Are you kidding? On Ohloh, C, C++, and Java are even. On Tiobe, it's basically even with PHP, after C and Java.
While C++ pretty much sucks, it's still better than anything else available
Depends on your meaning of "available". There have been many good general-purpose programming languages developed, many far better than C++. But they haven't caught on, because C++ is so hostile to interoperating with other languages.
Easy, make it compile java bytecode and you probably have the biggest library around on the planet
Yes, and it's a library with Java semantics and Java's built-in inefficiencies. And while there are a lot of them, many of them do the same thing (e.g. XML-related stuff), while there are gaping holes in others.
The crappy Java libraries are a big reason for me for not using Java in the first place anymore.
No, any modern language needs easy ways of binding to C libraries. C++ would be nice too. Java? Irrelevant.
Too bad it's GPL rather than LGPL. Although I write a lot of FOSS, I'm not going to invest time in building on a library that only can be used for FOSS development.
Just like GTK+ and other core libraries, in order to catch on, a library like this really has to be LGPL or GPL+linking.
Um, no. The whole point of a GC is that you don't have to explicitely deallocate something.
GC has several functions. One of the most important ones is to make a language safe. A secondary one is to save some work in non-performance critical code. However, in performance critical code, you have to worry about memory management as much with a GC as without.
There is a reason many people want an opt-in GC in C++0x.
The primary problem with C++ is not its lack of GC, it's its lack of safety. That's not fixed by adding a GC.
Most of the time, it's the Apple fanboys hogging the spotlight. Doesn't matter what the article is about, according to them, Apple did it first and did it best, and anybody who disagreed is modded into oblivion as a troll.
So, give the Linux trolls a break; occasionally, they need light to. And it's better if they come out over something as insignificant as a smaller DVI connector than if they start dismantling Apple's claims to novelty, innovation, and quality. We wouldn't want that, would we.
No I can't. PdaNet doesn't give me a standard modem and it's Windows-only. It also costs extra for functionality that's built into many other smartphones.
android has USB, bluetooth, and wifi tethering. what more do you want?
My Android phone has none of those. There are a few apps in the Android market that claim to provide bluetooth and wifi tethering, but they don't work on unmodified Android phones.
And I have never seen USB tethering at all for Android. Do you even know what USB tethering is? It means you plug in your phone and it appears as a modem. If that were (well) supported on Android, an Android phone would just appear as a 3G model when plugged into USB; it doesn't.
Are all of those in Java? What about people who want something efficient and scalable without running JVMs everywhere? Have some of them been ported to Mono?
<sarcasm> At least the UK doesn't have identity cards! We may be the most surveilled and recorded society in the world, with neighbors spying on neighbors, but we don't have identity cards. We elect conservative governments (of either party) who may put cameras everywhere, record where we walk and drive, and anal probe us at airports, but we don't have identity cards. Did I mention that the UK doesn't have identity cards and won't stoop to the communist and fascist continental depths of having identity cards? Yeah. The UK rules [not so much anymore]. </sarcasm>
Does a lack of a robots.txt file count as permission?
Effectively, it does. That's how the protocols work. And given that he has a highly paid, highly trained technical staff, he can't even plead ignorance.
Besides, he does have robots.txt files on his sites; every large site does.
I don't particularly like the senile old prick, but I am a little worried that he would have some kind of legal leverage by claiming that not dropping a robots.txt file in his server's shared directories did NOT constitute an implicit allowance of indexing of his sites.
Well, AFAIK, he does have robots.txt files. And he may claim that, but that's not how the technology works. Next thing he's going to claim that putting up a web server, leaving port 80 open, and linking to it from all over the world does NOT constitute permission to view the content? I don't think any of that would stick.
Being entitled to being enraged is obviously not a legal question but a moral one. Did Glenn Beck have a moral entitlement to being enraged? I don't think so, given his history. That's the point of that domain, after all.
* It's easy to construct markets in which finding the optimal solution is NP-hard, and many real-world problems are already of that form--for example, any economic decision that involves an NP-hard optimization problem.
* Participants already don't find optimal solutions even given infinite computational resources simply because people lack the necessary information to find optimal solutions to begin with.
* NP-hardness is nearly useless in characterizing the difficulty of real-world problems anyway. Being NP-hard doesn't mean that problems of interest are necessarily hard. And many problems in P don't have practical algorithms for large problem instances.
It's interesting that simple 2 person games can be hard as well, but that doesn't fundamentally change what was already known: markets often don't function optimally because of computational limitations.
Or you can just use any unlocked Symbian phone on a GSM carrier and tether it to your heart's content. And in most places other than the US, that's exactly what you're supposed to do. You know, $30/month 5Gbyte data plans and all that.
Mind you, Symbian sucks as a phone OS compared to Android, but Android really needs to get Symbian-like tethering. And Verizon's data plans are laughably expensive.
Genetic doesn't matter much for most people: if your genetics is a bit worse than average for some task, you can compensate with practice and skill to become a bit above average. For the extreme ends of the spectrum, it matters a great deal. Two decades of continuous training are unlikely to turn either you or me into an olympic style athlete.
That's not "geneticism" (which is an outdated and disproven theory) but simple biological fact.
This is what it comes down to with any language that doesn't deliberately limit the coder with enforced abstraction.
Nonsense. The problem with C++ is not that it provides access to unsafe features (lots of languages do that), it's that it doesn't separate unsafe from safe features.
Even better - don't let terrible programmers write programs.
Anybody who thinks they can handle C/C++ is a terrible programmer.
KDE was founded by open sourcers, not free software evangelists, as such, it was founded on a pragmatic baseGNOME came into existence by the Free Software people who couldn't bare having proprietary code touching their hardware, not exactly the most compelling reason to start a DE project.
Choosing a QPL-licensed toolkit wasn't pragmatic, it was idiotic. The QPL/GPL dual license meant that developing commercial Linux desktop apps cost a lot of money, while developing for Microsoft and Macintosh was nearly free. How was Linux supposed to compete like that? Gtk+ has been free even for commercial software development since its inception.
As for the snipe about languages... What do you propose
I don't "snipe" about languages, I'm telling you outright.
What should they have used? Almost anything. Even creating a simple compiled language is less work than all the crap that Qt added to C++.
People always bitch about C++ but that language is ultimately as messy or clean as you make it
KDE's bug database contains 2461 bugs related to crashes. Almost all of those simply would not exist if that code was written in a decent language.
The real crime on their part is GLib GObject, it's object-oriented C and is more ugly then Satan's backside -- if you're going to use C then use C, don't half-ass C++ features into it.
Qt commits exactly the same crime by layering its own object system on top of C++; it just hides it a little better using C++ syntax. Both tradeoffs are bad.
although I suspect you also think not having to declare variables before you use them is a good idea
You're really so inexperienced that the only languages that come to your mind are Ruby, Perl, C, and C++? You really can't imagine languages that actually work better?
I understand why he got it, and the effort he has managed to rally for KDE is impressive. However, I think KDE and Gnome together really screwed the community by picking such bad languages and platforms to build on. And KDE's pick of a non-FOSS toolkit to build on was a grave error that could have done enormous damage.
that are widely accepted as an effective industry practice
Windows is "widely accepted as an effective industry practice"; that doesn't make it so. Most people are not very good at security and will "accept" stupid practices.
Still others are good at organizational skills and less so at academic subjects.
Yet others are good at influencing and manipulating other human beings, which is probably the most important skill if you want to be rich and successful.
US bureaucrats are also falling over each other to regulate whatever they can because it gives them power. Bureaucracies work the same the world over, communist or not.
Slashdot Mirror
C++ has not suceeded
Are you kidding? On Ohloh, C, C++, and Java are even. On Tiobe, it's basically even with PHP, after C and Java.
While C++ pretty much sucks, it's still better than anything else available
Depends on your meaning of "available". There have been many good general-purpose programming languages developed, many far better than C++. But they haven't caught on, because C++ is so hostile to interoperating with other languages.
Easy, make it compile java bytecode and you probably have the biggest library around on the planet
Yes, and it's a library with Java semantics and Java's built-in inefficiencies. And while there are a lot of them, many of them do the same thing (e.g. XML-related stuff), while there are gaping holes in others.
The crappy Java libraries are a big reason for me for not using Java in the first place anymore.
No, any modern language needs easy ways of binding to C libraries. C++ would be nice too. Java? Irrelevant.
Too bad it's GPL rather than LGPL. Although I write a lot of FOSS, I'm not going to invest time in building on a library that only can be used for FOSS development.
Just like GTK+ and other core libraries, in order to catch on, a library like this really has to be LGPL or GPL+linking.
Um, no. The whole point of a GC is that you don't have to explicitely deallocate something.
GC has several functions. One of the most important ones is to make a language safe. A secondary one is to save some work in non-performance critical code. However, in performance critical code, you have to worry about memory management as much with a GC as without.
There is a reason many people want an opt-in GC in C++0x.
The primary problem with C++ is not its lack of GC, it's its lack of safety. That's not fixed by adding a GC.
I think the niche it's aiming at is the, "Look! We made a programming language, too!" niche.
Given how hard it is to get language design right, we need a lot more people going into that niche.
Otherwise, we continue to have crap like C and C++ succeed by default.
Most of the time, it's the Apple fanboys hogging the spotlight. Doesn't matter what the article is about, according to them, Apple did it first and did it best, and anybody who disagreed is modded into oblivion as a troll.
So, give the Linux trolls a break; occasionally, they need light to. And it's better if they come out over something as insignificant as a smaller DVI connector than if they start dismantling Apple's claims to novelty, innovation, and quality. We wouldn't want that, would we.
No I can't. PdaNet doesn't give me a standard modem and it's Windows-only. It also costs extra for functionality that's built into many other smartphones.
Well, sounds like that's yet another bad habit the UK has picked up from the US.
In many other countries, carriers simply don't care. If you buy 5G of volume, that's what you get, and it's up to you how you use it.
android has USB, bluetooth, and wifi tethering. what more do you want?
My Android phone has none of those. There are a few apps in the Android market that claim to provide bluetooth and wifi tethering, but they don't work on unmodified Android phones.
And I have never seen USB tethering at all for Android. Do you even know what USB tethering is? It means you plug in your phone and it appears as a modem. If that were (well) supported on Android, an Android phone would just appear as a 3G model when plugged into USB; it doesn't.
Are all of those in Java? What about people who want something efficient and scalable without running JVMs everywhere? Have some of them been ported to Mono?
<sarcasm>
At least the UK doesn't have identity cards! We may be the most surveilled and recorded society in the world, with neighbors spying on neighbors, but we don't have identity cards. We elect conservative governments (of either party) who may put cameras everywhere, record where we walk and drive, and anal probe us at airports, but we don't have identity cards. Did I mention that the UK doesn't have identity cards and won't stoop to the communist and fascist continental depths of having identity cards? Yeah. The UK rules [not so much anymore].
</sarcasm>
Does a lack of a robots.txt file count as permission?
Effectively, it does. That's how the protocols work. And given that he has a highly paid, highly trained technical staff, he can't even plead ignorance.
Besides, he does have robots.txt files on his sites; every large site does.
I don't particularly like the senile old prick, but I am a little worried that he would have some kind of legal leverage by claiming that not dropping a robots.txt file in his server's shared directories did NOT constitute an implicit allowance of indexing of his sites.
Well, AFAIK, he does have robots.txt files. And he may claim that, but that's not how the technology works. Next thing he's going to claim that putting up a web server, leaving port 80 open, and linking to it from all over the world does NOT constitute permission to view the content? I don't think any of that would stick.
Being entitled to being enraged is obviously not a legal question but a moral one. Did Glenn Beck have a moral entitlement to being enraged? I don't think so, given his history. That's the point of that domain, after all.
The implications of such a result are overstated:
* It's easy to construct markets in which finding the optimal solution is NP-hard, and many real-world problems are already of that form--for example, any economic decision that involves an NP-hard optimization problem.
* Participants already don't find optimal solutions even given infinite computational resources simply because people lack the necessary information to find optimal solutions to begin with.
* NP-hardness is nearly useless in characterizing the difficulty of real-world problems anyway. Being NP-hard doesn't mean that problems of interest are necessarily hard. And many problems in P don't have practical algorithms for large problem instances.
It's interesting that simple 2 person games can be hard as well, but that doesn't fundamentally change what was already known: markets often don't function optimally because of computational limitations.
"Murdoch believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results.
Indeed, they can't, without Murdoch's permission. Lucky for Google that Murdoch grants them permission in their robots.txt.
'There's a doctrine called "fair use," which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether,'
"We"? As in the "royal we"? Challenged by who? On what grounds?
The only thing that seems to be "challenged" here is Murdoch's intellect and ethics. Well, actually, it's beyond "challenged", it's just rotten.
Or you can just use any unlocked Symbian phone on a GSM carrier and tether it to your heart's content. And in most places other than the US, that's exactly what you're supposed to do. You know, $30/month 5Gbyte data plans and all that.
Mind you, Symbian sucks as a phone OS compared to Android, but Android really needs to get Symbian-like tethering. And Verizon's data plans are laughably expensive.
Genetic doesn't matter much for most people: if your genetics is a bit worse than average for some task, you can compensate with practice and skill to become a bit above average. For the extreme ends of the spectrum, it matters a great deal. Two decades of continuous training are unlikely to turn either you or me into an olympic style athlete.
That's not "geneticism" (which is an outdated and disproven theory) but simple biological fact.
This is what it comes down to with any language that doesn't deliberately limit the coder with enforced abstraction.
Nonsense. The problem with C++ is not that it provides access to unsafe features (lots of languages do that), it's that it doesn't separate unsafe from safe features.
Even better - don't let terrible programmers write programs.
Anybody who thinks they can handle C/C++ is a terrible programmer.
KDE was founded by open sourcers, not free software evangelists, as such, it was founded on a pragmatic baseGNOME came into existence by the Free Software people who couldn't bare having proprietary code touching their hardware, not exactly the most compelling reason to start a DE project.
Choosing a QPL-licensed toolkit wasn't pragmatic, it was idiotic. The QPL/GPL dual license meant that developing commercial Linux desktop apps cost a lot of money, while developing for Microsoft and Macintosh was nearly free. How was Linux supposed to compete like that? Gtk+ has been free even for commercial software development since its inception.
As for the snipe about languages... What do you propose
I don't "snipe" about languages, I'm telling you outright.
What should they have used? Almost anything. Even creating a simple compiled language is less work than all the crap that Qt added to C++.
People always bitch about C++ but that language is ultimately as messy or clean as you make it
KDE's bug database contains 2461 bugs related to crashes. Almost all of those simply would not exist if that code was written in a decent language.
The real crime on their part is GLib GObject, it's object-oriented C and is more ugly then Satan's backside -- if you're going to use C then use C, don't half-ass C++ features into it.
Qt commits exactly the same crime by layering its own object system on top of C++; it just hides it a little better using C++ syntax. Both tradeoffs are bad.
although I suspect you also think not having to declare variables before you use them is a good idea
You're really so inexperienced that the only languages that come to your mind are Ruby, Perl, C, and C++? You really can't imagine languages that actually work better?
There was a real choice of FOSS toolkits back then?
There was wxWidgets, plus several other ones.
But he shouldn't have picked C++ in the first place.
I understand why he got it, and the effort he has managed to rally for KDE is impressive. However, I think KDE and Gnome together really screwed the community by picking such bad languages and platforms to build on. And KDE's pick of a non-FOSS toolkit to build on was a grave error that could have done enormous damage.
that are widely accepted as an effective industry practice
Windows is "widely accepted as an effective industry practice"; that doesn't make it so. Most people are not very good at security and will "accept" stupid practices.
Still others are good at organizational skills and less so at academic subjects.
Yet others are good at influencing and manipulating other human beings, which is probably the most important skill if you want to be rich and successful.
FatELF is a stupid implementation of a stupid idea. I.e., even if you want fat binaries, modifying the ELF format is the wrong way of doing it.
Yeah for the Linux kernel developers for keeping this kind of crap out of the kernel.
US bureaucrats are also falling over each other to regulate whatever they can because it gives them power. Bureaucracies work the same the world over, communist or not.