C# - Basically specific to Microsoft platforms. Cripplingly limited unless you use native code anyway.
Quite wrong: C# has all the same constructs as C and C++, including pointers if you like.
[Language X] Virtually nobody has experience with this language, nice as it may seem. Changing to this would kill Firefox dead.
Virtually nobody has experience with XPCOM.
Firefox has invented its own programming language, it simply has done so very badly.
As for porting to other languages...
With all the effort wasted on XPCOM, Firefox developers could have created their own HLL-to-C translator and written Firefox in that. Heck, if it were a subset of C#, Java, or Objective-C, people would even feel comfortable with it. That would have been less work and made Firefox programming far more accessible than the messy codebase and Firefox specific hacks that are being shipped right now.
With users complaining about poor speed and high memory usage, moving to a higher-level language will hardly make anyone's day.
I didn't say anything about a "high level language"; D and C# are not "high level languages", they simply happen to be garbage collected languages.
And moving to a language with garbage collection is exactly what Firefox needs because it fixes the reason Firefox is bloated and slow: poor memory management.
Don't take it from me, take it from the Firefox developers: they implemented a garbage collector. However, implementing a garbage collector in user code simply doesn't work as well as when the compiler knows about it.
It's not that horrendously difficult to keep control of memory in C programs
The Firefox developers just told you that the browser bloated by hundreds of megabytes, had lots of memory leaks, and that they needed to focus for an entire release on fixing those problems, and you still claim "it's not that horrendously difficult". Evidently, it is for Firefox developers.
lots of us do it every day.
OK, so there are two possibilities: either you are a lot smarter than both the Firefox developers and me, or you simply don't know how much trouble you're even in and you just think you have memory management in C under control. Odds are it's the latter.
The same way a license extends to extracting dollars out of your wallet: you can only copy the software if you agree to the license terms, and the license terms require you to do something (which, coincidentally, actually has to do with making available software to others).
Memory usage: Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more.
Looks like Firefox is reinventing dynamic runtimes from scratch, and I don't mean that in a good sense; XPCOM and garbage collection in XPCOM is not going to be as fast as in runtimes designed from the ground up for those features. Worse, because C/C++ is so cumbersome, a lot of people seem to write things in Javascript that should probably really be written in a compiled (yet safe) language.
Maybe it's time to port Firefox to a language that's higher level than C/C++? Maybe D or C# or Vala or Objective-C 2.0?
If that was the purpose it would have been a consumer org starting the court action, not a rival telco.
It is, in fact, a goal of good business laws to set things up such that competing businesses have an interest to enforce consumer rights against each other.
In the US, trademark law works that way. In Europe, many other laws work that way, too.
Leaving things up to consumer orgs would not be very effective.
There are indeed several kinds of "years", but the one we use day-to-day isn't some arbitrary unit, it's important because of the relative orientation of sun and earth. So, perihelion and position relative to stars are bad choices. I believe zenith of shortest day is a reasonable criterion.
Put down the dictionary and listen to what people actually say.
Yes, you should. From the American Heritage Dictionary:
Conservatism: The inclination, especially in politics, to maintain the existing or traditional order.
Religious interests have no power. Business has less and less.
You're dreaming.
This is 180 degrees wrong. Conservatism is pro free-market. It's like we're not even talking about the same thing at all.
Conservatism likes to call what it stands for "pro free-market", but merely putting a free market label on it doesn't make it free market. In fact, conservatives in the US have been massively distorting the free market.
I'm talking about modern American Conservatism in the USA -- Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.
So am I. Those people have been anti-free market and anti-liberty. Actually, for the most part, they were simply corrupt crooks.
Maybe we can agree on smaller government? Fewer laws regulating individual behavior. Fewer laws regulating corporations. Lower taxes and less government-enforced transfer from earners to consumers. That's what conservatism is.
We can agree on smaller government, but that's not what conservatism is about. Conservatism is about conserving the past. And, true to its name, that means keeping established business and religious interests in power, while interfering with the free market and individual freedoms.
US conservatives have overseen massive expansions of government spending, in particular on the military and various kinds of police agencies.
US conservatives keep opposing legalizing assisted suicide, drugs, indecent speech, and consensual sexual acts. And US conservatives keep using our "Judeo-Christian heritage" as a justification for laws and policies.
US conservatives hand out massive welfare to agricultural business and established industries in the form of huge subsidies, government services, and failure to account for costs that businesses imposes on society.
US conservatives also hand out massive welfare to individuals in the form of subsidizing lifestyle choices like marriage and treating inheritance and gifts different from other business transactions.
US conservatives (and this includes both many Republicans and many Democrats) trample on individual rights and individual freedoms, because that's the way it's always been and preserving what has always been is what conservatism is about.
If you want to change these things, you're not a conservative, you're a liberal (or maybe a libertarian). But, of course, you really are a conservative, and you really are opposed to actual individual liberties.
It's not a partisan issue. It's a philosophical one. The left (not "the Democrat Party", the left) looks at ordinary people as incapable.
So does the political right; that's why the right is trying to restrict pornography, abortions, drug use, sex, sex education, not to mention numerous "smaller" issues.
On both sides of the political spectrum, many people call for "the government to do something about it" when their fellow citizens aren't behaving the way they think they ought to behave. This needs to be stopped, both on the left and on the right, and it's actually a bigger problem on the right.
I didn't accuse the right of trying to impose "political correctnes", I accused the right of trying to do something equivalent:
Actually, I meant "analogous"; while I'm no particular friend of "political correctness", I consider the attempts by the religious right to impose their will on the nation unconstitutional, and the beliefs they espouse immoral and mentally disordered.
To sum up, Political Correctness is an invention of leftists and communists used to silence conservative and religious opposition.
I didn't accuse the right of trying to impose "political correctnes", I accused the right of trying to do something equivalent: attempts to suppress discussion of, and criminalize, consensual private conduct, attempts to codify the ten commandments in law, attempts to ban abortion, attempts to misuse public funds to promote a Christian agenda, attempts to ban speech that is considered un-Christian, etc.
These same Liberals edit as much Christianity out of as many of the PBS-shown programs as possible.
Good! Religion of any kind has no place in publicly funded programming. I don't want a single one of my tax dollars to go towards promoting your lifestyle.
PBS needs to be de-funded by the government and made to succeed or fail on it's own.
I'm fine with that if, at the same time, we remove tax-exempt status for religious organizations and churches and stop giving grants to any organization (university, school, aid organization) with a religious affiliation. What about it? Do we have a deal?
You have a bunch of ignorant people house shopping, though they have no idea what they want or how much they're willing to pay for it
The usual reason why home buying takes so long is that the sellers hide defects and advertise too high a price. That means that both the buyer and the bank need to spend a lot of time on trying to figure out where the problem areas may be and whether the property is really worth it.
If you want a quick sell, price your property aggressively and don't try to cover up defects with a new coat of paint or other tricks.
Yay for our debt-based society!
A home purchase doesn't put you in debt unless you overpay.
"PC nanny staters" is usually a codeword used by the American right to complain about the American left.
But this isn't a left-vs-right issue. The right wing in the US has its very own "political correctness" (namely, conformance with Christian ideals) and its very own "nanny state" policies (ranging from school prayer to extrajudicial renditions).
So, if you want to contribute to this debate, why don't you start by avoiding slogans created by one party to smear the other one? Both the Democrats and the Republicans are to blame for this bullshit.
TinyURL only answers a need; the problem is with the web site authors themselves. People only need to create short URLs when the source URL is too messy.
Slashdot (although far from the worst offender) could start a trend here; instead of the cryptic and messy:
I got introduced to on-line communications in the early 1980's. There were pretty much the same modes of communication as there are today: people had E-mail, chat (eg, write/talk), home pages (eg, finger), and discussion groups (eg, USENET, mailing lists). Being in a college town, we could even order books and pizza online (what else do you need?). Some people would dial in, some would connect from work, and some had dedicated lines.
The web has added more graphics, more porn, more spam, and more people, but the basic functionality and technology hasn't changed much.
I'm sure Amazon will revolutionize online reading... with a bunch of patents: a patent to use buttons to flip the pages on an E-book, a patent on formatting textual content for display in a window, a patent on using black and white pixels for displaying text, a patent on storing books in files, a patent on using data compression for reducing the amount of storage required for storing an e-book.
...or a nut that must fund every social program under the sun.
The US hasn't had one of those in many decades; the fact that you think this is a real possibility just shows that you're both uninformed and brainwashed.
While the allocated military budget may be 21%, once you take into account all the related costs (i.e., costs you didn't have with so large a military), the military probably accounts for more than half of the federal budget.
What is truly scary, however, is not this little factoid about NASA, it's that people who are supposed to live in a democracy and keep whining about taxes have no idea where their money goes.
So, let me summarize it simply: if you want lower taxes, don't vote in a militaristic nut next time.
(2) You are particularly supposed to test your software if you send $200k and 1 ton of hardware careening through the street on autonomous real-time control.
(3) Garbage collectors do not prevent memory leaks.
(4) Garbage collected systems can be good for building real-time systems, but you need a real-time garbage collector or you need to treat the system as if it didn't have a garbage collector at all.
What "ruined their chances" was not that they overlooked a memory leak, what ruined their chances was that they didn't know what they were doing.
Slashdot Mirror
C# - Basically specific to Microsoft platforms. Cripplingly limited unless you use native code anyway.
Quite wrong: C# has all the same constructs as C and C++, including pointers if you like.
[Language X] Virtually nobody has experience with this language, nice as it may seem. Changing to this would kill Firefox dead.
Virtually nobody has experience with XPCOM.
Firefox has invented its own programming language, it simply has done so very badly.
As for porting to other languages...
With all the effort wasted on XPCOM, Firefox developers could have created their own HLL-to-C translator and written Firefox in that. Heck, if it were a subset of C#, Java, or Objective-C, people would even feel comfortable with it. That would have been less work and made Firefox programming far more accessible than the messy codebase and Firefox specific hacks that are being shipped right now.
With users complaining about poor speed and high memory usage, moving to a higher-level language will hardly make anyone's day.
I didn't say anything about a "high level language"; D and C# are not "high level languages", they simply happen to be garbage collected languages.
And moving to a language with garbage collection is exactly what Firefox needs because it fixes the reason Firefox is bloated and slow: poor memory management.
Don't take it from me, take it from the Firefox developers: they implemented a garbage collector. However, implementing a garbage collector in user code simply doesn't work as well as when the compiler knows about it.
It's not that horrendously difficult to keep control of memory in C programs
The Firefox developers just told you that the browser bloated by hundreds of megabytes, had lots of memory leaks, and that they needed to focus for an entire release on fixing those problems, and you still claim "it's not that horrendously difficult". Evidently, it is for Firefox developers.
lots of us do it every day.
OK, so there are two possibilities: either you are a lot smarter than both the Firefox developers and me, or you simply don't know how much trouble you're even in and you just think you have memory management in C under control. Odds are it's the latter.
Despite obesity and all that, life expectancies are generally up.
Ironically, the official was Lee Yong-chul, who was a presidential monitor against corruption at the time.
Doesn't seem "ironic" to me, it seems rational. I mean, who better to bribe than him?
The same way a license extends to extracting dollars out of your wallet: you can only copy the software if you agree to the license terms, and the license terms require you to do something (which, coincidentally, actually has to do with making available software to others).
Memory usage: Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more.
Looks like Firefox is reinventing dynamic runtimes from scratch, and I don't mean that in a good sense; XPCOM and garbage collection in XPCOM is not going to be as fast as in runtimes designed from the ground up for those features. Worse, because C/C++ is so cumbersome, a lot of people seem to write things in Javascript that should probably really be written in a compiled (yet safe) language.
Maybe it's time to port Firefox to a language that's higher level than C/C++? Maybe D or C# or Vala or Objective-C 2.0?
If that was the purpose it would have been a consumer org starting the court action, not a rival telco.
It is, in fact, a goal of good business laws to set things up such that competing businesses have an interest to enforce consumer rights against each other.
In the US, trademark law works that way. In Europe, many other laws work that way, too.
Leaving things up to consumer orgs would not be very effective.
There are indeed several kinds of "years", but the one we use day-to-day isn't some arbitrary unit, it's important because of the relative orientation of sun and earth. So, perihelion and position relative to stars are bad choices. I believe zenith of shortest day is a reasonable criterion.
Yes, you should. From the American Heritage Dictionary:
Religious interests have no power. Business has less and less.
You're dreaming.
This is 180 degrees wrong. Conservatism is pro free-market. It's like we're not even talking about the same thing at all.
Conservatism likes to call what it stands for "pro free-market", but merely putting a free market label on it doesn't make it free market. In fact, conservatives in the US have been massively distorting the free market.
I'm talking about modern American Conservatism in the USA -- Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.
So am I. Those people have been anti-free market and anti-liberty. Actually, for the most part, they were simply corrupt crooks.
Maybe we can agree on smaller government? Fewer laws regulating individual behavior. Fewer laws regulating corporations. Lower taxes and less government-enforced transfer from earners to consumers. That's what conservatism is.
We can agree on smaller government, but that's not what conservatism is about. Conservatism is about conserving the past. And, true to its name, that means keeping established business and religious interests in power, while interfering with the free market and individual freedoms.
US conservatives have overseen massive expansions of government spending, in particular on the military and various kinds of police agencies.
US conservatives keep opposing legalizing assisted suicide, drugs, indecent speech, and consensual sexual acts. And US conservatives keep using our "Judeo-Christian heritage" as a justification for laws and policies.
US conservatives hand out massive welfare to agricultural business and established industries in the form of huge subsidies, government services, and failure to account for costs that businesses imposes on society.
US conservatives also hand out massive welfare to individuals in the form of subsidizing lifestyle choices like marriage and treating inheritance and gifts different from other business transactions.
US conservatives (and this includes both many Republicans and many Democrats) trample on individual rights and individual freedoms, because that's the way it's always been and preserving what has always been is what conservatism is about.
If you want to change these things, you're not a conservative, you're a liberal (or maybe a libertarian). But, of course, you really are a conservative, and you really are opposed to actual individual liberties.
It's not a partisan issue. It's a philosophical one. The left (not "the Democrat Party", the left) looks at ordinary people as incapable.
So does the political right; that's why the right is trying to restrict pornography, abortions, drug use, sex, sex education, not to mention numerous "smaller" issues.
On both sides of the political spectrum, many people call for "the government to do something about it" when their fellow citizens aren't behaving the way they think they ought to behave. This needs to be stopped, both on the left and on the right, and it's actually a bigger problem on the right.
I didn't accuse the right of trying to impose "political correctnes", I accused the right of trying to do something equivalent:
Actually, I meant "analogous"; while I'm no particular friend of "political correctness", I consider the attempts by the religious right to impose their will on the nation unconstitutional, and the beliefs they espouse immoral and mentally disordered.
To sum up, Political Correctness is an invention of leftists and communists used to silence conservative and religious opposition.
I didn't accuse the right of trying to impose "political correctnes", I accused the right of trying to do something equivalent: attempts to suppress discussion of, and criminalize, consensual private conduct, attempts to codify the ten commandments in law, attempts to ban abortion, attempts to misuse public funds to promote a Christian agenda, attempts to ban speech that is considered un-Christian, etc.
These same Liberals edit as much Christianity out of as many of the PBS-shown programs as possible.
Good! Religion of any kind has no place in publicly funded programming. I don't want a single one of my tax dollars to go towards promoting your lifestyle.
PBS needs to be de-funded by the government and made to succeed or fail on it's own.
I'm fine with that if, at the same time, we remove tax-exempt status for religious organizations and churches and stop giving grants to any organization (university, school, aid organization) with a religious affiliation. What about it? Do we have a deal?
You have a bunch of ignorant people house shopping, though they have no idea what they want or how much they're willing to pay for it
The usual reason why home buying takes so long is that the sellers hide defects and advertise too high a price. That means that both the buyer and the bank need to spend a lot of time on trying to figure out where the problem areas may be and whether the property is really worth it.
If you want a quick sell, price your property aggressively and don't try to cover up defects with a new coat of paint or other tricks.
Yay for our debt-based society!
A home purchase doesn't put you in debt unless you overpay.
Right now the winners are the PC nanny-staters
"PC nanny staters" is usually a codeword used by the American right to complain about the American left.
But this isn't a left-vs-right issue. The right wing in the US has its very own "political correctness" (namely, conformance with Christian ideals) and its very own "nanny state" policies (ranging from school prayer to extrajudicial renditions).
So, if you want to contribute to this debate, why don't you start by avoiding slogans created by one party to smear the other one? Both the Democrats and the Republicans are to blame for this bullshit.
TinyURL only answers a need; the problem is with the web site authors themselves. People only need to create short URLs when the source URL is too messy.
Slashdot (although far from the worst offender) could start a trend here; instead of the cryptic and messy:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/18/1319201
what about:
http://slashdot.org/article1319201.html
Not only is that shorter, it also communicates that it is meant to be permanent and archival because it doesn't have query parameters.
I got introduced to on-line communications in the early 1980's. There were pretty much the same modes of communication as there are today: people had E-mail, chat (eg, write/talk), home pages (eg, finger), and discussion groups (eg, USENET, mailing lists). Being in a college town, we could even order books and pizza online (what else do you need?). Some people would dial in, some would connect from work, and some had dedicated lines.
The web has added more graphics, more porn, more spam, and more people, but the basic functionality and technology hasn't changed much.
I'm sure Amazon will revolutionize online reading... with a bunch of patents: a patent to use buttons to flip the pages on an E-book, a patent on formatting textual content for display in a window, a patent on using black and white pixels for displaying text, a patent on storing books in files, a patent on using data compression for reducing the amount of storage required for storing an e-book.
AFAIK, the sole patents are -as you point out- on mechanisms for bytecode verification
I wouldn't be sure those are the only ones; Sun has been quite busy patenting stuff around Java.
If you use a company that promises to hide your messages from the government, you can be sure that that's the first place the government looks!
Whereas code written by people who "know what they're doing" has zero bugs - ever. Right.
You're hallucinating something I didn't say.
But well tested code doesn't have these kinds of blatant and stupid bugs.
And to assert that they didn't test their software is ludicrous.
It sounds to me you don't even know what software testing is, because if you did, you'd know that they didn't test their software.
...or a nut that must fund every social program under the sun.
The US hasn't had one of those in many decades; the fact that you think this is a real possibility just shows that you're both uninformed and brainwashed.
While the allocated military budget may be 21%, once you take into account all the related costs (i.e., costs you didn't have with so large a military), the military probably accounts for more than half of the federal budget.
What is truly scary, however, is not this little factoid about NASA, it's that people who are supposed to live in a democracy and keep whining about taxes have no idea where their money goes.
So, let me summarize it simply: if you want lower taxes, don't vote in a militaristic nut next time.
(1) You are supposed to test your software.
(2) You are particularly supposed to test your software if you send $200k and 1 ton of hardware careening through the street on autonomous real-time control.
(3) Garbage collectors do not prevent memory leaks.
(4) Garbage collected systems can be good for building real-time systems, but you need a real-time garbage collector or you need to treat the system as if it didn't have a garbage collector at all.
What "ruined their chances" was not that they overlooked a memory leak, what ruined their chances was that they didn't know what they were doing.