Apparently Mr. Pratchett was approached by hollywood some years ago as they were interested in turning Mort into a film. The reason it never happened was because among the changes made, they wanted the "skeleton-guy" removed & he told them where to stick it.
Having seen the mess they made of Hitchhiker's Guide (and they had the nerve to stick Adam's name on the credits!) I'm glad nothing came of it.
Argh, this bloody AC system means decent comments on the topic such as this are generally lost to readers trying to filter the dross.
I stumbled across this while meta-moderating btw, and it's the kind of thing I mod up when I get points. It's got none at time of writing, but I like the point being made - we need something to make identity theft harder to pull off, such as a password to go with the id, that is kept from the 3rd party who've requested proof of your id, but used by the government to inform said 3rd party you are who you say you are.
Though I remember reading something here once about security not existing in nature..
Re: Scalable Link Interface?
on
SLI Primer
·
· Score: 1
I thought SLI stood for Scan Line Interleaving. "Scaleable Link Interface" is completly vauge. Did they change the technology and keep the old name, or is this writer just an idiot?
From the article:
SLI, or Scalable Link Interface... is based on a 1998 innovation by 3dfx called Scan Line Interleave.
So I wouldn't say the author's the idiot round here;)
..half the programmers don't
handle them and instead just ignore them, because Java won't let you be otherwise.
I'm sorry, are you saying "Java won't let me handle exceptions, so I have to ignore them"??? Pfft.
Yup, I'm yet another one of these professional Java developers that seem so numerous round here, and have been for some 5 very happy years or so.
I've looked at C# a little, but I'm not really familiar enough with it to diss it as I've no intention of ever learning it unless/until the employment choices offered by Java dry up - which I see no signs of happening yet, or at least for another couple of years.
As frequently mentioned, the use of Exception handling by less than competent developers - either empty catch blocks, or throwing the stack trace to stdout - IMHO just as bad quickly lead to an app behaving no better than any other poorly written app in any other language. How can you blame the lack of any error handling code in your app on the language you've used?
If C# only has unchecked exceptions (eqivalent to Java's RuntimeExceptions) - or makes the assumption that every method "throws Exception", you think those naff developers (and how I wish they would all jump ship to C#) will be writing more robust apps any time soon? I'd say it would make the task more difficult - It's the RuntimeExceptions that cause us most problems..
The Eclipse GUI is written using SWT, which I'll agree both looks nice and is pretty responsive - under win2k at least, I haven't tried the linux version yet..
Sun's unlikely to use it, as SWT's IBM technology, and a directly competing API with the likes of AWT & Swing..
The reason for it's speed is the Java Native Interface (JNI) calls to the platform-dependent libraries, coded in C IIRC.
IMHO, if you're planning on writing a Java Desktop App then SWT's your only real choice - though respect to the LimeWire project for what they've achieved with Swing.
I don't know if I'm thick or something, but I had a fairly hard time getting into Iain M Banks, though I guess Excession wasn't a good novel to try & start with.
Consider Phlebas & Inversions are the two I just about managed to understand:)
Iain Banks has a friend called Ken MacLeod who I started following a couple of years back, with novels out like The Start Fraction, The Cassini Division and The Sky Road, with 3 nominations for the Arthur C Clark award & 1 for a Hugo.
I've just finished Cosmonaut Keep, the first in the Engines of Light series and have to say I rate it his best work to date - and shows not just the strengths that Bank's work does (who must have helped out) but has an inventiveness and originality of its own. Some parallels to Greg Bear.
Keep your eyes open for all the Geek references. Not just the references to aging geeks/coders, Slashdot, Linux, Microsoft, etc, but he has the gall to start the book with "you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike"!
I'm glad to see you've been modded down a little while I've been writing this reply, but you're basically repeating what Bush was saying when he abandoned the treaty.
Yes, China is the world's second biggest CO2 producer, at 0.67 tonnes per person, per year (11% of the total). America, however is the largest with ten times that figure (25% of the total). Everyone in the world needs to acknowledge their responsibilities.
...the Kyoto treaty wouldn't have exempted China, India, Brazil, and every other third world nation
We're beyond any discussions on whether global warming is real or not. We have conclusive, undeniable evidence collected from many unrelated scientific surveys showing that global temperatures are rising.
While there are still debates raging between fossil-fuel-funded scientists & environmentalists over how much of the effect can be attributed to man-made causes, in truth IT DOESN'T MATTER! CO2 is a factor in the warming of the earth, and...
There's enough ice at the poles to put New York, LA, London and every other major costal city in the world under 50 foot of water. More than enough. How far above sea level do *you* live?
And there wouldn't be so much technophobic fear of nuclear power, which is our best shot at non-atmospheric-polluting power generation by far.
Which is only non-atmospheric-polluting if we can keep the byproducts safely housed for 10,000+ years. There are already fears for the integrity of the containment facilities at Sellafield, UK and they're not even 50 yet. If we could get the stuff cheaply into orbit though I'd have to agree with you that its our best shot by far..
Heh. As this is really the first time I've actually got off my ass & taken part in one of these protests slashdot seems to partial to, you've got to question my priorities. For what it's worth, here's my letter of protest:
Dear Sir/Madam,
Having purchased many fine Blizzard games over the years from Warcraft to Diablo 2, you've enjoyed my support - and indeed my many hours of unpaid technical support on battle.net.
Your recent actions regarding a piece of "open source" software called "bnetd" have come to my attention though, and have left a bad taste in my mouth.
As I understand it, a forked/modified version of the application has been made that supports of a "warezed" version of your Warcraft III beta test. What I fail to understand is the chain of events that lead to the forced closing of the UNMODIFIED project using a piece of legislation that is controversial at best.
I hope that members of the gaming community will receive clarification of your reasons behind your course of action in the near future.
I will be keeping a close eye on this one in the next few days. If this is true, I will be changing my plans to buy a new Radeon to buying a new nVidia card - because nVidia has never given me such a reason to distrust them.
Erm... Me Too. *grin*
Over the last couple of months I've started thinking about upgrading my graphics card, and I was thinking about the R8500 as well - the specs do look nice.
Having read most of the early reviews, I was looking forward to this card as the hardware's impressive, no doubt about it. But to have the driver writers *Deliberately Sacrificing Image Quality for Flattering Benchmark Results* is not something this potential customer was particularly happy finding out about.
This has the potential to really harm ATI.
No kidding. ATi have been loosing out to nVidia for some time now on all fronts, from the OEM to Mobile markets which historically are areas ATi were strong in. I think about the only thing they'll be able to do to save themselves from Chapter 11 is either a pay-per-view beheading of the schmuck responsible for the decision, or by selling their souls to Intel.
Looks like I'll have to get a Kyro II. Shame - I was looking forward to the DVD/Video capabilities of the ATi part, but there's nothing they can do now to persuade me they'll ever be able to produce usable drivers for any of their hardware.
Thanks for the post, and while I (naturally) agree with your conclusion AI is a software rather than a hardware problem, your comment
...one often neglects to notice the fact that human beings, with their neurons clicking away at petacycles per second, can only do arithmetic extremely poorly, at less than a flop!
only describes the calculations we carry out consciously. This doesn't really apply to the autistic lightning calculators - or even us when we're doing calculus to say, catch a ball or drive a car. Trying to think about what you're doing under those circumstances tends to make the task quite a bit harder..
(Is consciousness over-rated?:)
Is there anyone out there who knows more maths than me who's willing to tell me what my brain can do that a neural net of sufficient size can't?
Precisely. Diamond fibre is likely to be one of the first achievements that will have a broad impact on the world at large.
Buckminster-Fullerines (Bucky balls, tubes, and other assorted weirdness) have some excellent physical properties. The tubes, for example have the highest Young's modulus of any material currently available. They're also elastic, so snap back into their previous shape if bent, and when straight are an excellent conductor.
Oh yeah, we're already able to produce them at almost millimetre lengths.
Eric Drexler's 'Engines of Creation' is a great introduction, available free at www.foresight.org Although starting to get dated, it's a lot better than the posted story.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the fact they can finance all the candidates, ensuring they get their way rendering your vote useless against them.
The best chatbots I've come across are at www.a-i.com
Not quite good enough to pass the turing test yet, but some are quite witty.
Erm... I'm interested in what you're trying to say, but I don't really understand too well.
Could you explain?
If I get you right, we're all in a superposition already and nothing ever resolves itself, which would be patently untrue, wouldn't it?
Apparently Mr. Pratchett was approached by hollywood some years ago as they were interested in turning Mort into a film. The reason it never happened was because among the changes made, they wanted the "skeleton-guy" removed & he told them where to stick it.
Having seen the mess they made of Hitchhiker's Guide (and they had the nerve to stick Adam's name on the credits!) I'm glad nothing came of it.
I stumbled across this while meta-moderating btw, and it's the kind of thing I mod up when I get points. It's got none at time of writing, but I like the point being made - we need something to make identity theft harder to pull off, such as a password to go with the id, that is kept from the 3rd party who've requested proof of your id, but used by the government to inform said 3rd party you are who you say you are.
Though I remember reading something here once about security not existing in nature..
From the article:
So I wouldn't say the author's the idiot round here ;)
Yup, I'm yet another one of these professional Java developers that seem so numerous round here, and have been for some 5 very happy years or so.
I've looked at C# a little, but I'm not really familiar enough with it to diss it as I've no intention of ever learning it unless/until the employment choices offered by Java dry up - which I see no signs of happening yet, or at least for another couple of years.
As frequently mentioned, the use of Exception handling by less than competent developers - either empty catch blocks, or throwing the stack trace to stdout - IMHO just as bad quickly lead to an app behaving no better than any other poorly written app in any other language. How can you blame the lack of any error handling code in your app on the language you've used?
If C# only has unchecked exceptions (eqivalent to Java's RuntimeExceptions) - or makes the assumption that every method "throws Exception", you think those naff developers (and how I wish they would all jump ship to C#) will be writing more robust apps any time soon? I'd say it would make the task more difficult - It's the RuntimeExceptions that cause us most problems..
The Slashdot spam filter was the first thing that came to mind on reading this. Are we seeing excuses? ;)
The Eclipse GUI is written using SWT, which I'll agree both looks nice and is pretty responsive - under win2k at least, I haven't tried the linux version yet..
Sun's unlikely to use it, as SWT's IBM technology, and a directly competing API with the likes of AWT & Swing..
The reason for it's speed is the Java Native Interface (JNI) calls to the platform-dependent libraries, coded in C IIRC.
IMHO, if you're planning on writing a Java Desktop App then SWT's your only real choice - though respect to the LimeWire project for what they've achieved with Swing.
I don't know if I'm thick or something, but I had a fairly hard time getting into Iain M Banks, though I guess Excession wasn't a good novel to try & start with.
Consider Phlebas & Inversions are the two I just about managed to understand
Iain Banks has a friend called Ken MacLeod who I started following a couple of years back, with novels out like The Start Fraction, The Cassini Division and The Sky Road, with 3 nominations for the Arthur C Clark award & 1 for a Hugo.
I've just finished Cosmonaut Keep, the first in the Engines of Light series and have to say I rate it his best work to date - and shows not just the strengths that Bank's work does (who must have helped out) but has an inventiveness and originality of its own. Some parallels to Greg Bear.
Keep your eyes open for all the Geek references. Not just the references to aging geeks/coders, Slashdot, Linux, Microsoft, etc, but he has the gall to start the book with "you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike"!
Definately recommended, none the less.
Earth's average global temperature has risen 0.5C over the last 100 years.
There has only been a five degree change in average temperature since the coldest part of the ice age some 20,000 years ago.
I guess it depends on your definition of the word 'significant'. 5.0C hotter & the rise in sea levels will be closer to 200ft.
But as to the question of whether us humans have the right to (try to) control the global weather system..
I'm glad to see you've been modded down a little while I've been writing this reply, but you're basically repeating what Bush was saying when he abandoned the treaty.
Yes, China is the world's second biggest CO2 producer, at 0.67 tonnes per person, per year (11% of the total). America, however is the largest with ten times that figure (25% of the total). Everyone in the world needs to acknowledge their responsibilities.
We're beyond any discussions on whether global warming is real or not. We have conclusive, undeniable evidence collected from many unrelated scientific surveys showing that global temperatures are rising.
While there are still debates raging between fossil-fuel-funded scientists & environmentalists over how much of the effect can be attributed to man-made causes, in truth IT DOESN'T MATTER! CO2 is a factor in the warming of the earth, and...
There's enough ice at the poles to put New York, LA, London and every other major costal city in the world under 50 foot of water. More than enough. How far above sea level do *you* live?
Which is only non-atmospheric-polluting if we can keep the byproducts safely housed for 10,000+ years. There are already fears for the integrity of the containment facilities at Sellafield, UK and they're not even 50 yet. If we could get the stuff cheaply into orbit though I'd have to agree with you that its our best shot by far..
Heh. As this is really the first time I've actually got off my ass
& taken part in one of these protests slashdot seems to partial
to, you've got to question my priorities. For what it's worth,
here's my letter of protest:
Dear Sir/Madam,
Having purchased many fine Blizzard games over the years
from Warcraft to Diablo 2, you've enjoyed my support -
and indeed my many hours of unpaid technical support on
battle.net.
Your recent actions regarding a piece of "open source"
software called "bnetd" have come to my attention though,
and have left a bad taste in my mouth.
As I understand it, a forked/modified version of the
application has been made that supports of a "warezed"
version of your Warcraft III beta test. What I fail to
understand is the chain of events that lead to the forced
closing of the UNMODIFIED project using a piece of
legislation that is controversial at best.
I hope that members of the gaming community will receive
clarification of your reasons behind your course of action
in the near future.
Yours faithfully,
[signature]
Over the last couple of months I've started thinking about upgrading my graphics card, and I was thinking about the R8500 as well - the specs do look nice.
I'm not sure what it is I've got against nVidia, as this just isn't in the same league, but I'm hesitant about helping a rapidly-forming monopoly.
Having read most of the early reviews, I was looking forward to this card as the hardware's impressive, no doubt about it. But to have the driver writers *Deliberately Sacrificing Image Quality for Flattering Benchmark Results* is not something this potential customer was particularly happy finding out about. No kidding. ATi have been loosing out to nVidia for some time now on all fronts, from the OEM to Mobile markets which historically are areas ATi were strong in. I think about the only thing they'll be able to do to save themselves from Chapter 11 is either a pay-per-view beheading of the schmuck responsible for the decision, or by selling their souls to Intel.
Looks like I'll have to get a Kyro II. Shame - I was looking forward to the DVD/Video capabilities of the ATi part, but there's nothing they can do now to persuade me they'll ever be able to produce usable drivers for any of their hardware.
Thanks for the post, and while I (naturally) agree with your conclusion AI is a software rather than a hardware problem, your comment
only describes the calculations we carry out consciously. This doesn't really apply to the autistic lightning calculators - or even us when we're doing calculus to say, catch a ball or drive a car. Trying to think about what you're doing under those circumstances tends to make the task quite a bit harder..(Is consciousness over-rated? :)
Is there anyone out there who knows more maths than me who's willing to tell me what my brain can do that a neural net of sufficient size can't?
Totally impossible, isn't it?
I'm pretty certain most Glaswegians can't understand each other either. Or themselves, for that matter..
Reminds me of an old article I ran into on Usenet a few years back..
A student at college, Mary Emily Cummins fell foul of the institute's email address policy.
They took the first six letters of the surname followed by the initials of the forname. She ended up with cumminme@something.edu.
Would they allow her to change it? Of course not.
Precisely. Diamond fibre is likely to be one of the first achievements that will have a broad impact on the world at large.
Buckminster-Fullerines (Bucky balls, tubes, and other assorted weirdness) have some excellent physical properties. The tubes, for example have the highest Young's modulus of any material currently available. They're also elastic, so snap back into their previous shape if bent, and when straight are an excellent conductor.
Oh yeah, we're already able to produce them at almost millimetre lengths.
Eric Drexler's 'Engines of Creation' is a great introduction, available free at www.foresight.org
Although starting to get dated, it's a lot better than the posted story.