Re:I code C# for a living
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
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· Score: 4, Insightful
And I was a member of one of the JCP expert groups that brought you Java 5.
java doesn't have to do that much to "catch up" to it.
Stated another way, Java 5 is still behind C#, to which I would agree.
As to how far behind, that depends on what you value. Java's event handling/callback design is atrocious compared to the convenience of delegates. I would much rather pass a single method called OnAccountOverdrawn()to the event notifier than the Java style of making the whole class an instance of some interface, implementing stubs for all the useless methods of the interface, then implementing the one useful method--which will have a useless name like DoAction() that you can't change, then passing the object that contains the DoAction() method to the event notifier.
And for many things such as generics, autoboxing, enums, etc. (I don't recall which ones specifically), there are actual semantic differences in the virtual machine for C#, whereas Java's knockoff versions are just syntactic sugar for the writing out the equivalent source code yourself. I AM in favor of syntactic sugar, but having the actual semantics available in the underlying runtime gives you additional advantages.
Java's great advantage is its ubiquity, which is also an impediment to improvement. Sun's position was that it was pretty much finished with language improvements after Java 1.1 and would thereafter concentrate on libraries that would run on existing JVMs. New JVMs might run the code even better, but the old JVMs would still run it.
Microsoft knew they had to do better, or nobody would switch. They did a lot of things better, and they seem committed to doing more, even if it means obsoleting their existing VMs. They have far more control over The (One) Platform and seem quite willing to make improvements to C# and the other.Net technologies that will require a VM upgrade.
One catgegory of improvement they seem interested in is a way to make dynamic languages, like Python or Lisp, work REALLY well. Another is support for functional languages like Haskell or OCaml that have special needs of their own.
And if they do it well, (my speculation now), they could even add some of the attractive features of those languages, languages I like more than C#, to C#, widening the gap with Java.
Java might have a very hard time keeping up with C# improvements while anchored to existing runtimes, and letting go of the anchor would seriously impact its ubiquity, which is one way in which Java is vastly better than C#.
I don't think it's a given that Java is going to catch up to C#. But if Mono and/or DotGnu don't succeed, it may not matter as Windows fades away (which I believe it will).
I've voted for both Republicans and Democrats in the past. I usually vote for the candidate who is most moderate, which I define as being least likely to try to forcibly remove my personal decisions and property from my hands and place them in the hands of his Chosen Ones.
Usually the Republicans win this judgment. They violate it in many ways (telling gays they can't marry, people they can't smoke pot even at home, protesters that they can't burn the flag, etc.), but their overall tendency has been to try to restrict growth in government, while Democrats tend to think that all human problems require a corresponding federal agency whose task is to force reality to fit liberal theory.
Sometimes the Republicans lose this contest though. Such is the case this time, with Bush losing out massively due to his dragging us into a stupid war.
But this time, I'm not going for the Democrat, as I have in the past. This time, the Libertarians are going to take my vote away from the Democrats. Without the Libertarian option, Kerry would have gotten my vote. He still would have if it weren't for the Democrats' relentless "if you vote for me, I'll confiscate *their* stuff and give some of it to *you*" approach to governance.
There are a lot of things I like about the Democrats, the Bush administration is not even a consideration for me, and I think the Libertarians are often too extreme in their rejection of government. Even so, the Democrats' class warfare, "confiscate your way to prosperity", and "a federal agency should make your decisions, not you" attitude has driven my vote to the Libertarians.
Its no wonder the Chinese are winning in the technology battles.
What a peculiar comment. China's approach to intellectual property has meant that the software industry in China, a nation with 1.3 *billion* people, is still smaller than the software industry in several US states.
Half of my family still lives in China, and you want to talk about efficiency? Do you really have any idea? I have no doubt that the intellectual property laws in the US have gone to an extreme that results in less innovation than if they were weakened, but the situation in the US is still far better than that in China. The smartest thing a Chinese technologist (and there are a lot of great ones) can do is to go work for a US company so that his work can be sold somewhere where it will be protected, so he can make some money.
And as for the Chinese "winning in the technology battles", there are good people doing some good work in China, but about the only battles they can be said to be winning in any significant way so far are in whose labor is cheapest (even including labor at the PhD. level.) In that, they usually win, but that's not really what I would call a technology battle. It's a labor battle, though at times it is labor working in a technology industry.
Most of our lives will extend well into the long run in economic terms, but what you seem to favor is the "management" of the economy by the deep thinkers whose management policies are informed by a desire to buy near-term votes from short-sighted simpletons.
Those are not likely to be the policies that will benefit you most over the course of your life.
Despite the best efforts of some people to wipe it out, a lot of our founding fathers' country does still exist, and it seems that what you are encountering is resistance to your suggestion that we give up and surrender the rest. Sorry, not interested.
Whoever moderated you as "flamebait" is just trying to silence truthful words that he doesn't want others to hear.
I was a member of one of the JCP expert groups that worked on Java 5 (a.k.a. "Tiger" & "1.5"). I like Java as a programming *system* for certain tasks. I say "system" instead of language, because the big advantages are in areas other than the programming language, per se.
Although I don't find the C# language exactly exciting, I definitely prefer it to Java. The language improvements over Java (again, *language*, not associated ecosystem) are based on years of complaints from Java developers--complaints long ignored by Sun for reasons of backward compatibility and due to design philosophies of some senior designers who want a language that is optimized for productivity in the hands of frequently-changing commodity programmers.
Only the power of competition from C# has had the ability to shake the Java gods out of their committment to a frozen language. Sun is still committed to a frozen bytecode/JVM design, while Microsoft is not, so the gap is likely to widen, not narrow, while Java is likely to remain more widespread (new code will run everywhere on all of the old JVMs).
I prefer Java's portability and developed ecosystem, but I definitely prefer the C# language features, so I'm hoping that Mono will succeed at making C# much more portable.
Of course, for language only without consideration of the associated ecosystem (implementations, libraries, programmer availability, etc.), I most enjoy really dynamic languages like Lisp and ML, but whaddya gonna do....
Imagine you were building a semi-democratic nation from a blank slate... Would you try to make each citizen's vote equally powerful, or give extra-weight to the residents of certain areas?
Probably some version of the latter. I think people misunderstand that the USA (which was originally spelled with a lowercase 'u' in united) was intended to be better than a democracy because it included numerous checks and balances against the potential tyranny of pure democracies.
The electoral voting system, combined with putting almost all important laws at the state and not federal level, was one of those checks designed to protect minority rights. You could voluntarily associate with any state you felt matched your personal "culture" and the more numerous people who didn't match you would have a harder time voting to confiscate your possessions, enforcing their lifestyle preferences on you, and so on.
It was designed as a protection of diversity, and any form of protection of minority rights against a majority must, by definition, end up giving extra weight to some votes over others in at least some circumstances.
It seems to me that if you are going to do this, the fairest system is one that is attached to physical locations and not personal traits such as race. Instead of being born with inalienable extra rights relative to others, you can gain them or lose them by moving elsewhere, which all are free to do.
I'm not saying, though, that the electoral system currently in use is the best way, just that it is not the bogeyman that simple-minded analysis often portrays.
So *Salon* is your resource for unbiased analysis? Listen to this lead they write:
Partisan hack David Bossie raised political sliming to an art form against Bill Clinton. Now he's out to smear John Kerry and Michael Moore. Why does anyone in the media still take him seriously?
Partisan hack? Raised political sliming to an art form? Now out to smear [a presidential candidate]?
Sounds like a description of Michael Moore. Funny that Salon didn't mention that part, being Journalists with such high professional standards and all.
Why does anyone in the media still take him seriously?
I wonder the same about Salon. Oh, wait, they ARE the media.
I think the reason we disagree on the question of two inexperienced people being paired relates to the source of the disagreements between them. You are talking about "the one who is wrong" as if in most disagreements one will be right and one wrong.
In my experience, almost all of the disagreements are over personal preferences regarding how to do handle something. "We should use a 'for loop' because... No, a 'while loop' is better in this case because...." Or whether a certain method really belongs in Class A or Class B, or whether to bring in an additional library for two small functions or to avoid that dependency and rewrite both yourself, etc.
Two inexperienced people arguing over these decisions is not a productive situation. You should have a senior partner who is authorized to make the decision as he sees fit, after listening to the counter argument, without being required to convince his partner.
I think the best approach is to pair an experienced person with a less experienced person, and make it clear to both that the more experienced person had two votes and the less experienced had one in any disagreements.
I wouldn't mind being partnered with someone with a lot more experience. I would consider it an opportunity to turbocharge my own learning, and though I would ask lots of questions and might even gently challenge some decisions, I would make it clear that they were HIS decisions to make, even if the boss didn't manage it that way.
I also wouldn't mind being the senior partner as long as the junior understood that, though I would appreciate his input, the decisions were mine.
Two inexperienced people shouldn't be paired. All of their arguments will end up being over who is able to make who back down. Complete waste.
I would also be willing to be paired with another experienced person, with my (senior) level of experience, if it were the right person. It would be harder to make this work with two arbitrary people than the case with unequal pairings and one guy in charge. In the case of two experienced people, if you had to specify which one was in charge, it probably wouldn't be a good pairing.
I had a discussion with another senior architect (like me) the other day, and both of us agreed that it would be fun for us to try pair programming together some time because both of us have concluded that the other has expertise that we wish we had.;-) He's the only one in his group I'd be willing to work that way with, though.
Or did you mean that the INRIA guys were at a disadvantage...?
No, I meant advantage, which showed up this year in winning the judges' prize, but your point about how badly they lost objectively is a good one. I hadn't even noticed until you pointed it out. Odd that the judges would find them so cool if the actual results of their "cool" approach were so poor....
Yes, you're both right, and I think a big part of the problem is the fragility of the "ecosystem" on a typical home computer.
Consider what happens when you try a new game on a game console. You plug it in, play it, and if you don't like it, you just unplug it. It's as if it was never there. It's gone and the game system is "plain vanilla" again. It can't be corrupted by just using it. What a concept!
On a PC, Mac, or even a Linux box, installing something new -- almost anything -- is likely to put the system into an untested state and uninstalling may leave it that way. And now, even browsing the Web can put your system into an untested state.
The more this is done, the less reliable the system becomes, the more things go wrong, and the more you (and all who have to help you) yearn to return to a tested, working configuration.
Since the average consumer CAN'T restore his own machine to a pristine state, the only way to get one in that state is to buy a new one.
Since the price of doing so keeps falling, I think the reason for most upgrades these days is not the desire to have a more powerful machine -- most people feel theirs is already more powerful than they need -- but to finally have one that WORKS again (for a while...).
Yes, I agree with your assessment of the implementations, even though the CMUCL and SBCL *compilers* have some impressive characteristics.
Still, a contest like this doesn't require much from the platform. You don't need to put the system into production or keep it maintained. You just have to solve a programming problem in a one-off sort of way that takes away a lot of the advantages that the most popular platforms have in more mainstream, enterprise-type problems.
I (think I) understand the theory behind the stronger typing in OCaml & Haskell vs. Lisp. It helps the compiler catch more bugs automatically.
It seems to me as though this would slow down the initial process of exploring the problem, as Paul Graham claims. Proponents claim that it makes up for that by making larger systems more reliable.
But these contest entries don't ever become large systems, and the extra slowdown initially wouldn't have time to pay off in the long run if the long run is only 24hrs (or 72hrs).
Likewise with Haskell's isolation of side effects into the monad ghetto. Again, the theory of this is that the inconvenience pays off over the long run in reliability, if I understand correctly.
I can understand the value of such features when creating avionics, nuclear power plant controls, or automated securities trading, but these contests aren't about reliability. They're about quick & dirty, do only what you have to do to score a short-term win. If a team ends up with a bug that doesn't impede their victory, then they still win. If the bug does impede their victory, then they lose, but it's hardly a costly loss, so they have little to lose by being more aggressive.
Since they have so little to lose, I'm surprised that the majority of winners aren't primarily highly-dynamic/questionable-safety languages like Perl and Lisp. And I'm surprised that C++ ever wins, except where speed matters (as was the case last year, I think.)
For the circumstances of this contest at least, it seems to imply that if you are good at figuring out smart approaches to a problem, it doesn't matter what language you use as long as you are VERY quick and reliable in expressing your intentions in that language, meaning so much experience with the language and its dev tools that you can write your code as fast as you can type.
I'm not quite sure what to make of the underwhelming results of teams that use Lisp in these ICFP contests every year. Of course I can see that there are many ways in which the contest isn't a "fair" test of language against language. If one team has a dozen Inria guys whose full time job is OCaml development against another team with a single Lisp hobbyist, it isn't much of a fair fight.
It appears that winning depends more on choosing a good strategy than a good language and then implementing that strategy quickly and accurately. Choosing a winning strategy should be just as easy for a Lisp team as for anyone else, and helping you "discover" a good strategy is supposedly a strong point of Lisp. And as for implementing quickly and accurately, Lisp is said to have all sorts of advantages in that regard.
Even so, the number of teams that choose Lisp each year and the relatively poor showing of those teams implies to me that the amount of advantage Lisp provides is not as great as some (e.g., Paul Graham) would have us believe.
These contest problems are the sort of non-mainstream challenges that Lisp is supposed to be particularly good at, so I would expect more teams to choose Lisp to help them explore the problem and discover a winning strategy. Instead, Lisp appears to have, at best, average popularity among these programming language fans. I understand the overweighting in Haskell and OCaml given the name of the contest, but Lisp is roughly as functional as OCaml, so its lack of popularity puzzles me.
And of those who choose it, the results don't seem to imply that it gave them any advantage.
Yes, there are all sorts of ways in which the contest isn't a level playing field, but I'm still a bit puzzled at why the purported advantages of Lisp aren't showing up. Maybe they're real, but they don't appear to be very significant.
I have to laugh at this IBM lovefest because I remember when IBM was considered every bit the nemesis that Microsoft is considered today, by the same sorts of people.
Since I've now seen it with my own eyes, I have proof that it's possible that the next generation will astound many of you by embracing Microsoft as their hero.
It doesn't pay to get too carried away in your caricatures of heroes and villains.
The only ways people get 500 per day must be in their own stupidity.
I probably get 500 spams a day, but I don't think it's because I'm stupid.
I have an email address (MyFullName@MyCompanyName.com) that I've been using for well over a decade for a personal business. I don't plan to change either my name or my company name.
When I would be a speaker at some event or teach a seminar, the organizers would always include my email address as part of the speaker bio, which started going up on the Web when the Web was born. Also, in the early 90s, when the problem of spam was trivial, my address was mentioned in the industry press from time to time.
I can use an alternate address for close personal friends, but I have a lot of professional and personal inertia behind this very basic email address, so I can't stop using it. Friends I haven't heard from for years wouldn't know any other address, and I continue to get new business through that address.
I get more spam at this address, which I don't think has been publicly posted for six or seven years, than at my Hotmail spam magnet address, which I use roughly once a week for public postings, online product ordering, services that require a valid email address in order to register, etc.
It appears that the age of an email address matters even more than how much it is currently being exposed.
I go thru SpamAssassin on the server, and then thru SpamBayes on my laptop, and still about five spams get all the way thru to "ham". That amount is tolerable, but I also end up with an "Unsure" directory [SpamBayes sorts into three categories: spam, unsure, and ham] containing about 50 per day that I have to look through because occasionally I find an important *real* email in the "Unsure" pile.
Without SpamBayes, I'd be in big trouble. Some of us just can't change our email address frequently or even hide it very well, and that's not the same as being stupid...I think.;-)
Notice that that link contains only the announcement that they aren't accepting any further orders. If you want to try Suse, you pay in money and time or in inconvenience.
With Red Hat it was easy to create some installer CDs of the latest and have them around in case the urge to install it on some machine struck me. It often did, both at home and at work. If that machine wasn't connected to the Net or whatever, it didn't matter. I had real, local installation discs.
Suse wants to make installation less convenient, if you want the "real" version. Pay money, wait for discs, wonder what version they'll be and how long they'll be current before I have to order and wait again, or install by FTP, which sounds error prone since it is installing its own OS and yet it can't even get the files to install unless it is already up and running some OS (would that include any old Windows already on the machine? Dunno, I'd have to research it) plus a working network connection, which is what you're trying to install....
Each time I think that maybe I should give Suse a try, I run into this, decide that it's not worth the extra bother, and put it off again.... And the longer I go without switching to Suse, the less likely I am to ever do so.
If you know anybody with a dictionary, ask him to look up the word "analogy" for you.
Re:What nonsense
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Mock World Vote
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I believe - like the founders of America believed - that the governed, the people who are impacted by the decisions of governmental authority - should have some say in the selection of those who exert authority over them
You're either intentionally or unintentionally confused about the distinction between entities that make decisions that impact us, for better or worse, and entities chosen by us to make decisions and act on our behalf.
Americans are impacted by what the Chinese, the European Union, the French, the Mexicans, the Canadians, the Japanese, etc., do. That doesn't give America the right to choose their leaders for them. (And, yes, on that basis I believe that the US had no right to take some of the actions it has taken.)
I claimed that, "Whatever issues they consider, Americans will choose based on what they think most likely to benefit themselves, Americans, and non-Americans will choose based what they think most likely to benefit themselves, non-Americans."
You flatly contradict that with a "No", and as evidence of my incorrectness you explain what the "more compassionate and forward-thinking Americans, and foreigners" would do.
Again, your muddled logic makes it difficult to even discuss this issue with you. Are you proposing limiting voting rights to only those you consider the "more compassionate and forward-thinking" subset? If so, you didn't mention it, and cherry picking electors means choosing the outcome, so why bother with an election at all?
If everyone gets to vote, then what one subset of voters might do does not refute my claim regarding who the electorate would choose unless that subset is the majority.
But if these "compassionate and forward-thinking" ("CFT") Americans you mention were in the majority, you wouldn't need the foreign "say" in the election, because the election would come out the way the foreigners wanted anyway. Since you think foreign electors are a good idea, you must not think the majority of American voters are CFTs, which means Americans would vote for their own interests, which is what I said.
So maybe your "No" only refers to non-Americans as a whole, as an electorate, being "compassionate and forward thinking", not to Americans. That would be the sort of position I've come to expect from a liberal argument, and without that position, adding their votes to the US election would be either irrelevant or bad.
I stick to my position that if the French, Russians, and Chinese could vote in a US election, they would put weakening the US as a competitor ahead of helping Americans on their priority list. They consistently take positions, both officially and in their popular press, that reflect these priorities.
What if Mexican citizens were all allowed to vote in the US (instead of just lots of them, with the help of US liberals)? Would you think they would approve of extending US taxpayer funded benefits to all Mexican nationals or to oppose it as being "too expensive"?
What would a billion Chinese voters do to any proposed human rights or labor standards or job protectionism legislation proposed *by US liberals* that the gov't of China told them was designed to "weaken China"? They'd be impacted by it. Are you sure you'd want their votes?
My vote against Bush is based on my disgust with the way he has damaged our international relations, the disrespect he has shown to other nations' peoples, and the net loss of international goodwill toward us that I blame him for. This, however, does nothing to make me think that your idea has any merit whatsoever.
Your argument that the rest of the world is exposed to more of the issues in the American campaign is not only wrong but irrelevant.
Whatever issues they consider, Americans will choose based on what they think most likely to benefit themselves, Americans, and non-Americans will choose based what they think most likely to benefit themselves, non-Americans.
Whether correctly or not, the French and Russians tend to blame their waning importance in the world on America. Certainly the Chinese feel that if it weren't for America, the violent crushing of Taiwan's multiparty democracy would be a fait accompli. Yes, the choice of American President seems to have a big impact on them, so you think that means there's merit in letting them have some say in who should lead America.
By that argument, wouldn't there be some merit in letting the opposing team have some say in who your team's quarterback will be in the Superbowl? Wouldn't your choice have a big impact on them? Isn't that criterion sufficient to give the idea merit? I hear this silly blather all of the time from "enlightened" liberals. "Neanderthal" conservatives don't fall for it (though they fall for a lot of other foolishness).
And while it's true that there are many ways in which nations cooperate as well as compete, there is no reason to assume that the decisions of the vastly more numerous "happily uninformed, strongly-opinionated and emotionally-swayed peasants" in the rest of the world would put helping Americans high on their priority lists. There are plenty of people in the world who would argue that they were only being cooperative when they concluded that, "it would be better for BOTH of us if things were better for ME and worse for YOU."
It's not who is "exposed to more issues" or who is influenced in some way by the choice that matters. If you aren't motivated to help Americans, Americans shouldn't be very interested in your electoral preferences, except in the form of a warning. If the French, Russians, or Chinese felt that Kerry would be best for *them*, would that automatically make Kerry more likely to be best for Americans?
[And if you reply by simply bashing Bush, you are logic impaired. I OPPOSE Bush, but that is irrelevant to the above argument.]
I would appreciate it if Slashdot started posting their stats, even if Slashdot isn't representative of the Web overall.
And I'd prefer the truth to stats spun to support the open source agenda. I think the truth ought to be sufficient to support that agenda, and where it isn't, I'd like to know.
Yes, more European socialism in the US is a fundamental aspiration of the Democrats. And as socialist Democrats and leftist "educators" spread the meme that it is the government's job to "protect jobs" to more and more people, the Republicans can do favors for big corporations and claim they're just "protecting jobs", too.
If you're tired of it, vote Libertarian. Libertarians won't win the White House, but a large enough showing might impress the Democrats and Republicans that we're tired of them confiscating OUR money and passing it out like party favors to buy votes and political contributions.
They *do* have ICBMs that they have flown over Japan. These could probably hit Hawaii or Alaska and may be able to reach the US/Canadian West Coast.
It seems unlikely that this was an intentional nuclear test, though. It was close enough to the Chinese border to create a radiation hazard on Chinese soil, which would infuriate the Chinese.
It is already assumed by most that the North Koreans have a few nukes, and the North Koreans have already demonstrated their Rodong ("Workers") missile by shooting it right over Japan. The only thing close to a "friend" they have in the region is China, and the other parties have been trying to persuade China to pressure the NKs to stop playing around with nukes, which they've done only half-heartedly.
If the NKs deliberately tested a nuke so close to the Chinese border that it contaminated Chinese territory, the Chinese would suddenly become very motivated to pressure the NKs, so it's hard to believe that the NKs would do such a thing.
Still, they are on the lunatic fringe, so anything is possible.
Slashdot Mirror
And I was a member of one of the JCP expert groups that brought you Java 5.
.Net technologies that will require a VM upgrade.
java doesn't have to do that much to "catch up" to it.
Stated another way, Java 5 is still behind C#, to which I would agree.
As to how far behind, that depends on what you value. Java's event handling/callback design is atrocious compared to the convenience of delegates. I would much rather pass a single method called OnAccountOverdrawn()to the event notifier than the Java style of making the whole class an instance of some interface, implementing stubs for all the useless methods of the interface, then implementing the one useful method--which will have a useless name like DoAction() that you can't change, then passing the object that contains the DoAction() method to the event notifier.
And for many things such as generics, autoboxing, enums, etc. (I don't recall which ones specifically), there are actual semantic differences in the virtual machine for C#, whereas Java's knockoff versions are just syntactic sugar for the writing out the equivalent source code yourself. I AM in favor of syntactic sugar, but having the actual semantics available in the underlying runtime gives you additional advantages.
Java's great advantage is its ubiquity, which is also an impediment to improvement. Sun's position was that it was pretty much finished with language improvements after Java 1.1 and would thereafter concentrate on libraries that would run on existing JVMs. New JVMs might run the code even better, but the old JVMs would still run it.
Microsoft knew they had to do better, or nobody would switch. They did a lot of things better, and they seem committed to doing more, even if it means obsoleting their existing VMs. They have far more control over The (One) Platform and seem quite willing to make improvements to C# and the other
One catgegory of improvement they seem interested in is a way to make dynamic languages, like Python or Lisp, work REALLY well. Another is support for functional languages like Haskell or OCaml that have special needs of their own.
And if they do it well, (my speculation now), they could even add some of the attractive features of those languages, languages I like more than C#, to C#, widening the gap with Java.
Java might have a very hard time keeping up with C# improvements while anchored to existing runtimes, and letting go of the anchor would seriously impact its ubiquity, which is one way in which Java is vastly better than C#.
I don't think it's a given that Java is going to catch up to C#. But if Mono and/or DotGnu don't succeed, it may not matter as Windows fades away (which I believe it will).
Is it currently possible to calculate the hardness of a material knowing only its molecular structure? I'm guessing it is, but I don't know.
If so, do we already know what the hardest *possible* material would be? (Assuming regular atoms, not neutronium.)
I've voted for both Republicans and Democrats in the past. I usually vote for the candidate who is most moderate, which I define as being least likely to try to forcibly remove my personal decisions and property from my hands and place them in the hands of his Chosen Ones.
Usually the Republicans win this judgment. They violate it in many ways (telling gays they can't marry, people they can't smoke pot even at home, protesters that they can't burn the flag, etc.), but their overall tendency has been to try to restrict growth in government, while Democrats tend to think that all human problems require a corresponding federal agency whose task is to force reality to fit liberal theory.
Sometimes the Republicans lose this contest though. Such is the case this time, with Bush losing out massively due to his dragging us into a stupid war.
But this time, I'm not going for the Democrat, as I have in the past. This time, the Libertarians are going to take my vote away from the Democrats. Without the Libertarian option, Kerry would have gotten my vote. He still would have if it weren't for the Democrats' relentless "if you vote for me, I'll confiscate *their* stuff and give some of it to *you*" approach to governance.
There are a lot of things I like about the Democrats, the Bush administration is not even a consideration for me, and I think the Libertarians are often too extreme in their rejection of government. Even so, the Democrats' class warfare, "confiscate your way to prosperity", and "a federal agency should make your decisions, not you" attitude has driven my vote to the Libertarians.
Its no wonder the Chinese are winning in the technology battles.
What a peculiar comment. China's approach to intellectual property has meant that the software industry in China, a nation with 1.3 *billion* people, is still smaller than the software industry in several US states.
Half of my family still lives in China, and you want to talk about efficiency? Do you really have any idea? I have no doubt that the intellectual property laws in the US have gone to an extreme that results in less innovation than if they were weakened, but the situation in the US is still far better than that in China. The smartest thing a Chinese technologist (and there are a lot of great ones) can do is to go work for a US company so that his work can be sold somewhere where it will be protected, so he can make some money.
And as for the Chinese "winning in the technology battles", there are good people doing some good work in China, but about the only battles they can be said to be winning in any significant way so far are in whose labor is cheapest (even including labor at the PhD. level.) In that, they usually win, but that's not really what I would call a technology battle. It's a labor battle, though at times it is labor working in a technology industry.
Most of our lives will extend well into the long run in economic terms, but what you seem to favor is the "management" of the economy by the deep thinkers whose management policies are informed by a desire to buy near-term votes from short-sighted simpletons.
Those are not likely to be the policies that will benefit you most over the course of your life.
Despite the best efforts of some people to wipe it out, a lot of our founding fathers' country does still exist, and it seems that what you are encountering is resistance to your suggestion that we give up and surrender the rest. Sorry, not interested.
Whoever moderated you as "flamebait" is just trying to silence truthful words that he doesn't want others to hear.
I was a member of one of the JCP expert groups that worked on Java 5 (a.k.a. "Tiger" & "1.5"). I like Java as a programming *system* for certain tasks. I say "system" instead of language, because the big advantages are in areas other than the programming language, per se.
Although I don't find the C# language exactly exciting, I definitely prefer it to Java. The language improvements over Java (again, *language*, not associated ecosystem) are based on years of complaints from Java developers--complaints long ignored by Sun for reasons of backward compatibility and due to design philosophies of some senior designers who want a language that is optimized for productivity in the hands of frequently-changing commodity programmers.
Only the power of competition from C# has had the ability to shake the Java gods out of their committment to a frozen language. Sun is still committed to a frozen bytecode/JVM design, while Microsoft is not, so the gap is likely to widen, not narrow, while Java is likely to remain more widespread (new code will run everywhere on all of the old JVMs).
I prefer Java's portability and developed ecosystem, but I definitely prefer the C# language features, so I'm hoping that Mono will succeed at making C# much more portable.
Of course, for language only without consideration of the associated ecosystem (implementations, libraries, programmer availability, etc.), I most enjoy really dynamic languages like Lisp and ML, but whaddya gonna do....
Imagine you were building a semi-democratic nation from a blank slate ... Would you try to make each citizen's vote equally powerful, or give extra-weight to the residents of certain areas?
Probably some version of the latter. I think people misunderstand that the USA (which was originally spelled with a lowercase 'u' in united) was intended to be better than a democracy because it included numerous checks and balances against the potential tyranny of pure democracies.
The electoral voting system, combined with putting almost all important laws at the state and not federal level, was one of those checks designed to protect minority rights. You could voluntarily associate with any state you felt matched your personal "culture" and the more numerous people who didn't match you would have a harder time voting to confiscate your possessions, enforcing their lifestyle preferences on you, and so on.
It was designed as a protection of diversity, and any form of protection of minority rights against a majority must, by definition, end up giving extra weight to some votes over others in at least some circumstances.
It seems to me that if you are going to do this, the fairest system is one that is attached to physical locations and not personal traits such as race. Instead of being born with inalienable extra rights relative to others, you can gain them or lose them by moving elsewhere, which all are free to do.
I'm not saying, though, that the electoral system currently in use is the best way, just that it is not the bogeyman that simple-minded analysis often portrays.
So *Salon* is your resource for unbiased analysis? Listen to this lead they write:
Partisan hack David Bossie raised political sliming to an art form against Bill Clinton. Now he's out to smear John Kerry and Michael Moore. Why does anyone in the media still take him seriously?
Partisan hack? Raised political sliming to an art form? Now out to smear [a presidential candidate]?
Sounds like a description of Michael Moore. Funny that Salon didn't mention that part, being Journalists with such high professional standards and all.
Why does anyone in the media still take him seriously?
I wonder the same about Salon. Oh, wait, they ARE the media.
If the guy who is wrong does not step back...
I think the reason we disagree on the question of two inexperienced people being paired relates to the source of the disagreements between them. You are talking about "the one who is wrong" as if in most disagreements one will be right and one wrong.
In my experience, almost all of the disagreements are over personal preferences regarding how to do handle something. "We should use a 'for loop' because... No, a 'while loop' is better in this case because...." Or whether a certain method really belongs in Class A or Class B, or whether to bring in an additional library for two small functions or to avoid that dependency and rewrite both yourself, etc.
Two inexperienced people arguing over these decisions is not a productive situation. You should have a senior partner who is authorized to make the decision as he sees fit, after listening to the counter argument, without being required to convince his partner.
I think the best approach is to pair an experienced person with a less experienced person, and make it clear to both that the more experienced person had two votes and the less experienced had one in any disagreements.
;-) He's the only one in his group I'd be willing to work that way with, though.
I wouldn't mind being partnered with someone with a lot more experience. I would consider it an opportunity to turbocharge my own learning, and though I would ask lots of questions and might even gently challenge some decisions, I would make it clear that they were HIS decisions to make, even if the boss didn't manage it that way.
I also wouldn't mind being the senior partner as long as the junior understood that, though I would appreciate his input, the decisions were mine.
Two inexperienced people shouldn't be paired. All of their arguments will end up being over who is able to make who back down. Complete waste.
I would also be willing to be paired with another experienced person, with my (senior) level of experience, if it were the right person. It would be harder to make this work with two arbitrary people than the case with unequal pairings and one guy in charge. In the case of two experienced people, if you had to specify which one was in charge, it probably wouldn't be a good pairing.
I had a discussion with another senior architect (like me) the other day, and both of us agreed that it would be fun for us to try pair programming together some time because both of us have concluded that the other has expertise that we wish we had.
Or did you mean that the INRIA guys were at a disadvantage...?
No, I meant advantage, which showed up this year in winning the judges' prize, but your point about how badly they lost objectively is a good one. I hadn't even noticed until you pointed it out. Odd that the judges would find them so cool if the actual results of their "cool" approach were so poor....
Yes, you're both right, and I think a big part of the problem is the fragility of the "ecosystem" on a typical home computer.
Consider what happens when you try a new game on a game console. You plug it in, play it, and if you don't like it, you just unplug it. It's as if it was never there. It's gone and the game system is "plain vanilla" again. It can't be corrupted by just using it. What a concept!
On a PC, Mac, or even a Linux box, installing something new -- almost anything -- is likely to put the system into an untested state and uninstalling may leave it that way. And now, even browsing the Web can put your system into an untested state.
The more this is done, the less reliable the system becomes, the more things go wrong, and the more you (and all who have to help you) yearn to return to a tested, working configuration.
Since the average consumer CAN'T restore his own machine to a pristine state, the only way to get one in that state is to buy a new one.
Since the price of doing so keeps falling, I think the reason for most upgrades these days is not the desire to have a more powerful machine -- most people feel theirs is already more powerful than they need -- but to finally have one that WORKS again (for a while...).
Yes, I agree with your assessment of the implementations, even though the CMUCL and SBCL *compilers* have some impressive characteristics.
Still, a contest like this doesn't require much from the platform. You don't need to put the system into production or keep it maintained. You just have to solve a programming problem in a one-off sort of way that takes away a lot of the advantages that the most popular platforms have in more mainstream, enterprise-type problems.
I (think I) understand the theory behind the stronger typing in OCaml & Haskell vs. Lisp. It helps the compiler catch more bugs automatically.
It seems to me as though this would slow down the initial process of exploring the problem, as Paul Graham claims. Proponents claim that it makes up for that by making larger systems more reliable.
But these contest entries don't ever become large systems, and the extra slowdown initially wouldn't have time to pay off in the long run if the long run is only 24hrs (or 72hrs).
Likewise with Haskell's isolation of side effects into the monad ghetto. Again, the theory of this is that the inconvenience pays off over the long run in reliability, if I understand correctly.
I can understand the value of such features when creating avionics, nuclear power plant controls, or automated securities trading, but these contests aren't about reliability. They're about quick & dirty, do only what you have to do to score a short-term win. If a team ends up with a bug that doesn't impede their victory, then they still win. If the bug does impede their victory, then they lose, but it's hardly a costly loss, so they have little to lose by being more aggressive.
Since they have so little to lose, I'm surprised that the majority of winners aren't primarily highly-dynamic/questionable-safety languages like Perl and Lisp. And I'm surprised that C++ ever wins, except where speed matters (as was the case last year, I think.)
For the circumstances of this contest at least, it seems to imply that if you are good at figuring out smart approaches to a problem, it doesn't matter what language you use as long as you are VERY quick and reliable in expressing your intentions in that language, meaning so much experience with the language and its dev tools that you can write your code as fast as you can type.
I'm not quite sure what to make of the underwhelming results of teams that use Lisp in these ICFP contests every year. Of course I can see that there are many ways in which the contest isn't a "fair" test of language against language. If one team has a dozen Inria guys whose full time job is OCaml development against another team with a single Lisp hobbyist, it isn't much of a fair fight.
It appears that winning depends more on choosing a good strategy than a good language and then implementing that strategy quickly and accurately. Choosing a winning strategy should be just as easy for a Lisp team as for anyone else, and helping you "discover" a good strategy is supposedly a strong point of Lisp. And as for implementing quickly and accurately, Lisp is said to have all sorts of advantages in that regard.
Even so, the number of teams that choose Lisp each year and the relatively poor showing of those teams implies to me that the amount of advantage Lisp provides is not as great as some (e.g., Paul Graham) would have us believe.
These contest problems are the sort of non-mainstream challenges that Lisp is supposed to be particularly good at, so I would expect more teams to choose Lisp to help them explore the problem and discover a winning strategy. Instead, Lisp appears to have, at best, average popularity among these programming language fans. I understand the overweighting in Haskell and OCaml given the name of the contest, but Lisp is roughly as functional as OCaml, so its lack of popularity puzzles me.
And of those who choose it, the results don't seem to imply that it gave them any advantage.
Yes, there are all sorts of ways in which the contest isn't a level playing field, but I'm still a bit puzzled at why the purported advantages of Lisp aren't showing up. Maybe they're real, but they don't appear to be very significant.
I have to laugh at this IBM lovefest because I remember when IBM was considered every bit the nemesis that Microsoft is considered today, by the same sorts of people.
Since I've now seen it with my own eyes, I have proof that it's possible that the next generation will astound many of you by embracing Microsoft as their hero.
It doesn't pay to get too carried away in your caricatures of heroes and villains.
You were warned....
The only ways people get 500 per day must be in their own stupidity.
;-)
I probably get 500 spams a day, but I don't think it's because I'm stupid.
I have an email address (MyFullName@MyCompanyName.com) that I've been using for well over a decade for a personal business. I don't plan to change either my name or my company name.
When I would be a speaker at some event or teach a seminar, the organizers would always include my email address as part of the speaker bio, which started going up on the Web when the Web was born. Also, in the early 90s, when the problem of spam was trivial, my address was mentioned in the industry press from time to time.
I can use an alternate address for close personal friends, but I have a lot of professional and personal inertia behind this very basic email address, so I can't stop using it. Friends I haven't heard from for years wouldn't know any other address, and I continue to get new business through that address.
I get more spam at this address, which I don't think has been publicly posted for six or seven years, than at my Hotmail spam magnet address, which I use roughly once a week for public postings, online product ordering, services that require a valid email address in order to register, etc.
It appears that the age of an email address matters even more than how much it is currently being exposed.
I go thru SpamAssassin on the server, and then thru SpamBayes on my laptop, and still about five spams get all the way thru to "ham". That amount is tolerable, but I also end up with an "Unsure" directory [SpamBayes sorts into three categories: spam, unsure, and ham] containing about 50 per day that I have to look through because occasionally I find an important *real* email in the "Unsure" pile.
Without SpamBayes, I'd be in big trouble. Some of us just can't change our email address frequently or even hide it very well, and that's not the same as being stupid...I think.
Notice that that link contains only the announcement that they aren't accepting any further orders. If you want to try Suse, you pay in money and time or in inconvenience.
With Red Hat it was easy to create some installer CDs of the latest and have them around in case the urge to install it on some machine struck me. It often did, both at home and at work. If that machine wasn't connected to the Net or whatever, it didn't matter. I had real, local installation discs.
Suse wants to make installation less convenient, if you want the "real" version. Pay money, wait for discs, wonder what version they'll be and how long they'll be current before I have to order and wait again, or install by FTP, which sounds error prone since it is installing its own OS and yet it can't even get the files to install unless it is already up and running some OS (would that include any old Windows already on the machine? Dunno, I'd have to research it) plus a working network connection, which is what you're trying to install....
Each time I think that maybe I should give Suse a try, I run into this, decide that it's not worth the extra bother, and put it off again.... And the longer I go without switching to Suse, the less likely I am to ever do so.
If you know anybody with a dictionary, ask him to look up the word "analogy" for you.
I believe - like the founders of America believed - that the governed, the people who are impacted by the decisions of governmental authority - should have some say in the selection of those who exert authority over them
You're either intentionally or unintentionally confused about the distinction between entities that make decisions that impact us, for better or worse, and entities chosen by us to make decisions and act on our behalf.
Americans are impacted by what the Chinese, the European Union, the French, the Mexicans, the Canadians, the Japanese, etc., do. That doesn't give America the right to choose their leaders for them. (And, yes, on that basis I believe that the US had no right to take some of the actions it has taken.)
I claimed that, "Whatever issues they consider, Americans will choose based on what they think most likely to benefit themselves, Americans, and non-Americans will choose based what they think most likely to benefit themselves, non-Americans."
You flatly contradict that with a "No", and as evidence of my incorrectness you explain what the "more compassionate and forward-thinking Americans, and foreigners" would do.
Again, your muddled logic makes it difficult to even discuss this issue with you. Are you proposing limiting voting rights to only those you consider the "more compassionate and forward-thinking" subset? If so, you didn't mention it, and cherry picking electors means choosing the outcome, so why bother with an election at all?
If everyone gets to vote, then what one subset of voters might do does not refute my claim regarding who the electorate would choose unless that subset is the majority.
But if these "compassionate and forward-thinking" ("CFT") Americans you mention were in the majority, you wouldn't need the foreign "say" in the election, because the election would come out the way the foreigners wanted anyway. Since you think foreign electors are a good idea, you must not think the majority of American voters are CFTs, which means Americans would vote for their own interests, which is what I said.
So maybe your "No" only refers to non-Americans as a whole, as an electorate, being "compassionate and forward thinking", not to Americans. That would be the sort of position I've come to expect from a liberal argument, and without that position, adding their votes to the US election would be either irrelevant or bad.
I stick to my position that if the French, Russians, and Chinese could vote in a US election, they would put weakening the US as a competitor ahead of helping Americans on their priority list. They consistently take positions, both officially and in their popular press, that reflect these priorities.
What if Mexican citizens were all allowed to vote in the US (instead of just lots of them, with the help of US liberals)? Would you think they would approve of extending US taxpayer funded benefits to all Mexican nationals or to oppose it as being "too expensive"?
What would a billion Chinese voters do to any proposed human rights or labor standards or job protectionism legislation proposed *by US liberals* that the gov't of China told them was designed to "weaken China"? They'd be impacted by it. Are you sure you'd want their votes?
My vote against Bush is based on my disgust with the way he has damaged our international relations, the disrespect he has shown to other nations' peoples, and the net loss of international goodwill toward us that I blame him for. This, however, does nothing to make me think that your idea has any merit whatsoever.
There's merit to that argument.
Your argument that the rest of the world is exposed to more of the issues in the American campaign is not only wrong but irrelevant.
Whatever issues they consider, Americans will choose based on what they think most likely to benefit themselves, Americans, and non-Americans will choose based what they think most likely to benefit themselves, non-Americans.
Whether correctly or not, the French and Russians tend to blame their waning importance in the world on America. Certainly the Chinese feel that if it weren't for America, the violent crushing of Taiwan's multiparty democracy would be a fait accompli. Yes, the choice of American President seems to have a big impact on them, so you think that means there's merit in letting them have some say in who should lead America.
By that argument, wouldn't there be some merit in letting the opposing team have some say in who your team's quarterback will be in the Superbowl? Wouldn't your choice have a big impact on them? Isn't that criterion sufficient to give the idea merit? I hear this silly blather all of the time from "enlightened" liberals. "Neanderthal" conservatives don't fall for it (though they fall for a lot of other foolishness).
And while it's true that there are many ways in which nations cooperate as well as compete, there is no reason to assume that the decisions of the vastly more numerous "happily uninformed, strongly-opinionated and emotionally-swayed peasants" in the rest of the world would put helping Americans high on their priority lists. There are plenty of people in the world who would argue that they were only being cooperative when they concluded that, "it would be better for BOTH of us if things were better for ME and worse for YOU."
It's not who is "exposed to more issues" or who is influenced in some way by the choice that matters. If you aren't motivated to help Americans, Americans shouldn't be very interested in your electoral preferences, except in the form of a warning. If the French, Russians, or Chinese felt that Kerry would be best for *them*, would that automatically make Kerry more likely to be best for Americans?
[And if you reply by simply bashing Bush, you are logic impaired. I OPPOSE Bush, but that is irrelevant to the above argument.]
I would appreciate it if Slashdot started posting their stats, even if Slashdot isn't representative of the Web overall.
And I'd prefer the truth to stats spun to support the open source agenda. I think the truth ought to be sufficient to support that agenda, and where it isn't, I'd like to know.
Yes, more European socialism in the US is a fundamental aspiration of the Democrats. And as socialist Democrats and leftist "educators" spread the meme that it is the government's job to "protect jobs" to more and more people, the Republicans can do favors for big corporations and claim they're just "protecting jobs", too.
If you're tired of it, vote Libertarian. Libertarians won't win the White House, but a large enough showing might impress the Democrats and Republicans that we're tired of them confiscating OUR money and passing it out like party favors to buy votes and political contributions.
They *do* have ICBMs that they have flown over Japan. These could probably hit Hawaii or Alaska and may be able to reach the US/Canadian West Coast.
It seems unlikely that this was an intentional nuclear test, though. It was close enough to the Chinese border to create a radiation hazard on Chinese soil, which would infuriate the Chinese.
It is already assumed by most that the North Koreans have a few nukes, and the North Koreans have already demonstrated their Rodong ("Workers") missile by shooting it right over Japan. The only thing close to a "friend" they have in the region is China, and the other parties have been trying to persuade China to pressure the NKs to stop playing around with nukes, which they've done only half-heartedly.
If the NKs deliberately tested a nuke so close to the Chinese border that it contaminated Chinese territory, the Chinese would suddenly become very motivated to pressure the NKs, so it's hard to believe that the NKs would do such a thing.
Still, they are on the lunatic fringe, so anything is possible.