According to this wikipedia page we have 45k troops in Iraq while the US have 250000.
The wikipedia page is wrong. The 45,000 troops Britain supplied for the invasion were very welcome and for that help, yes, I am grateful. But right now, it's 140,000 USA, and 4,500 British, declining to around 1,500. Those British troops that are left will most likely be withdrawn by the end of the year. In short, Bush's surge bought the British cover to withdraw. While Americans were engaged in an enormous political upheaval over increasing the size of the US Army in Iraq at an enormous cost, the British were headed back home.
Anyway - our soldiers are dying too, and deserve some respect even if you're not going to show any appreciation.
When the USA was putting more troops into Iraq to support the Surge, the UK government was pulling troops out. Yes, thank you for the help, but right now, you are bailing.
I'm not usually one for being patriotic but you are actually managing to make me physically feel rage in my chest over this whole thing (maybe it's just the pie I had for lunch, but I don't think so:p )
I'm sorry to offend your patriotism, but, you have to call a spade a spade. You aren't seeing the thing through to the end, so while you helped for a while, and it was nice, ultimately, the USA is pretty much on its own. That's all well and good to say that you think the war was stupid, and it was a dumb thing to do to ourselves, but, right now, the UK is going Spanish on us and headed for the boats. By by UK.
Think of it like the global warming debate. Sure, Bush is doing -some- things to reduce greenhouse gasses, but you guys across the Atlantic aren't going to call that a real commitment when in reality it is a token effort designed to stall more than it is to solve. Sometimes, a little bit of effort is not a real commitment.
Well, that's fair enough. I don't argue with you at all, here (I might, but it's off-topic). *IF*, however, we're to extend our influence to other nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq then we must be able to stage and supply that operation. That means we need Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey (FWIW) and Germany quite a lot. If you're saying that we should just pull out of the Middle East, then that's a separate debate, but saying that Europe isn't supporting us in Iraq because of the number of bodies they've placed there is naive at best
Ok, my point of view is that a large part of the reason for the American Empire is that it also benefits European interests as well.
Historically, the USA produces roughly 1/4-1/2 domestically the oil and ALl of the food that it needs, and so, its imaginable, if horrific, to think of a world where the USA could forgo imported oil at all. However, Europe lacks both food and energy, although it contributes a talented people. So, when the USA invades Iraq, it isn't just to take the oil for the USA, it is to get that oil onto world markets so that everyone in the NATO can buy it. In that sense, the European contribution is in fact quite small.
However, in the long haul : Americans are terrible emperors, because we're too damned bipolar to run an empire in any enlightened way.
But the world has changed. Newer energy technologies are on the horizon such that if the USA and Europe collaborated on them through trade, there would be no need to project power in the middle east. There is plenty of coal in the USA (and in Germany for that matter), that can be cleanly converted to liquids for those allies that need it, and electric cars and alternative energy systems are getting better all the time.
Europe is anti-america because it's the devil. It shows that, while lefty politics are failing all over the globe, policies to the extreme right, and extreme liberty amongst citizens largely holding the Christian faith is a working, stable state structure.
I think Europe is anti-American solely because of what they perceive to be American militarism. I think Europe is so scarred from the World Wars that anything that smacks of a risk of a war terrifies them. And, I think that is understandable. Everyone in Europe, especially Germany, has a family member that was killed on the Eastern Front. Everyone in Europe has families tales of occupation, the bombings, the postwar starvations, the homelessness. They have had enough war to last for generations and they see us as fools for seemingly seeking it out.
Isn't that a question that should be answered by you and your country men? It is not only you that do not want this `job': most of the rest of the world emphatically does not want it either. This last war of `liberation' was very loudly opposed by essentially everyone, remember?
PRECISELY MY POINT! Most Americans do NOT want an Empire around the world. Conservatives don't want it. Liberals don't want it. I don't know anyone that in their right mind as an American who wants US bases everywhere. So.... why does the USA keep doing this?
Let's engage the world on the high ground, promoting our superior American values by living them first at home, keeping our borders open to those who are able and share them, but let's let the rest of the world handle its own security needs and stop being a bully.
I mean, if there was ONE candidate that actually said, "we're going to dismantle the American empire and bring our troops home from -everywhere-", he'd win in a landslide.
It can't happen. If Mexico or Canada invade, we nuke them. End of story.
As to what the difference to the USA is, in case you have forgotten you were involved in a cold war with the USSR.
See I was a staunch cold warrior in my youth and now I just see as replacing a Russian continental super power as a rival with a European one that actually has money. So, the thing for the USA to do is classic British continental foreign policy - stay neutral to all world affairs, and occasionally meddle in things enough to pit other powers against each other. I mean, let's not have a USA unequivocally anti-Russia with its NATO membership, and instead let the USA court Russia and the EU both and treat both as mutually important blocs. If people want freedom, they can come to the USA.
Hello! We're there with you. Not that we want to be, damned Blair.
Its a half-arsed token commitment, and it may as well be none at all, if only because we know the vast majority of Europeans do not want to be in the war at all. And that's fine. Given the bloody history of the World Wars, I'd be shocked that the Europeans would have any troops at all over there.
All I am saying is that there's no reason for the USA to have a military ally in Europe, or anyone else, and vice versa. From the world perspective, it seems the best thing for the USA to do is to disentangle itself from all the military alliances, save for a special relationship with the UK, but, really, lets keep the USA's relationships with the world based on trade and not basing rights.
I'm sorry, but that's pretty arrogant. I understand the notion, but you have to look at it this way. We are considered the evil war monger superpower now.
I don't disagree with any of that. That is why I am saying that the USA should not be military allies with anyone. We should bring all of our troops home from everywhere, cut down the size of our army, and focus on trade. We can sit fat and happy behind a mountain of nukes and a missile defense system for our own national security, plus with a sufficient navy to guard our waters and an air force for our air. But we don't need to be operating in 100 countries across the globe. Iraq is the least of our military perception problems.
Define "appeasing". Is it "appeasing" to treat other nations with the respect we would expect to be treated with?
The USA buys more from Europe than the other way around. If that's not respect, then I do not know what is.
If the dumbest thing you can think of is to appease the largest economic power outside of North America, then you clearly haven't watched American politics for the last 50 years.
Again, if Europe is so powerful, why does the USA need to have bases in Germany? Who is out there that can threaten Europe militarily, and more importantly, why should Americans care? America isn't a white country any more, its a mixed country, so, even the cultural similarity argument pales.
Europeans ARE fighting with Americans in Iraq.
America has roughly 150,000 men in Iraq, the UK has what, 3,000? Maybe we should have 3,000 soldiers to defend Europe and call it a day?
That said, Germany is a staunch US ally, host to US bases that are key in moving troops and equipment around the world, and a key member of NATO that helped us during the cold war. Discount such an ally at your own peril....
My question is, why is the USA so bent on moving troops all over the world. I don't want this job for America any more. America was better off as a trading superpower that it was before it became a military superpower.
I actually disagree here. I think Europeans have taken the high ground in this... war is about oil snip
That's fine and dandy, and I think you were unfairly modded troll, by the way. All I'm saying is, if Europeans aren't fighting for us, why should we fight for them? Why does it matter to the USA if Poland or Germany are independent from Russia any more than Iraq is liberated from Saddam? There's no difference. I'm saying, let Europeans deal with their own security, the USA can trade with them, but lets end NATO now and move on with life.
Sorry for not fighting all your ill-concieved wars.
Sorry our ill-conceived wars are not as so well conceived as World War I and World War II.
Why take offense though? All I said was that Europe is not an American ally, and if anything, you've only bolstered the point. Let's bring US troops out of Europe, bury NATO, and just trade with each other. Europe can handle European security.
I think it is fallacious to say money is the problem in the congress. It's not money, its the sheer greed of all involved. Congress has too much power and therefor people want it too much. If you take away the money for elected officials, there will be other, more secret levers that will be unaccountably manipulated. Decisions will be made in stealth, in secret, like the smoke filled back rooms of the old days.
No, it is better, really, to just have money go to whomever and without restriction. That way, we can at least see whom is owned by who, and vote accordingly. Better a billionaire writes a million dollar check to a senator than the same billionaire indirectly invests into a bevy of people to work some foul valve of power in the furnaces of Washington.
The main point of my post was corporate control is not a liberal or a conservative problem, its an institutional problem.
It's not Walmart's fault that people shop there and buy so much Chinese stuff. It's not Toyota's fault that Americans would rather pay Toyota and get a nicer car than have a better standard of living for American auto workers. It's not just that a banker on wall street is greedy. It is that -every- American is greedy, and therefor, we got the institutions we asked for.
Appeasing Europe is the dumbest thing any American President can do. Europeans are not American allies, or they would be fighting with Americans in Iraq.
8 years? Corporations have been exhibiting control over the legislature for much more than the past 8 years... One only has to look at the copyright act extensions to see that.
There's plenty of artists that would like to see copyright be extended as well, so don't pretend that this is merely a right wing corporate thing. There's quite a few liberals earning a living selling books, songs and movies that are delighted to know their grandchildren can inherit their royalties!
Um, the best anti-US moles in history worked for the government. This guy is a piker. Aldrich Ames worked for the CIA. He forked over the names of a lot of CIA moles to the Russians, resulting in their untimely demise. But, that's just a more recent example of a long stream of Soviet infiltrators. At one point in time, the Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, was in fact, a Soviet spy. Doesn't get much more government work than that!
At some point, lowering taxes to the point where hospitals, roads and schools are no longer supported also makes everyone poorer.
Taxes in the United States are now higher than in the rest of the western world. Per capita, the USA spends more in taxpayer money on hospitals, roads, and schools than any western nation. The problem is that health care is not rationed, we have a huge continent to build roads for, and schools are consistently getting milked by powerful local political groups as a source of patronage jobs.
No, I don't think you understand the optimizations. It has nothing to do with source vs. binary. The test applications both ended up on the same platform after all, Window
Well, of course it would. Here, let's imagine what sort of optimizations a JIT could make at run time. Basically you'll have different chip features, because that's the extent of the core virtual machine. Anything other than that is really going to be a run time optimization in the libraries and that's a whole different animal. So, since we're talking about chip features, if you compile the program once on a Linux box from source, you'll get all the machine specific optimizations that compiler allows, and you'll get them all at deployment time, rather than run time. So really, the whole idea of JIT being "better" because it happens at run time is pretty silly.
No, the optimizations are JIT, so it has no affect on load speed..Net applications don't "feel" slow, I've used quite a few. Its been a while since I played with Java, but there are differences in how Java's VM does JITting and how the CLR does it.
Most certainly does. If you open up a.NET application, for Windows, you'll get some sort of a pause before everything becomes operational because it has to compile everything that happens in response to the OnLoad event of the parent form. Then, as you use the application, it will have to compile everything that happens in response to each of the events for the first time. Every.NET application I've ever used feels like it needs to be kicked out of bed before they start to go, and then, after that, they are pretty slow. And of course,.NET's WinForms are built around GDI+, which is tiresomely and yawningly slow..NET windows forms are just butt ugly and slow, and custom controls written to them are horrific.
I've not even discussed a lot of the RAD features built into.NET that make an application even slower. The ubiquitous DataSet comes to mind. That thing is remarkably slow, and developers use that all the time.
I'd rather a slower application that is reliable vs. one that is unreliable but "faster." The fact is most applications speed is irrelevent because the application is barely using the processor anyway. Certainly things like games must perform well..Net is apparently fast enough that there's a VS version specifically for writing DX games on.Net.
Well,.NET applications aren't necessarily more reliable.
Yes, you can get some peace of mind because of garbage collection, but to get that, you have to give up the benefits of stack based objects destructing when they go out of scope as is the case in C++. So, if I have a consumer of a database class in.NET, my connection potentially stays alive until it is garbage collected unless I explicitly wrap it in a "using" block, which is frankly as ugly as hell. In C++, I just use the object naturally and don't worry about it.
Also, the thing about garbage collection is, its nice that.NET remembers that you've made a million tiny allocations, but, why do it at all?.NET means you are making a dynamic allocation every time you want a new object. You -don't- have to do this in C++. In C++, I can share allocations out of a single block of memory, and because of that, I can guarantee my application will run if I specify a bounds to the numbers of objects being allocated..NET leaves me only with a potential failure point - every time - I allocate, and that leads to additional coding complexity that must be addressed. As you said, I prefer to think about the problem, and, if I can just have my stuff use a simpler memory model than one that demands everything be managed, I'm way ahead of the curve over any.NET solution, because you have to think about exception hand
Not necessarly. In many cases,.Net outperforms the native application. That's because the VM can do JIT optimizations and other things a static compiler can't. Its not nearly as cut and dry as that. I think the same can be said for Java.
See, that would only be applicable if you are distributing binaries only. In the OSS model, I can distribute the source, and get the advantages of machine analysis at a single compile time. In.NET, your application optimization takes place nearly every time it loads, so it always -feels- slow. Java has much the same problem.
Wouldn't your time be better spent coding to actually solve the problem at hand, instead of worrying over each memory detail?
It depends on what the problem is that is to be solved. Speed sells, so, a really fast program can be much more appealing than a slow one. So yeah, you can choose to not sweat performance details, and that can help in a lot of kinds of IT programming, but for commercial applications, I would think that in many cases, you would want the performance.
Only if you define "better economy" as "access to spaceships" (and that point isn't actually even accurate in Star Wars...). I mean, Owen Lars was a moisture farmer. Vader started out as a slave. There's a huge criminal underground/slums, etc.
Yeah, but you could build up so much money that you could be a Trade Federation, and build up your own giant robot army. Don't see that in Trek. I wonder who had the better life, though, before defeat - Harry Mudd or Jabba the Hut?
I think on XP and above that isn't true. There are APIs on Windows to do this.
Actually you are right. It went out as a hotfix to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 in 2007. However, its not complete.... if you really want to check, have a look at the registry for Time Zones. You'll see that there is, for Eastern Standard Time, a Dynamic DST entry. But it only covers the recent transition, and not any of the historical ones. Its better than what was there a year ago, I'll give you that, but, what's bothersome about the whole thing is that they have a new API where one would have done.
don't get the obsession with C++. Yes, its powerful. It also lets you shoot yourself in the foot. Since moving to C# (or Java), I find I'm spending most of my time dealing with solving the actual problem at hand.. not writing lots of code to micromanage memory
It really depends on the application. If you want to write really fast code, you have to micromanage memory. That's just the way it is. On the other hand, if you are using normal business coding, then C# or Java will work pretty well, although, some folks would argue that Python is better because it facilitates dynamic dispatch in ways that C# or Java can't.
When I do C++ I tend to keep dynamic allocations to a minimum. I avoid string and I put all of my big "systems" of structures, trees if you will, into a single giant block that I can free with one call. It makes the application both faster and more reliable but at the price of some flexibility that I can live with.
Huh? Again, ruling out TFS, and many other scs. Yes, they cost money, but that doesn't mean you can rule them out.
Of course there's commercial stuff, but my argument was about tools that a solo or small team developer could reasonably afford. Even big IT departments balk at the cost of TFS.
Well, there's COBRA. At any rate COM is going away and the replacement is.Net. Its pretty obvious that's how they are positioning.Net, and.Net is worlds better than COM.
The distinction is minimal - there's just a flag "wire up stdin/out/err to a console on start-up". After that there's no distinction. There's no reason a console app can't drive a GUI.
But its a linker flag that gets stamped into the EXE and that's annoying.
m but there's certainly a 'interact with the desktop' permission they can be granted which would allow them to create their own windows for output
Well, there's a lot of bad security things that happen once you set that little flag. Like, there's a bunch of things that interactive services are not allowed to do, that only non-interactive services can do, and vice versa. Ultimately, you really want to have non-interactive services and the preferred way to debug them is to log them. Or, what you can do is have two entry paths into the service - one when invoked from the command line as a console app and the other when invoked by the SCM. Either way, the whole process of creating a service in Windows C++ is a pain in the rear..NET makes it nicer, but that's only because it sweeps a dumb idea that makes you work more under the rug. I prefer Linux daemons to Windows services, for sure.
Wow. This comes as a shock to me. Especially since the person delivering this message to me has the/. name of cplusplus
I wholeheartedly agree.
Yes, for C#, Visual Studio is amazing, but for C++, Linux is better.
I like KDevelop.
1) Solutions management is better - KDevelop is much better at managing multiple build targets, working with complicated builds, and more.
2) Source control is better - that's really for any Unix system. MS source control blows compared to what you get out of subversion, just because vss uses that stupid check out model.
3) Collaboration is better. If you want a genuine team suite type of thing, its pretty hard to top SourceForge.
4) Standards are better. If you are -really- into C++, the GNU compiler is simply better because it follows the standards. If I had a dollar for every time I ported something from VC to GCC, found that GCC rejected the code, did some research, and found that GCC actually did the right thing, I'd be pretty rich. On the flip side, I don't think I've ever run into a situation where GCC did something non-standards compliant that VC++ actually did do.
5) Performance coding is better. The whole point of C++ is to be doing systems programming. That means you need to consider architectural things like integer sizes, interfacing with assembly language, and good timer calls. On all of these fronts, Linux is better. The sizeof(int) is right on Linux and wrong on Windows for 64 bit platforms.. and the calling convention and stack situation in 64 bit Linux is just better. It's almost as if Microsoft chose their convention deliberately to not be like what the rest of the world was doing. Interfacing with assembly is better on Linux. It used to be in Windows that you could do inline assembly, but -not any more- in 64 bit land, so it becomes a push between AT&T syntax versus MS syntax. I prefer AT&T assembler syntax just because it seems cleaner. Finally, gettimeofday() works really well on Linux, whereas Windows gives you a mishmash of calls... the basic SYSTEMTIME call stinks, then there is QueryPerformanceCounter, and whatever new one they through into Vista. Enough already. And I'll toss in that dealing with UTF8 is probably faster than doing UTF16 all the time, especially if you writing quick and dirty code to be hosted on western european and American servers.
6) Code is more accurate. Everyone deals with temporal data lately and that means time zone conversions. On Windows these do not work and cannot work because the OS does not consider historic time zone transitions, while Linux does.
7) There is no COM on Linux. A few years ago, I would have argued this to be a disadvantage for Linux, but, having seen the disaster that resulted from COM, I'd have to say that Linux sticking to a basic C style call for the vast majority of its services turned out to be a pretty good plan.
Really, I'd almost have to say that people who say Microsoft is better for C++ haven't really programmed in C++ enough to know what they are talking about. If C++ on Windows was that good, the world would not be beating down the doors to C#...
Hate to say it, but there's enough extensions and non-standard behavior in Visual Studio to make porting C++ programs to GNU not nearly so straightforward for even simple console applications.
We don't need Quantum computing for a Star Trek futre. We need a way to disregard or at least completely reinterpret the laws of physics, and do without money, and all get on, and find entire worlds whose populations all conform to some stereotype. And are green.
It's interesting that the Star Trek universe doesn't seem to have "money", yet, they do have scarcity. They often had shortages of starships, and they had limits as to how fast they could develop technology. And, there really doesn't seem to be much in the way of private spaceflight, outside of the TOS, in the Trek Universe.
Oddly, the Star Wars Republic had both money and a fair amount of spaceships. In Star Wars, just about everyone had a spaceship or access to a spaceship of some kind. With the vast resources of the Galaxy, the Galactic Empire was able to build an incredible number of Star Destroyers AND, at least two Death Stars, plus numerous other combatant vehicles. In fact, the Galaxy was so rich that a number of systems could band together and fund their own rebellion.
I guess what it boils down to, is that Star Trek might have had a more advanced technology in some ways, but Star Wars had the better economy.
Slashdot Mirror
According to this wikipedia page we have 45k troops in Iraq while the US have 250000.
:p )
The wikipedia page is wrong. The 45,000 troops Britain supplied for the invasion were very welcome and for that help, yes, I am grateful. But right now, it's 140,000 USA, and 4,500 British, declining to around 1,500. Those British troops that are left will most likely be withdrawn by the end of the year. In short, Bush's surge bought the British cover to withdraw. While Americans were engaged in an enormous political upheaval over increasing the size of the US Army in Iraq at an enormous cost, the British were headed back home.
Anyway - our soldiers are dying too, and deserve some respect even if you're not going to show any appreciation.
When the USA was putting more troops into Iraq to support the Surge, the UK government was pulling troops out. Yes, thank you for the help, but right now, you are bailing.
I'm not usually one for being patriotic but you are actually managing to make me physically feel rage in my chest over this whole thing (maybe it's just the pie I had for lunch, but I don't think so
I'm sorry to offend your patriotism, but, you have to call a spade a spade. You aren't seeing the thing through to the end, so while you helped for a while, and it was nice, ultimately, the USA is pretty much on its own. That's all well and good to say that you think the war was stupid, and it was a dumb thing to do to ourselves, but, right now, the UK is going Spanish on us and headed for the boats. By by UK.
Think of it like the global warming debate. Sure, Bush is doing -some- things to reduce greenhouse gasses, but you guys across the Atlantic aren't going to call that a real commitment when in reality it is a token effort designed to stall more than it is to solve. Sometimes, a little bit of effort is not a real commitment.
Even Prince Harry saw that!
Well, that's fair enough. I don't argue with you at all, here (I might, but it's off-topic). *IF*, however, we're to extend our influence to other nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq then we must be able to stage and supply that operation. That means we need Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey (FWIW) and Germany quite a lot. If you're saying that we should just pull out of the Middle East, then that's a separate debate, but saying that Europe isn't supporting us in Iraq because of the number of bodies they've placed there is naive at best
Ok, my point of view is that a large part of the reason for the American Empire is that it also benefits European interests as well.
Historically, the USA produces roughly 1/4-1/2 domestically the oil and ALl of the food that it needs, and so, its imaginable, if horrific, to think of a world where the USA could forgo imported oil at all. However, Europe lacks both food and energy, although it contributes a talented people. So, when the USA invades Iraq, it isn't just to take the oil for the USA, it is to get that oil onto world markets so that everyone in the NATO can buy it. In that sense, the European contribution is in fact quite small.
However, in the long haul : Americans are terrible emperors, because we're too damned bipolar to run an empire in any enlightened way.
But the world has changed. Newer energy technologies are on the horizon such that if the USA and Europe collaborated on them through trade, there would be no need to project power in the middle east. There is plenty of coal in the USA (and in Germany for that matter), that can be cleanly converted to liquids for those allies that need it, and electric cars and alternative energy systems are getting better all the time.
Europe is anti-america because it's the devil. It shows that, while lefty politics are failing all over the globe, policies to the extreme right, and extreme liberty amongst citizens largely holding the Christian faith is a working, stable state structure.
I think Europe is anti-American solely because of what they perceive to be American militarism. I think Europe is so scarred from the World Wars that anything that smacks of a risk of a war terrifies them. And, I think that is understandable. Everyone in Europe, especially Germany, has a family member that was killed on the Eastern Front. Everyone in Europe has families tales of occupation, the bombings, the postwar starvations, the homelessness. They have had enough war to last for generations and they see us as fools for seemingly seeking it out.
Isn't that a question that should be answered by you and your country men? It is not only you that do not want this `job': most of the rest of the world emphatically does not want it either. This last war of `liberation' was very loudly opposed by essentially everyone, remember?
PRECISELY MY POINT! Most Americans do NOT want an Empire around the world. Conservatives don't want it. Liberals don't want it. I don't know anyone that in their right mind as an American who wants US bases everywhere. So.... why does the USA keep doing this?
Let's engage the world on the high ground, promoting our superior American values by living them first at home, keeping our borders open to those who are able and share them, but let's let the rest of the world handle its own security needs and stop being a bully.
I mean, if there was ONE candidate that actually said, "we're going to dismantle the American empire and bring our troops home from -everywhere-", he'd win in a landslide.
If Mexico or Canada invaded[1] the USA,
It can't happen. If Mexico or Canada invade, we nuke them. End of story.
As to what the difference to the USA is, in case you have forgotten you were involved in a cold war with the USSR.
See I was a staunch cold warrior in my youth and now I just see as replacing a Russian continental super power as a rival with a European one that actually has money. So, the thing for the USA to do is classic British continental foreign policy - stay neutral to all world affairs, and occasionally meddle in things enough to pit other powers against each other. I mean, let's not have a USA unequivocally anti-Russia with its NATO membership, and instead let the USA court Russia and the EU both and treat both as mutually important blocs. If people want freedom, they can come to the USA.
Hello! We're there with you. Not that we want to be, damned Blair.
Its a half-arsed token commitment, and it may as well be none at all, if only because we know the vast majority of Europeans do not want to be in the war at all. And that's fine. Given the bloody history of the World Wars, I'd be shocked that the Europeans would have any troops at all over there.
All I am saying is that there's no reason for the USA to have a military ally in Europe, or anyone else, and vice versa. From the world perspective, it seems the best thing for the USA to do is to disentangle itself from all the military alliances, save for a special relationship with the UK, but, really, lets keep the USA's relationships with the world based on trade and not basing rights.
I'm sorry, but that's pretty arrogant. I understand the notion, but you have to look at it this way. We are considered the evil war monger superpower now.
I don't disagree with any of that. That is why I am saying that the USA should not be military allies with anyone. We should bring all of our troops home from everywhere, cut down the size of our army, and focus on trade. We can sit fat and happy behind a mountain of nukes and a missile defense system for our own national security, plus with a sufficient navy to guard our waters and an air force for our air. But we don't need to be operating in 100 countries across the globe. Iraq is the least of our military perception problems.
Define "appeasing". Is it "appeasing" to treat other nations with the respect we would expect to be treated with?
The USA buys more from Europe than the other way around. If that's not respect, then I do not know what is.
If the dumbest thing you can think of is to appease the largest economic power outside of North America, then you clearly haven't watched American politics for the last 50 years.
Again, if Europe is so powerful, why does the USA need to have bases in Germany? Who is out there that can threaten Europe militarily, and more importantly, why should Americans care? America isn't a white country any more, its a mixed country, so, even the cultural similarity argument pales.
Europeans ARE fighting with Americans in Iraq.
America has roughly 150,000 men in Iraq, the UK has what, 3,000? Maybe we should have 3,000 soldiers to defend Europe and call it a day?
That said, Germany is a staunch US ally, host to US bases that are key in moving troops and equipment around the world, and a key member of NATO that helped us during the cold war. Discount such an ally at your own peril....
My question is, why is the USA so bent on moving troops all over the world. I don't want this job for America any more. America was better off as a trading superpower that it was before it became a military superpower.
I actually disagree here. I think Europeans have taken the high ground in this... war is about oil snip
That's fine and dandy, and I think you were unfairly modded troll, by the way. All I'm saying is, if Europeans aren't fighting for us, why should we fight for them? Why does it matter to the USA if Poland or Germany are independent from Russia any more than Iraq is liberated from Saddam? There's no difference. I'm saying, let Europeans deal with their own security, the USA can trade with them, but lets end NATO now and move on with life.
Nothing to get mad about.
Sorry for not fighting all your ill-concieved wars.
Sorry our ill-conceived wars are not as so well conceived as World War I and World War II.
Why take offense though? All I said was that Europe is not an American ally, and if anything, you've only bolstered the point. Let's bring US troops out of Europe, bury NATO, and just trade with each other. Europe can handle European security.
I think it is fallacious to say money is the problem in the congress. It's not money, its the sheer greed of all involved. Congress has too much power and therefor people want it too much. If you take away the money for elected officials, there will be other, more secret levers that will be unaccountably manipulated. Decisions will be made in stealth, in secret, like the smoke filled back rooms of the old days.
No, it is better, really, to just have money go to whomever and without restriction. That way, we can at least see whom is owned by who, and vote accordingly. Better a billionaire writes a million dollar check to a senator than the same billionaire indirectly invests into a bevy of people to work some foul valve of power in the furnaces of Washington.
I am an artist first, and a techie second. Personally, I think it would be enough if I, and my children, could benefit from my works
I think you would change your mind if live to meet your grandchildren.
The main point of my post was corporate control is not a liberal or a conservative problem, its an institutional problem.
It's not Walmart's fault that people shop there and buy so much Chinese stuff. It's not Toyota's fault that Americans would rather pay Toyota and get a nicer car than have a better standard of living for American auto workers. It's not just that a banker on wall street is greedy. It is that -every- American is greedy, and therefor, we got the institutions we asked for.
Appeasing Europe is the dumbest thing any American President can do. Europeans are not American allies, or they would be fighting with Americans in Iraq.
8 years? Corporations have been exhibiting control over the legislature for much more than the past 8 years... One only has to look at the copyright act extensions to see that.
There's plenty of artists that would like to see copyright be extended as well, so don't pretend that this is merely a right wing corporate thing. There's quite a few liberals earning a living selling books, songs and movies that are delighted to know their grandchildren can inherit their royalties!
too much privatization, and not enough oversight
Um, the best anti-US moles in history worked for the government. This guy is a piker. Aldrich Ames worked for the CIA. He forked over the names of a lot of CIA moles to the Russians, resulting in their untimely demise. But, that's just a more recent example of a long stream of Soviet infiltrators. At one point in time, the Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, was in fact, a Soviet spy. Doesn't get much more government work than that!
At some point, lowering taxes to the point where hospitals, roads and schools are no longer supported also makes everyone poorer.
Taxes in the United States are now higher than in the rest of the western world. Per capita, the USA spends more in taxpayer money on hospitals, roads, and schools than any western nation. The problem is that health care is not rationed, we have a huge continent to build roads for, and schools are consistently getting milked by powerful local political groups as a source of patronage jobs.
No, I don't think you understand the optimizations. It has nothing to do with source vs. binary. The test applications both ended up on the same platform after all, Window
.Net applications don't "feel" slow, I've used quite a few. Its been a while since I played with Java, but there are differences in how Java's VM does JITting and how the CLR does it.
.NET application, for Windows, you'll get some sort of a pause before everything becomes operational because it has to compile everything that happens in response to the OnLoad event of the parent form. Then, as you use the application, it will have to compile everything that happens in response to each of the events for the first time. Every .NET application I've ever used feels like it needs to be kicked out of bed before they start to go, and then, after that, they are pretty slow. And of course, .NET's WinForms are built around GDI+, which is tiresomely and yawningly slow. .NET windows forms are just butt ugly and slow, and custom controls written to them are horrific.
.NET that make an application even slower. The ubiquitous DataSet comes to mind. That thing is remarkably slow, and developers use that all the time.
.Net is apparently fast enough that there's a VS version specifically for writing DX games on .Net.
.NET applications aren't necessarily more reliable.
.NET, my connection potentially stays alive until it is garbage collected unless I explicitly wrap it in a "using" block, which is frankly as ugly as hell. In C++, I just use the object naturally and don't worry about it.
.NET remembers that you've made a million tiny allocations, but, why do it at all? .NET means you are making a dynamic allocation every time you want a new object. You -don't- have to do this in C++. In C++, I can share allocations out of a single block of memory, and because of that, I can guarantee my application will run if I specify a bounds to the numbers of objects being allocated. .NET leaves me only with a potential failure point - every time - I allocate, and that leads to additional coding complexity that must be addressed. As you said, I prefer to think about the problem, and, if I can just have my stuff use a simpler memory model than one that demands everything be managed, I'm way ahead of the curve over any .NET solution, because you have to think about exception hand
Well, of course it would. Here, let's imagine what sort of optimizations a JIT could make at run time. Basically you'll have different chip features, because that's the extent of the core virtual machine. Anything other than that is really going to be a run time optimization in the libraries and that's a whole different animal. So, since we're talking about chip features, if you compile the program once on a Linux box from source, you'll get all the machine specific optimizations that compiler allows, and you'll get them all at deployment time, rather than run time. So really, the whole idea of JIT being "better" because it happens at run time is pretty silly.
No, the optimizations are JIT, so it has no affect on load speed.
Most certainly does. If you open up a
I've not even discussed a lot of the RAD features built into
I'd rather a slower application that is reliable vs. one that is unreliable but "faster." The fact is most applications speed is irrelevent because the application is barely using the processor anyway. Certainly things like games must perform well.
Well,
Yes, you can get some peace of mind because of garbage collection, but to get that, you have to give up the benefits of stack based objects destructing when they go out of scope as is the case in C++. So, if I have a consumer of a database class in
Also, the thing about garbage collection is, its nice that
Not necessarly. In many cases, .Net outperforms the native application. That's because the VM can do JIT optimizations and other things a static compiler can't. Its not nearly as cut and dry as that. I think the same can be said for Java.
.NET, your application optimization takes place nearly every time it loads, so it always -feels- slow. Java has much the same problem.
See, that would only be applicable if you are distributing binaries only. In the OSS model, I can distribute the source, and get the advantages of machine analysis at a single compile time. In
Wouldn't your time be better spent coding to actually solve the problem at hand, instead of worrying over each memory detail?
It depends on what the problem is that is to be solved. Speed sells, so, a really fast program can be much more appealing than a slow one. So yeah, you can choose to not sweat performance details, and that can help in a lot of kinds of IT programming, but for commercial applications, I would think that in many cases, you would want the performance.
Only if you define "better economy" as "access to spaceships" (and that point isn't actually even accurate in Star Wars...). I mean, Owen Lars was a moisture farmer. Vader started out as a slave. There's a huge criminal underground/slums, etc.
Yeah, but you could build up so much money that you could be a Trade Federation, and build up your own giant robot army. Don't see that in Trek. I wonder who had the better life, though, before defeat - Harry Mudd or Jabba the Hut?
I think on XP and above that isn't true. There are APIs on Windows to do this.
.Net. Its pretty obvious that's how they are positioning .Net, and .Net is worlds better than COM.
Actually you are right. It went out as a hotfix to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 in 2007. However, its not complete.... if you really want to check, have a look at the registry for Time Zones. You'll see that there is, for Eastern Standard Time, a Dynamic DST entry. But it only covers the recent transition, and not any of the historical ones. Its better than what was there a year ago, I'll give you that, but, what's bothersome about the whole thing is that they have a new API where one would have done.
don't get the obsession with C++. Yes, its powerful. It also lets you shoot yourself in the foot. Since moving to C# (or Java), I find I'm spending most of my time dealing with solving the actual problem at hand.. not writing lots of code to micromanage memory
It really depends on the application. If you want to write really fast code, you have to micromanage memory. That's just the way it is. On the other hand, if you are using normal business coding, then C# or Java will work pretty well, although, some folks would argue that Python is better because it facilitates dynamic dispatch in ways that C# or Java can't.
When I do C++ I tend to keep dynamic allocations to a minimum. I avoid string and I put all of my big "systems" of structures, trees if you will, into a single giant block that I can free with one call. It makes the application both faster and more reliable but at the price of some flexibility that I can live with.
Huh? Again, ruling out TFS, and many other scs. Yes, they cost money, but that doesn't mean you can rule them out.
Of course there's commercial stuff, but my argument was about tools that a solo or small team developer could reasonably afford. Even big IT departments balk at the cost of TFS.
Well, there's COBRA. At any rate COM is going away and the replacement is
Agreed.
The distinction is minimal - there's just a flag "wire up stdin/out/err to a console on start-up". After that there's no distinction. There's no reason a console app can't drive a GUI.
.NET makes it nicer, but that's only because it sweeps a dumb idea that makes you work more under the rug. I prefer Linux daemons to Windows services, for sure.
But its a linker flag that gets stamped into the EXE and that's annoying.
m but there's certainly a 'interact with the desktop' permission they can be granted which would allow them to create their own windows for output
Well, there's a lot of bad security things that happen once you set that little flag. Like, there's a bunch of things that interactive services are not allowed to do, that only non-interactive services can do, and vice versa. Ultimately, you really want to have non-interactive services and the preferred way to debug them is to log them. Or, what you can do is have two entry paths into the service - one when invoked from the command line as a console app and the other when invoked by the SCM. Either way, the whole process of creating a service in Windows C++ is a pain in the rear.
Wow. This comes as a shock to me. Especially since the person delivering this message to me has the /. name of cplusplus
I wholeheartedly agree.
Yes, for C#, Visual Studio is amazing, but for C++, Linux is better.
I like KDevelop.
1) Solutions management is better - KDevelop is much better at managing multiple build targets, working with complicated builds, and more.
2) Source control is better - that's really for any Unix system. MS source control blows compared to what you get out of subversion, just because vss uses that stupid check out model.
3) Collaboration is better. If you want a genuine team suite type of thing, its pretty hard to top SourceForge.
4) Standards are better. If you are -really- into C++, the GNU compiler is simply better because it follows the standards. If I had a dollar for every time I ported something from VC to GCC, found that GCC rejected the code, did some research, and found that GCC actually did the right thing, I'd be pretty rich. On the flip side, I don't think I've ever run into a situation where GCC did something non-standards compliant that VC++ actually did do.
5) Performance coding is better. The whole point of C++ is to be doing systems programming. That means you need to consider architectural things like integer sizes, interfacing with assembly language, and good timer calls. On all of these fronts, Linux is better. The sizeof(int) is right on Linux and wrong on Windows for 64 bit platforms.. and the calling convention and stack situation in 64 bit Linux is just better. It's almost as if Microsoft chose their convention deliberately to not be like what the rest of the world was doing. Interfacing with assembly is better on Linux. It used to be in Windows that you could do inline assembly, but -not any more- in 64 bit land, so it becomes a push between AT&T syntax versus MS syntax. I prefer AT&T assembler syntax just because it seems cleaner. Finally, gettimeofday() works really well on Linux, whereas Windows gives you a mishmash of calls... the basic SYSTEMTIME call stinks, then there is QueryPerformanceCounter, and whatever new one they through into Vista. Enough already. And I'll toss in that dealing with UTF8 is probably faster than doing UTF16 all the time, especially if you writing quick and dirty code to be hosted on western european and American servers.
6) Code is more accurate. Everyone deals with temporal data lately and that means time zone conversions. On Windows these do not work and cannot work because the OS does not consider historic time zone transitions, while Linux does.
7) There is no COM on Linux. A few years ago, I would have argued this to be a disadvantage for Linux, but, having seen the disaster that resulted from COM, I'd have to say that Linux sticking to a basic C style call for the vast majority of its services turned out to be a pretty good plan.
Really, I'd almost have to say that people who say Microsoft is better for C++ haven't really programmed in C++ enough to know what they are talking about. If C++ on Windows was that good, the world would not be beating down the doors to C#...
'Nuff said.
Hate to say it, but there's enough extensions and non-standard behavior in Visual Studio to make porting C++ programs to GNU not nearly so straightforward for even simple console applications.
We don't need Quantum computing for a Star Trek futre. We need a way to disregard or at least completely reinterpret the laws of physics, and do without money, and all get on, and find entire worlds whose populations all conform to some stereotype. And are green.
It's interesting that the Star Trek universe doesn't seem to have "money", yet, they do have scarcity. They often had shortages of starships, and they had limits as to how fast they could develop technology. And, there really doesn't seem to be much in the way of private spaceflight, outside of the TOS, in the Trek Universe.
Oddly, the Star Wars Republic had both money and a fair amount of spaceships. In Star Wars, just about everyone had a spaceship or access to a spaceship of some kind. With the vast resources of the Galaxy, the Galactic Empire was able to build an incredible number of Star Destroyers AND, at least two Death Stars, plus numerous other combatant vehicles. In fact, the Galaxy was so rich that a number of systems could band together and fund their own rebellion.
I guess what it boils down to, is that Star Trek might have had a more advanced technology in some ways, but Star Wars had the better economy.