I can still write C code in emacs and compile with the same makefile under gcc if I wanted to. I can still call the same POSIX libraries.
And you can still write C code in Notepad and compile with the same makefile under nmake if you want to. You can still call the same Win32 libraries. They haven't gone anywhere.
The marketing is all on the shiny new stuff, sure, but nobody's forcing you to use it at gunpoint, any more than they're forcing you to switch to Ruby on Rails or Erlang in the FOSS world.
Frankly, there is no valid reason for starting a new program in C in this day and age.
A few years ago I would have agreed with you, but these days I'm not so sure. Even if you would have stayed away from templates, virtuals, exceptions, RTTI and other features that obviously impact size/speed, I can think of several possible reasons to stay in C:
1. C is the lingua franca of languages; if you write a module in C, pretty much everything else can call it without too much effort. A C++ API, on the other hand, can't easily be called from anything except C++ (and preferably C++ built with the same compiler and options). Yes, you can hide your C++ implementation behind a C interface, but that's not free.
2. C++ tooling is improving (LLVM's Clang in particular looks very promising) but basic text-processing tools work a lot better for a language without overloads etc. Think grep, ctags and the like.
3. C++ is a huge language, and people tend to settle into their own subsets and idioms to make it manageable. For a solo project that's fine. For a big group project, especially one without a recognized benevolent dictator, it's a recipe for pain.
Ford chewed on this problem for 12 years and ran dozens of experiments. As a result of Ford's experiments, he and his fellow industrialists lobbied Congress to pass 40 hour a week labor laws. Not because he was nice. Because he wanted to make the most money possible. We like to think of a 40 hour work week as a 'liberal policy' when in fact it was hard headed capitalism at its finest.
I've seen that factoid quoted before, and never understood it. If Ford thought he'd benefit from a 40-hour limit, why wouldn't he just impose a 40-hour limit on his own employees? Why lobby for legislation that would grant the same benefits to his less-enlightened competitors?
Surely the hard-headed capitalist approach would have been to let the slave-drivers put themselves out of business through lower productivity.
First, this isn't Adobe Reader, thank Zod. It's Google's own implementation.
Second, I have (entirely speculative) doubts that the bundling of Flash is happening on its own merits. I suspect a quid pro quo was agreed, whereby Google bundles Flash and offers moral support against Steve Jobs, and in return Adobe extends Flash to support the new WebM video format. This extends its reach to (most) users of IE and Safari, neither of which will be adding native support.
Getting enough people to use your social network so that you reach the critical mass Facebook has is the tough part.
Or maybe just the luck part. I think a kind of weak anthropic principle applies when talking about network-effect successes. They succeeded as a matter of a posteriori necessity, because otherwise people wouldn't be sitting around talking about why they succeeded.
Oh, I agree; it's not a yes/no thing. I posted that because GGP seemed to want random tracks for racing games, and in my very limited experience of racers learning the tracks is probably the single biggest aspect of mastering the game.
I've been saying this for years! Random level generation in first person shooters, racers, and platformers doesn't seem terribly complex to me. Why hasn't anyone introduced this into a game yet?
When nothing repeats, there's no scope for learning, and learning is a big part of what makes games fun.
Are you able to shed any light on the liability situation re the recently introduced Verified by Visa and Mastercard's equivalent ClickSafe? My bank seems to be pushing this quite hard, and it's sending my paranoia off the charts. As far as I can make out, the CC company persuades merchants to participate by removing their liability for fraudulent cardholder-not-present transactions, and my strong suspicion is that they're going to use it as a pretext for pushing liability all the way back to the consumer.
The scheme itself appears to be almost worthless, offering some protection against stolen cards but none whatsoever against black-hat websites (or keyloggers and the like), and I haven't been able to get anything remotely resembling a straight answer from the bank.
If you're intrigued by this sort of thing, there's a fantastic SF short by Ted Chiang called "Liking What You See: A Documentary". It's about the consequences and ethics of suppressing a person's ability to recognise (and thus be biased by) physical attractiveness. One of the best things I've ever read.
It's collected in his "Stories of Your Life and Others".
Speaking for myself... nothing. I haven't printed anything either at the office or at home for at least five years. Not out of any technophile or tree-hugging principles; I just haven't felt the need.
Watts' blog is biased, uninformative, and basically uninteresting, so... you link instead to the Toronto Star quoting that same blog, and quote the quote of that blog just for good measure?
At least the Star's description - resisting and obstructing, not assault - is an improvement on the Slashdot one.
The ML post, I'll grant, was exaggerating a little for the sake of snark.
Here at the Sarnia Best Western I don't have the actual statute in front of me but it includes a lengthy grab-bag of actions, things like "assault", "resist", "impede", "threaten", "obstruct" -- hell, "contradict" might be in there for all I know. And under "obstruct" is "failure to comply with a lawful order", and it's explicitly stated that violence on the part of the perp is not necessary for a conviction. Basically, everything from asking "Why?" right up to chain-saw attack falls under the same charge. And it's all a felony.
Peter Watts has been found guilty of being assaulted by a border guard. The actual charge was obstructing a border officer. The other charges were refuted in court, but there remained the fact that Watts, having just been punched twice in the head, did not immediately drop to the ground when ordered to do so, instead asking what the problem was. Apparently, this is a felony.
Interesting post. I've ignored GCD completely, being under the impression that it was so entangled with Apple's GCC extensions as to be effectively nonportable. Am I utterly wrong? Would it be feasible to use GCD with, f'rinstance, C++0x lambdas instead of Apple's blocks?
Oh, fer crying out loud. I don't know what it is that makes a certain kind of Slashdot poster feel unable to reply to a post until they've mentally rewritten it as a universal prescription and exaggerated everything by a couple of orders of magnitude, but it's kind of annoying. "You know, I quite like cheese." "Oh yeah? OH YEAH? You know what happens if you eat NOTHING BUT CHEESE, ALL THE TIME? Go ahead and become a phlegm-filled greasy artery-clogged spherical travesty of the human form if you want to, pal, but don't expect the rest of us to follow your insane death-by-cheese-panel dictates."
Of course the general population aren't going to put up with Anonymous Hermit Rules, any more than they'd put up with Extreme Exhibitionist Rules. My point was just that preferences can and will vary widely (without anybody necessarily being unreasonable), and I don't think that this is the non-issue that great-GP seems to think.
Look at the dating scene; there's plenty of room in the world for swingers and purity ring wearers and BDSMers and anybody else you care to mention, but without all the conventions that have evolved to minimize embarrassing expectation mismatches, it'd be a minefield. Privacy doesn't really have these conventions yet; there aren't any "don't-tag-pics-of-me" rings or "our-toilet-webcams-post-to-4chan" bars.
The things I post on facebook are things I would show to any stranger. I think of facebook as a PR tool, when I post to it, I imagine showing everybody in the world. I would never use it to share anything "secret". If there were pictures I only wanted certain friends to see, I wouldn't use facebook to share them. How hard can this be?
That's fine, as long as you're the only one in the pictures. If you're not, then either:
a) You diligently consult all the other people about their privacy preferences before posting, or b) Those other people are suddenly subject to *your* notion of privacy, which may well be a whole lot looser than theirs.
So to answer your rhetorical question: actually, quite hard. In extreme cases, i.e. extreme mismatches between notions of privacy, the more-private are pretty much forced to segregate themselves from the less-private, because they just flat can't trust them.
But.. why would you do this? DVD's successor is *already* mainstream, and the successor's successor is already being hinted at.
Why do people rip their CD collections? Because they've got them, and they don't have any burning desire to buy them all over again, and dealing with huge numbers of physical discs is a royal PITA.
DVD for me hits a "good enough" spot: cheap, reasonable quality, ineffectual DRM. Blu-Ray is higher quality, sure, but I gather the DRM is really obnoxious, and even if it weren't the filesizes are so ludicrous as to rule out all the possibilities that make digital formats a good thing. iTunes downloads and the like are OK for rentals, and I've used them for that, but I actually like owning movies, and that doesn't seem to be an option in the current marketplace. ("DRM that hasn't screwed you yet" is not "ownership".)
unless you really expect to use all of that 1 TB capacity. The average computer user uses maybe 1-200 gigs. For them, the effective price of HD storage hasn't changed significantly in about five years.
I dunno. I've recently noticed that the bigger disk capacities are being advertised as "nnn DVDs", in the same way that they used to be "nnn songs". It's not a given, but ripping DVD collections (and/or storing PVR recordings long-term) might well take off as a mass-market usage. I started ripping my own DVD library recently and believe me, it eats terabytes for breakfast.
wearing my full-time novelist hat, I'm a bit worried
If it's not violating any confidentiality clauses, does that imply that your experience with distribution via Baen's DRM-free webscription.net was less than peachy? I'd noticed that you were "not currently available" there, but had assumed that it was a Baen/Tor publisher disconnect rather than a personal choice.
So I guess you are saying your Dell laptops are representative of all Dell laptops ever made and your MBP is representative of all MBPs ever made therefore Dell is awesome and Apple is horrible at manufacturing laptops?
Hey, why stop there? Why not guess I am saying that we should set fire to kittens and add ground glass to baby food? I mean, if we're allowed to just make stuff up, why not really go to town?
I can't help noticing that, of all the posters castigating me for reporting my personal experience, not one seemed to have any problem with the OP reporting his. Funny, that.
Expressing my personal opinion is not a logical fallacy. Reporting my personal experience is not a logical fallacy. My inferences regarding build quality drawn from that experience, while subject to the usual caveats about inductive reasoning, are no less reasonable than those drawn by the O.P.
So I'm a little mystified as to what on Earth you're complaining about.
My MBP's keyboard backlight was misbehaving within a couple of months of buying it. The machine regularly overheated playing games. The motherboard fried itself and needed replacement after a couple of years. The DVD drive is now extremely fussy about recognizing an inserted disc.
The last two Dell laptops I've owned each lasted well over 5 years with no problems.
Macs may have their advantages, but IMHO build quality is not one of them. You know, to be brutally honest.
Slashdot Mirror
Paint or tape over the webcam lens. It's the only way to be sure.
And you can still write C code in Notepad and compile with the same makefile under nmake if you want to. You can still call the same Win32 libraries. They haven't gone anywhere.
The marketing is all on the shiny new stuff, sure, but nobody's forcing you to use it at gunpoint, any more than they're forcing you to switch to Ruby on Rails or Erlang in the FOSS world.
A few years ago I would have agreed with you, but these days I'm not so sure. Even if you would have stayed away from templates, virtuals, exceptions, RTTI and other features that obviously impact size/speed, I can think of several possible reasons to stay in C:
1. C is the lingua franca of languages; if you write a module in C, pretty much everything else can call it without too much effort. A C++ API, on the other hand, can't easily be called from anything except C++ (and preferably C++ built with the same compiler and options). Yes, you can hide your C++ implementation behind a C interface, but that's not free.
2. C++ tooling is improving (LLVM's Clang in particular looks very promising) but basic text-processing tools work a lot better for a language without overloads etc. Think grep, ctags and the like.
3. C++ is a huge language, and people tend to settle into their own subsets and idioms to make it manageable. For a solo project that's fine. For a big group project, especially one without a recognized benevolent dictator, it's a recipe for pain.
I've seen that factoid quoted before, and never understood it. If Ford thought he'd benefit from a 40-hour limit, why wouldn't he just impose a 40-hour limit on his own employees? Why lobby for legislation that would grant the same benefits to his less-enlightened competitors?
Surely the hard-headed capitalist approach would have been to let the slave-drivers put themselves out of business through lower productivity.
First, this isn't Adobe Reader, thank Zod. It's Google's own implementation.
Second, I have (entirely speculative) doubts that the bundling of Flash is happening on its own merits. I suspect a quid pro quo was agreed, whereby Google bundles Flash and offers moral support against Steve Jobs, and in return Adobe extends Flash to support the new WebM video format. This extends its reach to (most) users of IE and Safari, neither of which will be adding native support.
Or maybe just the luck part. I think a kind of weak anthropic principle applies when talking about network-effect successes. They succeeded as a matter of a posteriori necessity, because otherwise people wouldn't be sitting around talking about why they succeeded.
Oh, I agree; it's not a yes/no thing. I posted that because GGP seemed to want random tracks for racing games, and in my very limited experience of racers learning the tracks is probably the single biggest aspect of mastering the game.
When nothing repeats, there's no scope for learning, and learning is a big part of what makes games fun.
Thanks for the informative post.
Are you able to shed any light on the liability situation re the recently introduced Verified by Visa and Mastercard's equivalent ClickSafe? My bank seems to be pushing this quite hard, and it's sending my paranoia off the charts. As far as I can make out, the CC company persuades merchants to participate by removing their liability for fraudulent cardholder-not-present transactions, and my strong suspicion is that they're going to use it as a pretext for pushing liability all the way back to the consumer.
The scheme itself appears to be almost worthless, offering some protection against stolen cards but none whatsoever against black-hat websites (or keyloggers and the like), and I haven't been able to get anything remotely resembling a straight answer from the bank.
If you're intrigued by this sort of thing, there's a fantastic SF short by Ted Chiang called "Liking What You See: A Documentary". It's about the consequences and ethics of suppressing a person's ability to recognise (and thus be biased by) physical attractiveness. One of the best things I've ever read.
It's collected in his "Stories of Your Life and Others".
Speaking for myself... nothing. I haven't printed anything either at the office or at home for at least five years. Not out of any technophile or tree-hugging principles; I just haven't felt the need.
Watts' blog is biased, uninformative, and basically uninteresting, so... you link instead to the Toronto Star quoting that same blog, and quote the quote of that blog just for good measure?
At least the Star's description - resisting and obstructing, not assault - is an improvement on the Slashdot one.
The ML post, I'll grant, was exaggerating a little for the sake of snark.
From Watts' own blog:
Making Light put it more caustically:
Interesting post. I've ignored GCD completely, being under the impression that it was so entangled with Apple's GCC extensions as to be effectively nonportable. Am I utterly wrong? Would it be feasible to use GCD with, f'rinstance, C++0x lambdas instead of Apple's blocks?
Oh, fer crying out loud. I don't know what it is that makes a certain kind of Slashdot poster feel unable to reply to a post until they've mentally rewritten it as a universal prescription and exaggerated everything by a couple of orders of magnitude, but it's kind of annoying. "You know, I quite like cheese." "Oh yeah? OH YEAH? You know what happens if you eat NOTHING BUT CHEESE, ALL THE TIME? Go ahead and become a phlegm-filled greasy artery-clogged spherical travesty of the human form if you want to, pal, but don't expect the rest of us to follow your insane death-by-cheese-panel dictates."
Of course the general population aren't going to put up with Anonymous Hermit Rules, any more than they'd put up with Extreme Exhibitionist Rules. My point was just that preferences can and will vary widely (without anybody necessarily being unreasonable), and I don't think that this is the non-issue that great-GP seems to think.
Look at the dating scene; there's plenty of room in the world for swingers and purity ring wearers and BDSMers and anybody else you care to mention, but without all the conventions that have evolved to minimize embarrassing expectation mismatches, it'd be a minefield. Privacy doesn't really have these conventions yet; there aren't any "don't-tag-pics-of-me" rings or "our-toilet-webcams-post-to-4chan" bars.
That's fine, as long as you're the only one in the pictures. If you're not, then either:
a) You diligently consult all the other people about their privacy preferences before posting, or
b) Those other people are suddenly subject to *your* notion of privacy, which may well be a whole lot looser than theirs.
So to answer your rhetorical question: actually, quite hard. In extreme cases, i.e. extreme mismatches between notions of privacy, the more-private are pretty much forced to segregate themselves from the less-private, because they just flat can't trust them.
Screw making me happy, I can do that myself.
Really? Any chance you could share the secret with the rest of us?
I mean, laziness I could live with. If I'm happy, why would I care?
Text in images [...] can consume a lot of bandwidth relative to text.
Relative to text, yes. Relative to downloading an entire font? Hmm.
Arial.ttf is 756 KB on my machine. Arial Unicode MS is over 22 MB.
You must be new here...
Why do people rip their CD collections? Because they've got them, and they don't have any burning desire to buy them all over again, and dealing with huge numbers of physical discs is a royal PITA.
DVD for me hits a "good enough" spot: cheap, reasonable quality, ineffectual DRM. Blu-Ray is higher quality, sure, but I gather the DRM is really obnoxious, and even if it weren't the filesizes are so ludicrous as to rule out all the possibilities that make digital formats a good thing. iTunes downloads and the like are OK for rentals, and I've used them for that, but I actually like owning movies, and that doesn't seem to be an option in the current marketplace. ("DRM that hasn't screwed you yet" is not "ownership".)
I dunno. I've recently noticed that the bigger disk capacities are being advertised as "nnn DVDs", in the same way that they used to be "nnn songs". It's not a given, but ripping DVD collections (and/or storing PVR recordings long-term) might well take off as a mass-market usage. I started ripping my own DVD library recently and believe me, it eats terabytes for breakfast.
wearing my full-time novelist hat, I'm a bit worried
If it's not violating any confidentiality clauses, does that imply that your experience with distribution via Baen's DRM-free webscription.net was less than peachy? I'd noticed that you were "not currently available" there, but had assumed that it was a Baen/Tor publisher disconnect rather than a personal choice.
Hey, why stop there? Why not guess I am saying that we should set fire to kittens and add ground glass to baby food? I mean, if we're allowed to just make stuff up, why not really go to town?
I can't help noticing that, of all the posters castigating me for reporting my personal experience, not one seemed to have any problem with the OP reporting his. Funny, that.
Expressing my personal opinion is not a logical fallacy. Reporting my personal experience is not a logical fallacy. My inferences regarding build quality drawn from that experience, while subject to the usual caveats about inductive reasoning, are no less reasonable than those drawn by the O.P.
So I'm a little mystified as to what on Earth you're complaining about.
Build quality? Really?
My MBP's keyboard backlight was misbehaving within a couple of months of buying it. The machine regularly overheated playing games. The motherboard fried itself and needed replacement after a couple of years. The DVD drive is now extremely fussy about recognizing an inserted disc.
The last two Dell laptops I've owned each lasted well over 5 years with no problems.
Macs may have their advantages, but IMHO build quality is not one of them. You know, to be brutally honest.