While I agree with this statement, I think I should point out that the sort of language restriction that occurs in 1984 is considered by most linguists not to be possible. Even if an entire generation were forced to speak in a certain restricted way, that doesn't remove any concepts from the language - the expectation is that even if children never learned certain words they would spontaniously reappear among language learners within a generation or two.
I believe (though I am not too familiar with this) that there is evidence of this in both spontaneous generation of complete sign languages in deaf child communities, and in (one-generation) transitions from pidgen languages to creole languages. Pidgen languages are sort of 'fake' languages that typically happen when adult speakers of many different languages suddenly live together and form a way to communicate. They are fake in that they lack many properties of natural language. These properties spontaneously reappear in their children, who learn to speak the creole, which is a full language.
It is really based on the assumption that language dictates thought - and there's quite a bit of evidence that this isn't true. Thought certainly dictates language to some extent, but forcibly removing parts of language won't take away the equivelent thoughts.
That all said, the removal of words from a thesaurus by Microsoft is a little disturbing - not because of anything that it does directly, but because of the precedent it sets. The only direct impact that I can think of is that people with limited vocabulary (and without a paper thesaurus) will have more trouble writing really vitriolic flames on slashdot. ("Damn, what's that synonym for idiot again, I just can't think of it!")
Here is the (failed) validation of www.msn.com for people to
see
If only reporters knew about things like this - it would have put some spice into the second article if the reporter had pointed out that msn.com provably didn't follow xhtml standards.
w.r.t. smoking I doubt you are correct, though the concept of 'innocence' as you describe it, applied to smoking, would probably have to include people who's deaths are attributable to second hand smoke. This, I would imagine, is significant, though harder to count.
I also bet the innocent people dead from drunk driving would be included in the 'deaths attributable to drinking' figures. I could be wrong though.
> As an aside, this Rasterman guy is the only person in the OSS community that has any asthetic sense.
While I agree with you that many of the OSS developers do not seem to have any aesthetic sense, I disagree with this statement. I have always found the default e themes extremely garish, overly showy, and rather clunky. This complaint in my mind extends to a lot of recent interfaces and themes for linux.
Looking at one of the screenshots from the article (the last one), I see that most of the text is very difficult to read - much of it is shadowed, against a complex pixmapped background, all in shades of gray. Part of this is probably because the image is way scaled down, but I still prefer simple text with a readable font on a clean background.
The graphical tricks that e seems to use to get attention caught my eye when I was looking at screenshots 5 years ago when I was in high school and before I'd ever tried linux, but now they seem as subtle to me as a sledgehammer, and they detract from my experience using the computer. This is all my personal experience, and I am sure many will disagree.
Perhaps it's because of this that I use a macos9 theme for sawfish and an aqua theme for mozilla - interfaces based on extensive user interface testing/research, rather than showiness. If you want what I think to be a seriously aesthetic file manager, try the Rox file manager (http://rox.sourceforge.net), which has got to be one of the most elegent OSS programs I've seen in a while.
This comment may seem a little bit flameish, but it's actually meant to be a meaningful comment on how I perceive the visual design of many opensource programs - letting garishness, graphical tricks, and flashiness get in the way of actual use of the computer, and of the long term 'pleasantness' of the interface to use. Screenshots of E may be fun to look at in the short term, but most of them I'd never want to actually use.
Ironically, he mentions the Toyota Prius and says that people are modifying it, and even gives a link to some yahoo group on it or something. You would do well to _finish_ the article before flaming it...
>I can't think of any record-setting games that >were based on a movie. Most of the
>best-sellers are original material, such as Final >Fantasy and Zelda.
I agree with what you mean, but someone pointed out Goldeneye in an earlier post. I haven't even ever owned an N64 and I played that more than I've played some computer games that I own and liked.
Also, most of the people that I know who play games have played both starcraft and AoE, the second when we all got tired of the first, and liked both about as much. AoE really is a fun game, at least I think so. Don't let the poor quality of microsoft's OS division close your mind entirely...
Actually, most mathematicians prior to (maybe around) the 19th century kept most of their formulas secret. There were various reasons for this, and I unfortunately don't have any sources to cite regarding this (though I read some about it in the biography of paul erdo:ch(sp?), maybe in a few other places), but there were a number of reasons. Mathematicians would challenge each other to algebra contests - if they kept their solving methods secret, they could solve certain problems that no one else knew how to solve. There were methods for solving certain polynomials of degree 3 that weren't known until several hundred years after they were first found. Also, some just kept their work secret I guess for the hell of it. Gauss was supposedly really bad about this; people are still probably unearthing his notes.
The greeks, or at least some of them, were no stranger to this sort of secrecy. As someone pointed out, pythagoras was pretty bad about this too. He was a cult leader as well as a mathematician - he supposedly (though this is probably an exageration) had someone executed for pointing out that the hypotenuse of some triangles weren't rational numbers. (he really like rational numbers)
And you are talking mostly about philosophers, but mathematicians used to be mostly philosophers.
Actually, really running spam through spammimic shows a major flaw in their description of why people should use it. Their "encryption" is symmetric, so all NSAFBICIA has to do to check whether a message is spam or something encoded by this sysem is run it through the system...if it isn't spammimic encoded spam, it seems to get a "(Sorry cannot decode)" error message. Of course I only tried this with one piece of spam, but it seems like it'd be consistent.
ESR also said he doesn't think linux will be suitable for such a purpose (as an OEM), a statement which it's interesting that no one, including Timothy, has commented on...
>(unrelated rant) And is it just me, or are Java >exceptions completely useless? I thought the whole idea of exceptions
>was to bubble error conditions up to the nearest level of execution that knows how to handle them, but Java requires
>you to include what possible exceptions can be thrown in the method interface, so it's impractical to not handle
>exceptions as soon as they occur. It's no better than checking the return code from a function call in C. Actually it's
>worse since you don't even have the option of *not* checking it; if you don't catch (...), it won't compile, even for
>exceptions that will never ever happen.
If your Exception class extends RuntimeException or Error it does not have to be declared in the throws statement of a method. I can't remember how directly extending Throwable affects this. You're not really supposed to use Error for anything, it's supposed to be only generated by the VM, but RuntimeException is fair game - Exceptions that extend it already include things the programmer will throw manually, such as UnsupportedOperationException and NoSuchElementException. It's probably more oriented towards Exceptions indicating programmer errors that need fixing, but that hasn't stopped me from using it on occasion.
Of course using regular Exceptions does have advantages - if you forget to catch an exception in a function which doesn't throw it but calls one that does, (at least I do this occasionally), javac will not compile to bytecode - it's a way of enforcing checking of error conditions.
As someone pointed in a talkback on the mozillazine site, a timeline of two years is about _average_ for a large project like this. They gave some specific examples, a few of which were linux 1.0-2.0, linux 2.0 to 2.2, ie3 to ie4, nt4 to windows 2k. and all of those were based on existing code.
That's the way it would work if there were one or two or ten mcdonalds. But I bet they can afford to run a loss now in more neighbourhoods than they will actually make a loss, and will do so in order to keep as much market share as they can. _That's_ the way capitalism works.
I actually used to do this, but a number of sites stopped working completely for me - instead of loading a broken image or whatever for the banner, I got a full page error message, and no web page. I think the one that annoyed me most may have been NYT, but I can't remember exactly.
> I'll leave it at there is probably a type of development group out there for > whom C# would be a good language to use.
Interesting post, and I think you are almost definitely right, but I know that I'm certainly not in this group, and probably not anyone I know is either. It just seems to me that a lot of the stuff that has been highlighted as being new and innovative things in C# really don't hold up in comparison to more major language features that would have a strong effect on the code that results; anonymous closures, objects, strong typing, templates (ugh); things that make a particular language really what it is. These things they are adding just seem to me for the most part to be frills. But, as you say, perhaps in certain types of programming [that I don't really do], some of them may greatly improve the readability and maybe even quality of code (reduce the severity of bad code, as you describe it). I suppose, though, that I'm not qualified to comment much on things I don't do, am I:)
On a related note I have to wonder how different really nice code written in C# would be from similar really nice code written in c++ or java. My uninformed instinct says that it will be pretty close to the java for people who like java better, and pretty close to the c++ for people who like c++ better, and pretty close to the java for people who learn to program in c# (shudder). Of course, without a working compiler, and if the rumors of lack of internal support are true, we may never know.
When someone uses the phrase "syntactic sugar" they generally mean something along the lines of "unnecessary simplification that really makes things more confusing and isn't often used, probably most asked for by inexperienced vb database programmers who think 'ooh that's neat!' [mental image of the ferret from sluggy freelance]" (don't take that as a statement against db programmers by any means)
...in case you didn't notice i happen to agree pretty much with the above poster whom you appeared to disagree with. I think all of those features are pretty much completely unnecessary. There is a difference between syntactic sugar and something that makes the language easier and more useful to program in. Of course this is just my opinion, take it as you will.
Well, you'd think that. But, for instance, if you want to fork and call a shell in the background, without the background process zombifying when it finishes, how do you do it? You have to dig through man pages until you find the obscure one that mentions that the way to do this on linux is to set SIGCHLD to SIGIGN, which actually happens to violate POSIX, but that's how it works in linux anyways.
Now, of course I'm not the most experienced c/linux programmer, or at least I've forgotten how to do most of it. So I'm likely to be missing something. But this seems like an undocumented 'feature' to me, that violates well documented standards, but is kind of important for some things. (I just wanted gaim to call another program to play sounds instead of using its builtin functions - a zombie process for each sound playing fills the process tables right quickly)
Bungie does not post release dates, as company policy, I'm fairly certain. So I doubt they have posted any vaporous release dates for Halo. As far as I know they are just starting level design for Halo, so don't expect it terribly soon. I don't believe bungie has issued any press releases saying that it would be. Oni, I know nothing about.
One of the main things that seems to have gotten people drooling regarding their trailers, is the physics model. All of the no-play demos are scripted, rather than rendered videos, so they are all based on the ingame physics models - watch the details, which are pretty impressive.
there are 95 icq logs, spanning over 2.5 megs, all of text. This is *51000* lines of text! This would take huge amounts of time and effort to forge in any consistent manner, which they seem to be. I agree the methodologies that he described are pretty vague, but he got these logs somewhere, as well as a ridiculous amount of email. And if they are all real, the person who wrote them is obviously a hardcore spammer.
Your suggestion ends up not making sense in terms of modern linguistics, though I can see how it would sound appealing to those who do not know much about the field and how language works. For more information I recommend you (and anyone else interested) read "The Language Instinct" by Stephen Pinker (harper perennial, 1994), which is an excellent book. Pinker is a linguist at MIT, and in generally well respected in the field.
Slashdot Mirror
> Restricting language is _very_ evil.
While I agree with this statement, I think I should point out that the sort of language restriction that occurs in 1984 is considered by most linguists not to be possible. Even if an entire generation were forced to speak in a certain restricted way, that doesn't remove any concepts from the language - the expectation is that even if children never learned certain words they would spontaniously reappear among language learners within a generation or two.
I believe (though I am not too familiar with this) that there is evidence of this in both spontaneous generation of complete sign languages in deaf child communities, and in (one-generation) transitions from pidgen languages to creole languages. Pidgen languages are sort of 'fake' languages that typically happen when adult speakers of many different languages suddenly live together and form a way to communicate. They are fake in that they lack many properties of natural language. These properties spontaneously reappear in their children, who learn to speak the creole, which is a full language.
It is really based on the assumption that language dictates thought - and there's quite a bit of evidence that this isn't true. Thought certainly dictates language to some extent, but forcibly removing parts of language won't take away the equivelent thoughts.
That all said, the removal of words from a thesaurus by Microsoft is a little disturbing - not because of anything that it does directly, but because of the precedent it sets. The only direct impact that I can think of is that people with limited vocabulary (and without a paper thesaurus) will have more trouble writing really vitriolic flames on slashdot. ("Damn, what's that synonym for idiot again, I just can't think of it!")
Here is the (failed) validation of www.msn.com for people to see
If only reporters knew about things like this - it would have put some spice into the second article if the reporter had pointed out that msn.com provably didn't follow xhtml standards.
I quote from the web page:
/. list though.
"(Awardees are listed in alphabetical order.)"
not in the
w.r.t. smoking I doubt you are correct, though the concept of 'innocence' as you describe it, applied to smoking, would probably have to include people who's deaths are attributable to second hand smoke. This, I would imagine, is significant, though harder to count.
I also bet the innocent people dead from drunk driving would be included in the 'deaths attributable to drinking' figures. I could be wrong though.
> As an aside, this Rasterman guy is the only person in the OSS community that has any asthetic sense.
While I agree with you that many of the OSS developers do not seem to have any aesthetic sense, I disagree with this statement. I have always found the default e themes extremely garish, overly showy, and rather clunky. This complaint in my mind extends to a lot of recent interfaces and themes for linux.
Looking at one of the screenshots from the article (the last one), I see that most of the text is very difficult to read - much of it is shadowed, against a complex pixmapped background, all in shades of gray. Part of this is probably because the image is way scaled down, but I still prefer simple text with a readable font on a clean background.
The graphical tricks that e seems to use to get attention caught my eye when I was looking at screenshots 5 years ago when I was in high school and before I'd ever tried linux, but now they seem as subtle to me as a sledgehammer, and they detract from my experience using the computer. This is all my personal experience, and I am sure many will disagree.
Perhaps it's because of this that I use a macos9 theme for sawfish and an aqua theme for mozilla - interfaces based on extensive user interface testing/research, rather than showiness. If you want what I think to be a seriously aesthetic file manager, try the Rox file manager (http://rox.sourceforge.net), which has got to be one of the most elegent OSS programs I've seen in a while.
This comment may seem a little bit flameish, but it's actually meant to be a meaningful comment on how I perceive the visual design of many opensource programs - letting garishness, graphical tricks, and flashiness get in the way of actual use of the computer, and of the long term 'pleasantness' of the interface to use. Screenshots of E may be fun to look at in the short term, but most of them I'd never want to actually use.
Ironically, he mentions the Toyota Prius and says that people are modifying it, and even gives a link to some yahoo group on it or something. You would do well to _finish_ the article before flaming it...
I think that there is an aim client with that name - it is a console program. You should be able to find it on freshmeat.
>I can't think of any record-setting games that >were based on a movie. Most of the
>best-sellers are original material, such as Final >Fantasy and Zelda.
I agree with what you mean, but someone pointed out Goldeneye in an earlier post. I haven't even ever owned an N64 and I played that more than I've played some computer games that I own and liked.
Also, most of the people that I know who play games have played both starcraft and AoE, the second when we all got tired of the first, and liked both about as much. AoE really is a fun game, at least I think so. Don't let the poor quality of microsoft's OS division close your mind entirely...
Actually, most mathematicians prior to (maybe around) the 19th century kept most of their formulas secret. There were various reasons for this, and I unfortunately don't have any sources to cite regarding this (though I read some about it in the biography of paul erdo:ch(sp?), maybe in a few other places), but there were a number of reasons. Mathematicians would challenge each other to algebra contests - if they kept their solving methods secret, they could solve certain problems that no one else knew how to solve. There were methods for solving certain polynomials of degree 3 that weren't known until several hundred years after they were first found. Also, some just kept their work secret I guess for the hell of it. Gauss was supposedly really bad about this; people are still probably unearthing his notes.
The greeks, or at least some of them, were no stranger to this sort of secrecy. As someone pointed out, pythagoras was pretty bad about this too. He was a cult leader as well as a mathematician - he supposedly (though this is probably an exageration) had someone executed for pointing out that the hypotenuse of some triangles weren't rational numbers. (he really like rational numbers)
And you are talking mostly about philosophers, but mathematicians used to be mostly philosophers.
Actually, really running spam through spammimic shows a major flaw in their description of why people should use it. Their "encryption" is symmetric, so all NSAFBICIA has to do to check whether a message is spam or something encoded by this sysem is run it through the system...if it isn't spammimic encoded spam, it seems to get a "(Sorry cannot decode)" error message. Of course I only tried this with one piece of spam, but it seems like it'd be consistent.
ESR also said he doesn't think linux will be suitable for such a purpose (as an OEM), a statement which it's interesting that no one, including Timothy, has commented on...
>(unrelated rant) And is it just me, or are Java >exceptions completely useless? I thought the whole idea of exceptions
>was to bubble error conditions up to the nearest level of execution that knows how to handle them, but Java requires
>you to include what possible exceptions can be thrown in the method interface, so it's impractical to not handle
>exceptions as soon as they occur. It's no better than checking the return code from a function call in C. Actually it's
>worse since you don't even have the option of *not* checking it; if you don't catch (...), it won't compile, even for
>exceptions that will never ever happen.
If your Exception class extends RuntimeException or Error it does not have to be declared in the throws statement of a method. I can't remember how directly extending Throwable affects this. You're not really supposed to use Error for anything, it's supposed to be only generated by the VM, but RuntimeException is fair game - Exceptions that extend it already include things the programmer will throw manually, such as UnsupportedOperationException and NoSuchElementException. It's probably more oriented towards Exceptions indicating programmer errors that need fixing, but that hasn't stopped me from using it on occasion.
Of course using regular Exceptions does have advantages - if you forget to catch an exception in a function which doesn't throw it but calls one that does, (at least I do this occasionally), javac will not compile to bytecode - it's a way of enforcing checking of error conditions.
As someone pointed in a talkback on the mozillazine site, a timeline of two years is about _average_ for a large project like this. They gave some specific examples, a few of which were linux 1.0-2.0, linux 2.0 to 2.2, ie3 to ie4, nt4 to windows 2k. and all of those were based on existing code.
That's the way it would work if there were one or two or ten mcdonalds. But I bet they can afford to run a loss now in more neighbourhoods than they will actually make a loss, and will do so in order to keep as much market share as they can. _That's_ the way capitalism works.
I actually used to do this, but a number of sites stopped working completely for me - instead of loading a broken image or whatever for the banner, I got a full page error message, and no web page. I think the one that annoyed me most may have been NYT, but I can't remember exactly.
> I'll leave it at there is probably a type of development group out there for
> whom C# would be a good language to use.
Interesting post, and I think you are almost definitely right, but I know that I'm certainly not in this group, and probably not anyone I know is either. It just seems to me that a lot of the stuff that has been highlighted as being new and innovative things in C# really don't hold up in comparison to more major language features that would have a strong effect on the code that results; anonymous closures, objects, strong typing, templates (ugh); things that make a particular language really what it is. These things they are adding just seem to me for the most part to be frills. But, as you say, perhaps in certain types of programming [that I don't really do], some of them may greatly improve the readability and maybe even quality of code (reduce the severity of bad code, as you describe it). I suppose, though, that I'm not qualified to comment much on things I don't do, am I
On a related note I have to wonder how different really nice code written in C# would be from similar really nice code written in c++ or java. My uninformed instinct says that it will be pretty close to the java for people who like java better, and pretty close to the c++ for people who like c++ better, and pretty close to the java for people who learn to program in c# (shudder). Of course, without a working compiler, and if the rumors of lack of internal support are true, we may never know.
When someone uses the phrase "syntactic sugar" they generally mean something along the lines of "unnecessary simplification that really makes things more confusing and isn't often used, probably most asked for by inexperienced vb database programmers who think 'ooh that's neat!' [mental image of the ferret from sluggy freelance]" (don't take that as a statement against db programmers by any means)
...in case you didn't notice i happen to agree pretty much with the above poster whom you appeared to disagree with. I think all of those features are pretty much completely unnecessary. There is a difference between syntactic sugar and something that makes the language easier and more useful to program in. Of course this is just my opinion, take it as you will.
thanks - my inexperience with doing this sort of thing in c shows.
Well, you'd think that. But, for instance, if you want to fork and call a shell in the background, without the background process zombifying when it finishes, how do you do it? You have to dig through man pages until you find the obscure one that mentions that the way to do this on linux is to set SIGCHLD to SIGIGN, which actually happens to violate POSIX, but that's how it works in linux anyways.
Now, of course I'm not the most experienced c/linux programmer, or at least I've forgotten how to do most of it. So I'm likely to be missing something. But this seems like an undocumented 'feature' to me, that violates well documented standards, but is kind of important for some things. (I just wanted gaim to call another program to play sounds instead of using its builtin functions - a zombie process for each sound playing fills the process tables right quickly)
Bungie does not post release dates, as company policy, I'm fairly certain. So I doubt they have posted any vaporous release dates for Halo. As far as I know they are just starting level design for Halo, so don't expect it terribly soon. I don't believe bungie has issued any press releases saying that it would be. Oni, I know nothing about.
One of the main things that seems to have gotten people drooling regarding their trailers, is the physics model. All of the no-play demos are scripted, rather than rendered videos, so they are all based on the ingame physics models - watch the details, which are pretty impressive.
To elaborate on this point:
there are 95 icq logs, spanning over 2.5 megs, all of text. This is *51000* lines of text! This would take huge amounts of time and effort to forge in any consistent manner, which they seem to be. I agree the methodologies that he described are pretty vague, but he got these logs somewhere, as well as a ridiculous amount of email. And if they are all real, the person who wrote them is obviously a hardcore spammer.
Auto Repair for Dummies
Hardcover 2nd edition (March 1990)
Ten Speed Pr; [NOT by IDGB and published prior to their products] ISBN: 0070558841
from http://www.users.one.se/~feltby/idgb_s mells/
Your suggestion ends up not making sense in terms of modern linguistics, though I can see how it would sound appealing to those who do not know much about the field and how language works. For more information I recommend you (and anyone else interested) read "The Language Instinct" by Stephen Pinker (harper perennial, 1994), which is an excellent book. Pinker is a linguist at MIT, and in generally well respected in the field.
Not only that, I remember seeing this same image on this same site months ago, maybe even as long ago as a year.
english != american english != indian english etc etc