> I don't remember there being blood on the screen. Perhaps there is now in Halo 3?
There's quite a bit of blood, but it's all blue.
Clearly, Jack is looking out for the Covenant -- someone has to! In fact, he fashions himself something of a prophet, whereas I rather liken him to a shrieking little grunt.
> If it isn't the silicon doing it, then the company is using your CPU to do work it is supposed to be doing on the GPU.
GPU's are mostly just linear arrays of FPUs with an optimized memory architecture, and they've been that way for some years now. If there is no speed benefit to hardwiring the notion of "triangle" and "texture" into the silicon, then there isn't a really compelling reason for it. 3D drivers these days include optimizing compilers for shader languages. Still, no one's asking for the shader compilers and texture compressors, we're just asking for whatever magic bits we need to send over the bus to tell the card "this is a texture", "this is a vertex array", "this is a shader", and so on. Of course those specific bits are already figured out, but there's plenty of other similar details, like limitations that need to be respected lest stability is impacted, that aren't.
Requires two years of experience in systems engineering designing and developing communications software and hardware solutions including resolving problems surrounding real-time and non real time PC- based systems using C++ and network programming algorithms and their interaction with physical devices.
Note the emphasis on networking and lack of mention of anything like OpenGL or graphics. This is to maintain their existing dedicated server codebase.
> I seem to recall him being thrown out of a courtroom in Alabama because he didn't even have the legal right to practice law there
You don't need to be licensed in a state to practice there. You get admitted pro hac vice (literally "for the occasion"), and it's usually a rubberstamp thing as long as you have a valid license in another state. Thompson's behavior in the Alabama case was so abominable that he had his pro hac vice status revoked for that case, plus a requirement to attach the order to any further applications in Alabama. In other words, he's effectively been disbarred in that state.
Keep in mind that if Wacko Jacko gets disbarred in Florida, it will almost certainly be a temporary suspension of his license. It's virtually unheard of for a lawyer to be permanently disbarred for misconduct that isn't a felony or blatant ethics violation. Jack may have committed the latter on occasion, but most of his pleadings these days aren't for any client but himself.
> Using electrodermal activity to detect lies has been around for ages...
Yes, and it's never been anything but pseudoscience and snake oil. Time and time again, lie detectors have done no better than chance when subjected to double-blind tests.
By "interpreter state", I tend to think of actual separate interpreters, which perl supported with its mysterious "multiplicity" option. By my judgment, that was actualy a better implementation, and the current version is the worst of both worlds. I certainly didn't mean to endorse the way perl does it, but regardless of how brainless perl's thread implementation is, the threads are definitely scheduler entries in the kernel ala pthreads. At least they are on my platform -- there seem to be a lot of ways to implement threads in perl. I guess TMTOWTDI applies even in the internals. *sigh*
The image-based nature of smalltalk, combined with proprietary and expensive development environments, contributed to making smalltalk far less relevant today than it should have been. Largely, you cannot write a smalltalk script or library. You have to open up your image, go into smalltalk land, and keep everything in the image. Interface to the external system was an afterthought, and actively discouraged in the walled garden of smalltalk.
Even now there's not many free implementations that support scripts or small standalone executables. Possibly GNU smalltalk, but frankly it's less impressive than ruby.
Smalltalk did have a chance a while back: IBM was pushing it with VisualAge, smalltalk ISV's were popping up, it was getting popular for writing CBT software. Then came this upstart called Java, and the rest is a sad history.
The clue level on #python is pretty variable. Not worth consulting most of the time. You want reliable answers about the language itself, use the mailing lists. CPython has or had a "fake" threads implementation, but I don't think those even rise to the level of "green" threads. Stackless Python has green threads.
Jython has been "production-ready" for years and years, with its only major problem being that it's quite old and neither supports the latest python or Java idioms. IronPython is definitely stable these days, and is probably the flagship "alternative language" for the.NET DLR. Both of them are intended to port the python syntax and most of the idioms; Neither of them are meant to be drop-in replacement implementations of the python runtime down to all the libraries, and some of the blame falls on the libraries, which take advantage of idiosyncrasies of CPython, like reference counting. It could also be argued that CPython fails to implement IronPython's libraries.
Perl threads suck, they're crashy, and I think the only runtime that makes them work reliably is mod_perl. But they're still neither green threads nor does it run them in a separate interpreter instance.
Django does some pretty nifty things: its admin interface is a beautiful thing that's reminiscent of Naked Objects, it has transactional middleware that's nearly as elegant as J2EE declarative transactions, and it's reasonably zippy (though nearly anything will outrun rails).
It does have some horrible horrible design problems though: the admin interface is a highly-coupled hairball that you simply cannot extend without really intimate knowledge of Django internals that often have nothing to even do with the admin interface. The ORM is reasonably expressive, but not really any more than ActiveRecord (and suffers from the same "N+1 Selects" antipattern created by the AR pattern in general), while Python has other ORMs like SQLAlchemy and Storm that blow it away in flexibility. The Django ORM also commits heinous abuse of keyword args to make its own little language.
I tend to recommend Pylons, which has the added bonus of coming with some direct ports of rails idioms with its "helpers" library. Pylons isn't perfect either, but it's less complex than Django, and usually gets the job done. Django OTOH is much better suited for the specific application of content management with multiple subsites.
> Second, he's a buzzword bingo. "Business-logic"? Only clueless people talk like that.
Dude, I hate buzzwords as much as the next guy, but you better stay far the hell away from any non-hobby project if you think "business logic" is an empty buzzword from the web 2.0 or even the dot-com set.
The passwords are md5 encoded with a 6-character salt? That's application logic. The passwords expire in 90 days, and password change requests are cc'd to sec_audit@yourcompany? That's business logic. If you can't see the the separation of concerns (THAT's a buzzword) or the parameters of the business logic here, you can go back to writing mp3 catalog applets hardwired to mysql.
> Python threads are, like Ruby threads, user-space threads and not kernel threads.
Completely incorrect. Of course Python does have the GIL which means they're only good for blocking on I/O and not actual parallel computation. And neither Jython nor IronPython have the GIL.
Perl also has threading support (and no GIL) and no, it does not copy the entire interpreter state, and hasn't done so since perl 5.6 at least. Tcl supports running multiple threads, though I don't think the language itself actually supports their creation (it's more like the "multiplicity" option of old perl threads).
All the various scripting languages that run on the JVM also support threads. Perhaps that's cheating.
By the way, the year is currently 2007. Just in case that had to be cleared up too.
There's nothing hard about monads conceptually. The >>= operator is like a pipe, and >> is like a semicolon. The return statement is really badly named, and I can't offhand think of something it's related to, but it's not too hard once you get it. It's not really so different than learning loops and if statements -- it's just different kinds of control flow.
The problem comes when you fit different monads together, because they all have different types, the syntax for interfacing them is confusing and arcane, the type system is highly unforgiving, and you don't get any help doing it. Basically, it's not monads that are throwing you, it's the type system. You can use monads in languages that aren't as strongly typed -- they still have their uses -- and they're not nearly as painful as they are in Haskell.
And once you grok monads, you get to deal with things like Arrows and functional dependencies and whatever other shiny thing found its way into Haskell. Arrows actually seem a bit simpler than monads (because they're basically a subset), but I've never found a decent description of fundeps.
I'm referring to a solid state rate gyro, which uses some kind of piezoelectric effect (I think that's how they all work), and can be used as an accelerometer. Possibly the wiimote uses different technology though and I'm using the term incorrectly.
That's my #1 desired feature. Apple demands that we genuflect to the altar of awesome for a phone that has:
1. A non-replaceable battery. Fine that the battery's got a lot of cycles. How's that help people who take trips and carry a spare battery because they don't have a charger free?
2. Exhorbitant repair costs. More than half the cost of the phone to replace the glass.
3. Crippled bluetooth
4. Low volume.
5. Lack of basic features like searching contacts. Or SMS, so we can talk to our friends who aren't enlightened enough to have an iPhone.
6. No SDK. A lot of the software problems could be forgiven if we didn't have to beg you to fix them, but could run alternative apps instead.
Re:Get Heavenly Sword - Its Brilliant.
on
Lair Review
·
· Score: 1
> Heavenly Sword really does shine as a great game and it will for a long time.
Or until you've finished it on the same afternoon that you bought it. I'm sure it's a good game, I'm just not sure it's a good $60 game.
Re:motion controller
on
Lair Review
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The sensor bar doesn't read anything, it's just a set of IR LED's that the wiimote's IR camera sees and uses as a point of reference, for calibration and tracking. When it can't see the bar, it relies on the rate gyros alone. People have substituted candles for the bar and it works fine (you'd think it would blind the sensor, but I guess the camera has limiters).
If you think owing 20 grand on a mortgage of a 200K house is a bad debt, I'll be happy to take your 90% equity home off your hands for a shiny penny, even in today's screwed-up market.
> When the police show up and ask you to leave, leave. Don't resist arrest.
And if he does resist arrest, taser him over and over. Make sure you order him to stand up, at the same time you're leaning on him, especially since the function of tasers is to make your muscles not obey you.
It's not the jackbooted thugs that bother me so much as their cheerleaders.
They're defending Sen. Craig, not exactly a card-carrying member.
Knowing that people like you who aren't just pathetic trolls and actually think this way make me feel good about the hundred bucks I send the ACLU every year. Because all you most likely do is bitch about the people who are at least trying to do something to keep us from being disappeared on the president's whim.
Incidentally, there is already a Halo RTS coming out. Called, originally enough, Halo Wars. It's made by Ensemble, the Age of Empires guys. Long as they use Bungie's writers, it should come all right. I hope they're not dumb enough to release it at the same time as Starcraft 2 though.
Slashdot Mirror
> I don't remember there being blood on the screen. Perhaps there is now in Halo 3?
There's quite a bit of blood, but it's all blue.
Clearly, Jack is looking out for the Covenant -- someone has to! In fact, he fashions himself something of a prophet, whereas I rather liken him to a shrieking little grunt.
> If it isn't the silicon doing it, then the company is using your CPU to do work it is supposed to be doing on the GPU.
GPU's are mostly just linear arrays of FPUs with an optimized memory architecture, and they've been that way for some years now. If there is no speed benefit to hardwiring the notion of "triangle" and "texture" into the silicon, then there isn't a really compelling reason for it. 3D drivers these days include optimizing compilers for shader languages. Still, no one's asking for the shader compilers and texture compressors, we're just asking for whatever magic bits we need to send over the bus to tell the card "this is a texture", "this is a vertex array", "this is a shader", and so on. Of course those specific bits are already figured out, but there's plenty of other similar details, like limitations that need to be respected lest stability is impacted, that aren't.
Note the emphasis on networking and lack of mention of anything like OpenGL or graphics. This is to maintain their existing dedicated server codebase.
> I seem to recall him being thrown out of a courtroom in Alabama because he didn't even have the legal right to practice law there
You don't need to be licensed in a state to practice there. You get admitted pro hac vice (literally "for the occasion"), and it's usually a rubberstamp thing as long as you have a valid license in another state. Thompson's behavior in the Alabama case was so abominable that he had his pro hac vice status revoked for that case, plus a requirement to attach the order to any further applications in Alabama. In other words, he's effectively been disbarred in that state.
Keep in mind that if Wacko Jacko gets disbarred in Florida, it will almost certainly be a temporary suspension of his license. It's virtually unheard of for a lawyer to be permanently disbarred for misconduct that isn't a felony or blatant ethics violation. Jack may have committed the latter on occasion, but most of his pleadings these days aren't for any client but himself.
> Using electrodermal activity to detect lies has been around for ages...
Yes, and it's never been anything but pseudoscience and snake oil. Time and time again, lie detectors have done no better than chance when subjected to double-blind tests.
You sound like snoop dog with a head cold.
By "interpreter state", I tend to think of actual separate interpreters, which perl supported with its mysterious "multiplicity" option. By my judgment, that was actualy a better implementation, and the current version is the worst of both worlds. I certainly didn't mean to endorse the way perl does it, but regardless of how brainless perl's thread implementation is, the threads are definitely scheduler entries in the kernel ala pthreads. At least they are on my platform -- there seem to be a lot of ways to implement threads in perl. I guess TMTOWTDI applies even in the internals. *sigh*
The image-based nature of smalltalk, combined with proprietary and expensive development environments, contributed to making smalltalk far less relevant today than it should have been. Largely, you cannot write a smalltalk script or library. You have to open up your image, go into smalltalk land, and keep everything in the image. Interface to the external system was an afterthought, and actively discouraged in the walled garden of smalltalk.
Even now there's not many free implementations that support scripts or small standalone executables. Possibly GNU smalltalk, but frankly it's less impressive than ruby.
Smalltalk did have a chance a while back: IBM was pushing it with VisualAge, smalltalk ISV's were popping up, it was getting popular for writing CBT software. Then came this upstart called Java, and the rest is a sad history.
The clue level on #python is pretty variable. Not worth consulting most of the time. You want reliable answers about the language itself, use the mailing lists. CPython has or had a "fake" threads implementation, but I don't think those even rise to the level of "green" threads. Stackless Python has green threads.
.NET DLR. Both of them are intended to port the python syntax and most of the idioms; Neither of them are meant to be drop-in replacement implementations of the python runtime down to all the libraries, and some of the blame falls on the libraries, which take advantage of idiosyncrasies of CPython, like reference counting. It could also be argued that CPython fails to implement IronPython's libraries.
Jython has been "production-ready" for years and years, with its only major problem being that it's quite old and neither supports the latest python or Java idioms. IronPython is definitely stable these days, and is probably the flagship "alternative language" for the
Perl threads suck, they're crashy, and I think the only runtime that makes them work reliably is mod_perl. But they're still neither green threads nor does it run them in a separate interpreter instance.
Django does some pretty nifty things: its admin interface is a beautiful thing that's reminiscent of Naked Objects, it has transactional middleware that's nearly as elegant as J2EE declarative transactions, and it's reasonably zippy (though nearly anything will outrun rails).
It does have some horrible horrible design problems though: the admin interface is a highly-coupled hairball that you simply cannot extend without really intimate knowledge of Django internals that often have nothing to even do with the admin interface. The ORM is reasonably expressive, but not really any more than ActiveRecord (and suffers from the same "N+1 Selects" antipattern created by the AR pattern in general), while Python has other ORMs like SQLAlchemy and Storm that blow it away in flexibility. The Django ORM also commits heinous abuse of keyword args to make its own little language.
I tend to recommend Pylons, which has the added bonus of coming with some direct ports of rails idioms with its "helpers" library. Pylons isn't perfect either, but it's less complex than Django, and usually gets the job done. Django OTOH is much better suited for the specific application of content management with multiple subsites.
> Second, he's a buzzword bingo. "Business-logic"? Only clueless people talk like that.
Dude, I hate buzzwords as much as the next guy, but you better stay far the hell away from any non-hobby project if you think "business logic" is an empty buzzword from the web 2.0 or even the dot-com set.
The passwords are md5 encoded with a 6-character salt? That's application logic. The passwords expire in 90 days, and password change requests are cc'd to sec_audit@yourcompany? That's business logic. If you can't see the the separation of concerns (THAT's a buzzword) or the parameters of the business logic here, you can go back to writing mp3 catalog applets hardwired to mysql.
> Python threads are, like Ruby threads, user-space threads and not kernel threads.
Completely incorrect. Of course Python does have the GIL which means they're only good for blocking on I/O and not actual parallel computation. And neither Jython nor IronPython have the GIL.
Perl also has threading support (and no GIL) and no, it does not copy the entire interpreter state, and hasn't done so since perl 5.6 at least. Tcl supports running multiple threads, though I don't think the language itself actually supports their creation (it's more like the "multiplicity" option of old perl threads).
All the various scripting languages that run on the JVM also support threads. Perhaps that's cheating.
By the way, the year is currently 2007. Just in case that had to be cleared up too.
There's nothing hard about monads conceptually. The >>= operator is like a pipe, and >> is like a semicolon. The return statement is really badly named, and I can't offhand think of something it's related to, but it's not too hard once you get it. It's not really so different than learning loops and if statements -- it's just different kinds of control flow.
The problem comes when you fit different monads together, because they all have different types, the syntax for interfacing them is confusing and arcane, the type system is highly unforgiving, and you don't get any help doing it. Basically, it's not monads that are throwing you, it's the type system. You can use monads in languages that aren't as strongly typed -- they still have their uses -- and they're not nearly as painful as they are in Haskell.
And once you grok monads, you get to deal with things like Arrows and functional dependencies and whatever other shiny thing found its way into Haskell. Arrows actually seem a bit simpler than monads (because they're basically a subset), but I've never found a decent description of fundeps.
I'm referring to a solid state rate gyro, which uses some kind of piezoelectric effect (I think that's how they all work), and can be used as an accelerometer. Possibly the wiimote uses different technology though and I'm using the term incorrectly.
That's my #1 desired feature. Apple demands that we genuflect to the altar of awesome for a phone that has:
1. A non-replaceable battery. Fine that the battery's got a lot of cycles. How's that help people who take trips and carry a spare battery because they don't have a charger free?
2. Exhorbitant repair costs. More than half the cost of the phone to replace the glass.
3. Crippled bluetooth
4. Low volume.
5. Lack of basic features like searching contacts. Or SMS, so we can talk to our friends who aren't enlightened enough to have an iPhone.
6. No SDK. A lot of the software problems could be forgiven if we didn't have to beg you to fix them, but could run alternative apps instead.
> Heavenly Sword really does shine as a great game and it will for a long time.
Or until you've finished it on the same afternoon that you bought it. I'm sure it's a good game, I'm just not sure it's a good $60 game.
The sensor bar doesn't read anything, it's just a set of IR LED's that the wiimote's IR camera sees and uses as a point of reference, for calibration and tracking. When it can't see the bar, it relies on the rate gyros alone. People have substituted candles for the bar and it works fine (you'd think it would blind the sensor, but I guess the camera has limiters).
If you think owing 20 grand on a mortgage of a 200K house is a bad debt, I'll be happy to take your 90% equity home off your hands for a shiny penny, even in today's screwed-up market.
You also don't have to accept an inheritance.
> Now if the same incident happens again, he can't sue the city.
He waived his right to sue the city over this particular incident. He most certainly can sue them if it happens again.
> When the police show up and ask you to leave, leave. Don't resist arrest.
And if he does resist arrest, taser him over and over. Make sure you order him to stand up, at the same time you're leaning on him, especially since the function of tasers is to make your muscles not obey you.
It's not the jackbooted thugs that bother me so much as their cheerleaders.
They're defending Sen. Craig, not exactly a card-carrying member.
Knowing that people like you who aren't just pathetic trolls and actually think this way make me feel good about the hundred bucks I send the ACLU every year. Because all you most likely do is bitch about the people who are at least trying to do something to keep us from being disappeared on the president's whim.
Incidentally, there is already a Halo RTS coming out. Called, originally enough, Halo Wars. It's made by Ensemble, the Age of Empires guys. Long as they use Bungie's writers, it should come all right. I hope they're not dumb enough to release it at the same time as Starcraft 2 though.
Don't forget all the backstory they put into the two Myth games (the third wasn't a Bungie work).
Still, I think Bungie should just change their name to Halo. Microsoft will never let them write another game.
> Re:So .su me.
.yu?
What did Montenegro ever do to
> Yes, let's remove an organization whose competence is questioned and replace it with one whose corruption and incompetence is beyond question.
The US Government?