Even more worthless trivia: Pixar's product is called Photorealistic RenderMan, or prman for short. RenderMan is the standard to which prman adheres, not the name of a product.
"Embedded" doesn't mean "small". A cable set-top box, a DVD player, a vending machine, a map display in a new car and an MRI scanner are all "embedded".
Why the #defines for EMPTY, FULL, and PUSH_OK instead of an enum?
Probably because CAPACITY is too, and CAPACITY is a macro because this was probably written before static const ints could be used as array size initialisers.
Presumably this also explains why he didn't use exceptions instead of EMPTY/FULL/PUSH_OK. There's no excuse for the variables starting with underscores, though.
Besides that, the fat filesystem is only unique in the sense that it never occured to anyone to write a filesystem so blatantly weak and crippled.
I do take your point, but there's still a market for a filesystem which has enough frills to get stuff done but also has sufficiently low overhead that small media (e.g. flash cards, floppies etc) are used efficiently. FAT has played that de facto role for a while. We could do with an upgrade.
Personally, if I need floppies which don't need to be used them in a non-Linux machine, I tend to use minixfs for precisely this reason. (Yes, that's right, I'm the person who still uses minixfs on a semi-regular basis.) Another option might be QNX's IFS, but I think that's proprietary.
There's a problem with that theory. Geeks don't have any taste.
Coming soon: Queer Eye for the Geek Guy
Re:The main issue with XML is performance
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1
XML is heavy weight and isn't free. The best example of this is SQLXML.
Actually, SQLXML is possibly the worst example of XML use. It's hardly the best.
I work with large amounts (terabytes) of structured marked-up text. XML is almost precisely the right way to approach this problem domain. Forcing tabular data into XML is almost precisely the wrong way to approach that problem domain. Horses for courses.
While we live in the real world, we can't do everything, and when you're a parent, there are many battles to fight on behalf of your child(ren). A smart person knows which battles should be fought and which ones shouldn't. In making those decisions, morals and ethics are small fry compared with practicalities.
What would you consider an "original" film, then? Name three and we'll see how "original" they are.
They have to be fairly widely-known movies that the majority of people on/. are likely to have seen, otherwise it's not a fair contest. I could easily name a film done by a friend of mine while he was at film school, and you'd have no way of challenging that.
When where Disney's films highly original? Do you mean their remaking of traditional fairy tales like Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Pinnochio and Jungle Book?
What would you consider an "original" film, then? Name three and we'll see how "original" they are.
Snow White was the first ever animated feature. That's pretty damn original. Sleeping Beauty was the first animated feature shot in 70mm, and if you don't think that Eyvind Earle's production design counts as original...
I agree with you about Jungle Book, though. The "golden era" of Disney animation ended after WW2 when they couldn't afford inkers. It all went downhill from there.
Bambi and Fantasia are the only 'original' full-length Disney films I can think of from their early days.
Nobody, even Lassiter and Jobs, really expected that Pixar would end up being a better and more original storyteller than Disney. Yet they did. Most Disney work is derivative. From Snow White to Treasure Planet, the story came from elsewhere.
I think this is more than a little unfair. In the early days, Disney's films were highly original, because they had to basically invent the process upon which modern animation studios basically get a free ride. They had to deal with far more fundamental questions than Pixar does today, such as: Could you hold an audience's attention for 75+ minutes with a cartoon? Could you make an audience do anything but laugh with a cartoon? Could you, for example, make them cry? These are hard problems to solve, and nobody had tried it before.
As for originality, I'm not sure that Pixar's five (so far) films are a good sample. Shrek isn't an original story either, but it did extremely well at the box office. Besides, A Bug's Life isn't exactly the most original plot ever written.
Disney's problem, as I see it, is that they got complacent. They've decided that they're going to release two animated features a year, and that's too much creativity for their team, so they basically started turning their direct-to-video "cheapquels" into theatrical releases (Jungle Book 2 and Return to Never Land being two recent examples) and assumed that people would turn up to see them. If there's one thing that Disney has a long history of, it's producing filler material.
Nobody knows what kind of movie will work and what will not. The history of cinema is littered with highly original flops as well as highly derivative flops. However, there are certain things which are known not to work, and trying to sell a film on brand name alone is one of them.
Now to Pixar. They have a young, fresh team with lots of new ideas, and enough money in the bank to sit on a film until it's ready to be made. The big question is: How long can they sustain this? Only time will tell.
The ACLU doesn't support freedom till they support the 2nd adm.
...and the NRA doesn't support freedom until they support the rest of the constitution.
If you believe in civil rights (not just a civil right), and you're a gun not, why not join two organisations rather than hopelessly searching for one which fits with every single belief that you have?
Remember, though, the 5.5 million figure (which is a lower bound) accounts for only Jews. If you add the mentally ill, Gypsies, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses and so on, the body count for the holocaust is closer to 8 million.
Actually, the last point is worse than bullshit. It's downright dangerous.
One of the most important rules of security is: Don't engineer a single point of failure. The reason for firewalls et al is that we know that the software that they protect will be insecure despite our best efforts. That's why we put up an additional barrier.
Relying on firewalls because we made the software insecure and have no intention of fixing it is effectively engineering a single point of failure.
That analogy works for criminal cases, but what about in a civil case, such as is the case with copyright infringement?
Let me put it this way: You want to break a contract that you signed. You ask me who can help you with that and I say "Fred can, and he lives next door". Should that be illegal?
The answer is a utilitarian one: Human progress happens by building on the fringes of what we have now. If what we have now is locked up indefinitely, progress will effectively stop due to the cost of determining who owns what already exists.
Think about this for a moment. How much would your computer cost if, for every component in it, you had to pay a royalty to the descendents of Faraday, Telsa, Volta, Planck, Boole, Turing, Babbage and so on for everyone who discovered something crucial to its operation?
It's also surprisingly balanced. Their conclusion is that the benefits and costs of copyright term extension approximately balance each other, and hence harmonisation arguments result in a net gain for extending the term.
I noticed that they, like most pro-copyright-term-extension reports, miss out on one crucial thing, and that's that they do not acknowledge that thanks to modern technology, there is a burgeoning "public domain industry" which consists of real stakeholders whose interests are directly in opposition with the existing copyright holders on this issue.
Moreover, this industry is making a real foothold in Australia. I own a number of Australian-produced DVDs of 1930s era animated shorts, for example.
People writing to their MPs might like to point this out. A copyright term extension would effectively kill a new Australian industry.
Very simple: Because big studios have discovered that they can make a lot of money off derivative works, re-releases, remakes and so on. Especially now that they can release digitally enhanced special editions and DVDs. That's a lot of money for not much work. Far more profit that would have been gained from buying a few politicians.
Watch out next year for the feature blockbuster Flowers and Trees vs Steamboat Willie.
The main thing is "children" is a very broad term, and while I wouldn't want a 4 year-old viewing information on contraceptives [...]
While I'd hate to have to explain them to a four year old, I'm not actually very worried about this. (BTW, my daughter turns 4 next month.) Nor am I particularly worried about, say, nudity.
I'm way, way more concerned with my soon-to-be four year old viewing, say, material about prejudice and bigotry (e.g. racism), depression, suicide, relationship breakup, emotional/physical abuse or other complex emotions which require a certain level of emotional maturity to understand. (OK, I actually let my daughter watch Amadeus, but really, she only wants to listen to the music. She finds the rest deathly dull.)
Imagine trying to explain all that to a four year old. Guess what: This kind of material is perfectly legal for a four year old to view.
I really, really do not understand why people single out sex (which is a perfectly natural bodily function) when far more emotionally damaging material goes unregulated. I think this is very telling, because it suggests that the motivation behind legislation like COPA has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children, but is rather because someone thinks they've found a scapegoat for society's ills. It's kind of like how child care workers are heavily vetted these days (which is admittedly probably a good thing), but parents are not, even though a child is far, far more likely to be abused by a family member than an outsider.
First of all, I saw porn from as early an age as 13, like either most boys did, or most boys wanted to...
Had you lived before the industrial revolution, at age 13 you'd certainly be apprenticed and quite possibly engaged. The idea that the teenage years are "childhood" is actually a fairly modern invention. It's a semi-necessary invention, admittedly, given that the post-industrial revolution workplace is a complex thing, and teenagers aren't even close to ready for it. In addition, changes in community structure mean that we don't live in tribes/villages where any adult will freely take care of any child of the community, freeing up biological parents to do the farming/hunting/gathering should that be required. This is why we have schools.
An unfortunate side-effect of these changes is that some parents ignore the fact that teenagers are sexual beings. Admittedly, a typical 14 year old girl isn't emotionally ready for pregnancy and childbirth in the modern world (and trying to discourage this from happening is therefore probably a good thing), but that's not going to stop teenagers being interested in sex and, indeed, having sex with each other. Biology hasn't caught up with our post-industrial revolution social structures yet.
NT 3.51 and before were just as much microkernels as Mach is. Indeed, that's still arguably the case. NT's kernel has all sorts of GDI crap in it, but then Mach has a lot of networking crap in it.
In the "most gratuitous kernel bloat" stakes, of course, none of these beat the web server in Linux.:-)
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Even more worthless trivia: Pixar's product is called Photorealistic RenderMan, or prman for short. RenderMan is the standard to which prman adheres, not the name of a product.
"Embedded" doesn't mean "small". A cable set-top box, a DVD player, a vending machine, a map display in a new car and an MRI scanner are all "embedded".
Probably because CAPACITY is too, and CAPACITY is a macro because this was probably written before static const ints could be used as array size initialisers.
Presumably this also explains why he didn't use exceptions instead of EMPTY/FULL/PUSH_OK. There's no excuse for the variables starting with underscores, though.
OK, here's my version.
Exactly. The argument boils down to "The GPL is unconstitutional because the people who wrote it don't like some current laws."
Of course, not liking current laws is also constitutionally protected in the USA, as is the right to voice ones opinions on the matter.
I do take your point, but there's still a market for a filesystem which has enough frills to get stuff done but also has sufficiently low overhead that small media (e.g. flash cards, floppies etc) are used efficiently. FAT has played that de facto role for a while. We could do with an upgrade.
Personally, if I need floppies which don't need to be used them in a non-Linux machine, I tend to use minixfs for precisely this reason. (Yes, that's right, I'm the person who still uses minixfs on a semi-regular basis.) Another option might be QNX's IFS, but I think that's proprietary.
There's a problem with that theory. Geeks don't have any taste.
Coming soon: Queer Eye for the Geek Guy
Actually, SQLXML is possibly the worst example of XML use. It's hardly the best.
I work with large amounts (terabytes) of structured marked-up text. XML is almost precisely the right way to approach this problem domain. Forcing tabular data into XML is almost precisely the wrong way to approach that problem domain. Horses for courses.
No, Neo dies in the new Harry Potter book. Hope this helps.
While we live in the real world, we can't do everything, and when you're a parent, there are many battles to fight on behalf of your child(ren). A smart person knows which battles should be fought and which ones shouldn't. In making those decisions, morals and ethics are small fry compared with practicalities.
They only do RMS quotes on slow SCO lawsuit days or when they can't keep up the traffic using duplicate articles alone.
I wrote:
They have to be fairly widely-known movies that the majority of people on /. are likely to have seen, otherwise it's not a fair contest. I could easily name a film done by a friend of mine while he was at film school, and you'd have no way of challenging that.
What would you consider an "original" film, then? Name three and we'll see how "original" they are.
Snow White was the first ever animated feature. That's pretty damn original. Sleeping Beauty was the first animated feature shot in 70mm, and if you don't think that Eyvind Earle's production design counts as original...
I agree with you about Jungle Book, though. The "golden era" of Disney animation ended after WW2 when they couldn't afford inkers. It all went downhill from there.
I believe that Dumbo was also an original story.
I think this is more than a little unfair. In the early days, Disney's films were highly original, because they had to basically invent the process upon which modern animation studios basically get a free ride. They had to deal with far more fundamental questions than Pixar does today, such as: Could you hold an audience's attention for 75+ minutes with a cartoon? Could you make an audience do anything but laugh with a cartoon? Could you, for example, make them cry? These are hard problems to solve, and nobody had tried it before.
As for originality, I'm not sure that Pixar's five (so far) films are a good sample. Shrek isn't an original story either, but it did extremely well at the box office. Besides, A Bug's Life isn't exactly the most original plot ever written.
Disney's problem, as I see it, is that they got complacent. They've decided that they're going to release two animated features a year, and that's too much creativity for their team, so they basically started turning their direct-to-video "cheapquels" into theatrical releases (Jungle Book 2 and Return to Never Land being two recent examples) and assumed that people would turn up to see them. If there's one thing that Disney has a long history of, it's producing filler material.
Nobody knows what kind of movie will work and what will not. The history of cinema is littered with highly original flops as well as highly derivative flops. However, there are certain things which are known not to work, and trying to sell a film on brand name alone is one of them.
Now to Pixar. They have a young, fresh team with lots of new ideas, and enough money in the bank to sit on a film until it's ready to be made. The big question is: How long can they sustain this? Only time will tell.
...and the NRA doesn't support freedom until they support the rest of the constitution.
If you believe in civil rights (not just a civil right), and you're a gun not, why not join two organisations rather than hopelessly searching for one which fits with every single belief that you have?
Remember, though, the 5.5 million figure (which is a lower bound) accounts for only Jews. If you add the mentally ill, Gypsies, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses and so on, the body count for the holocaust is closer to 8 million.
Actually, the last point is worse than bullshit. It's downright dangerous.
One of the most important rules of security is: Don't engineer a single point of failure. The reason for firewalls et al is that we know that the software that they protect will be insecure despite our best efforts. That's why we put up an additional barrier.
Relying on firewalls because we made the software insecure and have no intention of fixing it is effectively engineering a single point of failure.
...or, say, Fortune 1000 companies only...
Preach it, brother!
That analogy works for criminal cases, but what about in a civil case, such as is the case with copyright infringement?
Let me put it this way: You want to break a contract that you signed. You ask me who can help you with that and I say "Fred can, and he lives next door". Should that be illegal?
...and probably Canberra's nicest. Not that there's a lot of competition.
The answer is a utilitarian one: Human progress happens by building on the fringes of what we have now. If what we have now is locked up indefinitely, progress will effectively stop due to the cost of determining who owns what already exists.
Think about this for a moment. How much would your computer cost if, for every component in it, you had to pay a royalty to the descendents of Faraday, Telsa, Volta, Planck, Boole, Turing, Babbage and so on for everyone who discovered something crucial to its operation?
...it's actually surprisingly understandable.
It's also surprisingly balanced. Their conclusion is that the benefits and costs of copyright term extension approximately balance each other, and hence harmonisation arguments result in a net gain for extending the term.
I noticed that they, like most pro-copyright-term-extension reports, miss out on one crucial thing, and that's that they do not acknowledge that thanks to modern technology, there is a burgeoning "public domain industry" which consists of real stakeholders whose interests are directly in opposition with the existing copyright holders on this issue.
Moreover, this industry is making a real foothold in Australia. I own a number of Australian-produced DVDs of 1930s era animated shorts, for example.
People writing to their MPs might like to point this out. A copyright term extension would effectively kill a new Australian industry.
Very simple: Because big studios have discovered that they can make a lot of money off derivative works, re-releases, remakes and so on. Especially now that they can release digitally enhanced special editions and DVDs. That's a lot of money for not much work. Far more profit that would have been gained from buying a few politicians.
Watch out next year for the feature blockbuster Flowers and Trees vs Steamboat Willie.
While I'd hate to have to explain them to a four year old, I'm not actually very worried about this. (BTW, my daughter turns 4 next month.) Nor am I particularly worried about, say, nudity.
I'm way, way more concerned with my soon-to-be four year old viewing, say, material about prejudice and bigotry (e.g. racism), depression, suicide, relationship breakup, emotional/physical abuse or other complex emotions which require a certain level of emotional maturity to understand. (OK, I actually let my daughter watch Amadeus, but really, she only wants to listen to the music. She finds the rest deathly dull.)
Imagine trying to explain all that to a four year old. Guess what: This kind of material is perfectly legal for a four year old to view.
I really, really do not understand why people single out sex (which is a perfectly natural bodily function) when far more emotionally damaging material goes unregulated. I think this is very telling, because it suggests that the motivation behind legislation like COPA has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children, but is rather because someone thinks they've found a scapegoat for society's ills. It's kind of like how child care workers are heavily vetted these days (which is admittedly probably a good thing), but parents are not, even though a child is far, far more likely to be abused by a family member than an outsider.
Had you lived before the industrial revolution, at age 13 you'd certainly be apprenticed and quite possibly engaged. The idea that the teenage years are "childhood" is actually a fairly modern invention. It's a semi-necessary invention, admittedly, given that the post-industrial revolution workplace is a complex thing, and teenagers aren't even close to ready for it. In addition, changes in community structure mean that we don't live in tribes/villages where any adult will freely take care of any child of the community, freeing up biological parents to do the farming/hunting/gathering should that be required. This is why we have schools.
An unfortunate side-effect of these changes is that some parents ignore the fact that teenagers are sexual beings. Admittedly, a typical 14 year old girl isn't emotionally ready for pregnancy and childbirth in the modern world (and trying to discourage this from happening is therefore probably a good thing), but that's not going to stop teenagers being interested in sex and, indeed, having sex with each other. Biology hasn't caught up with our post-industrial revolution social structures yet.
NT 3.51 and before were just as much microkernels as Mach is. Indeed, that's still arguably the case. NT's kernel has all sorts of GDI crap in it, but then Mach has a lot of networking crap in it.
:-)
In the "most gratuitous kernel bloat" stakes, of course, none of these beat the web server in Linux.