Yeah, that one. Java lets you declare "List list" (or similar) and then throw any implementation of the interface straight in the list and treat it as an ISomeInterface object when you get it out..Net generics are a bit tighter and don't quite have that same level of flexibility in an easy way, but based on other responses there is a "where PARAM_TYPE :...interfaces and classes here..." (which I've never seen any discussion or mention of previously, even when hunting for information about it because I thought it should exist). It isn't quite as flexible, but at least there is something.
Good points, I was just going on a general "C# was Java done (mostly) right, and is much nicer to work with than C++ and its predecessors". Now that you mention it, delegates was a mis-type - it is one of the few features that Java doesn't have that I definitely think.Net benefits from.
One thing I've noticed with generics as a "Java-by-profession, C#-by-hobby" developer is that I prefer many parts of the Java implementation. Having access to the generic parameter type in C# is useful, but it is far more likely that I need the "PARAM_TYPE extends SomeClassOrInterface" method rather than C#'s fixed generic parameters (at least in C# 2.0, which is what I target since Mono has good support and it isn't too huge a download for WinXP users if they don't have it).
If they wanted to completely depose Java then no, Java is still there.
If they wanted to introduce a Windows-centric alternative to re-invigorate desktop development and replace the horrors of C++ and VB with something with more modern and useful layers of abstraction and code checking that were already in Java (typed delegates, generic types, garbage collection, etc) then it seems to have done all right.
If they wanted to tear the OSS world in two with arguments over whether it.Net "teh evilz" or not then that'd be a definite yes, even thought more and more patent covenants are coming in to cover Mono (despite the fact that patent covenants shouldn't even be necessary if the legal system was sensible enough not to allow the patenting of software).
Nuking the thing isn't at all sensible but it's all we can really do.
Current single nukes probably wouldn't help much. What we need is more like the Earth-launched shuttles and linked multi-nukes in Stratos 4! Even that isn't fool-proof, though, and they did lose at least one city when it went wrong.
Antarctica? That'd be one hell of a curve shot to whip it underneath the Earth and up! Don't you know from all of those SciFi shows that asteroids come in perfectly horizontal and that the whole universe is like a plate. That's why ships can't avoid each other by flying higher or on a different plane - because there is only one plane that everything flies along!
it's a problem that will eventuate in another generation, hardly a 10 year problem;
Generations are generally averaged out to be approximately 25 years - that's still within the lifetime of a lot of people and not that much different to 10 years in the grand scheme of things!
That was generally the investment side rather than the accounts, though. The investment bankers are just idiots who shouldn't be trusted with money.
I take your point on credit cards and it not being my money, but the bank already gets to charge fees to merchants per transaction and gets interest and other fees if I don't pay it all off in one go (which I do but others don't) so why does it need to charge a monthly fee on top of that whether I use the card or not?
I don't know, most elderly British people seem quite grumpy and resistant to change:D There will always be the "silver surfer" type who pick it up quite easily, but others can be quite resistant to even quite simple technology like "insert card and press numbers" purely because it is digital technology that they don't know.
Annual fees for using credit cards? What kind of backward system as you using where you get charged to have access to your own money? Here in the UK credit cards are generally free, unless you specifically pick one that charges you to give you extra features (like lower interest, car insurance, etc).
For all the people in the US who worry about account security, isn't it funny, they don't seem to have problems with this system where you give your account number to someone else.
Well, Jeremy Clarkson may disagree with you. He was stung after putting his account details in a national paper. Granted, it was only possible with a charity (apparently), but still, people can take as well as deposit money using your account details:)
On the face of it, this at least looks better than the UK law. Over here they want to make it three accusations and you're out. At least the New Zealand law is back up by due process and has to be done by a tribunal.
On the down side, I guess it is tied to the account owner rather than the person who did it, which could lead to parents taking the punishment because of their kids.
Stable interface != stable internals;) Just because the interface doesn't change doesn't mean that everything will behave exactly the same as the last time you used it, or that it won't have bugs in some obscure part of the API that most people don't use much.
That depends on whether C is "people with real and legitimate problems that they could have foreseen" or whether C is "idiots with no clue what they're doing with dodgy setups that are actually the thing that happens to be causing the problem".
It can be self-contained in terms of dependencies (to some degree - if you want to bundle a full OS and graphics drivers etc), but that still runs in conjunction with other things.
Anti-virus. Kernel modules (such as graphics). Any nasties that have embedded themselves in the system. All of them are things you're not going to encounter when writing the software for a washing machine (which is also orders of magnitude simpler).
Also, hope that there isn't any "compensation" on top of a refund or else it'll be $Sales - $Refunds = ($X * N) - ($Y * C), and even if C N, $Y could be greater than $X by a sufficient amount that it outweighs it.
On top of that, just generally hope that C isn't anywhere near N, or you'll very quickly become unprofitable, because your company profit is $Sales - $Refunds - $ExpensesAndWages!
The legal liability of producing an "inferior or incomplete product". The summary says about "legal and ethical issues", which are irrespective of price. If they bring in legislation to say that "all software must be held to identical standards to stand-alone equipment, despite the fact that software operates in a completely uncontrolled and not entirely forseeable environment" then OSS could well be caught within the same net and be royally screwed in all nations that implement the law.
But the point is, why trust your data to an external shortener that can disappear at any moment when you can do it internally and tag it up in a microformat or similar? Yes, internally generated links can still break, but generally only if a) the entire website goes offline (at which point a full link would be broken as well) or b) the webmaster is an idiot and didn't bother maintaining things when he moved pages around (which is under the webmaster's control rather than some external organisation).
As for human readability, I'd rather take my slightly longer one over that meaningless monstrosity any day of the week!
Isn't there a bit of a difference there between the examples (TVs, DVD players, etc) and PC software? Everything else is a self-contained unit with no dependencies on anything else or (in the case of DVD players) accepts things that are within tight tollerances (and if your disk isn't, then it'll skip, but that's the disk's fault).
Software, on the other hand, has no control over the environment that it is put in (unless it is an OS X app, which is somewhat consistent), with huge permutations of other software, hardware components, and dodgy background processes, plus user fiddling. It isn't quite as easy to get things flawless in that situation (although some companies can improve on what they do now).
Also, how will this relate to OSS? Will I never release a final version of my app because I can't afford the liability and so it'll always be in beta because there could be bugs left?
That's shortening. The complaint here was short URLs where you don't know what you're clicking through to;) What you need for that is to do a request to the API to say "give me the long version". Firefox has a plugin for a single site/API, but longurl.org has an API that wraps multiple services, so one request can lengthen URLs from all the top sites, and the Chromium plugin I mentioned uses that. With my little fix I need never see a Bitly or Trim URL again:)
I'd probably be inclined to do it as a selective thing for the important pages but always generate them. From a quick skim of the URLs there isn't much "required" information in there, so a shortened/. URL for your comment could just be "http://slashdot.org/comment/1479074/30446550 (what appears to be "story ID" and "comment ID"). It isn't overly human readable and isn't as short as a most URL shorteners, but then if it was you'd run out of links very quickly, even within a single domain.
There are common alternatives, someone just needs to write the plugin. ChromeMUSE (which I patched an improvement for for my own use) uses LongURL.org to do its replacement. If you want to stick with Firefox then all you need is someone to write a wrapper around that (and for LongURL.org to keep updating their list of supported sites with all of these other sites people make).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that one. Java lets you declare "List list" (or similar) and then throw any implementation of the interface straight in the list and treat it as an ISomeInterface object when you get it out. .Net generics are a bit tighter and don't quite have that same level of flexibility in an easy way, but based on other responses there is a "where PARAM_TYPE : ...interfaces and classes here..." (which I've never seen any discussion or mention of previously, even when hunting for information about it because I thought it should exist). It isn't quite as flexible, but at least there is something.
Good points, I was just going on a general "C# was Java done (mostly) right, and is much nicer to work with than C++ and its predecessors". Now that you mention it, delegates was a mis-type - it is one of the few features that Java doesn't have that I definitely think .Net benefits from.
One thing I've noticed with generics as a "Java-by-profession, C#-by-hobby" developer is that I prefer many parts of the Java implementation. Having access to the generic parameter type in C# is useful, but it is far more likely that I need the "PARAM_TYPE extends SomeClassOrInterface" method rather than C#'s fixed generic parameters (at least in C# 2.0, which is what I target since Mono has good support and it isn't too huge a download for WinXP users if they don't have it).
It depends what the goals were.
If they wanted to completely depose Java then no, Java is still there.
If they wanted to introduce a Windows-centric alternative to re-invigorate desktop development and replace the horrors of C++ and VB with something with more modern and useful layers of abstraction and code checking that were already in Java (typed delegates, generic types, garbage collection, etc) then it seems to have done all right.
If they wanted to tear the OSS world in two with arguments over whether it .Net "teh evilz" or not then that'd be a definite yes, even thought more and more patent covenants are coming in to cover Mono (despite the fact that patent covenants shouldn't even be necessary if the legal system was sensible enough not to allow the patenting of software).
Current single nukes probably wouldn't help much. What we need is more like the Earth-launched shuttles and linked multi-nukes in Stratos 4! Even that isn't fool-proof, though, and they did lose at least one city when it went wrong.
Antarctica? That'd be one hell of a curve shot to whip it underneath the Earth and up! Don't you know from all of those SciFi shows that asteroids come in perfectly horizontal and that the whole universe is like a plate. That's why ships can't avoid each other by flying higher or on a different plane - because there is only one plane that everything flies along!
Generations are generally averaged out to be approximately 25 years - that's still within the lifetime of a lot of people and not that much different to 10 years in the grand scheme of things!
Most 60+ year old grandparents in the UK probably would, though.
That was generally the investment side rather than the accounts, though. The investment bankers are just idiots who shouldn't be trusted with money.
I take your point on credit cards and it not being my money, but the bank already gets to charge fees to merchants per transaction and gets interest and other fees if I don't pay it all off in one go (which I do but others don't) so why does it need to charge a monthly fee on top of that whether I use the card or not?
I don't know, most elderly British people seem quite grumpy and resistant to change :D There will always be the "silver surfer" type who pick it up quite easily, but others can be quite resistant to even quite simple technology like "insert card and press numbers" purely because it is digital technology that they don't know.
Annual fees for using credit cards? What kind of backward system as you using where you get charged to have access to your own money? Here in the UK credit cards are generally free, unless you specifically pick one that charges you to give you extra features (like lower interest, car insurance, etc).
Well, Jeremy Clarkson may disagree with you. He was stung after putting his account details in a national paper. Granted, it was only possible with a charity (apparently), but still, people can take as well as deposit money using your account details :)
Try getting a 60+ year old grandparent to do that instead of sending a cheque to their grandchild in their birthday card ;)
On the face of it, this at least looks better than the UK law. Over here they want to make it three accusations and you're out. At least the New Zealand law is back up by due process and has to be done by a tribunal.
On the down side, I guess it is tied to the account owner rather than the person who did it, which could lead to parents taking the punishment because of their kids.
Stable interface != stable internals ;) Just because the interface doesn't change doesn't mean that everything will behave exactly the same as the last time you used it, or that it won't have bugs in some obscure part of the API that most people don't use much.
That depends on whether C is "people with real and legitimate problems that they could have foreseen" or whether C is "idiots with no clue what they're doing with dodgy setups that are actually the thing that happens to be causing the problem".
It can be self-contained in terms of dependencies (to some degree - if you want to bundle a full OS and graphics drivers etc), but that still runs in conjunction with other things.
Anti-virus. Kernel modules (such as graphics). Any nasties that have embedded themselves in the system. All of them are things you're not going to encounter when writing the software for a washing machine (which is also orders of magnitude simpler).
Also, hope that there isn't any "compensation" on top of a refund or else it'll be $Sales - $Refunds = ($X * N) - ($Y * C), and even if C N, $Y could be greater than $X by a sufficient amount that it outweighs it.
On top of that, just generally hope that C isn't anywhere near N, or you'll very quickly become unprofitable, because your company profit is $Sales - $Refunds - $ExpensesAndWages!
The legal liability of producing an "inferior or incomplete product". The summary says about "legal and ethical issues", which are irrespective of price. If they bring in legislation to say that "all software must be held to identical standards to stand-alone equipment, despite the fact that software operates in a completely uncontrolled and not entirely forseeable environment" then OSS could well be caught within the same net and be royally screwed in all nations that implement the law.
But the point is, why trust your data to an external shortener that can disappear at any moment when you can do it internally and tag it up in a microformat or similar? Yes, internally generated links can still break, but generally only if a) the entire website goes offline (at which point a full link would be broken as well) or b) the webmaster is an idiot and didn't bother maintaining things when he moved pages around (which is under the webmaster's control rather than some external organisation).
As for human readability, I'd rather take my slightly longer one over that meaningless monstrosity any day of the week!
Isn't there a bit of a difference there between the examples (TVs, DVD players, etc) and PC software? Everything else is a self-contained unit with no dependencies on anything else or (in the case of DVD players) accepts things that are within tight tollerances (and if your disk isn't, then it'll skip, but that's the disk's fault).
Software, on the other hand, has no control over the environment that it is put in (unless it is an OS X app, which is somewhat consistent), with huge permutations of other software, hardware components, and dodgy background processes, plus user fiddling. It isn't quite as easy to get things flawless in that situation (although some companies can improve on what they do now).
Also, how will this relate to OSS? Will I never release a final version of my app because I can't afford the liability and so it'll always be in beta because there could be bugs left?
That's shortening. The complaint here was short URLs where you don't know what you're clicking through to ;) What you need for that is to do a request to the API to say "give me the long version". Firefox has a plugin for a single site/API, but longurl.org has an API that wraps multiple services, so one request can lengthen URLs from all the top sites, and the Chromium plugin I mentioned uses that. With my little fix I need never see a Bitly or Trim URL again :)
I'd probably be inclined to do it as a selective thing for the important pages but always generate them. From a quick skim of the URLs there isn't much "required" information in there, so a shortened /. URL for your comment could just be "http://slashdot.org/comment/1479074/30446550 (what appears to be "story ID" and "comment ID"). It isn't overly human readable and isn't as short as a most URL shorteners, but then if it was you'd run out of links very quickly, even within a single domain.
There are common alternatives, someone just needs to write the plugin. ChromeMUSE (which I patched an improvement for for my own use) uses LongURL.org to do its replacement. If you want to stick with Firefox then all you need is someone to write a wrapper around that (and for LongURL.org to keep updating their list of supported sites with all of these other sites people make).
Probably not, since Google's domain came first. Definitely not now you've shown intent to name the company that purely for the domain name impact ;)