I apologize for the slight against Python. I truly do enjoy that language. This was a classic case of the misplaced adjective. I meant for the "nearly" to apply to the level of support and not the maturity.
There is clearly not "nearly" as much support.
The maturity I believe to be slightly less as well. Let me explain.
As far as the syntax of the language itself, it is wonderful. It is beautiful. And I love it.
By maturity what I meant, although probably not what I said, and I aplogize for the confusion, was the maturity of the supporting libraries and supporting codebase. There is no Python equivalent of CPAN. There are many Python modules , and they are generally very nice, but there are some issues.
First, there aren't nearly as many. Perl has infinite modules.
Second, some overlapping packages. How many numeric packages are there for Python now? Why aren't they unified?
Third, still some language features that are under debate. The list comprehension syntax for more complex comprehensions is still heavily debated. The syntax for doing ranges is not widely liked and there are numerous debates and PEPs suggesting new ones, ranging from Haskell's [1,2..] to using numbers themselves as in "for i in 5". Frankly, I depsise that last one, but that's just me.
Python is wonderful, and is one of my favorite languages from a design standpoint. It just needs a few more years and some more users to get up to Perl's level of support in terms of online references and in terms of the libraries available. And maybe even to stabalize a bit in terms of the language syntax, although it has remained very backwards compatible and has evolved very gradually and incrementally. What a great language.
Again, sorry for the confusion. Have a wonderful day,
> Because it has all the great functional features that can make Lisp programmers happy.
Yeah. Of course it does. It support first-class functions perfectly, and of course, can handle lambda abstractions and currying without breaking a sweat. It can also do perfect continuations. It prefers recursion to looping and eschews side-effects too. Well, actually, perl 6 does do currying and first-class functions.
> Because it has a wonderful OO model which can make all OO programmers happy.
Yes, naturally. It's obvious perl was designed from the ground up to be the holy grail of OO programming. But seriously, it does have increasingly good OO support. OO in Perl 6 is nice. It's not the best OO language around, though. It's not even in the top 10. Well, maybe top 10. There aren't many OO languages that don't suck.
> Because it has super fast compilers that can make C and C++ programmers happy.
I mean, yeah, it's not slow. It doesn't have the god-awful long start-up time of Python. It's not C. It's not C++. It's not assembler. It is fast for a language of it's kind.
> Because it is great for imperative programming and for functional programming.
Imperative programming, fine. Functional programming, I think not. Not being lambda-calculus based, Perl may have a rough time with that whole mathematical provability of correctness thingy. It also doesn't do list comprehension for shit. Hell, who needs that stuff anyway.:-)
> Because it is great for procedural programming and for OO programming.
Procedural, fine. OO, see above.
> Because it is as multiplatform and portable as Java.
Multiplatform, check. Portable as java... are we counting GUI's? If not, check.
> Because it is designed to please everyone
> without compromising on anything, and, put more
> simply, because it can reconciliate the C, Java,
> Lisp and C++ community.
You CAN'T please everyone without compromising on anything. Plus, nothing will ever reconsile the Lisp community with anyone...:-)
> Because it can even be used indifferently as a scripting or a system language.
Ok.
> Because it is great for teaching AND for the real world.
Real world... yes... for smallish programs. You don't see many enterprise-class million-line-long programs written in Perl.
Teaching... good god i hope not. If you ever get my kids started with a language as cryptic as perl with it's magic variables that it uses without asking you and it's $var syntax I'll shoot someone. You may want to check out Python though. Imagine Perl without nearly as much support or maturity, but with beautiful syntax and good OO, and it's improving real quick.
> Because its compilers are libre software and its
> design and developement are made in a very open
> fashion.
Ok.
Anyway, I like Perl. It's a wonderful language for some things. I mean, it IS the glue of the internet. But it is NOT the holy grail of programming. It does not satisfy everyone, it can not do everything. It is a good language though.
Let me get this straight, we use the bytes of data as coefficients in a huge polynomial. The number of terms in the polynomial equals the number of bytes in the message, and we call that k. We then sample the polynomial at k+1 various places and send the samples to the receiver. It reconstructs the polynomial and hence the data.
If we have k coefficients to the polynomial, why would we send k+1 samples rather than just the k coefficients. This would alleivate the need of the receiver to reconstruct the polynomial and would have one less piece of data to send.
Hey, wait a minute, if the k coefficients are the actual data, and that's what we are sending, then we are just sending the data.
Wasn't that easier AND smaller than the polynomial idea.:-)
You should wander over to sci.crypt and sci.crypt.random-numbers. Maybe you can convince them that this method will let you compress random data also.
To elaborate, here's the general problem you are running in to:
With any sufficiently random data, the size of the polynomial tends to be equal to the size of the data and hence doesn't help you. In fact, with any pattern you can find in the data, it will tend to take as much or more space to encode what pattern you found than just to encode the original data. That's the nature of the beast.
I understand and agree with your course of action in your presented scenario. I would just like to make sure it is understood that what happened with your child does not necessarily happen with all kids.
I grew up watching "violent" cartoons like road runner, g.i. joe and transformers as well as non-cartoons like A-Team, Kung-Fu and more.
Also, since a young age I've been a huge fan of martial arts. Jet Li is, of course, my favorite.:-). Anyway, I've seen LOTS of martial arts movies. I've studied martial arts. Since a young age.
However, I have NEVER EVER been in a fight. I've never even hit anyone. I never will. I've never been in trouble at school for anything other than talking-back and heavy duty slacking. I'm a lazy son of a bitch, but not violent, not at all.
Anyway, just some anecdotcal evidence to provide some perspective. Have fun,
It would not give a root password. It would give a root token. That token, however, would only be valid on that one authentication server, so it would only make a difference if you wanted to do horrible things to programs that use that authentication server as their primary authentication server. Regular programs would still default to the system's authentication server which would laugh at your supposed root token.
When he spoke of user-owned authentication daemon's being secure because the cracked passwords are unusable other places that's exactly what he meant.
A user-owned authentication daemon is not just user-owned. It could also be user-written. You can't guarantee the security of something a user writes. So, it can be cracked, possibly. And, you can get passwords and tokens from it, possibly. However, they do you no good in any other authentication daemon.
The main, global, authentication server for the OS should be very damned secure.
This was not a traditional chinese movie, so you shouldn't have expected classic chinese styles throughout the whole length.
However, at the end, while the two Jet's are facing off in that factory, if you were paying attention you should have noticed the most beautiful execution of two very complicated forms of Kung Fu.
Gabe (Good Jet), was practicing Bagua Zhang, an open-fist form practiced by walking in circles with open hands. His technique in this form was absolutely beautiful and relies on circular, snake-like movements.
Yulaw (Bad Jet), was practicing Xing Yi Quan, a closed-fist form practiced sometimes by inmates in old chinese prisons and with an emphasis on straight, fast movements. His technique in this art was also absolutely breaktaking.
However, I probably only enjoyed it because of a very strong appreciation of the martial arts involved. It's probably true that, if I had been in your shoes, I would have felt the same way you did.
I would like to refute that The Matrix had ANY style at all to it. It had great camera work, sure, but absoltely NO good martial arts style as none of those involved know martial arts. The subtleties of the arts involved can't be taught during a month of training. It was, however, a damned entertaining movie, which may not be true of The One.
I guess I'm just rambling at this point. Conclusion: I understand how you feel, but respectfully disagree. Have a good day,
Interestingly enough, there actually WAS a lot of deeper meaning to this movie. It was steeped full of Jet's Buddhist beliefs. It wasn't made prominenent, so if you wanted to ignore it it wouldn't be hard, but they were there.
Examples:
All the talk about the life force being in a circle (remember when he recites what his grandfathe said)
When he switches from the closed-fist form to the open-fist form at the end. Soft overcomes hard.
I can't think of any more off hand but there were more. I remember noticing them during the film.
Secondly, I'm sick of people saying that Jet has *SOME* talent. He was the Chinese national martial arts champion (Wushu) 5 times before the age of 18, at which point he quit competing to do movies.
Thirdly, can you name ANY people who were big stars in one country for years, and then moved somewhere else and remained a big star?
I'd love to see Gene Hackman/Harrison Ford/Sam Jackson/whoever make it as a movie star in Hong Kong.
Fourthly, have no misconceptions about this movie. It wasn't meant to be thought-provoking, atleast not much. It wasn't even marketed as such. It was marketed as "Jet Li beats himself up."
So, duh, reviewers hated it. They were expecting Crouching Artsy Hidden Gravity. The people who actually saw it enjoyed it though. Cause the people who saw it saw it knowing what kind of movie it was. The two theaters I've seen it in have been somewhat full of people and almost all of them left very pleased with the result. I recall one black fellow commenting that it was, "off the hook.":-)
Anyway, I loved it. I"m seeing it again today. Have fun,
I wonder how much of that speed difference can be attributed to the 200Mhz CPU though.
I bet it is also running on old 66Mhz or worse, 33Mhz (maybe even paired) RAM. Yuch.
I bet the Hard Disk is running in damned PIO Mode 4 rather than UATA/anything.
Sure, if you could stick a 200Mhz CPU in my current machine with PC2100 DDR and an ATA/100 EIDE RAID 0, it would slow my box down. Windows would boot more slowly. But not NEARLY as slowly as with the slow buses as well.
Anyway, you are right. 200Mhz is too slow for many things. Just thought I should point out the numerous other factors involved. Have fun,
Yes, but that doesn't make it true. I honestly feel that in the near future. Maybe even the recent past, we hit the point where home users will NEVER need more Mhz power. I think the future is SMP, not Mhz. I don't mean dual-proc machines. I mean 32 processor machines and 256 processor machines. Multiprocessing is the future. Threaded applications running across several CPUs is the future. I think.
More cycles will NOT make Word run faster. Word is I/O bound, not CPU bound. It won't make Internet Explorer run faster either. It's bandwidth bound, not CPU bound. It won't make games run faster. Game's have become bandwidth bound as well, only different bandwidth. Specifically, AGP and North Bridge bandwidth.
There are things that will benefit infinitely from more Mhz though. Specifically AI and Physics simulations spring to mind. Haha, spring to mind, that's great, a figure of speach that combines both physics and AI. Whew. I kill me.
Anyway.
Faster memory, faster buses, more CPUs, that's what I think the future is like, not more Mhz.
But, I've been wrong before. Almost too consistantly to be coincidence:-). So, we'll see.
Then keep your important data on servers. Servers don't go on the LAN. If they need outside access they go in the DMZ. If not, they go in a separate LAN. A firewall or a smart bridge sits between that LAN and the regular LAN. Now we are back to having a firewall protecting everything.
Again, there is no reason to have SMB, RPC, SNMP, LPD or anything of that sort running on these special servers with their magical important information. They just have data and a port open for whatever software is used to interface with that data, whether a SQL port or what-have-you.
I'm not saying these bugs aren't significant. They need to be fixed. I'm simply trying to point out that a good firewall/bridge system can go a long way to preventing some problems. Not all of them, but some.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that all of those unix holes are silly. There is absolutely NO reason for RPC, rsh/rcp, LPD, sadmin/mountd or SNMP to be open to the outside world. Just no reason for it.
The very first thing you need for a secure network is a firewall. And not an opt-out firewall. An opt-in firewall. As follows:
Rule #1: block in all
Rule #2: block out all
There, now that the firewall is secure you can add rules to it to allow the specific things you need to flow into and out of the building.
Hahahah. Sad but true. I still believe that eventually CPU will be meaningless for graphics as more and more work gets offloaded. Then it will just be a matter of using otherwise wasted cycles for the AI and physics work. I can imagine just telling the video card the camera orientation and position and having it do all of the rest of the graphics work. Wow, that'd be cool.
Then, I would think, even the clueless producers would agree.
You see, my thinking is thus:
Right now they delegate around 10% of CPU time to AI, maximum. But, as graphics and sound begin to require less and less cpu time due to speciallized peripheral hardware, they'll be able to delegate more and more to AI. And physics. I can't forget physics.
I guess I eventually see physics and AI being offloaded to specialized hardware as well. Some kind of state-specification meta language which can be compiled and uploaded to a state-space searching chip on specialized hardware.
Same with physics and collision-detection calculations. These would probably be even easier to offload to separate hardware. Oh, that would be heaven. Having a real, dedicated CPU to use for AI calculations. Mmmmmmm....
The best part about weather forcasting isn't even Chaos theory. I mean, yes, there are infinite variables which are immeasurable to the needed accuracy (infinite) but, even better yet, due to Quantum theory, a lot of these variables are probably truly random.
No matter how powerful the computer, specific whether conditions will NEVER be able to be scientifically computed.
I know everyone here loves to bash processors by saying they are too fast and there is no need for it. And, yes, you are partially right.
The graphics of a game will not benefit from a 2.2Ghz over a 1.4Ghz processor as most of the work is offloaded to the video card.
Same with sound.
However, Artificial Inteligence will have that many more cycles to use searching state-space trees. That much more time to to prune and anneal its way to a better solution. More time to make more realistic artificial intelligence.
That's one thing that you CAN'T throw too many cycles at. The more cycles, the better the results. It's that simple.
What about his cited example of second hand smoke? Are those victims not innocent? Or, are they at fault for being near smokers?
What about people beaten, sometimes to death, by drunks? And, of course, the car accidents you mentioned.
You will need a lot of luck to draw a line between those who are "innocent" and those who are not.
It seems mean to say that someones death is "worse" because they were "innocent." No one is innocent. Atleast, no more innocent than anyone else. What if someone in the WTC was a wife-beater and like to drink. Is it now less awful that he was killed?
We are all humans. I feel it is wrong to say that the life of a worker in the WTC is somehow more valuable than the life of a smoker who dies of lung cancer. They are both human. They both suffer. Let's stop drawing lines.
Also, I think that the outrage had little to do with the number of "innocents" killed. I think it was a combination of a few things.
1) The raw number of people killed in this one incident. As opposed to the thousands of car accidents it would take to kill the same number.
2) The people were "innocent". You are right. People feel that way. Even though I think it is wrong.
3) Stripped away our security. I think THAT was the big outrage. "What? You mean people with guns/knives can do things like this? Even in America?"
I think someone finally ripped the blindfolds off of the American people in some respects so they are doing what everyone does when they are shocked. React. In a knee-jerk fashion. The gov't says that crypto==evil and led to this accident, so all the people who have no idea what crypto is say "Oh. Wow. Thank god we know what's at fault for this. Let's get rid of it."
Wow. You are really going to try and judge me as a person based on a single slashdot post?
I was not even TRYING to make the point that there was no reason to boycott. I was simply pointing out that if your reason is hurting Disney, than prepare for disappointment.
I have no problem with boycotting to make yourself feel better and more moral. It's like having a stance on abortion. Unless you are active in politics, you stance is just something you tell yourself to make yourself feel better and more moral. Your stance doesn't do a damned thing about the amount of abortion in the world.
You can boycott disney if it makes you feel better. But it WON'T hurt Disney's bottom line to any degree they will care about.
Yes, I may be apathetic and cynical:-), but I'm NOT a prick. I'm just realistic. Go ahead and boycott. Do whatever makes you happy. So will I. I'm just warning everyone that if you are trying to hurt Disney, your going to need a lot more than a geek boycott.
I would assume that once we make the move to Serial ATA, if that ever happens, it would be as simple as upping the clocking on the serial line to add more bits to the address space and hence maximum addressable size.
So, once that happens I would expect a clocking standard that would give us more than the 28 bits of addressing we have now.
My favorite game was the one where he pushed his two bishop pawns and then proceeded to walk his king around, move his queen out of the way, replace it with the king, and effectively swap his king and queen in 10 moves. LOL! What unique and effective gameplay. Amazing stuff.
Microsoft will be entering an already crowded marketplace loaded with other Big Boys. Sony and Nintendo aren't poor. Sony in fact is quite rich. They could almost give Microsoft a run for their money. Plus they have name-recognition, a fan following, and many years of console market expience.
Microsoft is newbie in an over-crowded market. Their gonna need a hell of a lot of luck to unseat Sony, Nintendo and Sega.
Advertising is NOT pointless. Without advertising no one would know about half the products that exist. I've SEEN my brother watch a commercial for Domino's and say "Hey, mom! Can we get a pizza?"
No, Advertising doesn't affect everyone, but it doesn't need to. It helps create product awareness though. Damned right it does. That is COMPLETELY different than a boycott.
Boycotts, unless done in mass, are COMPLETELY ineffective. I think you are entirely wrong that "[changing] a few people's minds [will] start hurting a company's profits."
...
"Hey Daddy, I wanna go see the new Disney movie!!"
"I'm sorry honey we are boycotting Disney"
"What's that?"
"That means Disney is bad, and to punish them we aren't going to see their movie."
"Oh, okay, well in that case nevermind. I completely understand your reasons and am willing to sacrafice something I enjoy to make them pay."
Just TRY convincing the average consumer and their kids that they should have to abstain from something they enjoy to punish Disney. Go ahead, try it. Cause, guess what, if they don't do it, NO ONE IN THE WORLD WILL NOTICE. And I guarantee that the average consumer doesn't give a fuck about your boycott. You think Disney is really worried about the geeks boycotting their films? Hah!
...
Even more hilarious is thus:
Everytime ANYONE does anything bad all you geeks cry out "boycott!". But none of you ever actually do it. Statistically, I'm guessing 0.5% of you actually boycott. Maybe less. And I'm betting only 1% of people are "geeks", maybe less. Well, that's about 50,000 people in an international market of billions boycotting. Even if I'm off by two powers of ten, it's still only a few million people (a few tenths of a percent of a billion). Run scared Disney, we've got you by the balls now.
Slashdot Mirror
I apologize for the slight against Python. I truly do enjoy that language. This was a classic case of the misplaced adjective. I meant for the "nearly" to apply to the level of support and not the maturity.
There is clearly not "nearly" as much support.
The maturity I believe to be slightly less as well. Let me explain.
As far as the syntax of the language itself, it is wonderful. It is beautiful. And I love it.
By maturity what I meant, although probably not what I said, and I aplogize for the confusion, was the maturity of the supporting libraries and supporting codebase. There is no Python equivalent of CPAN. There are many Python modules , and they are generally very nice, but there are some issues.
First, there aren't nearly as many. Perl has infinite modules.
Second, some overlapping packages. How many numeric packages are there for Python now? Why aren't they unified?
Third, still some language features that are under debate. The list comprehension syntax for more complex comprehensions is still heavily debated. The syntax for doing ranges is not widely liked and there are numerous debates and PEPs suggesting new ones, ranging from Haskell's [1,2..] to using numbers themselves as in "for i in 5". Frankly, I depsise that last one, but that's just me.
Python is wonderful, and is one of my favorite languages from a design standpoint. It just needs a few more years and some more users to get up to Perl's level of support in terms of online references and in terms of the libraries available. And maybe even to stabalize a bit in terms of the language syntax, although it has remained very backwards compatible and has evolved very gradually and incrementally. What a great language.
Again, sorry for the confusion. Have a wonderful day,
Justin Dubs
> Because it has all the great functional features that can make Lisp programmers happy.
:-)
:-)
Yeah. Of course it does. It support first-class functions perfectly, and of course, can handle lambda abstractions and currying without breaking a sweat. It can also do perfect continuations. It prefers recursion to looping and eschews side-effects too. Well, actually, perl 6 does do currying and first-class functions.
> Because it has a wonderful OO model which can make all OO programmers happy.
Yes, naturally. It's obvious perl was designed from the ground up to be the holy grail of OO programming. But seriously, it does have increasingly good OO support. OO in Perl 6 is nice. It's not the best OO language around, though. It's not even in the top 10. Well, maybe top 10. There aren't many OO languages that don't suck.
> Because it has super fast compilers that can make C and C++ programmers happy.
I mean, yeah, it's not slow. It doesn't have the god-awful long start-up time of Python. It's not C. It's not C++. It's not assembler. It is fast for a language of it's kind.
> Because it is great for imperative programming and for functional programming.
Imperative programming, fine. Functional programming, I think not. Not being lambda-calculus based, Perl may have a rough time with that whole mathematical provability of correctness thingy. It also doesn't do list comprehension for shit. Hell, who needs that stuff anyway.
> Because it is great for procedural programming and for OO programming.
Procedural, fine. OO, see above.
> Because it is as multiplatform and portable as Java.
Multiplatform, check. Portable as java... are we counting GUI's? If not, check.
> Because it is designed to please everyone
> without compromising on anything, and, put more
> simply, because it can reconciliate the C, Java,
> Lisp and C++ community.
You CAN'T please everyone without compromising on anything. Plus, nothing will ever reconsile the Lisp community with anyone...
> Because it can even be used indifferently as a scripting or a system language.
Ok.
> Because it is great for teaching AND for the real world.
Real world... yes... for smallish programs. You don't see many enterprise-class million-line-long programs written in Perl.
Teaching... good god i hope not. If you ever get my kids started with a language as cryptic as perl with it's magic variables that it uses without asking you and it's $var syntax I'll shoot someone. You may want to check out Python though. Imagine Perl without nearly as much support or maturity, but with beautiful syntax and good OO, and it's improving real quick.
> Because its compilers are libre software and its
> design and developement are made in a very open
> fashion.
Ok.
Anyway, I like Perl. It's a wonderful language for some things. I mean, it IS the glue of the internet. But it is NOT the holy grail of programming. It does not satisfy everyone, it can not do everything. It is a good language though.
Justin Dubs
Let me get this straight, we use the bytes of data as coefficients in a huge polynomial. The number of terms in the polynomial equals the number of bytes in the message, and we call that k. We then sample the polynomial at k+1 various places and send the samples to the receiver. It reconstructs the polynomial and hence the data.
:-)
If we have k coefficients to the polynomial, why would we send k+1 samples rather than just the k coefficients. This would alleivate the need of the receiver to reconstruct the polynomial and would have one less piece of data to send.
Hey, wait a minute, if the k coefficients are the actual data, and that's what we are sending, then we are just sending the data.
Wasn't that easier AND smaller than the polynomial idea.
You should wander over to sci.crypt and sci.crypt.random-numbers. Maybe you can convince them that this method will let you compress random data also.
To elaborate, here's the general problem you are running in to:
With any sufficiently random data, the size of the polynomial tends to be equal to the size of the data and hence doesn't help you. In fact, with any pattern you can find in the data, it will tend to take as much or more space to encode what pattern you found than just to encode the original data. That's the nature of the beast.
Justin Dubs
I understand and agree with your course of action in your presented scenario. I would just like to make sure it is understood that what happened with your child does not necessarily happen with all kids.
:-). Anyway, I've seen LOTS of martial arts movies. I've studied martial arts. Since a young age.
I grew up watching "violent" cartoons like road runner, g.i. joe and transformers as well as non-cartoons like A-Team, Kung-Fu and more.
Also, since a young age I've been a huge fan of martial arts. Jet Li is, of course, my favorite.
However, I have NEVER EVER been in a fight. I've never even hit anyone. I never will. I've never been in trouble at school for anything other than talking-back and heavy duty slacking. I'm a lazy son of a bitch, but not violent, not at all.
Anyway, just some anecdotcal evidence to provide some perspective. Have fun,
Justin Dubs
It would not give a root password. It would give a root token. That token, however, would only be valid on that one authentication server, so it would only make a difference if you wanted to do horrible things to programs that use that authentication server as their primary authentication server. Regular programs would still default to the system's authentication server which would laugh at your supposed root token.
When he spoke of user-owned authentication daemon's being secure because the cracked passwords are unusable other places that's exactly what he meant.
A user-owned authentication daemon is not just user-owned. It could also be user-written. You can't guarantee the security of something a user writes. So, it can be cracked, possibly. And, you can get passwords and tokens from it, possibly. However, they do you no good in any other authentication daemon.
The main, global, authentication server for the OS should be very damned secure.
Justin Dubs
This was not a traditional chinese movie, so you shouldn't have expected classic chinese styles throughout the whole length.
However, at the end, while the two Jet's are facing off in that factory, if you were paying attention you should have noticed the most beautiful execution of two very complicated forms of Kung Fu.
Gabe (Good Jet), was practicing Bagua Zhang, an open-fist form practiced by walking in circles with open hands. His technique in this form was absolutely beautiful and relies on circular, snake-like movements.
Yulaw (Bad Jet), was practicing Xing Yi Quan, a closed-fist form practiced sometimes by inmates in old chinese prisons and with an emphasis on straight, fast movements. His technique in this art was also absolutely breaktaking.
However, I probably only enjoyed it because of a very strong appreciation of the martial arts involved. It's probably true that, if I had been in your shoes, I would have felt the same way you did.
I would like to refute that The Matrix had ANY style at all to it. It had great camera work, sure, but absoltely NO good martial arts style as none of those involved know martial arts. The subtleties of the arts involved can't be taught during a month of training. It was, however, a damned entertaining movie, which may not be true of The One.
I guess I'm just rambling at this point. Conclusion: I understand how you feel, but respectfully disagree. Have a good day,
Justin Dubs
Interestingly enough, there actually WAS a lot of deeper meaning to this movie. It was steeped full of Jet's Buddhist beliefs. It wasn't made prominenent, so if you wanted to ignore it it wouldn't be hard, but they were there.
:-)
Examples:
All the talk about the life force being in a circle (remember when he recites what his grandfathe said)
When he switches from the closed-fist form to the open-fist form at the end. Soft overcomes hard.
I can't think of any more off hand but there were more. I remember noticing them during the film.
Secondly, I'm sick of people saying that Jet has *SOME* talent. He was the Chinese national martial arts champion (Wushu) 5 times before the age of 18, at which point he quit competing to do movies.
Thirdly, can you name ANY people who were big stars in one country for years, and then moved somewhere else and remained a big star?
I'd love to see Gene Hackman/Harrison Ford/Sam Jackson/whoever make it as a movie star in Hong Kong.
Fourthly, have no misconceptions about this movie. It wasn't meant to be thought-provoking, atleast not much. It wasn't even marketed as such. It was marketed as "Jet Li beats himself up."
So, duh, reviewers hated it. They were expecting Crouching Artsy Hidden Gravity. The people who actually saw it enjoyed it though. Cause the people who saw it saw it knowing what kind of movie it was. The two theaters I've seen it in have been somewhat full of people and almost all of them left very pleased with the result. I recall one black fellow commenting that it was, "off the hook."
Anyway, I loved it. I"m seeing it again today. Have fun,
Justin Dubs
maybe something like this:
/etc/passwd cat grep cut
/etc/passwd cat "fascdot" grep -d: -f7 cut
or
-d: -f7 "fascdot"
:-)
Justin Dubs
I wonder how much of that speed difference can be attributed to the 200Mhz CPU though.
I bet it is also running on old 66Mhz or worse, 33Mhz (maybe even paired) RAM. Yuch.
I bet the Hard Disk is running in damned PIO Mode 4 rather than UATA/anything.
Sure, if you could stick a 200Mhz CPU in my current machine with PC2100 DDR and an ATA/100 EIDE RAID 0, it would slow my box down. Windows would boot more slowly. But not NEARLY as slowly as with the slow buses as well.
Anyway, you are right. 200Mhz is too slow for many things. Just thought I should point out the numerous other factors involved. Have fun,
Justin
Yes, but that doesn't make it true. I honestly feel that in the near future. Maybe even the recent past, we hit the point where home users will NEVER need more Mhz power. I think the future is SMP, not Mhz. I don't mean dual-proc machines. I mean 32 processor machines and 256 processor machines. Multiprocessing is the future. Threaded applications running across several CPUs is the future. I think.
:-). So, we'll see.
More cycles will NOT make Word run faster. Word is I/O bound, not CPU bound. It won't make Internet Explorer run faster either. It's bandwidth bound, not CPU bound. It won't make games run faster. Game's have become bandwidth bound as well, only different bandwidth. Specifically, AGP and North Bridge bandwidth.
There are things that will benefit infinitely from more Mhz though. Specifically AI and Physics simulations spring to mind. Haha, spring to mind, that's great, a figure of speach that combines both physics and AI. Whew. I kill me.
Anyway.
Faster memory, faster buses, more CPUs, that's what I think the future is like, not more Mhz.
But, I've been wrong before. Almost too consistantly to be coincidence
Justin Dubs
You are right. Cliff is wrong.
Given his figure of 128MB for $12, that's 10.66MB per dollar.
From western-digital.com I can get a 40GB 7200RPM UATA/100 caviar harddrive for $117.00. That's 341.88MB per dollar.
This puts harddrives into the lead by a factor of 32. So, until it's at the point where 128MB of RAM costs $0.375, harddrives still have the lead.
Justin Dubs
Interestingly, atleast to me, that's almost exactly 4x per year. As in 300 * 4^14 is almost exactly 85,899,345,920.
Justin Dubs
Then keep your important data on servers. Servers don't go on the LAN. If they need outside access they go in the DMZ. If not, they go in a separate LAN. A firewall or a smart bridge sits between that LAN and the regular LAN. Now we are back to having a firewall protecting everything.
Again, there is no reason to have SMB, RPC, SNMP, LPD or anything of that sort running on these special servers with their magical important information. They just have data and a port open for whatever software is used to interface with that data, whether a SQL port or what-have-you.
I'm not saying these bugs aren't significant. They need to be fixed. I'm simply trying to point out that a good firewall/bridge system can go a long way to preventing some problems. Not all of them, but some.
Justin Dubs
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that all of those unix holes are silly. There is absolutely NO reason for RPC, rsh/rcp, LPD, sadmin/mountd or SNMP to be open to the outside world. Just no reason for it.
The very first thing you need for a secure network is a firewall. And not an opt-out firewall. An opt-in firewall. As follows:
Rule #1: block in all
Rule #2: block out all
There, now that the firewall is secure you can add rules to it to allow the specific things you need to flow into and out of the building.
Justin Dubs
Compared to solaris?
Justin dubs
Hahahah. Sad but true. I still believe that eventually CPU will be meaningless for graphics as more and more work gets offloaded. Then it will just be a matter of using otherwise wasted cycles for the AI and physics work. I can imagine just telling the video card the camera orientation and position and having it do all of the rest of the graphics work. Wow, that'd be cool.
Then, I would think, even the clueless producers would agree.
You see, my thinking is thus:
Right now they delegate around 10% of CPU time to AI, maximum. But, as graphics and sound begin to require less and less cpu time due to speciallized peripheral hardware, they'll be able to delegate more and more to AI. And physics. I can't forget physics.
I guess I eventually see physics and AI being offloaded to specialized hardware as well. Some kind of state-specification meta language which can be compiled and uploaded to a state-space searching chip on specialized hardware.
Same with physics and collision-detection calculations. These would probably be even easier to offload to separate hardware. Oh, that would be heaven. Having a real, dedicated CPU to use for AI calculations. Mmmmmmm....
Justin Dubs
The best part about weather forcasting isn't even Chaos theory. I mean, yes, there are infinite variables which are immeasurable to the needed accuracy (infinite) but, even better yet, due to Quantum theory, a lot of these variables are probably truly random.
No matter how powerful the computer, specific whether conditions will NEVER be able to be scientifically computed.
Justin Dubs
I know everyone here loves to bash processors by saying they are too fast and there is no need for it. And, yes, you are partially right.
The graphics of a game will not benefit from a 2.2Ghz over a 1.4Ghz processor as most of the work is offloaded to the video card.
Same with sound.
However, Artificial Inteligence will have that many more cycles to use searching state-space trees. That much more time to to prune and anneal its way to a better solution. More time to make more realistic artificial intelligence.
That's one thing that you CAN'T throw too many cycles at. The more cycles, the better the results. It's that simple.
Justin Dubs
What about his cited example of second hand smoke? Are those victims not innocent? Or, are they at fault for being near smokers?
What about people beaten, sometimes to death, by drunks? And, of course, the car accidents you mentioned.
You will need a lot of luck to draw a line between those who are "innocent" and those who are not.
It seems mean to say that someones death is "worse" because they were "innocent." No one is innocent. Atleast, no more innocent than anyone else. What if someone in the WTC was a wife-beater and like to drink. Is it now less awful that he was killed?
We are all humans. I feel it is wrong to say that the life of a worker in the WTC is somehow more valuable than the life of a smoker who dies of lung cancer. They are both human. They both suffer. Let's stop drawing lines.
Also, I think that the outrage had little to do with the number of "innocents" killed. I think it was a combination of a few things.
1) The raw number of people killed in this one incident. As opposed to the thousands of car accidents it would take to kill the same number.
2) The people were "innocent". You are right. People feel that way. Even though I think it is wrong.
3) Stripped away our security. I think THAT was the big outrage. "What? You mean people with guns/knives can do things like this? Even in America?"
I think someone finally ripped the blindfolds off of the American people in some respects so they are doing what everyone does when they are shocked. React. In a knee-jerk fashion. The gov't says that crypto==evil and led to this accident, so all the people who have no idea what crypto is say "Oh. Wow. Thank god we know what's at fault for this. Let's get rid of it."
Well, those are my thoughts on the matter,
Justin Dubs
Wow. You are really going to try and judge me as a person based on a single slashdot post?
:-), but I'm NOT a prick. I'm just realistic. Go ahead and boycott. Do whatever makes you happy. So will I. I'm just warning everyone that if you are trying to hurt Disney, your going to need a lot more than a geek boycott.
I was not even TRYING to make the point that there was no reason to boycott. I was simply pointing out that if your reason is hurting Disney, than prepare for disappointment.
I have no problem with boycotting to make yourself feel better and more moral. It's like having a stance on abortion. Unless you are active in politics, you stance is just something you tell yourself to make yourself feel better and more moral. Your stance doesn't do a damned thing about the amount of abortion in the world.
You can boycott disney if it makes you feel better. But it WON'T hurt Disney's bottom line to any degree they will care about.
Yes, I may be apathetic and cynical
Justin Dubs
I would assume that once we make the move to Serial ATA, if that ever happens, it would be as simple as upping the clocking on the serial line to add more bits to the address space and hence maximum addressable size.
So, once that happens I would expect a clocking standard that would give us more than the 28 bits of addressing we have now.
Justin Dubs
My favorite game was the one where he pushed his two bishop pawns and then proceeded to walk his king around, move his queen out of the way, replace it with the king, and effectively swap his king and queen in 10 moves. LOL! What unique and effective gameplay. Amazing stuff.
Justin Dubs
Key difference:
Microsoft will be entering an already crowded marketplace loaded with other Big Boys. Sony and Nintendo aren't poor. Sony in fact is quite rich. They could almost give Microsoft a run for their money. Plus they have name-recognition, a fan following, and many years of console market expience.
Microsoft is newbie in an over-crowded market. Their gonna need a hell of a lot of luck to unseat Sony, Nintendo and Sega.
Justin Dubs
Advertising is NOT pointless. Without advertising no one would know about half the products that exist. I've SEEN my brother watch a commercial for Domino's and say "Hey, mom! Can we get a pizza?"
No, Advertising doesn't affect everyone, but it doesn't need to. It helps create product awareness though. Damned right it does. That is COMPLETELY different than a boycott.
Boycotts, unless done in mass, are COMPLETELY ineffective. I think you are entirely wrong that "[changing] a few people's minds [will] start hurting a company's profits."
...
"Hey Daddy, I wanna go see the new Disney movie!!"
"I'm sorry honey we are boycotting Disney"
"What's that?"
"That means Disney is bad, and to punish them we aren't going to see their movie."
"Oh, okay, well in that case nevermind. I completely understand your reasons and am willing to sacrafice something I enjoy to make them pay."
Just TRY convincing the average consumer and their kids that they should have to abstain from something they enjoy to punish Disney. Go ahead, try it. Cause, guess what, if they don't do it, NO ONE IN THE WORLD WILL NOTICE. And I guarantee that the average consumer doesn't give a fuck about your boycott. You think Disney is really worried about the geeks boycotting their films? Hah!
...
Even more hilarious is thus:
Everytime ANYONE does anything bad all you geeks cry out "boycott!". But none of you ever actually do it. Statistically, I'm guessing 0.5% of you actually boycott. Maybe less. And I'm betting only 1% of people are "geeks", maybe less. Well, that's about 50,000 people in an international market of billions boycotting. Even if I'm off by two powers of ten, it's still only a few million people (a few tenths of a percent of a billion). Run scared Disney, we've got you by the balls now.
Justin Dubs