date:20090329


Hello Andrei,


BCS wrote:


IIRC the 7.62 NATO doesn't have that much penetration (more than the
5.56), enough to do in an Orc, but I don't think it would get the
next in line, particularly if the Orc in question has armor on his
back.


Not enough penetration to do in an Orc? I haven't read the book, but
the movie suggested Orcs were rather penetrable by the arrows and
swords of the humans.



Oh it would penetrate the first orc just fine, but meat is a lot of water 
and does a dandy job of stopping bullets. I know a guy who retrieved a 30-06 
round (same bullet as the 7.62 but with a slightly bigger charge behind it) 
from a deer after a classic side shoot so a deer is thick enough to stop 
a bullet and I aspect that an orc is thinker.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Hello Walter,



This would all make for a great scifi story!



the story I want to puzzle out is that a group of a few thousand people get 
dropped on a planet with an indestructible encyclopedic reference, really 
good geological maps and their birthday suits. I've wondered how long it 
would take to get into back into space. If they can keep society together, 
I'd bet it would be under 100 years, it might even be under a generation.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Hello Sean,


In another MythBusters episode they were asked to try and figure out
whether there was any practical benefit to arrows with flint tips vs.
simply being sharpened, and their results were surprisingly ambiguous.
The flint tipped arrows seemed to penetrate slightly better, but this
didn't seem offset by the greatly increased labor to make them.
Clearly, stone-tipped weapons were preferred over normal ones if
archaeological evidence is any indication, but I'd really like to know
why.  Stone tools makes complete sense (and therefore hatchets as
well), but why add a stone tip to something ostensibly disposable like
an arrow unless it provides a substantial benefit in terms of the
likelihood that a kill will be successful?



After the tip get in the animal, it breaks off, grinds up and does more damage 
as the animal runs away. Even modern razor edged arrows kill by bleeding 
the animal out.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Sean Kelly wrote:
I don't buy it.  Most foods would spoil too quickly for this to matter, 
the wagons would be slow, wheels would need repair, etc.  If I were in a 
nomadic tribe I wouldn't do more than pile stuff on the back of a Mule.


It depends on whether you'd domesticated some sort of pack animal first. 
I'm talking about hand carts.


As for spoiling...well, trial and error would get you to some reasonable 
system for storing food within a few hundred years, without much food 
loss. If you're willing to lose more food, you can get there sooner.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new

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Walter Bright wrote:
 Jérôme M. Berger wrote:
 Since we're on the subject, I suppose you all have read the 1632
 series by Eric Flint and others.
 
 Natch!
In the 1632 novel, a small American town gets transported to
middle Europe in the middle of the 30 years war when small
skirmishes, let alone full blown battles, routinely killed several
times the population of the town.

The story is all about how they survive. Despite their vastly
superior weapons and knowledge, it's not so easy. Sure they can kick
the cr*p out of any army they engage, at least so long as their ammo
lasts, but they are *vastly* outnumbered and military might won't
feed them or prevent them from being outflanked. Moreover, most of
their technical knowledge proves to be either too theoretical to use
directly or to need some tools or resources that they can't make out
of what's available to them now.

In addition to fiction, the rest of the series includes several
very interesting technical essays about the problems involved in
bringing technical advances to the 17th century: what can be done
immediately out of the available industrial base and how does that
industrial base need to be improved for other technological
advances. A must read if you are interested in this kind of things
(which from the discussion here, you seem to be).

Jerome
- --
mailto:jeber...@free.fr
http://jeberger.free.fr
Jabber: jeber...@jabber.fr
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Re: Eric S. Raymond on GPL and BSD licenses. Microsoft coming to Linux

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Hash: SHA1

Sergey Gromov wrote:
 Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:38:45 +0300, Yigal Chripun wrote:
 
 When you buy 
 a car you are free to look under the hood and the same should apply to 
 software. sure, the manufacturer can and probably should void any 
 warranty if you mess with the internals of its product, but they 
 shouldn't prevent you access to those internals.
 
 I hear automotive analogies here and there as explanations why open
 source is good.  But automotive does not apply.
 
 Yes you can buy Ford, modify it and sell it at a higher price.  But you
 cannot put Ford out of business this way because you must start from
 scratch on every single car you modify and that's a significant amount
 of work.  And if you actually try to manufacture copies of Ford cars
 you'll be sued for patent infringement.
 
 Now, how would you make money on free, as in libre, software?  How would
 you make a free, single-player RPG and still stay in business?  All you
 can under GPL is take payment for distribution, as long as nobody else
 starts to distribute it for free.  This means giving your hard work for
 free, as in gratis, not business.

Ask RedHat, or any of the increasingly large number of companies
that *do* make money on free, as in libre, software. Basically, you
make your customers pay for specific developments and
customizations. Once the software is released you still get paid for
tech support and maintenance.

Jerome
- --
mailto:jeber...@free.fr
http://jeberger.free.fr
Jabber: jeber...@jabber.fr
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Re: DMC to Create C .lib ?

2009-03-29 Thread Chris Andrews

Sergey Gromov Wrote:

 I just wanted to double-check that you did the conversion correctly.  So
 I ended up finding out what the hell TCOD was.  Sorry for the spoiler!
 :D

Hah, no biggie.  Good news though, I removed my extern(Windows) and tried the 
code against the coffimplib altered library and...
SUCESS!!  So that works... like its supposed to when you're not a huge noob.  
:p  Thanks for the advice in getting that straightened out.


 P.S.
 This post really belongs to D.learn.

Oops, sorry.  I'm still picking up the flow of these boards.  Advice and 
questions goes in Learn, while D is for discussion about the language itself, 
yes?

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new



BCS wrote:
 Hello Walter,
 

 This would all make for a great scifi story!

 
 the story I want to puzzle out is that a group of a few thousand people
 get dropped on a planet with an indestructible encyclopedic reference,

You mean a ruggedised Kindle 2 a.k.a. the Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy version 0.1?

 really good geological maps

Here's hoping Google Earth has that planet, then.  :P

 and their birthday suits. I've wondered how
 long it would take to get into back into space. If they can keep society
 together, I'd bet it would be under 100 years, it might even be under a
 generation.

Without a supply of food, not long, I'd imagine.  Assuming your list of
materials is complete, they'd have to figure out what's edible, then
hunt and gather their food for at least as long as it takes them to
figure out what they can grow, and then grow it.

Then there's the question of whether these people are skilled, or just a
few thousand random people off the street.

Not to mention that to get into space they'd need a hell of a lot of
things.  Even with written knowledge of how to do it, I don't imagine it
would be an easy thing to do.

  -- Daniel

Re: Eric S. Raymond on GPL and BSD licenses. Microsoft coming to Linux

2009-03-29 Thread Nick Sabalausky

Jérôme M. Berger jeber...@free.fr wrote in message 
news:gqn80v$17g...@digitalmars.com...

 Ask RedHat, or any of the increasingly large number of companies
 that *do* make money on free, as in libre, software. Basically, you
 make your customers pay for specific developments and
 customizations. Once the software is released you still get paid for
 tech support and maintenance.


Hmm, gaining income from specific developments and customizations is an 
interesting business model for a free software company (free as in both, 
because really, how often is free as in libre software ever *not* 
available at no cost? Heck, how often is that even realistically possible?), 
I didn't realize Red Hat was doing that.

But I've never been a big fan of the idea of using tech support as a 
business model for free (as in both) software. The way I see it, that 
creates a conflict of interest. The better a piece of software is (almost by 
definition of better), the less tech support it really needs. If I were 
creating a program that had enough tech-support-income-potential to support 
a whole company, I'd be ashamed to call myself a software developer.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Sean Kelly wrote:
In another MythBusters episode they were asked to try and figure out 
whether there was any practical benefit to arrows with flint tips vs. 
simply being sharpened, and their results were surprisingly ambiguous. 
The flint tipped arrows seemed to penetrate slightly better, but this 
didn't seem offset by the greatly increased labor to make them. Clearly, 
stone-tipped weapons were preferred over normal ones if archaeological 
evidence is any indication, but I'd really like to know why.  Stone 
tools makes complete sense (and therefore hatchets as well), but why add 
a stone tip to something ostensibly disposable like an arrow unless it 
provides a substantial benefit in terms of the likelihood that a kill 
will be successful?


Since stone arrowheads, and improvements in them, spread rapidly around 
the world, the people clearly thought they were substantially better. We 
often think of cavemen as idiots, but they weren't. They were ignorant 
of what we know, but they surely had intricate knowledge of their 
environment and how to survive.


There's something that mythbusters was missing.

Re: .NET on a string

2009-03-29 Thread Cristian Vlasceanu

At a first look yes I think the assertion will fail, but not if you declare 
x:
ref char[] x =trim this!   .dup;

It could be possible to tweak the compiler so that it forces you to declare 
x like that

Steven Schveighoffer schvei...@yahoo.com wrote in umessage 
news:op.urex03gyeav...@steves.networkengines.com...
 On Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:02:16 -0400, Cristian Vlasceanu 
 crist...@zerobugs.org wrote:

 Steven Schveighoffer Wrote:

 On Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:26:16 -0400, Cristian Vlasceanu
 crist...@zerobugs.org wrote:

  Back to the slices topic: I agree that my proposed ref solution
 would
  require code changes, but isn't that true for T[new] as well?
 
  Cristian
 

 There is not already a meaning for T[new], it is a syntax error.  There 
 is
 already a meaning for ref T[].


 Yes, but the current, existing meaning will be preserved:

 void f(ref T[] a) {
a[13] = 42; // still works as before if a is a slice under the hood
a = null; // very easy for the compiler to make this work: a.array = 
 null
 }

 OK, I'm not sure I understood your original proposal, before I respond 
 more, let me make it clear what my understanding was.

 In your proposal, a ref T[] a is the same as a slice today.  That is, 
 assignment to a ref T[] simply copies the pointer and length from another 
 T[] or ref T[].  However, it does not reference another slice struct, but 
 is a local struct in itself.

 In the current situation, a ref T[] is a reference to a slice struct. 
 That is, assignement to a ref T[] overwrites the pointer and length on the 
 reference that was passed.

 So here is my objection:

 void trim(ref char[] c)
 {
//
// remove leading and trailing spaces
//
while(c.length  0  c[0] == ' ')
   c = c[1..$];
while(c.length  0  c[$-1] == ' ')
   c = c[0..$-1];
 }

 void foo()
 {
char[] x =trim this!   .dup;
trim(x);
assert(x == trim this!);
 }

 Now, in your scheme, the ref simply means that c's data is referencing 
 something else, not that c is a reference, so the assert will fail, no?

 If this isn't the case, let me know how you signify:

 1. a normal slice (struct is local, but ptr and length are aliased from 
 data).
 2. a reference of a slice (references an external struct).

 -Steve

Re: What can you new

2009-03-29 Thread Cristian Vlasceanu


 It is quite possible and practical to write an OS in D, and it has been
 done.

This is not what I am arguing.

What I dislike is allowing both GC and non-GC allocation styles mixed within 
the same program.

The D + GC runtime support is for user apps; D + non-GC is a SPL

When I say D is not a SPL I mean the default D + GC configuration.

Re: Eric S. Raymond on GPL and BSD licenses. Microsoft coming to Linux

2009-03-29 Thread Frits van Bommel


Jérôme M. Berger wrote:

Now, how would you make money on free, as in libre, software?  How would
you make a free, single-player RPG and still stay in business?  All you
can under GPL is take payment for distribution, as long as nobody else
starts to distribute it for free.  This means giving your hard work for
free, as in gratis, not business.


Ask RedHat, or any of the increasingly large number of companies
that *do* make money on free, as in libre, software. Basically, you
make your customers pay for specific developments and
customizations. Once the software is released you still get paid for
tech support and maintenance.


And then, of course, there are the library developers that release their 
work as GPL, but sell commercial licenses to those who want to use it 
without GPL restrictions.
Of course, one could argue they don't make money on the free (as in 
both) software, but on the non-free version of it (which may have 
identical code).

Re: Signaling NaNs Rise Again

2009-03-29 Thread dennis luehring


Walter Bright schrieb:

Inspired by Don Clugston's recent compiler patch.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/87vqv/signaling_nans_rise_again/


what about Witold Baryluk Converting FPU exceptions to D comment on 
the codetalk article - seems to be another good extension for the fpu 
exception party


http://smp.if.uj.edu.pl/~baryluk/d/onpd/onp/ddoc/floatexp.html
http://smp.if.uj.edu.pl/~baryluk/d/onpd/onp/arithmetic/interval/floatexp.d

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Walter Bright wrote:

BCS wrote:
the story I want to puzzle out is that a group of a few thousand 
people get dropped on a planet with an indestructible encyclopedic 
reference, really good geological maps and their birthday suits. I've 
wondered how long it would take to get into back into space. If they 
can keep society together, I'd bet it would be under 100 years, it 
might even be under a generation.


Most of them would promptly die. The reference will be missing all kinds 
of woodcraft that is necessary to survive, but nobody found worthwhile 
to record. (The Firefox series of books is an attempt to record those 
old techniques before they were lost forever.)


Foxfire, not Firefox. There are about twelve volumes, each roughly as 
long as a Wheel of Time novel.


Most of the instructions in the encyclopedia will be useless, because 
they'll require non-existent precursor technology. How to build those 
precursors probably will not be recorded.


Assuming that the encyclopedia is not lacking in that regard, building 
the prerequisite technologies could take quite some time.


Then the people will have to have a very fast attitude adjustment, and 
many will die in that process. Take a look at the sad history of Jamestown.


The Battlestar Galactica finale where they just sent all their tech into 
the sun and went native is a romantic delusion.


Thanks for ruining it for me! (Actually, thanks. I was never going to 
watch it anyway.)

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Walter Bright wrote:
The Battlestar Galactica finale where they just sent all their tech into 
the sun and went native is a romantic delusion.


Damn! Thanks for the spoiler, I wanted to watch that! On second thought, 
maybe I don't :o).


Andrei

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new

2009-03-29 Thread Simen Kjaeraas


On Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:54:48 +0100, BCS n...@anon.com wrote:


Hello Andrei,


One that I do think would be more lethal is the mounted Gatling M134
(that Terminator made famous), see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minigun. That fires up to 6000
rounds/minute which is pretty crazy. I think a salvo of that would
have made a trench through the Orcs, the same bullet killing or
maiming several of them.


IIRC the 7.62 NATO doesn't have that much penetration (more than the  
5.56), enough to do in an Orc, but I don't think it would get the next  
in line, particularly if the Orc in question has armor on his back.


At least in the movie, the orcs only had front-facing armor, as they
weren't expected to run away from the battlefield.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


BCS wrote:
the story I want to puzzle out is that a group of a few thousand people 
get dropped on a planet with an indestructible encyclopedic reference, 
really good geological maps and their birthday suits. I've wondered how 
long it would take to get into back into space. If they can keep society 
together, I'd bet it would be under 100 years, it might even be under a 
generation.


Let's say, instead of just birthday suits and an encyclopedia, they'd 
have a magic box that just doles out any hand tool you can think of 
wishing you had. Oh, and another box that feeds them all. A third that 
keeps them clothed, and a fourth to tend to their medical issues. And, 
they'd be no ordinary rednecks, but all of them belonging to Mensa.


But let's say they aren't NASA engineers, just otherwise smart.

They'd have to start with some serious reading. They'd have to spend 
years figuring out the design of the ship, write the computer programs 
for avionics, fuel control, etc. Then they'd have to design the 
computers to run them on. And the computer programs to design the 
microchips.


Then they'd have to design a chip factory to make the CPUs and other 
chips needed. Another factory to make fuel. A couple of mines, too, to 
get titanium and aluminium alloys, and a few plastics factories to make 
all the plastic parts. They'd need to either develop synthetic rubber or 
find rubber trees, or find a substitute, to make hydraulic tubing.


They'd need some serious expeditions to find what they need, in great 
enough quantities.


Before all of this, they'd need to find out how to create factories that 
make bricks for the other factory buildings, build a power plant big 
enough to run the factories, chemical processes for fuel and stuff, 
mills and forges. They'd need a few hundred Jeeps just to get around the 
planet in search of raw materials, and they'd need to build factories 
for oil well drills, piping, and truck factories for transport of all 
kinds of crap and raw materials.


Oh, and they'd need to not be jealous, adulterous, envious, 
self-promoting, greedy, bossy, dishonest, delinquent, criminal, etc. and 
not treat others with disrespect. Or else half their progress will go to 
all that. (What's -50% compounded annually over, say, 20 years? Get it?) 
Motorola dominated the world of wireless communications, and was a big 
chip maker, only ten years ago. Ever wonder what happened?


(Yesterday I saw a rerun of Bad Boys. That movie is so true to life in 
that anytime something is going down, people just start yelling at each 
other, instead of focusing on the emergency at hand.)


And let's say /all/ the circumstances otherwise are perfect (like no 
earth quakes, no storms, floods, or even thunder).


How many parts are there in a rocket? Not to mention a StarTrek kind of 
spaceship? In the 1970' I was a camera salesman. I saw an exploded view 
of the Canon FTb (a regular SLR camera). They boasted it had one 
thousand parts. Say it takes a thousand cameras to build a rocket. 
That's a million parts.


How many rockets would they have to build just for testing various 
things, and getting it right?



Any author in whose book even one of them gets up in space before 500 
years, is an idiot, and should be sent back to college. Math, physics, 
chemistry, at least.


Their number one problem is, they're too few compared to the task. 
Developing things to make things to make things[...], and having the 
knowledge is fine, but you have to be so many that it actually gets done 
before doomsday. Hell, if it was that easy to build a rocket, then the 
guys in Afghanistan and Nigeria would have been a few times to the Moon 
already.


People really underestimate things. Yeah, this guy I know wrote this OS 
kernel, and today even mainframes run Linux. If you count the man-hours 
Linus and thousands of others have done, combined, guess what. Say 
they'd been a hundred instead. Today Linux is almost 20 years, so we're 
talking two hundred years, right?


You know, if the entire mankind decided to stop fighting, and wanted to 
build the Enterprise now (forget warp drive), I'd say it would take way 
more than a generation. Hell, merely sending 2 guys to Mars seems too 
much. How long does it currently take the world's most powerful nation, 
from decision to deployment, to make a jet fighter? And these guys 
already have the factories, infrastructure, CAD programs, expertise, 
experience, clout, etc.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Jérôme M. Berger wrote:

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

Sean Kelly wrote:

Christopher Wright wrote:

Walter Bright wrote:

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

My list:

- wheel
- fire
- smelting metals
- writing
- arithmetic

But humans had fire 20,000 years ago! I think fire goes back a lot
longer than that. I also suspect that simple arithmetic is innate,
although a numbering system is not (see Mayan and Roman number
systems).

Wouldn't the wheel be useless to a hunter-gatherer tribe?

If they are nomadic, wheels allow an individual to carry much more
equipment. This allows them to store up surplus food more easily and
safely. This in turn safeguards them from famine and allows for
excess food to diversify roles in the community to a greater degree.
Additionally, it means that the writing equipment that you supplied
gets used, and the texts don't get tossed as soon as they move.

I don't buy it.  Most foods would spoil too quickly for this to
matter, the wagons would be slow, wheels would need repair, etc.  If I
were in a nomadic tribe I wouldn't do more than pile stuff on the back
of a Mule.

When did you tame the mule??? :o)


AFAIK, it's more a question of when did you *breed* the mule? ;)
Mules are the result of breeding a horse with a donkey (one way or
the other although using a male donkey and a female horse has more
chance of success) and they are exceedingly rare in nature.


You'd need an elevated donkey... or shorten the mare's legs.


So what you actually need to do is first to tame the horse and the
donkey, *then* you can breed them to get a mule.

Jerome
- --
mailto:jeber...@free.fr
http://jeberger.free.fr
Jabber: jeber...@jabber.fr
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Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


BCS wrote:

Hello Walter,



This would all make for a great scifi story!



the story I want to puzzle out is that a group of a few thousand people 
get dropped on a planet with an indestructible encyclopedic reference, 
really good geological maps and their birthday suits. I've wondered how 
long it would take to get into back into space. If they can keep society 
together, I'd bet it would be under 100 years, it might even be under a 
generation.


I'd bet it takes longer.  Even with incredible knowledge, they'd have to 
build the technology from scratch, starting with improvised tools.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

Walter Bright wrote:
The Battlestar Galactica finale where they just sent all their tech 
into the sun and went native is a romantic delusion.


Damn! Thanks for the spoiler, I wanted to watch that! On second thought, 
maybe I don't :o).


It's well worth it, assuming you like space opera.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Jérôme M. Berger wrote:

When did you tame the mule??? :o)


AFAIK, it's more a question of when did you *breed* the mule? ;)
Mules are the result of breeding a horse with a donkey (one way or
the other although using a male donkey and a female horse has more
chance of success) and they are exceedingly rare in nature.


I always mix up mule and donkey.  I suppose I should have done a web 
search to make sure I had it right.  That, or gone with my first 
inclination and said Zedonk!

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Christopher Wright wrote:


As for spoiling...well, trial and error would get you to some reasonable 
system for storing food within a few hundred years, without much food 
loss. If you're willing to lose more food, you can get there sooner.


Grain lasts for a reasonable time, but that requires agriculture to 
produce.  I guess they could dig tubers.  But I think there's a reason 
even modern hunter-gatherer societies don't use wagons, even in 
ostensibly flat regions like Africa.  If nothing else, hand carts would 
dramatically increase the calorie expenditure for travel, which means 
they'd need more food than otherwise.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Georg Wrede wrote:

BCS wrote:
the story I want to puzzle out is that a group of a few thousand 
people get dropped on a planet with an indestructible encyclopedic 
reference, really good geological maps and their birthday suits. I've 
wondered how long it would take to get into back into space. If they 
can keep society together, I'd bet it would be under 100 years, it 
might even be under a generation.


Let's say, instead of just birthday suits and an encyclopedia, they'd 
have a magic box that just doles out any hand tool you can think of 
wishing you had. Oh, and another box that feeds them all. A third that 
keeps them clothed, and a fourth to tend to their medical issues. And, 
they'd be no ordinary rednecks, but all of them belonging to Mensa.


But let's say they aren't NASA engineers, just otherwise smart.

They'd have to start with some serious reading. They'd have to spend 
years figuring out the design of the ship, write the computer programs 
for avionics, fuel control, etc. Then they'd have to design the 
computers to run them on. And the computer programs to design the 
microchips.


Then they'd have to design a chip factory to make the CPUs and other 
chips needed. Another factory to make fuel. A couple of mines, too, to 
get titanium and aluminium alloys, and a few plastics factories to make 
all the plastic parts. They'd need to either develop synthetic rubber or 
find rubber trees, or find a substitute, to make hydraulic tubing.


They'd need some serious expeditions to find what they need, in great 
enough quantities.


Before all of this, they'd need to find out how to create factories that 
make bricks for the other factory buildings, build a power plant big 
enough to run the factories, chemical processes for fuel and stuff, 
mills and forges. They'd need a few hundred Jeeps just to get around the 
planet in search of raw materials, and they'd need to build factories 
for oil well drills, piping, and truck factories for transport of all 
kinds of crap and raw materials.


Oh, and they'd need to not be jealous, adulterous, envious, 
self-promoting, greedy, bossy, dishonest, delinquent, criminal, etc. and 
not treat others with disrespect. Or else half their progress will go to 
all that. (What's -50% compounded annually over, say, 20 years? Get it?) 
Motorola dominated the world of wireless communications, and was a big 
chip maker, only ten years ago. Ever wonder what happened?


(Yesterday I saw a rerun of Bad Boys. That movie is so true to life in 
that anytime something is going down, people just start yelling at each 
other, instead of focusing on the emergency at hand.)


And let's say /all/ the circumstances otherwise are perfect (like no 
earth quakes, no storms, floods, or even thunder).


How many parts are there in a rocket? Not to mention a StarTrek kind of 
spaceship? In the 1970' I was a camera salesman. I saw an exploded view 
of the Canon FTb (a regular SLR camera). They boasted it had one 
thousand parts. Say it takes a thousand cameras to build a rocket. 
That's a million parts.


How many rockets would they have to build just for testing various 
things, and getting it right?



Any author in whose book even one of them gets up in space before 500 
years, is an idiot, and should be sent back to college. Math, physics, 
chemistry, at least.


Their number one problem is, they're too few compared to the task. 
Developing things to make things to make things[...], and having the 
knowledge is fine, but you have to be so many that it actually gets done 
before doomsday. Hell, if it was that easy to build a rocket, then the 
guys in Afghanistan and Nigeria would have been a few times to the Moon 
already.


People really underestimate things. Yeah, this guy I know wrote this OS 
kernel, and today even mainframes run Linux. If you count the man-hours 
Linus and thousands of others have done, combined, guess what. Say 
they'd been a hundred instead. Today Linux is almost 20 years, so we're 
talking two hundred years, right?


You know, if the entire mankind decided to stop fighting, and wanted to 
build the Enterprise now (forget warp drive), I'd say it would take way 
more than a generation. Hell, merely sending 2 guys to Mars seems too 
much. How long does it currently take the world's most powerful nation, 
from decision to deployment, to make a jet fighter? And these guys 
already have the factories, infrastructure, CAD programs, expertise, 
experience, clout, etc.


Sorry for the long quote, I quoted this in full because I liked it this 
much. It's the best post I've read in a long time.


One thing I'd like to emphasize is that building complex technology is 
hard for a small core of people because it's hard to get specialized in 
multiple things at once. Think of how long it takes to become expert in 
any serious domain... I'm not sure most of us could get up-to-speed in 
more than a couple major technologies fast enough to also use them 
creatively.


We benefit

How to define templates

The documentation says:

TemplateDeclaration:
template TemplateIdentifier ( TemplateParameterList ) Constraint(opt)
{ DeclDefs }

DeclDefs as defined where?

What should be the effect of the following?

import std.stdio;

template gnomeSaying(T, U, V, string s)
{
writefln(s ~  motherfucker);
}

void main()
{
   writefln(gnomeSaying!(int, double, int, Yo));
}

Re: How to define templates

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 1:46 PM, Steve Teale
steve.te...@britseyeview.com wrote:
 The documentation says:

 TemplateDeclaration:
        template TemplateIdentifier ( TemplateParameterList ) Constraint(opt)
                { DeclDefs }

 DeclDefs as defined where?

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/module.html

 What should be the effect of the following?

 import std.stdio;

 template gnomeSaying(T, U, V, string s)
 {
    writefln(s ~  motherfucker);
 }

An error, since a function call is not a DeclDef.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally, absolutely OT] Re: What can you new

Sean Kelly Wrote:

 Christopher Wright wrote:
  
  As for spoiling...well, trial and error would get you to some reasonable 
  system for storing food within a few hundred years, without much food 
  loss. If you're willing to lose more food, you can get there sooner.
 
 Grain lasts for a reasonable time, but that requires agriculture to 
 produce.  I guess they could dig tubers.  But I think there's a reason 
 even modern hunter-gatherer societies don't use wagons, even in 
 ostensibly flat regions like Africa.  If nothing else, hand carts would 
 dramatically increase the calorie expenditure for travel, which means 
 they'd need more food than otherwise.

My dogs have ticks!

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Georg Wrede wrote:
 Jérôme M. Berger wrote:
 AFAIK, it's more a question of when did you *breed* the mule? ;)
 Mules are the result of breeding a horse with a donkey (one way or
 the other although using a male donkey and a female horse has more
 chance of success) and they are exceedingly rare in nature.
 
 You'd need an elevated donkey... or shorten the mare's legs.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mule first sentence: A mule is the
offspring of a male donkey and a female horse.

Jerome
- --
mailto:jeber...@free.fr
http://jeberger.free.fr
Jabber: jeber...@jabber.fr
-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAknPtskACgkQd0kWM4JG3k+JaQCfY4qHqPyhEKDXAw8JBdCn30aD
kF0An1P2GN8ZkCYNTlkSOL2MOL1919Nc
=x5L4
-END PGP SIGNATURE-

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Sean Kelly wrote:
 Jérôme M. Berger wrote:
 When did you tame the mule??? :o)

 AFAIK, it's more a question of when did you *breed* the mule? ;)
 Mules are the result of breeding a horse with a donkey (one way or
 the other although using a male donkey and a female horse has more
 chance of success) and they are exceedingly rare in nature.
 
 I always mix up mule and donkey.  I suppose I should have done a web
 search to make sure I had it right.  That, or gone with my first
 inclination and said Zedonk!

Well, mules are a much better choice than donkeys for carrying
things: stronger, with more endurance, more docile and less
aggressive...

Jerome
- --
mailto:jeber...@free.fr
http://jeberger.free.fr
Jabber: jeber...@jabber.fr
-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAknPt00ACgkQd0kWM4JG3k8tJACeN3qkM5qPFKRP69o80k0F5gh7
6iEAn2iU5OgcjQKbhV7WDaF+9+41hlr4
=sJBa
-END PGP SIGNATURE-

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Christopher Wright wrote:

Walter Bright wrote:
The Battlestar Galactica finale where they just sent all their tech 
into the sun and went native is a romantic delusion.


Thanks for ruining it for me! (Actually, thanks. I was never going to 
watch it anyway.)


You didn't miss anything.

I've only watched a handful of episodes. I found it to be so dark, 
literally, that I had a hard time seeing what was going on on my TV screen.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

Walter Bright wrote:
The Battlestar Galactica finale where they just sent all their tech 
into the sun and went native is a romantic delusion.


Damn! Thanks for the spoiler, I wanted to watch that! On second thought, 
maybe I don't :o).


Sorry, it's been over a week now, so I assumed everyone who cared about 
it had already seen it.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Georg Wrede wrote:
Any author in whose book even one of them gets up in space before 500 
years, is an idiot, and should be sent back to college. Math, physics, 
chemistry, at least.


To amplify your point a bit with a real life example, during WW2 a B-29 
landed in the USSR, intact. It was decades ahead of Soviet aerospace 
tech at the time. Stalin had to essentially redirect his entire 
aerospace industry to simply copy it. A propeller driven, 4 engine 
bomber. I saw a documentary on this, it took maybe 10 years and 10,000 
engineers who had to recreate every part on it. It was a monumental 
task. They had all the information needed, but no infrastructure to make 
the parts.



People really underestimate things. Yeah, this guy I know wrote this OS 
kernel, and today even mainframes run Linux. If you count the man-hours 
Linus and thousands of others have done, combined, guess what. Say 
they'd been a hundred instead. Today Linux is almost 20 years, so we're 
talking two hundred years, right?


People sometimes remark about how many thousands of programming 
languages are invented, and how few ever get anywhere. Part of the 
reason is that 99.99% of the work is not inventing it, it's debugging 
it, tuning it, deploying it, writing manuals, smoothing out all the 
rough edges, etc. That's what defeats all those language projects, the 
creators quit on them.



You know, if the entire mankind decided to stop fighting, and wanted to 
build the Enterprise now (forget warp drive), I'd say it would take way 
more than a generation. Hell, merely sending 2 guys to Mars seems too 
much. How long does it currently take the world's most powerful nation, 
from decision to deployment, to make a jet fighter? And these guys 
already have the factories, infrastructure, CAD programs, expertise, 
experience, clout, etc.


You're right. You'll need *millions* of people to create a starship, 
even starting with blueprints.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Sean Kelly wrote:
I'd bet it takes longer.  Even with incredible knowledge, they'd have to 
build the technology from scratch, starting with improvised tools.


Huh, 99% of the people will be full time engaged just in food production.

Re: How to define templates

Jarrett Billingsley Wrote:

 On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 1:46 PM, Steve Teale
 steve.te...@britseyeview.com wrote:
  The documentation says:
 
  TemplateDeclaration:
         template TemplateIdentifier ( TemplateParameterList ) Constraint(opt)
                 { DeclDefs }
 
  DeclDefs as defined where?
 
 http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/module.html
 
  What should be the effect of the following?
 
  import std.stdio;
 
  template gnomeSaying(T, U, V, string s)
  {
     writefln(s ~  motherfucker);
  }
 
 An error, since a function call is not a DeclDef.

OK, I didn't look there - perhaps a definition in 'Decalrations' would make 
thing easier.

But then I wonder, since a plain old string is acceptable as a template 
parameter, why I can't use a statement that does not involve any of the other 
template arguments.

Also, would it be reasonable for the compiler to issue a warning or error 
message to the effect that T, U, and V were never mentioned in the template 
body.

What is the basic difference between Templates and Macros - the declarations 
thing is obviously crucial, but why?

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Walter Bright wrote:

Sean Kelly wrote:
I'd bet it takes longer.  Even with incredible knowledge, they'd have 
to build the technology from scratch, starting with improvised tools.


Huh, 99% of the people will be full time engaged just in food production.


If the people were dropped on another planet, there's not even any 
guarantee that it would have the same mineral resources.  And food, 
forget it.  People would have to experiment with local plants and 
animals to find out what was edible, could be domesticated, had 
medicinal use, etc.


There's a lot of really basic knowledge that we take for granted because 
our ancestors spent thousands of years experimenting and dying to find 
this stuff out.  A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would be about the 
only truly useful text in such a scenario.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Walter Bright wrote:

Christopher Wright wrote:

Walter Bright wrote:
The Battlestar Galactica finale where they just sent all their tech 
into the sun and went native is a romantic delusion.


Thanks for ruining it for me! (Actually, thanks. I was never going to 
watch it anyway.)


You didn't miss anything.

I've only watched a handful of episodes. I found it to be so dark, 
literally, that I had a hard time seeing what was going on on my TV screen.


Obvious hint to start a donation campaign for a new plasma ignored.

Andrei

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Walter Bright wrote:

Sean Kelly wrote:
I'd bet it takes longer.  Even with incredible knowledge, they'd have 
to build the technology from scratch, starting with improvised tools.


Huh, 99% of the people will be full time engaged just in food production.


Well at some point it was said that a McDuff device provides food.

Andrei

Re: How to define templates

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Steve Teale
steve.te...@britseyeview.com wrote:

 OK, I didn't look there - perhaps a definition in 'Decalrations' would make 
 thing easier.

 But then I wonder, since a plain old string is acceptable as a template 
 parameter, why I can't use a statement that does not involve any of the other 
 template arguments.

Because... templates don't contain statements?  I'm not sure what your
question is, or what not using T, U, and V have to do with it.

 Also, would it be reasonable for the compiler to issue a warning or error 
 message to the effect that T, U, and V were never mentioned in the template 
 body.

Same idea as function arguments or locals.  Just a QOI issue.

 What is the basic difference between Templates and Macros - the declarations 
 thing is obviously crucial, but why?

That can't really be answered until macros make their way into the
language ;)  but templates parametrize declarations, whereas macros
parametrize arbitrary code.  A parametrized type is something very
different from arbitrary code.

Re: Eric S. Raymond on GPL and BSD licenses. Microsoft coming to Linux

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 2:42 PM, Rainer Deyke rain...@eldwood.com wrote:
 Jérôme M. Berger wrote:
 Sergey Gromov wrote:
 Now, how would you make money on free, as in libre, software?  How would
 you make a free, single-player RPG and still stay in business?  All you
 can under GPL is take payment for distribution, as long as nobody else
 starts to distribute it for free.  This means giving your hard work for
 free, as in gratis, not business.

       Ask RedHat, or any of the increasingly large number of companies
 that *do* make money on free, as in libre, software. Basically, you
 make your customers pay for specific developments and
 customizations. Once the software is released you still get paid for
 tech support and maintenance.

 There's a market for customizations to, or customer support for, single
 player RPGs?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/4/5/the-zone-of-pure-breakfast/

Apparently so ;)

Re: Eric S. Raymond on GPL and BSD licenses. Microsoft coming to Linux

2009-03-29 Thread Sergey Gromov

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 09:29:33 +0200, Jérôme M. Berger wrote:

 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1
 
 Sergey Gromov wrote:
 Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:38:45 +0300, Yigal Chripun wrote:
 
 When you buy 
 a car you are free to look under the hood and the same should apply to 
 software. sure, the manufacturer can and probably should void any 
 warranty if you mess with the internals of its product, but they 
 shouldn't prevent you access to those internals.
 
 I hear automotive analogies here and there as explanations why open
 source is good.  But automotive does not apply.
 
 Yes you can buy Ford, modify it and sell it at a higher price.  But you
 cannot put Ford out of business this way because you must start from
 scratch on every single car you modify and that's a significant amount
 of work.  And if you actually try to manufacture copies of Ford cars
 you'll be sued for patent infringement.
 
 Now, how would you make money on free, as in libre, software?  How would
 you make a free, single-player RPG and still stay in business?  All you
 can under GPL is take payment for distribution, as long as nobody else
 starts to distribute it for free.  This means giving your hard work for
 free, as in gratis, not business.
 
   Ask RedHat, or any of the increasingly large number of companies
 that *do* make money on free, as in libre, software. Basically, you
 make your customers pay for specific developments and
 customizations. Once the software is released you still get paid for
 tech support and maintenance.

Yeah, sure.  How much support a single-player game needs?  Or a
3D-modeling tool?  I agree with Nick: to make a profit on support you
must create something unusable in the first place, and then charge money
for fixing it.

I agree that support is sometimes a valid business model, like when you
create customized Linux kernels for various hardware and requirements.
But it's definitely not universal enough to apply to every software
created out there.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Walter Bright wrote:

Christopher Wright wrote:

Walter Bright wrote:
The Battlestar Galactica finale where they just sent all their tech 
into the sun and went native is a romantic delusion.


Thanks for ruining it for me! (Actually, thanks. I was never going to 
watch it anyway.)


You didn't miss anything.

I've only watched a handful of episodes. I found it to be so dark, 
literally, that I had a hard time seeing what was going on on my TV screen.


The problem I ran into is that the audio is mixed with the music about 
the same volume as the voices, and it almost seems like they applied so 
effects to the voice audio to make it sound more like they were talking 
in a big metal room.  In any case, I always had trouble hearing dialog 
clearly in that show, and often messed with the audio settings on my TV 
to boost that frequency range in hopes of hearing it better.  That's 
what I get for not wearing ear plugs all those years I spent at loud 
concerts, I suppose.

Re: How to define templates

Jarrett Billingsley Wrote:

 On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Steve Teale
 steve.te...@britseyeview.com wrote:
 
  OK, I didn't look there - perhaps a definition in 'Decalrations' would make 
  thing easier.
 
  But then I wonder, since a plain old string is acceptable as a template 
  parameter, why I can't use a statement that does not involve any of the 
  other template arguments.
 
 Because... templates don't contain statements?  I'm not sure what your
 question is, or what not using T, U, and V have to do with it.
 
  Also, would it be reasonable for the compiler to issue a warning or error 
  message to the effect that T, U, and V were never mentioned in the template 
  body.
 
 Same idea as function arguments or locals.  Just a QOI issue.
 
  What is the basic difference between Templates and Macros - the 
  declarations thing is obviously crucial, but why?
 
 That can't really be answered until macros make their way into the
 language ;)  but templates parametrize declarations, whereas macros
 parametrize arbitrary code.  A parametrized type is something very
 different from arbitrary code.

That's a most useful answer, and some of it should be in the documentation. I 
had tended to think that templates were something more general that macros. 
Maybe that's why (like many others) I've never really understood them.

It also accounts for most of the error messages I've got when trying to use 
templates.

So will we get macros ;=) ?

Re: DMC to Create C .lib ?

2009-03-29 Thread Sergey Gromov

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 04:00:47 -0400, Chris Andrews wrote:

 Sergey Gromov Wrote:
 
 I just wanted to double-check that you did the conversion correctly.  So
 I ended up finding out what the hell TCOD was.  Sorry for the spoiler!
 :D
 
 Hah, no biggie.  Good news though, I removed my extern(Windows) and
 tried the code against the coffimplib altered library and... SUCESS!!
  So that works... like its supposed to when you're not a huge noob. 
 :p  Thanks for the advice in getting that straightened out. 

Nice to hear!

I hope that you actually not removed your extern(Windows) but replaced
it with extern(C).  Otherwise you risk getting D linkage for those
functions which is neither C nor C++.

 This post really belongs to D.learn.
 
 Oops, sorry.  I'm still picking up the flow of these boards.  Advice
 and questions goes in Learn, while D is for discussion about the
 language itself, yes?

Well, your question was about linking D with C++ code.  Good interaction
with C/C++ code is one of D's main selling points.  One therefore could
guess that there's not much to discuss but rather to ask what they do
wrong.

No worries though.  There are no angry moderators with big plus-throwers
here.  ;D

Re: How to define templates

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Steve Teale
steve.te...@britseyeview.com wrote:

 So will we get macros ;=) ?


The 'macro' keyword is already reserved, and Walter showed them as a
future feature at the D con in 2007.  Unfortunately they won't be
coming in D2, probably D3, at least at last report from Walter.  For
all we know they'll just magically appear in the next compiler release
as a minor note in the changelog.  That's usually how things happen.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Sean Kelly wrote:
The problem I ran into is that the audio is mixed with the music about 
the same volume as the voices, and it almost seems like they applied so 
effects to the voice audio to make it sound more like they were talking 
in a big metal room.  In any case, I always had trouble hearing dialog 
clearly in that show, and often messed with the audio settings on my TV 
to boost that frequency range in hopes of hearing it better.  That's 
what I get for not wearing ear plugs all those years I spent at loud 
concerts, I suppose.


I've been having increasing problems understanding TV dialog, too. It 
sounds like they're mumbling their lines.

Re: How about a compatibility list?

2009-03-29 Thread Saaa


 I would think some of that work could be automated. Of course, setting up
 the automation could mean a fair bit of work...


Yeah of course that would be awesome, but how difficult is it to set up a 
thing like the wine database?(serious question)

As mentioned by dsimcha:
For me, writing a review: no problem, creating a patch: big problem.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

Walter Bright wrote:

Sean Kelly wrote:
I'd bet it takes longer.  Even with incredible knowledge, they'd have 
to build the technology from scratch, starting with improvised tools.


Huh, 99% of the people will be full time engaged just in food production.


Well at some point it was said that a McDuff device provides food.


McDuff is right. Trying to get enough food to eat has been the bane of 
human existence for essentially our entire existence. The current 
obesity epidemic is a startling anomaly.


Even now, I hear the siren call of the poptarts from the kitchen!

Re: How to define templates


Steve Teale wrote:

Also, would it be reasonable for the compiler to issue a warning or
error message to the effect that T, U, and V were never mentioned in
the template body.


No, because the template signature may be conforming to an externally 
applied interface, and may simply not need the args.



What is the basic difference between Templates and Macros - the
declarations thing is obviously crucial, but why?


Macros manipulate text, templates manipulate syntax trees. They happen 
at very different stages in compilation.

Re: How to define templates

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 3:24 PM, Walter Bright
newshou...@digitalmars.com wrote:
 What is the basic difference between Templates and Macros - the
 declarations thing is obviously crucial, but why?

 Macros manipulate text, templates manipulate syntax trees. They happen at
 very different stages in compilation.

Macros manipulate syntax trees.  Useful ones do, anyway.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Hello Simen,


On Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:54:48 +0100, BCS n...@anon.com wrote:

 
IIRC the 7.62 NATO doesn't have that much penetration (more than the

5.56), enough to do in an Orc, but I don't think it would get the
next  in line, particularly if the Orc in question has armor on his
back.


At least in the movie, the orcs only had front-facing armor, as they
weren't expected to run away from the battlefield.



that actually was a problem, the orcs were all AI driven CGI and for a while 
they had an issue if orcs running away from where they were supposed to get 
slaughtered.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Hello Walter,


Sean Kelly wrote:


The problem I ran into is that the audio is mixed with the music
about the same volume as the voices, and it almost seems like they
applied so effects to the voice audio to make it sound more like they
were talking in a big metal room.  In any case, I always had trouble
hearing dialog clearly in that show, and often messed with the audio
settings on my TV to boost that frequency range in hopes of hearing
it better.  That's what I get for not wearing ear plugs all those
years I spent at loud concerts, I suppose.


I've been having increasing problems understanding TV dialog, too. It
sounds like they're mumbling their lines.



I'm 25, don't like loud music and run movies with subtitles. It's kinda funny 
how the audio doesn't always track the text.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Hello Daniel,


BCS wrote:


Hello Walter,


This would all make for a great scifi story!


the story I want to puzzle out is that a group of a few thousand
people get dropped on a planet with an indestructible encyclopedic
reference,


You mean a ruggedised Kindle 2 a.k.a. the Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy version 0.1?


really good geological maps


Here's hoping Google Earth has that planet, then.  :P



That to, but I was thinking of minral maps for finding ore.


and their birthday suits. I've wondered how
long it would take to get into back into space. If they can keep
society
together, I'd bet it would be under 100 years, it might even be under
a
generation.

Without a supply of food, not long, I'd imagine.  Assuming your list
of materials is complete, they'd have to figure out what's edible,
then hunt and gather their food for at least as long as it takes them
to figure out what they can grow, and then grow it.


I'd argue that working out the food supply is a prerqueset to keeping society 
together




Then there's the question of whether these people are skilled, or just
a few thousand random people off the street.



Most of the work would be skilled labor and when know how to teach that fairly 
well. For the rest it wouldn't take much luck for a sampling of 5000 people 
to to include several doctors, engineers, some framers, a few scientists 
and some programmers. Besides, it a story, I can make my own luck. 


Not to mention that to get into space they'd need a hell of a lot of
things.  Even with written knowledge of how to do it, I don't imagine
it would be an easy thing to do.



If it were easy, it wouldn't make a good story.


-- Daniel

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Hello Georg,

[...]


I'll grant it's a hard job, but look at WW-II, throw in some large ugly unifying 
force and Stuff Gets Done! Heck, look at 1900-2009. I'd say that most of 
the tech that existed in 1900 could be built from the ground up in under 
50 years if the people didn't needed to do any RD and are motivated enough. 
As for some hard numbers, I recall a NOVA show where a construction planner 
was asked to set up a time line for the pyramids using period tech. The time 
line was under 3 years (2.5 IIRC).


With the best assumptions you can reasonably expect to get I think the timeline 
would surprise most everyone.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Hello Walter,


BCS wrote:


the story I want to puzzle out is that a group of a few thousand
people get dropped on a planet with an indestructible encyclopedic
reference, really good geological maps and their birthday suits. I've
wondered how long it would take to get into back into space. If they
can keep society together, I'd bet it would be under 100 years, it
might even be under a generation.


Most of them would promptly die. The reference will be missing all
kinds of woodcraft that is necessary to survive, but nobody found
worthwhile to record. (The Firefox series of books is an attempt to
record those old techniques before they were lost forever.)



No it does contain that knowledge. Assume, it has the totally recorded knowledge 
of earth, wikipidia + googel books + gotenberg + dusty tomes in the back 
of some monetary. The point is what if knowledge is not a limiting factor?



Most of the instructions in the encyclopedia will be useless, because
they'll require non-existent precursor technology. How to build those
precursors probably will not be recorded.

Then the people will have to have a very fast attitude adjustment, and
many will die in that process. Take a look at the sad history of
Jamestown.



What goods a story without some risk of life and limb? That and a social 
aspect.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Walter Bright wrote:

Sean Kelly wrote:
The problem I ran into is that the audio is mixed with the music about 
the same volume as the voices, and it almost seems like they applied 
so effects to the voice audio to make it sound more like they were 
talking in a big metal room.  In any case, I always had trouble 
hearing dialog clearly in that show, and often messed with the audio 
settings on my TV to boost that frequency range in hopes of hearing it 
better.  That's what I get for not wearing ear plugs all those years I 
spent at loud concerts, I suppose.


I've been having increasing problems understanding TV dialog, too. It 
sounds like they're mumbling their lines.


It's a conspiracy. You need to turn the volume up to understand, and 
meanwhile the entire house hears the bangs and shots, and everybody has 
to come and see. Same with commercials (at least around here) they got 
the nice idea to send commercials a lot louder than the program, so 
everybody in the building (including your freaking neighbors) has to 
hear what detergent to buy. #...@%!@#!!! I'd say that's harrassment and 
trespassing.


Check out any movie from the fifties, and all of a sudden you aren't old 
anymore: you can actually hear what they say. Without burning the amp or 
your nerves!


I've actually thought of buying a 5.1 sound system, for the sole purpose 
of turning everything else down, except the dialog speaker. (The one on 
top of the TV.) But I've been too lazy to go to a store and test if it 
actually would work. Does anybody know?


@#...@$#!!! And they used to have this logo screen between commercials and 
programming, but now they've got rid of it, so when I watch a movie, I 
literally have to have the remote in my hand so I can be ready to cut 
the volume before everybody wakes up. Technology advances indeed.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Sean Kelly wrote:

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

Walter Bright wrote:
The Battlestar Galactica finale where they just sent all their tech 
into the sun and went native is a romantic delusion.


Damn! Thanks for the spoiler, I wanted to watch that! On second 
thought, maybe I don't :o).


It's well worth it, assuming you like space opera.


That's the first series I'd consider buying a box set.

Re: DMC to Create C .lib ?

2009-03-29 Thread Chris Andrews

Sergey Gromov Wrote:

 I hope that you actually not removed your extern(Windows) but replaced
 it with extern(C).  Otherwise you risk getting D linkage for those
 functions which is neither C nor C++.

This is just going to sound silly now, but I was following along the .h to D 
conversion guide, so I basically took the .h files, wrapped them up in 
extern(C){} and set about translating the rest by hand (typdefs, types, etc).  
I just replaced all the exports with export extern(Windows). So, if I'm reading 
it right, what I did was extern everything to C, except what I had explicitly 
extern(Windows) instead.  :P  Sometimes I just don't think.

But yeah, should all be extern(C) now, so it's all good.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 4:01 PM, Georg Wrede georg.wr...@iki.fi wrote:

 It's a conspiracy. You need to turn the volume up to understand, and
 meanwhile the entire house hears the bangs and shots, and everybody has to
 come and see. Same with commercials (at least around here) they got the nice
 idea to send commercials a lot louder than the program, so everybody in the
 building (including your freaking neighbors) has to hear what detergent to
 buy. #...@%!@#!!! I'd say that's harrassment and trespassing.

It's not just there :P some commercials are, no kidding, about twice
as loud as the program.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


BCS wrote:
No it does contain that knowledge. Assume, it has the totally recorded 
knowledge of earth, wikipidia + googel books + gotenberg + dusty tomes 
in the back of some monetary. The point is what if knowledge is not a 
limiting factor?


That's *recorded* knowledge. A lot of knowledge never gets recorded. For 
example, many people have tried to recreate medieval trebuchets. All 
they've got is a couple of crappy drawings, and so they had to guess and 
invent to fill in a lot of blanks.


Damascus steel is a famous example.

Anyone who has tried to recreate medieval or ancient technology from 
recorded documents has found that an awful lot of fairly crucial 
information was left out.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


BCS wrote:
that actually was a problem, the orcs were all AI driven CGI and for a 
while they had an issue if orcs running away from where they were 
supposed to get slaughtered.


Skynet 1.0 has some bugs!

Keeping a list of instances and garbage-collection

2009-03-29 Thread Simon TRENY

Hello,

I have a class A and I'd like to keep a list of all the created instances of 
this class. To do that, I have a static List!(A) in the A class and, in the 
constructor, I add each new instance to this list. This gives me the following 
code:

class A {
   private static List!(A) s_instances;

   public this() {
  s_instances.add(this);
   }

   public ~this() {
  s_instances.remove(this);
   }

   public static void printAll() {
  foreach (A instance; s_instances)
 print(instance.toString());
   }
}

But then, since all the instances are referenced by the static list, they are 
never garbage-collected, which could be a problem. In some other languages, 
this can be solved using weak references, but I haven't found any informations 
about using weak references in D. Is there any way to solve this problem?

Thanks,
Simon

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new

Remember that old Bill Cosby routine where he plays Moses and God is 
giving him instructions on how to build the ark? The design was all 
given in terms of cubits.


And the end of the long, involved explanation, Moses (Cosby) says:

What's a cubit?

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Georg Wrede wrote:

Walter Bright wrote:

Sean Kelly wrote:
The problem I ran into is that the audio is mixed with the music 
about the same volume as the voices, and it almost seems like they 
applied so effects to the voice audio to make it sound more like they 
were talking in a big metal room.  In any case, I always had trouble 
hearing dialog clearly in that show, and often messed with the audio 
settings on my TV to boost that frequency range in hopes of hearing 
it better.  That's what I get for not wearing ear plugs all those 
years I spent at loud concerts, I suppose.


I've been having increasing problems understanding TV dialog, too. It 
sounds like they're mumbling their lines.


It's a conspiracy. You need to turn the volume up to understand, and 
meanwhile the entire house hears the bangs and shots, and everybody has 
to come and see. Same with commercials (at least around here) they got 
the nice idea to send commercials a lot louder than the program, so 
everybody in the building (including your freaking neighbors) has to 
hear what detergent to buy. #...@%!@#!!! I'd say that's harrassment and 
trespassing.


It was quite annoying, but I found a solution: don't watch broadcast 
television. There are friendly people on the internet who have already 
removed the commercials for me.


That said, the only television I regularly watch is Korean starcraft 
(with fan-made English commentary, usually), and nobody's going to sue 
me for that.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

Georg Wrede wrote:



How long does it currently take the world's most powerful 
nation, from decision to deployment, to make a jet fighter? And these 
guys already have the factories, infrastructure, CAD programs, 
expertise, experience, clout, etc.


Sorry for the long quote, I quoted this in full because I liked it this 
much. It's the best post I've read in a long time.


Cool!

One thing I'd like to emphasize is that building complex technology is 
hard for a small core of people because it's hard to get specialized in 
multiple things at once. Think of how long it takes to become expert in 
any serious domain... I'm not sure most of us could get up-to-speed in 
more than a couple major technologies fast enough to also use them 
creatively.


For the society, this is the problem with longevity. Exteding peoples' 
lives should really extend their productive years, which means keeping 
the brain young and spongy, sucking info and applying it effortlessly. 
Just adding retirement years is a burden no nation can soon afford to 
even try.


We benefit of many generations who worked before us and created 
technology. Even before the exponential elbow of recent times, there was 
plenty of technology that we afforded to take for granted.


Yes. It takes much thinking to even begin to appreciate how much we've 
got from earlier generations. It's all too easy to say that there was 
nothing we need before the telegraph and the steam engine.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Georg Wrede wrote:

That's the first series I'd consider buying a box set.


Waste of money  time. Buy Band of Brothers instead.

Re: Eric S. Raymond on GPL and BSD licenses. Microsoft coming to Linux

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Sergey Gromov wrote:
 Sun, 29 Mar 2009 09:29:33 +0200, Jérôme M. Berger wrote:
 Sergey Gromov wrote:
 Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:38:45 +0300, Yigal Chripun wrote:
 Now, how would you make money on free, as in libre, software?  How would
 you make a free, single-player RPG and still stay in business?  All you
 can under GPL is take payment for distribution, as long as nobody else
 starts to distribute it for free.  This means giving your hard work for
 free, as in gratis, not business.
  Ask RedHat, or any of the increasingly large number of companies
 that *do* make money on free, as in libre, software. Basically, you
 make your customers pay for specific developments and
 customizations. Once the software is released you still get paid for
 tech support and maintenance.
 
 Yeah, sure.  How much support a single-player game needs?  Or a
 3D-modeling tool?  I agree with Nick: to make a profit on support you
 must create something unusable in the first place, and then charge money
 for fixing it.
 
A single player game does not need any support, but a game is not
just software. So you can make a free game engine and have
proprietary data (of course, that would mean spending some time on
gameplay and scenario and so on, which most game companies don't do
anyway, they'd rather add some more useless special effects and use
the same old script and gameplay).

As for the 3D modelling tool, I hope you're kidding? Even though
they use mostly proprietary tools a lot of the budget of films go to
custom extensions to whatever tool they're using. There's a huge
profit to be made there even if the base software was free.

I agree that you can't make money with free software on the
consumer market, but most proprietary software companies don't make
their money there either (the main exception being games). Most
software companies make money on the B2B market and they *always*
sell additional support (whether it's help to setup the software,
special customizations or formations for the users and admins), so
they could put the software under a free licence and still make
money (and more and more of them do so).

 I agree that support is sometimes a valid business model, like when you
 create customized Linux kernels for various hardware and requirements.
 But it's definitely not universal enough to apply to every software
 created out there.
I didn't say it could apply to *all* software, I do say it could
apply to *most* (and your previous post stated that it couldn't
apply to any).

Jerome

PS: making something unusable and charge for fixing it won't work
with free software: if you were unable to get it right at first who
will trust you to fix it right? They're much more likely to hire
someone else to do it for them...
- --
mailto:jeber...@free.fr
http://jeberger.free.fr
Jabber: jeber...@jabber.fr
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Re: Eric S. Raymond on GPL and BSD licenses. Microsoft coming to Linux

2009-03-29 Thread dsimcha

== Quote from Georg Wrede (georg.wr...@iki.fi)'s article
 Seems BSD should be Our Way:
 [...] has a downside, the downside is that people, especially lawyers,
 especially corporate bosses look at the GPL and experience fear. Fear
 that all of their corporate secrets, business knowledge, and special
 sauce will suddenly be everted to the outside world by some inadvertent
 slip by some internal code. I think that fear is now costing us more
 than the threat[...]
 http://osnews.com/story/21192/ESR_GPL_No_Longer_Needed
 
 Unrelated to this, but interesting, too:
 Microsoft Server/Tools boss Muglia said that at some point, almost all
 our product(s) will have open source in (them). He went on to say that
 if MySQL (or) Linux do a better job for you, of course you should use
 those products.
 Well I'll be darned. I thought they'd get that like 5 years from now.
 (Hmm, maybe everybody should stick to the GPL, after all...)
 http://osnews.com/story/21053/Muglia_Open_Source_To_Permeate_Microsoft

Been thinking about this, and I think one of the things that the GPL really does
help with, for all its flaws, is resisting embrace, extend, extinguish tactics.
I'm not sure how practical it would be to make a license like the following 
stand
up in court and be unambiguous, but here's a very informal plain English version
of a license that I think would in principle be a good compromise between
permissive and copyleft:

Anyone receiving this code may modify, redistribute it, etc. in both binary and
source form without any except those mentioned below.

All warranties are disclaimed.

If you redistribute modified versions of this code in proprietary/closed source
form, you must specify any information necessary to allow other similar software
to interoperate with your product.  This includes file formats, network 
protocols,
etc.  You do not need to provide an implementation, only a reasonably
implementable specification.  Any modifications that do not affect
interoperability may be made and released with no strings attached.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new

2009-03-29 Thread Joel C. Salomon

Walter Bright wrote:
 You don't have to look far back to see many examples of superior
 technology burying a far more powerful foe. For example, there are
 several cases where a handful of stringbag airplanes sank capital
 battleships.
 
 Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time is about bringing modern weapons
 to bronze-age battlefields.

Then, of course, there’s Arthur C. Clarke’s “Superiority”, that turns
this trope on its head.

—Joel Salomon

Re: Keeping a list of instances and garbage-collection

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Leandro Lucarella llu...@gmail.com wrote:

 This was discussed several times in the past. For example:
 http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/learn/weak_references_13301.html
 http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/learn/Soft_weak_references_8264.html
 http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/announce/ANN_WeakObjectReference_-_class_to_hold_weak_references_9103.html
 etc.

 I hope it helps.

The one provided by Bill:

http://www.dsource.org/projects/scrapple/browser/trunk/weakref

seems to work fine, and has the advantage of working in both Phobos and Tango.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new

2009-03-29 Thread Gide Nwawudu

On Sun, 29 Mar 2009 12:17:33 -0700, Walter Bright
newshou...@digitalmars.com wrote:

Sean Kelly wrote:
 The problem I ran into is that the audio is mixed with the music about 
 the same volume as the voices, and it almost seems like they applied so 
 effects to the voice audio to make it sound more like they were talking 
 in a big metal room.  In any case, I always had trouble hearing dialog 
 clearly in that show, and often messed with the audio settings on my TV 
 to boost that frequency range in hopes of hearing it better.  That's 
 what I get for not wearing ear plugs all those years I spent at loud 
 concerts, I suppose.

I've been having increasing problems understanding TV dialog, too. It 
sounds like they're mumbling their lines.

Apparently the sound mixing is causing older audiences difficulties.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/mar/02/john-cleese-film

Gide

Re: Keeping a list of instances and garbage-collection

2009-03-29 Thread Chad J

Simon TRENY wrote:
 Hello,
 
 I have a class A and I'd like to keep a list of all the created instances 
 of this class. To do that, I have a static List!(A) in the A class and, in 
 the constructor, I add each new instance to this list. This gives me the 
 following code:
 
 class A {
private static List!(A) s_instances;
 
public this() {
   s_instances.add(this);
}
 
public ~this() {
   s_instances.remove(this);
}
 
public static void printAll() {
   foreach (A instance; s_instances)
  print(instance.toString());
}
 }
 
 But then, since all the instances are referenced by the static list, they are 
 never garbage-collected, which could be a problem. In some other languages, 
 this can be solved using weak references, but I haven't found any 
 informations about using weak references in D. Is there any way to solve this 
 problem?
 
 Thanks,
 Simon
 

Maybe what you are looking for are the GC.removeRoot or GC.removeRange
functions which are available in both Phobos and Tango?
http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango/docs/current/tango.core.Memory.html
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/phobos/std_gc.html
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/1.0/phobos/std_gc.html

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


BCS wrote:

Hello Georg,

[...]


I'll grant it's a hard job, but look at WW-II, throw in some large ugly 
unifying force and Stuff Gets Done!


Well, for example, when the Allied ganged up against Hitler, there were 
more than a hundred million people /focused/ on one single thing: to get 
him out before he gets us. /Nothing/ else had priority. Even housewives 
did the best they could to help, including nursing each others kids so 
the others could go to work making bombs.


So, _one_hundred_million_ really determined people, a few years, and 
they made some simple airplanes and war boats, some explosives, and 
guns. (OK, I'm putting this down a little... They also trained some guys 
to walk across France with assault rifles. :-) )


But the whole point is, they were a lot more than a couple of thousand, 
they had the infrastructure all in place, a ready society, and a common 
enemy! And it *still* took a couple of years to get up to D-day.


Heck, look at 1900-2009. I'd say 
that most of the tech that existed in 1900 could be built from the 
ground up in under 50 years if the people didn't needed to do any RD 
and are motivated enough. 


Reread my post. It's easier for the whole world than for a couple of 
thousand guys. There's simply too much to do. And, like Andrei said, too 
much expertise needed [for the nontrivial things] to have time to learn 
it all by that number of guys.


As for some hard numbers, I recall a NOVA show 
where a construction planner was asked to set up a time line for the 
pyramids using period tech. The time line was under 3 years (2.5 IIRC).


Say 2000 men and 3 years. But stacking stones is a bit easier than doing 
rocket science, right? Building rockets is not just stacking iron, most 
of it is the rocket science, and that takes reading, thinking, and 
asking each other. A lot.


And even if they had full blueprints, there's an awful lot of parts to 
make, and a crapload of fuel to make. And the fuel factory, with or 
without blueprints.


Just to get a measure, write on a piece of paper how many hours you 
would need to write a Monopoly (the board game) server that servers 
1 players, on a PC. One honest and careful estimate, according to 
your own programming skills. Then, do that many hours of work on it, and 
see how many percent of the work you got done in that time. (If that's 
too big a project, then do a TicTacToe server.)


I don't want the answer. It's for yourself.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Walter Bright wrote:
 BCS wrote:
 that actually was a problem, the orcs were all AI driven CGI and for a
 while they had an issue if orcs running away from where they were
 supposed to get slaughtered.
 
 Skynet 1.0 has some bugs!

Yeah; in 2.0, they changed

 bool runningAway = false;

to this:

 invariant bool runningAway = false;

  -- Daniel

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new

2009-03-29 Thread Joel C. Salomon

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
 Speaking of which (damn ranting and subject changing!) I think the
 Medieval Ages were a stain on our history. I read somewhere how at the
 beginning of that dark time there was actual *loss* of technology: they
 had these aquaducts and pumps and mechanisms and whatnot from the Romans
 and didn't know how to repair them anymore, so they just let them go
 decrepit. Very scary.

Jerry Pournelle defines a Dark Age as a time when not only is the
knowledge of how to do things forgotten, but even that these things are
possible.  Usually folks’d ascribe some large construction (like the
pyramids, the walls of Crete, c.) to magic or the gods or some such.

—Joel Salomon

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new



Walter Bright wrote:
 Christopher Wright wrote:
 Walter Bright wrote:
 The Battlestar Galactica finale where they just sent all their tech
 into the sun and went native is a romantic delusion.

 Thanks for ruining it for me! (Actually, thanks. I was never going to
 watch it anyway.)
 
 You didn't miss anything.
 
 I've only watched a handful of episodes. I found it to be so dark,
 literally, that I had a hard time seeing what was going on on my TV screen.

Don't forget that all their camera operators apparently suffer from
extreme Parkinson's disease!

The one cool thing I ever saw of BG was a clip online where they drop
the Galactica through a planet's atmosphere to get their fighters
deployed faster, then do a faster-than-light jump split seconds before
they hit the ground.  Very cool.

  -- Daniel

Re: Keeping a list of instances and garbage-collection

2009-03-29 Thread grauzone

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Leandro Lucarella llu...@gmail.com wrote:

This was discussed several times in the past. For example:
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/learn/weak_references_13301.html
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/learn/Soft_weak_references_8264.html
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/announce/ANN_WeakObjectReference_-_class_to_hold_weak_references_9103.html
etc.

I hope it helps.

The one provided by Bill:

http://www.dsource.org/projects/scrapple/browser/trunk/weakref

seems to work fine, and has the advantage of working in both Phobos and Tango.

First, I doubt this actually works. The WeakRef stores the pointer as
size_t, but the GC is conservative and will still recognize the size_t
as a pointer. The unittest in the existing code only works, because he
uses an explicit delete on the referenced object.

To actually hide the pointer from the GC, you could XOR the size_t value
with a constant. Note that you need to be very careful with the
WeakRef.ptr() function: what happens, if the GC invalidates the object,
and then the user calls ptr() in parallel, before the GC calls
rt_detachDisposeEvent()? The user will get an invalid pointer. As far as
I remember, rt_detachDisposeEvent() is supposed to be called when all
threads have been resumed (after a collect() run). This is to avoid
deadlocks if the dispose handler locks something.

Secondly, this should be extended by a ReferenceQueue (like in Java). As
soon as the object referenced by the WeakRef is collected, it is added
to the ReferenceQueue associated with the WeakRef. (In Java,
ReferenceQueue.remove() also provides a roundabout way to notify the
program when a reference has been collected.)

And finally: why is this thing not in Tango?

Maybe a Tango dev could comment on this and the correctness issues
mentioned above?

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new



Georg Wrede wrote:
 ...
 
 It's a conspiracy. You need to turn the volume up to understand, and
 meanwhile the entire house hears the bangs and shots, and everybody has
 to come and see. Same with commercials (at least around here) they got
 the nice idea to send commercials a lot louder than the program, so
 everybody in the building (including your freaking neighbors) has to
 hear what detergent to buy. #...@%!@#!!! I'd say that's harrassment and
 trespassing.

I have this long list of what I'd do if I was made Prime Minister.
One of the entries relates to outlawing advertising firms and anything
other than plain text ads with maybe a voice at a sensible volume over
the top.  (Rivers does this, bless 'em, and I always make a point of
paying attention to their ads if I happen to see one.)

Then, to really bugger 'em up, I'd make it law that if there's anything
in an ad that you can't support with concrete evidence, you get hanged.
 Enough of this five out of six fluffy ducks love our toilet paper
best or Australia's favourite or any of the other bullshit they use.
 Let's see how eager they are to make stuff up when it's their neck on
the line...

They can keep the cannes ad awards, though; if only as a hobby.

 Check out any movie from the fifties, and all of a sudden you aren't old
 anymore: you can actually hear what they say. Without burning the amp or
 your nerves!

Probably because it was when they still gave a rats about quality and
not annoying the crap out of the viewer.

I guess this is all endemic of the media industry these days.  I mean, I
got so furious with all the bullshit going on that I just completely
stopped buying/renting movies and music.

 I've actually thought of buying a 5.1 sound system, for the sole purpose
 of turning everything else down, except the dialog speaker. (The one on
 top of the TV.) But I've been too lazy to go to a store and test if it
 actually would work. Does anybody know?

See, I just turn on subtitles.  I guess I got used to them from watching
Anime with Japanese language and English subs, so it really doesn't
bother me.

 @#...@$#!!! And they used to have this logo screen between commercials and
 programming, but now they've got rid of it, so when I watch a movie, I
 literally have to have the remote in my hand so I can be ready to cut
 the volume before everybody wakes up. Technology advances indeed.

I have a great solution to this: I don't watch TV.  The only exception I
make on any vaguely regular basis is to turn it on to watch TopGear
(when someone reminds me, since I have an atrocious memory for this.)

Sometimes, I wonder how far above my own the general public's tolerance
for being treated like cattle is.  Just how far do the media and TV
companies have to push people before society at large turns around and
hacks their hands off with a blunt spoon...

  -- Daniel

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new



Walter Bright wrote:
 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
 Walter Bright wrote:
 Sean Kelly wrote:
 I'd bet it takes longer.  Even with incredible knowledge, they'd
 have to build the technology from scratch, starting with improvised
 tools.

 Huh, 99% of the people will be full time engaged just in food
 production.

 Well at some point it was said that a McDuff device provides food.
 
 McDuff is right. Trying to get enough food to eat has been the bane of
 human existence for essentially our entire existence. The current
 obesity epidemic is a startling anomaly.

Aye... except, of course, for all the people starving to death.

I get the sneaking suspicion that it's less a problem of too much food
and more of too much of the food in too few places.

We seemingly have the same problem with money, too.  :P

  -- Daniel

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Joel C. Salomon joelcsalo...@gmail.com wrote:
 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
 Speaking of which (damn ranting and subject changing!) I think the
 Medieval Ages were a stain on our history. I read somewhere how at the
 beginning of that dark time there was actual *loss* of technology: they
 had these aquaducts and pumps and mechanisms and whatnot from the Romans
 and didn't know how to repair them anymore, so they just let them go
 decrepit. Very scary.

 Jerry Pournelle defines a Dark Age as a time when not only is the
 knowledge of how to do things forgotten, but even that these things are
 possible.  Usually folks’d ascribe some large construction (like the
 pyramids, the walls of Crete, c.) to magic or the gods or some such.

Indeed.  The European Dark Ages were dominated by views that humans
were inherently flawed; that everyone was born a sinner; that you were
predestined to go to either heaven or hell and there was nothing you
could do to change that.  There was pretty much a complete loss of
faith in the capabilities of humanity itself.  It wasn't until the
renaissance that humanistic thought made a return and caused politics,
science, and technology to simply explode in development.  Heck, even
most of the work of the ancient Greeks and Romans was lost, either
unavailable to the public at large due to a lack of printing
technology and literacy, or simply disregarded as heresy.  Some
incredible writings had the ink stripped off the pages and were reused
in copying the Bible or other liturgical works.  Incredible.

Re: Keeping a list of instances and garbage-collection

grauzone wrote:

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Leandro Lucarella llu...@gmail.com
wrote:

This was discussed several times in the past. For example:
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/learn/weak_references_13301.html

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/learn/Soft_weak_references_8264.html

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/announce/ANN_WeakObjectReference_-_class_to_hold_weak_references_9103.html

etc.

I hope it helps.

The one provided by Bill:

http://www.dsource.org/projects/scrapple/browser/trunk/weakref

seems to work fine, and has the advantage of working in both Phobos
and Tango.

If the WeakRef is on the stack, this is true.

If the WeakRef is part of an aggregate type that contains pointers, this
is true.

Otherwise, the GC will see that the relevant block is marked as having
no pointers.

True -- weakref is a difficult thing to make thread-safe.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
When I'll see loss of technology happening, I'll now we're in big 
trouble. I hope it won't happen in my lifetime, or ever.


Hi-tech export restrictions are a good start. Forbidding teaching Darwin 
in schools. Forbidden encryption software. Forbidden stem cell research.


It's here. There are better examples, but this is not a Politically 
Incorrect Forum...


Although it seems to be getting a lot better now, with the change in power.

And nobody can guarantee that the EU and US will outlast us. The USSR 
didn't. And simply nobody believed it would disappear within our 
lifetime. (One day I stood in the cafe at the top of the WTC, looking at 
the sunset. I still remember thinking I'll be long gone in 50 years, 
but this building will probably be here for a thousand years. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Manhattan_from_helicopter_edit1.jpg)


Once the big change comes, you can bet your last cent that those who 
take over will have a whole new idea of what is good an bad for you. 
(Technology-wise, the demise of the USSR or East Germany was no loss, 
but that was an exception compared to the US or the EU.)


I really hope nothing will happen while my kids are around.

Re: Keeping a list of instances and garbage-collection

2009-03-29 Thread Bill Baxter

Part of the reason I wrote it and made it available was to serve as a
focal point for such critiques. If you think it doesn't work and can
fix it, please do so!

--bb

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 7:00 AM, grauzone n...@example.net wrote:
Jarrett Billingsley wrote:

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Leandro Lucarella llu...@gmail.com
wrote:

This was discussed several times in the past. For example:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/learn/weak_references_13301.html

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/learn/Soft_weak_references_8264.html

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/announce/ANN_WeakObjectReference_-_class_to_hold_weak_references_9103.html
etc.

I hope it helps.

The one provided by Bill:

http://www.dsource.org/projects/scrapple/browser/trunk/weakref

seems to work fine, and has the advantage of working in both Phobos and
Tango.

First, I doubt this actually works. The WeakRef stores the pointer as
size_t, but the GC is conservative and will still recognize the size_t as a
pointer. The unittest in the existing code only works, because he uses an
explicit delete on the referenced object.

To actually hide the pointer from the GC, you could XOR the size_t value
with a constant. Note that you need to be very careful with the
WeakRef.ptr() function: what happens, if the GC invalidates the object, and
then the user calls ptr() in parallel, before the GC calls
rt_detachDisposeEvent()? The user will get an invalid pointer. As far as I
remember, rt_detachDisposeEvent() is supposed to be called when all threads
have been resumed (after a collect() run). This is to avoid deadlocks if the
dispose handler locks something.

Secondly, this should be extended by a ReferenceQueue (like in Java). As
soon as the object referenced by the WeakRef is collected, it is added to
the ReferenceQueue associated with the WeakRef. (In Java,
ReferenceQueue.remove() also provides a roundabout way to notify the program
when a reference has been collected.)

And finally: why is this thing not in Tango?

Maybe a Tango dev could comment on this and the correctness issues mentioned
above?

Re: Keeping a list of instances and garbage-collection

2009-03-29 Thread grauzone

Christopher Wright wrote:

grauzone wrote:

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Leandro Lucarella llu...@gmail.com
wrote:

This was discussed several times in the past. For example:
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/learn/weak_references_13301.html

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/learn/Soft_weak_references_8264.html

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/announce/ANN_WeakObjectReference_-_class_to_hold_weak_references_9103.html

etc.

I hope it helps.

The one provided by Bill:

http://www.dsource.org/projects/scrapple/browser/trunk/weakref

seems to work fine, and has the advantage of working in both Phobos
and Tango.

If the WeakRef is on the stack, this is true.

If the WeakRef is part of an aggregate type that contains pointers, this
is true.

If WeakRef is a class, this is also true. Because all objects contain a
hidden monitor pointer, and the monitor is subject to garbage collection
AFAIK.

Otherwise, the GC will see that the relevant block is marked as having
no pointers.

True -- weakref is a difficult thing to make thread-safe.

It seems there's still work to do, and a thread-safe WeakRef can't be
created with the current interfaces. Is this true?

I'm thinking rt_attachDisposeEvent() should take a *pointer* to the
reference instead of the reference itself (effectively a double
pointer), and clear this pointer during garbage collection, when all
threads are still globally locked.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Daniel Keep wrote:
 Then, to really bugger 'em up, I'd make it law that if there's anything

in an ad that you can't support with concrete evidence, you get hanged.
 Enough of this five out of six fluffy ducks love our toilet paper
best or Australia's favourite or any of the other bullshit they use.
 Let's see how eager they are to make stuff up when it's their neck on
the line...


Oh yes!! Today, I'm having a hard time telling my kids not to lie, while 
all the TV ads do is blatant lying.



They can keep the cannes ad awards, though; if only as a hobby.


Check out any movie from the fifties, and all of a sudden you aren't old
anymore: you can actually hear what they say. Without burning the amp or
your nerves!


Probably because it was when they still gave a rats about quality and
not annoying the crap out of the viewer.

I guess this is all endemic of the media industry these days.  I mean, I
got so furious with all the bullshit going on that I just completely
stopped buying/renting movies and music.


I've actually thought of buying a 5.1 sound system, for the sole purpose
of turning everything else down, except the dialog speaker. (The one on
top of the TV.) But I've been too lazy to go to a store and test if it
actually would work. Does anybody know?


See, I just turn on subtitles.  I guess I got used to them from watching
Anime with Japanese language and English subs, so it really doesn't
bother me.


Well, I learnt all my English from watching and listening while reading 
local subtitles. I'd hate to turn off the volume.



Sometimes, I wonder how far above my own the general public's tolerance
for being treated like cattle is.  Just how far do the media and TV
companies have to push people before society at large turns around and
hacks their hands off with a blunt spoon...


Well, if folks download movies and music, the industry sure makes them 
have less of a bad conscience. And soon more people will do it, just to 
get even with the industry.


Most of my TV watching is either recordings, or time-shift, where I can 
skip commercials even when I watch live.

Re: Keeping a list of instances and garbage-collection

2009-03-29 Thread bearophile

grauzone:
 First, I doubt this actually works. [...] To actually hide the pointer from 
 the GC, you could XOR the size_t value with a constant.

This is may be a stupid idea: Can't the OP just allocate with 
std.c.stdlib.malloc a block of void* pointers (plus keep an int length too), 
fill them with the object references and and then cast one of them back to 
object reference when necessary? Objects of such class can keep a similarly 
C-heap pointer to the cell of the block that contains its reference, and set it 
to null when they are removed.
It's not a general solution yet and it looks a bit messy.

Weak references may just need to be added to Phobos/Tango GC, if not present.

Bye,
bearophile

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new

2009-03-29 Thread Rioshin an'Harthen


Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

Speaking of which (damn ranting and subject changing!) I think the 
Medieval Ages were a stain on our history. I read somewhere how at the 
beginning of that dark time there was actual *loss* of technology: they 
had these aquaducts and pumps and mechanisms and whatnot from the Romans 
and didn't know how to repair them anymore, so they just let them go 
decrepit. Very scary.


I seem to remember reading from science mags that the ancient Greeks were 
close to building, if they hadn't already succeeded to, mechanical 
calculators. I also remember reading about some kind of batteries, but can't 
remember which ancient civilization it was that had discovered them. 
Scientists are only now managing to piece out pre-Dark Ages technology and 
how advanced it really was.


Now, if only the ancient times had continued to develop scientifically... 
who knows where we'd be now? It's not hard to imagine the computer being 
invented around 500 AD or so, if the current theories of ancient times hold 
up.


For some reason, the scientific development seems to have halted and even 
taken steps back in areas christianity spread to in ancient times, and only 
in the last about half a millenia has technological progress resumed.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Hello Christopher,


It was quite annoying, but I found a solution: don't watch broadcast
television. There are friendly people on the internet who have already
removed the commercials for me.



hulu.com grand total of about 2 minutes of non show tops. I don't even own 
a TV.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Joel C. Salomon wrote:

Jerry Pournelle defines a Dark Age as a time when not only is the
knowledge of how to do things forgotten, but even that these things are
possible.  Usually folks’d ascribe some large construction (like the
pyramids, the walls of Crete, c.) to magic or the gods or some such.


I remember one of those idiot In Search Of... type shows in the 70's 
saying that the fit of stones in South America was so tight you couldn't 
 put a knife blade between them. Therefore, the stone walls must have 
been made by aliens.


Never mind why would aliens with such advanced tech would build a 
crooked lumpy stone wall like that anyway.


But a few years later, some archeologist demonstrated how to make such a 
fit by banging a couple stones together. Took him 30 minutes per 
surface. No aliens or even tools were required.

The Case for D

I am writing an article for a programming magazine entitled The Case 
for D.


Would anyone be interested in reviewing it before publication? Please 
send me private email if so. I will need to limit the number of 
reviewers to a fraction of the responders, and one hard requirement is 
that they must be regulars on this group.


It's a rather long read but also light.

Please let me know. Thanks!


Andrei

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new

2009-03-29 Thread Ellery Newcomer


Walter Bright wrote:

Joel C. Salomon wrote:

Jerry Pournelle defines a Dark Age as a time when not only is the
knowledge of how to do things forgotten, but even that these things are
possible.  Usually folks’d ascribe some large construction (like the
pyramids, the walls of Crete, c.) to magic or the gods or some such.


I remember one of those idiot In Search Of... type shows in the 70's 
saying that the fit of stones in South America was so tight you couldn't 
 put a knife blade between them. Therefore, the stone walls must have 
been made by aliens.


Never mind why would aliens with such advanced tech would build a 
crooked lumpy stone wall like that anyway.


But a few years later, some archeologist demonstrated how to make such a 
fit by banging a couple stones together. Took him 30 minutes per 
surface. No aliens or even tools were required.


I've not heard about that, any good links on the subject?

Some of the rocks at Sacsayhuaman were pretty dang huge, though.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new



BCS wrote:
 Hello Christopher,
 
 It was quite annoying, but I found a solution: don't watch broadcast
 television. There are friendly people on the internet who have already
 removed the commercials for me.
 
 
 hulu.com grand total of about 2 minutes of non show tops. I don't even
 own a TV.

Only a valid point if you happen to live in the US.

  -- Daniel

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new



Rioshin an'Harthen wrote:
 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
 
 Speaking of which (damn ranting and subject changing!) I think the
 Medieval Ages were a stain on our history. I read somewhere how at the
 beginning of that dark time there was actual *loss* of technology:
 they had these aquaducts and pumps and mechanisms and whatnot from the
 Romans and didn't know how to repair them anymore, so they just let
 them go decrepit. Very scary.
 
 I seem to remember reading from science mags that the ancient Greeks
 were close to building, if they hadn't already succeeded to, mechanical
 calculators. I also remember reading about some kind of batteries, but
 can't remember which ancient civilization it was that had discovered
 them. Scientists are only now managing to piece out pre-Dark Ages
 technology and how advanced it really was.
 
 Now, if only the ancient times had continued to develop
 scientifically... who knows where we'd be now? It's not hard to imagine
 the computer being invented around 500 AD or so, if the current theories
 of ancient times hold up.
 
 For some reason, the scientific development seems to have halted and
 even taken steps back in areas christianity spread to in ancient times,
 and only in the last about half a millenia has technological progress
 resumed.

It seems the major purpose of religion is to retard the progress of
science [1].  Just look at the intelligent design movement.  Or hell,
Scientology.

Every time I can begin to hope that humanity has reached the point where
everyone is free to believe whatever they choose without being set upon
by people who believe differently, some group of insane gits comes along
and just has to spoil it.

Disclaimer: I'm an atheist who believes everyone should be free to
believe whatever they like.

  -- Daniel

[1] Which is a diplomatic way of saying to keep people stupid and
gullible.  No offence to any religious people on the NG; it's not
individuals I have problems with, it's *institutionalised* belief.

Re: Eric S. Raymond on GPL and BSD licenses. Microsoft coming to

2009-03-29 Thread Jussi Jumppanen

Yigal Chripun Wrote:

 That is why there are many successful companies that base 
 their business model on free licenses like the GPL and zero 
 companies that use the BSD.

The Apple OS X is a BSD derivative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X

  Mac OS X is based upon the Mach kernel.[7] Certain parts 
  from FreeBSD's and NetBSD's implementation of Unix were 
  incorporated in Nextstep, the core of Mac OS X.

Re: Eric S. Raymond on GPL and BSD licenses. Microsoft coming to Linux

2009-03-29 Thread Mike Parker


Yigal Chripun wrote:

On 29/03/2009 08:26, Mike Parker wrote:

Yigal Chripun wrote:




How many companies do you know that use the BSD for their products?
BSD is used by universities and non-profit organizations not companies.
claiming that BSD  GPL in a corporate environment is simply wrong.


That's not the point. Plenty of companies use open source libraries in
their code, even if they don't open source the end product. BSD is
friendlier to them because they aren't forced to open up everything that
touches it. GPL is viral. Use one GPL library and your whole project is
tainted. Philosophically, GPL gives freedom to the end user. BSD leaves
freedom with the developer. IMO, the latter is where it should be, as it
is the developer who expends the resources to create the product in the
first place.


you contradict yourself. if a company uses open source libraries in 
their products than they are the *users* of the code, and the 
*developers* are those who *created* the library. what you meant to say 
is that many companies _exploit_ non free open source code (BSD and 
such) in their closed source products. You do all the hard work, give 
away your library for free, and those companies exploit that to enlarge 
their profit margins, after all they invested much less time/money in 
the product. if you really intended this outcome, you just robbed 
someone's job at that same company.


When someone release a under a library under a more generous license 
like the BSD, they know full well that anyone can use that source in 
closed-source, proprietary software. Companies who do so are not 
*exploiting* anyone or anything. They are given permission by the 
developers of the library, who consciously made that choice, to do so.




The GPL gives freedom to both the developers and the end-users while the 
BSD doesn't give any freedoms at all, to no one. That is why there are 
many successful companies that base their business model on free 
licenses like the GPL and zero companies that use the BSD. and that is 
the point.


No, it gives no freedom to developers at all. Using any GPL code in your 
project /forces/ you to open your source. It takes the decision of 
whether to open or not out of your hands and puts it in the hands of the 
whomever create GPLed product you use. That's why you won't find 
bindings for any GPL libraries in Derelict, because then Derelict and 
any project that uses it would have to be GPL. You call that freedom?

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Ellery Newcomer wrote:

Walter Bright wrote:
I remember one of those idiot In Search Of... type shows in the 70's 
saying that the fit of stones in South America was so tight you 
couldn't  put a knife blade between them. Therefore, the stone walls 
must have been made by aliens.


Never mind why would aliens with such advanced tech would build a 
crooked lumpy stone wall like that anyway.


But a few years later, some archeologist demonstrated how to make such 
a fit by banging a couple stones together. Took him 30 minutes per 
surface. No aliens or even tools were required.


I've not heard about that, any good links on the subject?


Sorry, saw it on TV long ago.



Some of the rocks at Sacsayhuaman were pretty dang huge, though.


The same principle should work.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Daniel Keep wrote:

I have this long list of what I'd do if I was made Prime Minister.
One of the entries relates to outlawing advertising firms and anything
other than plain text ads with maybe a voice at a sensible volume over
the top.  (Rivers does this, bless 'em, and I always make a point of
paying attention to their ads if I happen to see one.)


I'd be happy with removing the stupidest ones for now. I hate the Geico 
ads with the idiotic wad of cash. Apparently they decided the gecko and 
the cavemen were too subtle for the public.


Andrei

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new


Hello Daniel,



[1] Which is a diplomatic way of saying to keep people stupid and
gullible.  No offence to any religious people on the NG; it's not
individuals I have problems with, it's *institutionalised* belief.



I'm a cristian, but even so I'll *almost* go with you there. it's not institutionalised 
belief that is the problem but where faiths systems get the *power to force* 
people to beleave and not to question.


And it's not just in theology that I find this a problem; take a look at 
the (not unbiased) documetery Expelled (http://www.expelledthemovie.com), 
people are getting ostrosized for questionig the party line on evolution. 
Some of these people aren't even getting past maybe without getting shot 
down.


Faith done right is the greatest power for good man will ever see. Faith 
done wrong is the greatest power for evil that can ever be.

Re: [OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you new