Java is just frustrating in so many ways. C# is frustrating in some narrow ways due to it's lack of macros, so there's some boilerplate you just can't get rid of. Sadly, null-checking is one of those boilerplate problems.
I try to explain to people that you want a contract, not merely an interface, but I also get a lot of blank stares. But in most languages you can get there: just use an abstract base class that validates the contract explicitly as part of the "interface", right where the caller can see and depend on it. But you can't do any of that with web services, which is just nasty.
Sure, that's one kind of class. Some classes exist just to collect a variety of fields that travel together through your system: data classes.
For most cases, you want either a control class, with all members private, and no getters or setters, or you want a data class, with all memebrs public, and no business logic. Both are valid, common cases.
I assume you're talking about a time after Greece went top the Euro.
Greece was spending vastly more than it was making, It's debt-to-GDP ratio was one of the highest in the world. If your living at double your income off credit cards, of course it's going to suck when you stop doing that! But that's not mean fiscal conservatives hurting you, that's your unsustainable lifestyle running out.
Again, austerity isn't something designed to give you a better life! No one imagines that. If that's the position you're attacking, you have no opposition.
Austerity is what you must do to service your debts. When you're past the point where you can play games moving your debt from one credit card to another, and you finally run out of lenders, well, now you're in a bad way. Not only do you have to live on what you earn, you have to life on what you earn less the massive amount you're paying in interest.
None of that is the fault of fiscal conservatives either. All the "austerity" is is the outright lie that you can live beyond your means, a lie told to buy votes, finally being revealed as what it is. Greece was never going to make it work: long term, you can only consume as much as you produce.
So they tossed methods that were wrtten well. (methods that only do one thing) So if you wrote a simple 2 line validation of an input field. Field must be populated. Field must match regex. They tossed that as chaff?
Why the Hell should you have to write code over and over to validate that a reference isn't null, or an int is positive, or other such cases. Sure that's all part of the interface contract anyhow, right? For that matter, why is "allowed to be null" the default rather than an exceptional special case. Why isn't there a simple operator that decorates a parameter as "nullable" with a single character.
Why not simply
public Foo foo;
No getter or setter needed, by default it can't be null. For those odd cases where null actually means something useful, then just write:
public Foo? foo;
This goes double for C#, where "?" is already established as the "nullable" decorator.
Worth noting that many Java coders use Lombock to effectively achieve this already, just with auto-generated getters and setters, since we lack the courage ad/or authority to just have public members instead of pointless getters and setters.
And, above all else, give us a way to declare that the returned value can't be null, and auto-throw if it is, so the caller never has to check!
You have the causation backwards. When the economy is doing well, we elect Democrats to spend all that money. After things have tanked, we elect Republicans to be the stern grown-ups who force us to do our chores until things are good again (or, at least, they used to, the current GOP not so much, which is the big problem).
So if there is a candidate ignoring the things that are already being handled by the states and only focusing on the things the feds are actually supposed to be meddling with (and getting the feds to stop meddling with things they shouldn't have meddled with in the first place).
Wouldn't that be an amazing change in US politics? Well, a man can hope.
How can you be so out of touch? Greece fiscally conservative? Really?
Greece spent so much more than it was making that it finally ran out of other people's money. Then it went totally to shit. We're spending like crack addicts now ourselves. Eventually we will run out of other people's money. Then we will go to shit.
The fiscal conservatives are the ones saying "we should live within our means to avoid that fate". Because consuming more than you produce is unsustainable, full stop. You can wean your self off that gracefully, or you can fall off the cliff, but what you can't do is get away with it forever. No one, anywhere, thinks "austerity" is something that will make life better; no, it's what you're forced into when your lenders start cutting you off, and it's only better than being cut off by everyone all at once.
Greece right now is trying to threaten it's lenders with "if you don't keep lending us money, we won't pay you back". We'll see how that goes - might work for a little bit, since if you can't pay the bank $100 you have a problem, but if you can't pay the bank $100 million the bank has a problem, but that only works till you drag your bank down with you.
Try reading the thread again. You've got the DC GOP, which demagogues social issues (which you seem obsessed with), which only hurts the conservative cause. Then you've got the base, the actual voters, whom the GOP at the national level is increasingly disconnected from - the surveys I've seen don't put social issues in the top "important issues today" among conservatives.
This is at least partly because the GOP establishment is quite a bit older than the average voter (bizarrely, the average Dem congresscritter is sever years older than the average GOP congresscritter right now, but both are quite a bit older than the average voter).
US foreign policy has been an unmitigated disaster for the past few years. It's hard to think of a time when we've done so poorly on the world stage, though Carter maybe ties. I don't see how Hillary can put enough distance between her and the administration she was a part of, even with the mainstream news being 100% in the bag for her. Experience? Definitely. But credibility requires successful experience.
Sure, if like most zealots you define "idiot" as "person I disagree with" then I'm sure that's me. Partisan? Not sure what you mean by that. I don't think I can name a single federal politician whom I like or support from either party. It's not about party - it's about not wanting to see the US enter the troubled times that I expect overspending to cause. I'm a "hot-button issue" guy, who sees nothing to like in the current DC establishment on either side, but only sees hope for one side to possibly, maybe, change for the better. Maybe.
LOL, Walker doesn't know anything about foreign policy so he'll have to make up some positions quick!
Every governor will have this problem. Senators can bring some foreign policy experience, but typically have no experience as an executive, and tend to not be good at getting things done (plus good luck finding one who's credible as a fiscal conservative without "Paul" in his name).
I think a GOP candidate can do fine as long as he has some clear positions he can explain on foreign policy issues, even if he stumbles on ambush questions about east Elbonia. There's don't seem to be any Dem candidates on deck who will be credible on foreign policy anyhow, but then of course it's still early in primary season, and we likely haven't seen all the contenders yet on ether side.
The conservative base has grown quite tired of "establishment candidates" that are inoffensive to the Democratic base, or the mainstream media (but I repeat myself). This is primary season, and for once I have a bit of hope that we'll get a conservative candidate who's fiscally conservative, instead of someone who pleases the current crop DC lobbyists and pork-senders. Walker has proven that he's willing to ignore 100% negative media coverage and do what he sees as right, when it comes to cutting spending. A shocking idea for a national candidate, I know, but the right-wing base understands that any possible GOP candidate will get 100% negative media coverage, regardless of actual views, so it's about time we get someone who isn't trying to please the press, and is instead trying to govern effectively.
Obviously, if you favor government spending and increased federal power, you'll hate Walker, but it's about damn time we as a nation had a chance to vote on that basis, rather than choose between the 2 big spenders who differ only on social issues.
Jeb is very much the GOP "establishment" candidate, loved by those already in power and almost no one else (though I though he was great as governor of Florida, especially in the 4-hurricaine year, I think he's completely the wrong guy for president). The conservative base isn't rooting for Jeb, to be sure.
At the national level, few on the right really care that much about social issues right now, unless you want to consider "immigration" a social issue. Foreign policy, economic growth, and government spending are the focus, and Jeb brings nothing to that except "same old same old" (which of course is why the existing GOP power structure loves him).
Scot Walker is the current guy the right is rooting for, or "Mr Scott" as the NYT recently called him (they don't even know his name, but they're against him!), though we've yet to hear much from him on foreign policy and it's early yet.
My Samsung TV couldn't recognize me when I said it's activation phrase for shit, but it would activate all the time at random sounds being played from the TV itself. Total garbage, and dammit it would be a cool feature if it actually worked.
No, Windows doesn't really have a "power-user" version, they have a bling version, that's about it (well, there's also a 3rd world version that's deliberately crippled). Desktop vs server, of course, that makes a lot of sense.
It's crucial for liberty to make it impractical to do broad-reaching dragnet surveillance, and any real encryption of archives accomplishes that. Much like for email, PGP might have some weakness, but it's good enough to stop wholesale searches (unless there's something Snowden didn't know). If you're archiving actual state secrets or somesuch, by all means be more paranoid, but remember that for valuable targets, the NSA has a frankly astonishing toolkit, with dozens of ways to get a keylogger where they want it. In the crypto boards I follow, people are now hand-assembling their own RNGs from discrete components for keygen, because no IC can be trusted now. So I'm not sure "keeping physical control" really accomplishes much, unless you're wearing two layers of tinfoil hats (as clearly the tinfoil hatters weren't paranoid enough, fucking NSA).
Police aren't raiding HS parties to pad their budget with asset forfeitures, AFAIK, it's just a nuisance crime that they don't want to be bothered with in the first place. At least at my college, there was never any shortage of willing narcs to have all parties covered, unless you worked to keep it secret. I suspect HS parties are about the same.
Yes, there are real problems with police overreach, but this just doesn't seem like one of them.
Calm your taco: none of this is new or different, except the "on a computer" part. I thought we were over "on a computer" freak-outs?
HS and college parties have always had narcs. Either undercover officers, or informers who were in the social scene and would ruin parties for fun. In college, we'd always learn who they were by the end of the year, and plan accordingly, but there'd be a new crop of them the next year.
This is just that, "on a computer". A fake profile is easier than a CI, enabling more surveillance, but this doesn't seem different in kind. This isn't some panopticon with perpetual DB, like a lot of recent crap, this is just automating old-school narcing a bit.
Wow, you still believe in Obamacare, even after it's architect bragged that it was a lie designed to fool the gullible America voter? No wonder he felt safe in bragging.
I'd stand by that definition of a serious problem, at the national scale. Problems that can be solved by talking, or by economic pressure, those are the lesser problems. The guys who will kill and rape and plunder and conquer until you stop them by force, the guys immune to rational incentives, who just delight in causing pain or who have lost any concern for anything but what fun they can have today--you know, evil--those are the serious problem.
Always have 2 backups, as I said upthread. You want an offsite backup of some sort, kept in a different state. The expensive (but better) way to to backup to tape, and send the tape to Iron Mountain, or whoever, in a distant state. For the rest of us, sticking the data in the cloud is just as good.
There's no perfect safe place to put any sort of archive - but having the live data plus 2 backups each with different failure modes, is pretty close. Sure things can go wrong in the cloud, but those are different things than can go wrong with the HDD sitting in a desk drawer somewhere.
Have you installed Windows recently? OK, I haven't since Windows 7, myself, but that install just asked me for timezone, language, and maybe which keyboard I was using (but the default was right), and the rest was just "next, next, next" and that was it, it ran for a while and rebooted 2x and was done with no further input.
For a homebuild, where Windows didn't even have the chipset driver, it still installed successfully, and gave me a full desktop to use for running the install CDs or whatever. But normal users don't ever have that problem.
I do think it's silly to have a "newbie" vs "power user" distro. That just seems nuts to me. Set up the default install to be newbie-friendly, and the power user can then do whatever to "fix" it.
OTOH, it's really quite important to have "server" vs "desktop" distros. I can kinda see the value in systemd on a desktop, for example, or the Ubuntu "app store" thingy. OTOH, on a server, while I still want a GUI desktop installed (I spend much of my life coding on a desktop on the same server distro we run on), I want a bare-bones, easy to troubleshoot system, with any convenience features tilted towards remote access.
If you don't use good encryption, obviously you're not even trying.
In what scenario does it actually matter that your encrypted archive is in some cloud service? If your government can compel you to divulge the key, OK, I could see that, maybe.
Once you give your data to "the cloud" it ceases to be YOUR data.
Now it belongs to whomever owns those servers.
You want to keep it? Then keep it on your own hardware.
"The cloud" is just too fuzzy a term. I have no problem with cloud-based file storage services, but I'd never put, say, my personal photos on an online photo-sharing service, or any other content-aware cloudy-thing.
My own hardware? That's silly. From Snowden we know the NSA can access files on my home server just as easily as they can on a cloud-based file server. If they take an interest in you, pretty much the only defense is a latop that you built before they took an interest in you and that you keep locked in a safe at all times when not using (I believe Bruce Schneier does this). But anything less than that, if they like you then you have a keylogger already, sorry.
All we can realistically hope to put our trust in is encryption. Even that's not easy (but if TrueCrypt passes it's audit, it's good enough for me). An encrypted archive is just as safe "in the cloud" as it is on a home file server.
Want to backup your data long-term and can't afford LTO tapes in a box out of state? Make one (encrypted) copy locally, but not in your house and not powered. Store another (encrypted) copy in the free files hosts if its small, or Amazon Glacier if you can't fit in the various free options.
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Java is just frustrating in so many ways. C# is frustrating in some narrow ways due to it's lack of macros, so there's some boilerplate you just can't get rid of. Sadly, null-checking is one of those boilerplate problems.
I try to explain to people that you want a contract, not merely an interface, but I also get a lot of blank stares. But in most languages you can get there: just use an abstract base class that validates the contract explicitly as part of the "interface", right where the caller can see and depend on it. But you can't do any of that with web services, which is just nasty.
Sure, that's one kind of class. Some classes exist just to collect a variety of fields that travel together through your system: data classes.
For most cases, you want either a control class, with all members private, and no getters or setters, or you want a data class, with all memebrs public, and no business logic. Both are valid, common cases.
I assume you're talking about a time after Greece went top the Euro.
Greece was spending vastly more than it was making, It's debt-to-GDP ratio was one of the highest in the world. If your living at double your income off credit cards, of course it's going to suck when you stop doing that! But that's not mean fiscal conservatives hurting you, that's your unsustainable lifestyle running out.
Again, austerity isn't something designed to give you a better life! No one imagines that. If that's the position you're attacking, you have no opposition.
Austerity is what you must do to service your debts. When you're past the point where you can play games moving your debt from one credit card to another, and you finally run out of lenders, well, now you're in a bad way. Not only do you have to live on what you earn, you have to life on what you earn less the massive amount you're paying in interest.
None of that is the fault of fiscal conservatives either. All the "austerity" is is the outright lie that you can live beyond your means, a lie told to buy votes, finally being revealed as what it is. Greece was never going to make it work: long term, you can only consume as much as you produce.
So they tossed methods that were wrtten well. (methods that only do one thing) So if you wrote a simple 2 line validation of an input field. Field must be populated. Field must match regex. They tossed that as chaff?
Why the Hell should you have to write code over and over to validate that a reference isn't null, or an int is positive, or other such cases. Sure that's all part of the interface contract anyhow, right? For that matter, why is "allowed to be null" the default rather than an exceptional special case. Why isn't there a simple operator that decorates a parameter as "nullable" with a single character.
Why not simply
public Foo foo;
No getter or setter needed, by default it can't be null. For those odd cases where null actually means something useful, then just write:
public Foo? foo;
This goes double for C#, where "?" is already established as the "nullable" decorator.
Worth noting that many Java coders use Lombock to effectively achieve this already, just with auto-generated getters and setters, since we lack the courage ad/or authority to just have public members instead of pointless getters and setters.
And, above all else, give us a way to declare that the returned value can't be null, and auto-throw if it is, so the caller never has to check!
Was Carter president 12 years ago when we started a war against a wrong country? :P
You seem to have a bad case of "but Bush!". Butt bush is very unappealing - you might try shaving that area, or perhaps laser hair removal.
You have the causation backwards. When the economy is doing well, we elect Democrats to spend all that money. After things have tanked, we elect Republicans to be the stern grown-ups who force us to do our chores until things are good again (or, at least, they used to, the current GOP not so much, which is the big problem).
So if there is a candidate ignoring the things that are already being handled by the states and only focusing on the things the feds are actually supposed to be meddling with (and getting the feds to stop meddling with things they shouldn't have meddled with in the first place).
Wouldn't that be an amazing change in US politics? Well, a man can hope.
How can you be so out of touch? Greece fiscally conservative? Really?
Greece spent so much more than it was making that it finally ran out of other people's money. Then it went totally to shit. We're spending like crack addicts now ourselves. Eventually we will run out of other people's money. Then we will go to shit.
The fiscal conservatives are the ones saying "we should live within our means to avoid that fate". Because consuming more than you produce is unsustainable, full stop. You can wean your self off that gracefully, or you can fall off the cliff, but what you can't do is get away with it forever. No one, anywhere, thinks "austerity" is something that will make life better; no, it's what you're forced into when your lenders start cutting you off, and it's only better than being cut off by everyone all at once.
Greece right now is trying to threaten it's lenders with "if you don't keep lending us money, we won't pay you back". We'll see how that goes - might work for a little bit, since if you can't pay the bank $100 you have a problem, but if you can't pay the bank $100 million the bank has a problem, but that only works till you drag your bank down with you.
Try reading the thread again. You've got the DC GOP, which demagogues social issues (which you seem obsessed with), which only hurts the conservative cause. Then you've got the base, the actual voters, whom the GOP at the national level is increasingly disconnected from - the surveys I've seen don't put social issues in the top "important issues today" among conservatives.
This is at least partly because the GOP establishment is quite a bit older than the average voter (bizarrely, the average Dem congresscritter is sever years older than the average GOP congresscritter right now, but both are quite a bit older than the average voter).
US foreign policy has been an unmitigated disaster for the past few years. It's hard to think of a time when we've done so poorly on the world stage, though Carter maybe ties. I don't see how Hillary can put enough distance between her and the administration she was a part of, even with the mainstream news being 100% in the bag for her. Experience? Definitely. But credibility requires successful experience.
Sure, if like most zealots you define "idiot" as "person I disagree with" then I'm sure that's me. Partisan? Not sure what you mean by that. I don't think I can name a single federal politician whom I like or support from either party. It's not about party - it's about not wanting to see the US enter the troubled times that I expect overspending to cause. I'm a "hot-button issue" guy, who sees nothing to like in the current DC establishment on either side, but only sees hope for one side to possibly, maybe, change for the better. Maybe.
LOL, Walker doesn't know anything about foreign policy so he'll have to make up some positions quick!
Every governor will have this problem. Senators can bring some foreign policy experience, but typically have no experience as an executive, and tend to not be good at getting things done (plus good luck finding one who's credible as a fiscal conservative without "Paul" in his name).
I think a GOP candidate can do fine as long as he has some clear positions he can explain on foreign policy issues, even if he stumbles on ambush questions about east Elbonia. There's don't seem to be any Dem candidates on deck who will be credible on foreign policy anyhow, but then of course it's still early in primary season, and we likely haven't seen all the contenders yet on ether side.
Ah, but I'm guessing you're a Democrat anyhow?
The conservative base has grown quite tired of "establishment candidates" that are inoffensive to the Democratic base, or the mainstream media (but I repeat myself). This is primary season, and for once I have a bit of hope that we'll get a conservative candidate who's fiscally conservative, instead of someone who pleases the current crop DC lobbyists and pork-senders. Walker has proven that he's willing to ignore 100% negative media coverage and do what he sees as right, when it comes to cutting spending. A shocking idea for a national candidate, I know, but the right-wing base understands that any possible GOP candidate will get 100% negative media coverage, regardless of actual views, so it's about time we get someone who isn't trying to please the press, and is instead trying to govern effectively.
Obviously, if you favor government spending and increased federal power, you'll hate Walker, but it's about damn time we as a nation had a chance to vote on that basis, rather than choose between the 2 big spenders who differ only on social issues.
Jeb is very much the GOP "establishment" candidate, loved by those already in power and almost no one else (though I though he was great as governor of Florida, especially in the 4-hurricaine year, I think he's completely the wrong guy for president). The conservative base isn't rooting for Jeb, to be sure.
At the national level, few on the right really care that much about social issues right now, unless you want to consider "immigration" a social issue. Foreign policy, economic growth, and government spending are the focus, and Jeb brings nothing to that except "same old same old" (which of course is why the existing GOP power structure loves him).
Scot Walker is the current guy the right is rooting for, or "Mr Scott" as the NYT recently called him (they don't even know his name, but they're against him!), though we've yet to hear much from him on foreign policy and it's early yet.
My Samsung TV couldn't recognize me when I said it's activation phrase for shit, but it would activate all the time at random sounds being played from the TV itself. Total garbage, and dammit it would be a cool feature if it actually worked.
No, Windows doesn't really have a "power-user" version, they have a bling version, that's about it (well, there's also a 3rd world version that's deliberately crippled). Desktop vs server, of course, that makes a lot of sense.
It's crucial for liberty to make it impractical to do broad-reaching dragnet surveillance, and any real encryption of archives accomplishes that. Much like for email, PGP might have some weakness, but it's good enough to stop wholesale searches (unless there's something Snowden didn't know). If you're archiving actual state secrets or somesuch, by all means be more paranoid, but remember that for valuable targets, the NSA has a frankly astonishing toolkit, with dozens of ways to get a keylogger where they want it. In the crypto boards I follow, people are now hand-assembling their own RNGs from discrete components for keygen, because no IC can be trusted now. So I'm not sure "keeping physical control" really accomplishes much, unless you're wearing two layers of tinfoil hats (as clearly the tinfoil hatters weren't paranoid enough, fucking NSA).
Police aren't raiding HS parties to pad their budget with asset forfeitures, AFAIK, it's just a nuisance crime that they don't want to be bothered with in the first place. At least at my college, there was never any shortage of willing narcs to have all parties covered, unless you worked to keep it secret. I suspect HS parties are about the same.
Yes, there are real problems with police overreach, but this just doesn't seem like one of them.
Calm your taco: none of this is new or different, except the "on a computer" part. I thought we were over "on a computer" freak-outs?
HS and college parties have always had narcs. Either undercover officers, or informers who were in the social scene and would ruin parties for fun. In college, we'd always learn who they were by the end of the year, and plan accordingly, but there'd be a new crop of them the next year.
This is just that, "on a computer". A fake profile is easier than a CI, enabling more surveillance, but this doesn't seem different in kind. This isn't some panopticon with perpetual DB, like a lot of recent crap, this is just automating old-school narcing a bit.
Wow, you still believe in Obamacare, even after it's architect bragged that it was a lie designed to fool the gullible America voter? No wonder he felt safe in bragging.
I'd stand by that definition of a serious problem, at the national scale. Problems that can be solved by talking, or by economic pressure, those are the lesser problems. The guys who will kill and rape and plunder and conquer until you stop them by force, the guys immune to rational incentives, who just delight in causing pain or who have lost any concern for anything but what fun they can have today--you know, evil--those are the serious problem.
Always have 2 backups, as I said upthread. You want an offsite backup of some sort, kept in a different state. The expensive (but better) way to to backup to tape, and send the tape to Iron Mountain, or whoever, in a distant state. For the rest of us, sticking the data in the cloud is just as good.
There's no perfect safe place to put any sort of archive - but having the live data plus 2 backups each with different failure modes, is pretty close. Sure things can go wrong in the cloud, but those are different things than can go wrong with the HDD sitting in a desk drawer somewhere.
Have you installed Windows recently? OK, I haven't since Windows 7, myself, but that install just asked me for timezone, language, and maybe which keyboard I was using (but the default was right), and the rest was just "next, next, next" and that was it, it ran for a while and rebooted 2x and was done with no further input.
For a homebuild, where Windows didn't even have the chipset driver, it still installed successfully, and gave me a full desktop to use for running the install CDs or whatever. But normal users don't ever have that problem.
I do think it's silly to have a "newbie" vs "power user" distro. That just seems nuts to me. Set up the default install to be newbie-friendly, and the power user can then do whatever to "fix" it.
OTOH, it's really quite important to have "server" vs "desktop" distros. I can kinda see the value in systemd on a desktop, for example, or the Ubuntu "app store" thingy. OTOH, on a server, while I still want a GUI desktop installed (I spend much of my life coding on a desktop on the same server distro we run on), I want a bare-bones, easy to troubleshoot system, with any convenience features tilted towards remote access.
If you use good encryption, do you care?
If you don't use good encryption, obviously you're not even trying.
In what scenario does it actually matter that your encrypted archive is in some cloud service? If your government can compel you to divulge the key, OK, I could see that, maybe.
Once you give your data to "the cloud" it ceases to be YOUR data.
Now it belongs to whomever owns those servers.
You want to keep it? Then keep it on your own hardware.
"The cloud" is just too fuzzy a term. I have no problem with cloud-based file storage services, but I'd never put, say, my personal photos on an online photo-sharing service, or any other content-aware cloudy-thing.
My own hardware? That's silly. From Snowden we know the NSA can access files on my home server just as easily as they can on a cloud-based file server. If they take an interest in you, pretty much the only defense is a latop that you built before they took an interest in you and that you keep locked in a safe at all times when not using (I believe Bruce Schneier does this). But anything less than that, if they like you then you have a keylogger already, sorry.
All we can realistically hope to put our trust in is encryption. Even that's not easy (but if TrueCrypt passes it's audit, it's good enough for me). An encrypted archive is just as safe "in the cloud" as it is on a home file server.
Want to backup your data long-term and can't afford LTO tapes in a box out of state? Make one (encrypted) copy locally, but not in your house and not powered. Store another (encrypted) copy in the free files hosts if its small, or Amazon Glacier if you can't fit in the various free options.