All I've read is that the Euro PS3 will play fewer PS2. Exactly what does that mean?
Well, Sony's press release said they will have a compatability list up on the EU launch date in March. They also called the system's support for PS2 games "limited", so I'm thinking that means a lot more than 1 less game (since the US/Japan PS3 supports nearly all PS2 games, at least enough that Sony has never refered to the number as "limited").
"The European PS3 will feature the Cell Broadband Engine(TM), 60 GB hard disc drive, Blu-ray Disc player, built-in Wi-Fi connectivity, SIXAXIS(TM) wireless controller. It also embodies a new combination of hardware and software emulation which will enable PS3 to be compatible with a broad range of original PlayStation® (PS) titles and a limited range of PlayStation®2 (PS2) titles."
"Rather than concentrate on PS2 backwards compatibility, in the future, company resources will be increasingly focused on developing new games..."
"Certain PlayStation 2 format software titles may not perform properly on this system."
And other references in the press release about future software patches to support more PS2 games, and a special list of compatible PS2 games for the EU version of the console (that isn't live yet).
Oh, and before you pull some blatant fanboi linguistic bullshit and say that Sony never literally said "reduced", then realize what everyone else does: They don't call the US/Japan PS3's support for the PS2 "limited", ergo being "limited" is a reduction. If it was the same level of support as the US/Japan version, they would have said words to that effect and let it drop. Instead they said words to the effect that the new PS3 is not designed with backward compatability as a major feature, new games are better, only a limited selection of old games will work. You'd have to be mental to not understand that this means a reduction. Maybe you are mental. We're not.
That makes the pre-VAT (we have sales tax here, but it varies state to state and isn't included in the advertised price) cost of the PS3 $710, more than a hundred dollars more than the U.S. price.
Yeah, you're getting screwed. Don't you guys get screwed on pretty much all console prices? Isn't even the Wii the equivalent of like $300 there?
Even considering that, if Sony doesn't announce that they are also dropping the price of the EU PS3 (since they're making the hardware cheaper), then yeah, you're getting extra-special screwed by the arrogant bastards at Sony. Of course they're probably just trying to reduce their losses, which are still going to be substantial even at $710 and with cheaper hardware.
Not exactly, but they -are- functions that are handled specially, rather than functions that are only called directly at the programmer's behest (or through a function reference explicitly initialized by the programmer). Constructors and allocators have special syntax in the C++ and Java; having them be identified as 'different' in python makes sense as well. You rarely explicitly call someobject.__init__() because it is called automatically. Ergo special syntax. It's consistant and it works and I like it.
That sounds a lot like the US administration when they try to scare the public by saying that just because we haven't been attacked since 9/11, doesn't mean that the terrorists won't attack tomorrow...
Now, this is just me, and of course I don't approve of this being used politically by Bush&Co to scare people into voting for them, but in a way I think he is right. I think Dick Cheney was right when he said that the Democrats taking control of the country could result in more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.
The basic reason is that as of right now there is still no need to attack the U.S. 9/11 got Osama bin Laden just about everything he could have ever dreamed for in response. We not only invaded one Muslim country but two, and think about what great P.R. that makes for his brochures! "U.S. wants to invade Muslim states and destroy them!" is much more convincing when you can point to a T.V. showing American troops occupying a Muslim state, right? "U.S. is full of depraved pyschopaths who hate us!" is much more convincing when you see pictures from abu Ghraib, no? Then there's the fact that we are being bloodied so badly in Iraq. The quagmire there is weakening us, just like Russia's failed occupation of Afghanistan weakened them. Not to mention Iraq is now a fantastic recruiting and training ground for more terrorists, who have grown multiplied faster than we can kill them. No single attack on us could hurt us as badly as what we are doing to ourselves in Iraq.
So as long as the "War on Terror" continues full force, al Qaeda et al don't really need to bother with us directly. The War on Terror is exactly what they want.
Now lets say that a new president comes in and starts rolling back the war on terror, pulls our troops out of Iraq. Well that won't do! Recruiting is a lot tougher when "America wants to kill Muslims!" is merely a hypothetical argument. So what's the obvious thing to do? Poke the tiger again! Another 9/11 so that even the most peacenik Pres of all time would have to bomb the shit out of somebody.
We are vulnerable when we are crazy-scared of terrorism, running around doing stupid things and basically becoming our own worst enemy. So if we stop doing that, I say expect another attack to try to get us riled up and crazy again.
The key thing to note is that this is the reaction they want, and thus it is imperative that we don't do it.
Interfering with their politics? More like daring to a non-Islamic free society.
Yeah, right. Sure there are those opposed to Western-style governments, just as many in the west are opposed to Islamic governments anywhere. That alone does not make terrorists go after you. You can easily tell because there are non-Islamic free societies which have zero problems with Islamic terrorists.
Did you notice that even Bush lap-dog John Howard was saying it was Australia's foreign policy, their actions, which caused them to become a target? He's saying that they should have intervened in E.Timor anyway, that they shouldn't change their values to accomodate terrorists, and that's fine, he's still admiting it was interference that was the proximate cause. Or was Australia not a free society before 1999?
Also, let me quote Mr. Howard again:
"Those who assert that through some calibration of our foreign policy we can buy immunity from terrorist attacks advance a proposition which is both morally flawed and factually wrong."
Yes, that's trivially false, you can never buy "immunity". Yet the implied opposite argument is that there are no cases where calibrating ones foreign policy to take into account the reaction of those who are directly affected by that policy would prevent terrorist attacks. This is also trivially false. It is morally flawed and factually wrong to imply that at no point can your foreign policy legitimately inspire people to hate you when otherwise they would not, or that you should never take this into consideration when making policy.
Case in point: Over the next couple decades, there are going to be a lot of Iraqi, especially Sunni, kids who grow up hating the United States, and it sure as fuck won't be for our freedom. Unless "freedom" means "bomb that killed my family" or "soldier who raped my sister". So hypothetically lets say there is a terrorist attack on the U.S. performed by Iraqis. Would you then argue that the decision to invade Iraq had nothing to do with that act, that had we not invaded the U.S. that attack would have happened anyway?
This is why I can't stand the "they hate us for our freedom" gambit. It denies cause and effect. It denies that anyone else's actions could be in any way inspired by your own. It denies the possibility to actually rectify the underlying causes.
It would be as non-sensical as bin Laden claiming that the West hates him solely because he is such a devout muslim. He says it though, and there are surely people gullible enough to believe it and join him, just like the ones who buy "they hate us for our freedom". And thus the cycle of violence continues.
Oh, that's easy! Ideally Microsoft pays the fine first, once again getting bit in the ass by software patents, and thus becomes an even greater force against software patents. Software patents are eliminated, and both MS and Free Software folks have a big party together with beer kegs and streamers and drunken install CD swapping.
Then Microsoft gets fined another $1.5 billion, for being jerks. Then another billion for being assholes. Then another billion for each chair Ballmer has thrown.
But seriously, I think them being penalized goes great with getting rid of patents. The more evidence that software patents are a hindrance to the software industry the better.
Okay, I haven't used private variables enough to care, but the __init__ stuff falls into the same category for me as 'internal magic'. __init__ is a special function that gets called automatically. Writing your own __init__ or __new__ or __str__ has meaning in other contexts that you need to be aware of. The underscores, well, underscore this special behavior.
Double leading and trailing underscores is a bit excessive though.
I'm a bit pissed that I had no way of knowing Nintendo would release a better Wii in a couple years instead of the usual 5 or so for consoles, and not only that, we're not even being told what new features it's going to have.
Um, are you completely ignoring that the usual 5 years between consoles is for completely new consoles, like PS1 -> PS2 or N64 -> Gamecube, right? DS -> DS Lite is nothing like that, because it's the same platform. Any game that plays on the DS Lite also plays on the DS just as well. Games are no different for the GBA SP than the GBA.
The only thing in your list that is even comparable to a new console release is the Game Boy Color, because games were written differently to take advantage of it. Of course people were complaining that the gameboy platform hadn't changed in about a decade, and it's true it was overdue for some change. A lot of people welcomed it, but apparently some people don't like progress.
I mean each of these minor revisions fixed problems with the previous one. Why is that "screwing" you, again? Because Nintendo should have had the better screens and the smaller form-factors to begin with? As if they strategically held back these advances to "force" you to upgrade again... In reality, they did it because at the time they launched the consoles, that was what they could afford to have. Releasing the "better" version of the console two years earlier would have meant that it cost much more, and then I'm certain you would be bitching about that.
Actually, that's a good question... Do you bitch about price drops in consoles, because you got "screwed over" when they didn't tell you in advance that they'd be dropping the price on such and such day by such and such amount? Or do you instead take the approach that the console was worth what you paid for it when you got it? In which case, why is that not true with your DS/GBA/Wii? Your console didn't get worse when the newer version came out.
I find it utterly hilarious the way you defend the actions of the "good guys" by saying this is REALITY, there's no black-and-white, it's all shades of gray, and you can't expect the good guys to only ever do good chasing the bad guys, but that's okay because they're bad guys.
I know the contradiction is invisible to you, so I'll make it plain: There's no such thing as black and white according to you, yet good guy/bad guy IS black and white to you.
The Good Guy can do whatever he wants, because he's the Good Guy, so obviously he only wants to do Good Things. If he does a Bad Thing, it was obviously only so that he could do Good. That's the most blatantly black-and-white-with-no-shades-of-grey opinion you could possibly have. The most hilarious part is that you a-priori define who the Good Guys are, and who the Bad Guys are, even if the Good Guys are known to have done Bad Things, while the alleged Bad Guys aren't know to have done anything at all!
You use this to justify everything from vigilante computer hacking, to torture of detainees, to the invasion of countries. Sure it looks like these are Bad, but the Good Guys are doing it, and of course the Good Guys mean to do Good!
In REALITY, Good Guy/Bad Guy is not so well defined. The Good Guy doesn't get to keep his title no matter what he does. You don't get to say "nobody is perfect, so this guy gets to be a Good Guy even if he isn't Good".
If you can't see how the "minor" crime of vigilante justice could easily become much worse than the "big" crime the "minor" crime stopped in one case, then it is in fact you who are completely disconnected from reality.
The fact is that we cannot have any tolerance for either crime.
Honestly, just say tear up the 4th and 5th and 8th Ammendments if you really think that the Good Guys are always Good and it's okay for them to occassionally do Bad, so long as it's going after the Bad Guys.
Python fans say that the obnoxious whitespace handling of Python is a minor thing to have to put up with, but with Ruby around I don't have to put up with it. Or the ugly __underscores.
If I can get my employer to let me learn Ruby on company time, I'd absolutely love to. Maybe next time a scripting project comes up, I can convince my boss that Python is old and tired, and Ruby is the new hotness.;)
What do you mean __ugly __underscores__? Personally I like it, because it's an easy visual clue that the code is dinking with the internal magic of python objects.
And now I can see a debate immediately arising about the difference between "software" and "algorithm".:-)
Maybe, but I would rather point out that an algorithm that isn't software is purely math, and math is not patentable.
Personally, I don't think software should be patentable despite the fact I have such a patent. It makes for a real mess and stymies the creative juices of developers who must worry over such things. Hell, if we all had to check every darn algorithm in our code to see if it might infringe a patent somewhere, we'd never get anything useful to market!
That's really cool that you can look beyond the personal investment, and I agree. In fact, I was told by our patent lawyer not to look for patents that may cover what we are doing, because there probably was but if we knew that it would be more damaging if we got caught. It's an utterly twisted version of what the law was supposed to do.
However I don't think software should be patentable simply because I do think software is simply an algorithm, is simply math, just like "3x + ln(y) = z" is math, or more precisely a representation of math. But math books aren't patentable, and neither should be software, which is just a way of describing math that a computer understands.
Ballmer should spend less time throwing chairs like Bobby Knight and spend more time seeing what is going on.
Whoa. That sentence conjured up an image of what Ballmer and Knight combined would be like and it sent a shiver down my spine. Throw in some Karl Rove and you've got the villain of the next Final Fantasy.
Wow! That does the trick nicely. Thank you very much, that makes things even easier. And who says you'll never learn anything on slashdot?
Heh, which was exactly why I brought the issue up. I was hoping someone would reply "You fuckin retard [cus this is the internet -ed], all you have to do is use this emacs lisp file blah-blah-blah" and fix it for me.:)
That's not true. The Supreme Court can rule on any matter of law relevent to the case being brought, and the patentability of software is certainly such an issue. They do not have to assume an interpretation of the law just because the parties bringing the suit have made that assumption. They are the ones who decide what the correct interpretation of the law is! If the parties bringing the suit and the lower courts operated under an interpretation that the Supreme Court feels is mistaken, they are both empowered and willing to correct that mistake.
A language which makes a semantic distinction between tabs and spaces may give the appearance of enforcing legibility but in fact does little useful to help legibility.
Well, python's treatment of indentation as block membership is my least favorite thing about it, simply because my editor doesn't know where blocks begin/end if I cut/paste code or add new levels of control flow. I'm not aware of python treating spaces and tabs differently, so i'll take your word for it, and yet nevertheless I can't find this to be an important complaint for one reason:
You should be using spaces for indentation, and only spaces. If you use tabs, then the code will look different -- and probably ridiculous and broken -- depending on whether or not you view it in emacs, vi, a terminal, a web browser, a line printer, etc.
There're tons of coding guideline/style issues that I have strong opinions about but will readily concede that it is just my opinion and not necessarily the "right" answer. Spaces vs tabs is not such an issue. There is only one correct answer: spaces. There is no reason not to use spaces, since every real programmers' editor can be set to use spaces when you hit tab.
Though I will grant that it sucks when you run across code someone else wrote that uses tabs, and if python treats these differently I can only imagine how screwed up it would be -- your belief of how the code is structured from looking at it could differ from the interpreters. Ick.
I just wish it had a whitespace-agnostic mode.
I want a mode where it still enforces whitespace, but lets you use curly braces as block delimiters.:(
Fortunately, Emacs has rectangle mode which I find very helpful in indenting a bunch of lines together all at once (C-x t SPACE SPACE SPACE SPACE ENTER to move them all 4 spaces forward, for example).
Do you know the function name? It isn't mapped to C-x t in my emacs. If there was a way to de-indent (backspace instead?) that would probably solve most of my issues.
I know you've been in an igloo all your life and this probably seems frightening but trust us, it's going to be OK.
Oh yeah, I should just trust you. That's exactly what the doctor said when he wanted me to leave the womb, and I've regretted that decision ever since. I'm not falling for it again!
About a year ago I decided to give Python a try. And I haven't looked back. It can do everything Perl can do, and then some. Everything is clearer and having a "standard" way to do most things makes learning new modules immensely easier. Having slightly more verbose syntax and strict type-checking is slightly annoying at first, but keeps me sane in the long run.
Basically I don't use perl for anything other than one-liner regexp tricks anymore. Stuff like perl -i -pe 's/FOO/BAR/g' *, which will change the string FOO to BAR in all the files in the current directory.
Yeah, pretty much the same story here, though I was never as professionaly invested in Perl. Loved it though, and still use it for one-off command line things. Pretty much any time I had to write or deal with someone else's Perl program that was more than 1000 lines, it simply became unmanageable too fast. I could leave a 100k line C program for a couple months, and at least be able to pick it back up quickly. A mere 10k Perl program was basically unreadable to me after a long weekend. Then finally I was given an opportunity to learn Python for a project at work, the purpose of which was to re-write an old Perl program that we wanted to add features to but nobody understood anymore. Hooray for getting paid to enhance my resume! But anyway...
I now love Python. It's great. Got some quirks, but generally makes sense, and I also like how easy it makes working with arrays, creating arrays on the fly, splicing arrays, and so on. Highly recommend it to anyone who has ever said "I like Perl, I just wish I could read it after a bender".
However there is one thing I don't like about Python. And it's the first thing anyone coming to Python first says "Whaaaaa?!" to. Which is: indentation defines blocks.
Now don't get me wrong, it's not so much the enforced importance of indentation. I always religiously indent my C code, and nothing is more obnoxious than finding half a dozen closing braces all at the same level of indentation. It's the absence of block-enclosing characters that I don't like. Block enclosing characters make it simple -- for humans and for machines -- to determine where a block begins and ends. With C, if I want to move a block of code I simply cut/paste it, hit my re-indent macro, and bam I'm done. With Python, I have to manually indent the block after I paste it, because for my macro to figure out what the new indention should be it also needs to know what the intended semantic meaning of the code is, because it would basically be deciding where the blocks begin and end. C explicitly encodes this information, so my macro doesn't have to figure anything out. Adding/removing a nested 'if' is a similarly annoying case.
Basically, all I want is Python with curly braces. You can even make the interpreter barf if my indentation doesn't match what my braces claim the blocks are.
Also I should say that this is a fairly minor issue, and shouldn't be a reason to avoid Python.
Well, "clean" and "environmentally friendly" aren't always the same... Methane burns cleanly, pretty much as cleanly as combustion can possibly get. "Clean" here is implying "without partial combustion byproducts that result from burning gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, wood, or pretty much any other organic substance". So in the sense of what we traditionally think of as pollutants, the noxious fumes that come from your car's tail pipe, it's clean. Is it going to reduce greenhouse gasses? Well, not so much.
So it turns out that this particular find is not a solution for global warming. Yet if we are going to continue burning organic materials for energy, and we assuredly are for the next decade at least, then I'd rather it be a "clean" burning hydrocarbon.
I'm sure I will no more be modded down for criticizing NASA than I would be for criticizing Apple or Linux.
Lol, and people say the same thing "I know I'll be modded down for going against the groupthink..." and then they get modded up. And if the comment is actually of any merit, it will even stay that way.
But you're aware of that, but not aware that "I know I'll be modded down" is karma whore trick #1? As if.
We're all just one big fair-minded, even-handed family here.
In spite of that, the Wii is still outselling both. If you're Microsoft, you can always claim that it's because the 360 has been out for a year, and it's total sales are (of course) much higher at this point.
I don't think they really have to say that, though, to make this look like good news. Remember, these are sales in Japan, where xbox bombed and xbox 360 bombed worse, at first anyway. Considering that, and that this is post-holiday, and yes that the 360 has been out for a year, I'd say that's a really good sales number for Microsoft. It looks like their plan to try to make their product appeal to the Japanese market has begun to work. I don't see them as having any real reason to be jealous of Nintendo based on these numbers. Sure their ~8mil lead has been shrunk by ~100k, but that's about the only downside you can claim and it isn't much.
But if you're Sony, that's just got to hurt.
Oh yeah. The 360 beat PS3 on Sony's home turf. That's bad news no matter how you slice it. It puts some sony execs' comments about it being impossible to find units in stores in perspective. If I were them, I'd do anything to try to believe that this was a supply issue. If this is actually indicative of relative demand for their consoles, then they're in bad shape.
On the other hand, that's another 250,000 BluRay players out there. I guess that's the silver lining for them. Still, not good.
Slashdot Mirror
All I've read is that the Euro PS3 will play fewer PS2. Exactly what does that mean?
Well, Sony's press release said they will have a compatability list up on the EU launch date in March. They also called the system's support for PS2 games "limited", so I'm thinking that means a lot more than 1 less game (since the US/Japan PS3 supports nearly all PS2 games, at least enough that Sony has never refered to the number as "limited").
True, Sony never said anything about PS/2 support.
p ?ReleaseID=4331&NewsAreaID=2
But if you meant the PS2, as in the Playstation 2, then U are the only Ass around here.
Linky to press release: http://www.scee.presscentre.com/Content/Detail.as
Selected relevent quotes:
"The European PS3 will feature the Cell Broadband Engine(TM), 60 GB hard disc drive, Blu-ray Disc player, built-in Wi-Fi connectivity, SIXAXIS(TM) wireless controller. It also embodies a new combination of hardware and software emulation which will enable PS3 to be compatible with a broad range of original PlayStation® (PS) titles and a limited range of PlayStation®2 (PS2) titles."
"Rather than concentrate on PS2 backwards compatibility, in the future, company resources will be increasingly focused on developing new games..."
"Certain PlayStation 2 format software titles may not perform properly on this system."
And other references in the press release about future software patches to support more PS2 games, and a special list of compatible PS2 games for the EU version of the console (that isn't live yet).
Oh, and before you pull some blatant fanboi linguistic bullshit and say that Sony never literally said "reduced", then realize what everyone else does: They don't call the US/Japan PS3's support for the PS2 "limited", ergo being "limited" is a reduction. If it was the same level of support as the US/Japan version, they would have said words to that effect and let it drop. Instead they said words to the effect that the new PS3 is not designed with backward compatability as a major feature, new games are better, only a limited selection of old games will work. You'd have to be mental to not understand that this means a reduction. Maybe you are mental. We're not.
That makes the pre-VAT (we have sales tax here, but it varies state to state and isn't included in the advertised price) cost of the PS3 $710, more than a hundred dollars more than the U.S. price.
Yeah, you're getting screwed. Don't you guys get screwed on pretty much all console prices? Isn't even the Wii the equivalent of like $300 there?
Even considering that, if Sony doesn't announce that they are also dropping the price of the EU PS3 (since they're making the hardware cheaper), then yeah, you're getting extra-special screwed by the arrogant bastards at Sony. Of course they're probably just trying to reduce their losses, which are still going to be substantial even at $710 and with cheaper hardware.
Not exactly, but they -are- functions that are handled specially, rather than functions that are only called directly at the programmer's behest (or through a function reference explicitly initialized by the programmer). Constructors and allocators have special syntax in the C++ and Java; having them be identified as 'different' in python makes sense as well. You rarely explicitly call someobject.__init__() because it is called automatically. Ergo special syntax. It's consistant and it works and I like it.
That sounds a lot like the US administration when they try to scare the public by saying that just because we haven't been attacked since 9/11, doesn't mean that the terrorists won't attack tomorrow...
Now, this is just me, and of course I don't approve of this being used politically by Bush&Co to scare people into voting for them, but in a way I think he is right. I think Dick Cheney was right when he said that the Democrats taking control of the country could result in more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.
The basic reason is that as of right now there is still no need to attack the U.S. 9/11 got Osama bin Laden just about everything he could have ever dreamed for in response. We not only invaded one Muslim country but two, and think about what great P.R. that makes for his brochures! "U.S. wants to invade Muslim states and destroy them!" is much more convincing when you can point to a T.V. showing American troops occupying a Muslim state, right? "U.S. is full of depraved pyschopaths who hate us!" is much more convincing when you see pictures from abu Ghraib, no? Then there's the fact that we are being bloodied so badly in Iraq. The quagmire there is weakening us, just like Russia's failed occupation of Afghanistan weakened them. Not to mention Iraq is now a fantastic recruiting and training ground for more terrorists, who have grown multiplied faster than we can kill them. No single attack on us could hurt us as badly as what we are doing to ourselves in Iraq.
So as long as the "War on Terror" continues full force, al Qaeda et al don't really need to bother with us directly. The War on Terror is exactly what they want.
Now lets say that a new president comes in and starts rolling back the war on terror, pulls our troops out of Iraq. Well that won't do! Recruiting is a lot tougher when "America wants to kill Muslims!" is merely a hypothetical argument. So what's the obvious thing to do? Poke the tiger again! Another 9/11 so that even the most peacenik Pres of all time would have to bomb the shit out of somebody.
We are vulnerable when we are crazy-scared of terrorism, running around doing stupid things and basically becoming our own worst enemy. So if we stop doing that, I say expect another attack to try to get us riled up and crazy again.
The key thing to note is that this is the reaction they want, and thus it is imperative that we don't do it.
Interfering with their politics? More like daring to a non-Islamic free society.
Yeah, right. Sure there are those opposed to Western-style governments, just as many in the west are opposed to Islamic governments anywhere. That alone does not make terrorists go after you. You can easily tell because there are non-Islamic free societies which have zero problems with Islamic terrorists.
Did you notice that even Bush lap-dog John Howard was saying it was Australia's foreign policy, their actions, which caused them to become a target? He's saying that they should have intervened in E.Timor anyway, that they shouldn't change their values to accomodate terrorists, and that's fine, he's still admiting it was interference that was the proximate cause. Or was Australia not a free society before 1999?
Also, let me quote Mr. Howard again:
"Those who assert that through some calibration of our foreign policy we can buy immunity from terrorist attacks advance a proposition which is both morally flawed and factually wrong."
Yes, that's trivially false, you can never buy "immunity". Yet the implied opposite argument is that there are no cases where calibrating ones foreign policy to take into account the reaction of those who are directly affected by that policy would prevent terrorist attacks. This is also trivially false. It is morally flawed and factually wrong to imply that at no point can your foreign policy legitimately inspire people to hate you when otherwise they would not, or that you should never take this into consideration when making policy.
Case in point: Over the next couple decades, there are going to be a lot of Iraqi, especially Sunni, kids who grow up hating the United States, and it sure as fuck won't be for our freedom. Unless "freedom" means "bomb that killed my family" or "soldier who raped my sister". So hypothetically lets say there is a terrorist attack on the U.S. performed by Iraqis. Would you then argue that the decision to invade Iraq had nothing to do with that act, that had we not invaded the U.S. that attack would have happened anyway?
This is why I can't stand the "they hate us for our freedom" gambit. It denies cause and effect. It denies that anyone else's actions could be in any way inspired by your own. It denies the possibility to actually rectify the underlying causes.
It would be as non-sensical as bin Laden claiming that the West hates him solely because he is such a devout muslim. He says it though, and there are surely people gullible enough to believe it and join him, just like the ones who buy "they hate us for our freedom". And thus the cycle of violence continues.
Oh, that's easy! Ideally Microsoft pays the fine first, once again getting bit in the ass by software patents, and thus becomes an even greater force against software patents. Software patents are eliminated, and both MS and Free Software folks have a big party together with beer kegs and streamers and drunken install CD swapping.
Then Microsoft gets fined another $1.5 billion, for being jerks. Then another billion for being assholes. Then another billion for each chair Ballmer has thrown.
But seriously, I think them being penalized goes great with getting rid of patents. The more evidence that software patents are a hindrance to the software industry the better.
Okay, I haven't used private variables enough to care, but the __init__ stuff falls into the same category for me as 'internal magic'. __init__ is a special function that gets called automatically. Writing your own __init__ or __new__ or __str__ has meaning in other contexts that you need to be aware of. The underscores, well, underscore this special behavior.
Double leading and trailing underscores is a bit excessive though.
I'm a bit pissed that I had no way of knowing Nintendo would release a better Wii in a couple years instead of the usual 5 or so for consoles, and not only that, we're not even being told what new features it's going to have.
Um, are you completely ignoring that the usual 5 years between consoles is for completely new consoles, like PS1 -> PS2 or N64 -> Gamecube, right? DS -> DS Lite is nothing like that, because it's the same platform. Any game that plays on the DS Lite also plays on the DS just as well. Games are no different for the GBA SP than the GBA.
The only thing in your list that is even comparable to a new console release is the Game Boy Color, because games were written differently to take advantage of it. Of course people were complaining that the gameboy platform hadn't changed in about a decade, and it's true it was overdue for some change. A lot of people welcomed it, but apparently some people don't like progress.
I mean each of these minor revisions fixed problems with the previous one. Why is that "screwing" you, again? Because Nintendo should have had the better screens and the smaller form-factors to begin with? As if they strategically held back these advances to "force" you to upgrade again... In reality, they did it because at the time they launched the consoles, that was what they could afford to have. Releasing the "better" version of the console two years earlier would have meant that it cost much more, and then I'm certain you would be bitching about that.
Actually, that's a good question... Do you bitch about price drops in consoles, because you got "screwed over" when they didn't tell you in advance that they'd be dropping the price on such and such day by such and such amount? Or do you instead take the approach that the console was worth what you paid for it when you got it? In which case, why is that not true with your DS/GBA/Wii? Your console didn't get worse when the newer version came out.
I find it utterly hilarious the way you defend the actions of the "good guys" by saying this is REALITY, there's no black-and-white, it's all shades of gray, and you can't expect the good guys to only ever do good chasing the bad guys, but that's okay because they're bad guys.
I know the contradiction is invisible to you, so I'll make it plain: There's no such thing as black and white according to you, yet good guy/bad guy IS black and white to you.
The Good Guy can do whatever he wants, because he's the Good Guy, so obviously he only wants to do Good Things. If he does a Bad Thing, it was obviously only so that he could do Good. That's the most blatantly black-and-white-with-no-shades-of-grey opinion you could possibly have. The most hilarious part is that you a-priori define who the Good Guys are, and who the Bad Guys are, even if the Good Guys are known to have done Bad Things, while the alleged Bad Guys aren't know to have done anything at all!
You use this to justify everything from vigilante computer hacking, to torture of detainees, to the invasion of countries. Sure it looks like these are Bad, but the Good Guys are doing it, and of course the Good Guys mean to do Good!
In REALITY, Good Guy/Bad Guy is not so well defined. The Good Guy doesn't get to keep his title no matter what he does. You don't get to say "nobody is perfect, so this guy gets to be a Good Guy even if he isn't Good".
If you can't see how the "minor" crime of vigilante justice could easily become much worse than the "big" crime the "minor" crime stopped in one case, then it is in fact you who are completely disconnected from reality.
The fact is that we cannot have any tolerance for either crime.
Honestly, just say tear up the 4th and 5th and 8th Ammendments if you really think that the Good Guys are always Good and it's okay for them to occassionally do Bad, so long as it's going after the Bad Guys.
Heh, hilarious.
"One expert said calamari rings made from it would be like tractor tyres."
I had to wonder, was this person an expert in giant sea creatures, seafood, or tires?
Python fans say that the obnoxious whitespace handling of Python is a minor thing to have to put up with, but with Ruby around I don't have to put up with it. Or the ugly __underscores.
;)
If I can get my employer to let me learn Ruby on company time, I'd absolutely love to. Maybe next time a scripting project comes up, I can convince my boss that Python is old and tired, and Ruby is the new hotness.
What do you mean __ugly __underscores__? Personally I like it, because it's an easy visual clue that the code is dinking with the internal magic of python objects.
And now I can see a debate immediately arising about the difference between "software" and "algorithm". :-)
Maybe, but I would rather point out that an algorithm that isn't software is purely math, and math is not patentable.
Personally, I don't think software should be patentable despite the fact I have such a patent. It makes for a real mess and stymies the creative juices of developers who must worry over such things. Hell, if we all had to check every darn algorithm in our code to see if it might infringe a patent somewhere, we'd never get anything useful to market!
That's really cool that you can look beyond the personal investment, and I agree. In fact, I was told by our patent lawyer not to look for patents that may cover what we are doing, because there probably was but if we knew that it would be more damaging if we got caught. It's an utterly twisted version of what the law was supposed to do.
However I don't think software should be patentable simply because I do think software is simply an algorithm, is simply math, just like "3x + ln(y) = z" is math, or more precisely a representation of math. But math books aren't patentable, and neither should be software, which is just a way of describing math that a computer understands.
Ballmer should spend less time throwing chairs like Bobby Knight and spend more time seeing what is going on.
Whoa. That sentence conjured up an image of what Ballmer and Knight combined would be like and it sent a shiver down my spine. Throw in some Karl Rove and you've got the villain of the next Final Fantasy.
Wow! That does the trick nicely. Thank you very much, that makes things even easier. And who says you'll never learn anything on slashdot?
:)
Heh, which was exactly why I brought the issue up. I was hoping someone would reply "You fuckin retard [cus this is the internet -ed], all you have to do is use this emacs lisp file blah-blah-blah" and fix it for me.
That's not true. The Supreme Court can rule on any matter of law relevent to the case being brought, and the patentability of software is certainly such an issue. They do not have to assume an interpretation of the law just because the parties bringing the suit have made that assumption. They are the ones who decide what the correct interpretation of the law is! If the parties bringing the suit and the lower courts operated under an interpretation that the Supreme Court feels is mistaken, they are both empowered and willing to correct that mistake.
A language which makes a semantic distinction between tabs and spaces may give the appearance of enforcing legibility but in fact does little useful to help legibility.
:(
Well, python's treatment of indentation as block membership is my least favorite thing about it, simply because my editor doesn't know where blocks begin/end if I cut/paste code or add new levels of control flow. I'm not aware of python treating spaces and tabs differently, so i'll take your word for it, and yet nevertheless I can't find this to be an important complaint for one reason:
You should be using spaces for indentation, and only spaces. If you use tabs, then the code will look different -- and probably ridiculous and broken -- depending on whether or not you view it in emacs, vi, a terminal, a web browser, a line printer, etc.
There're tons of coding guideline/style issues that I have strong opinions about but will readily concede that it is just my opinion and not necessarily the "right" answer. Spaces vs tabs is not such an issue. There is only one correct answer: spaces. There is no reason not to use spaces, since every real programmers' editor can be set to use spaces when you hit tab.
Though I will grant that it sucks when you run across code someone else wrote that uses tabs, and if python treats these differently I can only imagine how screwed up it would be -- your belief of how the code is structured from looking at it could differ from the interpreters. Ick.
I just wish it had a whitespace-agnostic mode.
I want a mode where it still enforces whitespace, but lets you use curly braces as block delimiters.
Hope that helps.
Sure does! Thank you.
Fortunately, Emacs has rectangle mode which I find very helpful in indenting a bunch of lines together all at once (C-x t SPACE SPACE SPACE SPACE ENTER to move them all 4 spaces forward, for example).
Do you know the function name? It isn't mapped to C-x t in my emacs. If there was a way to de-indent (backspace instead?) that would probably solve most of my issues.
I know you've been in an igloo all your life and this probably seems frightening but trust us, it's going to be OK.
Oh yeah, I should just trust you. That's exactly what the doctor said when he wanted me to leave the womb, and I've regretted that decision ever since. I'm not falling for it again!
About a year ago I decided to give Python a try. And I haven't looked back. It can do everything Perl can do, and then some. Everything is clearer and having a "standard" way to do most things makes learning new modules immensely easier. Having slightly more verbose syntax and strict type-checking is slightly annoying at first, but keeps me sane in the long run.
Basically I don't use perl for anything other than one-liner regexp tricks anymore. Stuff like perl -i -pe 's/FOO/BAR/g' *, which will change the string FOO to BAR in all the files in the current directory.
Yeah, pretty much the same story here, though I was never as professionaly invested in Perl. Loved it though, and still use it for one-off command line things. Pretty much any time I had to write or deal with someone else's Perl program that was more than 1000 lines, it simply became unmanageable too fast. I could leave a 100k line C program for a couple months, and at least be able to pick it back up quickly. A mere 10k Perl program was basically unreadable to me after a long weekend. Then finally I was given an opportunity to learn Python for a project at work, the purpose of which was to re-write an old Perl program that we wanted to add features to but nobody understood anymore. Hooray for getting paid to enhance my resume! But anyway...
I now love Python. It's great. Got some quirks, but generally makes sense, and I also like how easy it makes working with arrays, creating arrays on the fly, splicing arrays, and so on. Highly recommend it to anyone who has ever said "I like Perl, I just wish I could read it after a bender".
However there is one thing I don't like about Python. And it's the first thing anyone coming to Python first says "Whaaaaa?!" to. Which is: indentation defines blocks.
Now don't get me wrong, it's not so much the enforced importance of indentation. I always religiously indent my C code, and nothing is more obnoxious than finding half a dozen closing braces all at the same level of indentation. It's the absence of block-enclosing characters that I don't like. Block enclosing characters make it simple -- for humans and for machines -- to determine where a block begins and ends. With C, if I want to move a block of code I simply cut/paste it, hit my re-indent macro, and bam I'm done. With Python, I have to manually indent the block after I paste it, because for my macro to figure out what the new indention should be it also needs to know what the intended semantic meaning of the code is, because it would basically be deciding where the blocks begin and end. C explicitly encodes this information, so my macro doesn't have to figure anything out. Adding/removing a nested 'if' is a similarly annoying case.
Basically, all I want is Python with curly braces. You can even make the interpreter barf if my indentation doesn't match what my braces claim the blocks are.
Also I should say that this is a fairly minor issue, and shouldn't be a reason to avoid Python.
Well, "clean" and "environmentally friendly" aren't always the same... Methane burns cleanly, pretty much as cleanly as combustion can possibly get. "Clean" here is implying "without partial combustion byproducts that result from burning gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, wood, or pretty much any other organic substance". So in the sense of what we traditionally think of as pollutants, the noxious fumes that come from your car's tail pipe, it's clean. Is it going to reduce greenhouse gasses? Well, not so much.
So it turns out that this particular find is not a solution for global warming. Yet if we are going to continue burning organic materials for energy, and we assuredly are for the next decade at least, then I'd rather it be a "clean" burning hydrocarbon.
I'm sure I will no more be modded down for criticizing NASA than I would be for criticizing Apple or Linux.
Lol, and people say the same thing "I know I'll be modded down for going against the groupthink..." and then they get modded up. And if the comment is actually of any merit, it will even stay that way.
But you're aware of that, but not aware that "I know I'll be modded down" is karma whore trick #1? As if.
We're all just one big fair-minded, even-handed family here.
Yep, and there's no whores here either.
NDP is American and Canadian sales, not Japanese. Or am I missing something?
/.
No, I'm missing something.
Anyone see half a brain lying around? The half I've got left only knows how to drink coffee and post on
In spite of that, the Wii is still outselling both. If you're Microsoft, you can always claim that it's because the 360 has been out for a year, and it's total sales are (of course) much higher at this point.
I don't think they really have to say that, though, to make this look like good news. Remember, these are sales in Japan, where xbox bombed and xbox 360 bombed worse, at first anyway. Considering that, and that this is post-holiday, and yes that the 360 has been out for a year, I'd say that's a really good sales number for Microsoft. It looks like their plan to try to make their product appeal to the Japanese market has begun to work. I don't see them as having any real reason to be jealous of Nintendo based on these numbers. Sure their ~8mil lead has been shrunk by ~100k, but that's about the only downside you can claim and it isn't much.
But if you're Sony, that's just got to hurt.
Oh yeah. The 360 beat PS3 on Sony's home turf. That's bad news no matter how you slice it. It puts some sony execs' comments about it being impossible to find units in stores in perspective. If I were them, I'd do anything to try to believe that this was a supply issue. If this is actually indicative of relative demand for their consoles, then they're in bad shape.
On the other hand, that's another 250,000 BluRay players out there. I guess that's the silver lining for them. Still, not good.