SWF is an open file format; while the Flash application itself may not be open source, its ultimate product can be read and produced by open source applications.
This gives Flash, or at least the SWF format, some serious leverage.
A multi-headed worm that can penetrate seven different networks at once, and steal 4 billion dollars from the Swordfish slush fund, all within ten seconds?
Did you get some of those TC Legos that you could plug into your Apple computer? (The ancestor to Mindstorms.) Man those things were awesome. Geeky childhood memory: Going to see Seymour Papert talk about Lego robots, and controlling them with the LOGO language.
Don't you remember "Yo, Noid" and "Cool Spot" on the NES? Kool Aid Man on the Atari 2600? Nowadays the blatant ad games are confined to the likes of Flash Web thingies, but that doesn't prevent the occasional Chiquita banana or Sobe drink from making its way into bigger, commercialized games.
But those programs don't have calendaring! They are therefore inferiar to Outlook!
Fact: People will endure bugs, viruses, trojans, and other nasties in order to have an integrated e-mail/groupware client with calendaring.
There's a lesson to be learned here for open source hackers: The Unix philosophy of small tools that do one thing well doesn't cut it in the marketplace.
That poster is probably Canadian, and to Canadians there is only one significant geographical distinction: that which exists between the United States (backward, barbaric, arrogant) and "the rest of the world" (sensible, civilized, humble, and conveniently includes Canada).
I have a Dell Latitude CP that's four or five years old now. I bought it used, and have taken good care of it. Should last a while, still. Also: It came with the mother of all docking stations. Built in enet and SCSI, expansion slots, room for extra drives. Sweet.
I don't know about now, but Dell used to make good stuff. There are probably a lot of old Latitudes floating around out there as portable workhorses.
Sorry, but the tone of the interview sounded like this:
"WOO! EFF is like, totally cool! Fight for your rights and use my daddy's service! Goooooo Madster! WOOOOO!"
Hate to break it to you, but Aimee Deep ain't very deep.
Teach the kids Scheme or Smalltalk.
on
Preview of Java 1.5
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Those two languages are far simpler, and let you really hammer the points about programming down without getting the kids confused about syntax rules.
Smalltalk has, essentially, only one operation: the message send. Send object X a message Y, and get Z back as a result. Even simple things like addition are implemented this way. While not blazingly fast (except in certain specialized implementations), the message-send semantic is surprisingly efficient: many complex real-world systems have been constructed using Smalltalk.
Scheme also enjoys the advantage of being small and simple, yet powerful. You don't need to know what the lambda calculus is to see how effective and intuitive Scheme's procedural semantics is. ("Lather, rinse, repeat." See? Tail recursion. It was there all along.)
Either way, it's better to use a simple language to teach students how to formulate plans for doing things (i.e., algorithms), and then hit them with fanciful syntax later rather than drop them into a popular, but bewildering for newcomers, language (which I consider C++ and Java to be).
I think this is just a token nod to get the music industry off Apple's back.
Hey, Darwin Streaming Server can still stream mp3's. True, it's tougher to configure and set up, but it's free and it runs on a Mac.
Economical? Soundly engineered?
on
IT at the CIA
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· Score: 1
This looks like a job for...
OPEN SOURCE!!!...man!
Bah, just a front!
on
IT at the CIA
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· Score: 4, Funny
Everybody knows the "declassified" version is just a diversionary tactic to make us THINK the agency is behind the times, IT-wise. In reality, they've slipped nanites into everyone's drinking water to track the populace's movements and habits, beaming the data through the ether to the giant mainframe computers under Mt. Weather (where the CIA also happens to keep its massive drug stash).
The poster of the parent asserted that COBOL and RPG were the only trustworthy languages for financial work because all other languages introduced rounding errors in their floating-point implementations. While that is the nature of the beast when it comes to binary floating point, my point was, you don't *use* floating point when dealing with money; you do all your calculations internally as integral numbers of cents, say, and then stick your decimal point in the right place when formatting the output. That is essentially what COBOL and RPG do anyway.
I'm to understand that a lot of financial institutions rely on Smalltalk for their newer applications...
Bjarne Stroustrup has been known to observe that the primary difference between "legacy" systems and the systems replacing them is that the legacy system works and scales.
A case can be built for the verity of that assertion as applied to the mainframe situation.
The problem is, for Web applications, other languages (such as Perl, LISP, and perhaps Python) come readily to mind as comparable at least to Java. C++ and its like are verbose and confining in a domain (like Web apps) where agility is paramount. In C++'s case this is somewhat justified since like its ancestor C, C++ is only a step or two above assembly language, and thus can be used to produce VERY tight code. Java, running on a VM, has no such excuse.
Java offers two main advantages: a beefy class library, and enough of the bondage-and-discipline nature to herd legions of mediocre programmers into typing a lot and doing a lot of important-looking work. Other than that it seems to combine the disadvantages of other languages, producing the old saw "Java: All the power of C++ with the blinding speed of Smalltalk".
The thing about knowing many languages is that you can evaluate them and choose a better language, even than the conventional default. The idea that programmers should know many languages has been invoked far more often to justify the incumbence of bad languages rather than promote the adoption of good ones.
Slashdot Mirror
SWF is an open file format; while the Flash application itself may not be open source, its ultimate product can be read and produced by open source applications.
This gives Flash, or at least the SWF format, some serious leverage.
A multi-headed worm that can penetrate seven different networks at once, and steal 4 billion dollars from the Swordfish slush fund, all within ten seconds?
Wasn't there a Stephen King novel set there?
I think you mean "nucular power consumption" or "nookyular power consumption". However you want to spell it. :)
Did you get some of those TC Legos that you could plug into your Apple computer? (The ancestor to Mindstorms.) Man those things were awesome. Geeky childhood memory: Going to see Seymour Papert talk about Lego robots, and controlling them with the LOGO language.
Don't you remember "Yo, Noid" and "Cool Spot" on the NES? Kool Aid Man on the Atari 2600? Nowadays the blatant ad games are confined to the likes of Flash Web thingies, but that doesn't prevent the occasional Chiquita banana or Sobe drink from making its way into bigger, commercialized games.
But those programs don't have calendaring! They are therefore inferiar to Outlook!
Fact: People will endure bugs, viruses, trojans, and other nasties in order to have an integrated e-mail/groupware client with calendaring.
There's a lesson to be learned here for open source hackers: The Unix philosophy of small tools that do one thing well doesn't cut it in the marketplace.
Better not mess with the Germans when it comes to serious, hardcore geekery. This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life.
Malda spends a week in the House of Next Tuesday! In the world of Next Tuesday, humanity has been conquered by giant ants!
Tardblog!!!
That poster is probably Canadian, and to Canadians there is only one significant geographical distinction: that which exists between the United States (backward, barbaric, arrogant) and "the rest of the world" (sensible, civilized, humble, and conveniently includes Canada).
I have a Dell Latitude CP that's four or five years old now. I bought it used, and have taken good care of it. Should last a while, still. Also: It came with the mother of all docking stations. Built in enet and SCSI, expansion slots, room for extra drives. Sweet.
I don't know about now, but Dell used to make good stuff. There are probably a lot of old Latitudes floating around out there as portable workhorses.
Sorry, but the tone of the interview sounded like this:
"WOO! EFF is like, totally cool! Fight for your rights and use my daddy's service! Goooooo Madster! WOOOOO!"
Hate to break it to you, but Aimee Deep ain't very deep.
Those two languages are far simpler, and let you really hammer the points about programming down without getting the kids confused about syntax rules.
Smalltalk has, essentially, only one operation: the message send. Send object X a message Y, and get Z back as a result. Even simple things like addition are implemented this way. While not blazingly fast (except in certain specialized implementations), the message-send semantic is surprisingly efficient: many complex real-world systems have been constructed using Smalltalk.
Scheme also enjoys the advantage of being small and simple, yet powerful. You don't need to know what the lambda calculus is to see how effective and intuitive Scheme's procedural semantics is. ("Lather, rinse, repeat." See? Tail recursion. It was there all along.)
Either way, it's better to use a simple language to teach students how to formulate plans for doing things (i.e., algorithms), and then hit them with fanciful syntax later rather than drop them into a popular, but bewildering for newcomers, language (which I consider C++ and Java to be).
I think this is just a token nod to get the music industry off Apple's back.
Hey, Darwin Streaming Server can still stream mp3's. True, it's tougher to configure and set up, but it's free and it runs on a Mac.
This looks like a job for...
...man!
OPEN SOURCE!!!
Everybody knows the "declassified" version is just a diversionary tactic to make us THINK the agency is behind the times, IT-wise. In reality, they've slipped nanites into everyone's drinking water to track the populace's movements and habits, beaming the data through the ether to the giant mainframe computers under Mt. Weather (where the CIA also happens to keep its massive drug stash).
Remember, just because you're paranoid...
"Vinnie! Guido! Go 'pursue' the X-Box Linux intellectual property issue. To a satisfactory conclusion."
Goons: "Daaaah, right away, boss! Heehee heheh!"
The most publicized viruses and trojans have been written in... Visual Basic. Like, ew, man.
I mean they do have libpr0n :)
My comment was intended to be sarcastic.
The poster of the parent asserted that COBOL and RPG were the only trustworthy languages for financial work because all other languages introduced rounding errors in their floating-point implementations. While that is the nature of the beast when it comes to binary floating point, my point was, you don't *use* floating point when dealing with money; you do all your calculations internally as integral numbers of cents, say, and then stick your decimal point in the right place when formatting the output. That is essentially what COBOL and RPG do anyway.
I'm to understand that a lot of financial institutions rely on Smalltalk for their newer applications...
Bjarne Stroustrup has been known to observe that the primary difference between "legacy" systems and the systems replacing them is that the legacy system works and scales.
A case can be built for the verity of that assertion as applied to the mainframe situation.
Because fixed-point math is impossible in those languages!
From my Mac OS X license agreement:
"This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time."
It is illegal to run Mac OS X on a non-Apple computer. Even machines built from Apple parts are iffy.
The problem is, for Web applications, other languages (such as Perl, LISP, and perhaps Python) come readily to mind as comparable at least to Java. C++ and its like are verbose and confining in a domain (like Web apps) where agility is paramount. In C++'s case this is somewhat justified since like its ancestor C, C++ is only a step or two above assembly language, and thus can be used to produce VERY tight code. Java, running on a VM, has no such excuse.
Java offers two main advantages: a beefy class library, and enough of the bondage-and-discipline nature to herd legions of mediocre programmers into typing a lot and doing a lot of important-looking work. Other than that it seems to combine the disadvantages of other languages, producing the old saw "Java: All the power of C++ with the blinding speed of Smalltalk".
The thing about knowing many languages is that you can evaluate them and choose a better language, even than the conventional default. The idea that programmers should know many languages has been invoked far more often to justify the incumbence of bad languages rather than promote the adoption of good ones.