Then it shows that they're selling a knowingly flawed product. Were someone to attempt to drive down one of these false roads, perhaps into a drainage ditch that is actually there instead, and was killed, then it would be a tragedy. The map makers who performed such cartographic falsity should be held responsible for such a death.
I'm not harping on functional programming. That is not the problem in any way. The problem is that most developers today are simply unable or unwilling to learn the paradigm. And while Lisp isn't as extreme as SML or Haskell, it is still far more functional than C or Visual BASIC. Most programmers today aren't willing to learn new paradigms that may not bring them immediate benefit.
Indeed, I have developed on an LMI-LAMBDA machine quite a bit. And yourself?
Of course there is the "cultural" aspect. Like I mentioned, many programmers today struggle with functional programming. Most programmers these days are brought up using imperative/imperative-derived languages like C or BASIC. Functional programming is part of the academic culture, not part of the corporate culture. And in order for technology to spread these days, it must often be part of the corporate culture (see Java, C#).
The general unfamiliarity of most programmers with a language such as Lisp makes those who are competent with it worth a great deal. The cost of one talented Lisp programmer could exceed that of numerous (especially offshored) VB programmers. That leads to numerous economic issues.
Sure, you could "toss together something nice in basically no time at all". But it was expensive. That's the economics at play. It was expensive in the late 1970s and 1980s. Today the costs would be astronomical, especially to get the system to where current systems are.
For many tasks these days it is often cheaper to throw together a Perl or Visual Basic implementation on a commodity PC. While a re-emergence of Lisp machines may be beneficial in some niches, such a machine will never play a prominent role in today's (or tomorrow's) computing environment. Like we both agree, the economics just don't work for such a machine.
Does Battlefield 2 include improved terrain/building damage? Indeed, such things will be the hallmark of future games.
If you bump a tank into a building, the building should suffer from some sort of damage. Games like those in the GTA series do at least include rudimentary support for broken lamp posts, trees, fire hydrants, etc. But besides shattering some glass windows, you can't really cause true damage to your surroundings.
Today's games lack such realism. But perhaps we will see such things in the very near future.
Perhaps you find it harder to code today because you are forced to program at a higher level. Sure, in the 1980s implementing a hash table yourself was part of programming. And you'd get paid for reimplementing a very well-known and well-understood idea.
But things have changed. Now the hash table is already implemented for you. As a programmer, you must devise systems that aren't so well known. You must now implement the unknown. That is called innovation. You find it "harder" to code today because we're actually having to think now. We have to innovate in order to create the systems we need.
If everyone keeps implementing rudimentary stuff like hash tables over and over, then our systems will never evolve beyond what was implemented in the 1980s.
Languages like Java, which offer many of the common data structures as part of their libraries, or languages like Lisp, Scheme, O'Caml, Python and Ruby, which offer them instrinsically, are what are needed. They are what will lead us into the future. They let us build on what we mastered in the 1970s and 1980s. Today calls for very complex systems. They allow us to develop such systems. Things are "harder" today because they are far more complex.
"Why is it that somebody "invents" one decently cool thing (along with a whole bunch of other people I imagine) and then feels like they have license to blather on about the future of technology as if they were suddenly granted some kind of oracular vision."
As opposed to yourself, who has not invented anything "decently cool", yet still feels like they "have license to blather on about the future of technology as if they were suddenly granted some kind of oracular vision"?
You do realize that Mach is 1980s technology, correct? Even stuff like today's Cocoa was mostly developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While Mac OS X is a fantastic system, it is hardly "futuristic", as you incorrectly claim.
The thing with Mac OS X is that it does not have the cruft of other systems. Hardware wise, Apple is willing to force their consumers to eliminate the old (ie. floppy drives) and to proceed with the more modern (ie. FireWire). But the more modern technology is hardly futuristic. Mac OS X is still solidly based on software technology that is at least 15 to 20 years old, it not more.
Don't confuse "modern" with "futuristic". You'll never find "futuristic" items available for sale today.
Why the various Lisp machines did it not make it outside of academia? It is because most programmers simply cannot handle functional programming, even when using a non-pure functional, semi-imperative language such as Lisp. The pool of programmers capable of developing for such a system is quite limited, as as such they will cost far more to employ.
Why should a company spend a massive amount of money on a Lisp-based (ie. at the hardware level) system and developers for it, when they can toss together a very powerful PC and Visual Basic code written for pennies or pence by some offshore programmer.
It's all a matter of economics. Technically, such a system is very sound. Economically, it just plain isn't worth it. Unless similar machines could be developed which included massive technical benefits over existing systems, they will not become popular.
I respect the opinions of somebody who has actually been involved in serious conflict, such as Mr. Doohan, over those of people who have not.
Indeed, given the severity of his injuries his opinions have greater weight than those of people today who today advocate war (ie. many American and British politicians) yet never themselves participated in any conflict, let alone suffered the loss of limb or other injury.
X11 is not the first version of the X Window System. There were quite a few X releases before 1986.
Of course. That is why, had you actually read my post before replying to it, you would have seen the part that states "... began work on X in 1984...". Indeed, you're correct in pointing out the fact that X was released before 1986. But X11, the most widely used release, was released in 1986. You must recognize that X11 is not X10, or any earlier X release.
During World War II, he participated in the invasion of Juno Beach on D-Day as a captain with the Royal Canadian Artillery. At 11:30 that night, he was machine-gunned, taking six hits: one that took off his middle right finger (he managed to hide the missing finger on screen), four in his leg and one in the chest. The chest bullet was stopped by his silver cigarette case. - Wikipedia
Does anyone know if he later on became politically active against warfare? What was his stance on such things as the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and earlier than that, Vietnam?
Either way, it's not being used for defence. Whether such vehicles are directly involved in attacks, or supplying necessities to the attackers, the vehicles are still not being used for "defence"-related purposed. They are offensive vehicles.
And what exactly is your point? Just because Google finds the incorrect phrase more often doesn't mean that the incorrect phrase is semantically correct. Considering that that most likely takes into account numerous entries and forum posts from bloggers who have no idea what they're talking about, I consider your findings to be completely useless.
Do you want me to prove how truly useless your "Google returns oh-so-many hits" method is? Check this out for yourself:
Google: "windows is unstable": 1090 "windows is stable": 1280
Sorry, my friend, your method of proving the correctness of the meaning of a phrase based on the number of hits that Google returns is completely flawed! Only a cockfool would dare use such a method.
She no longer has the title of "Editor-in-Chief" (or whatever she was), but she still has a very infiltrating presence on the site. At this moment she has four stories posted on the front page alone.
That is very interesting. Can you describe your setup a bit more? Since you worked in the software portion of it, could you please elaborate? What sort of computing hardware are you using? Did you choose to go with a traditional embedded OS, or have you written one from scratch? What language is the software itself written in? What are some of its notable capabilities?
None of these developments will be used for true "defence". They won't be there to protect the average American citizen. But judging from the past several years, there is a very good chance that they will be used for offensive purposes. Perhaps against Iran or Syria.
These days the defence industry isn't about defense. It is about creating offensive weapons used to instigate conflict in non-American, resource-rich areas.
Why would I keep my eyes on them? Like you said, you guys missed the cut in April. What's to say you won't miss it again in August? And like you also mentioned, it is being done by people without much education nor experience. The best of luck to you, my friend, but please don't go into this competition with too much of an ego. It may be hurting once you get your ass kicked by the big boys.
"Long before Windows existed, X-Windows had a callback, event driven mechanism for GUI programming. This resulted in considerably better performance than the message mechanism used in Win16 (which was carried over to Win32)."
I fear you're getting your history quite confused.
It is well known that Bob Scheifler and Jim Gettys began work on X in 1984, while at MIT. X11 was released in September of 1987.
Microsoft Windows was first released in November of 1985, after first being announced in November of 1983.
Indeed, GEM was demoed (ie. it was somewhat functional) at COMDEX in November, 1983.
The fact that Windows was announced a year before work started on X suggests that your claim is quite invalid.
"The Unix Programers can do it on a P4, but it'll work just fine on a Mot 68K or a 486."
Except that really isn't the case very much any more. Please, take a modern Linux distro, a BSD or Solaris and try to run it on a modern system underclocked to be equivalent to a 486. Hell, even leave it with the typical 512 MB or 1 GB of RAM common today, as well as a 400 MHz DDR2 bus. It'll be painful to do anything practical with such a system.
Now, a lot of the performance loss may be attributed to the many new features such a system supports. But it could also be attributed to a lack of talent. While there are of course some fantastic coders working on Linux, the BSDs and Solaris, they don't often have the same level of inherent talent that the previous UNIX masters had. Even if they know how to, they have very little incentive these days to squeeze out every last drop of performance from a machine, something that true UNIX was known for for literally decades.
The only UNIX today that may be able to handle a 486 machine is SCO OpenServer. But that's only because of its roots as a 386 server OS, and the fact that its core development has stagnated for well over a decade now.
C is a fantastic language for developing operating system kernels. It excels in that department, as it allows for code to be written extremely close to the hardware. But that's no surprise, considering it's origin. As long as things don't get too big, then everything is usually okay.
In the mainframe world of software that cannot fail, then C is just not an option. The aforementioned benefits leave it far too vulnerable to coding mistakes. When you get programs that are millions upon millions of lines long, then C just doesn't cut it any longer. Indeed, that is why languages such as COBOL and especially Rexx are so prevalent in the mainframe world.
A language like Rexx allows most non-systems tasks to be performed very easily and efficiently, but with a far greater level of safety and security. It is interesting to note that the OORexx is bringing Rexx to the Linux, BSD and Unix masses. Indeed, even today we are seeing Java take a far greater enterprise role.
I used to be a great fan of Turbolinux on the workstation, especially when it was available free of charge. Indeed, it was quite a capable distro. But then they stopped providing a freely available release, and I moved on.
Has anyone used it recently? How was the experience? I see they're up to Turbolinux 10 Desktop. But they use XFree86 4.3.0 and KDE 3.1.5. They are just slightly dated, no?
Slashdot Mirror
Then it shows that they're selling a knowingly flawed product. Were someone to attempt to drive down one of these false roads, perhaps into a drainage ditch that is actually there instead, and was killed, then it would be a tragedy. The map makers who performed such cartographic falsity should be held responsible for such a death.
How did you manage that? Are you subscribed to 10000+ busy mailing lists? Do you send and/or receive massive attachments?
I've started using http://gigablast.com/ lately. I find that it's very quick and sassy.
Internet Explorer 5 for UNIX supported Solaris and HP-UX, but not IRIX.
r osoft.com/unix/ie/SysReq/default.ASP
http://web.archive.org/web/19990508060533/www.mic
I'm not harping on functional programming. That is not the problem in any way. The problem is that most developers today are simply unable or unwilling to learn the paradigm. And while Lisp isn't as extreme as SML or Haskell, it is still far more functional than C or Visual BASIC. Most programmers today aren't willing to learn new paradigms that may not bring them immediate benefit.
Indeed, I have developed on an LMI-LAMBDA machine quite a bit. And yourself?
Of course there is the "cultural" aspect. Like I mentioned, many programmers today struggle with functional programming. Most programmers these days are brought up using imperative/imperative-derived languages like C or BASIC. Functional programming is part of the academic culture, not part of the corporate culture. And in order for technology to spread these days, it must often be part of the corporate culture (see Java, C#).
The general unfamiliarity of most programmers with a language such as Lisp makes those who are competent with it worth a great deal. The cost of one talented Lisp programmer could exceed that of numerous (especially offshored) VB programmers. That leads to numerous economic issues.
Sure, you could "toss together something nice in basically no time at all". But it was expensive. That's the economics at play. It was expensive in the late 1970s and 1980s. Today the costs would be astronomical, especially to get the system to where current systems are.
For many tasks these days it is often cheaper to throw together a Perl or Visual Basic implementation on a commodity PC. While a re-emergence of Lisp machines may be beneficial in some niches, such a machine will never play a prominent role in today's (or tomorrow's) computing environment. Like we both agree, the economics just don't work for such a machine.
Does Battlefield 2 include improved terrain/building damage? Indeed, such things will be the hallmark of future games.
If you bump a tank into a building, the building should suffer from some sort of damage. Games like those in the GTA series do at least include rudimentary support for broken lamp posts, trees, fire hydrants, etc. But besides shattering some glass windows, you can't really cause true damage to your surroundings.
Today's games lack such realism. But perhaps we will see such things in the very near future.
Perhaps you find it harder to code today because you are forced to program at a higher level. Sure, in the 1980s implementing a hash table yourself was part of programming. And you'd get paid for reimplementing a very well-known and well-understood idea.
But things have changed. Now the hash table is already implemented for you. As a programmer, you must devise systems that aren't so well known. You must now implement the unknown. That is called innovation. You find it "harder" to code today because we're actually having to think now. We have to innovate in order to create the systems we need.
If everyone keeps implementing rudimentary stuff like hash tables over and over, then our systems will never evolve beyond what was implemented in the 1980s.
Languages like Java, which offer many of the common data structures as part of their libraries, or languages like Lisp, Scheme, O'Caml, Python and Ruby, which offer them instrinsically, are what are needed. They are what will lead us into the future. They let us build on what we mastered in the 1970s and 1980s. Today calls for very complex systems. They allow us to develop such systems. Things are "harder" today because they are far more complex.
"Why is it that somebody "invents" one decently cool thing (along with a whole bunch of other people I imagine) and then feels like they have license to blather on about the future of technology as if they were suddenly granted some kind of oracular vision."
As opposed to yourself, who has not invented anything "decently cool", yet still feels like they "have license to blather on about the future of technology as if they were suddenly granted some kind of oracular vision"?
You do realize that Mach is 1980s technology, correct? Even stuff like today's Cocoa was mostly developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While Mac OS X is a fantastic system, it is hardly "futuristic", as you incorrectly claim.
The thing with Mac OS X is that it does not have the cruft of other systems. Hardware wise, Apple is willing to force their consumers to eliminate the old (ie. floppy drives) and to proceed with the more modern (ie. FireWire). But the more modern technology is hardly futuristic. Mac OS X is still solidly based on software technology that is at least 15 to 20 years old, it not more.
Don't confuse "modern" with "futuristic". You'll never find "futuristic" items available for sale today.
Why the various Lisp machines did it not make it outside of academia? It is because most programmers simply cannot handle functional programming, even when using a non-pure functional, semi-imperative language such as Lisp. The pool of programmers capable of developing for such a system is quite limited, as as such they will cost far more to employ.
Why should a company spend a massive amount of money on a Lisp-based (ie. at the hardware level) system and developers for it, when they can toss together a very powerful PC and Visual Basic code written for pennies or pence by some offshore programmer.
It's all a matter of economics. Technically, such a system is very sound. Economically, it just plain isn't worth it. Unless similar machines could be developed which included massive technical benefits over existing systems, they will not become popular.
I respect the opinions of somebody who has actually been involved in serious conflict, such as Mr. Doohan, over those of people who have not.
Indeed, given the severity of his injuries his opinions have greater weight than those of people today who today advocate war (ie. many American and British politicians) yet never themselves participated in any conflict, let alone suffered the loss of limb or other injury.
X11 is not the first version of the X Window System. There were quite a few X releases before 1986.
...". Indeed, you're correct in pointing out the fact that X was released before 1986. But X11, the most widely used release, was released in 1986. You must recognize that X11 is not X10, or any earlier X release.
Of course. That is why, had you actually read my post before replying to it, you would have seen the part that states "... began work on X in 1984
During World War II, he participated in the invasion of Juno Beach on D-Day as a captain with the Royal Canadian Artillery. At 11:30 that night, he was machine-gunned, taking six hits: one that took off his middle right finger (he managed to hide the missing finger on screen), four in his leg and one in the chest. The chest bullet was stopped by his silver cigarette case. - Wikipedia
Does anyone know if he later on became politically active against warfare? What was his stance on such things as the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and earlier than that, Vietnam?
Either way, it's not being used for defence. Whether such vehicles are directly involved in attacks, or supplying necessities to the attackers, the vehicles are still not being used for "defence"-related purposed. They are offensive vehicles.
And what exactly is your point? Just because Google finds the incorrect phrase more often doesn't mean that the incorrect phrase is semantically correct. Considering that that most likely takes into account numerous entries and forum posts from bloggers who have no idea what they're talking about, I consider your findings to be completely useless.
Do you want me to prove how truly useless your "Google returns oh-so-many hits" method is? Check this out for yourself:
Google:
"windows is unstable": 1090
"windows is stable": 1280
Sorry, my friend, your method of proving the correctness of the meaning of a phrase based on the number of hits that Google returns is completely flawed! Only a cockfool would dare use such a method.
She no longer has the title of "Editor-in-Chief" (or whatever she was), but she still has a very infiltrating presence on the site. At this moment she has four stories posted on the front page alone.
You have the old saying reversed. It is actually: the best offense is a good defense.
LOL, it looks like you guys are getting your asses handed back to you daily by the citizenry of Iraq.
But my point still stands: these developments are not directly defence-related. They are completely offense-related.
That is very interesting. Can you describe your setup a bit more? Since you worked in the software portion of it, could you please elaborate? What sort of computing hardware are you using? Did you choose to go with a traditional embedded OS, or have you written one from scratch? What language is the software itself written in? What are some of its notable capabilities?
None of these developments will be used for true "defence". They won't be there to protect the average American citizen. But judging from the past several years, there is a very good chance that they will be used for offensive purposes. Perhaps against Iran or Syria.
These days the defence industry isn't about defense. It is about creating offensive weapons used to instigate conflict in non-American, resource-rich areas.
Why would I keep my eyes on them? Like you said, you guys missed the cut in April. What's to say you won't miss it again in August? And like you also mentioned, it is being done by people without much education nor experience. The best of luck to you, my friend, but please don't go into this competition with too much of an ego. It may be hurting once you get your ass kicked by the big boys.
"Long before Windows existed, X-Windows had a callback, event driven mechanism for GUI programming. This resulted in considerably better performance than the message mechanism used in Win16 (which was carried over to Win32)."
I fear you're getting your history quite confused.
It is well known that Bob Scheifler and Jim Gettys began work on X in 1984, while at MIT. X11 was released in September of 1987.
Microsoft Windows was first released in November of 1985, after first being announced in November of 1983.
Indeed, GEM was demoed (ie. it was somewhat functional) at COMDEX in November, 1983.
The fact that Windows was announced a year before work started on X suggests that your claim is quite invalid.
"The Unix Programers can do it on a P4, but it'll work just fine on a Mot 68K or a 486."
Except that really isn't the case very much any more. Please, take a modern Linux distro, a BSD or Solaris and try to run it on a modern system underclocked to be equivalent to a 486. Hell, even leave it with the typical 512 MB or 1 GB of RAM common today, as well as a 400 MHz DDR2 bus. It'll be painful to do anything practical with such a system.
Now, a lot of the performance loss may be attributed to the many new features such a system supports. But it could also be attributed to a lack of talent. While there are of course some fantastic coders working on Linux, the BSDs and Solaris, they don't often have the same level of inherent talent that the previous UNIX masters had. Even if they know how to, they have very little incentive these days to squeeze out every last drop of performance from a machine, something that true UNIX was known for for literally decades.
The only UNIX today that may be able to handle a 486 machine is SCO OpenServer. But that's only because of its roots as a 386 server OS, and the fact that its core development has stagnated for well over a decade now.
C is a fantastic language for developing operating system kernels. It excels in that department, as it allows for code to be written extremely close to the hardware. But that's no surprise, considering it's origin. As long as things don't get too big, then everything is usually okay.
In the mainframe world of software that cannot fail, then C is just not an option. The aforementioned benefits leave it far too vulnerable to coding mistakes. When you get programs that are millions upon millions of lines long, then C just doesn't cut it any longer. Indeed, that is why languages such as COBOL and especially Rexx are so prevalent in the mainframe world.
A language like Rexx allows most non-systems tasks to be performed very easily and efficiently, but with a far greater level of safety and security. It is interesting to note that the OORexx is bringing Rexx to the Linux, BSD and Unix masses. Indeed, even today we are seeing Java take a far greater enterprise role.
I used to be a great fan of Turbolinux on the workstation, especially when it was available free of charge. Indeed, it was quite a capable distro. But then they stopped providing a freely available release, and I moved on.
Has anyone used it recently? How was the experience? I see they're up to Turbolinux 10 Desktop. But they use XFree86 4.3.0 and KDE 3.1.5. They are just slightly dated, no?