Re:The more I learn about JavaScript...
on
GWT in Action
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· Score: 1
I'm not really sure I see the point of GWT, given that JavaScript is actually a more powerful language at this point. I think "the point of GWT" is clearly stated on their front page. The ability to write your web application more like a real application. The ability to share client and server side code. The possibility of using a real debugger. Support for browser history (havn't seen this for AJAX before).. just to name a few.
But one shouldn't forget that our senses have adapted to our surroundings. Our eyes are tailored to the way common substances reflect certain wavelengths of light. Our ears are tailored to the way physical events causes waves to form in air and how the air carries those waves. And it's likely that our perception of time is tailored to things like the forces of gravity, the speed at which predators can move, weight vs. gravity,...
There are likely to be SOME differences in senses between humans and extraterrestrial life, but I find it unlikely that they would be orders of magnitude apart unless they had evolved in a very different place... like in atmosphere of a gas giant:)
As for music, there's a lot of classical music that can be appreciated at very different speeds. Fugues of J.S.Bach are often so complex that they're often best experienced by learning to play them yourself (one note at a time, slowly beginning to understand the progressions and so on). In the other end of the spectrum, a lot of people find whale song fascinating, even though they "seem to go on forever" and the medium is very different from air.
About visual arts, even humans have trouble appreciating that:) But seriously, wavelengths of light, shapes and imagination is all there's to it. It's probably a lot harder for an alien to understand our art at first, but with help I find it likely they'd manage to eventually understand it. The way they perceive light is probably the least of the problems since wavelengths can be translated just like we sometimes do to present astronomical phenomena in ways that we see with the naked eye
I didn't say that I wanted Flash to be killed off by Silverlight just that I wanted the competition (I agree that may be a dangerous thing to wish for when the competition is Microsoft). Also, last I checked (when it was under the name WPF/E) Microsoft claimed they'd write a player for Linux too - they seem to have dropped that:(. On another note, I just discovered JavaFX which seems like an exciting 3rd contender. Too bad it's still in alpha, but open source competition for Flash is what I'm really looking forward to.
The Flash monopoly is probably worse than the Internet Explorer monopoly (which is slowly dissolving). While the file format is semi-open to the public you have to agree on a license that prevents you from writing your own Flash player from the documentation - it only allows you to write exporters. When you get past that you'll find a file format that is hideously obfuscated. Variable bitlength integers means that your data isn't even byte-aligned. The documentation does very little to help you figure out why a seemingly valid Flash file just doesn't render correctly in the player.
It pisses me off because Flash really has a lot of exciting stuff to offer, yet they can run the development at their own pace, writing shitty players with security holes (not to mention that they're still software rendering graphics in year of 2007). Even though my primary computer has Linux installed I find myself hoping that the new Windows Silverlight will give Flash a lot of healthy competition. It doesn't seem like any opensource projects are close to rivaling Flash yet.
I had a friend back in the early 90s who one day found that his Amiga 500 wouldn't load some game. Then he proceeded to warm boot and test ALL his other floppy disks to see if they had the same problem. That virus destroyed 50 disks worth of pirated games in less than an hour.
Unless an EULA actually states that their software shares your harddisk's contents with another party this it's utterly illegal. Everybody reads the EULA's don't they?
Calm down! Relax! It's all part of a carefully orchestrated plan; when we eventually begin to get severely affected by global warming, the US war mongering will reach a point where nuclear winter will cancel it out.
Score:4, Informative?! Have I slept for a few years and not noticed that technobabble has made it into mainstream physics? Is positron emission really the key to artificial intelligence? Is alternating between two velocity states while remaining at neither for longer than Planck time, 1.3 x 10^-43 seconds, the secret behind superluminal travel? Do all aliens really look like humans with play-doh on their heads?!!
Re:1st rule of google is you do NOT talk about goo
on
Google's Evil NDA
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· Score: 1
I imagine it's more like...
The first rule of Google is you do not talk about Google The second rule of Google is, you DO NOT talk about Goog... erh.. no, I got that wrong... The second rule of Google is.. no smoking in your office
(Okay, I borrowed that from the Spaced television series)
I disagree. Parent asked about PHP vs. RoR, and it highlights an interesting tendency; sites written in plain PHP are a common sight whereas sites written in plain Ruby are not (compared to RoR-powered sites). Framework or not, they're each self-sufficient and popular approaches to web development.
Re:Ruby astroturfing
on
Beginning Ruby
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· Score: 3, Informative
Define "high usage website". RoR-powered sites like 43 Things and ODEO don't seem like backyard hobby projects to me.
Re:Enlighten me
on
Beginning Ruby
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· Score: 4, Informative
Ruby isn't any more a server-side language than 68k assembler is. You've probably confused it with Ruby on Rails which is a framework (and an excellent one, I might add) for making websites. Compared to plain PHP it makes web development easy and fun and even supports stuff like AJAX out of the box.
Yeah, and go have a look for the 'CAM' and 'TS' keywords on your favorite torrent search site. Those buggers sure know how to archive the crap out of analog media.
The x86 instruction set doesn't need to be replaced. We're approaching the ceiling of what performance you can squeeze out of a single general purpose core anyway. Some years ago some people figured out that a special purpose processor could beat the living crap out of a standard CPU in terms of rendering graphics, and today there are virtually no games relying on the CPU for that anymore. We even have physics accelerator cards now, and the Cell microprocessor follows a similar principle. So, I believe the x86 instruction set will still live 10 years from today, but in musical terms I believe it will continue towards the role of becoming the "conductor", and away from being the "musician". I wouldn't be surprised if Intel or AMD at some point releases a CPU similar in design to the Cell processor (with PowerPC replaced by x86).
"But which bits of java script are fancy and which are not?"
This is actually quite easy. Stuff that relates to the DOM often differ from browser to browser while the core language does not. This is somewhat similar to the fact that you can compile and link ANSI-compliant C on virtually any platform as long as you don't do anything platform specific.
At work I recently developed a JavaScript framework for calculating text length that had to take variable character widths and hyphenation into account. The idea is that the user can type away in a standard TEXTAREA field and know when some predefined text area in a PDF document is full. I think the code ended up as 500+ lines of JavaScript code, but the ONLY browser specific problem I ran into was a subtle difference in the parsing of arrays; Firefox would treat the statement [1,2,3,4,] as an array with the length of 4, while Internet Explorer would say the length was instead 5 (and the last value was "undefined", if I recall). I gather that the reason why browser independence came so painlessly was that 95% of the code was just text processing and number crunching anyway. I doubt I'd have the same luck if I tried to do a WYSIWYG editor since it would have a great more interaction with the DOM.
Star Control 2 in Super Melee mode. It's basically a 1-on-1 space combat arcade game, but it has a lot of depth. There are 25 very different and unique ships to choose between and they all have advantages and disadvantages; some are slow, others are fast. Some rely on raw firepower while others rely on strange innovative devices like tractor beams. Before the game starts each player chooses ships for his fleet and that makes it suitable for tournament play among friends.
You can get the GPL port here (GPL). Oh, and when you're tired of blasting your friends out of the sky, the single player game itself is probably one of the best ever made.
Eighth Question: Have you ever used computer enhancements for your voices? Does this ever occur?
I can't speak for him, but I'm pretty confident that the answer is "very little". On the commentary track for some Futurama episode (sorry, I can't remember which) they speak about this particular subject because Billy West voice acts for a robot dog with a very mechanical voice in that episode. David X. Cohen states that he thinks they used "very little" effect on his voice for the robot dog, to which Billy replies "ROBO-MIS-TREAT-MENT-A-LERT" with a voice almost identical to what we just heard in the episode moments earlier.
Slashdot Mirror
But one shouldn't forget that our senses have adapted to our surroundings. Our eyes are tailored to the way common substances reflect certain wavelengths of light. Our ears are tailored to the way physical events causes waves to form in air and how the air carries those waves. And it's likely that our perception of time is tailored to things like the forces of gravity, the speed at which predators can move, weight vs. gravity,...
There are likely to be SOME differences in senses between humans and extraterrestrial life, but I find it unlikely that they would be orders of magnitude apart unless they had evolved in a very different place... like in atmosphere of a gas giant :)
As for music, there's a lot of classical music that can be appreciated at very different speeds. Fugues of J.S.Bach are often so complex that they're often best experienced by learning to play them yourself (one note at a time, slowly beginning to understand the progressions and so on). In the other end of the spectrum, a lot of people find whale song fascinating, even though they "seem to go on forever" and the medium is very different from air.
About visual arts, even humans have trouble appreciating that :) But seriously, wavelengths of light, shapes and imagination is all there's to it. It's probably a lot harder for an alien to understand our art at first, but with help I find it likely they'd manage to eventually understand it. The way they perceive light is probably the least of the problems since wavelengths can be translated just like we sometimes do to present astronomical phenomena in ways that we see with the naked eye
I didn't say that I wanted Flash to be killed off by Silverlight just that I wanted the competition (I agree that may be a dangerous thing to wish for when the competition is Microsoft). Also, last I checked (when it was under the name WPF/E) Microsoft claimed they'd write a player for Linux too - they seem to have dropped that :(. On another note, I just discovered JavaFX which seems like an exciting 3rd contender. Too bad it's still in alpha, but open source competition for Flash is what I'm really looking forward to.
The Flash monopoly is probably worse than the Internet Explorer monopoly (which is slowly dissolving). While the file format is semi-open to the public you have to agree on a license that prevents you from writing your own Flash player from the documentation - it only allows you to write exporters. When you get past that you'll find a file format that is hideously obfuscated. Variable bit length integers means that your data isn't even byte-aligned. The documentation does very little to help you figure out why a seemingly valid Flash file just doesn't render correctly in the player.
It pisses me off because Flash really has a lot of exciting stuff to offer, yet they can run the development at their own pace, writing shitty players with security holes (not to mention that they're still software rendering graphics in year of 2007). Even though my primary computer has Linux installed I find myself hoping that the new Windows Silverlight will give Flash a lot of healthy competition. It doesn't seem like any opensource projects are close to rivaling Flash yet.
I had a friend back in the early 90s who one day found that his Amiga 500 wouldn't load some game. Then he proceeded to warm boot and test ALL his other floppy disks to see if they had the same problem. That virus destroyed 50 disks worth of pirated games in less than an hour.
Unless an EULA actually states that their software shares your harddisk's contents with another party this it's utterly illegal. Everybody reads the EULA's don't they?
Calm down! Relax! It's all part of a carefully orchestrated plan; when we eventually begin to get severely affected by global warming, the US war mongering will reach a point where nuclear winter will cancel it out.
Don't compare apples to.. operating systems.
..and the scary thing is that this reply might get modded interesting.
Score:4, Informative?! Have I slept for a few years and not noticed that technobabble has made it into mainstream physics? Is positron emission really the key to artificial intelligence? Is alternating between two velocity states while remaining at neither for longer than Planck time, 1.3 x 10^-43 seconds, the secret behind superluminal travel? Do all aliens really look like humans with play-doh on their heads?!!
Which part of your face is this?
I imagine it's more like...
The first rule of Google is you do not talk about Google
The second rule of Google is, you DO NOT talk about Goog... erh.. no, I got that wrong...
The second rule of Google is.. no smoking in your office
(Okay, I borrowed that from the Spaced television series)
Oh freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to me
as nine dee, seven four, eee three, five bee
Off-topic? Parent was likely referring to this gem
I disagree. Parent asked about PHP vs. RoR, and it highlights an interesting tendency; sites written in plain PHP are a common sight whereas sites written in plain Ruby are not (compared to RoR-powered sites). Framework or not, they're each self-sufficient and popular approaches to web development.
Define "high usage website". RoR-powered sites like 43 Things and ODEO don't seem like backyard hobby projects to me.
Ruby isn't any more a server-side language than 68k assembler is. You've probably confused it with Ruby on Rails which is a framework (and an excellent one, I might add) for making websites. Compared to plain PHP it makes web development easy and fun and even supports stuff like AJAX out of the box.
Yeah, and go have a look for the 'CAM' and 'TS' keywords on your favorite torrent search site. Those buggers sure know how to archive the crap out of analog media.
...by any chance be a viable replacement for the management where I work?
The x86 instruction set doesn't need to be replaced. We're approaching the ceiling of what performance you can squeeze out of a single general purpose core anyway. Some years ago some people figured out that a special purpose processor could beat the living crap out of a standard CPU in terms of rendering graphics, and today there are virtually no games relying on the CPU for that anymore. We even have physics accelerator cards now, and the Cell microprocessor follows a similar principle. So, I believe the x86 instruction set will still live 10 years from today, but in musical terms I believe it will continue towards the role of becoming the "conductor", and away from being the "musician". I wouldn't be surprised if Intel or AMD at some point releases a CPU similar in design to the Cell processor (with PowerPC replaced by x86).
"But which bits of java script are fancy and which are not?"
This is actually quite easy. Stuff that relates to the DOM often differ from browser to browser while the core language does not. This is somewhat similar to the fact that you can compile and link ANSI-compliant C on virtually any platform as long as you don't do anything platform specific.
At work I recently developed a JavaScript framework for calculating text length that had to take variable character widths and hyphenation into account. The idea is that the user can type away in a standard TEXTAREA field and know when some predefined text area in a PDF document is full. I think the code ended up as 500+ lines of JavaScript code, but the ONLY browser specific problem I ran into was a subtle difference in the parsing of arrays; Firefox would treat the statement [1,2,3,4,] as an array with the length of 4, while Internet Explorer would say the length was instead 5 (and the last value was "undefined", if I recall). I gather that the reason why browser independence came so painlessly was that 95% of the code was just text processing and number crunching anyway. I doubt I'd have the same luck if I tried to do a WYSIWYG editor since it would have a great more interaction with the DOM.
Star Control 2 in Super Melee mode. It's basically a 1-on-1 space combat arcade game, but it has a lot of depth. There are 25 very different and unique ships to choose between and they all have advantages and disadvantages; some are slow, others are fast. Some rely on raw firepower while others rely on strange innovative devices like tractor beams. Before the game starts each player chooses ships for his fleet and that makes it suitable for tournament play among friends.
You can get the GPL port here (GPL). Oh, and when you're tired of blasting your friends out of the sky, the single player game itself is probably one of the best ever made.
It begins with the radioactive snails.. but ends with the place crawling with radscorpions and glowing geckos! Run for your lives!
Eighth Question: Have you ever used computer enhancements for your voices? Does this ever occur?
I can't speak for him, but I'm pretty confident that the answer is "very little". On the commentary track for some Futurama episode (sorry, I can't remember which) they speak about this particular subject because Billy West voice acts for a robot dog with a very mechanical voice in that episode. David X. Cohen states that he thinks they used "very little" effect on his voice for the robot dog, to which Billy replies "ROBO-MIS-TREAT-MENT-A-LERT" with a voice almost identical to what we just heard in the episode moments earlier.
To anyone who posts in the first 5 hours: RTFM!