Perl is actually very good for bit fiddling; the pack and unpack operations would be excellent for this type of work. And it is also a very nice language for manipulating complex data structures with the ability to dynamically create and manipulate hashes and arrays.
Perl is no good at real-time tasks, of course. I doubt I would consider Perl for heavily calculation-oriented applications either.
But given the same algorithmic improvements,you will of course be able to gain additional speed by choosing your language.
If speed were not so critical, I'd suggest Perl, actually. With the speed demands, and the need for cross-platform IO, I think C is probably what you want to use.
But most wouldn't. The sad fact is that most users see nothing wrong with having a choice. There's a small but vocal group from both camps that seem out to whip up as much hostility as they can, and sadly, it seems some/. editors are among them (just see the rather skewed gnome item in the 'development' channel).
With the steadily improving interoperability between these two environments, it is easier and easier to run applications for either and just use the desktop that makes you happy. Why care? Why look for a 'winner'? Instead, appreciate the flexibility that a choice of multiple desktop environments gives us (where Gnome and KDE are just the two most visible alternatives).
Not to sound like a troll or anything, I used VI for years, but this is 2002, the year in which we can buy a tiny mobile phone which can be used to watch a movie on it or browse websites, so using an ascii based editor that hasn't any tricks up its sleeve besides coloring keywords is IMHO kidding yourself with irrelevant reasons like "the new stuff is not worth it, this is more productive" etc.
OK, so maybe I'm missing something here, but exactly how will the ability to watch movies on my mobile help me edit my C or Perl code on a Linux machine?
I use Gvim for pretty much all my editing needs; for me it's not a backup editor, but the editor of choice whenever I can use it. I'm using it for programming, configuration edits and I'm writing my thesis using Vim. Graphical editors are pretty, but they all lack the power and flexibility of an editor like Vim (Emacs also qualifies, but I'm from Earth and don't have the extra hands needed for all key combinations...).
There is a beginning of a Gnome component wrapping for Gvim as well, and when it's mature enough, I'll finally be able to use Vim in Evolution ass well. Ending half of my mail messages with a friendly ':wq' is a little embarrassing...
BTW: what is it with Slashdot and Gnome/KDE? Seems there's quite a bit of hostility towards Gnome among the editors lately.
On the contrary, inductive proofs are often among the most elegant ones I've seen. Just establish a base case, then show that if the previous case is true, then so must the next one.
...and of course I press submit before actually engaging the clutch to my brain...
With parallel tests it is of course O(N). My bad. But why stop there? Why not split each list into overlapping pairs: [1,2], [2,3], [3,4]... and let each 'sub' universe destroy itself if the pair is sorted. If there are no sub-universes, this usiverse stays (as it is sorted). If there are remaining sub-universa, we destroy them, and ourselves. This makes it an O(1) algorithm (assuming the creation of all these parallel universa is in constant time and in parallel).
Except, of course, that you get one universe per permutation, not per element. Which means it's an O(N!) algorithm. Unless, of course, each universe is able to decide by itself whether it is sorted and destroy iteslf, in which case it's an O(1) algorithm. In neither case is it O(N).
OK, I can not speak for Airbus and not for steel industries outside Sweden, but I do know something about the Swedish steel industry (having worked at a plant, and having relatives working there). The steel industry in this country was a mess 20 years ago. Heavily subsidized and yet losing money. Subsidies and export deals where abolished in the late 80's and early 90's - and, predictably, a lot of those mills disappeared, and the jobs with them.
Today, those companies that are left are modern, very efficient and are dealing on the open market without any need of government assistance. It looks _very_ much like the US is simply trying to avoid having to go through the same painful and bloody (in the economic sense) restructuring of their steel industry we did ten years ago. Fine - but don't complain about the punishing tariffs being proposed on american products.
So, you felt the need to slap 30% duties on european steel exactly why?
/Janne
Re:a little nonsense, but hey - it's near April Fo
on
Globalism Post 9/11
·
· Score: 1
BUY GOOGLE ADS! - They have refused ads for firearms!
The point? Just as with things like arms control, there are some undisputable facts regarding the effects of globalization - both good and bad - but whether the effects are seen as good or as bad, or whether the good outweighs the bad, will become a difference of opinion.
For some people, discontent and upheaval is seen as a good thing - and not just by extremists either. It can be seen as a chance of getting rid of the old and bringing in the new. That's essentially what liberal and conservative economics alike propagated for with their 'chock therapy' method of fixing the east european economies.
The middle east has a huge problem with their oil reserves. If you think the west has an oil dependency problem, that is nothing compared to these big oil producers. The oil industry is the only large industry there is, and these countries stand and fall with the oil price. There are efforts to attract other kinds of business there, but there just is no intellectual or technological infrastructure there to really support it. Will they need fairly radical changes in their political and economic structures eventually? Yes, they do. If those changes come in the form of armed unrest or even revolutions, is there a big risk that they will regress and shut themselves off from the world like Iran did? Yes.
I've been on the lookout for a decent distribution I can customize heavily. I have a P133 laptop with a 1.2Gb HD, and I really like the machine (excellent footprint, good screen, best laptop keyboard I've ever used). To get the most out of it, I really need something that is easily customized. Right now I run RedHat 6.2 on it, but it's time to move forward.
I like the idea of a source distro; 5% to 10% performance matters a lot more on a machine like this, than on a large, modern desktop. Unfortunately, Gentoo seems not to be the distribution I was looking for. I would not mind long installation time, but the recommended minimum specs (especially disk space) is way over this little machine, and it seems like a fairly substantial hassle to install it without a CD-ROM.
Does anybody have a recommendation for a distro that can be built small and efficient enough to for this machine, and does offer decent support for all those laptop-centric issues like no CD, networking through PCMCIA and so on? I've been considering Debian as a possibility but I feel that too seems a little heavy. Roll-your-own distros could be fun, but they generally assume you'll be able to boot and install from a CD at the end of the process. Also, this extreme form of customization means you are all on your own, with nary a mailing list archive to search through if you get into trouble.
I can't be the only one with this problem; any feedback would be welcome.
When looking at AI and Cognitive research, you really have to keep in mind that there are two differwent motivations at work in doing the research.
One motivation - the one alluded to in the article - is to make stuff that gives the same behavior as humans (or whatever animal you are looking at). You don't really care whether your methods are biologially correct, you want things that work. Most of classical AI falls into this category.
The other motivation is to figure out how we do things (we being animals in general). If the research ends up being useful in appolications, great, but that's not the goal of the work. You really want models of how real brains solve problem, and these models may be far too inomplete or computationally intensive to be used in implementations, yet be perfectly fine for their intended use. A lot of Cognitive science falls into this category.
Game AI designers probably have a much richer mine of information and techniques in AI than in cognitive research, and they have so far been able to exploit that knowledge - as well as judicious 'cheating' - to make a compelling illusion. If/when they turn to cognitive science, however, the pickings will be slimmer and harder to use, as the methods and models aren't designed to solve any kind of real-world problems to begin with.
...unless the contact is 'onerous' or unclear; contract law generally gives greater protection to individuals than to companies, so in some cases, what the customer heard from the sales force, or can 'reasonably expect' can take precedence over the fine print.
You can get that effect whenever a site is paranoid about being copied. If you have you Cache setting set to compare the cache with the site every time, it can result in the site getting confused as to where you come from, and refuse the content (the image in this case). If you set your cache setting to "once per session" instead, things will work out a lot better.
Unfortunately, the model viewer is Windows only. The included tooset used to create new adventures is also only coming out on windows (long story). The creature viewer does not currently work under Wine, but it is built using the same technology as the toolset, os if someone can make Wine run the creature viewer, there's a good chance the toolset will run as well.
I've thought about this sort of problem. It's great when a lot of people rally around a project. Some do a lot of work, some do just a little (though that is usually very appreciated as well). The problem comes when you for one reason or another need to figure out who did what afterwards.
There could be many reasons for this need - some trivial, some serious. The current Mozilla thing is one, of course. A serious one could be for projects attempting to reverse-engineer an existing technology (be it.NET, Samba, the Windows API or whatever). If someone 'sneaks' on board with exposure to the original code, it can be vital to identify what parts that person has worked on, so they can be examined, and if necessary removed. A silly (or perhaps not so silly) example could be someone having his or her contributions as a reference for a job application or similar. It would be very helpful if that person could point to a log showing exactly what they did (and how the community reacted to it).
Bottom line: we might want to start thinking about how to keep better track of such stuff. While a few larger projects (such as Mozilla) are already doing this to some extent, I believe many smaller projects are lucky to have an accurate list of names, never mind actual logs of the contributions.
About that business thing: the only restriction I know about is regarding urban planning, and that can restrict where you're allowed to have certain kinds of businesses in certain places. This especially goes for hazardous activities (like gas stations), and food sales.
Saying that you need permission to start a business is way, [i]way[/i] overstating it; the local urban plan doesn't allow you to put your fast-food restaurant at a certain spot - well, just put it somewhere else. And for most business activities, there's no such concerns at all. You can start your software enterprise wherever you want.
GPL requires that you allow the recipients to distribute the code at will, also under the GPL. You are not allowed to stop the ciustomer to redistribute.
You sell that weapons technology to another country, and you have to provide them with source code. There is then nothing at all stopping them from posting that source on the net or do whatever they want with it - as long as that doesn't break GPL.
If you add a restriction that they may not redistribute as they see fit, you _are_ breaking GPL.
I'm not sure it's such a good thing a trademark can be lost just on the basis of being a common word. I mean, a common word where, exactly? It's really not easy to think of a new name that doesn't sound utterly stupid, and then you run the risk that whatever you came up with actually _is_ a common word in some language. You could end up with many product names that can't be used in all the markets you want to use it.
And where do you draw the line? Is 'Red Hat' too common? 'Dell'? 'Ford'?
Of course, some due diligence is always required anyway: Honda apparently tried to name one of their models 'Honda Fitta', but found out what it meant in Swedish in time... With slogans like "Small outside but large when you're in it" or "It's a daily pleasure" it could have become a very real embarrassment for Honda.
Slashdot Mirror
Perl is actually very good for bit fiddling; the pack and unpack operations would be excellent for this type of work. And it is also a very nice language for manipulating complex data structures with the ability to dynamically create and manipulate hashes and arrays.
Perl is no good at real-time tasks, of course. I doubt I would consider Perl for heavily calculation-oriented applications either.
/Janne
But given the same algorithmic improvements,you will of course be able to gain additional speed by choosing your language.
If speed were not so critical, I'd suggest Perl, actually. With the speed demands, and the need for cross-platform IO, I think C is probably what you want to use.
/Janne
It would be good, except there's only a graph with nodefinite numbers; and that most browsers (inlcuding Mozilla-based ones) get clumped into 'other'.
/Janne
This is a pretty good link:
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
/Jann e
But most wouldn't. The sad fact is that most users see nothing wrong with having a choice. There's a small but vocal group from both camps that seem out to whip up as much hostility as they can, and sadly, it seems some /. editors are among them (just see the rather skewed gnome item in the 'development' channel).
With the steadily improving interoperability between these two environments, it is easier and easier to run applications for either and just use the desktop that makes you happy. Why care? Why look for a 'winner'? Instead, appreciate the flexibility that a choice of multiple desktop environments gives us (where Gnome and KDE are just the two most visible alternatives).
/Janne
Not to sound like a troll or anything, I used VI for years, but this is 2002, the year in which we can buy a tiny mobile phone which can be used to watch a movie on it or browse websites, so using an ascii based editor that hasn't any tricks up its sleeve besides coloring keywords is IMHO kidding yourself with irrelevant reasons like "the new stuff is not worth it, this is more productive" etc.
OK, so maybe I'm missing something here, but exactly how will the ability to watch movies on my mobile help me edit my C or Perl code on a Linux machine?
I use Gvim for pretty much all my editing needs; for me it's not a backup editor, but the editor of choice whenever I can use it. I'm using it for programming, configuration edits and I'm writing my thesis using Vim. Graphical editors are pretty, but they all lack the power and flexibility of an editor like Vim (Emacs also qualifies, but I'm from Earth and don't have the extra hands needed for all key combinations...).
There is a beginning of a Gnome component wrapping for Gvim as well, and when it's mature enough, I'll finally be able to use Vim in Evolution ass well. Ending half of my mail messages with a friendly ':wq' is a little embarrassing...
BTW: what is it with Slashdot and Gnome/KDE? Seems there's quite a bit of hostility towards Gnome among the editors lately.
/Janne
On the contrary, inductive proofs are often among the most elegant ones I've seen. Just establish a base case, then show that if the previous case is true, then so must the next one.
/Janne
...and of course I press submit before actually engaging the clutch to my brain...
With parallel tests it is of course O(N). My bad. But why stop there? Why not split each list into overlapping pairs: [1,2], [2,3], [3,4]... and let each 'sub' universe destroy itself if the pair is sorted. If there are no sub-universes, this usiverse stays (as it is sorted). If there are remaining sub-universa, we destroy them, and ourselves. This makes it an O(1) algorithm (assuming the creation of all these parallel universa is in constant time and in parallel).
/Janne
Except, of course, that you get one universe per permutation, not per element. Which means it's an O(N!) algorithm. Unless, of course, each universe is able to decide by itself whether it is sorted and destroy iteslf, in which case it's an O(1) algorithm. In neither case is it O(N).
/Janne
OK, I can not speak for Airbus and not for steel industries outside Sweden, but I do know something about the Swedish steel industry (having worked at a plant, and having relatives working there). The steel industry in this country was a mess 20 years ago. Heavily subsidized and yet losing money. Subsidies and export deals where abolished in the late 80's and early 90's - and, predictably, a lot of those mills disappeared, and the jobs with them.
Today, those companies that are left are modern, very efficient and are dealing on the open market without any need of government assistance. It looks _very_ much like the US is simply trying to avoid having to go through the same painful and bloody (in the economic sense) restructuring of their steel industry we did ten years ago. Fine - but don't complain about the punishing tariffs being proposed on american products.
/Janne
So, you felt the need to slap 30% duties on european steel exactly why?
/Janne
BUY GOOGLE ADS! - They have refused ads for firearms!
The point? Just as with things like arms control, there are some undisputable facts regarding the effects of globalization - both good and bad - but whether the effects are seen as good or as bad, or whether the good outweighs the bad, will become a difference of opinion.
For some people, discontent and upheaval is seen as a good thing - and not just by extremists either. It can be seen as a chance of getting rid of the old and bringing in the new. That's essentially what liberal and conservative economics alike propagated for with their 'chock therapy' method of fixing the east european economies.
The middle east has a huge problem with their oil reserves. If you think the west has an oil dependency problem, that is nothing compared to these big oil producers. The oil industry is the only large industry there is, and these countries stand and fall with the oil price. There are efforts to attract other kinds of business there, but there just is no intellectual or technological infrastructure there to really support it. Will they need fairly radical changes in their political and economic structures eventually? Yes, they do. If those changes come in the form of armed unrest or even revolutions, is there a big risk that they will regress and shut themselves off from the world like Iran did? Yes.
/Janne
I've been on the lookout for a decent distribution I can customize heavily. I have a P133 laptop with a 1.2Gb HD, and I really like the machine (excellent footprint, good screen, best laptop keyboard I've ever used). To get the most out of it, I really need something that is easily customized. Right now I run RedHat 6.2 on it, but it's time to move forward.
I like the idea of a source distro; 5% to 10% performance matters a lot more on a machine like this, than on a large, modern desktop. Unfortunately, Gentoo seems not to be the distribution I was looking for. I would not mind long installation time, but the recommended minimum specs (especially disk space) is way over this little machine, and it seems like a fairly substantial hassle to install it without a CD-ROM.
Does anybody have a recommendation for a distro that can be built small and efficient enough to for this machine, and does offer decent support for all those laptop-centric issues like no CD, networking through PCMCIA and so on? I've been considering Debian as a possibility but I feel that too seems a little heavy. Roll-your-own distros could be fun, but they generally assume you'll be able to boot and install from a CD at the end of the process. Also, this extreme form of customization means you are all on your own, with nary a mailing list archive to search through if you get into trouble.
I can't be the only one with this problem; any feedback would be welcome.
/Janne
When looking at AI and Cognitive research, you really have to keep in mind that there are two differwent motivations at work in doing the research.
One motivation - the one alluded to in the article - is to make stuff that gives the same behavior as humans (or whatever animal you are looking at). You don't really care whether your methods are biologially correct, you want things that work. Most of classical AI falls into this category.
The other motivation is to figure out how we do things (we being animals in general). If the research ends up being useful in appolications, great, but that's not the goal of the work. You really want models of how real brains solve problem, and these models may be far too inomplete or computationally intensive to be used in implementations, yet be perfectly fine for their intended use. A lot of Cognitive science falls into this category.
Game AI designers probably have a much richer mine of information and techniques in AI than in cognitive research, and they have so far been able to exploit that knowledge - as well as judicious 'cheating' - to make a compelling illusion. If/when they turn to cognitive science, however, the pickings will be slimmer and harder to use, as the methods and models aren't designed to solve any kind of real-world problems to begin with.
/Janne
...unless the contact is 'onerous' or unclear; contract law generally gives greater protection to individuals than to companies, so in some cases, what the customer heard from the sales force, or can 'reasonably expect' can take precedence over the fine print.
IANAL, BTW
/Janne
You can get that effect whenever a site is paranoid about being copied. If you have you Cache setting set to compare the cache with the site every time, it can result in the site getting confused as to where you come from, and refuse the content (the image in this case). If you set your cache setting to "once per session" instead, things will work out a lot better.
/Janne
Yes, it's coming for Linux, Mac and Windows, all in the same box. The toolset, however, is wondows only.
/Janne
Unfortunately, the model viewer is Windows only. The included tooset used to create new adventures is also only coming out on windows (long story). The creature viewer does not currently work under Wine, but it is built using the same technology as the toolset, os if someone can make Wine run the creature viewer, there's a good chance the toolset will run as well.
/Janne
Well, each CPU could add just 1% productive instructions, and it would still be linear, right?
/Janne
What I've seen of the Ximian setup tools, they seem like a very good alternative.
Linuxconf persisted in breaking things for me under earlier releases and was in the end more work to use than editing the files directly.
/Janne
I've thought about this sort of problem. It's great when a lot of people rally around a project. Some do a lot of work, some do just a little (though that is usually very appreciated as well). The problem comes when you for one reason or another need to figure out who did what afterwards.
.NET, Samba, the Windows API or whatever). If someone 'sneaks' on board with exposure to the original code, it can be vital to identify what parts that person has worked on, so they can be examined, and if necessary removed. A silly (or perhaps not so silly) example could be someone having his or her contributions as a reference for a job application or similar. It would be very helpful if that person could point to a log showing exactly what they did (and how the community reacted to it).
There could be many reasons for this need - some trivial, some serious. The current Mozilla thing is one, of course. A serious one could be for projects attempting to reverse-engineer an existing technology (be it
Bottom line: we might want to start thinking about how to keep better track of such stuff. While a few larger projects (such as Mozilla) are already doing this to some extent, I believe many smaller projects are lucky to have an accurate list of names, never mind actual logs of the contributions.
/Janne
About that business thing: the only restriction I know about is regarding urban planning, and that can restrict where you're allowed to have certain kinds of businesses in certain places. This especially goes for hazardous activities (like gas stations), and food sales.
Saying that you need permission to start a business is way, [i]way[/i] overstating it; the local urban plan doesn't allow you to put your fast-food restaurant at a certain spot - well, just put it somewhere else. And for most business activities, there's no such concerns at all. You can start your software enterprise wherever you want.
/Janne
GPL requires that you allow the recipients to distribute the code at will, also under the GPL. You are not allowed to stop the ciustomer to redistribute.
You sell that weapons technology to another country, and you have to provide them with source code. There is then nothing at all stopping them from posting that source on the net or do whatever they want with it - as long as that doesn't break GPL.
If you add a restriction that they may not redistribute as they see fit, you _are_ breaking GPL.
/Janne
I'm not sure it's such a good thing a trademark can be lost just on the basis of being a common word. I mean, a common word where, exactly? It's really not easy to think of a new name that doesn't sound utterly stupid, and then you run the risk that whatever you came up with actually _is_ a common word in some language. You could end up with many product names that can't be used in all the markets you want to use it.
And where do you draw the line? Is 'Red Hat' too common? 'Dell'? 'Ford'?
Of course, some due diligence is always required anyway: Honda apparently tried to name one of their models 'Honda Fitta', but found out what it meant in Swedish in time... With slogans like "Small outside but large when you're in it" or "It's a daily pleasure" it could have become a very real embarrassment for Honda.
/Janne
Ummm, the right name is X. As the FAQ says: it's not a system named X-windows,, it's a window system named X.
/Janne