The currently available compilers have all caught up. Visual C++ 7.1, Intel C++ 7.1, GCC 3.2.x, and Comeau are all throughly standards complient. The only known missing feature for most compilers is export, and export is DOA to begin with. By the time the next standard comes out (not for more than a year, at least) most of the kinks with the current batch of compilers should be worked out. I've been using advanced C++ features (Boost, template metaprogramming, etc) for a while now, and I've yet to hit any major compiler bugs in ICC7 or GCC 3.x.
I've used SCons in two projects so far, an OS kernel and something for work. Its absolutely awesome. The kernel bit was extremely telling. You can't compile a kernel just like any old userspace program. You have to use special linker scripts and compiler options. Further, the compiler I'm using (Intel C++) allows a special optimization mode that requires a few changes to the usual compile/link process. Implementing support for all that would have been very complex with makefiles. With SCons, the Python code that implements configuration management (deciding what files to build based on features included in the kernel) and software installation (installing headers and binaries to appropriate places in the filesystem) is only 200 lines of code in all. Autoconf-generated Makefiles for a single directory can be larger than that! Having a full programming language on hand when you need it (in my setup, even config files are regular old Python scripts) is very powerful.
When my friend first showed me the site, I thought it was a hoax. He bitched about it enough that we decided to build some at school. We opened up some monitors to use as 25,000 volt power supplies, and wired one up using very thin wire and balsa wood. The damn thing flew alright. Power-to-weight ratio sucked, though. The thing was hooked up to a monitor (don't know much it was actually dissipating) but could only lift about its body weight (2 or 3 grams for our model). The nifty thing about it is that while we were working on it, we left it in the robotics lab labeled "Anti-gravity machine, do not touch!"
PS> If you try this at home, remember, high voltages arc very easily! One of the times we tried it, there was a class in the lab at the time. One guy was so fascinated that the electric charge in the wires made the hair on his arm stand on end that he got a little too close:)
IIRC, Java doesn't support unsafe coercion. You can cast a value to something, but the runtime will check if that value is actually of that type and throw an exception if it isn't. Coercion in Python works the same way. Unless I'm misunderstanding your use of 'coercion'?
All of the major translations done in the past 50 years are copyrighted. >>>>>>>>> That's my point. The original versions, made 2000 years ago, weren't copyrighted, which allowed them to spread the religion.
Instead of focusing on the fact that 99.9% of Freenet's traffic is illegal music and porn, look at it from the other direction. Is there any other system out there that allows people to anonymously communicate with millions of people worldwide. If the answer is no, then it is unjustifiable to take away a system that has such obviously huge potential benifets for freedom of speech without providing an alternative.
You're missing the point. Its not that proof should be easy (and it may not be --- thanks to computers and large hard drives, I leave my physical CDs at home when I'm at school), but they shouldn't have any more right to demand proof from you than anybody else has. Its the whole idea of innocent until proven guilty --- unless the *accuser* has proof that I stole something, they shouldn't be allowed to harass me about it. Beyond that, the RIAA is doing lots of things (like talking about breaking into computers to sniff for pirated MP3s) that are clearly breaking the law. Even the police don't have the right to search you without a warrent, so why should a private organization?
You'd be surprised how small KDE is. As of KDE 3.1, the KDE CVS only contains about 2.6 million lines of code. Given that the KDE CVS includes everything from a toolkit to a web-browser to an Office suite, 2.6 million lines is quite a bargain.
>>>>>>>> I imagine every nation in that area was a crumbling bankrupt mess ten years ago. >>>>>>>> I was responding to this point specifically. Some nations came out a lot better than others.
Re:Interesting, but some methodological holes
on
Addicted to Information?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The difference between common sense and science is the difference between observation and understanding. Sure it's common sense that loud sounds and flashing lights are distracting. However, it would be a wonderful advance in medical science if we knew exactly what reactions loud sounds and flashing lights cause in our brains that makes them more distracting than the huge amount of sensory information our brain is bombarded with anyway.
Do you actually have any experience with this or are you just regurgitating all the propoganda US-ians were fed during the '80s? The situation was bad, no doubt, but it wasn't quite as bad as you make it out to be, and most importantly, its nowhere near as simple as you make it out to be.
I see a lot of skepticism about this, but it makes sense. In order to understand this, you have to take a big-picture view of things. First, a few premises:
1) The standard of living worldwide is improving, and will continue to improve in the future, as far as we can tell. 2) Progress occurs mainly at the top end of society, with those at the bottom being left further behind. This is will proven by the fact that the disparity between rich and poor keeps growing larger, faster, especially in developed nations.
Now, given (1) and (2), one can consider basic human rights in the following terms: Human rights are not basic in the same sense as mathematical primitives are basic. Rather, they are basic in the sense that society, realizing that the lower classes are being left further behind , asserts that there is a lowest (most basic) allowable level of human existance. Society decides that, no matter what might otherwise have happened to a person, there are certain things that this person must have. Now, as a consequence of the fact that the standard of living continues to go up, it is logical to assume that society's opinion of the lowest allowable state will also continue to go up. The result is that rights will added to the sets of basic ones to reflect the continuing progress of society.
Consider, for example, one of the more recent, yet pervasive rights --- the right to an education. Education is free in most developed countries today. Why? Because society has decided that the education of children is too important to leave to the vagracies of a Darwinian universe, and has set a standard below which no person should fall.
Now, having internet access be a basic right seems novel, but fits logically if you consider the progress of human rights over time. Indeed, the right to internet access is merely an extension of the right to speak freely, and the right to an education. The internet is becoming critically important. Soon, I think having access to the internet will be almost as important as having access to an education. Most country's worldwide have made the latter a top priority, so, going forward, I would not be surprised to see the former becoming an increasingly important priority.
You hit a point where AA is absolutely critical. My screen is very high res (133 dpi). non-AA text looks absolutely terrible, because most hinting algorithms make strokes 1 pixel wide, which is nearly invisible on my screen. Most AA algorithms, on the other hand, try to preserve the actual shape of the letters. This results in strokes being at least a couple of pixels thick, which makes things look very nice. The gray pixels used to do the AA are so small, you can't see it unless you look really close. For the next wave of high-res screens (there are 140 dpi laptops at normal prices, and Viewsonic and IBM have 200 dpi LCDs) AA is going to be absolutely critical, because they're high-res enough to make effective use of it, but not high res enough to look good without it.
Maybe. But a lot of intellectuals I know live in Bangladesh, where violent strikes are called at the drop of a hat. Many other intellectuals live in difficult conditions elsewhere in the world. They still manage, somehow.
To break up Microsoft, however beneficial it could be to the economy as a result of more competition, constitutes state intervention in the market and is befitting of a Command Economy, the diametric opposite to the laisser-faire, individualist ideology of capitalism. >>>>>>>>>>>>&g t; All economies in existance today are command economies. There are laws, for example, against killing children, extracting their blood, and selling it as an anti-aging treatment. Thus, the argument that any particular action is "befitting a Command Economy" just because it involves government intervention, makes no sense. The argument must stand on its own merits, and even by your logic, breaking up Microsoft is more in line with the spirit of capitalism.
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The currently available compilers have all caught up. Visual C++ 7.1, Intel C++ 7.1, GCC 3.2.x, and Comeau are all throughly standards complient. The only known missing feature for most compilers is export, and export is DOA to begin with. By the time the next standard comes out (not for more than a year, at least) most of the kinks with the current batch of compilers should be worked out. I've been using advanced C++ features (Boost, template metaprogramming, etc) for a while now, and I've yet to hit any major compiler bugs in ICC7 or GCC 3.x.
I tried to figure out Jam once. Couldn't do it. It's hideously complex, and the documentation is poorly written. Went with scons instead :)
I've used SCons in two projects so far, an OS kernel and something for work. Its absolutely awesome. The kernel bit was extremely telling. You can't compile a kernel just like any old userspace program. You have to use special linker scripts and compiler options. Further, the compiler I'm using (Intel C++) allows a special optimization mode that requires a few changes to the usual compile/link process. Implementing support for all that would have been very complex with makefiles. With SCons, the Python code that implements configuration management (deciding what files to build based on features included in the kernel) and software installation (installing headers and binaries to appropriate places in the filesystem) is only 200 lines of code in all. Autoconf-generated Makefiles for a single directory can be larger than that! Having a full programming language on hand when you need it (in my setup, even config files are regular old Python scripts) is very powerful.
On the other hand, I live in the goddamn middle of Atlanta, and I can't get a Sprint PCS connection without climbing on a building or something...
When my friend first showed me the site, I thought it was a hoax. He bitched about it enough that we decided to build some at school. We opened up some monitors to use as 25,000 volt power supplies, and wired one up using very thin wire and balsa wood. The damn thing flew alright. Power-to-weight ratio sucked, though. The thing was hooked up to a monitor (don't know much it was actually dissipating) but could only lift about its body weight (2 or 3 grams for our model). The nifty thing about it is that while we were working on it, we left it in the robotics lab labeled "Anti-gravity machine, do not touch!"
:)
PS> If you try this at home, remember, high voltages arc very easily! One of the times we tried it, there was a class in the lab at the time. One guy was so fascinated that the electric charge in the wires made the hair on his arm stand on end that he got a little too close
IIRC, Java doesn't support unsafe coercion. You can cast a value to something, but the runtime will check if that value is actually of that type and throw an exception if it isn't. Coercion in Python works the same way. Unless I'm misunderstanding your use of 'coercion'?
All of the major translations done in the past 50 years are copyrighted.
>>>>>>>>>
That's my point. The original versions, made 2000 years ago, weren't copyrighted, which allowed them to spread the religion.
Scientology is relatively recent. Are you willing to bet they'll be around 1900 years from now?
Isn't theft a criminal, rather than civil offense?
Instead of focusing on the fact that 99.9% of Freenet's traffic is illegal music and porn, look at it from the other direction. Is there any other system out there that allows people to anonymously communicate with millions of people worldwide. If the answer is no, then it is unjustifiable to take away a system that has such obviously huge potential benifets for freedom of speech without providing an alternative.
Interestingly, if the Bible was subject to the same draconian, everlasting copyright laws we have in the US, nobody would remember Christianity today!
You're missing the point. Its not that proof should be easy (and it may not be --- thanks to computers and large hard drives, I leave my physical CDs at home when I'm at school), but they shouldn't have any more right to demand proof from you than anybody else has. Its the whole idea of innocent until proven guilty --- unless the *accuser* has proof that I stole something, they shouldn't be allowed to harass me about it. Beyond that, the RIAA is doing lots of things (like talking about breaking into computers to sniff for pirated MP3s) that are clearly breaking the law. Even the police don't have the right to search you without a warrent, so why should a private organization?
You'd be surprised how small KDE is. As of KDE 3.1, the KDE CVS only contains about 2.6 million lines of code. Given that the KDE CVS includes everything from a toolkit to a web-browser to an Office suite, 2.6 million lines is quite a bargain.
Actually GPL is already a verb. "To GPL" --- To put software under the GPL.
Food runs at 3:00 am are standard operating procedures at college dorms. That's when dinner at 7:00 starts to wear off and you get hungry again :)
From the grand-parent post:
>>>>>>>>
I imagine every nation in that area was a crumbling bankrupt mess ten years ago.
>>>>>>>>
I was responding to this point specifically. Some nations came out a lot better than others.
The difference between common sense and science is the difference between observation and understanding. Sure it's common sense that loud sounds and flashing lights are distracting. However, it would be a wonderful advance in medical science if we knew exactly what reactions loud sounds and flashing lights cause in our brains that makes them more distracting than the huge amount of sensory information our brain is bombarded with anyway.
Do you actually have any experience with this or are you just regurgitating all the propoganda US-ians were fed during the '80s? The situation was bad, no doubt, but it wasn't quite as bad as you make it out to be, and most importantly, its nowhere near as simple as you make it out to be.
I see a lot of skepticism about this, but it makes sense. In order to understand this, you have to take a big-picture view of things. First, a few premises:
1) The standard of living worldwide is improving, and will continue to improve in the future, as far as we can tell.
2) Progress occurs mainly at the top end of society, with those at the bottom being left further behind. This is will proven by the fact that the disparity between rich and poor keeps growing larger, faster, especially in developed nations.
Now, given (1) and (2), one can consider basic human rights in the following terms: Human rights are not basic in the same sense as mathematical primitives are basic. Rather, they are basic in the sense that society, realizing that the lower classes are being left further behind , asserts that there is a lowest (most basic) allowable level of human existance. Society decides that, no matter what might otherwise have happened to a person, there are certain things that this person must have. Now, as a consequence of the fact that the standard of living continues to go up, it is logical to assume that society's opinion of the lowest allowable state will also continue to go up. The result is that rights will added to the sets of basic ones to reflect the continuing progress of society.
Consider, for example, one of the more recent, yet pervasive rights --- the right to an education. Education is free in most developed countries today. Why? Because society has decided that the education of children is too important to leave to the vagracies of a Darwinian universe, and has set a standard below which no person should fall.
Now, having internet access be a basic right seems novel, but fits logically if you consider the progress of human rights over time. Indeed, the right to internet access is merely an extension of the right to speak freely, and the right to an education. The internet is becoming critically important. Soon, I think having access to the internet will be almost as important as having access to an education. Most country's worldwide have made the latter a top priority, so, going forward, I would not be surprised to see the former becoming an increasingly important priority.
It is indeed Bengali. The second screenshot shows an excerpt from something written by a famous Bengali poet.
Bangladesh is predominantly Muslim, as is Indian's West Bengal. In total, there are about 200+ million Muslims living in the area.
You hit a point where AA is absolutely critical. My screen is very high res (133 dpi). non-AA text looks absolutely terrible, because most hinting algorithms make strokes 1 pixel wide, which is nearly invisible on my screen. Most AA algorithms, on the other hand, try to preserve the actual shape of the letters. This results in strokes being at least a couple of pixels thick, which makes things look very nice. The gray pixels used to do the AA are so small, you can't see it unless you look really close. For the next wave of high-res screens (there are 140 dpi laptops at normal prices, and Viewsonic and IBM have 200 dpi LCDs) AA is going to be absolutely critical, because they're high-res enough to make effective use of it, but not high res enough to look good without it.
Maybe. But a lot of intellectuals I know live in Bangladesh, where violent strikes are called at the drop of a hat. Many other intellectuals live in difficult conditions elsewhere in the world. They still manage, somehow.
Its a trade-off. The saftey of some vs the freedom of all. The intellectuals just have a better idea than most people where the proper boundary lies.
To break up Microsoft, however beneficial it could be to the economy as a result of more competition, constitutes state intervention in the market and is befitting of a Command Economy, the diametric opposite to the laisser-faire, individualist ideology of capitalism.
>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;
All economies in existance today are command economies. There are laws, for example, against killing children, extracting their blood, and selling it as an anti-aging treatment. Thus, the argument that any particular action is "befitting a Command Economy" just because it involves government intervention, makes no sense. The argument must stand on its own merits, and even by your logic, breaking up Microsoft is more in line with the spirit of capitalism.