Mononoke is his most adult and maybe the most beautiful, but it left my virgin stomach in a knot from the lack of Hollywood tidiness of plot. It's also quite different from his other works.
Spirited Away is more representative of his other stuff, and probably the best of the rest of it. Interesting & engaging; also will twist a non-Japanese stomach.
The two above are the most recent (barring "Howl's") and IMO not second to any of the rest, so I'd say start with the two above. Now, I like his movies for the adventure & imagination, so this is my order of preference of the rest:
Laputa, & Nausicaa (I prefer Laputa, but I wouldn't miss Nausicaa either. It's based on a long series, I wish they'd managed to put more of it in the movie).
My Neighbor Totoro for kids but plenty imaginative and dang cute (secretly one of my favs).
Kiki's Delivery Service - good for 10-12 yr old girls but not much for anyone else (IMO; but then, I like imaginative stuff like I said).
Porco Rosso - Useless! Very early work; you can see the Miyazaki elements (cute little girls, strong young women & flying pirates) but other than that it's the bottom of the barrel (again IMO). For Miyazaki completists.
Note I haven't seen Howl's Moving Castle or Lupin III.
Though math is also fine (maybe better), for grad school. Grad school's where it's really at though.
My BS CS was kind of straight-laced and boring - I could see how someone, faced with the same kind of thing, could think it's not worth it. But the really interesting material comes at the higher levels, and if you go to a school with a graduate component you can get in on the research, which is the juice.
If you think knowing how to use stacks, queues, and databases is all there is though, you haven't seen what's out there, or what it takes.
But as for your main point, no, it's true, you don't need a CS degree to/do/ for-hire coding - just be decently smart. I'd say mostly what you get from the degree is practice! (and maybe knowledge of DBs & graphics or whatever).
I guess it surprises me that a kid could know that the movies wouldn't be the same as the books. You're fortunate, I hope I'm able to get it to my future kids via book the first time, too.
I've only read any of Charles Williams work (one book) but, it sucked (imo). I haven't read the others. But, Lewis wrote that he considered George MacDonald his master, and MacDonald wrote fantasy with Christian (more, moral) themes, which could be very beautiful and spiritual (not explicitly Christian). If you're interested in Lewis I'd investigate MacDonald before those others.
regardless. After a lot of Narnia stories you've gotten familiar with it. It's wonderful to 'step out of' it at that point and start from scratch with new characters, and a world bigger than Narnia. And then that turns into Narnia's beginning. Just in time then, for the series to return to the familiar characters, and finally end. I think "Magician's Nephew"'s published position bookends the series with great effect.
since they were my two favorite authors. One of Lewis' inspirations (he's said that he regarded him as his master) was George MacDonald. I agree. Now, not all of MacDonald's stuff is great, some of it is just hokey Victorian children's stories, but some has a spirit and spirituality that goes beyond Lewis in some direction. To anyone wanting to investigate I'd suggest collections of his short stories, 'The Golden Key' and 'The Wise Woman' being two of my favorites. My favorite passage of all though comes from one of his full books (which one I don't remember right now).
What Tolkien thought of MacDonald I don't recall, but his 'Smith of Wooten Major' is reminiscent to me, for its sense of something higher and unknown.
Funny you should say that - a story about sprintf
on
A Review of GCC 4.0
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
A prospective professor gave a talk at our school, he'd been working at some grid computing lab. Well their code was underperforming, so they profiled it and found that sprintf was taking 30? 50? 70? % (I forget) of their code time - the machines had to communicate with each other a lot, and they used sprintf to serialize. (It's an easy fix - C++'s stream operators are much faster, since the type is known at compile time.)
Oh yeah, also, for Quake 1, John Carmack hired Michael Abrash, an assembly language guru, to help out. Well Abrash found that GCC's memcpy() (or whatever it was) was copying byte-by-byte instead of by word (or something, I don't remember) and his reimplementation of that alone, doubled the frame rate!
Just some interesting counter examples to keep in mind:)
The notion of a hundred year language comes from the fact that some languages have been around for 50 years already, and there's little sign that they won't last another 50 (Fortran eg is still being written, and has a large code base as well). It's not hubris that makes him say his language will be around that long, there's a good chance of it. And since that's the length of time you're talking, it's worth a couple of years to get it right.
But, thanks for the link, I'll have to check that out.
Arc would probably get widely taken up
on
Practical Common Lisp
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Paul Graham's Arc is the great hope (there's a lot of interest in it at least). If it is elegant as promised I think Lispers would take it up. But, it's pretty ambitious and he appears stuck for the time being; the most recent I've heard on the subject is this comment (2nd down) at lemonodor. He's said he intends it to be a hundred-year language and that he'll take his time, so, everyone'll have to make do with CL for the while.
Somewhere around the time of the 3 & 4- 86, competitors started making compatible chips and giving them 3- & 4- ??? names. Intel tried to sue to prevent them from doing this, but the court ruled you can't copyright numbers. Thus their next iteration had a real name, the 'Pentium'.
Check out comp.lang.lisp to see for yourself. No one appreciates people asking them to do their work for them but, they're helpful to people earnestly trying to learn.
The Pentarch story could be correct, and have divided the Jewish and Arab people, but Islam the religion started much later. Before Islam, Arabs' religions were tribal things of one sort or another (I'm not a scholar). It was Mohammed who converted pretty much the whole Arab world, later (~600AD), to Islam.
Here's a link to wikipedia on how Muslims view Jews & Christians BTW.
Are you thinking about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? If so, no, that's when, according to tradition, the Jews split from the Arabs. But/Islam/ sprang up in, what, the AD 600s sometime (from memory, I didn't look this up).
back to one of the older forms. Don't ask me why it's ok to/be/ a Christian but not, for a Muslim to convert to one, but that's how it is. It's very bad for them to convert. Too much more detail I couldn't give you, this is all just from a couple conversations with a (peaceful-style) Muslim officemate.
Christians enjoy feeling hated & persecuted too much IMO - I don't think aside from some contempt for fighting evolution, no-one cares. Only in your 'Left Behind' books are you the center of the world.
Who hates Christians? Not even Moslems do (well in 'Crusader' form maybe). What they hate is having the US put their fingers all over their affairs and supporting Israel (Osama has said so, several times, consistently). Did you know that Muslims believe that Christians are also Believers? Jews are version 1, Christians version 2, and Muslims version 3 so to speak, when God finally ensured that his message didn't get corrupted. But they're all still Believers.
But for sure, Bush is in very little way similar to Jesus. Unfortunately I think Christians 'consume' Christianity; they use Christianity as an adjunct to their lives instead of making their lives conform to Christ. It's hard to blame them though, that's a hard thing.
Does U Toronto have a graduate program? (too lazy to look myself, sorry). You should know that computer science (and its applications) gets more interesting the higher up you go, like math. If you have a graduate program there, take a grad class or two that look interesting before you write school off. Undergrad curricula are basically learning to program, data structures, and a few odds & ends (DB, graphics maybe). But in grad school the world opens up - bioinformatics, robotics, logic & constraint programming, machine learning - real, varied problems to solve. Don't judge computer science by what you learn as an undergrad. If you're restless take a break but don't write school off. Grad school is the difference between being a code monkey and a professional doing something interesting. If you're at all smart you'll get tired of code monkeying in a few years and want more - I did - and grad school mostly delivers.
a few years ago, without (IIRC) the extensible language part. I don't remember who. Sorry to worsen your pain but, ideas themselves are cheap; implemented ideas are what make the world go 'round.
The good news is that, everyones' thinking of this means that hopefully it's an idea whose time has come. I sure hope so.
Yes, that's what I meant. But I guess Scheme went ahead despite that happening to its authors. But anyway, re-reading this, written Oct 2003 (from 'Some Work on..'), mostly reassures me:
The longer answer is that the project is now in the third of four stages. The plan was (a) to make a crappy initial version of Arc, (b) use that for a while in real applications, then (c) go back and write a complete, cleaned up language spec, and (d) use that as the basis of a fairly good implementation.
I'm in phase (c) now. I don't know how much longer it will take to finish the spec.
I posted just to extend the conversation about Arc, really;:). For a refresher fix, theres's always his Arc page.
Slashdot Mirror
Mononoke is his most adult and maybe the most beautiful, but it left my virgin stomach in a knot from the lack of Hollywood tidiness of plot. It's also quite different from his other works.
Spirited Away is more representative of his other stuff, and probably the best of the rest of it. Interesting & engaging; also will twist a non-Japanese stomach.
The two above are the most recent (barring "Howl's") and IMO not second to any of the rest, so I'd say start with the two above. Now, I like his movies for the adventure & imagination, so this is my order of preference of the rest:
Laputa, & Nausicaa (I prefer Laputa, but I wouldn't miss Nausicaa either. It's based on a long series, I wish they'd managed to put more of it in the movie).
My Neighbor Totoro for kids but plenty imaginative and dang cute (secretly one of my favs).
Kiki's Delivery Service - good for 10-12 yr old girls but not much for anyone else (IMO; but then, I like imaginative stuff like I said).
Porco Rosso - Useless! Very early work; you can see the Miyazaki elements (cute little girls, strong young women & flying pirates) but other than that it's the bottom of the barrel (again IMO). For Miyazaki completists.
Note I haven't seen Howl's Moving Castle or Lupin III.
except that slash doesn't allow no text.
Though math is also fine (maybe better), for grad school. Grad school's where it's really at though.
/do/ for-hire coding - just be decently smart. I'd say mostly what you get from the degree is practice! (and maybe knowledge of DBs & graphics or whatever).
My BS CS was kind of straight-laced and boring - I could see how someone, faced with the same kind of thing, could think it's not worth it. But the really interesting material comes at the higher levels, and if you go to a school with a graduate component you can get in on the research, which is the juice.
If you think knowing how to use stacks, queues, and databases is all there is though, you haven't seen what's out there, or what it takes.
But as for your main point, no, it's true, you don't need a CS degree to
passionately curious" - Einstein.
Just karma whoring.
in its general direction.
I guess it surprises me that a kid could know that the movies wouldn't be the same as the books. You're fortunate, I hope I'm able to get it to my future kids via book the first time, too.
I've only read any of Charles Williams work (one book) but, it sucked (imo). I haven't read the others. But, Lewis wrote that he considered George MacDonald his master, and MacDonald wrote fantasy with Christian (more, moral) themes, which could be very beautiful and spiritual (not explicitly Christian). If you're interested in Lewis I'd investigate MacDonald before those others.
regardless. After a lot of Narnia stories you've gotten familiar with it. It's wonderful to 'step out of' it at that point and start from scratch with new characters, and a world bigger than Narnia. And then that turns into Narnia's beginning. Just in time then, for the series to return to the familiar characters, and finally end. I think "Magician's Nephew"'s published position bookends the series with great effect.
since they were my two favorite authors. One of Lewis' inspirations (he's said that he regarded him as his master) was George MacDonald. I agree. Now, not all of MacDonald's stuff is great, some of it is just hokey Victorian children's stories, but some has a spirit and spirituality that goes beyond Lewis in some direction. To anyone wanting to investigate I'd suggest collections of his short stories, 'The Golden Key' and 'The Wise Woman' being two of my favorites. My favorite passage of all though comes from one of his full books (which one I don't remember right now).
What Tolkien thought of MacDonald I don't recall, but his 'Smith of Wooten Major' is reminiscent to me, for its sense of something higher and unknown.
A prospective professor gave a talk at our school, he'd been working at some grid computing lab. Well their code was underperforming, so they profiled it and found that sprintf was taking 30? 50? 70? % (I forget) of their code time - the machines had to communicate with each other a lot, and they used sprintf to serialize. (It's an easy fix - C++'s stream operators are much faster, since the type is known at compile time.)
:)
Oh yeah, also, for Quake 1, John Carmack hired Michael Abrash, an assembly language guru, to help out. Well Abrash found that GCC's memcpy() (or whatever it was) was copying byte-by-byte instead of by word (or something, I don't remember) and his reimplementation of that alone, doubled the frame rate!
Just some interesting counter examples to keep in mind
The notion of a hundred year language comes from the fact that some languages have been around for 50 years already, and there's little sign that they won't last another 50 (Fortran eg is still being written, and has a large code base as well). It's not hubris that makes him say his language will be around that long, there's a good chance of it. And since that's the length of time you're talking, it's worth a couple of years to get it right.
But, thanks for the link, I'll have to check that out.
Paul Graham's Arc is the great hope (there's a lot of interest in it at least). If it is elegant as promised I think Lispers would take it up. But, it's pretty ambitious and he appears stuck for the time being; the most recent I've heard on the subject is this comment (2nd down) at lemonodor. He's said he intends it to be a hundred-year language and that he'll take his time, so, everyone'll have to make do with CL for the while.
Perhaps I'm evil, not supporting bn.com but, it's a massive difference in price - cheap enough to pick up casually.
Somewhere around the time of the 3 & 4- 86, competitors started making compatible chips and giving them 3- & 4- ??? names. Intel tried to sue to prevent them from doing this, but the court ruled you can't copyright numbers. Thus their next iteration had a real name, the 'Pentium'.
Check out comp.lang.lisp to see for yourself. No one appreciates people asking them to do their work for them but, they're helpful to people earnestly trying to learn.
Here's a link to wikipedia on how Muslims view Jews & Christians BTW.
Are you thinking about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? If so, no, that's when, according to tradition, the Jews split from the Arabs. But /Islam/ sprang up in, what, the AD 600s sometime (from memory, I didn't look this up).
back to one of the older forms. Don't ask me why it's ok to /be/ a Christian but not, for a Muslim to convert to one, but that's how it is. It's very bad for them to convert. Too much more detail I couldn't give you, this is all just from a couple conversations with a (peaceful-style) Muslim officemate.
Christians enjoy feeling hated & persecuted too much IMO - I don't think aside from some contempt for fighting evolution, no-one cares. Only in your 'Left Behind' books are you the center of the world.
Who hates Christians? Not even Moslems do (well in 'Crusader' form maybe). What they hate is having the US put their fingers all over their affairs and supporting Israel (Osama has said so, several times, consistently). Did you know that Muslims believe that Christians are also Believers? Jews are version 1, Christians version 2, and Muslims version 3 so to speak, when God finally ensured that his message didn't get corrupted. But they're all still Believers.
But for sure, Bush is in very little way similar to Jesus. Unfortunately I think Christians 'consume' Christianity; they use Christianity as an adjunct to their lives instead of making their lives conform to Christ. It's hard to blame them though, that's a hard thing.
- those Christians! - is making me want to bomb something.
I can't think of what though.
Pretty painful, and IIRC depressing.
Does U Toronto have a graduate program? (too lazy to look myself, sorry). You should know that computer science (and its applications) gets more interesting the higher up you go, like math. If you have a graduate program there, take a grad class or two that look interesting before you write school off. Undergrad curricula are basically learning to program, data structures, and a few odds & ends (DB, graphics maybe). But in grad school the world opens up - bioinformatics, robotics, logic & constraint programming, machine learning - real, varied problems to solve. Don't judge computer science by what you learn as an undergrad. If you're restless take a break but don't write school off. Grad school is the difference between being a code monkey and a professional doing something interesting. If you're at all smart you'll get tired of code monkeying in a few years and want more - I did - and grad school mostly delivers.
a few years ago, without (IIRC) the extensible language part. I don't remember who. Sorry to worsen your pain but, ideas themselves are cheap; implemented ideas are what make the world go 'round.
The good news is that, everyones' thinking of this means that hopefully it's an idea whose time has come. I sure hope so.
It's got Stuff, contributing to the conversation...