Wow...that's quite the non sequitur. There are other reasons to choose C or C++ to write a program in, e.g. portability.
Isn't it about time to retire that old rationalization for needlessly complicated or error-prone programming languages: "Professional tools are necessarily complicated and easy to put out your eye/cut your arm off with," with the subtext of "I'm an 3L337 D00D because I {know all the IEYxxxx error codes in OS/360, never need cdecl, know all the perverse interactions of obscure C++ features}."
The point is that it is too much--but it's a logical consequence of the sort of "altruism" that underlies "so-and-so has too much money; he ought to be giving it to others." It's easy to say about someone else, but not so nice when it's applied to oneself, eh?
No...the original poster is quite serious. Compare Gates to Gary Kildall. Kildall didn't just write CP/M; he made significant contributions to data flow analysis techniques. (Look in the bibliography of the Dragon Book.) Bill Gates has made no worthwhile contribution to the field.
Street pricing and AMD pricing seem to be loosely coupled, then--pricewatch.com today (18 April 2002) shows Athlon XP 1500s starting at $87, XP 1600s at $80 (no, that's not a typo), and XP 1700s at $89. (Admittedly, Duron 1.3 GHz can be had starting at $63, so there is definitely still a difference...)
I think it was Ring Lardner who said (with some borrowing from Ecclesiastes) "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong--but that's the way to bet."
Sure, it's possible that someone might overturn the "laws" of thermodynamics tomorrow, just as effects that are described by Einstein's Theory of Relativity contradict Newton's mechanics and their notions of absolute time and space...but they've worked well enough that any alleged evidence to the contrary will be gone over with a fine-toothed comb.
There's an even bigger "but" here: even though people agree that Newton got it wrong to that extent, he didn't get it much wrong. It's only in what are to us extreme conditions that the difference is detectable, and engineers use good old Newtonian mechanics to design car motors and the like without worry--the pistons aren't ever going to move at a significant fraction of the speed of light, OK?:) So...even if the laws of thermodynamics differ from the way reality works, chances are for everyday things they'll continue to work as well as they have since the days of Carnot et al.
Homeopathic medicine is based on the crackpot idea of one Samuel Hahnemann, "Like cures like" (the Latin version looks a lot more impressive, but I don't remember the precise quote). In other words, he came up with the brilliant idea that, for example, if you have a fever, you should take some medicine that would raise your body temperature. (Some of the "likenesses" are pretty silly, e.g. to cure hepatitis, take something colored yellow.) Giving people something that would make the symptoms worse probably wouldn't fly even in the world of "alternative medicine." So Hahnemann diluted the substance. I mean, really diluted. To paraphrase the late Douglas Adams, you may think that one part per trillion is diluted, but that's nothing compared to homeopathic "medicine." Homeopathic medicine is so diluted that essentially certain that not even a single molecule of the "like" substance remains.
Ah, but then there's Hahnemann's other brilliant idea--the medicine "remembers" that the stuff was there! (And the more dilute the solution is, the more powerful it is--hence the homeopathic joke, "Did you hear about the guy who OD'd on homeopathic medicine? Yeah, he forgot to take it.") So, according to homeopathic practitioners, the fact that you're taking water, or a sugar pill, or whatever, doesn't matter, because at one time it contained something that would make your symptoms worse and hence will, they say, cure you.
Now, consider tap water. At one time or another it's had just about every possible substance in it that homeopaths have ever used--so if homeopathy is true, shouldn't drinking tap water keep you in perfect health?
The perverse part is that homeopathic medicine is perfectly suited for today's litigious society; because there's nothing in it but water or pill substrate, it can have no side effects, and hence will never give rise to a lawsuit...never mind that it's totally worthless.
Eh? Aside from the unfortunate transput morass, Algol 68 is really a pretty small language. C++ is already vastly more convoluted than Algol 68 ever was (C++ books have taken over from Computer Shopper issues as instruments of deforestation; it doesn't appear to be possible to cover C++ in under 1-1.2K pages these days, and books just on STL or iostreams and locales run from nearly seven hundred to eight hundred pages)--and it's going to get bigger. Ah, well; it would take Dijkstra to really do justice to commenting on C++.
There's a wonderful book on the linguistics of Japanese that touches on other languages in places. The original title is Kotoba to Bunka, literally "Words and Culture," but the English translation is titled Words in Context.
What does this have to do with the matter at hand? Well, in one chapter the author discusses in passing how Turkish romantic poetry goes on at great length about the beloved's eyes, and claims that this is because of Islamic restrictions on women's clothing--the eyes were all one could see! (He didn't go into whether there was a difference between pre-Ataturk and post-Ataturk literature, which would have been interesting...)
The point is, obsessed people will always find something to feed their fantasies. The children's underwear section of the Sears catalog or the Sunday paper Target inserts, Parents magazine, Sesame Street...you can bet that somewhere, someone's clipping those out of the paper and keeping a scrapbook or taping them and building up a video collection. Do we need burqas for children?
A car user can run someone down, or make a getaway from a crime scene. How can we stem car crime, other than mandating GPS tracking and the ability for the police to override driver control of cars?
Sigh...Burroughs came up with some excellent designs for their time (the B5000 and its descendants, the B1700). I'm extremely depressed to think that they have come to this.
Why Internet Radio? Because commercial music radio stations are now all mindless crap controlled by what focus groups like and the cookie-cutter schlock that the record companies are pushing for the Ashley market ("The new [insert boy group name] CD is out!" "Oooh, scandalous!"), and because public radio, at least in my area, doesn't always have what I want either. They stick with the safe stuff--not much chance of hearing, say, Harry Partch or Stockhausen or Varese or Machaut or des Prez on the "classical" segments, and if on a jazz show here you hear Ornette Coleman or John Zorn, I'll eat my Opus doll.
Internet radio is the only way to get something resembling choice nowadays. Let's take Des Moines, where I live as an example: the "Des Moines Radio Group" owns six radio stations; Clear Channel Communications owns five; Two Rivers Broadcasting owns three. That's pretty much all there is in the way of commercial broadcasting--the last good commercial station in Des Moines, KFMG, went under around 1996, replaced by KAZR, a station by and for people who think a guitar is a penis substitute and who proudly display their playlist on their web site: all thirteen songs of it.
KUNI is the best station around these parts. It's based in eastern Iowa, and all we have here is a low-power translator that's easily overwhelmed by skip in the summer and the far more powerful transmitters of nearby commercial FM stations the rest of the time--most FM radios have the selectivity and capture ratio of a dead crab, which doesn't help. I'm stuck in a basement condo and hence can't get a decent antenna going.
Internet radio is the only way to get anything decent around here--and as a fine example of that, I'd point everybody at BeOS Radio, which plays a wide variety of music, running on submissions of only original works and original performances of works in the public domain.
A shame that the Good Doctor wasn't around to hear of this. Anyone who hasn't read his Wendell Urth short stories or his other SF mysteries should hasten to a book store; they're great fun.
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Braun's referring to the other guys' method, not his. Braun's method is cheaper.
Isn't it about time to retire that old rationalization for needlessly complicated or error-prone programming languages: "Professional tools are necessarily complicated and easy to put out your eye/cut your arm off with," with the subtext of "I'm an 3L337 D00D because I {know all the IEYxxxx error codes in OS/360, never need cdecl, know all the perverse interactions of obscure C++ features}."
Come to think of it, couldn't one do something like the "metaprogramming" in PL/I with its preprocessor?
The point is that it is too much--but it's a logical consequence of the sort of "altruism" that underlies "so-and-so has too much money; he ought to be giving it to others." It's easy to say about someone else, but not so nice when it's applied to oneself, eh?
You misspelled "vo-tech school."
OK...now we know what to smell for; the Rock is cookin' crawfish etouffé!
No...the original poster is quite serious. Compare Gates to Gary Kildall. Kildall didn't just write CP/M; he made significant contributions to data flow analysis techniques. (Look in the bibliography of the Dragon Book.) Bill Gates has made no worthwhile contribution to the field.
Street pricing and AMD pricing seem to be loosely coupled, then--pricewatch.com today (18 April 2002) shows Athlon XP 1500s starting at $87, XP 1600s at $80 (no, that's not a typo), and XP 1700s at $89. (Admittedly, Duron 1.3 GHz can be had starting at $63, so there is definitely still a difference...)
Sure, it's possible that someone might overturn the "laws" of thermodynamics tomorrow, just as effects that are described by Einstein's Theory of Relativity contradict Newton's mechanics and their notions of absolute time and space...but they've worked well enough that any alleged evidence to the contrary will be gone over with a fine-toothed comb.
There's an even bigger "but" here: even though people agree that Newton got it wrong to that extent, he didn't get it much wrong. It's only in what are to us extreme conditions that the difference is detectable, and engineers use good old Newtonian mechanics to design car motors and the like without worry--the pistons aren't ever going to move at a significant fraction of the speed of light, OK? :) So...even if the laws of thermodynamics differ from the way reality works, chances are for everyday things they'll continue to work as well as they have since the days of Carnot et al.
Ah, but then there's Hahnemann's other brilliant idea--the medicine "remembers" that the stuff was there! (And the more dilute the solution is, the more powerful it is--hence the homeopathic joke, "Did you hear about the guy who OD'd on homeopathic medicine? Yeah, he forgot to take it.") So, according to homeopathic practitioners, the fact that you're taking water, or a sugar pill, or whatever, doesn't matter, because at one time it contained something that would make your symptoms worse and hence will, they say, cure you.
Now, consider tap water. At one time or another it's had just about every possible substance in it that homeopaths have ever used--so if homeopathy is true, shouldn't drinking tap water keep you in perfect health?
The perverse part is that homeopathic medicine is perfectly suited for today's litigious society; because there's nothing in it but water or pill substrate, it can have no side effects, and hence will never give rise to a lawsuit...never mind that it's totally worthless.
Eh? Aside from the unfortunate transput morass, Algol 68 is really a pretty small language. C++ is already vastly more convoluted than Algol 68 ever was (C++ books have taken over from Computer Shopper issues as instruments of deforestation; it doesn't appear to be possible to cover C++ in under 1-1.2K pages these days, and books just on STL or iostreams and locales run from nearly seven hundred to eight hundred pages)--and it's going to get bigger. Ah, well; it would take Dijkstra to really do justice to commenting on C++.
What does this have to do with the matter at hand? Well, in one chapter the author discusses in passing how Turkish romantic poetry goes on at great length about the beloved's eyes, and claims that this is because of Islamic restrictions on women's clothing--the eyes were all one could see! (He didn't go into whether there was a difference between pre-Ataturk and post-Ataturk literature, which would have been interesting...)
The point is, obsessed people will always find something to feed their fantasies. The children's underwear section of the Sears catalog or the Sunday paper Target inserts, Parents magazine, Sesame Street...you can bet that somewhere, someone's clipping those out of the paper and keeping a scrapbook or taping them and building up a video collection. Do we need burqas for children?
...and if not, shouldn't she? Seems to me this is clear evidence that the proposed settlement is worthless.
Now, now...if they want to canter^H^H^H^Hter to the horse market, that's their business.
Sexy or not, anything that makes it possible for Fuzzy fuzzy holloway to survive is OK in my book!
I'd grab the 360-series emulation in a New York minute if I could get Algol W and Algol 68C for it.
That is, they like it as long as they can be parasites.
A car user can run someone down, or make a getaway from a crime scene. How can we stem car crime, other than mandating GPS tracking and the ability for the police to override driver control of cars?
Everyone knows that it's 6809 assembly language programmers who have SEX.
What I don't understand is the Rob Enderle quote--surely one of the points of modularity is to avoid replicated code.
How about John Lennon's classic song, "Crippled Inside"? (Sigh...one can't copyright song titles. Never mind.)
...I'm afraid to look, because filters for newsgroups may not have made it in.
Sigh...Burroughs came up with some excellent designs for their time (the B5000 and its descendants, the B1700). I'm extremely depressed to think that they have come to this.
Internet radio is the only way to get something resembling choice nowadays. Let's take Des Moines, where I live as an example: the "Des Moines Radio Group" owns six radio stations; Clear Channel Communications owns five; Two Rivers Broadcasting owns three. That's pretty much all there is in the way of commercial broadcasting--the last good commercial station in Des Moines, KFMG, went under around 1996, replaced by KAZR, a station by and for people who think a guitar is a penis substitute and who proudly display their playlist on their web site: all thirteen songs of it.
KUNI is the best station around these parts. It's based in eastern Iowa, and all we have here is a low-power translator that's easily overwhelmed by skip in the summer and the far more powerful transmitters of nearby commercial FM stations the rest of the time--most FM radios have the selectivity and capture ratio of a dead crab, which doesn't help. I'm stuck in a basement condo and hence can't get a decent antenna going.
Internet radio is the only way to get anything decent around here--and as a fine example of that, I'd point everybody at BeOS Radio, which plays a wide variety of music, running on submissions of only original works and original performances of works in the public domain.
A shame that the Good Doctor wasn't around to hear of this. Anyone who hasn't read his Wendell Urth short stories or his other SF mysteries should hasten to a book store; they're great fun.