"What I want to know is how the system reacts when a hamster dies. Because I didn't see any food or water in the device. Does the system play minor notes for awhile in reaction to the sadness of the other hampters?"
Do you see sushi on stage when the stones are playing? There are performers goddamit and you won't see them eat or shit on stage. Well, eat anyway. Uh, I mean the hamsters. Excpe for that incid... never mind.
It's got a catchy beat and you can dance to it. I like it. But it needs a better title. I suggest "Ein klein rodentmusik".
This is resampling the digital text of the alphabet, am I infringing? I often ponder, Opps, there is someone at the door, hold on
Mod parent something other than flamebait. He is making a point in perhaps in a slightly silly way , but still a good point. Where does it end , if i quote people`s works in a work of my own, am I liable.
It's Oscar (tm) night eve and the MPAA wonks are coked up and have mod points.
"Even if you are the only programmer who will ever look at the code. 10 years from now"
10 years? Try six months.
As as teen I was the guinea pig for Dave Conroy's C compiler in 1976 (now gcc) and back then we looked at every PDP 11/34 instruction it generated. Next, with a Z80 you still had to do it but not as much. Once we got to 68000 and x86 (spit) machines, forget it. It'll be fine.
With todays modern processors (ever see a pocket sized Pentium instruction set reference? me either) even with the the knowledge that 90% of the time you execute 10% of the code it just doen't matter.
In the very few cases where it does matter - and these are exteme cases, you can still always hand optimaize some tight inner loop in assembly.
I'm told Alta Vists had a 6 instruction hand coded assembler bit and the rest was "just C".
Keep in mind too extereme performance tuning this way throw portability out the door. While it'd be great to see somebody, say, do Postfix filter rules in assembly utilizing fully the whacko instructions on a Pentium, you lose posrtability.
But, and this is a but of epic proportion, nothing beats being able to understand instantly what a statement is doing; I write excessiviely verbose long drawn out lots of whitespace C, use no tricks and assume my kids have to read it knowing only BASIC.
I doubt this has ever saved my ass, but the less I have to think, the better for everybody. Trust me on this.
And besides, in most cases CPU doesn't matter. Faster disk, more RAM, faster net connection more RAM and more RAM go a long way before you get around to needing faster code execution.
So while I used to check every single friggin bit and instruction in the beginning I don't even bother thinking about optimization levels or fine tuning code. But it's not like I write code that takes 40 hours to run or do video games - obviously realtime progamming needs a bit more atention to detail. I think. It used to when I was doing it but that's been a while.
"The importance of clearly written code (and the process of writing code clearly) is difficult to overstate"
Welllllllll, impossible is a pretty absolute concept. I've written bios chips and lots of drivers and although I feel dirty saying so, some winblows stuff. What he's describing in distictly non-technical terms ("Driver layer", snicker) is very very hard to do. But not impossible. possible means you can't do it under any circumstances. Very very hard to do means lots of time and money.
He's got a point. But, it's also true that shitty third party drivers could be the death of this thing. It would make "MS Linux" look no more reliable than winblows. Ewww.
"Indeed, ppl just deride Alan Kay and others because it's using smalltalk and fail to see that imagination behind this.
I wouldn't believe it was good myself for the longest time until I walked through a 3D spreadsheet and started conjuring 3D objects into my rooms. It's "Second Life" but without fees and with much more potential. And it's working now.
I mean I am not totally dissing the Ximian stuff, but that's news for corporate nerds. This looks way further ahead and begins to realise the "VR" net we were all once promised.
All I can say is, "this is not drop shadows people", you have to check it out to believe it."
Exactly. Actually it's squeek not smalltalk, but that's a terribly minor distinction.
Some caveats: it's beta. you get debug messages. It's a 60 meg download and you need OpenGL.
"Or something. I've never tried other auction places"
Don't bother. I collect old watches and one day I saw a watch I wanted. At $50, no reserve. I emailed the guy to see if he'd take $250 (about a quarter of what it's worth, hey, it's worked in the past) and he said he'd just sold it for $200 and can't understand why it didn't sell in a month on Yahoo auctions with a buy it now price of $100.
ebay has no competition. That's bad in a way, but it's also good in that you only have to look in one place.
I don't sell on ebay, only buy and its saved me tons of money. Actually it's cost me tons of money, but I got way more for the money than I'd get paying retail.
In fact, I just noticed I don't really buy much on stores at all any more.
"You my laugh, but I have my wife's high school German History textbook from West Germany 1970s. It covers Germany from around the mid-18th century to about 1970. It's about 250 pages long...and has exactly two for the period 1933-1945"
Tis true. If you go to the Brandenburg gate and look at the commerative plaque there you'll see its history going back quite a while. Lots of details. Then there's this gap and later explaining how it was rebuilt. It doesn't actually mention the fact why it needed to be. (bombed into oblivion).
The restoration is superb BTW. And I'm not sure leaving out that part of history is a bad idea. Sinse of two generations past bear little relevance to Germany today.
"For those who believe Hitler couldn't have "happened" in a democratic state...it's worth noting that he was elected, and was widely popular among many Germans at the time."
Not acording to the (admittedly small number) of Germans I've spken to that were there at the time. He was just anther politician, and before the Polish incursion did a lot of good so they tell me.
My frinds father joned the SS because he would be given a motorcycles. His Jewish friend was not accepted, was surprised, and when found out why shortly after, moved to Argentina.
I think you've confused George Bush with Hitler. That's easy to do.
"Especially in the mass media, there is much more censorship in the USA anyway"
What he said. In Berlin I saw an Ricoh ad painted on the side of a building, 3 stories high. It was of a photorealistic naked woman, from the back, from neck to knees, who had half a fax machine between her buttocks. The caption read (in German) "Is your fax machine a pain in the ass?"
Somehow I don't see that flying in the US despite all its "land of the free", "free speech" rhetoric.
""Interesting, here in Northern VA (Alexandria), it redirects to google.com . It must think your IP is in CA."
It's not that simple. I'm in Canada and if I go to "google.com" I get google.ca. If I use a different URL (a search box on my (local) home page) I get google.com results - from the same IP.
Having said that I've heard (from a google employee) that google uses Akamai's technology to figure out where you are based on your IP. So what you say may be true but it's not universally true.
Keep in mind the swastika far predates world war II. It was used by native American culture and found it's way into the popular press in America in the early century. I have a 1910 typeface catalog and one of the sample pages is a mockup of a church social announcement and the border graphic is a row of swastikas. 30 years before hitler latched onto them.
I also have a 1998 Japanese dodad that came with instructions that uses swastikas for decoration; I think it's a buddist symbol (although am not sure).
Point is, it's nowhere universally true that swastikas = = nazis.
Lemme tell you a little story about neonazis in Germany.
Back in the days of the formation of ICANN, the then new organization introduced to the public in Berlin as the 5 star (should have been a tipoff right there) Hotel Adlon on the Unter den Linden (sp?) the Rodeo Drive of Berlin, near the Brandenburg Gate.
I attended. I'd never been to Germany before.
I grabbed a bus from the airport and the driver and the nice German airport information man who helped me on the bus (I don't speak much German) told me "there might be a delay, there is a, uh, demonstration".
When we were a few blocks from the hotel I started noticing a lot of green police vans. There were literally hundreds. The stret was barracaded off and cops in flack jackers were everywhere. Holy fuck what's all this?
I walked up the steps to the Hotel Adlon dooorway and asked the doorman what the hell was going on. "oh, it's a neonazi demonstration. The young people are sick of the Turks taking all their jobs". Meanwhile a group of skinheads paraded down the street with a huge flag with an iron cross on it. I don't mind saying I was scared.
"Is it safe?" I asked, Marathon Man style.
"Oh, jah, you have nothing to fear"
"Why are there 300 cop cars here then".
"Oh, that's to protect the neonazis. Poeple would kill the if they wern't there.".
That's really what they said.
(If you google you'll find pics of this)
Later that night I was in an underground club with hundreds of these sweaty skinheads and very loud German techno-pop (nice stuff). I accidentally bumped into a nearly 7 foot black leathered skinhead who was probably in that demonstration almost knocking himover. That's it I thought, my life is freakin' over. He apologized for being in the way and bought me a beer.
I couldn't have had a nicer three days there and absolutely fell in love with Berlin. I found Berliners to be the nicest, most helpful soft spoken people imaghinsable, thus trashing the hatred I was taught as a British schoolboy about Germans.
If I had to live anywhere besides Cananda it would be Germany. Their rules may sound weird sometiems but until you've been there to check it out you have no idea what a nice place it is or how well the country is actualy run.
Also, another curious thing I noticed was nearly everthing there is stamped "Made in Germany" and you have to go out of your way to find "the China shop" where you can buy stuff made in China, and it's of MUCH higher quality than the crap sold in North America.
Perhaps now 1000 Germans will say "you're wrong it's not like that" but this is how it appeared to me.
"Private radio stations can still get fined. And what value is there in censoring 'fuck' either?"
There is, I'm told, a difference between what is a nasty word in US/UK/Canada and say Germany and Holland.
I run a bunch or mailing lists for aqaurium stuff, various aspect of aquatic plants and certain specialty fishes. Every now and again a German or Dutch (who do the aquaria thing better than anybody) will say somthing like "no the problem is the shit in your tank" or "just stick that plant outside in a bucket of cow shit" and all the North Americans and Brits recoil in abject horror and complain while the Euros know they've posted something as innocuous as "manure".
Frankly I live for these moments.
Don't unsult the Church though, that's real profanity over there, not something that canbe said in polite conversation like "fuck" or "shit".
Slashdot Mirror
" I guess it is too much to ask for journalists to get a clue"
(big booming voice from the shadows) "You ask much my friend"
4.5 stable was the last release to be trusted. I don't know anybody that would use a later version - or any version of Linux that's as good as this.
"Do you really want to spend your time looking thtough all of them?"
Beats working.
"What I want to know is how the system reacts when a hamster dies. Because I didn't see any food or water in the device. Does the system play minor notes for awhile in reaction to the sadness of the other hampters?"
Do you see sushi on stage when the stones are playing? There are performers goddamit and you won't see them eat or shit on stage. Well, eat anyway. Uh, I mean the hamsters. Excpe for that incid... never mind.
It's got a catchy beat and you can dance to it. I like it. But it needs a better title. I suggest "Ein klein rodentmusik".
It's Oscar (tm) night eve and the MPAA wonks are coked up and have mod points.
I think it's alright, as long as they take the right path. But maybe they're afraid of this.
"My rule is never comment what the program does, comment why it does it."
Bah. Comments lie. Code never lies.
"Even if you are the only programmer who will ever look at the code. 10 years from now"
10 years? Try six months.
As as teen I was the guinea pig for Dave Conroy's C compiler in 1976 (now gcc) and back then we looked at every PDP 11/34 instruction it generated. Next, with a Z80 you still had to do it but not as much. Once we got to 68000 and x86 (spit) machines, forget it. It'll be fine.
With todays modern processors (ever see a pocket sized Pentium instruction set reference? me either) even with the the knowledge that 90% of the time you execute 10% of the code it just doen't matter.
In the very few cases where it does matter - and these are exteme cases, you can still always hand optimaize some tight inner loop in assembly.
I'm told Alta Vists had a 6 instruction hand coded assembler bit and the rest was "just C".
Keep in mind too extereme performance tuning this way throw portability out the door. While it'd be great to see somebody, say, do Postfix filter rules in assembly utilizing fully the whacko instructions on a Pentium, you lose posrtability.
But, and this is a but of epic proportion, nothing beats being able to understand instantly what a statement is doing; I write excessiviely verbose long drawn out lots of whitespace C, use no tricks and assume my kids have to read it knowing only BASIC.
I doubt this has ever saved my ass, but the less I have to think, the better for everybody. Trust me on this.
And besides, in most cases CPU doesn't matter. Faster disk, more RAM, faster net connection more RAM and more RAM go a long way before you get around to needing faster code execution.
So while I used to check every single friggin bit and instruction in the beginning I don't even bother thinking about optimization levels or fine tuning code. But it's not like I write code that takes 40 hours to run or do video games - obviously realtime progamming needs a bit more atention to detail. I think. It used to when I was doing it but that's been a while.
"The importance of clearly written code (and the process of writing code clearly) is difficult to overstate"
s/difficult/impossible
Welllllllll, impossible is a pretty absolute concept. I've written bios chips and lots of drivers and although I feel dirty saying so, some winblows stuff. What he's describing in distictly non-technical terms ("Driver layer", snicker) is very very hard to do. But not impossible. possible means you can't do it under any circumstances. Very very hard to do means lots of time and money.
He's got a point. But, it's also true that shitty third party drivers could be the death of this thing. It would make "MS Linux" look no more reliable than winblows. Ewww.
"I don't see how a "seamless 3D environment" makes that any easier. If anything, I want less clutter and less glitz on my desktop, not omre"
Back when you used Lynx to browse a a jpeg-less www could you see how having pictures would make things any easier?
But you have to admit they turned out to be pretty popular, no?
If you try using any of the 3D/vrml browsers and get used to them then go back to the 2D web it all seems so flat and lifeless.
Nice one. Ya done good.
"Indeed, ppl just deride Alan Kay and others because it's using smalltalk and fail to see that imagination behind this.
I wouldn't believe it was good myself for the longest time until I walked through a 3D spreadsheet and started conjuring 3D objects into my rooms. It's "Second Life" but without fees and with much more potential. And it's working now.
I mean I am not totally dissing the Ximian stuff, but that's news for corporate nerds. This looks way further ahead and begins to realise the "VR" net we were all once promised.
All I can say is, "this is not drop shadows people", you have to check it out to believe it."
Exactly. Actually it's squeek not smalltalk, but that's a terribly minor distinction.
Some caveats: it's beta. you get debug messages. It's a 60 meg download and you need OpenGL.
I'm convinced it's the future though.
"http://www.opencroquet.org/"
Amen brother. Anybody that dosn't understand why should see whose involved (and if you don't recognize the names, look them up).
IMO this is the most significant advancement since the web.
"Or something. I've never tried other auction places"
Don't bother. I collect old watches and one day I saw a watch I wanted. At $50, no reserve. I emailed the guy to see if he'd take $250 (about a quarter of what it's worth, hey, it's worked in the past) and he said he'd just sold it for $200 and can't understand why it didn't sell in a month on Yahoo auctions with a buy it now price of $100.
ebay has no competition. That's bad in a way, but it's also good in that you only have to look in one place.
I don't sell on ebay, only buy and its saved me tons of money. Actually it's cost me tons of money, but I got way more for the money than I'd get paying retail.
In fact, I just noticed I don't really buy much on stores at all any more.
"You my laugh, but I have my wife's high school German History textbook from West Germany 1970s. It covers Germany from around the mid-18th century to about 1970. It's about 250 pages long...and has exactly two for the period 1933-1945"
Tis true. If you go to the Brandenburg gate and look at the commerative plaque there you'll see its history going back quite a while. Lots of details. Then there's this gap and later explaining how it was rebuilt. It doesn't actually mention the fact why it needed to be. (bombed into oblivion).
The restoration is superb BTW. And I'm not sure leaving out that part of history is a bad idea. Sinse of two generations past bear little relevance to Germany today.
"For those who believe Hitler couldn't have "happened" in a democratic state...it's worth noting that he was elected, and was widely popular among many Germans at the time."
Not acording to the (admittedly small number) of Germans I've spken to that were there at the time. He was just anther politician, and before the Polish incursion did a lot of good so they tell me.
My frinds father joned the SS because he would be given a motorcycles. His Jewish friend was not accepted, was surprised, and when found out why shortly after, moved to Argentina.
I think you've confused George Bush with Hitler. That's easy to do.
"Thank goodness for "the company of single attractive women"! Where would we be without it?
Slashdot?
"Especially in the mass media, there is much more censorship in the USA anyway"
What he said. In Berlin I saw an Ricoh ad painted on the side of a building, 3 stories high. It was of a photorealistic naked woman, from the back, from neck to knees, who had half a fax machine between her buttocks. The caption read (in German) "Is your fax machine a pain in the ass?"
Somehow I don't see that flying in the US despite all its "land of the free", "free speech" rhetoric.
""Interesting, here in Northern VA (Alexandria), it redirects to google.com . It must think your IP is in CA."
It's not that simple. I'm in Canada and if I go to "google.com" I get google.ca. If I use a different URL (a search box on my (local) home page) I get google.com results - from the same IP.
Having said that I've heard (from a google employee) that google uses Akamai's technology to figure out where you are based on your IP. So what you say may be true but it's not universally true.
Keep in mind the swastika far predates world war II. It was used by native American culture and found it's way into the popular press in America in the early century. I have a 1910 typeface catalog and one of the sample pages is a mockup of a church social announcement and the border graphic is a row of swastikas. 30 years before hitler latched onto them.
I also have a 1998 Japanese dodad that came with instructions that uses swastikas for decoration; I think it's a buddist symbol (although am not sure).
Point is, it's nowhere universally true that swastikas = = nazis.
Lemme tell you a little story about neonazis in Germany.
Back in the days of the formation of ICANN, the then new organization introduced to the public in Berlin as the 5 star (should have been a tipoff right there) Hotel Adlon on the Unter den Linden (sp?) the Rodeo Drive of Berlin, near the Brandenburg Gate.
I attended. I'd never been to Germany before.
I grabbed a bus from the airport and the driver and the nice German airport information man who helped me on the bus (I don't speak much German) told me "there might be a delay, there is a, uh, demonstration".
When we were a few blocks from the hotel I started noticing a lot of green police vans. There were literally hundreds. The stret was barracaded off and cops in flack jackers were everywhere. Holy fuck what's all this?
I walked up the steps to the Hotel Adlon dooorway and asked the doorman what the hell was going on. "oh, it's a neonazi demonstration. The young people are sick of the Turks taking all their jobs". Meanwhile a group of skinheads paraded down the street with a huge flag with an iron cross on it. I don't mind saying I was scared.
"Is it safe?" I asked, Marathon Man style.
"Oh, jah, you have nothing to fear"
"Why are there 300 cop cars here then".
"Oh, that's to protect the neonazis. Poeple would kill the if they wern't there.".
That's really what they said.
(If you google you'll find pics of this)
Later that night I was in an underground club with hundreds of these sweaty skinheads and very loud German techno-pop (nice stuff). I accidentally bumped into a nearly 7 foot black leathered skinhead who was probably in that demonstration almost knocking himover. That's it I thought, my life is freakin' over. He apologized for being in the way and bought me a beer.
I couldn't have had a nicer three days there and absolutely fell in love with Berlin. I found Berliners to be the nicest, most helpful soft spoken people imaghinsable, thus trashing the hatred I was taught as a British schoolboy about Germans.
If I had to live anywhere besides Cananda it would be Germany. Their rules may sound weird sometiems but until you've been there to check it out you have no idea what a nice place it is or how well the country is actualy run.
Also, another curious thing I noticed was nearly everthing there is stamped "Made in Germany" and you have to go out of your way to find "the China shop" where you can buy stuff made in China, and it's of MUCH higher quality than the crap sold in North America.
Perhaps now 1000 Germans will say "you're wrong it's not like that" but this is how it appeared to me.
"Isn't it often said, those that don't learn from the past are destined to repeat it?"
Please don't be so hard on slashdot editors. Dups are a way of life.
"Private radio stations can still get fined. And what value is there in censoring 'fuck' either?"
There is, I'm told, a difference between what is a nasty word in US/UK/Canada and say Germany and Holland.
I run a bunch or mailing lists for aqaurium stuff, various aspect of aquatic plants and certain specialty fishes. Every now and again a German or Dutch (who do the aquaria thing better than anybody) will say somthing like "no the problem is the shit in your tank" or "just stick that plant outside in a bucket of cow shit" and all the North Americans and Brits recoil in abject horror and complain while the Euros know they've posted something as innocuous as "manure".
Frankly I live for these moments.
Don't unsult the Church though, that's real profanity over there, not something that canbe said in polite conversation like "fuck" or "shit".
"67 years"
Or 65. Nobody knows for sure. Not even Hunter.
"And people wonder why HST blew his brains out."
But before he did...
http://ctr.vrx.net/hst/