The point of using C was that you could easily embed assembly within it, it was reasonably elegant to program (I've seen 2 line 'hello world' programs written in C, and the equivalent in Java in as little as 30 lines.... and you Java kids who say "I can so do it in 2 lines... and then attempt to show me those two lines, I then try and run those two lines, and you mutter something about having to call in 30 lines of support libraries, and I have my point made)
There's a point people always seem to miss when using "Hello World" as an example of how elegant (or not) a language is:
Basically, it is this: Printing "Hello World" is not truly representative of the things people normally want to accomplish in a programming language.
At best, a "Hello World" example gives you the basic idea of how a language can be used to interact with the user: which is where those 30-line versions come from... The reason you've got 30 lines is probably because it's a GUI implementation of the example. Try something comparable in C and you'll probably get a comparably large source. Of course, there's usually some kind of utility function that'll let you do even a GUI version with less code - but that isn't the point. Again, under normal circumstances, throwing up a window showing a static message isn't something you'll want to do very often. Knowing how to create a window, set its title, and populate it with controls and respond to them, however - that can be the starting point to creating real programs.
When a "Hello World" example is more STDIO-oriented, it tends to be shorter and show you the basics of working in the language and using STDIO. It can be helpful for introducing the syntax, and any steps you have to go through to start writing a program.
But as an indicator of a programming language's "elegance"? It's ridiculous. A Haskell version of "Hello World" isn't going to teach you about pattern-matching arguments or list processing, let alone monads (though the Haskell version of "Hello World" will probably use a monad...) A Python version of "Hello World" probably isn't going to teach you about classes and objects, or the useful interactive features of the language, or the challenges posed by the level to which objects and their member values and functions may be redefined. A Perl "Hello World" won't even scratch the surface of its compact, sometimes arcane syntax - let alone convey how this "arcane" syntax can actually be useful.
You only get an idea of a language's "elegance" - and its potential in general - by working with it. And maybe not even then.:)
You could also build a house out of Popsicle sticks. But...WHY?
That question is fundamental to art in general. (More the general "WHY?" part - not specifically the popsicle stick thing - though it does come up from time to time.)
Despite all the lip-flapping, the real answer is often just "because I wanted to". And people may enjoy it just because "it's neat". It doesn't necessarily mean it's a practical thing, though sometimes it may be... And it depends on how you define practicality, too. (What's more practical than making something that earns you money?)
I'm not much of a.NET guy myself but I can see the appeal of taking that sort of system down to the core of the OS. From a practical standpoint, performance is bound to be a challenge - but having a lower barrier for people to be involved in development may mean the code gets more attention. And if performance optimization makes this kind of approach largely impractical at present, in the future this may not be the case - in fact, the ease of working with the code (esp. if C# can help with issues like thread synchronization) may be important as multiprocessing continues to become more important.
You can't get Windows for free unless you buy something. But it's something that you'll probably already have to buy anyway, so it looks free to the end user.
Let's take this argument back to the original issue: how does this apply to Cosmos?
I think the bottom line is that most folks can get what they need to tinker with Cosmos at minimal cost: they likely already have Windows, and (I guess) you can get a copy of Visual Studio capable of targeting.NET for free or minimal cost.
As you say, it's not really "free" in any sense - but from a practical standpoint, the barrier to entry for developing Cosmos is very low.
If you have a 32-bit PC, which is likely unless your PC originally came with 4 GB of RAM or more
I think it's actually quite common for systems to have 64-bit CPUs in them, on any system sold in the last several years. Whether the computer has more than 4GiB (or 3GiB, really, because you hit limitations in the OS's addressing strategy before you hit the actual CPU memory address limit) and whether the computer has a 64-bit OS is a separate issue.
What good is an open source OS if it requires me to purchase proprietary products to change or compile it?
There's nothing wrong with that. To me, it's not the ideal situation, but sometimes that's just the way things go. If you want to make (or hack on) cool stuff, sometimes you have to start with the right set of tools. Using proprietary tools on open projects does sometimes limit who can work with the project - but without those proprietary tools, the project might not exist at all.
Until he explains why he made whitespace into a control character, I refuse to accept him as anything remotely divine.
The explanation is out there and it's pretty basic: whitespace is almost always used to indicate program structure anyway, so why have that and separate syntax? Why not have the visual cues we use to read program structure be the same ones used by the computer to interpret program structure?
(Of course, it does mean one can't write loops and such in a single line, even where it makes sense to do so. I don't think it's a perfect approach, but it does make a certain amount of sense.)
No, but just so you know, it's entirely possible that the password was contained in plain text in the HTML source of that page. Did you check?
HTML source? Huh, didn't think of that. I guess I just assumed that either the file was entirely bogus, or the maze between me and the cheese was more well-constructed. Well, maybe I'll give that a try next time.
I will honestly probably go right back to piracy since I can't afford to buy every Disney movie that comes out.
Because the only logical alternative to paying for something is stealing it. Wow. I guess your excuse it they made you do it, huh? I can't afford a new BMW, so they MADE me steal one.
Stealing is stealing.
The copyright system seriously undermines the normal market forces of competition, erosion of value over time, etc. which allows content creators to dictate terms for their content for a term on par with the length of a person's life. Generations come and go, and there is apparently no point at which we collectively take ownership of these works that become significant elements of our culture.
Breaking the rules partially restores these market forces: degrading the value of works and breaking copyright holders' exclusivity over the works. It's not fair, but I don't think copyright law is fair, either. So in moral terms I don't have a lot of qualms about media piracy.
Yes...google "[name of movie or show] torrent" and pick one.
I tried this and wound up with a 3GiB password-protected RAR file and a text file telling me to fill out an online survey and to give my cell phone number as part of the last step...
Watching the 30-second bunnies clips is pure agony with a 20-second starz intro, 20 second starz outro, and buffering time. I only made it through a few because it took too long.
That 30 seconds in the middle isn't so great, either.
Of course, the real villain here is copyright. Not the law, but the idea that it gives publishers complete control over their works (rather than just being a way to help them make a reasonable return). It means that publishers like Starz feel entitled to demand whatever price they want for their content, or flat-out refuse to license it - particularly if they'd rather you spent $10/mo on their service (even though you only want to watch the odd show), rather than paying Netflix $x/mo, of which only a fraction will end back at Starz.
Sadly, the only way around this (short of having very strict and rigorously-enforced anti-trust laws - which take a long time to work; the initial complaint against MS above was made in 1994 - an appeal is still pending) is compulsory licensing.
Actually, I was thinking: another equitable way might be if they set some kind of limit on how long an individual or party can hold copyright on a work. Like instead of the current system, where the copyright holder has exclusive control over the work in perpetuity, maybe copyright could be limited to 10 or 20 years... That way, content distributors would at least have plenty of older material to run. Copyright owners would still have some leverage with their new and recent material, but with competing material out of copyright, and limited time for them to profit on their new material, their position would be reduced from one of absolute power to something more reasonable.
TFA's a fine intellectual exercise, but as explicitly pointed out, the willingness to commit kidnapping and inflict torture rather pathetically trumps all of that.
Interesting. Not completely practical, but interesting.
Well, it depends on how you define practical - and what kind of situation you're in.
I mean, if it were my laptop? Sure, probably not worth this kind of security. Someone could get credit card numbers, site passwords perhaps, and possibly enough personal information to do some identity theft scheme... Damaging stuff, potentially, but probably not worth their while to extract the data, or worth my while to protect it. But let's say it contained some sensitive, valuable information from my job - so that stealing my laptop could be a worthwhile target for corporate espionage. Then it might be worth protecting it a little more carefully...
Another thing to consider is that, while the XKCD password cracking algorithm does trump most forms of security, that's only true if someone is actually willing to use it. I could see kidnapping and torture as a real possibility if you were dealing with organized crime or an intelligence agency... Otherwise, the escalation of the crime (from simple theft of a moderately expensive piece of hardware to various forms of felony) would deter most people from attempting it.
If someone has reason to believe it's worth stealing my laptop for the information on it, simply stealing a laptop would be pretty easy. Nick it when I'm at a hotel or something - talk their way past the cleaning staff to get into the room, game over. If a laptop is stolen, police aren't going to care. The machine is simply gone. As long as the initial theft goes off without a hitch, it's a pretty safe crime, especially if they don't try to sell the machine after stealing it.
There's bound to be some level at which information is worth enough to be worth stealing a laptop, but not worth kidnapping and torturing someone for a password... So locking down the machine from those kinds of attacks isn't totally impractical. It just depends on what's on the machine.
It's amazing how people can declare that government must be either competent and efficient at everything, or incompetent and lousy at everything.
The world (including government) is much more grey than that.
I would suggest that the income gained from automatically-generated traffic tickets is an excellent motivator for them to develop a very specific competency at developing and optimizing the system that produces them.:)
But more seriously, it's a good point... There would be certain organizational hurdles involved in rigging the traffic lights to maximize ticket revenues.
Steve Jobs came back to Apple officially in September 1997. Slashdot was founded in Septemer 1997. Steve Jobs quits in August 2011. Rob Malda quits in August 2011.
So... Batman... and Bruce Wayne... Are one and the same?
I think this is a great opportunity to introduce a car analogy I've been working on, which I think could instantly and effortlessly make a wide variety of scenarios accessible to the "car analogy" crowd. I call it the "Turbo Teen" analogy.
Basically, imagine that Malda is Turbo Teen - that he has the weird ability to turn into a sports car. Now imagine that Malda (AKA Turbo Teen) is leaving Slashdot.
The machines in Avatar were kind of along the lines of the power loaders in "aliens", too. Not really suits, but humanoid machines with cockpits. The main difference was the Avatar ones were combat-oriented, with weapons, armor, etc. And just a little reminiscent of the Scopedog.
IronPython does this. Of course, both dot-net and Python provide sufficient reflection capabilities to allow at least calling dot-net from Python to be a very straightforward, automated process (hence, for instance, the "Python for dot-net" project which is just that - an interface layer for CPython that lets you call dot-net stuff...)
We were combining multiple languages long before Windows even existed. Ever heard of a sneaky little program called a linker ?
1: Write an application using MS Visual Studio's compiler. 2: Give it an extension library interface using STL classes (string, vector, etc.) as calling arguments and return arguments 3: Write an extension library using another compiler (or even just a different version of the same compiler), probably with another implementation of STL.
Such a library will compile happily and fail gloriously. It may not even make it to an STL failure if the two compilers have different calling conventions. This is one reason why, although you can do this sort of thing with an ordinary linker, it's not nearly as easy without a common framework like.NET's CLR.
Slashdot Mirror
Google must still defeat Shen Long to stand a chance.
The point of using C was that you could easily embed assembly within it, it was reasonably elegant to program (I've seen 2 line 'hello world' programs written in C, and the equivalent in Java in as little as 30 lines.... and you Java kids who say "I can so do it in 2 lines... and then attempt to show me those two lines, I then try and run those two lines, and you mutter something about having to call in 30 lines of support libraries, and I have my point made)
There's a point people always seem to miss when using "Hello World" as an example of how elegant (or not) a language is:
Basically, it is this: Printing "Hello World" is not truly representative of the things people normally want to accomplish in a programming language.
At best, a "Hello World" example gives you the basic idea of how a language can be used to interact with the user: which is where those 30-line versions come from... The reason you've got 30 lines is probably because it's a GUI implementation of the example. Try something comparable in C and you'll probably get a comparably large source. Of course, there's usually some kind of utility function that'll let you do even a GUI version with less code - but that isn't the point. Again, under normal circumstances, throwing up a window showing a static message isn't something you'll want to do very often. Knowing how to create a window, set its title, and populate it with controls and respond to them, however - that can be the starting point to creating real programs.
When a "Hello World" example is more STDIO-oriented, it tends to be shorter and show you the basics of working in the language and using STDIO. It can be helpful for introducing the syntax, and any steps you have to go through to start writing a program.
But as an indicator of a programming language's "elegance"? It's ridiculous. A Haskell version of "Hello World" isn't going to teach you about pattern-matching arguments or list processing, let alone monads (though the Haskell version of "Hello World" will probably use a monad...) A Python version of "Hello World" probably isn't going to teach you about classes and objects, or the useful interactive features of the language, or the challenges posed by the level to which objects and their member values and functions may be redefined. A Perl "Hello World" won't even scratch the surface of its compact, sometimes arcane syntax - let alone convey how this "arcane" syntax can actually be useful.
You only get an idea of a language's "elegance" - and its potential in general - by working with it. And maybe not even then. :)
It compiles into a bootable operating system. They're compiling C# to IDL and then IDL to native machine code. So, there you go.
You could also build a house out of Popsicle sticks. But...WHY?
That question is fundamental to art in general. (More the general "WHY?" part - not specifically the popsicle stick thing - though it does come up from time to time.)
Despite all the lip-flapping, the real answer is often just "because I wanted to". And people may enjoy it just because "it's neat". It doesn't necessarily mean it's a practical thing, though sometimes it may be... And it depends on how you define practicality, too. (What's more practical than making something that earns you money?)
I'm not much of a .NET guy myself but I can see the appeal of taking that sort of system down to the core of the OS. From a practical standpoint, performance is bound to be a challenge - but having a lower barrier for people to be involved in development may mean the code gets more attention. And if performance optimization makes this kind of approach largely impractical at present, in the future this may not be the case - in fact, the ease of working with the code (esp. if C# can help with issues like thread synchronization) may be important as multiprocessing continues to become more important.
You can't get Windows for free unless you buy something. But it's something that you'll probably already have to buy anyway, so it looks free to the end user.
Let's take this argument back to the original issue: how does this apply to Cosmos?
I think the bottom line is that most folks can get what they need to tinker with Cosmos at minimal cost: they likely already have Windows, and (I guess) you can get a copy of Visual Studio capable of targeting .NET for free or minimal cost.
As you say, it's not really "free" in any sense - but from a practical standpoint, the barrier to entry for developing Cosmos is very low.
If you have a 32-bit PC, which is likely unless your PC originally came with 4 GB of RAM or more
I think it's actually quite common for systems to have 64-bit CPUs in them, on any system sold in the last several years. Whether the computer has more than 4GiB (or 3GiB, really, because you hit limitations in the OS's addressing strategy before you hit the actual CPU memory address limit) and whether the computer has a 64-bit OS is a separate issue.
What good is an open source OS if it requires me to purchase proprietary products to change or compile it?
There's nothing wrong with that. To me, it's not the ideal situation, but sometimes that's just the way things go. If you want to make (or hack on) cool stuff, sometimes you have to start with the right set of tools. Using proprietary tools on open projects does sometimes limit who can work with the project - but without those proprietary tools, the project might not exist at all.
Until he explains why he made whitespace into a control character, I refuse to accept him as anything remotely divine.
The explanation is out there and it's pretty basic: whitespace is almost always used to indicate program structure anyway, so why have that and separate syntax? Why not have the visual cues we use to read program structure be the same ones used by the computer to interpret program structure?
(Of course, it does mean one can't write loops and such in a single line, even where it makes sense to do so. I don't think it's a perfect approach, but it does make a certain amount of sense.)
No, but just so you know, it's entirely possible that the password was contained in plain text in the HTML source of that page. Did you check?
HTML source? Huh, didn't think of that. I guess I just assumed that either the file was entirely bogus, or the maze between me and the cheese was more well-constructed. Well, maybe I'll give that a try next time.
I will honestly probably go right back to piracy since I can't afford to buy every Disney movie that comes out.
Because the only logical alternative to paying for something is stealing it. Wow. I guess your excuse it they made you do it, huh?
I can't afford a new BMW, so they MADE me steal one.
Stealing is stealing.
The copyright system seriously undermines the normal market forces of competition, erosion of value over time, etc. which allows content creators to dictate terms for their content for a term on par with the length of a person's life. Generations come and go, and there is apparently no point at which we collectively take ownership of these works that become significant elements of our culture.
Breaking the rules partially restores these market forces: degrading the value of works and breaking copyright holders' exclusivity over the works. It's not fair, but I don't think copyright law is fair, either. So in moral terms I don't have a lot of qualms about media piracy.
Any good sites for finding movies now?
Yes...google "[name of movie or show] torrent" and pick one.
I tried this and wound up with a 3GiB password-protected RAR file and a text file telling me to fill out an online survey and to give my cell phone number as part of the last step...
That's legit, right?
To watch the 100 or so episodes of "Have Gun - Will Travel" that are left in my queue.
That is not a sentence.
Watching the 30-second bunnies clips is pure agony with a 20-second starz intro, 20 second starz outro, and buffering time. I only made it through a few because it took too long.
That 30 seconds in the middle isn't so great, either.
Of course, the real villain here is copyright. Not the law, but the idea that it gives publishers complete control over their works (rather than just being a way to help them make a reasonable return). It means that publishers like Starz feel entitled to demand whatever price they want for their content, or flat-out refuse to license it - particularly if they'd rather you spent $10/mo on their service (even though you only want to watch the odd show), rather than paying Netflix $x/mo, of which only a fraction will end back at Starz.
Sadly, the only way around this (short of having very strict and rigorously-enforced anti-trust laws - which take a long time to work; the initial complaint against MS above was made in 1994 - an appeal is still pending) is compulsory licensing.
Actually, I was thinking: another equitable way might be if they set some kind of limit on how long an individual or party can hold copyright on a work. Like instead of the current system, where the copyright holder has exclusive control over the work in perpetuity, maybe copyright could be limited to 10 or 20 years... That way, content distributors would at least have plenty of older material to run. Copyright owners would still have some leverage with their new and recent material, but with competing material out of copyright, and limited time for them to profit on their new material, their position would be reduced from one of absolute power to something more reasonable.
Yes.
TFA's a fine intellectual exercise, but as explicitly pointed out, the willingness to commit kidnapping and inflict torture rather pathetically trumps all of that.
Interesting. Not completely practical, but interesting.
Well, it depends on how you define practical - and what kind of situation you're in.
I mean, if it were my laptop? Sure, probably not worth this kind of security. Someone could get credit card numbers, site passwords perhaps, and possibly enough personal information to do some identity theft scheme... Damaging stuff, potentially, but probably not worth their while to extract the data, or worth my while to protect it.
But let's say it contained some sensitive, valuable information from my job - so that stealing my laptop could be a worthwhile target for corporate espionage. Then it might be worth protecting it a little more carefully...
Another thing to consider is that, while the XKCD password cracking algorithm does trump most forms of security, that's only true if someone is actually willing to use it. I could see kidnapping and torture as a real possibility if you were dealing with organized crime or an intelligence agency... Otherwise, the escalation of the crime (from simple theft of a moderately expensive piece of hardware to various forms of felony) would deter most people from attempting it.
If someone has reason to believe it's worth stealing my laptop for the information on it, simply stealing a laptop would be pretty easy. Nick it when I'm at a hotel or something - talk their way past the cleaning staff to get into the room, game over. If a laptop is stolen, police aren't going to care. The machine is simply gone. As long as the initial theft goes off without a hitch, it's a pretty safe crime, especially if they don't try to sell the machine after stealing it.
There's bound to be some level at which information is worth enough to be worth stealing a laptop, but not worth kidnapping and torturing someone for a password... So locking down the machine from those kinds of attacks isn't totally impractical. It just depends on what's on the machine.
It's amazing how people can declare that government must be either competent and efficient at everything, or incompetent and lousy at everything.
The world (including government) is much more grey than that.
I would suggest that the income gained from automatically-generated traffic tickets is an excellent motivator for them to develop a very specific competency at developing and optimizing the system that produces them. :)
But more seriously, it's a good point... There would be certain organizational hurdles involved in rigging the traffic lights to maximize ticket revenues.
Home is by far one of their best revenue generators. It's literally a free-to-play MMO with tons of paid virtual content that people actually buy.
I find that incredibly difficult to believe.
Would you believe "moderately popular time-killer with great potential"?
Steve Jobs came back to Apple officially in September 1997.
Slashdot was founded in Septemer 1997.
Steve Jobs quits in August 2011.
Rob Malda quits in August 2011.
So... Batman ... and Bruce Wayne... Are one and the same?
Car analogy please?
I think this is a great opportunity to introduce a car analogy I've been working on, which I think could instantly and effortlessly make a wide variety of scenarios accessible to the "car analogy" crowd. I call it the "Turbo Teen" analogy.
Basically, imagine that Malda is Turbo Teen - that he has the weird ability to turn into a sports car. Now imagine that Malda (AKA Turbo Teen) is leaving Slashdot.
There... See? Perfect car analogy.
Since when are you able to measure force in mass per area squared?
Well, this thing is ultimately going to be used in the conquest of hyperspace, so the ability to apply force in four-dimensions is very important.
Your mom is on /.? Awesome!!!!
She was on Slashdot, but she left when she couldn't figure out how to post her amateur porn work to her profile.
The machines in Avatar were kind of along the lines of the power loaders in "aliens", too. Not really suits, but humanoid machines with cockpits. The main difference was the Avatar ones were combat-oriented, with weapons, armor, etc. And just a little reminiscent of the Scopedog.
I mean, really, powered exo-suits? That's kids' stuff. Cartoons. Don't waste my time with all your blabberin' blatherskite.
Let's see python use C# objects, or vice versa.
IronPython does this. Of course, both dot-net and Python provide sufficient reflection capabilities to allow at least calling dot-net from Python to be a very straightforward, automated process (hence, for instance, the "Python for dot-net" project which is just that - an interface layer for CPython that lets you call dot-net stuff...)
We were combining multiple languages long before Windows even existed. Ever heard of a sneaky little program called a linker ?
1: Write an application using MS Visual Studio's compiler.
2: Give it an extension library interface using STL classes (string, vector, etc.) as calling arguments and return arguments
3: Write an extension library using another compiler (or even just a different version of the same compiler), probably with another implementation of STL.
Such a library will compile happily and fail gloriously. It may not even make it to an STL failure if the two compilers have different calling conventions. This is one reason why, although you can do this sort of thing with an ordinary linker, it's not nearly as easy without a common framework like .NET's CLR.