Quote from STROBE :

Sounds brutal? I guess so. But let's face it, the velvet gloves "ooh don't touch them, those poor deprived angels" approach is hardly working.

Problem is neither does your approach work. Take a long hard look at the way the Brazilian police act, (pretty much along the lines of what you suggest), and then look at the difference in the level of violent crimes between London and Sao Paulo/Rio de Janeiro

Just to put it all in to perspective. The murder rate in Sao Paulo is 55x higher than in London. That's not total murders it's per head of population !.

Think about it....

Problem with Prison sentences for carrying knives is two fold as I see it

a) They're likely to learn even more bad things to get involved in and how not to get caught doing it..

b) The kind of people that (predominantly) carry knives will just see it as a badge of honor anyway so it's no deterrent.


I have to admit my desparation and frustration at the whole issue leads me to thoughts along the lines of....


a) Replace prison terms with a tour of duty in somewhere like Iraq or Afganistan for anyone caught carrying an knife. The threat of real death, (in circumstances where they feel disempowered - knife carrying is significantly about being "the man" on the streets), might just create enough fear to discourage it.

b) Punish those caught with the person who actually has the knife (say 3-6 months inside), might just start a wave of peer pressure as a significant number of people will not want to "go down" for something their "mate" has done.

c) Stop wasting public money on putting people who stab/shoot/kill commit any kind of violent act against another person in prison. The French had the right idea. Find a deserted island surrounded by shark infested waters and dump them there and let them get on with it. If they want to live by the rules of the jungle let them, but deny them the right to do it here.

Saying those things doesn't make me feel comfortable but I'm getting older and more reactionary each year.

Belgium huh? Make sure you check out Brugge. Worth it just for the Waffles I rekon ! I know you said French part but Belgium is small - a day trip to Brugge is no problem. -

damn just noticed the dates ! - Sounds like you had a good time .. nice

Last edited by gezmoor, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 18:27.

Great immersive on-line racing - pure and simple.

Nothing more needs to be said I feel.

Quote from keiran :

I wouldn't class his race in Turkey GP2 great, sure the come back was impressive but he only managed to get 2nd because he drove across oncoming traffic (http://youtube.com/watch?v=xjotF2Bwbmg)... He forced other drivers to slow significantly and avoid him while he tried to spin his car around. Again one of his `panic` moments we are seeing when things don't go his way. Had he waited till the pack past like he should have then chances are he wouldn't have made the podium.

Ouch.. I've never seen that before. That was just plain dangerous if you ask me.

Quote from wark :

Not to be disrespectful, but you're not doing "them" much of a tribute if you don't explain who they are or how they died.

The only moment we'll be taking is to find out what you're talking about.

Maybe even list their names—there are only 52...

Well as I said in my second post, I don't expect the event to be relevant to everyone. Those that were affected will know what I'm refering to and that was my sole intention with the post. Also, the thread wasn't intended as an actual tribute to those that died but a rememberance of the event and the way it affected the reader as an individual. A moment of personal reflection. Not everyone will react to the event in the same way, and it's not my place to dictate the way in which they do, which is why I deliberately chose not to make it a list of names.

As I also stated in my second post, the numbers aren't the issue.

Quote from Batterypark :

Sickening? I'll take that as a compliment, thank you very much. To be honest, I just asked because I didn't know.

In which case I appologise for misconstueing your post.

Quote from Batterypark :

Huh? If I recall correctly, over 150000 people die each day. What are you talking about?

If that's a weak attempt at making the point about human suffering it's serverely misplaced on this thread, if it's an attempt to diminish the deaths of the people this thread is about it's sickening.

1 innocent death is 1 death too many, for any reason.

I don't expect everyone here to understand or care about the significance of the deaths of these people, but I'd respectfully request that unless you have something sympathetic to say just don't bother posting. Thanks.

Quote from P5YcHoM4N :

......
....... it is 4 x 32, which means 4x zoom and a 32º FOV.

.....

Actually the 32 is the diameter of the object lens in mm.

I'd just like to take a moment to remind everyone to take a moment to think about the 52 innocent lives that were lost on July 7th 2005.

R.I.P

Taking the time to actually vote - finaly !

I voted for Barrichello. He will probably always be my favorite F1 driver (the vote did say favorite not best), and as far as I can tell he is probably most other F1 drivers favorite driver too. He always comes across as a nice guy and all the comments I've ever heard about him from anyone in F1 have said the same thing. He is respected by just about everyone in F1 as a fair driver too. Sure he was never WDC but I still believe he was one of the better drivers in F1. Anyone that can out drive an on form Schumacher on occasion has to be better than average IMO.

Quote from sam93 :

.......but he has worked bloody hard to get where he is today, he comes from a poor background ..........

hmm.. well "poor" and "worked hard" are relative terms. For me it's patently clear from his accent that neither he nor his father are from a "poor background" as I would use the term to describe someone.

Clearly the School he went too is very reprasentative of a working class inner city school full of disadvantaged kids

http://www.johnhenrynewman.herts.sch.uk/about/about.htm

As for worked hard, well I'm sure he did as an individual in terms of racing, but as an early interview with his father shows, they didn't struggle for cash to fund his racing....

http://www.silverstonemagazine.co.uk/pdf/svn2_onetowatch.pdf

Looks like a very poor neighbourhood he's from too...

http://www.itnsource.com/templ ... px?flashMovieStartIndex=1

http://www.itnsource.com/templ ... px?flashMovieStartIndex=2

Quote from sam93 :

Superb drive from LH, people ask what makes him special well I think that nearly answers it, all the anti-fans of him who think there is nothing special I think you will need to take that drive into account.

why? What does being a rain specialist prove? So are Button and Barichello, (and a few other drivers in the field), anyone ever compare them with Senna?

Sure I'll take that drive in to account. But I reserve the right to take all his other drives in to account when forming an opinion of his "talent". Only picking and choosing the "best bits" as evidence of "special" talent is the defacto definition of bias.


As for massa it is patently clear that there was a problem with his car. People making accusations of him not having throttle control obviously choose to blinker their ears to the commentary during the race, (coming from far more talented and experienced drivers than anyone on this forum !), pointing out that he hardly touched the throttle and the car was stepping out on him.

Quote from Crommi :

It could be all the PR stuff that is reflecting to his performance on the track.

Or it could just be that he's not as good as all the hype is making him out to be. Reminds me of something my drum tutor once told me (He was a well regarded pro session musician):

"You're only as good as the worst you play. Anyone can pull it together and excell for that one song, gig or session, but being truely good is about consistantly excelling".

Apply that to F1 drivers and it puts Hamilton in to perspective IMHO.

Quote from (-Mark-) :

looks like spa stuck on :P

It does? Pure coincidence if it does, I've no idea what spa layout looks like.

It wasn't a serious design really, I just extended the track adding stuff I thought would be interesting to drive as I went. Looking back it does look rather long, Donnington's not that short a track to begin with.

CEO of Donnington just announced on the F1 coverage that the updated track will be entirely within the current infield.

Not all the files are duplicated, and I haven't done anything with any of the folders under LFS except install the new update. I haven't even looked in any of them until today, which I only did to look at some of the new interior dds files.

Why should i need to have hdd disc space issues to care about good housekeeping??

Also, I really don't understand the negative reaction to using an installer. It gives the advantage of being able to do file management whilst implementing updates to software. I don't see anything but advantages personally.

Quote from DevilDare :

that might be nice, but there is absolutely no way they could get it done by 2010

Depends on who they contract. Certainly wouldn't be on the cards if they asked the local council to do it !

Quote from aoun :

What happened to Massa?

Spare car. He totalled his race car in practice. They've obviously had some issues getting the new one up to scratch. That or the crash knocked his confidence (not that likely, it's not like he's never had an off before) or maybe he's just fuelled heavy? Who knows, he set some very competitive times in practice.

As for Hamilton, personally I think he's over extending himself off the track too much. He's all over the media, going sailing, in adverts all over the place etc . If I were a complete newbie to F1, (as he is - despite what he or anyone else might think), I'd be focusing ALL my attention on achieving. Not acting like he's already a multiple world champion. It's only going to rebound on him IMO.

How about this?

Quote from tristancliffe :

Both are great circuits (though I've not driven on Donington ), but I think the access and facilites will be a problem at Donington due to a lack of space - it's not got a huge infield, it's not got a huge paddock (because the Melbourne loop goes behind the pits)...

I don't think it'll last long on the calender unless it's massively changed. And that would almost certainly be a bad thing - like the ruining of Hockenheim for example.

I agree, it might be a good thing for British F1 as in it's the only reason there will be a British GP according to Bernie, but it'll be terrible for Donnington IMHO. Donnington is a great motorcycle track and it'll be ruined by widening etc required for it to be able to host F1.

I've noticed after upgrading to patch Z that there is another folder named "dds" under the existing "dds" folder. There appears to be quite a few files in both folders with the same name.

I'm assuming one folder is actually the patch Y dds files and the other is the patch Z files. Is that correct? if so which is which and which files can safely be deleted?

which brings me to the question. Is it ever the intention to make LFS a full windows installation package, (ie use an installer and register files in the registry etc), rather than a simple unzip ? Would be good if "updates" could remove redundant files in future versions .

Quote from only.one.RydeR :

I don't like how some of the steering wheels are different from one another. ....... Why didn't you just make the same for all cars?

Do real cars all have the same steering wheel?

IMHO the more different the interiors of each of the cars is the better. I'd really like to see each car have it's own unique character in every respect, including interiors, before it's released as a finished product.

Quote from wien :

I'd say they are that way to make programming more accessible. Higher level languages, just like assembly and FORTRAN try to abstract away the details of how a computer works so you can write code quickly and easily without having to worry about the down and dirty details.

You use file abstractions to access the disk instead of keeping track of file systems, platters, cylinders, sectors etc. and writing the data manually. You use graphics APIs instead of writing a command buffer native to the GPU and send that across the PCIe bus. You write machine assembly instead of having to write binary opcodes using 1s and 0s. It's just easier, and the more complex applications get (because of user expectations), the more layers of abstraction are needed to keep thing at a manageable complexity level. We usually only have to worry about the top level though, Meaning it's easier for out pathetic human brains to cope. These languages simply let you describe what you want done, not how you want the computer to do it (which, let's face it, you don't really care about).

I know what you mean about the "write code in English" bit though, and there are languages that will let you do something close to that. BASIC has been around forever but some popular incarnations are getting quite long in the tooth these days. Ruby is one of the newer languages that try to stay fairly intuitive, so there's alternatives that are FAR better than C++ in this respect.

They're still not anything like real English though, and that's simply because English is a spectacularly bad language for instructing a computer. It's just too vague and ambiguous and requires extraordinary amounts of logic and intelligence to make head and tails of. It's better/easier to teach a human how to communicate in a way a computer can understand (we're good at that sort of stuff) than it is to teach a computer how to understand a human.

EDIT: Just wanted to add one of my favourite quotes on the subject which pretty much sum up high level languages to me: "Being abstract is something profoundly different from being vague... The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise." - E. Dijkstra

Thinking about it that way I suppose it's true, even relatively low level languages are actually abstractions of what is really going on in the hardware as far as bits of data etc are concerned.

I just remember that when I first heard of the use of libraries as a way of calling specific functions I thought "at last" simple programming. Coding will just be a case of stringing together the calls in the order you wanted to execute them without needing or caring to know how the computer actually achieves it. Take an imaginary file handling call for example:

write.file(file.name)

would take car of all the opening and writing too and then releasing of the file with no worries about needing any bits of code to come around later and close it etc. How wrong I was !

Though I guess if you open/write/close a file for every bit of data and you know you're going to be writing more data to that file it's maybe a bit of an overhead to have to keep opening and closing it, (from the file system access speeds on the hard drive point of view i mean).

btw - do people still use subroutines any more, or are they a thing of the past?

Quote from DanneDA :

Another question:

How do you structure the code?

Like this:


function foo()
{
for(int i = 0; i < 25; i++)
{
do_something(i);
}
}


or this:


function foo() {
for(int i = 0; i < 25; i++) {
do_something(i);
}
}


Or some other way? I myself use the first of the two as I find it easier to read the code at a later point.

I'd do it the first way too. Like you say just seems easier to read, (though I've no idea if it makes any difference to the way they run). Just be thankful it doesn't care how many spaces there are between the start of the line and the code !! Fortran was a real pig for that

Quote from wien :

Well, not quite. But to take the file handle example, let's say you want to write into a file. To do that you need to ask the OS to please open *that* file for writing for me. The OS will then lock that file so no other program can access it while you're changing it, and return a handle to the file you can use for any operations you want to do on that file (reading, writing etc.). In C this is done through a call like "FILE *handle = fopen(<filename>, "w+");".

Now, when you're done with this file you need to tell the OS so it can release the lock on the file, once again allowing other programs (or your own program at a later time) to open the file again. In C this is done through a call like "fclose(handle);". This is of course when things can go wrong. If for some reason you don't call fclose you've leaked that file handle and the file lock won't be released. Exact same concept as a memory leak.

In GC languages like C# and Java the GC will take care of this for you, but if can't guarantee when the handle will be released unless you explicitly tell it to release the handle yourself (much like in C). For memory that's usually not a problem since you have lots and lots of it and a few tenths of delay on deallocation here and there won't matter in the long run.

With file handles though (and a lot of other resources), it's extremely important. You could very well end up in a situation where your own program tries to fetch a handle to a file that the GC has not yet gotten around to releasing (from some previous access). That could mean you won't be able to fetch a handle at all, or worse your program will lock up until the GC has released the handle.

So you need to explicitly tell the OS "I'm done with the file now", and you're back to square one (C) even though you have a fancy GC to help you.

C++ and RAII does not have that problem as the mere action of fetching a resource (memory, handles) also dictates the lifetime of that resource. You can't fetch a resource without also stating when the resource should be released. The two actions are one and the same. Once the resource handle goes out of scope (at the end of a function call for instance), the handle's destructor will automatically tell the OS "I'm done with it". There's no need to do this explicitly.

Ahh ok, I'm familiar with opening and closing files and understand the concept of calls, I get it now. I've haven't done any programming for over 20 years, (and I was never much good at it anyway), so I'm completely unfamiliar with the terminology of "modern" languages. One thing I've never really understood about a lot of languages is why they need to be so "abstract". I've often thought that they're purposely designed to be obtuse just to keep programming "elite". Whatever happened to the goal of a high level language that could just be programmed in plain language? Back in the days I remember talk of programming eventually getting to the level where you could almost write in plain english what you wanted to do and the computer would translate that in to it's own internal machine code and do it. Seems to be going the other way to me. The fact that developers are forever trying to reinvent the wheel doesn't help either IMHO. A multitude of languages each with their own syntax and terminology to achieve exactly the same thing.