My thought exactly. Of course if we want this new probe to end up near a neighbouring star in 30,000 years, it really starts to add up. But over that time, chances are we'll have lots of other unknown and unexpected effects to correct for as well, so we're going to need to ability to adjust course during flight anyway.
On the other hand, I don't think keeping track of relativistic effects is really going to be that big of an issue. It's not as intuitive as Newtonian physics, but we've got all the necessary math, right?
What would the result be in weakly typed language like C where you do 1 + "1234"?
My guess would be it's the memory location where the "2" from that string is stored.
See, C, while superficially weakly typed, is actually a strongly typed language where every object is a memory location. At least that's how I managed to get somebody to finally understand C's pointer arithmatic.
And that of just about every Java library out there. There are a lot of great Java libraries that do lots of wonderful things, but mostly they do a lot of work to negate the advatages of static typing. Working with Java will eventually convince you that dynamic typing is the way to go.
Saying that a question is silly is hardly an insult,
It presumes bad faith or ignorance on the part of the questioner.
It presumes nothing. If the question really is silly, then it's an honest answer. If it's a trick question, it might even be the answer they're looking for. It's quite possible to politely inform someone that something is silly, and not doing so could be dishonest.
If I were interviewing prospective employees, I'd definitely prefer one capable of distinguishing silliness over one who tries to bluff his way out.
The code snippets on the website http://www.scala-lang.org/ are intriguing. It's certainly a terse language. That's both good and bad.
Terse is mostly good, as long as it doesn't come at the cost of readability (see Perl for an example of that). Scala, while being about as terse as Ruby, doesn't seem to be quite as readable, unfortunately. But maybe the code snippets I've looked at aren't the best examples.
If software apps were purely compositional and organized as a hierarchical tree, the low level components would need to be written only once. Once the bottom levels (mostly leaves) of the tree become populated, then all of the higher level apps will be compositions of existing objects. Plug and play. The trick is in the purely compositional part: everything must be compositional from the bottom up.
But software already is a hierarchical tree, and many components have been written once (for each version of each language for each platform). We're using much higher level primitives than we were using decades ago, and we're writing much more complex programs with them. But that doesn't mean you suddenly don't have to think anymore. Quite the contrary. We're using our more powerful tools to do more impressive things.
I think it will be the elimination of the traditional programmer, because a time is coming when everybody will be a programmer whether they know it or not. Drag'm and drop'm, that sort of thing.
What do you mean by "the traditional programmer"? We don't write full applications by flipping switches anymore. Programming is a lot more accessible than it used to be. You don't have to worry about memory allocation anymore. That is, most people don't. But the people who write our compilers and VMs still do. They're not going anywhere, they're just making the job easier for higher-level programers.
No doubt programming will continue to become increasingly more accessible to normal people (see the LEGO Mindstorms programming system, for a good example), but educated programmers will continue to use the additional power to make even more impressive programs.
I agree with all that. I know where's the problem: it's the definition of "PC gaming". You went with the correct definition of "PC gaming", meaning all kind of games on PC including Solitaire, while I went with the context in which these guys are when they talk about "PC gaming". And keep in mind that in their context, Solitaire in not at all part of "PC gaming". "PC gaming" in their context only include a select kind of games with some arbitrary amount of cost. Games that need so many resources that they have a barrier of entry for the smaller developers. That "PC gaming" is the one dead for them on PC, but "PC gaming" in your context is still very well alive. When they talk about "PC gaming", they're actually talking about a selective group of developers.
So when they say "PC gaming is dying", what they really mean is: "our business model is dying".
They can't really expect me to deal with an arbitrary, unspecified definition of "PC gaming", can they? Using your own custom definition of a word can be a useful rhetorical trick, but something like "PC gaming" sounds just too generic for lots of PC gamers to accept without some more thorough spin.
Again, I was talking in the context of the "PC gaming" they are talking about, not your context. In your context of "PC gaming" being all kind of games on the PC, of course what I write is nonsense. The selective group of developers that call themselves "PC gaming", I'll call them the "famous developers", nearly all fled to the consoles though.
But others have taken their place. Pretending a few famous developers constitute "PC gaming" may sound like a cool idea to them, but it's not exactly accurate or even useful. All they mean when they say "PC gaming is dying" is that they're seeing more revenue elsewhere for their business model. But it has little relation with what gamers call "PC gaming", so it only makes those developers look silly.
They develop first for the consoles, and then try to adapt it for the PC, which makes very awkward games for PC. Only the most succesful ones among the famous developers go on making games with the PC as the main platform in mind.
I don't care about the fame of developers. Brad Wardel of Stardock is one of the few I know by name, and he develops very successful games entirely for PC.
How is this a troll? The Japanese are notorious for their SMS and MMS use; even more so than Americans. Releasing a phone in Japan without these capabilities would not garner huge sales. Or is it a troll because previous IPhones DID have these features?
MMS support is (or was, at least) useless on the iPhone 3G. My wife MMSed me a photo, and I had to pick it up at a website.
SMS support is excellent, however. Very nice interface. I like it a lot.
My main problem with the iPhone is that it's too restrictive: Apple blocks useful apps from the app store, and I can only buy an iPhone together with a 2-year subscription as a network that sucks. I think I'll try that HTC Hero with Android next.
It's fascism in the sense that it is extreme nationalism but lacks the racist/violent overtones of what is considered Fascism in the world today.
Racism is not necessarily part of fascism, and Nazism is not the archetypical form of fascism. Stalinism is arguably more fascistic than Nazism was.
Fascism is first and foremost about belonging to the group (fasci). That group could be Aryans, members of the Party, descendants of the Roman Empire, people who served in the military, or even humans. People who belong to the group are considered superior, and those outside the group are subhuman.
Often it's a set of concentric circles: Parrty Secretary, politbureau, Communist Party, Russian (in the case of Stalinism), or Fuhrer, Nazi party, Aryan (nazis), etc. (Exactly how Mussolini's Italy was organised, I'm not sure, but that was actually the prototype for fascism).
If you define your group along racial lines (as the nazis did), then considering everybody outside of the group subhuman is definitely racist, but this isn't necessary for fascism.
Have you seen the movie The Wave? That's basically how fascism works.
The propaganda (in the film) does bear a significant resemblance to Nazi style propaganda but adjusted to be the product of corporate thought (would you like to know more, it's more like nationalistic advertising then propaganda).
Of course it's different. It's a much more American approach, but that doesn't mean it's not propaganda. It tries to influence thought, and urges everybody to belong to the group. Do your bit in the fight against the Bugs, even if it means killing innocent insects.
I fully agree that the society presented in the film is not nearly as utterly evil as the nazis, but it does have what I recognise as strong fascist tendencies.
No it didn't. It did not at all chronicle the transition from free society to Fascism under a time of war.
But it does show a brand of fascism that looks like it could easily arrise in an American-style society. And it shows the propaganda used to create support for it.
The movie and in far greater detail, the book depicted what a utopian nationalistic/libertarian society would look like.
Utopian? Libertarian? Nationalistic yes, but more in a authoritarian/fascist way than a libertarian one. At least in the movie. I forgot most of the details from the book, but it never struck me as particularly libertarian or utopian.
Personally, I'd argue that the biggest contributor towards being warlike isn't fascism or having fascist policies, but hatred towards and blaming others for whatever problems ail society.
Blaming (people in) other countries, in particular. I don't see how blaming your own country would make the country warlike. If everybody hates/blames their own country, they're more likely to fix their own country. If they hate/blame another country, they're more likely to want to fix that other country. Through force of arms, if necessary.
I don't think 2001 is very watchable, but models instead of CGI does attract my attention. Halfway decent models often look much better than halway decent CGI.
The movie was practically completely unrelated to the book, but I agree with you: the movie was better. Not great, but better.
The book is basically just a script for a military action movie. The movie actually shows a little bit of human insight into our fascist tendencies, and does so in a pretty creepy and believable way. Other than that, there's not much of interest in the movie, and it makes little sense in lots of places, but that one bit of insight is still more than most movies have these days.
Well, it does tell us something about ourselves: how easily we resort to fascism in times of war, and how tempting it will seem to do so. And I don't think the movie, lame though it may be, is all that wrong there.
I dont think Floyd really got their groove on until much, much later. Perhaps until they lost Barrett and released Dark Side of The Moon.
There's quite a bit of time between losing Barrett and releasing Dark Side of the Moon, and they did some great stuff in that time.
Recently I discovered I completely disagree with Pink Floyd on what their best albums are. I'm a big fan of Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma, but they consider them "stumbling around in the dark". On the other hand, I'm a bit tired of Dark Side of the Moon, whereas to them it's when everything fell into place.
On one hand, it's fun to see Microsoft getting punished, on the other, I happen to agree with Microsoft's argument with regard to patent trolls.
It's an odd feeling to find myself agreeing with Microsoft, but in this particular case, I do. On the other hand...
Arguing to invalidate the patent could have hurt them and their practice of patent filing and arguing Bilski could have really blown the lid off of things. In short, they more or less had to defend "software patents" while at the same time finding a legal argument against the plaintiff.
... if MS chose to defend (or not attack) the validity of software patents in general or this patent in particular, but only claimed that the reason it was invalid is because the patent holder wasn't using it, then they get what they deserve. It's a silly patent and they should have attacked it.
So what? Not every single genre out there has to be popular on the PC for PC gaming not to be dead. PC gaming is very much alive due to plenty of genres that only work well on PC.
And even if all genres were more popular on consoles (unlikely, but let's assume it happens), then PC gaming would still not be dead due to lots of people having PCs and feeling the occasional urge to play a game on it. The only way to kill PC gaming is to kill the PC.
Of course it's false. It's not exactly the situation. PC gaming is not dead, it has fled on what is believed to be consoles, but actually are mini PC with DRM. These are the HD consoles. Did you notice how most developers on these HD consoles are historically PC developers that didn't develop for consoles? Now they all are making their main games for consoles, PC coming after. This is killing the gaming on PC even more, meaning decreasing revenues, but PC gaming still lives on these HD consoles, which really are mini PC with DRM. At least that's how the PC developers see them.
Could you possibly write even bigger nonsense? PC gaming is alive because people play games on consoles, and it's dying because some developers develop for PCs, but give it lower priority than consoles.
There are a lot of developers developing only for PC, and there are a lot of people playing games only on PC. What the hell do consoles have to do with anything? There's room for more than one platform.
Besides, the biggest selling game ever in the history of mankind is on PC. As long as that's the case, any claim of PC gaming dying is just plain silly.
Slashdot Mirror
Power problem? I guess those mars rovers are doing ok with solar.
Except solar isn't going to help you much at 2500 AU.
My thought exactly. Of course if we want this new probe to end up near a neighbouring star in 30,000 years, it really starts to add up. But over that time, chances are we'll have lots of other unknown and unexpected effects to correct for as well, so we're going to need to ability to adjust course during flight anyway.
On the other hand, I don't think keeping track of relativistic effects is really going to be that big of an issue. It's not as intuitive as Newtonian physics, but we've got all the necessary math, right?
Thanks! I'd mod you informative if I could.
What would the result be in weakly typed language like C where you do 1 + "1234"?
My guess would be it's the memory location where the "2" from that string is stored.
See, C, while superficially weakly typed, is actually a strongly typed language where every object is a memory location. At least that's how I managed to get somebody to finally understand C's pointer arithmatic.
Weird casting issues? Maybe your design sucks.
And that of just about every Java library out there. There are a lot of great Java libraries that do lots of wonderful things, but mostly they do a lot of work to negate the advatages of static typing. Working with Java will eventually convince you that dynamic typing is the way to go.
Saying that a question is silly is hardly an insult,
It presumes bad faith or ignorance on the part of the questioner.
It presumes nothing. If the question really is silly, then it's an honest answer. If it's a trick question, it might even be the answer they're looking for. It's quite possible to politely inform someone that something is silly, and not doing so could be dishonest.
If I were interviewing prospective employees, I'd definitely prefer one capable of distinguishing silliness over one who tries to bluff his way out.
The code snippets on the website http://www.scala-lang.org/ are intriguing. It's certainly a terse language. That's both good and bad.
Terse is mostly good, as long as it doesn't come at the cost of readability (see Perl for an example of that). Scala, while being about as terse as Ruby, doesn't seem to be quite as readable, unfortunately. But maybe the code snippets I've looked at aren't the best examples.
But if all you're doing is reinventing Perl with C-like syntax, it's not really a step forward.
Any change to Perl's syntax is a step forward.
(No idea what this has to do with Scala, though.)
If software apps were purely compositional and organized as a hierarchical tree, the low level components would need to be written only once. Once the bottom levels (mostly leaves) of the tree become populated, then all of the higher level apps will be compositions of existing objects. Plug and play. The trick is in the purely compositional part: everything must be compositional from the bottom up.
But software already is a hierarchical tree, and many components have been written once (for each version of each language for each platform). We're using much higher level primitives than we were using decades ago, and we're writing much more complex programs with them. But that doesn't mean you suddenly don't have to think anymore. Quite the contrary. We're using our more powerful tools to do more impressive things.
I think it will be the elimination of the traditional programmer, because a time is coming when everybody will be a programmer whether they know it or not. Drag'm and drop'm, that sort of thing.
What do you mean by "the traditional programmer"? We don't write full applications by flipping switches anymore. Programming is a lot more accessible than it used to be. You don't have to worry about memory allocation anymore. That is, most people don't. But the people who write our compilers and VMs still do. They're not going anywhere, they're just making the job easier for higher-level programers.
No doubt programming will continue to become increasingly more accessible to normal people (see the LEGO Mindstorms programming system, for a good example), but educated programmers will continue to use the additional power to make even more impressive programs.
I agree with all that. I know where's the problem: it's the definition of "PC gaming".
You went with the correct definition of "PC gaming", meaning all kind of games on PC including Solitaire, while I went with the context in which these guys are when they talk about "PC gaming".
And keep in mind that in their context, Solitaire in not at all part of "PC gaming". "PC gaming" in their context only include a select kind of games with some arbitrary amount of cost. Games that need so many resources that they have a barrier of entry for the smaller developers.
That "PC gaming" is the one dead for them on PC, but "PC gaming" in your context is still very well alive.
When they talk about "PC gaming", they're actually talking about a selective group of developers.
So when they say "PC gaming is dying", what they really mean is: "our business model is dying".
They can't really expect me to deal with an arbitrary, unspecified definition of "PC gaming", can they? Using your own custom definition of a word can be a useful rhetorical trick, but something like "PC gaming" sounds just too generic for lots of PC gamers to accept without some more thorough spin.
Again, I was talking in the context of the "PC gaming" they are talking about, not your context. In your context of "PC gaming" being all kind of games on the PC, of course what I write is nonsense.
The selective group of developers that call themselves "PC gaming", I'll call them the "famous developers", nearly all fled to the consoles though.
But others have taken their place. Pretending a few famous developers constitute "PC gaming" may sound like a cool idea to them, but it's not exactly accurate or even useful. All they mean when they say "PC gaming is dying" is that they're seeing more revenue elsewhere for their business model. But it has little relation with what gamers call "PC gaming", so it only makes those developers look silly.
They develop first for the consoles, and then try to adapt it for the PC, which makes very awkward games for PC.
Only the most succesful ones among the famous developers go on making games with the PC as the main platform in mind.
I don't care about the fame of developers. Brad Wardel of Stardock is one of the few I know by name, and he develops very successful games entirely for PC.
How is this a troll? The Japanese are notorious for their SMS and MMS use; even more so than Americans. Releasing a phone in Japan without these capabilities would not garner huge sales. Or is it a troll because previous IPhones DID have these features?
MMS support is (or was, at least) useless on the iPhone 3G. My wife MMSed me a photo, and I had to pick it up at a website.
SMS support is excellent, however. Very nice interface. I like it a lot.
My main problem with the iPhone is that it's too restrictive: Apple blocks useful apps from the app store, and I can only buy an iPhone together with a 2-year subscription as a network that sucks. I think I'll try that HTC Hero with Android next.
It's fascism in the sense that it is extreme nationalism but lacks the racist/violent overtones of what is considered Fascism in the world today.
Racism is not necessarily part of fascism, and Nazism is not the archetypical form of fascism. Stalinism is arguably more fascistic than Nazism was.
Fascism is first and foremost about belonging to the group (fasci). That group could be Aryans, members of the Party, descendants of the Roman Empire, people who served in the military, or even humans. People who belong to the group are considered superior, and those outside the group are subhuman.
Often it's a set of concentric circles: Parrty Secretary, politbureau, Communist Party, Russian (in the case of Stalinism), or Fuhrer, Nazi party, Aryan (nazis), etc. (Exactly how Mussolini's Italy was organised, I'm not sure, but that was actually the prototype for fascism).
If you define your group along racial lines (as the nazis did), then considering everybody outside of the group subhuman is definitely racist, but this isn't necessary for fascism.
Have you seen the movie The Wave? That's basically how fascism works.
The propaganda (in the film) does bear a significant resemblance to Nazi style propaganda but adjusted to be the product of corporate thought (would you like to know more, it's more like nationalistic advertising then propaganda).
Of course it's different. It's a much more American approach, but that doesn't mean it's not propaganda. It tries to influence thought, and urges everybody to belong to the group. Do your bit in the fight against the Bugs, even if it means killing innocent insects.
I fully agree that the society presented in the film is not nearly as utterly evil as the nazis, but it does have what I recognise as strong fascist tendencies.
No it didn't. It did not at all chronicle the transition from free society to Fascism under a time of war.
But it does show a brand of fascism that looks like it could easily arrise in an American-style society. And it shows the propaganda used to create support for it.
The movie and in far greater detail, the book depicted what a utopian nationalistic/libertarian society would look like.
Utopian? Libertarian? Nationalistic yes, but more in a authoritarian/fascist way than a libertarian one. At least in the movie. I forgot most of the details from the book, but it never struck me as particularly libertarian or utopian.
Personally, I'd argue that the biggest contributor towards being warlike isn't fascism or having fascist policies, but hatred towards and blaming others for whatever problems ail society.
Blaming (people in) other countries, in particular. I don't see how blaming your own country would make the country warlike. If everybody hates/blames their own country, they're more likely to fix their own country. If they hate/blame another country, they're more likely to want to fix that other country. Through force of arms, if necessary.
ta Palin/Arpaio 2012 ticket may be just the shot in the arm US Republicans need....
ITYM "shot in the head".
In fact it clearly shows why the rest of the world is laughing at the USA.
That could be why Americans don't like it.
my 'one movie this year' was Watchmen.
Good choice.
And it uses miniatures rather than CGI :D
I don't think 2001 is very watchable, but models instead of CGI does attract my attention. Halfway decent models often look much better than halway decent CGI.
Transformers doesn't even count because Michael Bay blows
Why is this modded as flamebait? It's informative!
The movie was practically completely unrelated to the book, but I agree with you: the movie was better. Not great, but better.
The book is basically just a script for a military action movie. The movie actually shows a little bit of human insight into our fascist tendencies, and does so in a pretty creepy and believable way. Other than that, there's not much of interest in the movie, and it makes little sense in lots of places, but that one bit of insight is still more than most movies have these days.
Starship Troopers?
*ducks* ;)
Well, it does tell us something about ourselves: how easily we resort to fascism in times of war, and how tempting it will seem to do so. And I don't think the movie, lame though it may be, is all that wrong there.
District 9 actually uses the premise to tell us something about ourselves.
Sounds good. This is what SF is all about (rather than special effects). I think I'll go see this movie (if they even release it in my country).
I just checked: it's going to be released on 8 October. I'll note the date in my agenda.
I dont think Floyd really got their groove on until much, much later. Perhaps until they lost Barrett and released Dark Side of The Moon.
There's quite a bit of time between losing Barrett and releasing Dark Side of the Moon, and they did some great stuff in that time.
Recently I discovered I completely disagree with Pink Floyd on what their best albums are. I'm a big fan of Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma, but they consider them "stumbling around in the dark". On the other hand, I'm a bit tired of Dark Side of the Moon, whereas to them it's when everything fell into place.
On one hand, it's fun to see Microsoft getting punished, on the other, I happen to agree with Microsoft's argument with regard to patent trolls.
It's an odd feeling to find myself agreeing with Microsoft, but in this particular case, I do. On the other hand...
Arguing to invalidate the patent could have hurt them and their practice of patent filing and arguing Bilski could have really blown the lid off of things. In short, they more or less had to defend "software patents" while at the same time finding a legal argument against the plaintiff.
... if MS chose to defend (or not attack) the validity of software patents in general or this patent in particular, but only claimed that the reason it was invalid is because the patent holder wasn't using it, then they get what they deserve. It's a silly patent and they should have attacked it.
Those genres are already very popular.
Yes but not on PC.
So what? Not every single genre out there has to be popular on the PC for PC gaming not to be dead. PC gaming is very much alive due to plenty of genres that only work well on PC.
And even if all genres were more popular on consoles (unlikely, but let's assume it happens), then PC gaming would still not be dead due to lots of people having PCs and feeling the occasional urge to play a game on it. The only way to kill PC gaming is to kill the PC.
Of course it's false. It's not exactly the situation. PC gaming is not dead, it has fled on what is believed to be consoles, but actually are mini PC with DRM.
These are the HD consoles. Did you notice how most developers on these HD consoles are historically PC developers that didn't develop for consoles? Now they all are making their main games for consoles, PC coming after.
This is killing the gaming on PC even more, meaning decreasing revenues, but PC gaming still lives on these HD consoles, which really are mini PC with DRM. At least that's how the PC developers see them.
Could you possibly write even bigger nonsense? PC gaming is alive because people play games on consoles, and it's dying because some developers develop for PCs, but give it lower priority than consoles.
There are a lot of developers developing only for PC, and there are a lot of people playing games only on PC. What the hell do consoles have to do with anything? There's room for more than one platform.
Besides, the biggest selling game ever in the history of mankind is on PC. As long as that's the case, any claim of PC gaming dying is just plain silly.