So we "still can get good performance" from C? The implication is that C will somehow become overcome by some unnamed high-elvel language soon. That is just wishful thinking. The article is not very substantial, and where it tries to substantiate, it misses the mark badly. The claim that C cannot handle SIMD instructions well is not true. You can use them directly from C, or the C compiler can use them through autovectorization, as in gcc 4.1. The claim that C cannot inline functions from another source file is also wrong. This is a limitation in gcc, but other compilers can do it, and IIRC the intel compiler can. It is certainly not "impossible".
The moment another big power learns of such an effort (say China or Russia), sharks would quickly go extinct, as they would start killing sharks indiscriminately around their fleet bases and fleets at sea. It would in effect make sharks a military target that could be attacked at will in times of peace. That would be horribly unethical. Many shark species are already facing extinction.
Why should 3DRealms make Duke Nuke'm Forever after all this time? Because when it finally ships it will receive the most free PR from the trade press and every other press under the sun ever. Sure, they will make fun of it, probably give it poor reviews, but as long as 3DRealms manage to keep it fun, ironic and in bad taste it will still sell like hot cakes. If they play their cards right they could turn this into a stroke of genius.
Although we'll lose a good joke. But the joke might in the end be on us.
if they no longer have to dish out the tremendous amount of money that getting astronauts and cargo to the ISS requires.
They will still pay the tremendous amount of money that getting astronauts and cargo to the ISS requires. The only difference is that the money will be going to a private company instead of doing it in-house. What did the OP expect - that the private sector will do something like this for free?
Of course, it is possible that a private company can do it cheaper. However, since there are currently no private companies that can do this, it is equally possible that it will cause no end of scandals, court battles, disasters and bankruptcies that may force NASA to pick up unexpected bills. The good thing about doing things in-house is that a large number of variables can be trusted to be under control without the overhead of armies of lawyers, miles of contracts, thousands of accountants and unbelivably expensive insurance.
I would like to see the insurance company that would insure a small space company against the possibility of astronatus being stranded in space, or a failure to deliver setting a space program like the ISS back so long that it would have to be scrapped. Who can even provide an objective cost of such losses?
Yes, the Romans did not have Napalm. However, the Greeks had "Greek Fire", which is somewhat similar. So this kind of knowledge did exist in ancient times.
> Instead of an image based Turing test like > Captcha, I just have the last question on a log in > screen or form be a randomly selected super easy > question. For example, "Spell the number 7" or > "What is the next logical number in the sequence > 1, 3, 5, 7,...?
The sad thing is that many humans will have problems solving these trivial puzzles, too. Especially when English is not your first language.
Well, here in Europe, forests are growing back and reclaiming abandoned farmland that it is no longer profitable to keep in use. People are moving into the cities, and population growth rates are negative in many countries. The changes are vast, and wolves and other larger animals that were made extinct in western Europe long ago have moved back in.
Environmentalists are not all amused, however. A lot of adapted wildlife will go bye bye along with the farmland, as new-grown, dense forests are rather inhospitable to wildlife variety.
> The real solution is to stop writing critical code > in C.
Yeah. Right. It pisses me off that whenever security gets spoken of here, someone comes up with this pathetic magic fix.
Look, for commonly used libraries like zlib, you can't code it in anything but C. That is because only a C library can be called from every other language out there. Code it in, say, Python, and suddenly you lost all but Python programmers. Same goes for almost everything else. Yay for reuse of code!
Point in case - you write "for example OCaml which I prefer nowadays". Keyword 'nowadays'. What happens when you move on to the next big thing that comes along? Can you call libraries written in OCaml from that language? Extremely unlikely. But I bet it supports calling C libraries, because no serious language can avoid that.
Lots can be done to make C code safer. For example using safe versions of all non-safe functions, and integrating with a proper security model in the OS to drop non-needed permissions. But dropping the only language that can share code with everything else out there is just silly.
I think it would have been cooler if the machines were using us as inexpensive processing units. What if, in the real world, you didn't actually have to sleep, and that 'sleep' is the machines using you to think?
You should definitely read the 'Hyperion' books by Dan Simmons. Very good exploration of this concept.
A small group of freedom-loving youth come together to write a very helpful free software program that helps people around the world solve some problem they have, and then an evil corporate entity comes along with an overbroad software patent, files a lawsuit and takes ownership of the program as damages. I wonder how they would deal with such a film;-)
Wrong. The European Patent Office (EPO) has issued thousands of software patents. There are just doubts as to their enforcability, and several member countries do not accept them at all. This is what the new EU directive (CIID) is all about.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The supershadow site and everything on it is totally FAKE. It has NOTHING to do with George Lucas. Everything on it, including its so-called "interviews" with George Lucas are made up. Google around for a lot more info on this.
I'm not usually a big fan of copyright lawsuits, but I hope George Lucas' lawyers nail this guy. He is spreading so much misinformation and outright lies about Starwars it is disgusting.
You are not the first to think about this. Making an OpenGL client of Freeciv is harder than you might think, and for different reasons. While the client-server design is very clean, and the common client code is neatly separated from the client specific front-end, making a graphical design that would work with a Freeciv map is non-trivial.
Rotating a flat map would look odd. Adding elevation makes it very hard to add units, cities, terrain improvement and so on. Not to mention that doing the elevation in any sane way is difficult, as well, since you are pretty restricted as to how you can do it (if you use only existing freeciv maps). A lot of other games (SimCity eg) of elevation by sacrificing some tiles to slopes. We cannot do that. SMAC has smooth slopes but no mountains. We can't do that. One person tried to make a mapview that had rugged mountains that had sharp mountaintops. We can't do that - we might have to draw cities, mines, and so on on it. Some games solve this by having mountains (and rivers) as items between tiles. We can't do that. So if you manage to jump through all those difficulties, can you make it look good?
That remains to be proven. If you have ideas, try making a map demo first to test them out and show us.
See http://www.freeciv.org/index.php/OpenGL in the Freeciv wiki once our web site is un-slashdotted to learn more about this, and add your thoughts.
After ruining HP, the Bush administration has suggested her for rui^H^Hnning the World Bank.
Read it here.
'Top executives' like herself like to tell us that they need their huge salaries because they take such risks, and if they screw up they are done in the business. Yeah, right. The truth is, it doesn't matter how much they screw up, their own will take care of them anyway.
It is true that the chance of starts actually colliding is very remote, but the danger for life is mostly clouds of interstellar gas colliding, smaller stuff being sent in every direction, and worst of all, the chance that the supermassive black holes in the center will attract each other and collide.
If the black holes in the center of the galaxies collide, I doubt any living things could survive in either galaxy.
The magazine Science posted this article today. To quote its conclusion for those who can't RAFA:
"there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen."
From RTFA, the company intends to a) buy patents and b) generate patents by brainstorming. Nothing else. This is the typical submarine patent strategy, which is IP piracy, pure and simple. Such companies contribute absolutely nothing to society. They are a mockery of the original intention of copyright and patents.
That Microsoft, Apple, Google et al choose to invest in such a slimy venture speaks volumes about its intentions. I can understand why Google joined - they see where this is going, and do not want to be on the receiving end when those lawsuits start flying. But this is going to either change IP law, or ruin the industry. So Google's "do no evil" mantra was just exposed as another hoax.
Unlike the big companies that invest in it, this vulture company will not be interested in crosslicensing, and it has no reputation to lose from an all out attack on free software. So when (not if) it goes after free software, putting pressure on its investors might be the only way of getting at it.
Freeciv would be a better example if one could negotiate with the AI. This has been a feature request for years, and last I checked it was still not implemented.
It is implemented in the cvs version and will be coming out in the next release.
Besides, Freeciv is a very obvious and uncreative copy of the original Civilization.
We were the first out with multiplayer civilization. In a number of areas, the commercial civ games cloned us!
That is not so surprising when you consider who runs the show. the previous and long-time IOC president, Samaranch, was a fascist. I don't just mean that as en call-name. He was a member of fascist organizations for 40 years, was an ardent supporter of Franco and was appointed government secretary for sports under Franco's fascist dictatorship.
The IOC is not democratic nor accountable to anyone, and have always operated in a totally autocratic manner.
(An a less important but symbolic aside: The torch-carrying tradition was invented by Nazi Germany, who used the games held in Germany 1936 as a huge propaganda event.)
The games have also been connected to commercial interest since the start. For example, the games in 1900 and 1904 were both side-by-side with large trade fairs.
That's funny. I thought there were a lot of things that came naturally to us, us sharing the fact that we are all human, all mortal beings. For example, "survival" would be pretty high up there as a common good, along with "security in person", which is one reason why we have a state...
It is the same with most hospitals and dentists' offices. They are strictly minimalist with simple, dull colours, to relax the mind and make you feel comfortable and safe.
No, do *not* look directly at the sun, even though it is dimmed by smoke! The radiation most dangerous to your eyes is not visible light, and you could easily harm your eyes this way...
If I'm selling my own music over the Internet, I want people to come to my site and eat up my bandwidth.
If I'm buying music over the Internet, I do not want to deal with any number of different web site interfaces and payment methods in order to do so. A common system with high speed, known reliability and familiar interface would be a good selling point and encourage to buy.
Slashdot Mirror
So we "still can get good performance" from C? The implication is that C will somehow become overcome by some unnamed high-elvel language soon. That is just wishful thinking. The article is not very substantial, and where it tries to substantiate, it misses the mark badly. The claim that C cannot handle SIMD instructions well is not true. You can use them directly from C, or the C compiler can use them through autovectorization, as in gcc 4.1. The claim that C cannot inline functions from another source file is also wrong. This is a limitation in gcc, but other compilers can do it, and IIRC the intel compiler can. It is certainly not "impossible".
The moment another big power learns of such an effort (say China or Russia), sharks would quickly go extinct, as they would start killing sharks indiscriminately around their fleet bases and fleets at sea. It would in effect make sharks a military target that could be attacked at will in times of peace. That would be horribly unethical. Many shark species are already facing extinction.
Although we'll lose a good joke. But the joke might in the end be on us.
if they no longer have to dish out the tremendous amount of money that getting astronauts and cargo to the ISS requires.
They will still pay the tremendous amount of money that getting astronauts and cargo to the ISS requires. The only difference is that the money will be going to a private company instead of doing it in-house. What did the OP expect - that the private sector will do something like this for free?
Of course, it is possible that a private company can do it cheaper. However, since there are currently no private companies that can do this, it is equally possible that it will cause no end of scandals, court battles, disasters and bankruptcies that may force NASA to pick up unexpected bills. The good thing about doing things in-house is that a large number of variables can be trusted to be under control without the overhead of armies of lawyers, miles of contracts, thousands of accountants and unbelivably expensive insurance.
I would like to see the insurance company that would insure a small space company against the possibility of astronatus being stranded in space, or a failure to deliver setting a space program like the ISS back so long that it would have to be scrapped. Who can even provide an objective cost of such losses?
Yes, the Romans did not have Napalm. However, the Greeks had "Greek Fire", which is somewhat similar. So this kind of knowledge did exist in ancient times.
> Instead of an image based Turing test like ...?
> Captcha, I just have the last question on a log in
> screen or form be a randomly selected super easy
> question. For example, "Spell the number 7" or
> "What is the next logical number in the sequence
> 1, 3, 5, 7,
The sad thing is that many humans will have problems solving these trivial puzzles, too. Especially when English is not your first language.
"persistantly encroaching civilization"
Well, here in Europe, forests are growing back and reclaiming abandoned farmland that it is no longer profitable to keep in use. People are moving into the cities, and population growth rates are negative in many countries. The changes are vast, and wolves and other larger animals that were made extinct in western Europe long ago have moved back in.
Environmentalists are not all amused, however. A lot of adapted wildlife will go bye bye along with the farmland, as new-grown, dense forests are rather inhospitable to wildlife variety.
> The real solution is to stop writing critical code
> in C.
Yeah. Right. It pisses me off that whenever security gets spoken of here, someone comes up with this pathetic magic fix.
Look, for commonly used libraries like zlib, you can't code it in anything but C. That is because only a C library can be called from every other language out there. Code it in, say, Python, and suddenly you lost all but Python programmers. Same goes for almost everything else. Yay for reuse of code!
Point in case - you write "for example OCaml which I prefer nowadays". Keyword 'nowadays'. What happens when you move on to the next big thing that comes along? Can you call libraries written in OCaml from that language? Extremely unlikely. But I bet it supports calling C libraries, because no serious language can avoid that.
Lots can be done to make C code safer. For example using safe versions of all non-safe functions, and integrating with a proper security model in the OS to drop non-needed permissions. But dropping the only language that can share code with everything else out there is just silly.
You should definitely read the 'Hyperion' books by Dan Simmons. Very good exploration of this concept.
A small group of freedom-loving youth come together to write a very helpful free software program that helps people around the world solve some problem they have, and then an evil corporate entity comes along with an overbroad software patent, files a lawsuit and takes ownership of the program as damages. I wonder how they would deal with such a film ;-)
> Europe (as of now) has no software patents.
Wrong. The European Patent Office (EPO) has issued thousands of software patents. There are just doubts as to their enforcability, and several member countries do not accept them at all. This is what the new EU directive (CIID) is all about.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The supershadow site and everything on it is totally FAKE. It has NOTHING to do with George Lucas. Everything on it, including its so-called "interviews" with George Lucas are made up. Google around for a lot more info on this.
I'm not usually a big fan of copyright lawsuits, but I hope George Lucas' lawyers nail this guy. He is spreading so much misinformation and outright lies about Starwars it is disgusting.
You are not the first to think about this. Making an OpenGL client of Freeciv is harder than you might think, and for different reasons. While the client-server design is very clean, and the common client code is neatly separated from the client specific front-end, making a graphical design that would work with a Freeciv map is non-trivial.
Rotating a flat map would look odd. Adding elevation makes it very hard to add units, cities, terrain improvement and so on. Not to mention that doing the elevation in any sane way is difficult, as well, since you are pretty restricted as to how you can do it (if you use only existing freeciv maps). A lot of other games (SimCity eg) of elevation by sacrificing some tiles to slopes. We cannot do that. SMAC has smooth slopes but no mountains. We can't do that. One person tried to make a mapview that had rugged mountains that had sharp mountaintops. We can't do that - we might have to draw cities, mines, and so on on it. Some games solve this by having mountains (and rivers) as items between tiles. We can't do that. So if you manage to jump through all those difficulties, can you make it look good?
That remains to be proven. If you have ideas, try making a map demo first to test them out and show us.
See http://www.freeciv.org/index.php/OpenGL in the Freeciv wiki once our web site is un-slashdotted to learn more about this, and add your thoughts.
- Per
(freeciv dev)
After ruining HP, the Bush administration has suggested her for rui^H^Hnning the World Bank. Read it here. 'Top executives' like herself like to tell us that they need their huge salaries because they take such risks, and if they screw up they are done in the business. Yeah, right. The truth is, it doesn't matter how much they screw up, their own will take care of them anyway.
It is true that the chance of starts actually colliding is very remote, but the danger for life is mostly clouds of interstellar gas colliding, smaller stuff being sent in every direction, and worst of all, the chance that the supermassive black holes in the center will attract each other and collide.
If the black holes in the center of the galaxies collide, I doubt any living things could survive in either galaxy.
The magazine Science posted this article today. To quote its conclusion for those who can't RAFA:
"there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen."
From RTFA, the company intends to a) buy patents and b) generate patents by brainstorming. Nothing else. This is the typical submarine patent strategy, which is IP piracy, pure and simple. Such companies contribute absolutely nothing to society. They are a mockery of the original intention of copyright and patents.
That Microsoft, Apple, Google et al choose to invest in such a slimy venture speaks volumes about its intentions. I can understand why Google joined - they see where this is going, and do not want to be on the receiving end when those lawsuits start flying. But this is going to either change IP law, or ruin the industry. So Google's "do no evil" mantra was just exposed as another hoax.
Unlike the big companies that invest in it, this vulture company will not be interested in crosslicensing, and it has no reputation to lose from an all out attack on free software. So when (not if) it goes after free software, putting pressure on its investors might be the only way of getting at it.
Gonzalez to replace Ashcroft. This guy is a madman. He "fought with Congress to keep the details of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy commission meetings secret and defended the administration's right to detain terrorism suspects indefinitely without formal charges and to deny them access to counsel or to protection from the court system".
Do not celebrate just yet. You may soon wish Ashcraft back.
Every time I think the world cannot get any more fucked, it does.
That is not so surprising when you consider who runs the show. the previous and long-time IOC president, Samaranch, was a fascist. I don't just mean that as en call-name. He was a member of fascist organizations for 40 years, was an ardent supporter of Franco and was appointed government secretary for sports under Franco's fascist dictatorship.
The IOC is not democratic nor accountable to anyone, and have always operated in a totally autocratic manner.
(An a less important but symbolic aside: The torch-carrying tradition was invented by Nazi Germany, who used the games held in Germany 1936 as a huge propaganda event.)
The games have also been connected to commercial interest since the start. For example, the games in 1900 and 1904 were both side-by-side with large trade fairs.
That's funny. I thought there were a lot of things that came naturally to us, us sharing the fact that we are all human, all mortal beings. For example, "survival" would be pretty high up there as a common good, along with "security in person", which is one reason why we have a state...
The advocacydev wiki linked to in this article has been vandalised, and several links have been redirected to goatse.cx.
So be careful if you are browsing from work.
I could not find an easy way to roll back the changes.
64-40-63-15.nocharge.com seems to be the vandal. Go to Revision 21 if you want the non-vandalised site.
It is the same with most hospitals and dentists' offices. They are strictly minimalist with simple, dull colours, to relax the mind and make you feel comfortable and safe.
No, do *not* look directly at the sun, even though it is dimmed by smoke! The radiation most dangerous to your eyes is not visible light, and you could easily harm your eyes this way...
If I'm buying music over the Internet, I do not want to deal with any number of different web site interfaces and payment methods in order to do so. A common system with high speed, known reliability and familiar interface would be a good selling point and encourage to buy.