-sourc-y type people to choose some :(
> snazzy but obscure format to distribute their stuff. Why not gif or png?
Thumbnails in PNG format are included for each image, but PNG is a _bitmapped_
format, so it's not appropriate for _vector_ graphics. (Converting a vector
graphic to a bitmapped format is a lossy operation; you can't go back and
change your mind about how big you wanted the image to be. The difference
between PNG and SVG is like the difference between Photoshop and Illustrator.)
The only other widely supported vector formats I know about are WMF,
Illustrator's format, or the source formats for various raytracers. The
latter are mostly obscure (except maybe POV) and require specific software
and usually quite a lot of CPU time to render. They're great for rendering
wickedly cool 3D scenes, but they're not a good format choice for clipart.
WMF or Illustrator formats could have been used, but SVG was chosen because
it is a W3C standard (so _theoretically_ should within a decade or thereabouts
be supported directly by most browsers; there is little chance that WMF or
Illustrator formats will ever be supported by browsers) and also because it
supports embedded metadata for keeping track of the author and stuff.
If someone wants to distribute packages of rendered PNG versions at a larger
size than the thumbnails, that would be acceptable. There are tools that
can automatically batch-render the SVG images to PNGs -- the project uses
such tools to generate the thumbnails. Long-term, we would prefer that
applications develop support for SVG, since it is a W3C standard and also
because the ability to resize images without having them pixelate is very
useful -- and, indeed, many applications have this on their TODO lists and
just haven't gotten around to it yet, or in some cases (such as Mozilla)
haven't got it debugged enough to include in the main releases, although
it's available as an option at compile time -- but packages of pre-rendered
bitmapped graphics would be useful in the short term for use with apps that
do not support SVG right now. However, those would only be just that --
prerendered bitmaps. We still need to keep the SVG source images, because
those are the ones that can be scaled to any resolution and have the metadata.
> > I've already been hearing talk from people excited about electing Cheney
> > next election. It would not surprise me at all.
>
> I don't think that'll happen. First, Cheney's too old. Second, he lacks
> the proper charisma. He's fat, bald, and harsh. That won't fly.
If he chooses to run, he'll probably get the party nomination on the strength
of eight years as VP. It would be hard to argue against it; statistically,
the current VP has a significantly better chance of being elected President
than anyone else the party could choose to nominate.
He might simply not run, though, due to age or whatever. In that case, it
leaves open the question of whom the GOP could run. Will Liz Dole still be
a viable candidate by then? I'd vote for her. I'd rather Dan Quayle, but
that's not terribly likely. They could run Taft (the Ohio governor), but
that scares me to death: the man's a weasel, and far more liberal than any
Republican candidate ought to be. He'd be a shoe-in for Ohio, though, which
would be a convenient advantage. They could run Jeb Bush, but I'm not fond
of that notion either; two Presidents from the same family in as many decades
is quite enough -- we don't want to start having Presidential dynasties.
They could pick a relatively unknown senator or representative...
The scary thing is, my dad thinks (and has thought since 2000) that the Dems
are gearing up to run Hillary at some point. I would prefer that she not be
the first female US President.
> As a Green who voted for Kerry I am disappointed to see Bush re-elected.
> But I'm really disappointed in the reasons why he was re-elected. Many Bush
> supporters polled indicated that they believe Iraq had WMD.
Not sure about had; he was trying to develop them, but in any case WMD is a
gross oversimplification for what Hussein's regime represented and was trying
to accomplish. You surely cannot, however, honestly expect the overwhelming
majority of voters to do realistic analysis of international politics.
> They further believe that Saddam was linked to al-Qaeda and supported the
> 9/11 attacks.
I'm not sure about direct support, but I thought indirect support had been
more-or-less established. Granted, al-Qaeda had little to do with the real
reasons for ousting Hussein; it was an excuse.
> I don't mind folks who have informed opinions that differ from mine. But
> it's depressing to see people who have been lied to acting on those lies
> as if it were the right thing to do.
Welcome to Earth. Politics is ugly here, and most people don't have a lot
of discernment. The tradition of electing US Presidents based on lies goes
back to George Washington, whose campaign featured fictitious anecdotes to
boost public opinion of his honesty and other character traits. I don't like
it either, FWIW, but it's not unique to any particular party or candidate.
People voted for Kerry because they believed he was going to simultaneously
kill all the terrorists and bring all our soldiers home to the dinner table,
vote for tax decreases (despite his well-established record), and so on.
People are naive. Don't be one of them.
> What standards are you using for power? We've got the biggest military,
> and that equates to what? Sure we could destroy the whole world, so could
> several other countries, are we more powerful because we could nuke the
> same area 7 times? What about diplomatic power, which is the way things
> really get done in the modern world, we're certainly not #1 in that category.
No?
Name another *individual* country with more diplomatic influence and clout
than the US. A single country, mind you; Europe is a continent.
> Most successful eh?
That one's a bit more on the dubious side, yeah. He probably meant we have the
largest single GDP or somesuch, which is true as far as it goes; per capita
is another matter, though -- and there are other measures of success than
money, as far as that goes.
> He specifically put up the mirrors because his servers were getting
> attacked before. It's not just from mass visitation.
It actually *could* be just from extreme mass visitation. The last time a
news topic created as much public interest in up-to-the-minute news as this
election has done was 9/11. CNN is sluggish. MSNBC is sluggish. The site
we're talking about is the number one Google result for the phrase "electoral
vote", and it's also one of the top results for several other relevant phrases.
We're talking about *WAY* more traffic than a slashdotting. For one thing,
we're talking about millions of people, not a few hundred thousand geeks.
For another thing, people are reloading the site every five minutes in hopes
of an update. Tannenbaum was thinking "tracking the accuracy of polls", so
he was anticipating mostly geek and academic traffic -- a normal, or perhaps
somewhat larger than normal -- slashdotting or so. He was *not* prepared
for his site to get more traffic than Yahoo and Hotmail combined for 36 hours,
which is what is happening.
> Let's post it to Slashdot with a link.
At this point, a slashdotting is *NOTHING* compared to the traffic this site
is taking. I guess roughly a third of the schools in North America showed
the site to their students yesterday or earlier last week, and it's one of
the first hits in Google for what is right now an extremely hot topic. Voter
turnout this election was very high -- unprecedently-high in Ohio given that
it rained statewide all day. A lot of people are deeply interested in the
outcome of this election. There are probably several million people reloading
the site several times an hour or more. The guy who set it up intended it
as a site to track the accuracy of pollsters, so he was anticipating mostly
traffic from geeks and academics; what he got was the mother slashdotting of
all time, because projections of the outcome of this election are, as of this
moment, more popular than email.
MSNBC and CNN are sluggish too.
It's raining in Ohio. All day. Statewide. So, the voter turnout among union
workers will be pathetic, and Ohio is pretty much a lock for Bush, if past
election turnouts in the rain are any indication.
That leaves Pennsylvania and Florida: Kerry needs them both; Bush needs one
or the other of them. That's my analysis.
> Umm wouldn't windhisled that don't break cause more fatalities? I'd imagine
> that doing a header through breakable glass is much more desirable than
> through jaws of life proof brick wall like polycarbonate.
Statistically, if you go out through the windshield, you're pretty much dead,
no matter what the windshield is made of. Even if the windshield were made
of air, whatever you hit outside isn't bloody likely to be significantly
softer than a brick wall. Asphalt is the most likely thing. The steel of
another vehicle is second-most-likely. If you're worried about dying of
deceleration trauma in this situation, there's a nifty safety device built
into most newer-model vehicles called a "seatbelt", which if used properly
will generally prevent you from going through the windshield. HTH.HAND.
(Yes, the glass of the windshield would slow you down a bit going through
it, but since it doesn't have a lot of give, it doesn't do so gently. If
we made windshields out of two-foot-thick foam rubber (SPF), that might
help a bit, but it would also have the negative side-effect of reducing
visibility too much. The airbag is an attempt at a compromise partial
solution to this problem -- it only reduces visibility when it activates,
and in those cases it presumbly is needed rather more than visibility, or
so goes the theory.
The point of the unbreakable windshields is presumably to prevent injuries
(or fatalities) from outside objects coming in through the windshield and
whacking the occupants. If the occupants go out through the windshield,
there isn't a great deal that can be done for them. That's a DOA scenerio.
So instead of making soft windshields, it's better to _prevent_ people from
going there in the first place -- hence seatbelts and airbags.
Agreed. In terms of _working_, cygwin is somewhat better than WINE (assuming
you have the source of the app you want to run; it's not much good for running
binaries, obviously). This is presumably because the POSIX API and stuff
doesn't have to be reverse-engineered to be implemented.
But as you say, neither WINE nor Cygwin is really appropriate for the hurried,
"Just run this _now_ and don't bug me with setup" user. Some distros claim to
have WINE pre-set-up so that running popular Windows apps is almost that easy,
but in practice it usually doesn't work out that way -- and Cygwin doesn't
even attempt that, AFAIK, because it is squarely aimed at an audience of tech
users who know *nix but are on a Win32 platform for other reasons.
I would think the solution for getting *nix apps running on Windows would in
most cases be porting them over. Granted, this has to be done for each and
every app, and end users can't do it... but the end results should be a lot
better than with emulation. Using Gimp on Windows is a lot nicer than using
a Windows app on Linux with WINE. Sure, the scrollbars are a bit funky (since
Gimp uses GTK, not the native widgets), but that's minor.
> I do agree with your observation, though - I too have never seen a legit .biz namespace.
.com domain as their primary domain, the one that they advertise and so forth.
.biz is more lame than .travel, because .biz is *exactly* .com, having mutual 100% overlap in terms of what logically .travel is redundant, but at least it's only a
> business in the
Some legit businessess register theirname.biz *in addition* to theirname.com
(and sometimes also theirname.org and theirname.net), but they always use the
I agree that
redundant with
belongs in them; whereas,
subset and therefore arguably more specialized or something, albeit still
pointless and lame.
# ssh -l neo the_matrix; killall -9 agent_smith
Have you ever tried to killall a program that's forking itself constantly?
Doesn't work. You end up killing all the processes that were active at the
time you started the killall, but there were others forked before you got
them killed, so _those_ processes continue to fork off more.
What you have to do is perl -e 'while(1){`killall -9 agent_smith`}'
This geometrically reduces the number of offending processes each iteration,
because it loops faster than the others can fork; you can then kill off your
perl process easily once you're sure all the offending forking processes are
all quite well and truly dead.
there is a number -1 :.
there is a number 0
if you have two numbers, there is a third number which represents their sum.
there is a number -1 + 0
> if you cannot prove there is a number -1 + 0, you cannot even get that far.
That's because you're approaching it from the wrong direction. You can't use
the existence of negative numbers to prove the existence of negative numbers.
You need to drop subtraction and -1 from your logic and build the demonstration
on just addition and positive integers. Start by demonstrating zero, and
proceed to negative numbers along the same lines.
> You're a hydroponics specialist? Can't grow root crops without soil, eh?
Okay, several meters of water, then. How does that solve the problem?
Even if you could grow them with the roots suspended in air, a crop of
dandelions is still going to have taproots -- long, straight taproots --
and you have to put them somewhere.
> I've never seen a dandelion with roots more than about two or three
> decimeters deep, even in really good tilth.
My seventh-grade science teacher tried to dig up a dandelion once, to show us
how long their roots are. He tried hard to get the whole root, but it broke
off. So he brought the thing in and clipped the green part to the top of the
chalkboard. The root trailed on the floor for a foot or so, so that's 6-7
feet... but the real clincher is that the root was almost exactly the same
diameter where it was broken off as it was at the top.
Even if you could grow dandelions with roots only three feet deep, that's
still quite impractically long for onboard an interplanetary spacecraft.
You want something you can grow in an inch of rich soil, ideally.
> Would anybody know if there are any plants here on Earth that could survive
> on Mars itself? Not in some closed dome but in the actual atmosphere?
I think they'd probably start with a dome initially.
It's an interesting question, though. The atmosphere on Mars isn't toxic; it's
thin, and it's low on oxygen, but plants can _make_ oxygen if they have carbon
dioxide and sunlight. There's *plenty* of carbon dioxide on Mars.
Nitrogen is in rather shorter supply compared to on Earth, which could be a
problem for many plants; I'm not sure how *much* of a problem -- there *is*
Nitrogen, just not the same copious extent as here. A botanist might be able
to answer this question. In any event, if you use soil fertilizers or even
bring along your soil, you might be able to work around that, at least in
controlled areas.
Then we come to the real problem: climate. Specifically, temperature and
humidity. The endolithic plants from the Dry Valleys of Antarctica might be
right at home, but you're not exactly going to be growing bananas. There
isn't an obvious solution for this one: Mars doesn't have enough mass to hold
the kind of atmosphere that would be needed to get the surface temperature
up to Earth-temperate-zone standards.
In a small controlled area, especially in a dome, you can compensate for that
by a variety of means -- thicker air within the dome, one-side-transparent
walls to let the sunlight in and trap it there, with a thin vacuum gap to
stop too much heat from escaping, and if necessary a larger area of lenses
and mirrors to collect extra sunlight and focus it on your greenhouse. And
inside an enclosed dome you can have whatever humidity you want, if you bring
some water with you to set it up.
So they'll go with the dome initially. We have the technology to make the
dome work. We don't have the technology to terraform the planet, not at this
time, and not in the near-term future either.
The idea of terraforming Mars is tantalizing, because it's so *close* to
being livable. But it's just not quite there, and we don't have the kind
of technology that would be needed to change that.
> Anyhow, they were supposed to cycle "forever?" in their closed, balanced
> system.
A glass globe is only a closed system if you put it an opaque box (and even
then heat gets in and out). I'm not sure what the right terminology is for
this kind of eccological system that's not interdependent with the rest of
the world -- "isolated" maybe? Dunno.
But anyway, yeah, that's the idea, except they were hoping for a system that
would produce a net surplus of oxygen at least (given carbon dioxide -- i.e.,
to balance the respiration of the humans) and preferably also food. Sunlight
would be a bit less plentiful than on Earth, but still available. The *amount*
of sunlight available (per square whatever per time unit) on Mars no doubt is
important to determining what plants are suited, as many plants would just die.
Hardiness in general would be an important consideration also, I would think.
> Then there's the lowly weed. Do people know just how useful and healthful
> dandelion is?
I don't know if you'd want to try to grow dandelion on a spaceship, though.
You'd need soil several meters deep to accommodate the root system, and that
doesn't seem like an efficient use of the very expensive space onboard.
Something with shallower roots that branch out more might be better suited.
> the only plants that would grow on Mars are ragweed and poison ivy.
And crab grass. That stuff will grow anywhere. Maybe potatoes too, come to
think of it. And lichens.