The problem is most Americans have no training in what to do so they become paralyzed. Consider many other countries have some minimal requirement of military service for all citizens.
Now I am absolutely not saying the U.S. should implement compulsory military service but I do feel every person should get some form of self defense training as part of the public education system. Make it part of P.E. or whatever but everyone should have several weeks of self-defense and light military/police team/squad tactics training.
Some of these types of EM sources really bother me. At certain frequencies I can actually feel the EM field as a slight tingling in my skin. My Wacom tablet does it but my hand has to be pretty close to it to feel anything (which is really annoying because I otherwise love that tablet).
I wonder what this would feel like? I imagine it would have a pretty high level of output, I wonder what frequency it runs at and if it will bother some people. It could make being anywhere near one of these charging table cloths pretty uncomfortable.
I did this too for the same reason. I would use all sorts of e-mail address as I need them so I just opened up the mail server to accept To: *.anything in my domain. However after suffering for years with the problem you are seeing now I learned that spammers love domains like this. After sending a few messages to your server to determine if it accepts any user then they are more likely to use your domain as the From: because they can use any user name and it will be valid.
After examining my mail history I figured out that it's pointless you use a different e-mail address for everything. I rarely used it for what I expected. I original plan was that if one address started getting spammed to death I could simply block that address. That never really happened though. The addresses that get spammed to death are the same ones I use a lot. Spamassassin has done a near perfect job of blocking spam and letting through the ham for many years anyway.
So I closed up my mail server. I just have a handful of addresses now. Basically I have my main e-mail address, an addresses I use for sites that might spam me, and then a couple administrative addresses. Obviously since I closed up the mail server I stopped getting bounces and any incorrectly configured server that bounces mail will at least get an error stating there is no such user.
Heh, that "disease" is actually a disorder and it's called Asperger's Syndrome (well, that's the current buzzword for it anyway). It's not really the fault of the person. In some cases, sure but a lot of geeks can't help the way they are. That essay is akin to calling mentally challenged people retards that should be wiped off the planet because of their inability to cope with life.
If you want all that then it's already available and the branch is called Ubuntu. Even better is that it is stabilized and releases are made every 6 months.
If I recall correctly CPMA was an attempt to make something that felt like Quake1. Quake1 feels muddy and rigid to me also. It's like the screen redraws lag behind my mouse movements and the run/strafe movement feels like I'm on train tracks rather than being smooth.
Movement physics are a huge part of the engine and how it was coded. Since obviously they have full access to the engine source they could change that. However, there are many subtle issues with "feel" that are hard to quantify and hard to completely change unless you really pay attention and are extremely meticulous.
OK maybe I didn't play Warsow for long enough. To me Warsow feels like they tried to put the Quake1 movement in Quake2 (maybe they were aiming for Q3 style movement but failed). It still has a strong Q2 feel except a bit more "muddy" than normal (movement still feels rigid; muddy and rigid, I can't explain it). I don't like it but maybe I could get used to it. To be honest I think something like Warsow done in the Quake3 engine would be killer because I like the concept of Warsow.
As for Urban Terror, it's a Q3 engined game right? In that case it should have a halfway decent feel just from that fact alone. Quake3 is not the end-all be-all for game feel but from the very beginning Carmack's engines had a superior feel that steadily got better up to the Q3 engine. The Doom3 engine feels bad to me though, it feels muddy like Warsow.
Thanks for pointing those out. It has been a long time since I played around with this stuff. It's neat to see people are still working with it. Years ago I did mod development for all these engines (I have done projects for Q1, Q2, Q3, and UT).
The main problem is most of these projects don't "get it" when it comes to game feel. I just tried both Nexuiz and Warsow and they both feel exactly like Quake1 and Quake2. Some of the graphics are updated and they have added a few effects but it looks exactly like the original. That is, dated. Also the movement feels exactly like the originals which is probably on purpose but compared to a more modern engine like Quake3 the movement feels very rigid and forced. I guess my point is while they do some updating, they don't really go far enough to create something that feels right and good. I mean they have the whole frigg'in engine source available yet they don't tweak the feel of the game. Back when I was doing mod development I would have killed for access to the engine source so I could make the game feel just right.
Nexuiz is kinda meh but I like the cartoon shading in Warsow.
No touch screen. PDA's were around way before the PSP came out, it should have been the first thing they thought of. Both the PSP and GP2x suffer from the same problem. A touchscreen makes the device so much more versatile. Web browsers, calculators, calenders, console type applications, etc are much easier to do with a touch screen. It vastly opens up the possibilities for home-brew stuff.
Both the PSP and GP2x are high-powered cool machines but without a touchscreen I'm going to stick with my Nintendo DS.
ASN.1 is not meant to encode existing data formats. It is its own encoding format.
It is probably the most widely used binary encoding though, everything from the Internet protocols you are using right now to stuff in your cell phone.
XML is a standard for heavyweight text type communication.
ASN.1 BER encoding is a standard for lightweight binary communication (similar to this Thrift crap except ASN.1 is an ISO standard and used everywhere).
Any RPC method worth its salt would use one of those.
Many people switching to Apple are honeymooning. I happen to be a long time Apple user and MacOS (in any form) has its share of problems just like Windows, Linux, or whatever. It hangs, it crashes, some applications have awful interfaces, it's slow, etc. The problems are often different but it's really no better than any other OS. It does look slick though.
I haven't found the hardware to be better than anything else either. In fact my experience with Apple hardware has been that it breaks more often than other brands. My iBook has the only LCD display I own with dead pixels. Everyone I know with Macs has had it in the shop at one point or another (everyone in my company has a Mac, among other computers). They're like Ferrari's, nice to look at but a bitch to keep running.
On the technical side I don't like Apple either. I find it extremely hard to get anything done. I have no idea what the problem is but almost every time I try to do something with MacOS it seems I can't figure out how to. I don't understand the people that say the OS is user friendly because it seems to me it's the least friendly. I mean is there a single person on this planet that likes Finder?
I also hate developing for MacOS. Ugh, there are so many tacked on API's and just plain bizarre ways of doing things that it causes nothing but pain (and I know what I'm doing, I have worked for Apple doing software development). I'll compare the API's between Microsoft and Apple. Where Microsoft also has a lot of tacked-on API's, they tend to be extensions of existing systems or otherwise have the feel on something designed by a group of people. Buried in OS X in a ton of stuff just flying around every which direction like a whole bunch of developer's doing their own thing.
Now I'm not saying Microsoft or Linux is better or anything like that. I do happen to use Linux as my primary OS and run everything else in VMware. I'm just saying that I think many of the people switching to Apple will be looking for something else eventually.
... is Qt. GPL is by far the biggest problem with KDE. It's impossible to develop non-GPL applications using the KDE stuff without paying a crapload of money to Trolltech. Currently Qt is way too expensive compared to other things like MSDN and it just keeps getting more expensive while MSDN gets cheaper (plus Apple's tools are free!).
I have tried KDE many times over the years just to check it out but I stick with GNOME based pretty much solely on the licensing. Qt is a fairly nice API (if buggy at times) but forcing me into GPL isn't good (I prefer LGPL and BSD-style). I wouldn't even mind paying for Qt if it was reasonably priced.
Granted you don't have to use Qt to develop for KDE but then you're not really integrating with the desktop (especially for anything with a UI).
It's a very similar situation to what auto manufacturers have to deal with. There are a lot of cool cars outside the US but we don't get them because it's hard to meet all the US regulations.
It's a double edged sword. On the one hand the US regulations protect the various interested parties (FCC, amateur radio operators, TV/radio/cable companies, safety regulations, etc.) but it also makes it hard for a company to just throw something together and release it like they do in other countries.
The rules are not always correct or easy to deal with but many of them protect the little guys. As a amateur radio operator myself I wouldn't want companies to be able to just throw together a phone and release it without passing the emissions regulations that at least attempt to keep my little section of airwaves clear of interference. I also want them to do proper testing and pass safety regulations that keep the thing from melting down in my hand and exploding (or whatever, you get idea).
You did say that no FP language has focussed on doing everything a functional programming language should do. That's the statement I was referring to. There are many things one might imagine functional languages should do, and some of them conflict. You're reading way too much into what I wrote. The "should" could mean anything. Nothing conflicts in my definition of what a language should do (note I never said what I thought a language should do because that is beside the point).
Don't change my words. I would have said lack of universality if that's what I meant. I also think it's unreasonable to think that one language can do everything but I never said otherwise.
It has always been viable but no one has put the pieces together well enough to make developers actually want to use them (outside of academia). C is an example of a language that put things together well enough to take off in its respective arena.
Your view is skewed due to the market you work in.
By the way I'm not coming from an academic background. I have not been in school for several decades and my career in programming is just fine thankyouverymuch.
Note that I said lack of focus around functional programming languages in general, not specific to Erlang. Individual languages focus on certain things but none of them try to be everything a functional language should. A native compiled version of Erlang would be pretty nice. HiPE doesn't count because that is a tacked on system that is far from nice. If Erlang would have been designed for both VM and native executation earlier then it would be better off (see O'Caml).
Please note, I'm a fan of Erlang too. I wouldn't consider it a high performance platform though. Mostly people don't notice all the overhead it has when handling multiple cores because the whole thing is relatively slow.
Also note that certain programming languages can make multithreaded programming a lot easier. Nothing against C++ (one of my favorite languages) but no matter what you do it's relatively hard to use in multithreaded applications compared to a functional language. We are already seeing more functional features put into existing languages.
The main problem I see is that there is lack of focus in the functional arena. Many current functional languages are designed to use a VM with bytecode (Erlang for example) and don't support native threads easily (often requiring multiple VM instances and slow[er] message passing). The languages that do support native compiling almost always have other problems like horrible syntax (O'Caml, Lisp) or just general lack of refinement. Arguably Haskell comes the closest but suffers from a complicated and large backend support requirement like Java.
Without native thread support it's hard to take advantage of multiple processor cores. Too bad we don't see more mature native compiled functional languages out there.
To even begin to answer this we need more information.
A home PC type machine? With current off-the-shelf technology? Server? Desktop? Graphics? Games? Number crunching? How much space can it take up? Do we have ulimited power feeds? Or...?
anthropomorphize Main Entry: anthropomorphize Function: verb Inflected Form(s): -phized; -phizing transitive verb : to attribute human form or personality to intransitive verb : to attribute human form or personality to things not human
I have never been a RedHat (I'm including Fedora here) fan. I have run almost every version since the beginning because I'm a consultant and RedHat/Fedora is one of the "standard" Linux distros that some companies use. RedHat based systems have always had two basic problems:
1. The install is non-standard. They move stuff into wierd locations and often you have to add special considerations to your build process to make it work on RedHat based systems.
2. The packaging system sucks donkey balls! I can't stress that enough. RPM is awful. They have tried to fix it with all sorts of tacked on systems but they all suck. They're always slow as hell and the dependancy system often doesn't work right. I mean the term "RPM hell" was coined for a reason.
But I am biased because I started with Slackware (basically before there was anything else) and went to Debian not long after. Although I have tried many, many distros over the last 15 years I always come back to Debian based systems. Ubuntu is what I run now because it has the goodness of Debian with a better/faster development model.
I saw the response to Raymond's comments. It's always the "do the right thing" argument which is valid but I believe there needs to be a balance between reality and complete fanaticism. Windows is a commercial product from an "evil" corporation yet they are still top dog dispite morally attractive alternatives. There are many good valid reasons behind that.
The concept is bizarre to me. I haven't shut my desktop off on a daily basis in probably 15 years (or about as long as I've been running Linux as my desktop).
This has nothing to do with the OS though. I don't power cycle any of my important electronics more than needed because I do believe it stresses them. My (PC) computers have always run 24/7 unless there is an electrical storm passing over or I don't have power.
The last time I power cycled on a daily basis was back when I had "console" type computers (C64, Amiga, etc.). Even then they often ran 24/7 serving BBS duty.
Uh, and where better to get information on how to prevent the disease, where it's spreading, etc. than the Internet?
The Internet is information. People would be looking for information on what is happening, the latest techniques to prevent infection, and all sorts of stuff.
You seem to have some sort of apocalyptic vision from a movie where everyone would be huddled in bomb shelters or something. This would likely last for years and people would try to carry on with their lives as best they could. The world wouldn't just shut down because millions of people died.
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The problem is most Americans have no training in what to do so they become paralyzed. Consider many other countries have some minimal requirement of military service for all citizens.
Now I am absolutely not saying the U.S. should implement compulsory military service but I do feel every person should get some form of self defense training as part of the public education system. Make it part of P.E. or whatever but everyone should have several weeks of self-defense and light military/police team/squad tactics training.
They are thinking "out of sight, out of mind" which as any advertiser will tell you does have a valid basis.
I'm pretty sure that's the underlying emotion with issues like this even though it make not always make sense.
Some of these types of EM sources really bother me. At certain frequencies I can actually feel the EM field as a slight tingling in my skin. My Wacom tablet does it but my hand has to be pretty close to it to feel anything (which is really annoying because I otherwise love that tablet).
I wonder what this would feel like? I imagine it would have a pretty high level of output, I wonder what frequency it runs at and if it will bother some people. It could make being anywhere near one of these charging table cloths pretty uncomfortable.
I did this too for the same reason. I would use all sorts of e-mail address as I need them so I just opened up the mail server to accept To: *.anything in my domain. However after suffering for years with the problem you are seeing now I learned that spammers love domains like this. After sending a few messages to your server to determine if it accepts any user then they are more likely to use your domain as the From: because they can use any user name and it will be valid.
After examining my mail history I figured out that it's pointless you use a different e-mail address for everything. I rarely used it for what I expected. I original plan was that if one address started getting spammed to death I could simply block that address. That never really happened though. The addresses that get spammed to death are the same ones I use a lot. Spamassassin has done a near perfect job of blocking spam and letting through the ham for many years anyway.
So I closed up my mail server. I just have a handful of addresses now. Basically I have my main e-mail address, an addresses I use for sites that might spam me, and then a couple administrative addresses. Obviously since I closed up the mail server I stopped getting bounces and any incorrectly configured server that bounces mail will at least get an error stating there is no such user.
Heh, that "disease" is actually a disorder and it's called Asperger's Syndrome (well, that's the current buzzword for it anyway). It's not really the fault of the person. In some cases, sure but a lot of geeks can't help the way they are. That essay is akin to calling mentally challenged people retards that should be wiped off the planet because of their inability to cope with life.
Real nice...
If you want all that then it's already available and the branch is called Ubuntu. Even better is that it is stabilized and releases are made every 6 months.
If I recall correctly CPMA was an attempt to make something that felt like Quake1. Quake1 feels muddy and rigid to me also. It's like the screen redraws lag behind my mouse movements and the run/strafe movement feels like I'm on train tracks rather than being smooth.
Movement physics are a huge part of the engine and how it was coded. Since obviously they have full access to the engine source they could change that. However, there are many subtle issues with "feel" that are hard to quantify and hard to completely change unless you really pay attention and are extremely meticulous.
OK maybe I didn't play Warsow for long enough. To me Warsow feels like they tried to put the Quake1 movement in Quake2 (maybe they were aiming for Q3 style movement but failed). It still has a strong Q2 feel except a bit more "muddy" than normal (movement still feels rigid; muddy and rigid, I can't explain it). I don't like it but maybe I could get used to it. To be honest I think something like Warsow done in the Quake3 engine would be killer because I like the concept of Warsow.
As for Urban Terror, it's a Q3 engined game right? In that case it should have a halfway decent feel just from that fact alone. Quake3 is not the end-all be-all for game feel but from the very beginning Carmack's engines had a superior feel that steadily got better up to the Q3 engine. The Doom3 engine feels bad to me though, it feels muddy like Warsow.
Thanks for pointing those out. It has been a long time since I played around with this stuff. It's neat to see people are still working with it. Years ago I did mod development for all these engines (I have done projects for Q1, Q2, Q3, and UT).
The main problem is most of these projects don't "get it" when it comes to game feel. I just tried both Nexuiz and Warsow and they both feel exactly like Quake1 and Quake2. Some of the graphics are updated and they have added a few effects but it looks exactly like the original. That is, dated. Also the movement feels exactly like the originals which is probably on purpose but compared to a more modern engine like Quake3 the movement feels very rigid and forced. I guess my point is while they do some updating, they don't really go far enough to create something that feels right and good. I mean they have the whole frigg'in engine source available yet they don't tweak the feel of the game. Back when I was doing mod development I would have killed for access to the engine source so I could make the game feel just right.
Nexuiz is kinda meh but I like the cartoon shading in Warsow.
No touch screen. PDA's were around way before the PSP came out, it should have been the first thing they thought of. Both the PSP and GP2x suffer from the same problem. A touchscreen makes the device so much more versatile. Web browsers, calculators, calenders, console type applications, etc are much easier to do with a touch screen. It vastly opens up the possibilities for home-brew stuff.
Both the PSP and GP2x are high-powered cool machines but without a touchscreen I'm going to stick with my Nintendo DS.
ASN.1 is not meant to encode existing data formats. It is its own encoding format.
It is probably the most widely used binary encoding though, everything from the Internet protocols you are using right now to stuff in your cell phone.
No kidding.
XML is a standard for heavyweight text type communication.
ASN.1 BER encoding is a standard for lightweight binary communication (similar to this Thrift crap except ASN.1 is an ISO standard and used everywhere).
Any RPC method worth its salt would use one of those.
Good points. I'll add some to this.
Many people switching to Apple are honeymooning. I happen to be a long time Apple user and MacOS (in any form) has its share of problems just like Windows, Linux, or whatever. It hangs, it crashes, some applications have awful interfaces, it's slow, etc. The problems are often different but it's really no better than any other OS. It does look slick though.
I haven't found the hardware to be better than anything else either. In fact my experience with Apple hardware has been that it breaks more often than other brands. My iBook has the only LCD display I own with dead pixels. Everyone I know with Macs has had it in the shop at one point or another (everyone in my company has a Mac, among other computers). They're like Ferrari's, nice to look at but a bitch to keep running.
On the technical side I don't like Apple either. I find it extremely hard to get anything done. I have no idea what the problem is but almost every time I try to do something with MacOS it seems I can't figure out how to. I don't understand the people that say the OS is user friendly because it seems to me it's the least friendly. I mean is there a single person on this planet that likes Finder?
I also hate developing for MacOS. Ugh, there are so many tacked on API's and just plain bizarre ways of doing things that it causes nothing but pain (and I know what I'm doing, I have worked for Apple doing software development). I'll compare the API's between Microsoft and Apple. Where Microsoft also has a lot of tacked-on API's, they tend to be extensions of existing systems or otherwise have the feel on something designed by a group of people. Buried in OS X in a ton of stuff just flying around every which direction like a whole bunch of developer's doing their own thing.
Now I'm not saying Microsoft or Linux is better or anything like that. I do happen to use Linux as my primary OS and run everything else in VMware. I'm just saying that I think many of the people switching to Apple will be looking for something else eventually.
... is Qt. GPL is by far the biggest problem with KDE. It's impossible to develop non-GPL applications using the KDE stuff without paying a crapload of money to Trolltech. Currently Qt is way too expensive compared to other things like MSDN and it just keeps getting more expensive while MSDN gets cheaper (plus Apple's tools are free!).
I have tried KDE many times over the years just to check it out but I stick with GNOME based pretty much solely on the licensing. Qt is a fairly nice API (if buggy at times) but forcing me into GPL isn't good (I prefer LGPL and BSD-style). I wouldn't even mind paying for Qt if it was reasonably priced.
Granted you don't have to use Qt to develop for KDE but then you're not really integrating with the desktop (especially for anything with a UI).
It's a very similar situation to what auto manufacturers have to deal with. There are a lot of cool cars outside the US but we don't get them because it's hard to meet all the US regulations.
It's a double edged sword. On the one hand the US regulations protect the various interested parties (FCC, amateur radio operators, TV/radio/cable companies, safety regulations, etc.) but it also makes it hard for a company to just throw something together and release it like they do in other countries.
The rules are not always correct or easy to deal with but many of them protect the little guys. As a amateur radio operator myself I wouldn't want companies to be able to just throw together a phone and release it without passing the emissions regulations that at least attempt to keep my little section of airwaves clear of interference. I also want them to do proper testing and pass safety regulations that keep the thing from melting down in my hand and exploding (or whatever, you get idea).
Don't change my words. I would have said lack of universality if that's what I meant. I also think it's unreasonable to think that one language can do everything but I never said otherwise.
It has always been viable but no one has put the pieces together well enough to make developers actually want to use them (outside of academia). C is an example of a language that put things together well enough to take off in its respective arena.
Your view is skewed due to the market you work in.
By the way I'm not coming from an academic background. I have not been in school for several decades and my career in programming is just fine thankyouverymuch.
Note that I said lack of focus around functional programming languages in general, not specific to Erlang. Individual languages focus on certain things but none of them try to be everything a functional language should. A native compiled version of Erlang would be pretty nice. HiPE doesn't count because that is a tacked on system that is far from nice. If Erlang would have been designed for both VM and native executation earlier then it would be better off (see O'Caml).
Please note, I'm a fan of Erlang too. I wouldn't consider it a high performance platform though. Mostly people don't notice all the overhead it has when handling multiple cores because the whole thing is relatively slow.
Also note that certain programming languages can make multithreaded programming a lot easier. Nothing against C++ (one of my favorite languages) but no matter what you do it's relatively hard to use in multithreaded applications compared to a functional language. We are already seeing more functional features put into existing languages.
The main problem I see is that there is lack of focus in the functional arena. Many current functional languages are designed to use a VM with bytecode (Erlang for example) and don't support native threads easily (often requiring multiple VM instances and slow[er] message passing). The languages that do support native compiling almost always have other problems like horrible syntax (O'Caml, Lisp) or just general lack of refinement. Arguably Haskell comes the closest but suffers from a complicated and large backend support requirement like Java.
Without native thread support it's hard to take advantage of multiple processor cores. Too bad we don't see more mature native compiled functional languages out there.
To even begin to answer this we need more information.
A home PC type machine? With current off-the-shelf technology? Server? Desktop? Graphics? Games? Number crunching? How much space can it take up? Do we have ulimited power feeds? Or...?
anthropomorphize
Main Entry: anthropomorphize
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): -phized; -phizing
transitive verb : to attribute human form or personality to
intransitive verb : to attribute human form or personality to things not human
I have never been a RedHat (I'm including Fedora here) fan. I have run almost every version since the beginning because I'm a consultant and RedHat/Fedora is one of the "standard" Linux distros that some companies use. RedHat based systems have always had two basic problems:
1. The install is non-standard. They move stuff into wierd locations and often you have to add special considerations to your build process to make it work on RedHat based systems.
2. The packaging system sucks donkey balls! I can't stress that enough. RPM is awful. They have tried to fix it with all sorts of tacked on systems but they all suck. They're always slow as hell and the dependancy system often doesn't work right. I mean the term "RPM hell" was coined for a reason.
But I am biased because I started with Slackware (basically before there was anything else) and went to Debian not long after. Although I have tried many, many distros over the last 15 years I always come back to Debian based systems. Ubuntu is what I run now because it has the goodness of Debian with a better/faster development model.
I saw the response to Raymond's comments. It's always the "do the right thing" argument which is valid but I believe there needs to be a balance between reality and complete fanaticism. Windows is a commercial product from an "evil" corporation yet they are still top dog dispite morally attractive alternatives. There are many good valid reasons behind that.
Do people actually shut their desktops off?
The concept is bizarre to me. I haven't shut my desktop off on a daily basis in probably 15 years (or about as long as I've been running Linux as my desktop).
This has nothing to do with the OS though. I don't power cycle any of my important electronics more than needed because I do believe it stresses them. My (PC) computers have always run 24/7 unless there is an electrical storm passing over or I don't have power.
The last time I power cycled on a daily basis was back when I had "console" type computers (C64, Amiga, etc.). Even then they often ran 24/7 serving BBS duty.
Uh, and where better to get information on how to prevent the disease, where it's spreading, etc. than the Internet?
The Internet is information. People would be looking for information on what is happening, the latest techniques to prevent infection, and all sorts of stuff.
You seem to have some sort of apocalyptic vision from a movie where everyone would be huddled in bomb shelters or something. This would likely last for years and people would try to carry on with their lives as best they could. The world wouldn't just shut down because millions of people died.