I really don't care about cross-platform support. Why? Because the major work of getting applications to work well on differnet platforms isn't the GUI library, it's doing all the platform integration work. A cross-platform library only makes that more difficult.
In different words, the way to do a cross-platform C# application is to use.NET libraries on Windows, Gtk# on Linux, and Cocoa# on OS X.
On the other hand, if you use Java and Swing, your application will never work well on any platform.
There are maybe a dozen commonly used Mono applications on Linux. They don't involve.NET at all, they are written in Gnome. When you install Mono on Linux, you usually don't even get the.NET libraries.
The value of Mono on Linux is primarily as a better programming language for the existing Linux, Gtk+, and Gnome APIs. The fact that it also provides.NET compatibility is icing on the cake.
Without the support of features in.Net 3.5, very few people are going to choose it for new developments.
Lots of people are already choosing Mono for new developments, and most of them don't use or care about.NET.
C# has some features that Java just lacks: efficient parameterized classes, multidimensional arrays, value classes, call-by-reference, explicitly unsafe modules, and native code interfaces.
We were waiting for years for Sun to fix those, but Sun never did (there has been some movement on some of them recently, but it's too little too late). As far as I'm concerned, the only reasonable general purpose programming languages these days are C++ and C#. Java simply isn't even in the running.
What it "besmirches" is (1) stock speculation and people who fall for that and (2) companies that are propped up by irrational exuberance and illusions.
In the wake of the SEC's crackdown, the mainstream financial press has acknowledged that widespread and deliberate naked shorting can artificially deflate stock prices, flooding the market with what amounts to counterfeit shares.
How is this different from the trillions of dollars in fake money that are created every year in borrowing/lending arrangements?
In order to be able to use this attack, the image needs to be completely uncompressed, you need to be using a dumb encryption system, and you need to know where the bits making up the image are stored. In practice, none of those are going to be true.
So you had software problems.. with a fairly experimental operating system.. couldn't also be Linux's fault, nah, it's gotta be the manufacturer's fault.
We know it's the manufacturer's fault because on all these netbooks, if you install Linux yourself, they are rock solid, update the way they should, have an excellent user interface, etc.
Maybe if Linux would've focused long ago on being friendly to third-party closed-source driver developers, app developers, etc, there would've been [...]
Windows does all this and it works like shit on a lot of hardware: bad user interfaces, driver problems, failed upgrades, bad video drivers, etc.
That's an obvious but incorrect analysis. A security audit does not require the same kind or level of understanding that porting and maintaining code does.
I've had two netbooks so far, and on both, the Linux installations sucked. One came with Xandros, the other with SuSE. Both were poorly installed, neither of them updated correctly over the network, and neither of them was properly adapted to the device (screen, keyboard, etc.). If I hadn't been able to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I would have returned the machines myself.
that disclosed information might be handed from the Chinese government to Chinese companies
It might. And then they have a massive re-engineering problem on their hands. It would usually be easier for them to reimplement the functionality than try to start with undocumented, unsupported source code.
Doing security audits on software is a legitimate request by a governmental agency. Of course, they should just request that vendors provide open source software.
Backup isn't the same as sharing. And do you want actual replication or merely fault tolerance to node failure? Actual n-fold replication means you're going to pay n times the amount of money for storage. And why do you insist on one application to do everything?
My suggestion: set up automatic backups to one of the many backup services on the net. They worry about how to replicate your data, you don't have to. For the same service to support both backup and sharing is hard and it's probably a bad idea. It's much easier if you know that the backup service simply cannot access the contents of any of your files.
For sharing, use services designed for that: Flickr Pro, Picasa, Google Docs, whatever. They are designed for sharing, they know about users and permissions, and they can only publish what you actually upload to them.
As for Cleversafe, the idea is as old as forward error correction, but the economics and management never seem to quite work out. And basically, you're getting the same functionality from hosted storage: Amazon, Google, Box.NET, etc. are already figuring out how to keep your data available and secure, and are probably doing a better job than you could do with a homebrew system.
Violation of just your vales and principles or everyone in America's?
There are about 5-6 million Muslims in the US. In addition, conservative Muslims and Christian fundamentalists/evangelicals have very similar values and principles to each other anyway.
And a not trusting Obama because he was raised a Muslim is a violation of everyone in America's values and principles or just yours?
It's a violation of accepted American principles of religious tolerance and freedom of religion, as expressed, among other places, in the Constitution, writings of the Founding Fathers, and our laws.
What do you believe are American principles regarding religion?
Every one of the absolute facts cited here, admittedly cited in such a way to make Mr. Obama look very bad, is a real fact you can look up for yourself.
I certainly can't verify most your so-called facts. Many of them actually have been debunked:
More importantly, even if your allegations were true, they tell you nothing about Obama. Who cares what political or religious persuasion his parents had? What difference does that make to his own beliefs? My parents were Christians, I went to a Christian school with Christian practice, but I was never a "practicing Christian". And I certainly don't share the political beliefs of my parents.
Even if? You still doubt that he was a practicing Muslim? Considering the evidence, including his own damned autobiography, being unwilling to believe it shows you perfectly fit into today's topic.
Actually, you fit in very well into a long history of anti-democratic right wing populists: you try to character-assassinate your opponents with fabrications, lies, and half-truths.
McCain and Palin both have long records of specific actions in their personal and professional lives that are unethical or contradict their stated political philosophies. Obama, on the other hand, reallly embodies what America is all about: he worked hard in order to achieve success, and he cares about his community and gives back.
You don't make a coherent argument against Obama's character.
McCain and Palin's characters are a different story. McCain was having sex with his future second wife while still married to his first, he slept around in Brazil, he was belligerent, his academic work ethic was poor, and his primary military qualification appears to have been locked up and tortured in Vietnam for several years. Palin appears to be intolerant of people who hold different beliefs from her, she appears to abuse the power of her office, and her family values lead to her teenage daughter having an illegitimate child. In terms of campaigning, McCain and Palin are trying the same kind of character assassination, and McCain is clearly trying to make political capital out of the $700b financial crisis. And McCain and Palin are flip-flopping on the issues and trying to rewrite their records.
Given their record and their (lack of) character, you should be afraid of McCain and Palin in office.
Based on raw market share alone, the iPhone seems likely to remain the smartphone developer's platform of choice
Those kinds of statements are the typical phrases people with an agenda use to try to influence people and sneak fabricated facts into their language.
There is no evidence that the iPhone is "the smartphone developer's platform of choice". Given the number of applications and the number of developers, one of J2ME, Symbian, or Windows Mobile is likely on top.
Given the limitations of the iPhone, it's questionable whether it should even be called a "smart phone".
Expressing an opinion that a particular book "does not belong there" is not an attempt to ban anything.
No, but attempting to fire the librarian sure is.
On the other side one could make the argument that Obama was raised as a Muslim in a portion of his childhood
So? Does being "raised a Muslim" violate any legal or ethical principles? Even if he had been raised as a practicing Muslim, would that say anything about his character today? The only reason that being "raised a Muslim" is an issue in this campaign at all is because of religious intolerance and prejudice by Republicans.
On the other hand, attempting to fire the city librarian because she was not "politically loyal" and apparently had different views from Pailin is a violation of American values and principles.
You're letting your prejudices and biases cloud your judgment.
Of course, Palin didn't literally ban books from library shelves: she simply doesn't have the power to do so. But it appears that she opposed the presence of particular books in the library and exerted pressure.
Science education may help a little, but it doesn't fix the problem for making judgments based on given data or information: you're still subject to the same biases and failures of rationality.
What good scientists do is that they realize that they are just as fallible as everybody else and as a result set up their experiments such that the experiments are not influenced by their own biases That's why medical studies are double-blind, not merely blind.
In different words, if you're a scientist and listen to FOX, you're in as much trouble as any random Joe. The scientific thing to do is to turn off FOX and do you own, careful analysis of the data, checking and cross checking data and hypotheses.
Read your TOS; they could always terminate you. Comcast is under no obligation to keep providing you with service. And why should they? What kind of bizarre mindset is that in which companies are required to provide you service, give you unlimited bandwidth, and all below cost?
Our common law actually has a lot in common with Shari'a in terms of how it works.
I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. Historically, British and US law have worked well in ensuring liberty and progress for their people.
I don't think one can establish that one system is "better" than the other by example, but since you do give examples, keep this in mind: Napoleonic law was created by a military dictator and was the basis of both Nazi and Vichy law.
Who's getting mad at them? People are simply pointing out that the platform has restrictions that users generally don't expect of a smart phone and that limit the functionality.
There is tons of stuff you can't do with an iPhone that you can do with just about any other smart phone, and people should know and understand that before they waste their money.
It's true that correctness is harder in C than in Haskell. But a correct program that doesn't meet performance requirements is useless, and Haskell and similar languages lack the primitives to ensure that you can make software run fast after you got it correct. That's not because it's impossible, it's because the people developing Haskell and similar languages simply don't seem to care (this has been going on for at least thirty years).
That's why most people who like FP (including myself) have resigned themselves to using a mix of scripting languages like Python, that offer some FP support, with C/C++ code.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, apparently, nobody in the Perl community cared enough about it to create it. Do you care enough to start such a project.
I suspect most people probably thought it was easier to switch to a different language that did support the environment they needed. I know I did.
Hmm I didn't know java lacked multidimensional arrays.
Well, obviously you don't know Java very well then.
What does JNI stand for and does it predate C#?
JNI isn't part of the Java language. It's also one of the worst designed and most inefficient ways of interfacing native code and a HLL ever.
Java is a piece of shit.
I really don't care about cross-platform support. Why? Because the major work of getting applications to work well on differnet platforms isn't the GUI library, it's doing all the platform integration work. A cross-platform library only makes that more difficult.
In different words, the way to do a cross-platform C# application is to use .NET libraries on Windows, Gtk# on Linux, and Cocoa# on OS X.
On the other hand, if you use Java and Swing, your application will never work well on any platform.
There are maybe a dozen commonly used Mono applications on Linux. They don't involve .NET at all, they are written in Gnome. When you install Mono on Linux, you usually don't even get the .NET libraries.
The value of Mono on Linux is primarily as a better programming language for the existing Linux, Gtk+, and Gnome APIs. The fact that it also provides .NET compatibility is icing on the cake.
Without the support of features in .Net 3.5, very few people are going to choose it for new developments.
Lots of people are already choosing Mono for new developments, and most of them don't use or care about .NET.
C# has some features that Java just lacks: efficient parameterized classes, multidimensional arrays, value classes, call-by-reference, explicitly unsafe modules, and native code interfaces.
We were waiting for years for Sun to fix those, but Sun never did (there has been some movement on some of them recently, but it's too little too late). As far as I'm concerned, the only reasonable general purpose programming languages these days are C++ and C#. Java simply isn't even in the running.
What it "besmirches" is (1) stock speculation and people who fall for that and (2) companies that are propped up by irrational exuberance and illusions.
In the wake of the SEC's crackdown, the mainstream financial press has acknowledged that widespread and deliberate naked shorting can artificially deflate stock prices, flooding the market with what amounts to counterfeit shares.
How is this different from the trillions of dollars in fake money that are created every year in borrowing/lending arrangements?
In order to be able to use this attack, the image needs to be completely uncompressed, you need to be using a dumb encryption system, and you need to know where the bits making up the image are stored. In practice, none of those are going to be true.
So you had software problems.. with a fairly experimental operating system.. couldn't also be Linux's fault, nah, it's gotta be the manufacturer's fault.
We know it's the manufacturer's fault because on all these netbooks, if you install Linux yourself, they are rock solid, update the way they should, have an excellent user interface, etc.
Maybe if Linux would've focused long ago on being friendly to third-party closed-source driver developers, app developers, etc, there would've been [...]
Windows does all this and it works like shit on a lot of hardware: bad user interfaces, driver problems, failed upgrades, bad video drivers, etc.
That's an obvious but incorrect analysis. A security audit does not require the same kind or level of understanding that porting and maintaining code does.
I've had two netbooks so far, and on both, the Linux installations sucked. One came with Xandros, the other with SuSE. Both were poorly installed, neither of them updated correctly over the network, and neither of them was properly adapted to the device (screen, keyboard, etc.). If I hadn't been able to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I would have returned the machines myself.
that disclosed information might be handed from the Chinese government to Chinese companies
It might. And then they have a massive re-engineering problem on their hands. It would usually be easier for them to reimplement the functionality than try to start with undocumented, unsupported source code.
Doing security audits on software is a legitimate request by a governmental agency. Of course, they should just request that vendors provide open source software.
Backup isn't the same as sharing. And do you want actual replication or merely fault tolerance to node failure? Actual n-fold replication means you're going to pay n times the amount of money for storage. And why do you insist on one application to do everything?
My suggestion: set up automatic backups to one of the many backup services on the net. They worry about how to replicate your data, you don't have to. For the same service to support both backup and sharing is hard and it's probably a bad idea. It's much easier if you know that the backup service simply cannot access the contents of any of your files.
For sharing, use services designed for that: Flickr Pro, Picasa, Google Docs, whatever. They are designed for sharing, they know about users and permissions, and they can only publish what you actually upload to them.
As for Cleversafe, the idea is as old as forward error correction, but the economics and management never seem to quite work out. And basically, you're getting the same functionality from hosted storage: Amazon, Google, Box.NET, etc. are already figuring out how to keep your data available and secure, and are probably doing a better job than you could do with a homebrew system.
I'd like one without the x86 and without Vista, please.
Violation of just your vales and principles or everyone in America's?
There are about 5-6 million Muslims in the US. In addition, conservative Muslims and Christian fundamentalists/evangelicals have very similar values and principles to each other anyway.
And a not trusting Obama because he was raised a Muslim is a violation of everyone in America's values and principles or just yours?
It's a violation of accepted American principles of religious tolerance and freedom of religion, as expressed, among other places, in the Constitution, writings of the Founding Fathers, and our laws.
What do you believe are American principles regarding religion?
Every one of the absolute facts cited here, admittedly cited in such a way to make Mr. Obama look very bad, is a real fact you can look up for yourself.
I certainly can't verify most your so-called facts. Many of them actually have been debunked:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/muslim.asp
More importantly, even if your allegations were true, they tell you nothing about Obama. Who cares what political or religious persuasion his parents had? What difference does that make to his own beliefs? My parents were Christians, I went to a Christian school with Christian practice, but I was never a "practicing Christian". And I certainly don't share the political beliefs of my parents.
Even if? You still doubt that he was a practicing Muslim? Considering the evidence, including his own damned autobiography, being unwilling to believe it shows you perfectly fit into today's topic.
Actually, you fit in very well into a long history of anti-democratic right wing populists: you try to character-assassinate your opponents with fabrications, lies, and half-truths.
McCain and Palin both have long records of specific actions in their personal and professional lives that are unethical or contradict their stated political philosophies. Obama, on the other hand, reallly embodies what America is all about: he worked hard in order to achieve success, and he cares about his community and gives back.
You don't make a coherent argument against Obama's character.
McCain and Palin's characters are a different story. McCain was having sex with his future second wife while still married to his first, he slept around in Brazil, he was belligerent, his academic work ethic was poor, and his primary military qualification appears to have been locked up and tortured in Vietnam for several years. Palin appears to be intolerant of people who hold different beliefs from her, she appears to abuse the power of her office, and her family values lead to her teenage daughter having an illegitimate child. In terms of campaigning, McCain and Palin are trying the same kind of character assassination, and McCain is clearly trying to make political capital out of the $700b financial crisis. And McCain and Palin are flip-flopping on the issues and trying to rewrite their records.
Given their record and their (lack of) character, you should be afraid of McCain and Palin in office.
Those kinds of statements are the typical phrases people with an agenda use to try to influence people and sneak fabricated facts into their language.
There is no evidence that the iPhone is "the smartphone developer's platform of choice". Given the number of applications and the number of developers, one of J2ME, Symbian, or Windows Mobile is likely on top.
Given the limitations of the iPhone, it's questionable whether it should even be called a "smart phone".
Expressing an opinion that a particular book "does not belong there" is not an attempt to ban anything.
No, but attempting to fire the librarian sure is.
On the other side one could make the argument that Obama was raised as a Muslim in a portion of his childhood
So? Does being "raised a Muslim" violate any legal or ethical principles? Even if he had been raised as a practicing Muslim, would that say anything about his character today? The only reason that being "raised a Muslim" is an issue in this campaign at all is because of religious intolerance and prejudice by Republicans.
On the other hand, attempting to fire the city librarian because she was not "politically loyal" and apparently had different views from Pailin is a violation of American values and principles.
You're letting your prejudices and biases cloud your judgment.
Of course, Palin didn't literally ban books from library shelves: she simply doesn't have the power to do so. But it appears that she opposed the presence of particular books in the library and exerted pressure.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5766173&page=1
The story is credible also because Palin is in trouble for several other abuses of power.
Science education may help a little, but it doesn't fix the problem for making judgments based on given data or information: you're still subject to the same biases and failures of rationality.
What good scientists do is that they realize that they are just as fallible as everybody else and as a result set up their experiments such that the experiments are not influenced by their own biases That's why medical studies are double-blind, not merely blind.
In different words, if you're a scientist and listen to FOX, you're in as much trouble as any random Joe. The scientific thing to do is to turn off FOX and do you own, careful analysis of the data, checking and cross checking data and hypotheses.
Read your TOS; they could always terminate you. Comcast is under no obligation to keep providing you with service. And why should they? What kind of bizarre mindset is that in which companies are required to provide you service, give you unlimited bandwidth, and all below cost?
Our common law actually has a lot in common with Shari'a in terms of how it works.
I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. Historically, British and US law have worked well in ensuring liberty and progress for their people.
I don't think one can establish that one system is "better" than the other by example, but since you do give examples, keep this in mind: Napoleonic law was created by a military dictator and was the basis of both Nazi and Vichy law.
You don't get mad at
Who's getting mad at them? People are simply pointing out that the platform has restrictions that users generally don't expect of a smart phone and that limit the functionality.
There is tons of stuff you can't do with an iPhone that you can do with just about any other smart phone, and people should know and understand that before they waste their money.
It's true that correctness is harder in C than in Haskell. But a correct program that doesn't meet performance requirements is useless, and Haskell and similar languages lack the primitives to ensure that you can make software run fast after you got it correct. That's not because it's impossible, it's because the people developing Haskell and similar languages simply don't seem to care (this has been going on for at least thirty years).
That's why most people who like FP (including myself) have resigned themselves to using a mix of scripting languages like Python, that offer some FP support, with C/C++ code.