Oh, and that virus was protected by international copyright law. By spreading the virus without charge, you may run into some legal problems.
Actually, this reminds me of something someone brought up on Bugtraq.
Consider that now virus scanners will have to look "inside" a PDF file to see if there is a virus there. But what if, da-dum, the PDF is encrypted?
Let's, erm... assume that PDF's super-secure-don't-worry-about-a-thing encryption could be (gasp!) broken. Then the good thing to do would be for the virus scanners to break the encryption and look for viruses inside. But of courrse, as certain poeple have discovered, it's not considered a good thing to decrypt PDFs, unless you are using offical nice-and-expensive Adobe software, even if the purpose for doing so it totally legal.
So basically Adobe has created a legally and technologically protected virus transmission scheme, that nobody can scan for.
At least it only works in the full Acrobat versions.
Maybe there is a way to convert mp3 to wav to ogg in a bash script. I really haven't researched it.
Yeah, I wrote something like that a while back (which I now cannot find). Basically it used "mpg123 -s", which dumps the raw WAV to stdout, and piped it into oggenc). Obviously there isn't much point to doing it as far as sound quality goes, but I felt nice that less of my music was in a patented format.
Since I don't have a hardware player of any sort (unless you count various PCs, of course), the lack of them for Ogg doesn't really matter for me (though I could see how that would be a major issue for people that do have them).
I did note that Ogg with 256 kbit (average VBR) was usually noticably smaller than the same song encoded with 256 kbit MP3. Over an entire CD it came out to around 5 megs difference, IIRC. And it certainly sounded the same to me, though I'll admit that my sound card is very poor quality (my speakers are actually really nice, I really need to replace that card...)
If you find yourself interested by this article, you should probably subscribe to the readhat watch lists. I moslty do so because they send security alerts for Redhat there, but I found out about the beta a couple of days ago thanks to that.
Now if only they would put out RH 7.2 for SPARC. Sigh. Probably not. Actually, any news about a new Redhat for Alpha?
What happens is that equipment that no one needs gets stashed there and forgotten. I've dug up everything from high precision mirrors to fiber optic by the yard, and bits of machined metal I couldn't identify but thought looked cool. It helps if your department hasn't redecorated and refurbished its digs in a long, long time.
I use to work in the physics dept at my school (JHU). The phyiscs department building is brand new (it's this crazy fortess), but nonetheless I get the feeling there are tens of thousands of strange artifacts waiting to be discovered in the rooms in the basement. This is probably influenced by going into the room with the VBNS routers, and finding hundreds of... old rotary phones. Just sitting there in a huge pile. If they've got that there, who knows what else they've got...
Actually when the local ACM chapter changed rooms, we inherited maybe 100+ feet of fiber. Didn't have any use for it, but it was kind of odd...
why all these projects seem hell-bent on writing thier own C# compilers, when it's probably a _lot_ simpler to write a GCC frontend.
Now I know, GCC is not perfect (by a long shot...). But it seems reasonable (to me) that C# be part of GCC. I mean, not all compiled languages are supported by GCC, but it seems to do a decent job of supporting C-like languages, C, C++, Java, Objective-C, plus odd and ends like Fortran, Ada, Pascal (?), etc. And as a bonus you immediately get native code generation.
And the whole idea of writing a C# compiler in C#... I mean... c'mon people. Must we repeat the lesssons of Sun's JDK and Jikes once again?
I image that the (hypothetical) C# GCC frontend and the (already existing) Java GCC frontend could probably share a pretty decent amount of code, as well.
will be selling an all-in-one media system that will have GameCube hardware and DVD playback. It looks like a shinier vesion of the Cube with more buttons.
You don't happen to have a link to some details about this beast, do you? I've been considering waiting on buying a Gamecube until these come out, as DVD playing would be a nice bonus (assuming one of my housemates doesn't go and buy one first, of course).
Being a (very minor) Pokemon fan (the Pokenmon manga is suprisingly deep, actually [not deep, deep, but much less commercially and formulaic than the cartoon]), I won't respond to the second part of your response (BTW, to my knowledge, purple has nothing to do with Pokemon... though I don't play the games or whatever, so I suppose I could be wrong on that score).
And Pikachu is my favorite character in Smash Brothers.:) Good speed, decent attacks, and with teleport you're damn hard to kill.
Even if they were 3.5" DVDs (which I've never heard of), they would still only be able to hold less than 1/2 of what an Xbox or PS2 can on a single disc. So much for nice large textures on the games....
Actually:
a) It's proprietary to Nintendo and Matsushita (probably based on DVD technology), and can hold about 1.5 Gigs.
b) Sometime next spring, a version will be released which can play DVDs.
And anyway... who the hell cares? I mean, do you buy PC games based on how much space they take up on your disk? Or how fun they are the play?
I really don't understand people who keep comparing these 3 consoles on the basis of fill rate/clock speed/memory speed/whatever. How does this detirmine:
a) Which one will have the best games. Obviously a subjective question, but fortunately I already know _my_ answer.
b) Which ones will look the nicest. X-Box has like... what, twice the "speed" of Gamecube? Then why was everyone so impressed with Gamecube at E3? This is one problem throwing hardware at is not going to help.
Not to mention the fact that the thing is gonna be in *cough* Pokemon colors.
You know... the Gamecube has always been shown in multiple colors (black, purple (which I happen to like), silver, and a couple of others). You can get N64 in four or five different colors and I imagine Nintendo will keep doing that (hey, it worked for the iMac).
I don't see how purple is related to Pokemon, BTW. Could you please clarify?
But there is no way for you to factor any of these numbers while you're still alive. Last year the RSA 512 bit number was factored. It required about 9 months on ~400 Alphas and Pentium IIs, plus (and this is the kicker), about 4 weeks on a really huge supercomputer (I think about 2 weeks at the start, and 2 and at the end). You need like 4 gigs of RAM (at least, more as the numbers get longer) to do this.
The supercomputer steps cannot be done in parrallel - it's a huge linear algebra problem. You would have to find a new factoring algorithm if you wanted to make it a distributed.net-style problem.
Mainframe make the Transformers look more fluid than these characters.
I disagree. While I loved Beast Wars, the animation really wasn't that fluid. It didn't have to be. They were robots. Who really knows how a giagantic robot (or even a giant talking gorilla) is going to move? Even if you have a rough idea, it's not an innate piece of knowledge, like you know how a human moves.
Though for the time the animation in Beast Wars was phenoemnally good.
I saw the last part of it on Sci-fi a few weeks back, and was really impressed at how well it actually followed the book. The Dune series has always been one of my favorite books, and while some of the effects looked a little cheapo (not bad considering the budget was probably not Hollywood-blockbuster big), the way that entire blocks of dialog and scenes were taken directly from the book was really great. Hopefully these new ones will keep that up. I want to "see" Frank Herbert's book * of Dune, I don't want something that's kind of similiar to what happened in * of Dune.
I never really liked Lynch's Dune movie, because it seemed in many ways totally unrelated to the book.
Is anyone else sick of the 'titanium' buzzword that everyone is in love with?
I saw this guy on TV, selling titanium kitchen knives. He talked about how strong it was, becauseit was developed for the space program, etc....
Well, I haven't seen stuff like that, but I can imagine it might get irritating after a while (I spend most of my time raging at the fact that ads for Shrek and Cats&Dogs come on every single damn commercial break when I'm watching Dragonball).
Titanium is very strong for it's weight... but that's it.
Don't forget it also looks cool.:)
You make a good point. I suppose if they can ever come out with some sort of composite material which:
a) Doesn't make the machine look like a block of charcoal (aka every PC laptop in existence), which I detest.
b) Is light (like titanium)
c) Is tough (like steel)
I might stop lusting after the Powerbook so much.
But I always figured the whole point of the Cube was to look cool (and it was IMHO a great success there), and Titatium would be great for that. Additionally, the cracking problems would go away then.
The GNU part of GNU\Linux is all about taking existing commerical tools and implementing them in an open-source\free way
Ignoring, of course, the millions of enhancements and new programs added by FSF and friends. Ever try using vi on Solaris? It's not that nice. Or Emacs? Oh, wait, RMS basically invented Emacs from scratch (based on some ideas from... Gosmacs? Something like that).
XFree86 is a free implementation of the X-Server design
BZZT. XFree86 is an enhancement of X11R6, which is avialable for free, just like XFree86, under the MIT license, from the X Consortium (now part of the Open Group, which I think is part of something else now). The only non-free versions of X are those that run on non-Unix operating systems.
OpenOffice is a massive attempt to compete with MS-Office and be an Office-workalike.
Agreed. Though obviously pre-existing tools like LaTeX are far superior to either if you actually care about quality.
Mozilla is an attempt to movie what was Navigator into the modern, spec-compliant age and wrest control back from IE.
Who said anything about IE? I like Mozilla because it's better than Netscape 4.77, that's it. Anyway, I don't see how this one supports your argument. It's not cloning IE, it's just updating Netscape.
SAMBA is a major project to attempt to imitate to the point of compatibility SMB sharing in Windows.
Just like: Windows TCP/IP is a major attempt to imitate to the point of compatibility the Internet code of 4.2 BSD and friends. It can go both ways, my friend.
This is true -- it's unlike anything you've ever used before. But that's not a bad thing, necessarily! This is a different way of thinking about programming, and many people feel it's better than the traditional procedural models.
I didn't say it was bad. In many ways it's a rather nice language. And it has a perfectly valid approach to programming, which happens to be almost completely different from the languages most people know (C, C++, Java, Perl, etc). So it can be very hard to get the hang of sometimes.
Almost no diagnostics? Did you use the debugger? ocamldebug has many features of gdb, supposedly.
Hrmm... I'll try it out. The thing is, I've never had to use a debugger before, for any language. If that's what's needed, then OK. But I don't really like that apperantly the only way to get decent diagnostics is to use the debbugger. What about a "-w" switch for ocaml? Ah, well...
(case in point: how many good C books are there? what about LISP?).
Well, I don't know Lisp (except for basic Emacs Lisp), but I would say there is one good C book - K&R. But one good book is really all you need. I guess there are some good books about ML (or at least books, presumably at least one is good), but so far nothing about Caml/O'Caml.
You make it sound so painful!:)
OK, I'll admit it didn't help that I was on tight deadlines to write programs in O'Caml. So I couldn't just lay back and take a break if I wanted to.
Not knowing your development platform's quirks (every one of them has them) is not an excuse.
Of course not. OTOH, this error makes absolutely no sense. It's like gcc just printing out "Error: foo". It's totalay unhelpful and if you're trying to learn the language that's pretty irritating. I've seen some bad C++ template type mixups before, but even then there is usually at least some information. This is just saying "Hi! I'm the O'caml system! I don't like this! Please change it to something I do like".
(BTW, I was not in the top-loop when I saw that error - I was doing "ocaml myfile.ml").
I can see many of my programs being written in OCaml from now on.
Ok, about O'caml [O'caml = Objective Caml = a variant of ML with objects]. I had to use it for a PL class last semester. It's kind of nice, but don't expect it to be in any way like any language you've ever used (unless you know some other ML variant, of course).
In many ways it's very nice. In other ways it will drive you absolutely insane. For example, O'caml has very strong typing rules (which are good). It has almost no diagnostics when it decides it doesn't like your code (which is very very bad). It also apperantly sometimes gets very confused. For example, sometimes you'll get something like this:
foo.ml, line 100, chars 16-30: this expression has type int, but is used here with type int
This can be a little maddening after a few hours.
Other annoyances: no function overloading. So to print a string, use print_string. To print an int, use print_int. And so on. This is just how it works (I think you can write a wrapper which will check the type and dispatch the right call, but that's fairly irritating in and of itself).
Another thing that irritates me (probably just because I'm from a C/C++/Perl background), is that sometimes you use no ';' to end a statement, sometimes one, sometimes a pair.
Also, I found the documentation to be very erratic (the modules docs are quite complete, but try finding simple examples of how to do OO, without reading the BNF grammar they put in the docs - that's no way to learn a language).
Nice stuff: strong typing, cool type matching stuff, bytecode and native compilers, seems like a decent module system.
But if you don't already know it, good luck. You'll need it.
In a lot of states, sodomy is illegal, but how many of you have gotten busted getting/giving 'moral and legal' head
Probably not many. This is slashdot, after all.
[Ducks head to avoid tomatoes/bricks/moderation]
Re:Tell me what THIS is good for?
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
Just look at this thing.... Is someone going to haul a load of manure in this thing? Or throw a bunch of lumber in the back? What good is it for?
LOL. Yeah, I remember seeing a preview of one of these things on TV last summer. I remarked to my Mom that I thought it was funny that anyone would want it, because anyone who actually bought one would never use the bed for fear of scratching up their paint job. Fscking ridiculous.
It doesn't even look like it has much bed space - more like an SUV with the end cut off and a tiny bed welded onto the back.
I suspect I would feel physically ill if I ever actually saw one of those things, it's such a waste of metal (my dad has a 1965 Chevy - now that's a truck <g>)
Re:The only thing that helps is taxes
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 1
Ever consider that folks living in rural parts may need a four-wheel vehicle to get to and from their homes (next time you eat something, remember us - your food didn't grow at Albertsons).
Where I'm from (specifically, a rural area), we call those things "trucks". Ever try to haul a tractor or a cord of firewood in an SUV?
Could it be that Square didn't ask them because they knew they would say no?
Maybe, but that seems pretty unlikely. If they asked for one and Nintendo turned them down, they could make Nintendo look like the bad guys holding a grudge against a developer, and more likely than not fans of Squaresoft games would go yell at Nintendo, etc.
Also, even if Nintendo has differences with Squaresoft, I highly doubt they would go so far as to do something like that. They're launching a new console in the face of heavy opposition. They need all the help they can get.
Really. I read some review for DVD/MPEG-4 encoding (on Tom's, I think), which basically decided that all for all the Duron 800 was the best CPU if you wanted to do that stuff a lot. I liked that: it's not the fastest, but it was 70 or 80% of the speed of the fastest while being 1/N as much.
I mean, if all you care about is having tons and tons of Flops, go buy an Alpha or R10000 (or IA-64 (<g>)). Performance isn't everything, at least not for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and that virus was protected by international copyright law. By spreading the virus without charge, you may run into some legal problems.
Actually, this reminds me of something someone brought up on Bugtraq.
Consider that now virus scanners will have to look "inside" a PDF file to see if there is a virus there. But what if, da-dum, the PDF is encrypted?
Let's, erm... assume that PDF's super-secure-don't-worry-about-a-thing encryption could be (gasp!) broken. Then the good thing to do would be for the virus scanners to break the encryption and look for viruses inside. But of courrse, as certain poeple have discovered, it's not considered a good thing to decrypt PDFs, unless you are using offical nice-and-expensive Adobe software, even if the purpose for doing so it totally legal.
So basically Adobe has created a legally and technologically protected virus transmission scheme, that nobody can scan for.
At least it only works in the full Acrobat versions.
Maybe there is a way to convert mp3 to wav to ogg in a bash script. I really haven't researched it.
Yeah, I wrote something like that a while back (which I now cannot find). Basically it used "mpg123 -s", which dumps the raw WAV to stdout, and piped it into oggenc). Obviously there isn't much point to doing it as far as sound quality goes, but I felt nice that less of my music was in a patented format.
Since I don't have a hardware player of any sort (unless you count various PCs, of course), the lack of them for Ogg doesn't really matter for me (though I could see how that would be a major issue for people that do have them).
I did note that Ogg with 256 kbit (average VBR) was usually noticably smaller than the same song encoded with 256 kbit MP3. Over an entire CD it came out to around 5 megs difference, IIRC. And it certainly sounded the same to me, though I'll admit that my sound card is very poor quality (my speakers are actually really nice, I really need to replace that card...)
If you find yourself interested by this article, you should probably subscribe to the readhat watch lists. I moslty do so because they send security alerts for Redhat there, but I found out about the beta a couple of days ago thanks to that.
Now if only they would put out RH 7.2 for SPARC. Sigh. Probably not. Actually, any news about a new Redhat for Alpha?
The best source for Ricochet modems for use in peer-to-peer networking is eBay. Many former customers sell their equipment there.
:)
Hah, I should have thought of that. Where else can you buy damn near anything?
Wow, looks like they're going pretty cheap, too.
Thanks!
I guess Baltimore does have/had a Ricochet network, so this is fairly academic, but...
Can I/will I be able to buy one of these modems? Back home (rural Oregon), there isn't any such network, so the P2P will work.
I figure that if they're going out of business you might be able to buy their remaining stock cheap?
What happens is that equipment that no one needs gets stashed there and forgotten. I've dug up everything from high precision mirrors to fiber optic by the yard, and bits of machined metal I couldn't identify but thought looked cool. It helps if your department hasn't redecorated and refurbished its digs in a long, long time.
... old rotary phones. Just sitting there in a huge pile. If they've got that there, who knows what else they've got...
I use to work in the physics dept at my school (JHU). The phyiscs department building is brand new (it's this crazy fortess), but nonetheless I get the feeling there are tens of thousands of strange artifacts waiting to be discovered in the rooms in the basement. This is probably influenced by going into the room with the VBNS routers, and finding hundreds of
Actually when the local ACM chapter changed rooms, we inherited maybe 100+ feet of fiber. Didn't have any use for it, but it was kind of odd...
why all these projects seem hell-bent on writing thier own C# compilers, when it's probably a _lot_ simpler to write a GCC frontend.
Now I know, GCC is not perfect (by a long shot...). But it seems reasonable (to me) that C# be part of GCC. I mean, not all compiled languages are supported by GCC, but it seems to do a decent job of supporting C-like languages, C, C++, Java, Objective-C, plus odd and ends like Fortran, Ada, Pascal (?), etc. And as a bonus you immediately get native code generation.
And the whole idea of writing a C# compiler in C#... I mean... c'mon people. Must we repeat the lesssons of Sun's JDK and Jikes once again?
I image that the (hypothetical) C# GCC frontend and the (already existing) Java GCC frontend could probably share a pretty decent amount of code, as well.
will be selling an all-in-one media system that will have GameCube hardware and DVD playback. It looks like a shinier vesion of the Cube with more buttons.
:) Good speed, decent attacks, and with teleport you're damn hard to kill.
You don't happen to have a link to some details about this beast, do you? I've been considering waiting on buying a Gamecube until these come out, as DVD playing would be a nice bonus (assuming one of my housemates doesn't go and buy one first, of course).
Being a (very minor) Pokemon fan (the Pokenmon manga is suprisingly deep, actually [not deep, deep, but much less commercially and formulaic than the cartoon]), I won't respond to the second part of your response (BTW, to my knowledge, purple has nothing to do with Pokemon... though I don't play the games or whatever, so I suppose I could be wrong on that score).
And Pikachu is my favorite character in Smash Brothers.
Even if they were 3.5" DVDs (which I've never heard of), they would still only be able to hold less than 1/2 of what an Xbox or PS2 can on a single disc. So much for nice large textures on the games....
Actually:
a) It's proprietary to Nintendo and Matsushita (probably based on DVD technology), and can hold about 1.5 Gigs.
b) Sometime next spring, a version will be released which can play DVDs.
And anyway... who the hell cares? I mean, do you buy PC games based on how much space they take up on your disk? Or how fun they are the play?
I really don't understand people who keep comparing these 3 consoles on the basis of fill rate/clock speed/memory speed/whatever. How does this detirmine:
a) Which one will have the best games. Obviously a subjective question, but fortunately I already know _my_ answer.
b) Which ones will look the nicest. X-Box has like... what, twice the "speed" of Gamecube? Then why was everyone so impressed with Gamecube at E3? This is one problem throwing hardware at is not going to help.
Not to mention the fact that the thing is gonna be in *cough* Pokemon colors.
You know... the Gamecube has always been shown in multiple colors (black, purple (which I happen to like), silver, and a couple of others). You can get N64 in four or five different colors and I imagine Nintendo will keep doing that (hey, it worked for the iMac).
I don't see how purple is related to Pokemon, BTW. Could you please clarify?
But there is no way for you to factor any of these numbers while you're still alive. Last year the RSA 512 bit number was factored. It required about 9 months on ~400 Alphas and Pentium IIs, plus (and this is the kicker), about 4 weeks on a really huge supercomputer (I think about 2 weeks at the start, and 2 and at the end). You need like 4 gigs of RAM (at least, more as the numbers get longer) to do this.
The supercomputer steps cannot be done in parrallel - it's a huge linear algebra problem. You would have to find a new factoring algorithm if you wanted to make it a distributed.net-style problem.
Mainframe make the Transformers look more fluid than these characters.
I disagree. While I loved Beast Wars, the animation really wasn't that fluid. It didn't have to be. They were robots. Who really knows how a giagantic robot (or even a giant talking gorilla) is going to move? Even if you have a rough idea, it's not an innate piece of knowledge, like you know how a human moves.
Though for the time the animation in Beast Wars was phenoemnally good.
Certainly it's a nice hack, but will Adobe make Photoshop for it?
Heh. Will Adobe make Photoshop for OS X?
once the companies start releasing their flagship[0] Mac products for OSX I think this will be relegated to the "cool hack" pile
I would say s/once/if ever/
And what's wrong with a cool hack? Of course OS X is really damn nice, but does that somehow mean Linux on PPC is useless? I don't.
I saw the last part of it on Sci-fi a few weeks back, and was really impressed at how well it actually followed the book. The Dune series has always been one of my favorite books, and while some of the effects looked a little cheapo (not bad considering the budget was probably not Hollywood-blockbuster big), the way that entire blocks of dialog and scenes were taken directly from the book was really great. Hopefully these new ones will keep that up. I want to "see" Frank Herbert's book * of Dune, I don't want something that's kind of similiar to what happened in * of Dune.
I never really liked Lynch's Dune movie, because it seemed in many ways totally unrelated to the book.
perhaps not quite as shiny, not ulike Al.
But lighter - nice for laptops and, to a lesser extent, something like the Cube. Al is less silvery, too.
Where did you see charcoal black Ti?
No, I meant the normal black plastic laptops (sorry, I guess my first statement was kind of confusing by not mentioning plastic).
Is anyone else sick of the 'titanium' buzzword that everyone is in love with?
:)
I saw this guy on TV, selling titanium kitchen knives. He talked about how strong it was, becauseit was developed for the space program, etc....
Well, I haven't seen stuff like that, but I can imagine it might get irritating after a while (I spend most of my time raging at the fact that ads for Shrek and Cats&Dogs come on every single damn commercial break when I'm watching Dragonball).
Titanium is very strong for it's weight... but that's it.
Don't forget it also looks cool.
You make a good point. I suppose if they can ever come out with some sort of composite material which:
a) Doesn't make the machine look like a block of charcoal (aka every PC laptop in existence), which I detest.
b) Is light (like titanium)
c) Is tough (like steel)
I might stop lusting after the Powerbook so much.
But I always figured the whole point of the Cube was to look cool (and it was IMHO a great success there), and Titatium would be great for that. Additionally, the cracking problems would go away then.
The GNU part of GNU\Linux is all about taking existing commerical tools and implementing them in an open-source\free way
Ignoring, of course, the millions of enhancements and new programs added by FSF and friends. Ever try using vi on Solaris? It's not that nice. Or Emacs? Oh, wait, RMS basically invented Emacs from scratch (based on some ideas from... Gosmacs? Something like that).
XFree86 is a free implementation of the X-Server design
BZZT. XFree86 is an enhancement of X11R6, which is avialable for free, just like XFree86, under the MIT license, from the X Consortium (now part of the Open Group, which I think is part of something else now). The only non-free versions of X are those that run on non-Unix operating systems.
OpenOffice is a massive attempt to compete with MS-Office and be an Office-workalike.
Agreed. Though obviously pre-existing tools like LaTeX are far superior to either if you actually care about quality.
Mozilla is an attempt to movie what was Navigator into the modern, spec-compliant age and wrest control back from IE.
Who said anything about IE? I like Mozilla because it's better than Netscape 4.77, that's it. Anyway, I don't see how this one supports your argument. It's not cloning IE, it's just updating Netscape.
SAMBA is a major project to attempt to imitate to the point of compatibility SMB sharing in Windows.
Just like: Windows TCP/IP is a major attempt to imitate to the point of compatibility the Internet code of 4.2 BSD and friends. It can go both ways, my friend.
This is true -- it's unlike anything you've ever used before. But that's not a bad thing, necessarily! This is a different way of thinking about programming, and many people feel it's better than the traditional procedural models.
:)
I didn't say it was bad. In many ways it's a rather nice language. And it has a perfectly valid approach to programming, which happens to be almost completely different from the languages most people know (C, C++, Java, Perl, etc). So it can be very hard to get the hang of sometimes.
Almost no diagnostics? Did you use the debugger? ocamldebug has many features of gdb, supposedly.
Hrmm... I'll try it out. The thing is, I've never had to use a debugger before, for any language. If that's what's needed, then OK. But I don't really like that apperantly the only way to get decent diagnostics is to use the debbugger. What about a "-w" switch for ocaml? Ah, well...
(case in point: how many good C books are there? what about LISP?).
Well, I don't know Lisp (except for basic Emacs Lisp), but I would say there is one good C book - K&R. But one good book is really all you need. I guess there are some good books about ML (or at least books, presumably at least one is good), but so far nothing about Caml/O'Caml.
You make it sound so painful!
OK, I'll admit it didn't help that I was on tight deadlines to write programs in O'Caml. So I couldn't just lay back and take a break if I wanted to.
Not knowing your development platform's quirks (every one of them has them) is not an excuse.
Of course not. OTOH, this error makes absolutely no sense. It's like gcc just printing out "Error: foo". It's totalay unhelpful and if you're trying to learn the language that's pretty irritating. I've seen some bad C++ template type mixups before, but even then there is usually at least some information. This is just saying "Hi! I'm the O'caml system! I don't like this! Please change it to something I do like".
(BTW, I was not in the top-loop when I saw that error - I was doing "ocaml myfile.ml").
I can see many of my programs being written in OCaml from now on.
Ok, about O'caml [O'caml = Objective Caml = a variant of ML with objects]. I had to use it for a PL class last semester. It's kind of nice, but don't expect it to be in any way like any language you've ever used (unless you know some other ML variant, of course).
In many ways it's very nice. In other ways it will drive you absolutely insane. For example, O'caml has very strong typing rules (which are good). It has almost no diagnostics when it decides it doesn't like your code (which is very very bad). It also apperantly sometimes gets very confused. For example, sometimes you'll get something like this:
foo.ml, line 100, chars 16-30: this expression has type int, but is used here with type int
This can be a little maddening after a few hours.
Other annoyances: no function overloading. So to print a string, use print_string. To print an int, use print_int. And so on. This is just how it works (I think you can write a wrapper which will check the type and dispatch the right call, but that's fairly irritating in and of itself).
Another thing that irritates me (probably just because I'm from a C/C++/Perl background), is that sometimes you use no ';' to end a statement, sometimes one, sometimes a pair.
Also, I found the documentation to be very erratic (the modules docs are quite complete, but try finding simple examples of how to do OO, without reading the BNF grammar they put in the docs - that's no way to learn a language).
Nice stuff: strong typing, cool type matching stuff, bytecode and native compilers, seems like a decent module system.
But if you don't already know it, good luck. You'll need it.
In a lot of states, sodomy is illegal, but how many of you have gotten busted getting/giving 'moral and legal' head
Probably not many. This is slashdot, after all.
[Ducks head to avoid tomatoes/bricks/moderation]
Just look at this thing.... Is someone going to haul a load of manure in this thing? Or throw a bunch of lumber in the back? What good is it for?
LOL. Yeah, I remember seeing a preview of one of these things on TV last summer. I remarked to my Mom that I thought it was funny that anyone would want it, because anyone who actually bought one would never use the bed for fear of scratching up their paint job. Fscking ridiculous.
It doesn't even look like it has much bed space - more like an SUV with the end cut off and a tiny bed welded onto the back.
I suspect I would feel physically ill if I ever actually saw one of those things, it's such a waste of metal (my dad has a 1965 Chevy - now that's a truck <g>)
Ever consider that folks living in rural parts may need a four-wheel vehicle to get to and from their homes (next time you eat something, remember us - your food didn't grow at Albertsons).
Where I'm from (specifically, a rural area), we call those things "trucks". Ever try to haul a tractor or a cord of firewood in an SUV?
Could it be that Square didn't ask them because they knew they would say no?
Maybe, but that seems pretty unlikely. If they asked for one and Nintendo turned them down, they could make Nintendo look like the bad guys holding a grudge against a developer, and more likely than not fans of Squaresoft games would go yell at Nintendo, etc.
Also, even if Nintendo has differences with Squaresoft, I highly doubt they would go so far as to do something like that. They're launching a new console in the face of heavy opposition. They need all the help they can get.
but I really prefer rot13!
I would recommend double-rot13 for extra security.
A better way to normalize would be bang/buck.
Really. I read some review for DVD/MPEG-4 encoding (on Tom's, I think), which basically decided that all for all the Duron 800 was the best CPU if you wanted to do that stuff a lot. I liked that: it's not the fastest, but it was 70 or 80% of the speed of the fastest while being 1/N as much.
I mean, if all you care about is having tons and tons of Flops, go buy an Alpha or R10000 (or IA-64 (<g>)). Performance isn't everything, at least not for me.