> Manufactured parts come in a variety of materials formed in a variety of ways. Not all parts can be built in any one specific way - not because of the cost - but because of the material structure, the stresses which the material will experience, and so on.
You're right of course. The precise material properties are tremendously important. Even if chemical composition is the same, yield strength of plate metal depends upon roll schedule, anneal time etc. However, these problems are not as insurmountable as all that. With RP manafacturing technology, you can actually control the precise macro-structure of the material,eg create structures with custom sized bubbles in a regular pattern, and with some processes you can vary the microstructure too by adjusting time between ejection of bubble to control anneal time precisely or you could control alloy composition for every different cubic gram of material. This stuff will be controllable at a level that traditional processes can only dream about.
As the technology gets better RP manafucturing processes will be able to build structures far lighter and stronger, with desired resonance frequencies and all sorts of other cool exotic shit. It's not there yet, but give it 10 years, maybe 20... the technology will improve.
I would say, improvement rate is between 10-20 % pa.
It's a lot less incremental than processors though. Completely different approaches give radical changes. Computers are easier to measure. Turing machines only have 2 meaningful variables really, speed and memory. All digital computers are mathematically equivalent.
RP is different, material qualities, strength, versatility (not all processes can create all geometries), speed, accuracy, cost, ease of cleanup. It's hard to quantify.
For instance, a couple of researchers for hitachi in Japan, and some academics in Oxford, have recently extended scale downwards considerably, down to almost nano-scale.
3dsytems created the first machines, laser based, then later created bubble-jet based machines. The bubble-jet technology has potential to be cheap and accurate, but doesn't have strength or versatlity of stereolithography machines...
I wrote a lot of software for this stuff, (responsible for several patents too, eg http://home.att.net/~castleisland/up10/up10_12.htm _ and others before I realised that SW patents are evil.....)
It was dead fun working at 3dsystems though. I wrote a translator so I could grab cool looking VRML models off the net and print them out as solid objects. As far as I know, I was the first person to do this. Fun to come to work in the morning and have a vat full of models of the Enterprise waiting for you.
Manafacturers don't have to hang up their boots just yet though. The current machines generally print in a single material, plastic, wax, or some such. It will be a while before you go to the mechanic and he prints out a new transmission instead of ordering one from Ford. However already, you can create a cast and injection mold a small run of parts, accuracy is around 1/1000 of an inch on the better machines. Currently takes around 10 hours of so for a 10 inch cubed model.
However, the technology will improve. An auto-parts company *will* download the part instead of ordering it. Eventually manafacturing will be an information business too. This won't do humanity a blind bit of good until we move over to a post capitalist society though. Capitalism is a good mechansim for efficient distribution of scarce resources but when wealth is in the form of information, capitalism only works by enforcing false scarcity on the information.
They are the old fashioned ones. Hey language is inefficient... lets go back to scratching pictures in the dirt or hieroglyphics on the wall in order to communicate.
This visual programming crap crops up from time to time because so many people are brainwashed by that crap about a picture being worth a 1000 words. Draw me a picture of "misguided".
Programming is done with languages because programming is communication. It's communication between programmer and computer.
This is also the reason why the GUI monkeys can never understand the power of a gcommand line. The command line is a language. They are stuck on the "pictures are better than words" meme. Yeah, true, they are, until you learn to read that is.
Visual stuff, GUIs, languages etc, are more *intuitive* in the same way that picture books are more intuitive to babies. It doesn't mean they are superior. This is why the best interfaces are a combination of GUI and language. It's just like the way you give children picture books while they are learning to read.
In the rich world there is a closely correlated inversely proportional relationship between amount of TV watched versus how successful and fullfilling peoples lives are. Plot income against free time spent watching TV: you'll get a straighter line than if you do the same with smoking, life expectancy, drug addiction, alcoholism, still-borns or any other social disease.
It's amazing there isn't more of a stigma against it. I mean, people can smoke crack all day long for all I care, but you don't expect them to come in to work and freely admit it.
You can have a worthwhile job, spend the necessary time to be a good hacker, and then you can have enough time left over either to play video games, watch TV, or have a social life.
So, the corps wanted to turn the net into Television v2.0, and it didn't work out. Thank Christ. A bunch of assholes lost a lot of money. Good.
billion used to be 10^12, but now common UK-english has billion at 10^9, and trillion at 10^12. I,m not sure when change occured, I vaguely think it changed about the same time a shilling became 5p instead of 12d.
Whenever some says a billion pounds they mean 10^9 not 10^12. You must find the financial news very confusing.
However, if a British consumer group finds that America has better privacy measures, it may be motivated by desire to improve privacy policy in UK, rather than to let US feel complacent.
Actually, I wish I had done more assembly, although compilers are pretty good these days. I was learning things like Lisp, prolog, pop11 and ML when in retrospect, I would have been better off learning more assembly, and understanding microcode would be even better. However, C is sufficiently low level for most tasks thanks.
There are plenty of shit C/C++ applications, this is true. Writing such applications isn't easy, and not everybody is smart/experienced enough to do it right. Yes, when they misbehave they do so nastily. So nastily in fact, that the problem tends to get noticed and fixed. Tell me something though, where are the good applications written in high level languages. Of the actual applications you use every day, how many are written in high level languages ?
True enough, it does take longer to write an HTML form handler in a low level language. The discipline involved wouldn't pay off until you start writing much larger and more complicated applications. That's the paradox, high level languages are supposed to help out with very big complicated programs, but the more impressive the task performed by a working program is, the less likely that it was written in a high level language. To me, impressive programs are things like: compilers, CAD/CAM applications, operating systems, space shuttle control systems, voice recognition, etc etc. The bigger the project, the more important it is to have control down to the lowest level.
There's nothing wrong with writing an OS in C++ as long as you use good programmers. Although, that is easier said than done. As long as they understand the implications of what they write in terms of the assembly generated by the compiler, it's a fine language for writing an OS.
The problem with languages is that the easier it is to write, the less people think. The theory is that with higher level languages people can devote their minds to worry about their high level algorithms instead of continually worrying about low level implementation details. The reality is that they just use their brains less, and don't properly think about either the low level or the high level. The *worst* possible software is generated when people go even higher level and start generating programs using Rational Rose together with the Design Patterns book.
This is part of the reason why Java applications are generally shit. It's only the fault of the language to the extent that people are encouraged to think less. This doesn't "let you concentrate on what's important", it just allows mental laziness, and very few people have the discipline to devote the freed mental CPU cycles to their design. Instead it just lets them churn out more shit code, which fools them into thinking they are being more "productive". Likewise, lots of C++ programs are worse than the equivalent C.
The redeeming feature of C++, and the reason why there are several decent applications and a couple of decent OSs written in C++ is that it shoots you in the foot often enough to prevent you from forgetting about the low level details for very long. Even though in theory the language allows you to ignore implementation details, there are so many gotchas that you have to understand all the gory details in order to write tolerable code. Like, you can use multiple inheritance, but just try doing that without understanding what virtual inheritance means and you'll soon be in a world of pain. The many dangerous and complicated language features in C++ keep people on their mental toes.
I can't tell whether you are a clever troll of just genuninely deluded.
USA has many (not terribly effective) local controls, but on a global scale is biggest polluter. Also, it is the country which managed to scupper the last two world environmental summits by refusing to sign up for lower emissions, and trying to get an exemption so that you wouldn't have to reduce your emissions to a level similar to rest of industrialised world. Your standards are the *worst* in the world for a major economy.
You're like the family that is always throwing garbage into the street, but says "but we're the cleanest household on the street, I clean my stove twice a day".
Nous let us not plan to tax the computers " : such are the words " fire hose " whose Catherine Tasca yesterday sprinkled the hemicycle at the time of the meeting of the questions to the government. Once, twice, three times. Pompière of service, decided to embed an opposition which improvises pyromaniac : " It is a tactic to shout with fire before there is fire " , reproached the Minister for the Culture the address of a line goguenarde. " It is good, the grass snakes ? " , howls the RPR Patrick Devedjian.
It is necessary some more to dismount Catherine Tasca. Does Olivier de Chazeaux (RPR) reproach to the Prime Minister the " tax culture " of the government and his mania supposed to regulate the problems thanks to surtaxes ? It is it, and not Lionel Jospin, who again rises : " You have a will of confusion which confines with the misinformation. We do not create a tax. He is a pity which you choose to poke of the nonfounded fears. " A boob, that is only assumed.
A boob... summarized well here the general feeling on the left. Words of Socialists, Catherine Tasca would have better done to keep silent itself rather than to publicly consider a possible tax on the computers and other instruments likely to copy works ( Release of yesterday). As of Monday, Lionel Jospin took down his telephone to explain to his Minister for the Culture that the words like " tax " or " taxation " are explosive matters, to handle with infinitely prudence - and after agreement of Matignon.
On its side, the ministry for the Economy made in evening a first avenger statement, before softening the tone.
Yesterday, at the time of the breakfast which brings together with the table of the Prime Minister the socialist leaders (François Holland, number 1 of the PS, Jean-Marc Ayrault, president of the group PS to the national Assembly, and Claude Estier, his counterpart with the Senate), it was again the festival with Tasca. Jean-Marc Ayrault and especially François Holland howled their dissatisfaction, underlining the inconsistency that there was to display an objective of fall of the taxes and in same time to announce the birth of a new tax, when well even the latter would not be of tax nature...
For proof, the opposition was given some already to heart joy. Ones, like deputy DL François Goulard, denouncing " a new universal taking away " ; others, the such RPR Christian Estrosi, underlining " the additional obstacle with the democratization of Internet " .
For the leaders of the PS, it was urgently necessary to raise ambiguity. Even if it means to condemn the Tasca tax officially. The Prime Minister did not contradict them. Moreover, yesterday, with the ministry for the Culture, the principal interested party recognized, into private, to have shown " awkwardness " .
With the PS, the mea culpa could not be enough to clear Matignon and to more largely clarify the governmental priorities. " the machine packed without there being arbitration of the Prime Minister " , insisted Jean-Marc Ayrault. " We fell from naked ", slipped one in Bercy. In short, the ideas of Tasca belong to Tasca, only to it. Received message. Death in the heart, the minister, yesterday in front of the deputies, buried itself the idea that it was on the point of defending near the actors of the data-processing die. The tax on the computers is still-born child. Governmental coherence obliges.
I thought people believed that open source was better than commerical software.
So MP3 comes out, and open source can faithfully reproduce it by violating these (non-obvious) patents. It matches implementation but certainly doesn't improve on the efforts of Fraunhofer institute, their real work being in developing the acoustic model. If Fraunhofer can improve on that it just shows that potential for improvement was always there, but open source efforts weren't good enough to find it.
The only reason people would switch to this new encoding would be if it was substantially better. If that means that open source software falls behind - tough shit, this can be fixed eventually, it just means ignoring a different set of patents. This just shows where the real innovation comes from. I know that innovation is a dirty word now that MS have got their fangs in it, but there is such a thing as the genuine article.
It may not work well in a big household, but a really good pair of headphones will take you deeper into a movie than any speaker system. It's a very different effect, totally anti-social, but when you watch a movie do you want top quality sound, or do you want to listen to your buddies making a bunch of inane predictable "funny" comments.
Sennheiser 600s are great for this, and feel very spacious and surround-soundish. Not properly directional like surround-speaker setup, but better quality and less gimmicky. You'll need a decent amp of course.
Governments intrude on your freedom in many ways, but the thing that really makes people slaves are their own internal attitudes. The greatest freedom you can have is freedom of thought, and it is the hardest to obtain. It's no use being able to say or hear whatever you like if you've been indoctrinated to only believe what you want to believe. People are rarely prevented from doing what they wish by anything other than their own internal constraints, their (possibly warped) sense of right and wrong, and most of all their unspoken fears (of discovery, punishment, what others will think etc etc).
By all means go and live elsewhere, the main benefit will not be throwing off government constraints but exposing yourself to different viewpoints. If and when you return the experience will give you greater freedom than if you had stayed at home.
As an example - US media is enormously one-sided. Not through any government or corporate mandated conspiracy but because of a strange vicious cycle. People are most likely to listen to what they want to hear - they generally don't want to hear stuff that portrays America as anything other than the best place on earth, and since they have been told that all their lives that America represents everything good they are rather suspect of something telling them otherwise, they're less likely to believe it.
Now, every nation on earth is taught it's own version of history, the bits that reflect well on that country are emphasised, but this occurs to extraordinary extent in US.
In order to obtain greater internal freedom, you would probably be well advised to move somewhere less free. The UK is becoming a police state more rapidly than US (thanks Jack Straw...) so I think it would be a good place for you to move - it has an interesting mix of less free and more free. For instance, it's perfectly legal to walk down the street drinking a bottle of whiskey, or even to drive a car while drinking whiskey (as long as you are under the limit). Also, the strangest example of lack of freedom I saw in the US was going to the beach at night was illegal ("The beach is closed" !! What the fuck ??). However, the real benefit of moving to England is that you will encounter an ignorant closed mindset in many people that can rival that found in many Americans, but is different and will thus be more striking - it should help you identify similar mental slavery in yourself and others. For greater benefits, move somewhere even less free and even more strange - Singapore might be good.
When someone breaks into a computer containing sensitive information, it makes a certain amount of sense to hand out punishment... to the idiots who left the computer unsecured.
Seriously - who is being irresponsible here ?
If I leave it at this, I'm bound to have some moron respond by saying "what - so you should be punished if someone breaks into your house.."
Here is a clue, I'll speak slowly for your benefit: c o m p u t e r s a n d h o u s e s a r e d i f f e r e n t
If it was absolutely impossible to catch thieves, and they could break into your house from the other side of the world, and then break into other people's houses once they had got into yours... there probably would be penalties fo
r not keeping your front door locked.
Just because I can run dosemu under Linux does not mean dos is platform independent. The JVM is emulated on a lot of platforms, but it is just as much a platform as win32.
Although, actually I agree with the decision. Java is a much better language for teaching than C++. Personally, I wouldn't touch java with a barge pole for a production [client] system [but servlets are cool..] C++ takes far too long to learn for a teaching language. That language has warped my fragile little mind...
I think it would be even better if they taught them the abstract machine language designed for java (ie write class files with an assembler rather than a compiler).
You make some good points, and I over-reacted, but whenever someone mentions C++ someone says, hey - why not use java and all your problems will go away, I get a little tired of it.
One thing though:
"You're right that novice Java developers take longer to learn the value of reference handling than C developers, but this is mainly because Java extracts a much smaller penalty for those errors. By your logic, presumably, C++ would be even better if each time the developer left a dangling reference they received a high-voltage shock to the nipples."
Exactly ! yes, that is an excellent idea. Having the program die horribly would probably suffice, but the high-voltage shock to the nipples would be even better. Immediate catastophic failure is a far more useful reaction to bugs during development than limping along, papering over the cracks.
OK, I've used this quite a lot..
It's unuseable with less than 128M or RAM. It's almost tolerable with 256M. It suffers from random freezes and needs to be restarted from time to time, otherwise memory consumption rises mysteriously. If you build a sizeable jar file from within Jbuilder it takes about 10 minutes - create the same jar from command line (jar -cvf) will take 20 seconds. It randomly caches class files, so you can never quite tell whether a source change has really taken effect - you can manually delete all the class files, do a full rebuild, and it will still use some cached class file from memory somewhere - misleading you into thinking that your code change didn't fix the bug. In the end we abandoned it and reverted to using jdk1.1.8 command line tools together with gnu make.
I bet I've written more java than you.
I spent about two years doing full time java
development (full fledged scientific java application for Alcan). I first learned java five years ago, and have tried it on and off since then. I recommended using it in that project because the superficial impression it gives is pretty positive, and *anything* is better than using MFC. (I wish I had known about FLTK back then)
I would not recommend Java for client side application development. If you really care I could drone on for days about why it's a bad idea. Personally I wouldn't use it on server side either, but I agree that it is pretty good for that. Sun has spent many millions of dollars putting together suitable libraries and tools to make it a good tool for server development.
Actually, I had thought soffice was largely java because it's a misconception that's quite common and also because soffice is slow and bloated, but not as bad as I expected for a java application. I think it's largely C++ though. Please give me an example of a good, substantial Java client-side application if you believe I'm just spreading FUD.
1. What the hell has this got to do with his suggestion - he's asking about debugging threads. It would have made some sense if you had talked about threads in Java and the tools provided to debug them (for instance JbuilderX allows thread debugging, but it's far from ideal). Java threads are notoriously error prone same as threads everywhere.
2. "Given the fact that 90% of all C / C++ bugs.."
This is a fact that you pulled out of your ass. It may be roughly true for novices or students, but is nonsense for experienced developers. With tools like purify, these problems are very easy to track down in C/C++, and 2nd nature to avoid.
Java encourages people to forget about these problems and rely on gc, then they leave dangling references dotted around and wonder why their disk is grinding.
3. The performance hit is not minor. Sometimes, in simple cases, Java works great, but it depends what you're doing. An uncontrived comparison is at http://sprout.stanford.edu/uli/java_cpp.html
In summary, with HotSpot 1.3 beta, (a JIT that Sun touted as being faster than C++ !!) Java was roughly 5 times slower than C++.
4. Is StarOffice supposed to be an example of a good Java application with acceptable performance ? Heaven help us, it makes Word2000 seem slick and efficient.
Are there *any* examples of serious Java applications with acceptable performance ?
I would say go the other way. Write some assembly programs, write more C. Then write some ML or LISP, prolog, smalltalk or something truly high level
> Try to stay well away from C++ until everything you write comes out object oriented just because you can't help it
Fuck that. I can't think of worse advice. Stay away from C++ if you like - it *is* complicated, but OO is no panacea. In fact the main reason why there are still no good Java applications is that it forces everything to be OO.
Slashdot Mirror
> Manufactured parts come in a variety of materials formed in a variety of ways. Not all parts can be built in any one specific way - not because of the cost - but because of the material structure, the stresses which the material will experience, and so on.
You're right of course. The precise material properties are tremendously important. Even if chemical composition is the same, yield strength of plate metal depends upon roll schedule, anneal time etc. However, these problems are not as insurmountable as all that. With RP manafacturing technology, you can actually control the precise macro-structure of the material,eg create structures with custom sized bubbles in a regular pattern, and with some processes you can vary the microstructure too by adjusting time between ejection of bubble to control anneal time precisely or you could control alloy composition for every different cubic gram of material. This stuff will be controllable at a level that traditional processes can only dream about.
As the technology gets better RP manafucturing processes will be able to build structures far lighter and stronger, with desired resonance frequencies and all sorts of other cool exotic shit. It's not there yet, but give it 10 years, maybe 20... the technology will improve.
I would say, improvement rate is between 10-20 % pa.
It's a lot less incremental than processors though. Completely different approaches give radical changes. Computers are easier to measure. Turing machines only have 2 meaningful variables really, speed and memory. All digital computers are mathematically equivalent.
RP is different, material qualities, strength, versatility (not all processes can create all geometries), speed, accuracy, cost, ease of cleanup. It's hard to quantify.
For instance, a couple of researchers for hitachi in Japan, and some academics in Oxford, have recently extended scale downwards considerably, down to almost nano-scale.
3dsytems created the first machines, laser based, then later created bubble-jet based machines. The bubble-jet technology has potential to be cheap and accurate, but doesn't have strength or versatlity of stereolithography machines...
I wrote a lot of software for this stuff, (responsible for several patents too, eg http://home.att.net/~castleisland/up10/up10_12.htm _ and others before I realised that SW patents are evil.....)
It was dead fun working at 3dsystems though. I wrote a translator so I could grab cool looking VRML models off the net and print them out as solid objects. As far as I know, I was the first person to do this. Fun to come to work in the morning and have a vat full of models of the Enterprise waiting for you.
Manafacturers don't have to hang up their boots just yet though. The current machines generally print in a single material, plastic, wax, or some such. It will be a while before you go to the mechanic and he prints out a new transmission instead of ordering one from Ford. However already, you can create a cast and injection mold a small run of parts, accuracy is around 1/1000 of an inch on the better machines. Currently takes around 10 hours of so for a 10 inch cubed model.
However, the technology will improve. An auto-parts company *will* download the part instead of ordering it. Eventually manafacturing will be an information business too. This won't do humanity a blind bit of good until we move over to a post capitalist society though. Capitalism is a good mechansim for efficient distribution of scarce resources but when wealth is in the form of information, capitalism only works by enforcing false scarcity on the information.
> Maybe I'm just old fashioned . . .
not at all.
They are the old fashioned ones. Hey language is inefficient... lets go back to scratching pictures in the dirt or hieroglyphics on the wall in order to communicate.
This visual programming crap crops up from time to time because so many people are brainwashed by that crap about a picture being worth a 1000 words. Draw me a picture of "misguided".
Programming is done with languages because programming is communication. It's communication between programmer and computer.
This is also the reason why the GUI monkeys can never understand the power of a gcommand line. The command line is a language. They are stuck on the "pictures are better than words" meme. Yeah, true, they are, until you learn to read that is.
Visual stuff, GUIs, languages etc, are more *intuitive* in the same way that picture books are more intuitive to babies. It doesn't mean they are superior. This is why the best interfaces are a combination of GUI and language. It's just like the way you give children picture books while they are learning to read.
run aleph[1] programs.
I'm not sure what kind of keyboard you would need to write regular aleph[1] programs.
Some weird quantum analog hybrid might more
truly be considered aleph[1].
Is the notion profound, stupid, or profoundly stupid. I really can't tell.
In the rich world there is a closely correlated inversely proportional relationship between amount of TV watched versus how successful and fullfilling peoples lives are. Plot income against free time spent watching TV: you'll get a straighter line than if you do the same with smoking, life expectancy, drug addiction, alcoholism, still-borns or any other social disease.
It's amazing there isn't more of a stigma against it. I mean, people can smoke crack all day long for all I care, but you don't expect them to come in to work and freely admit it.
You can have a worthwhile job, spend the necessary time to be a good hacker, and then you can have enough time left over either to play video games, watch TV, or have a social life.
So, the corps wanted to turn the net into Television v2.0, and it didn't work out. Thank Christ. A bunch of assholes lost a lot of money. Good.
billion used to be 10^12, but now common UK-english has billion at 10^9, and trillion at 10^12. I,m not sure when change occured, I vaguely think it changed about the same time a shilling became 5p instead of 12d.
Whenever some says a billion pounds they mean 10^9 not 10^12. You must find the financial news very confusing.
you are welcome to use GPL license for stuff you create. Just don't tell everyone else what license other people should use for stuff they create.
And IMHO they're full of shit, wherever they are.
However, if a British consumer group finds that America has better privacy measures, it may be motivated by desire to improve privacy policy in UK, rather than to let US feel complacent.
I know, it sounds stupid, doesn't it.
Actually, I wish I had done more assembly, although compilers are pretty good these days. I was learning things like Lisp, prolog, pop11 and ML when in retrospect, I would have been better off learning more assembly, and understanding microcode would be even better. However, C is sufficiently low level for most tasks thanks.
There are plenty of shit C/C++ applications, this is true. Writing such applications isn't easy, and not everybody is smart/experienced enough to do it right. Yes, when they misbehave they do so nastily. So nastily in fact, that the problem tends to get noticed and fixed. Tell me something though, where are the good applications written in high level languages. Of the actual applications you use every day, how many are written in high level languages ?
True enough, it does take longer to write an HTML form handler in a low level language. The discipline involved wouldn't pay off until you start writing much larger and more complicated applications. That's the paradox, high level languages are supposed to help out with very big complicated programs, but the more impressive the task performed by a working program is, the less likely that it was written in a high level language. To me, impressive programs are things like: compilers, CAD/CAM applications, operating systems, space shuttle control systems, voice recognition, etc etc. The bigger the project, the more important it is to have control down to the lowest level.
There's nothing wrong with writing an OS in C++ as long as you use good programmers. Although, that is easier said than done. As long as they understand the implications of what they write in terms of the assembly generated by the compiler, it's a fine language for writing an OS.
The problem with languages is that the easier it is to write, the less people think. The theory is that with higher level languages people can devote their minds to worry about their high level algorithms instead of continually worrying about low level implementation details. The reality is that they just use their brains less, and don't properly think about either the low level or the high level. The *worst* possible software is generated when people go even higher level and start generating programs using Rational Rose together with the Design Patterns book.
This is part of the reason why Java applications are generally shit. It's only the fault of the language to the extent that people are encouraged to think less. This doesn't "let you concentrate on what's important", it just allows mental laziness, and very few people have the discipline to devote the freed mental CPU cycles to their design. Instead it just lets them churn out more shit code, which fools them into thinking they are being more "productive". Likewise, lots of C++ programs are worse than the equivalent C.
The redeeming feature of C++, and the reason why there are several decent applications and a couple of decent OSs written in C++ is that it shoots you in the foot often enough to prevent you from forgetting about the low level details for very long. Even though in theory the language allows you to ignore implementation details, there are so many gotchas that you have to understand all the gory details in order to write tolerable code. Like, you can use multiple inheritance, but just try doing that without understanding what virtual inheritance means and you'll soon be in a world of pain. The many dangerous and complicated language features in C++ keep people on their mental toes.
You might think I'm kidding, but I'm not.
Do you really believe this ?
I can't tell whether you are a clever troll of just genuninely deluded.
USA has many (not terribly effective) local controls, but on a global scale is biggest polluter. Also, it is the country which managed to scupper the last two world environmental summits by refusing to sign up for lower emissions, and trying to get an exemption so that you wouldn't have to reduce your emissions to a level similar to rest of industrialised world. Your standards are the *worst* in the world for a major economy.
You're like the family that is always throwing garbage into the street, but says "but we're the cleanest household on the street, I clean my stove twice a day".
WTF,
Nous let us not plan to tax the computers " : such are the words " fire hose " whose Catherine Tasca yesterday sprinkled the hemicycle at the time of the meeting of the questions to the government. Once, twice, three times. Pompière of service, decided to embed an opposition which improvises pyromaniac : " It is a tactic to shout with fire before there is fire " , reproached the Minister for the Culture the address of a line goguenarde. " It is good, the grass snakes ? " , howls the RPR Patrick Devedjian.
It is necessary some more to dismount Catherine Tasca. Does Olivier de Chazeaux (RPR) reproach to the Prime Minister the " tax culture " of the government and his mania supposed to regulate the problems thanks to surtaxes ? It is it, and not Lionel Jospin, who again rises : " You have a will of confusion which confines with the misinformation. We do not create a tax. He is a pity which you choose to poke of the nonfounded fears. " A boob, that is only assumed.
A boob... summarized well here the general feeling on the left. Words of Socialists, Catherine Tasca would have better done to keep silent itself rather than to publicly consider a possible tax on the computers and other instruments likely to copy works ( Release of yesterday). As of Monday, Lionel Jospin took down his telephone to explain to his Minister for the Culture that the words like " tax " or " taxation " are explosive matters, to handle with infinitely prudence - and after agreement of Matignon.
On its side, the ministry for the Economy made in evening a first avenger statement, before softening the tone.
Yesterday, at the time of the breakfast which brings together with the table of the Prime Minister the socialist leaders (François Holland, number 1 of the PS, Jean-Marc Ayrault, president of the group PS to the national Assembly, and Claude Estier, his counterpart with the Senate), it was again the festival with Tasca. Jean-Marc Ayrault and especially François Holland howled their dissatisfaction, underlining the inconsistency that there was to display an objective of fall of the taxes and in same time to announce the birth of a new tax, when well even the latter would not be of tax nature...
For proof, the opposition was given some already to heart joy. Ones, like deputy DL François Goulard, denouncing " a new universal taking away " ; others, the such RPR Christian Estrosi, underlining " the additional obstacle with the democratization of Internet " .
For the leaders of the PS, it was urgently necessary to raise ambiguity. Even if it means to condemn the Tasca tax officially. The Prime Minister did not contradict them. Moreover, yesterday, with the ministry for the Culture, the principal interested party recognized, into private, to have shown " awkwardness " .
With the PS, the mea culpa could not be enough to clear Matignon and to more largely clarify the governmental priorities. " the machine packed without there being arbitration of the Prime Minister " , insisted Jean-Marc Ayrault. " We fell from naked ", slipped one in Bercy. In short, the ideas of Tasca belong to Tasca, only to it. Received message. Death in the heart, the minister, yesterday in front of the deputies, buried itself the idea that it was on the point of defending near the actors of the data-processing die. The tax on the computers is still-born child. Governmental coherence obliges.
You can't have it both ways.
I thought people believed that open source was better than commerical software.
So MP3 comes out, and open source can faithfully reproduce it by violating these (non-obvious) patents. It matches implementation but certainly doesn't improve on the efforts of Fraunhofer institute, their real work being in developing the acoustic model. If Fraunhofer can improve on that it just shows that potential for improvement was always there, but open source efforts weren't good enough to find it.
The only reason people would switch to this new encoding would be if it was substantially better. If that means that open source software falls behind - tough shit, this can be fixed eventually, it just means ignoring a different set of patents. This just shows where the real innovation comes from. I know that innovation is a dirty word now that MS have got their fangs in it, but there is such a thing as the genuine article.
It may not work well in a big household, but a really good pair of headphones will take you deeper into a movie than any speaker system. It's a very different effect, totally anti-social, but when you watch a movie do you want top quality sound, or do you want to listen to your buddies making a bunch of inane predictable "funny" comments.
Sennheiser 600s are great for this, and feel very spacious and surround-soundish. Not properly directional like surround-speaker setup, but better quality and less gimmicky. You'll need a decent amp of course.
Governments intrude on your freedom in many ways, but the thing that really makes people slaves are their own internal attitudes. The greatest freedom you can have is freedom of thought, and it is the hardest to obtain. It's no use being able to say or hear whatever you like if you've been indoctrinated to only believe what you want to believe. People are rarely prevented from doing what they wish by anything other than their own internal constraints, their (possibly warped) sense of right and wrong, and most of all their unspoken fears (of discovery, punishment, what others will think etc etc).
By all means go and live elsewhere, the main benefit will not be throwing off government constraints but exposing yourself to different viewpoints. If and when you return the experience will give you greater freedom than if you had stayed at home.
As an example - US media is enormously one-sided. Not through any government or corporate mandated conspiracy but because of a strange vicious cycle. People are most likely to listen to what they want to hear - they generally don't want to hear stuff that portrays America as anything other than the best place on earth, and since they have been told that all their lives that America represents everything good they are rather suspect of something telling them otherwise, they're less likely to believe it.
Now, every nation on earth is taught it's own version of history, the bits that reflect well on that country are emphasised, but this occurs to extraordinary extent in US.
In order to obtain greater internal freedom, you would probably be well advised to move somewhere less free. The UK is becoming a police state more rapidly than US (thanks Jack Straw...) so I think it would be a good place for you to move - it has an interesting mix of less free and more free. For instance, it's perfectly legal to walk down the street drinking a bottle of whiskey, or even to drive a car while drinking whiskey (as long as you are under the limit). Also, the strangest example of lack of freedom I saw in the US was going to the beach at night was illegal ("The beach is closed" !! What the fuck ??). However, the real benefit of moving to England is that you will encounter an ignorant closed mindset in many people that can rival that found in many Americans, but is different and will thus be more striking - it should help you identify similar mental slavery in yourself and others. For greater benefits, move somewhere even less free and even more strange - Singapore might be good.
When someone breaks into a computer containing sensitive information, it makes a certain amount of sense to hand out punishment... to the idiots who left the computer unsecured.
Seriously - who is being irresponsible here ?
If I leave it at this, I'm bound to have some moron respond by saying "what - so you should be punished if someone breaks into your house.."
Here is a clue, I'll speak slowly for your benefit: c o m p u t e r s a n d h o u s e s a r e d i f f e r e n t
If it was absolutely impossible to catch thieves, and they could break into your house from the other side of the world, and then break into other people's houses once they had got into yours... there probably would be penalties fo
r not keeping your front door locked.
Just because I can run dosemu under Linux does not mean dos is platform independent. The JVM is emulated on a lot of platforms, but it is just as much a platform as win32.
Although, actually I agree with the decision. Java is a much better language for teaching than C++. Personally, I wouldn't touch java with a barge pole for a production [client] system [but servlets are cool..] C++ takes far too long to learn for a teaching language. That language has warped my fragile little mind...
I think it would be even better if they taught them the abstract machine language designed for java (ie write class files with an assembler rather than a compiler).
You make some good points, and I over-reacted, but whenever someone mentions C++ someone says, hey - why not use java and all your problems will go away, I get a little tired of it.
One thing though:
"You're right that novice Java developers take longer to learn the value of reference handling than C developers, but this is mainly because Java extracts a much smaller penalty for those errors. By your logic, presumably, C++ would be even better if each time the developer left a dangling reference they received a high-voltage shock to the nipples."
Exactly ! yes, that is an excellent idea. Having the program die horribly would probably suffice, but the high-voltage shock to the nipples would be even better. Immediate catastophic failure is a far more useful reaction to bugs during development than limping along, papering over the cracks.
OK, I've used this quite a lot..
It's unuseable with less than 128M or RAM. It's almost tolerable with 256M. It suffers from random freezes and needs to be restarted from time to time, otherwise memory consumption rises mysteriously. If you build a sizeable jar file from within Jbuilder it takes about 10 minutes - create the same jar from command line (jar -cvf) will take 20 seconds. It randomly caches class files, so you can never quite tell whether a source change has really taken effect - you can manually delete all the class files, do a full rebuild, and it will still use some cached class file from memory somewhere - misleading you into thinking that your code change didn't fix the bug. In the end we abandoned it and reverted to using jdk1.1.8 command line tools together with gnu make.
Does anything else sping to mind ?
I bet I've written more java than you.
I spent about two years doing full time java
development (full fledged scientific java application for Alcan). I first learned java five years ago, and have tried it on and off since then. I recommended using it in that project because the superficial impression it gives is pretty positive, and *anything* is better than using MFC. (I wish I had known about FLTK back then)
I would not recommend Java for client side application development. If you really care I could drone on for days about why it's a bad idea. Personally I wouldn't use it on server side either, but I agree that it is pretty good for that. Sun has spent many millions of dollars putting together suitable libraries and tools to make it a good tool for server development.
Actually, I had thought soffice was largely java because it's a misconception that's quite common and also because soffice is slow and bloated, but not as bad as I expected for a java application. I think it's largely C++ though. Please give me an example of a good, substantial Java client-side application if you believe I'm just spreading FUD.
to make this stupid suggestion..
1. What the hell has this got to do with his suggestion - he's asking about debugging threads. It would have made some sense if you had talked about threads in Java and the tools provided to debug them (for instance JbuilderX allows thread debugging, but it's far from ideal). Java threads are notoriously error prone same as threads everywhere.
2. "Given the fact that 90% of all C / C++ bugs.."
This is a fact that you pulled out of your ass. It may be roughly true for novices or students, but is nonsense for experienced developers. With tools like purify, these problems are very easy to track down in C/C++, and 2nd nature to avoid.
Java encourages people to forget about these problems and rely on gc, then they leave dangling references dotted around and wonder why their disk is grinding.
3. The performance hit is not minor. Sometimes, in simple cases, Java works great, but it depends what you're doing. An uncontrived comparison is at http://sprout.stanford.edu/uli/java_cpp.html
In summary, with HotSpot 1.3 beta, (a JIT that Sun touted as being faster than C++ !!) Java was roughly 5 times slower than C++.
4. Is StarOffice supposed to be an example of a good Java application with acceptable performance ? Heaven help us, it makes Word2000 seem slick and efficient.
Are there *any* examples of serious Java applications with acceptable performance ?
editors are for wimps
once you start programming using cat, you never
go back
cat > t.c
#include
main(){printf("goodbye cruel world\n");}
I would say go the other way. Write some assembly programs, write more C. Then write some ML or LISP, prolog, smalltalk or something truly high level
> Try to stay well away from C++ until everything you write comes out object oriented just because you can't help it
Fuck that. I can't think of worse advice. Stay away from C++ if you like - it *is* complicated, but OO is no panacea. In fact the main reason why there are still no good Java applications is that it forces everything to be OO.