No... but the point of my post wasn't to enumerate every great artist. I only wanted to describe some fuzzy principles and let other people extrapolate from there.
Actually it's funny that you bring up Beethoven (I think that the importance of the methods implied by Picasso or Monet is pretty self-evident.) Just the other day I was using Beethoven's Fur Elise to explain state-machines to a friend who wanted to write a script interpreter.
In addition, the two play off of each other pretty often.
For instance, the artistic work of somebody like M.C. Escher is used as a model for the analysis of a complex graded lattice. Somebody says, "my God that's beautiful," and then they write a computer program to do it. There are plenty of other examples too. In fact, much of the early work in projective geometry was done by "artists."
I personally think that it's wrong to place Art and Science on the same scale. In fact, I think that things only really start making sense when you throw in more specific labels. That way you keep the wheat ("artists" who design tesselated computer models of interesting characters for video games) and throw out the chaff (the elephants you mentioned.)
I think that you've gone a bit too far with your generalization of "nerds" here. Firstly, "Wall Street" didn't grant any money, it just reflected the public opinion of specific companies. In that respect, the failing companies weren't necessarily owned (or operated) by "nerds." Some of these "dot-bombs" (as the idiot editor of my local paper keeps calling them) were incredibly ridiculous ideas. In fact, some weren't serious ideas at all. They were VC-cash sinks.
In short, a snake oil salesman is not necessarily a "nerd" just because the oil is wrapped in PCBs.
I think that we're arguing two completely different points here. I'm not claiming that OpenGL is a poorly designed rasterizer. That having been said... I'll respond to the necessary points in your post.
Sure they are: Fortran does not have a concept of "objects" or "pointers". The only way you can make COM work under Fortran is via non-standard language extensions or obscure glue libraries.
You don't need objects or pointers but you do need compiler support. I've used OLE automation with Lisp... Fortran is no big deal.:)
The point is that if COM really mattered in this application, Microsoft didn't have to invent a whole new API, they could have simply done the obvious COM binding to OpenGL.
It doesn't matter. In fact, what I brought up was dispinterfaces, not COM specifically. In any case, I said originally that it was a toy. I wasn't claiming that it's impossible to wrap OpenGL in the same way. I was claiming that Windows doesn't ship with scriptable OpenGL wrapper. That's all. Don't put words in my mouth (or fingers, as it were.):)
Well, of course, it isn't anymore [wrt: gaming being the primary purpose of DX]. After Microsoft tried to move everybody to DirectX, people didn't have much of a choice. And DirectX has accreted other functionality, like some audio I/O and multimedia stuff.
They were using it for things aside from games before it became a "big hit." On a side note, pick a side ok? You said in your last post to me that DirectX is an uncessary "real-time" access layer for games and that was the premise that I questioned. Now you are ok with dismissing that premise but you go on with other arguments that are based on that premise (or dismiss your dismissal.)
Just look at the range of graphics APIs Windows supports.
The range? You mean the GDI and D3D? There's a huge difference between the GDI and D3D. The GDI is an abstract raster-device interface. The same routines that you use to manipulate device contexts can be used for printers, plotters, monitors, or whatever display device you make on your own. One part of the appeal of OpenGL/D3D is that they get around that abstraction. This is only useful for applications that require high-performance in this aspect. The other part of the appeal is that the objects can be written specifically with 3D rasterization in mind.
Because of your talk about brilliant "software engineering" practices before... I'm sure that you're not advocating that Microsoft develop DrawWireframe(HDC hDestDC, TRIANGLE* pAlignedTris, HOMOGENOUSTRANSMATRIX matCamera); alongside SelectObject(HDC hDestDC, HGDIOBJ hObj);. There's nothing inherently wrong with having two graphics subsystems so long as both serve different tasks.
If you want a programming interface that can make use of OpenGL, GDI, DirectX, QuickDraw, QT, GTK+, or any other other drawing interface, you can always write it yourself. If Microsoft had designed their programming interface (the interface, not an access-control supersystem) to put strict limitations on what you could do (uh... like not using the rendering capabilities of modern video cards) then I'm sure you'd complain about that (at least I would.)
Even if you look at DirectX itself, it is evolving so rapidly that it is very difficult to provide an independent implementation on other platforms.
Maybe difficult... but not impossible. They didn't get it right until version 8. Still, if you're going to write your own implementation of each version leading up to that, at least you can break them off into seperate projects and let the calling program pick the appropriate project through its invocation of QueryInterface.
In any case, I doubt that MS really wanted anybody to implement DirectX on other platforms. That's part of the idea of tying everything to the COM.
Contrast that with OpenGL, which goes through an orderly standardization process and has multiple, independent implementations.
Like the orderly standardization process for Lisp, or C++, or C? How well do those implementations generally work together?
Not that those things are the issue... it's OpenGL. The last I heard of the OpenGL standards body, there was some serious fighting going on over the direction of the programming interface. I've also heard that SGI has lost a lot of interest in it. They're just rumors in any case. The point of my original message was not to debate the relative merits of D3D over OpenGL. I was only stating that D3D is winning by its accessibility (being installed on every Windows system and being usable by everyone from actual graphics programmers to VB junkies.) Yes, part of this is just that Microsoft is behind it. Yes, OpenGL is a fine standard and I have enjoyed writing OpenGL programs in the past. If current trends continue though, OpenGL might not live much longer.
OpenGL used to be self-sufficient drivers on Windows, etc etc
Yes I know all about its history on the Windows platform... I don't think that anything in my previous post went against this.
The OpenGL API is trivial, and easily bound to any language; that was part of its design goals. Microsoft's COM/DirectX interfaces are much less portable and much more difficult to bind to many languages (try accessing them from Fortran).
They're not hard to access from Fortran. COM is just a binary standard. It's no more difficult to implement than a PE loader. Most Windows-aware Fortran compilers will take care of the grunt work for you. I've written code to access or implement "complicated" OLE interfaces in ANSI C++. I don't get the argument that it's difficult to "bind to a language." It's a lock-in to the Windows platform though, I wasn't suggesting that it wasn't.:)
Even wrapping OpenGL in a COM interface is something anybody (including Microsoft) could do in a couple of hours.
The point is that it's not implemented and that you can assume that, given the correct installation of DX, those interfaces will be there. My point about hastening the pace of script-interpreter development was applicable to those who don't want to know how dispinterfaces work. These people are not going to want to make an efficient scriptable access layer to OpenGL.
Furthermore, you can, in fact, write efficient 3D graphics applications using OpenGL even from a scripting language, because all the compute-intensive stuff is handled by the OpenGL implementation; the scripting language only needs to manipulate the high level structures.
I think that you must think that I'm "against" OpenGL.
You are missing the point here as well. I was asking (rhetorically) "why does an operating system need a separate set of game APIs to get real-time networking and audio I/O?" The facilities DirectX provides are useful for many applications, and they shouldn't be designed around gaming (of course, you can use DirectX with other applications, but that's not their primary purpose).
They aren't designed specifically for games nor are they designed "around" (?) gaming. "Gaming" is not the primary purpose of DirectX. I'm sure that you'll agree that 3D Studio Max, SoundForge, Internet Explorer, and Media Player aren't games.
This is classic Microsoft: fragment the market, fragment the APIs, and achieve quick time-to-market with specialized solutions. It is also clasically bad software engineering.
How much Windows software have you written, exactly? Can you provide some specific examples of "fragmented" APIs?
Under Windows, OpenGL is just a transformation layer for DirectX calls. For the render-loop calls, there's an associated overhead (certain procedure calls even equate to two times the memory block copying as would be seen with D3D.)
Another nice thing about the DirectX interfaces (issues of overhead aside) is that you can access dispatch interfaces on each DX object. That means that cute little graphics demos can be done in VBScript (or any WSH-compatible scripting language.) Yes this is mostly a toy (albeit a really cool toy) but it does have the potential to alleviate some of the burden of writing a script interpreter (something that most large scale games really need.)
As for your last question:
why does an operating system need a separate set of game APIs to get real-time networking and audio I/O?
Because it's a preemptive multitasking system. The same thing would be necessary under Linux to shut down any running subsystems that hog valuable time-slices. DX doesn't provide "real-time" access either (whatever you meant by that,) but it does let you shut down most of the monolithic systems in Windows that get in your way and talk to the computer at one level of abstraction above the hardware.
WINE allows people to keep writing software for Win32, and ignore the Linux. Is that what you want?
WINE allows people who need Windows software to use Linux. With WINE, Windows becomes a subset of "Linux" (or rather -- the intersection of all components of all Linux distributions.) When traditional Windows users move to a Linux-based OS, they'll be much more likely to run Linux-based software than they would have been under Windows (obviously.) You may have heard this approach called "bait and switch" or "embrace and extend." In any case, it's an effective approach (as has been demonstrated by many successful companies) so long as the "embrace" (or "bait") portion is kept working long enough.
Find me an amateur physicist, or mathematician, or chemist who's made a major discovery in the past 50 years.
That doesn't prove that having a PhD is necessary or even that major contributions can only be made by people with PhDs. For a claimed advocate of Science, this is a pretty silly fallacy to commit.;)
I say that it's a good joke because a) you can pretend that he inadvertantly put a title in the sentence, and it's grammatical. The whole point of an inadvertant ambiguity is that you "could" take it both ways. (Even if that actual meaning is clear)
Given the sentence in question and the extrapolation that you did, that's a hell of a stretch. The punchline requires that you ignore some basic conventions of language. That's why I don't think that it's funny.
b) BNW has to do with the story at hand, because it's a dystopian future in which we're controlled by the government (albeit in this case a government dispensing soma instead of a government chaining you with eyes everywhere).
Did you actually read BNW (I asked this before and you never answered?) People took soma because of social pressure (aside from the riot at the end.) BNW was about the tyranny of the majority. 1984 was about the horror of a pure totalitarian state. BNW warned about the problems that arise when people are given too much freedom (that's why this guy saying "brave new world" isn't incredibly funny.) You seem to like saying "dystopian" but the word (much like the phrase "brave new world") is largely ambiguous at best.
As far as future dystopias go, BNW ranks somewhere in the top ten
Where is this list to which you continuously make reference?
It's funny because italicizing it into a title changes the meaning of the sentance without changing its form! (I.E. merely points out an ambiguity, whose alternate meaning is tellingly humorous.)
And then they can point out Miranda's statement and say that it's an indication that eBooks will usher in a new golden age. Double meanings don't require that you modify the sentence to interpret them properly.
Hamlet's story of betrayal (or whatever word you want to summarize it up in)
There were several themes in Hamlet. This is why people borrow quotes to apply to the situations at hand rather than making reference to the whole work ("Something's rotten in the state of Slashdot" applies here.) You wouldn't compress 45MB of data into 2 bytes (unless there was a VERY simple pattern to it) and you can't very well compress Huxley's novels or Shakespeare's plays into a word either. That's why it's not funny (not to mention that the sentence still isn't correct if you interpret "brave new world" as a book.)
Do you think that it is not humorous?
No I don't think that it's very funny. You should have made a joke about Agatha's "And then there were none" (originally "Ten Little Indians" -- a great book.)
Sorry, I meant in order of popularity. 1984 is the book, of course.
Haven't you heard of Dostoevsky? When Eric Blair wrote 1984, he was reminding the world of things that guys like Dostoevsky, Machiavelli, and Chekhov had been saying for a long time. In order of popularity, those guys still beat out Blair (as they should... they analysed these subjects to a much finer degree than did Blair.)
"This first-of-its-kind offering is just the beginning of a Brave New World of literature and technology." See?
LOL! That's ridiculous. Interpreting "Brave New World" as the title of a book in that context strips the sentence of meaning. How about, "This is the Hamletest of days," for absurdity?:)
Which is why I mention that BNW is practically 1984 -- in order of dystopian rankitude in the mass psyche. (Neverminding the fact that BMW has comparably little big brotherliness, as my first link in the original post indicates...)
Considering that the overall message of BNW is so different than that of 1984, I don't agree. Maybe you could say that they're both bitter social comments, but they're not the same comment. That goes beyond superficial aspects of the stories (like "Big Brother" or "lots of strange people.")
Will you concede I'm right?
I'll concede that you're grasping at straws.;)
It's amazing how desperately some people will fight against saying, "oh I misunderstood what he saying, thanks for pointing that out."
If you start with 1984 and continue listing books about dystopian future societies, you reach Brave New World within the first 10.
What? Brave New World was written before 1984. Also, if you've read Huxley's "The Doors of Perception," you might think that Huxley was being serious with BNW.
"Ape and Essence" (published around the same time as 1984) is Huxley's darkest comments on society.
Therefore, my pointing it out is appropriate. Especially considering that if you italicize it (as though the CEO had actually been intending to quote it as a title) the sentence still makes sense.
No it doesn't make sense if you read "brave new world" as the title of a book in that case. Why don't you just admit that you misinterpreted the statement? It's not that big of a deal... and I could care less about your moderation.
Also, the company is dead serious. The business strategy outlined on their web page isn't anything like the antagonists' in 1984.
Did you read Huxley's "Brave New World?" The title comes from a statement that John the Savage makes when he enters civilization. He says "O brave new world that has such people in it." John the Savage was quoting Miranda in William Shakespeare's The Tempest.
See the context of that quote. When Miranda said it, she meant it in a good way (as did John the Savage at first.)
(For a more appropriate quote from Aldous Huxley, see my signature.)
I agree, I can hardly stand to even have somebody else in the room while I'm programming. I do think that peer review is helpful (I frequently dump out source blocks that I think are interesting and discuss them with my coworkers,) but not *real-time* peer review.;)
I'm talking about a quantitative analysis. That's the first step to a deeper understanding of the nature of the brain's higher level functions.
In other words... it's common knowledge that you can throw your brother up in the air and he'll fall back down, but explaining *exactly* where he'll go takes quite a bit more than common knowledge (we call it "physics.")
That's not exactly it. The idea is to collect lots of tiny single-purpose tasks (from your users most likely,) shuffle them all together, rip through them ("fancy frameworks" are looked down upon,) practice QA by having your friend Bubba watch what you're doing over your shoulder, and don't be afraid to rework the code (also -- don't program anything that's not on any of the single-purpose task cards.) Once you've run through one iteration of this, go back to step one and start over.
Could you please solve the Traveling Salesman problem with an algorithm that works in linear time (linear in relation to the number of cities?)
He's just been sitting there waiting for somebody to solve this problem and I'm sure that with your COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, C, Java and Python experience, this kind of thing will be no problem. You even said you'd "been round the block quite a lot" so all you've got to do is let the guy follow you (just make sure that you pick the right blocks.)
Slashdot Mirror
No ... but the point of my post wasn't to enumerate every great artist. I only wanted to describe some fuzzy principles and let other people extrapolate from there.
Actually it's funny that you bring up Beethoven (I think that the importance of the methods implied by Picasso or Monet is pretty self-evident.) Just the other day I was using Beethoven's Fur Elise to explain state-machines to a friend who wanted to write a script interpreter.
In addition, the two play off of each other pretty often.
For instance, the artistic work of somebody like M.C. Escher is used as a model for the analysis of a complex graded lattice. Somebody says, "my God that's beautiful," and then they write a computer program to do it. There are plenty of other examples too. In fact, much of the early work in projective geometry was done by "artists."
I personally think that it's wrong to place Art and Science on the same scale. In fact, I think that things only really start making sense when you throw in more specific labels. That way you keep the wheat ("artists" who design tesselated computer models of interesting characters for video games) and throw out the chaff (the elephants you mentioned.)
I think that you've gone a bit too far with your generalization of "nerds" here. Firstly, "Wall Street" didn't grant any money, it just reflected the public opinion of specific companies. In that respect, the failing companies weren't necessarily owned (or operated) by "nerds." Some of these "dot-bombs" (as the idiot editor of my local paper keeps calling them) were incredibly ridiculous ideas. In fact, some weren't serious ideas at all. They were VC-cash sinks.
In short, a snake oil salesman is not necessarily a "nerd" just because the oil is wrapped in PCBs.
History is written by anyone left living. That's not necessarily the same thing as being "written by the winners."
I think that we're arguing two completely different points here. I'm not claiming that OpenGL is a poorly designed rasterizer. That having been said ... I'll respond to the necessary points in your post.
... Fortran is no big deal. :)
:)
... I'm sure that you're not advocating that Microsoft develop DrawWireframe(HDC hDestDC, TRIANGLE* pAlignedTris, HOMOGENOUSTRANSMATRIX matCamera); alongside SelectObject(HDC hDestDC, HGDIOBJ hObj);. There's nothing inherently wrong with having two graphics subsystems so long as both serve different tasks.
... like not using the rendering capabilities of modern video cards) then I'm sure you'd complain about that (at least I would.)
... but not impossible. They didn't get it right until version 8. Still, if you're going to write your own implementation of each version leading up to that, at least you can break them off into seperate projects and let the calling program pick the appropriate project through its invocation of QueryInterface.
... it's OpenGL. The last I heard of the OpenGL standards body, there was some serious fighting going on over the direction of the programming interface. I've also heard that SGI has lost a lot of interest in it. They're just rumors in any case. The point of my original message was not to debate the relative merits of D3D over OpenGL. I was only stating that D3D is winning by its accessibility (being installed on every Windows system and being usable by everyone from actual graphics programmers to VB junkies.) Yes, part of this is just that Microsoft is behind it. Yes, OpenGL is a fine standard and I have enjoyed writing OpenGL programs in the past. If current trends continue though, OpenGL might not live much longer.
Sure they are: Fortran does not have a concept of "objects" or "pointers". The only way you can make COM work under Fortran is via non-standard language extensions or obscure glue libraries.
You don't need objects or pointers but you do need compiler support. I've used OLE automation with Lisp
The point is that if COM really mattered in this application, Microsoft didn't have to invent a whole new API, they could have simply done the obvious COM binding to OpenGL.
It doesn't matter. In fact, what I brought up was dispinterfaces, not COM specifically. In any case, I said originally that it was a toy. I wasn't claiming that it's impossible to wrap OpenGL in the same way. I was claiming that Windows doesn't ship with scriptable OpenGL wrapper. That's all. Don't put words in my mouth (or fingers, as it were.)
Well, of course, it isn't anymore [wrt: gaming being the primary purpose of DX]. After Microsoft tried to move everybody to DirectX, people didn't have much of a choice. And DirectX has accreted other functionality, like some audio I/O and multimedia stuff.
They were using it for things aside from games before it became a "big hit." On a side note, pick a side ok? You said in your last post to me that DirectX is an uncessary "real-time" access layer for games and that was the premise that I questioned. Now you are ok with dismissing that premise but you go on with other arguments that are based on that premise (or dismiss your dismissal.)
Just look at the range of graphics APIs Windows supports.
The range? You mean the GDI and D3D? There's a huge difference between the GDI and D3D. The GDI is an abstract raster-device interface. The same routines that you use to manipulate device contexts can be used for printers, plotters, monitors, or whatever display device you make on your own. One part of the appeal of OpenGL/D3D is that they get around that abstraction. This is only useful for applications that require high-performance in this aspect. The other part of the appeal is that the objects can be written specifically with 3D rasterization in mind.
Because of your talk about brilliant "software engineering" practices before
If you want a programming interface that can make use of OpenGL, GDI, DirectX, QuickDraw, QT, GTK+, or any other other drawing interface, you can always write it yourself. If Microsoft had designed their programming interface (the interface, not an access-control supersystem) to put strict limitations on what you could do (uh
Even if you look at DirectX itself, it is evolving so rapidly that it is very difficult to provide an independent implementation on other platforms.
Maybe difficult
In any case, I doubt that MS really wanted anybody to implement DirectX on other platforms. That's part of the idea of tying everything to the COM.
Contrast that with OpenGL, which goes through an orderly standardization process and has multiple, independent implementations.
Like the orderly standardization process for Lisp, or C++, or C? How well do those implementations generally work together?
Not that those things are the issue
Yes that's a problem isn't it? :)
OpenGL used to be self-sufficient drivers on Windows, etc etc
... I don't think that anything in my previous post went against this.
:)
Yes I know all about its history on the Windows platform
The OpenGL API is trivial, and easily bound to any language; that was part of its design goals. Microsoft's COM/DirectX interfaces are much less portable and much more difficult to bind to many languages (try accessing them from Fortran).
They're not hard to access from Fortran. COM is just a binary standard. It's no more difficult to implement than a PE loader. Most Windows-aware Fortran compilers will take care of the grunt work for you. I've written code to access or implement "complicated" OLE interfaces in ANSI C++. I don't get the argument that it's difficult to "bind to a language." It's a lock-in to the Windows platform though, I wasn't suggesting that it wasn't.
Even wrapping OpenGL in a COM interface is something anybody (including Microsoft) could do in a couple of hours.
The point is that it's not implemented and that you can assume that, given the correct installation of DX, those interfaces will be there. My point about hastening the pace of script-interpreter development was applicable to those who don't want to know how dispinterfaces work. These people are not going to want to make an efficient scriptable access layer to OpenGL.
Furthermore, you can, in fact, write efficient 3D graphics applications using OpenGL even from a scripting language, because all the compute-intensive stuff is handled by the OpenGL implementation; the scripting language only needs to manipulate the high level structures.
I think that you must think that I'm "against" OpenGL.
You are missing the point here as well. I was asking (rhetorically) "why does an operating system need a separate set of game APIs to get real-time networking and audio I/O?" The facilities DirectX provides are useful for many applications, and they shouldn't be designed around gaming (of course, you can use DirectX with other applications, but that's not their primary purpose).
They aren't designed specifically for games nor are they designed "around" (?) gaming. "Gaming" is not the primary purpose of DirectX. I'm sure that you'll agree that 3D Studio Max, SoundForge, Internet Explorer, and Media Player aren't games.
This is classic Microsoft: fragment the market, fragment the APIs, and achieve quick time-to-market with specialized solutions. It is also clasically bad software engineering.
How much Windows software have you written, exactly? Can you provide some specific examples of "fragmented" APIs?
Thank you for your post.
Just some minor points ...
Under Windows, OpenGL is just a transformation layer for DirectX calls. For the render-loop calls, there's an associated overhead (certain procedure calls even equate to two times the memory block copying as would be seen with D3D.)
Another nice thing about the DirectX interfaces (issues of overhead aside) is that you can access dispatch interfaces on each DX object. That means that cute little graphics demos can be done in VBScript (or any WSH-compatible scripting language.) Yes this is mostly a toy (albeit a really cool toy) but it does have the potential to alleviate some of the burden of writing a script interpreter (something that most large scale games really need.)
As for your last question:
why does an operating system need a separate set of game APIs to get real-time networking and audio I/O?
Because it's a preemptive multitasking system. The same thing would be necessary under Linux to shut down any running subsystems that hog valuable time-slices. DX doesn't provide "real-time" access either (whatever you meant by that,) but it does let you shut down most of the monolithic systems in Windows that get in your way and talk to the computer at one level of abstraction above the hardware.
Hope this helped,
WINE allows people to keep writing software for Win32, and ignore the Linux. Is that what you want?
WINE allows people who need Windows software to use Linux. With WINE, Windows becomes a subset of "Linux" (or rather -- the intersection of all components of all Linux distributions.) When traditional Windows users move to a Linux-based OS, they'll be much more likely to run Linux-based software than they would have been under Windows (obviously.) You may have heard this approach called "bait and switch" or "embrace and extend." In any case, it's an effective approach (as has been demonstrated by many successful companies) so long as the "embrace" (or "bait") portion is kept working long enough.
Find me an amateur physicist, or mathematician, or chemist who's made a major discovery in the past 50 years. That doesn't prove that having a PhD is necessary or even that major contributions can only be made by people with PhDs. For a claimed advocate of Science, this is a pretty silly fallacy to commit. ;)
I say that it's a good joke because a) you can pretend that he inadvertantly put a title in the sentence, and it's grammatical. The whole point of an inadvertant ambiguity is that you "could" take it both ways. (Even if that actual meaning is clear)
Given the sentence in question and the extrapolation that you did, that's a hell of a stretch. The punchline requires that you ignore some basic conventions of language. That's why I don't think that it's funny.
b) BNW has to do with the story at hand, because it's a dystopian future in which we're controlled by the government (albeit in this case a government dispensing soma instead of a government chaining you with eyes everywhere).
Did you actually read BNW (I asked this before and you never answered?) People took soma because of social pressure (aside from the riot at the end.) BNW was about the tyranny of the majority. 1984 was about the horror of a pure totalitarian state. BNW warned about the problems that arise when people are given too much freedom (that's why this guy saying "brave new world" isn't incredibly funny.) You seem to like saying "dystopian" but the word (much like the phrase "brave new world") is largely ambiguous at best.
As far as future dystopias go, BNW ranks somewhere in the top ten
Where is this list to which you continuously make reference?
It's funny because italicizing it into a title changes the meaning of the sentance without changing its form! (I.E. merely points out an ambiguity, whose alternate meaning is tellingly humorous.)
And then they can point out Miranda's statement and say that it's an indication that eBooks will usher in a new golden age. Double meanings don't require that you modify the sentence to interpret them properly.
Hamlet's story of betrayal (or whatever word you want to summarize it up in)
There were several themes in Hamlet. This is why people borrow quotes to apply to the situations at hand rather than making reference to the whole work ("Something's rotten in the state of Slashdot" applies here.) You wouldn't compress 45MB of data into 2 bytes (unless there was a VERY simple pattern to it) and you can't very well compress Huxley's novels or Shakespeare's plays into a word either. That's why it's not funny (not to mention that the sentence still isn't correct if you interpret "brave new world" as a book.)
Do you think that it is not humorous?
No I don't think that it's very funny. You should have made a joke about Agatha's "And then there were none" (originally "Ten Little Indians" -- a great book.)
Sorry, I meant in order of popularity. 1984 is the book, of course.
... they analysed these subjects to a much finer degree than did Blair.)
Haven't you heard of Dostoevsky? When Eric Blair wrote 1984, he was reminding the world of things that guys like Dostoevsky, Machiavelli, and Chekhov had been saying for a long time. In order of popularity, those guys still beat out Blair (as they should
"This first-of-its-kind offering is just the beginning of a Brave New World of literature and technology." See?
:)
;)
LOL! That's ridiculous. Interpreting "Brave New World" as the title of a book in that context strips the sentence of meaning. How about, "This is the Hamletest of days," for absurdity?
Which is why I mention that BNW is practically 1984 -- in order of dystopian rankitude in the mass psyche. (Neverminding the fact that BMW has comparably little big brotherliness, as my first link in the original post indicates...)
Considering that the overall message of BNW is so different than that of 1984, I don't agree. Maybe you could say that they're both bitter social comments, but they're not the same comment. That goes beyond superficial aspects of the stories (like "Big Brother" or "lots of strange people.")
Will you concede I'm right?
I'll concede that you're grasping at straws.
It's amazing how desperately some people will fight against saying, "oh I misunderstood what he saying, thanks for pointing that out."
The story you've quoted is a rumor but you quote it like it's a fact.
If you start with 1984 and continue listing books about dystopian future societies, you reach Brave New World within the first 10.
... and I could care less about your moderation.
What? Brave New World was written before 1984. Also, if you've read Huxley's "The Doors of Perception," you might think that Huxley was being serious with BNW.
"Ape and Essence" (published around the same time as 1984) is Huxley's darkest comments on society.
Therefore, my pointing it out is appropriate. Especially considering that if you italicize it (as though the CEO had actually been intending to quote it as a title) the sentence still makes sense.
No it doesn't make sense if you read "brave new world" as the title of a book in that case. Why don't you just admit that you misinterpreted the statement? It's not that big of a deal
Also, the company is dead serious. The business strategy outlined on their web page isn't anything like the antagonists' in 1984.
Did you read Huxley's "Brave New World?" The title comes from a statement that John the Savage makes when he enters civilization. He says "O brave new world that has such people in it." John the Savage was quoting Miranda in William Shakespeare's The Tempest.
See the context of that quote. When Miranda said it, she meant it in a good way (as did John the Savage at first.)
(For a more appropriate quote from Aldous Huxley, see my signature.)
What have you got against Lisp?
Whose hands can you trust?
Allstate's!
How much would you be willing to wager?
What if you`re not a regular slashdot reader? Whose father does be become then?
He's Father Christmas in that case.
I agree, I can hardly stand to even have somebody else in the room while I'm programming. I do think that peer review is helpful (I frequently dump out source blocks that I think are interesting and discuss them with my coworkers,) but not *real-time* peer review. ;)
I'm talking about a quantitative analysis. That's the first step to a deeper understanding of the nature of the brain's higher level functions.
... it's common knowledge that you can throw your brother up in the air and he'll fall back down, but explaining *exactly* where he'll go takes quite a bit more than common knowledge (we call it "physics.")
In other words
That's not exactly it. The idea is to collect lots of tiny single-purpose tasks (from your users most likely,) shuffle them all together, rip through them ("fancy frameworks" are looked down upon,) practice QA by having your friend Bubba watch what you're doing over your shoulder, and don't be afraid to rework the code (also -- don't program anything that's not on any of the single-purpose task cards.) Once you've run through one iteration of this, go back to step one and start over.
Could you please solve the Traveling Salesman problem with an algorithm that works in linear time (linear in relation to the number of cities?)
He's just been sitting there waiting for somebody to solve this problem and I'm sure that with your COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, C, Java and Python experience, this kind of thing will be no problem. You even said you'd "been round the block quite a lot" so all you've got to do is let the guy follow you (just make sure that you pick the right blocks.)
He means "eXtreme Programming" (See this link.) It's the latest process trend (that is ... it's trendy --- like, sooo retro.)
Has anyone had any good experiences with ISO 9001?