I didn't see it in a cinema, but I imagine the reaction was much the same as when I saw the Toronto premiere of Polytechnique (Canadian film of the year, 2009); I'd never seen an audience sit silent and motionless through the whole credits of a film, before.
by moving to unicode, git svn bazaar mercury and cvs all have to be updated to understand how to treat unicode files - which they can't (they'll treat it as binary) - in order to identify lines that are added or removed, rather than store the entire file on each revision. bear in mind that you've just doubled (or quadrupled, for UCS-4) the amount of space required to store the revisions in the revision control systems' back-end database
There is this thing called UTF-8 which VCS already handle just fine (including even humble CVS, afaik).
Not appreciably larger. No larger at all, for characters in ASCII set.
As unlikely as it sounds from context, he seems to care a great deal about correctness. It also paints a vivid picture of how hard Unicode is to get right.
If you think about how the 'incumbents' in the software industry work - their business models are not about technology or product quality, but about first capturing a monopoly (by any means available), then trying to hang on to it for as long as possible (by any means available).
Like a skyscraper shadowing a garden, this has the effect of making it almost impossible for small players to sprout or survive very long. The resources - sunlight, nutrition in the metaphor - just aren't enough.
However if an upstart can somehow beat that, growing sufficiently large while not being crushed, then they can occupy a viable niche, having resources to fight off the attacks of the other larger players (which include, as somebody commented above, doing due diligence upfront and being able to afford legal defences).
I agree that the jury is still out on whether this is long-run good for the end user. Will Google become just another complacent, evil monopolist?
Slashdot Mirror
I was left stunned by IRREVERSIBLE as well.
I didn't see it in a cinema, but I imagine the reaction was much the same as when I saw the Toronto premiere of Polytechnique (Canadian film of the year, 2009); I'd never seen an audience sit silent and motionless through the whole credits of a film, before.
I figured there was maybe *one* reel change, didn't know there were more than say five...
Somehow the comment thread fooled me. I thought you were commenting on IRREVERSIBLE. Never mind! (Though we could talk about that anyway...)
One word: Twi...
But surely screening it doesn't take 7 or 8 reel changes any more, does it? What am I missing?
I'm curious, as my opinion was rather different.
Isn't that exactly what Linux is doing? "Fixing performance"
I appreciated that OS X got faster through 10.4. It's the way things should be.
But compiling the kernel is the one area where Gentoo is exactly the same as every other distribution.
Larry pisses his logo on everything first.
Then later he'll set fire to it, cut it into pieces, and throw it in a barrel of quicklime. He's the serial killer of good technology.
About time.
OS X has Quartz... *runz*
It's 'pound' to North Americans, yes. The rest of us don't call it 'pound' for reasons well explained at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sign
For reasons that are more social than technical:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LispInJakAndDaxter
...is how Erlang started.
"Rough around the edges" is fine if you have a paradigm-shifting product. :)
http://www.erlang.se/publications/bjarnelic.pdf
there's no easy way to try out stuff without putting money on the line
Wrong - most banks and online brokers have 'play' accounts that let you experiment with a portfolio without spending a cent.
Plus, you can also do it with historical data (I can't remember the proper term for doing that).
Railways, like character sets, are one of those situations where "close" doesn't quite cut it.
by moving to unicode, git svn bazaar mercury and cvs all have to be updated to understand how to treat unicode files - which they can't (they'll treat it as binary) - in order to identify lines that are added or removed, rather than store the entire file on each revision. bear in mind that you've just doubled (or quadrupled, for UCS-4) the amount of space required to store the revisions in the revision control systems' back-end database
There is this thing called UTF-8 which VCS already handle just fine (including even humble CVS, afaik).
Not appreciably larger. No larger at all, for characters in ASCII set.
Michael Kaplan has an interesting blog.
As unlikely as it sounds from context, he seems to care a great deal about correctness. It also paints a vivid picture of how hard Unicode is to get right.
When you need him.
And somebody else said something about 26 soldiers of lead conquering the world but the interwebs can't seem to decide who, or if. That's progress!
That the linked ASCII chart is SVG... which can render Unicode and is encoded in an explicitly Unicode medium...
No - I think we're already in the future, sorry PKH.
There, fixed that for ya.
If you think about how the 'incumbents' in the software industry work - their business models are not about technology or product quality, but about first capturing a monopoly (by any means available), then trying to hang on to it for as long as possible (by any means available).
Like a skyscraper shadowing a garden, this has the effect of making it almost impossible for small players to sprout or survive very long. The resources - sunlight, nutrition in the metaphor - just aren't enough.
However if an upstart can somehow beat that, growing sufficiently large while not being crushed, then they can occupy a viable niche, having resources to fight off the attacks of the other larger players (which include, as somebody commented above, doing due diligence upfront and being able to afford legal defences).
I agree that the jury is still out on whether this is long-run good for the end user. Will Google become just another complacent, evil monopolist?
I hope that the era of cowboy coders isn't entirely done
Judging from the world *outside* Google, it's cowboys all the way down.
Or, you've already made a start on the path to working *inside* Google, with your degree. Good luck!
Would be teaching them to DRAW.
Which is also about learning to see.
Trading this fast brings the market closer to optimal economic efficiency, where prices at any instant accurately reflect value
This has been refuted many times. It's precisely wrong, at least when exploited by HFT methods, which completely defeat meaningful pricing.