Mix and match as you will. Chances are some of the folks here will be able to understand a code sample demonstrating your iron monkey style, should you choose to provide it.
The patent say, bad! Horrible! Instead, use content + "metacode map":
"I am a sentence."
+
chars 0-7 : normal chars 7-15: bold chars 15-16: normal
This is somehow supposed to be dramatically better in every way. Every frickin memory structure ever invented to edit any kind of structured text did this first and did it better.
I'm quite surprised that anyone would ever be found in violation of this "patent", because it's a pretty stupid thing to do.
I can't quite decide where I come down on this issue...I'll have to think it through, and of course my decision will be final and binding on all of you. In the mean time, consider this analogy.
There's a stretch of highway, a few hundred feet long. On the left end there's a store called Brass Cat Shoes(tm). Brass Cat Shoes has been there for quite a while, and is pretty well known, at least in Brass Cat Shoe circles. And they have the trademark. On the right end of the stretch of highway is another store named Dave's Cat Shoe. Dave's fuzzy fabric shoes don't properly warn people when stupid, annoying cats are around, and they're a bit hard to sell because the live demos don't work out.
Between the two stores there's a really, really big billboard. It's trans-dimensionally massive, and seems to be able to inject itself into eyeballs such that it can be seen all over the world. You can barely make out the stores, which are incredibly tiny in comparison.
Dave pays billboard owner Boogle to display "Brass Cat Shoes" in type that will occupy 1 full degree of arc of a viewer's vision, vertically. He also pays for an equally large arrow, to be displayed, pointing to his store, down and to the right.
Dave's traffic level increases massively, and because he now stocks Bronze Cat Shoes (which, while unworthy of a discriminating cat-shoer, are moderately functional), he gets the sale. In fact, he gets most of the sales. Boogle counts cars, and pockets their toll.
Amen, brother. My own military training was minimal and in the very distant past, but arguing and thinking were just not part of the equation.
Imagine this: You're on guard duty in front of a hospital, at an entrance that opens to a wide pedestrian square. The crowd is light. You see a woman, dressed locally, about 40 feet away, walking rapidly towards you. On your radio, a command is barked, from your CO: 'woman in dark clothes 12 o'clock walking towards you corporal shoot her NOW NOW NOW'.
There are fifty ways we could think of this as a terrible tragedy, and fifty ways we could think of it as a terrible tragedy averted. In that exact moment, that soldier can't work it through in his head, just to accommodate civilian analysis in hindsight.
This is yet another one of those times when I wish Slashdot wasn't so ridiculously hostile to Microsoft. What we need here is some informed, possibly even official commentary from someone in the know at MS. Exactly why is a workload slower on Vista? Where's that time going? Right now something like 60-70% of corporate workloads still run on Windows OS, so gaining an understanding of exactly why is important.
When the difference is on the order of 20-40% (if the article is to be believed), we're looking at some level of system-call "tax" under Vista, or we're looking at a different _capability set_. If the workload on Vista is in a secured environment, and the same workload runs faster on XP in an unsecured environment, we're talking apples and oranges.
It could be the case the even for workloads running as root equivalents in Vista execution times are worse...but we don't really know from what's quoted in this article, and there isn't any response from MS.
I think Vista is a pretty important upgrade for most users. Even if its security mechanisms are intrusive, at least they're _there_, and that's a step in the right direction.
The runtime library in jfx has been a long time coming, and raises the bar in JavaLand to an acceptable starting point for creating visuals with sophisticated hardware-accelerated effects.
The principle flaw of the graphics runtime is its pervasive single-threading model, which means it will never be able to achieve smooth animation of sophisticated displays. The technical excellence of the JVM goes to waste under this display model. The good news is that the jfx team is certainly aware of this, and may be able to address it. Apple splits the scene graph from the rendering graph, and it's the right way to do it.
The most interesting part of jfx is the language itself. It combines three key features:
1. Self-adjusting computation through the compile-time construction of a dynamic dataflow graph, with a goal of minimal recomputation. The dataflow can easily and extensively reconfigure itself at runtime.
2. Strong declarative sequence manipulation, fully integrated with 1, fully supporting the goal of minimal recomputation and propagation of minimal change.
3. Simple and sensible class/object literal notation. Almost-complete compatibility with existing Java code (with a few irritating limitations, such as an inability to call non-default constructors).
The language feels a bit incomplete to me, but I can see where they're going, and it's a pretty nice place. Coming from a Java/Scala perspective, the type system of jfx is pretty weak generally, but it does a fine job for its core cases.
Relative to Java, I see about a 10 to 1 reduction in code for most UI tasks...but to get there, you have to think about declarative sequence manipulation. Things like this:
public class Nest extends Operation {
override var items = bind
[operands[0].boundLeaves(
function(leaf: Dimension) {
Dimension {
name: bind leaf.name
items: bind for (o in operands[1..]) o.items };
}).items]; }
This folds together two tree-like structures, copying the second under each _leaf_ node of the first. The cool thing about this is the bind statements, which make this entire function _incremental_. After executing it, I can insert items anywhere I want in the first or second trees, and the jfx runtime will do the minimal recomputation necessary to build the new folded tree. This pervasive support for the effortless, listener-free handling of incremental modifications is pretty impressive in practice.
That being said, there's a lot being shifted under the covers, in the name of being declarative. Whatever the flaws may be in the current runtime, there are some pretty smart people working on it, and it's only going to get better.
I look forward to a tighter type system with generics, Scala-like abstract members, a concurrency model, and better tools. If you do Java programming (UI or not), it's worth your time to investigate it.
1. Try using some hardware purchased after 1999. 2. It's a library, more or less. It's shared, the theory being that you download the jfx runtime once, and from then on you have it. 3. I couldn't agree more. Particularly when you drag applets out of the browser. Or maybe there's just some weird compatibility thing going on with one of my browser plugins.
There isn't any particularly good reason for all players in a game to be seeing the same things. Each player can evolve a "version" of reality, where things stay done, from their perspective. Groups can be formed from players with compatible "realities".
Oh please. How many people buy a game more than once because of copy protection? A vanishingly small number, I'd guess.
I _did_ buy Beyond Good and Evil for the second time on Steam, recently...couldn't find the old CD and didn't want the copy protection anyway. For a few dollars I have semi-permanent access to the game anywhere I want it.
I won't buy games any longer where there is CD-based protection. I don't have a problem with Steam, Direct2Drive, or most recently the EA download for Mass Effect. It's vastly more convenient than shuffling through DVDs.
Cities are cool. Underwater would be cooler. With special underwater lighting. And little spiffy killer fishies at the bottom on the Marianas trench. Or a way to see coral before we succeed in killing all of it off.
The simplest explanation is that someone mistakenly selected the Republican ballot, then BEFORE voting canceled and selected the Democratic ballot. Does the machine allow "backing out" and switching to the other ballot, before voting has taken place? What does the screen say at that point?
I suppose that if this were the case, the representative of the voting machine company might have done better damage control by pointing this out.
The best way to speed up boarding is to use BOTH doors on the plane. I don't know who decided that in America thou shalt use only the front door to board. Idiotic.
..and the only blue ray player I've even vaguely considered is the PS3. Looks like most blue ray discs cost around $30 or so, and that's just too high for an incremental increase in quality. I agree that player prices will likely come down, but the big uptake in HD media sales will only occur when the price drops below $20 on average, just like with DVDs. $20 is the magic number.
So congrats to Sony on spending $400 million to push Toshiba out of the business. Your $30 product is now competing with $15 DVDs. Good luck!
I'd like to add that when I transitioned from XP to Vista, every Steam-based game I owned made the transition flawlessly. I can't say the same for the disk-based protection crap. And I hate having to look for CDs just to play a game. At this point I pretty much avoid buying anything that comes on disc, and always buy on Steam or Direct2Drive if possible.
I agree completely. My hope is that the UAC mechanism will strongly encourage developers to avoid doing anything that requires administrative permissions. A lot of it is just developers being lazy and not finding ways to confine their program's activities to appropriate areas.
I really don't see all that many UAC boxes. I get them when I make system changes and sometimes when I install new software. I'm not sure what the difference is between having to su or click to allow administrative access.
Vista works well enough. I had early trouble with audio drivers for my Echo Audio card, but those have been resolved with the release of a native Vista driver set from the manufacturer. I see some odd pauses now and again when using the explorer; I'm hopeful that those will be fixed in the service pack.
I don't think I'd want to go back from the UAC; I'd like it even better if it had nested virtual environments...
And where is this list of stuff that should be eliminated from Vista? It takes 15GB on the hard drive. BFD -- this isn't 1995.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn. I'm gonna go re-read that. Thanks for reminding me!!!
At some point this is supposed to be Slashdot, so I'll bite.
You claim your Kung Fu is strong, but reference a mysterious "style".
Functional? Object-oriented? Stack-oriented?
Single-threaded? Multi-threaded? CSP? Event-oriented?
Heap allocation? Stack allocation? Fixed-size pools?
Mix and match as you will. Chances are some of the folks here will be able to understand a code sample demonstrating your iron monkey style, should you choose to provide it.
Since I am bored, I read it.
"I am a <b>sentence</b>."
The patent say, bad! Horrible! Instead, use content + "metacode map":
"I am a sentence."
+
chars 0-7 : normal
chars 7-15: bold
chars 15-16: normal
This is somehow supposed to be dramatically better in every way. Every frickin memory structure ever invented to edit any kind of structured text did this first and did it better.
I'm quite surprised that anyone would ever be found in violation of this "patent", because it's a pretty stupid thing to do.
Call me stupid, but I don't see the fail. Which means it is probably there.
see my cat shoes post later on. i think the sign analogy is quite accurate.
I can't quite decide where I come down on this issue...I'll have to think it through, and of course my decision will be final and binding on all of you. In the mean time, consider this analogy.
There's a stretch of highway, a few hundred feet long. On the left end there's a store called Brass Cat Shoes(tm). Brass Cat Shoes has been there for quite a while, and is pretty well known, at least in Brass Cat Shoe circles. And they have the trademark. On the right end of the stretch of highway is another store named Dave's Cat Shoe. Dave's fuzzy fabric shoes don't properly warn people when stupid, annoying cats are around, and they're a bit hard to sell because the live demos don't work out.
Between the two stores there's a really, really big billboard. It's trans-dimensionally massive, and seems to be able to inject itself into eyeballs such that it can be seen all over the world. You can barely make out the stores, which are incredibly tiny in comparison.
Dave pays billboard owner Boogle to display "Brass Cat Shoes" in type that will occupy 1 full degree of arc of a viewer's vision, vertically. He also pays for an equally large arrow, to be displayed, pointing to his store, down and to the right.
Dave's traffic level increases massively, and because he now stocks Bronze Cat Shoes (which, while unworthy of a discriminating cat-shoer, are moderately functional), he gets the sale. In fact, he gets most of the sales. Boogle counts cars, and pockets their toll.
You blew your chance to say that Valve read your mind, and ate it.
I heard that if you like find a mouse in your beer bottle and bring it to the beer store they like have to give you free beer or something.
Amen, brother. My own military training was minimal and in the very distant past, but arguing and thinking were just not part of the equation.
Imagine this: You're on guard duty in front of a hospital, at an entrance that opens to a wide pedestrian square. The crowd is light. You see a woman, dressed locally, about 40 feet away, walking rapidly towards you. On your radio, a command is barked, from your CO: 'woman in dark clothes 12 o'clock walking towards you corporal shoot her NOW NOW NOW'.
There are fifty ways we could think of this as a terrible tragedy, and fifty ways we could think of it as a terrible tragedy averted. In that exact moment, that soldier can't work it through in his head, just to accommodate civilian analysis in hindsight.
This is yet another one of those times when I wish Slashdot wasn't so ridiculously hostile to Microsoft. What we need here is some informed, possibly even official commentary from someone in the know at MS. Exactly why is a workload slower on Vista? Where's that time going? Right now something like 60-70% of corporate workloads still run on Windows OS, so gaining an understanding of exactly why is important.
When the difference is on the order of 20-40% (if the article is to be believed), we're looking at some level of system-call "tax" under Vista, or we're looking at a different _capability set_. If the workload on Vista is in a secured environment, and the same workload runs faster on XP in an unsecured environment, we're talking apples and oranges.
It could be the case the even for workloads running as root equivalents in Vista execution times are worse...but we don't really know from what's quoted in this article, and there isn't any response from MS.
I think Vista is a pretty important upgrade for most users. Even if its security mechanisms are intrusive, at least they're _there_, and that's a step in the right direction.
The runtime library in jfx has been a long time coming, and raises the bar in JavaLand to an acceptable starting point for creating visuals with sophisticated hardware-accelerated effects.
The principle flaw of the graphics runtime is its pervasive single-threading model, which means it will never be able to achieve smooth animation of sophisticated displays. The technical excellence of the JVM goes to waste under this display model. The good news is that the jfx team is certainly aware of this, and may be able to address it. Apple splits the scene graph from the rendering graph, and it's the right way to do it.
The most interesting part of jfx is the language itself. It combines three key features:
1. Self-adjusting computation through the compile-time construction of a dynamic dataflow graph, with a goal of minimal recomputation. The dataflow can easily and extensively reconfigure itself at runtime.
2. Strong declarative sequence manipulation, fully integrated with 1, fully supporting the goal of minimal recomputation and propagation of minimal change.
3. Simple and sensible class/object literal notation. Almost-complete compatibility with existing Java code (with a few irritating limitations, such as an inability to call non-default constructors).
The language feels a bit incomplete to me, but I can see where they're going, and it's a pretty nice place. Coming from a Java/Scala perspective, the type system of jfx is pretty weak generally, but it does a fine job for its core cases.
Relative to Java, I see about a 10 to 1 reduction in code for most UI tasks...but to get there, you have to think about declarative sequence manipulation. Things like this:
public class Nest extends Operation {
override var items = bind
[operands[0].boundLeaves(
function(leaf: Dimension) {
Dimension {
name: bind leaf.name
items: bind for (o in operands[1..]) o.items };
}).items];
}
This folds together two tree-like structures, copying the second under each _leaf_ node of the first. The cool thing about this is the bind statements, which make this entire function _incremental_. After executing it, I can insert items anywhere I want in the first or second trees, and the jfx runtime will do the minimal recomputation necessary to build the new folded tree. This pervasive support for the effortless, listener-free handling of incremental modifications is pretty impressive in practice.
That being said, there's a lot being shifted under the covers, in the name of being declarative. Whatever the flaws may be in the current runtime, there are some pretty smart people working on it, and it's only going to get better.
I look forward to a tighter type system with generics, Scala-like abstract members, a concurrency model, and better tools. If you do Java programming (UI or not), it's worth your time to investigate it.
1. Try using some hardware purchased after 1999.
2. It's a library, more or less. It's shared, the theory being that you download the jfx runtime once, and from then on you have it.
3. I couldn't agree more. Particularly when you drag applets out of the browser. Or maybe there's just some weird compatibility thing going on with one of my browser plugins.
There isn't any particularly good reason for all players in a game to be seeing the same things. Each player can evolve a "version" of reality, where things stay done, from their perspective. Groups can be formed from players with compatible "realities".
Oh please. How many people buy a game more than once because of copy protection? A vanishingly small number, I'd guess.
I _did_ buy Beyond Good and Evil for the second time on Steam, recently...couldn't find the old CD and didn't want the copy protection anyway. For a few dollars I have semi-permanent access to the game anywhere I want it.
I won't buy games any longer where there is CD-based protection. I don't have a problem with Steam, Direct2Drive, or most recently the EA download for Mass Effect. It's vastly more convenient than shuffling through DVDs.
All of this crazy crap is necessary because
a) Stoopid computer parts can't just sit outside and work right.
b) Cheap heartland desert acres are beloved by accountants.
No roof == no heat problem. If there's wind. And you're not in the sahara.
If only my data center was water-resistant...
Cities are cool. Underwater would be cooler. With special underwater lighting. And little spiffy killer fishies at the bottom on the Marianas trench. Or a way to see coral before we succeed in killing all of it off.
Where's the underwater google truck-a-subtomic?
Or near-earth orbit, so we can see the junk?
The simplest explanation is that someone mistakenly selected the Republican ballot, then BEFORE voting canceled and selected the Democratic ballot. Does the machine allow "backing out" and switching to the other ballot, before voting has taken place? What does the screen say at that point?
I suppose that if this were the case, the representative of the voting machine company might have done better damage control by pointing this out.
The best way to speed up boarding is to use BOTH doors on the plane. I don't know who decided that in America thou shalt use only the front door to board. Idiotic.
..and the only blue ray player I've even vaguely considered is the PS3. Looks like most blue ray discs cost around $30 or so, and that's just too high for an incremental increase in quality. I agree that player prices will likely come down, but the big uptake in HD media sales will only occur when the price drops below $20 on average, just like with DVDs. $20 is the magic number.
So congrats to Sony on spending $400 million to push Toshiba out of the business. Your $30 product is now competing with $15 DVDs. Good luck!
I'd like to add that when I transitioned from XP to Vista, every Steam-based game I owned made the transition flawlessly. I can't say the same for the disk-based protection crap. And I hate having to look for CDs just to play a game. At this point I pretty much avoid buying anything that comes on disc, and always buy on Steam or Direct2Drive if possible.
I agree completely. My hope is that the UAC mechanism will strongly encourage developers to avoid doing anything that requires administrative permissions. A lot of it is just developers being lazy and not finding ways to confine their program's activities to appropriate areas.
I really don't see all that many UAC boxes. I get them when I make system changes and sometimes when I install new software. I'm not sure what the difference is between having to su or click to allow administrative access.
Vista works well enough. I had early trouble with audio drivers for my Echo Audio card, but those have been resolved with the release of a native Vista driver set from the manufacturer. I see some odd pauses now and again when using the explorer; I'm hopeful that those will be fixed in the service pack.
I don't think I'd want to go back from the UAC; I'd like it even better if it had nested virtual environments...
And where is this list of stuff that should be eliminated from Vista? It takes 15GB on the hard drive. BFD -- this isn't 1995.
Obviously I haven't. Good point. ;)
Security by arrogance. That's a new one.
The future will be memory-mapped files coupled with STM (software transactions). The type system will guarantee transactional boundaries.
Stupid object-relational boundaries drive me nuts. Objects drive me nuts too.
They'll have to violate the DMCA to create those archives. So no cultural heritage for you! And no soup!