Also note that the Apache Portable Runtime is highly lacking in introcuctory documentation. What it has is DOxygen generated comments for poorly documented routines. They're probably quite adequate if you already know what they do, and just need reminding, but otherwise....sheesh!
Sorry, but which version of Gtk? Gtk3 is pretty much incompatible with Gtk2. so I've stopped paying either version much attention. (The last time I checked, Gtk3 had mad many of the things I was doing with Gtk2 not work, so I stopped active development on the Gtk projects...or switched to other libraries. Admittedly that was several years ago, but I haven't heard many people singing the praises of Gtk since then. Qt, yes, and it has many nice features, along with some I rather dislike, but not Gtk...of course Qt is C++. There's much to be said in favor of C libraries, I'm a lot less convinced about much to be said in favor of Gtk.)
That's pretty much irrelevant. He's talking about using the Chrome libraries, so the linker will strip out any unused functions.
What this means is that it's likely providing a bunch of useful functions above and beyond the standard library. The problem is, he only talks about those routines in such general terms that you can't figure out whether they're useful, and he doesn't give any links to documentation, so you don't even know if they're documented.
N.B.: You *could* check the source and see if it was documented, if you were interested enough, but why pick this set of libraries instead of the ones you already know about? You need to be pretty much sold ahead of time. My wild guess is that they don't have any decent documentation, or he would have linked to it, but that *is* just a WAG.
Qt has many advantages. I, however, don't like 16-bit characters. (Possibly this is because of experiences with Java.) Either they should use utf-8 or utf-32. Or both. And the heavy emphasis on latin1 in the documentation of Qt is a real turnoff. (Yes, you can avoid it, but yeesh...the only useful thing to do with latin1 is to convert it into utf...either 8 or 32, depending on your purpose.)
OTOH, I've no reason to believe that Chrome libraries are any better. If the *have* a documented API, he didn't mention it, and didn't provide any links. Also, although he was pushing it as a C library, in the comments he reveals that much (most?) of the library code is in C++.
What's wrong with the approach is that there isn't a link to API documentation, so you can't quickly judge how well it would fit your project. Source code takes a LOT longer to review.
If I were convinced enough, I could download the source and run it through DOxygen, but that's not much good unless the code has been properly documented. Is it? Not a clue. Yes, if I get convinced I can do it myself, but I take a lot more convincing if I can't see the API ahead of time.
This was a piece of PR fluff. Well done, but shy of all useful details. Yes, libraries are a very good idea. Why should I prefer *this* set of libraries? He doesn't say. He just says "Hey, it's great!". (Well, he does say in *very* general terms, but because they are so general, you can't prove hime wrong, which means he's not usefully right, either.)
They used to do that with jingles on the radio. I still remember several of them, because they used catchy tunes. Don't think I've ever bought anything because of one, though. But... "Use Ajax, The foaming clenser, Wash the dirt Right down the drain, boo-ba-do-(something or other)." It's been at least a decade since I've bough any, probably longer, because I have no idea whether it is any good or not. I may never have bought any. Does remembering the jingle do them any good?
You don't get it. We don't trust you to verify the integrity of the software you are trying to force on us. I don't really care that you would prefer to have delivered it yourself, I care that it's malware. And I don't want it.
If your site requires that I have malware installed on my computer to use it, then your site, and the company attached to it, can just drop dead.
Actually, most of the sites I visit WERE around before the advertisers got thick. True, I used Alta-Vista rather than Google, but Google existed. I'm not really convinced that Javascript was a good idea, even though now most sites can barely be used without it. That doesn't mean they need it. It means they were redesigned to take advantage of the "new hot way to deliver web content". I'm not impressed. And I'm so unimpressed by Flash that I refuse to install it.
Well, most of my experience with 16-bit chars is with Java, since if I have the option of avoiding them I do. So perhaps I am being unfairly harsh on 16-bit characters. But, personally, I see no justification for them. If I need compactness, I use utf-8. If I need consistency, I use utf-32. And I'll switch back and forth between representations in the same program if there's enough reason. (Usually, however, if I'm going to use utf-32, the only conversions happen at I/O time, as I always use utf-8 on disk. Still, there are occasions where I'll decode a small chunk of a string from utf-8 into utf-32 to work with it. It's extremely rare that I will then re-encode the altered version into utf-8. If I were to need to do that, I'd probably just do all the work in utf-32 except the I/O.)
There are, indeed, people with that opinion. Some of them are quite voceriferous. I don't, however, believe that there is any substantial number of them. If they are, then they are welcome to fork the code from my point of view. I don't know whether they would be allowed to keep the name, though.
As for backporting the Python3 features to 2.8...my understanding was that the reason that they weren't backported to 2.7 is that there wasn't any reasonable way to do so.
QChars are 16-bit chars. This is indefensible. Utf-8 is defensible. Utf-32 is defensible. Utf-16 is... is only defensible on CPUs with 16-bit registers.
The Qt libraries seem to have been badly sabotaged by historical continuity. At one point there were good reasons for 16-bit characters. They no longer exist. Now the only reason is to be consistent with what they've been doing. (And I must also admit that I really dislike C++ iterators. Python, D, and Ruby have well designed iterators. C++ doesn't. Probably because it was the first to implement them. Again, it's being treated savagely by historical continuity. That's probably also the only reason it has that attrocious macro processor, and the abyssmal use of pointers. (C++ does at least allow ref references instead of pointers. C doesn't even allow that, or didn't the last time I checked.)
Additionally, the error messages are atrocious. This is partially the compiler, but it's also partially that the language design discourages intelligible error messages. (Still, some compilers manage decent error messages in many contexts. IIRC this is one of the arguments in favor of Clang.)
P.S.: Yes, I know that MSWind uses 16-bit characters. So does Java. This was once a reasonable choice, but is no longer such. Latin1 only covers a fraction of the characters that one must deal with. True, it's usually a very large fraction, but that doesn't suffice. Missing even one character is often intolerable, and it rarely happens that just one is missed. (That said, even full unicode doesn't cover everything. There are, e.g., Japanese poetic forms that aren't covered even by full unicode. But it's the closest we have without going into specialized character sets that while they cover one area more deeply, are narrow in their coverage.)
Sorry, but it's more like they didn't want to bother. The story makes it probable (not quite certain) that they already knew that it was the password to other devices that he had used.
Also, was he a terrorist? Could be. The story says he was serving time for planning attacks on the UK, but that could be fraud as easily as violence. If I were interested enough, I'd look it up, as it is I'm just commenting on the slipshod nature of reporting (which I'm assuming matches the original story without checking). I did note that an earlier post asserted that he was a terrorist, while another asserted that he was just a fraudster, and that BOTH assertions were reasonably compatible with the summary.
Saying "the Python culture is embroiled in a civil war with 2.x vs 3.x" is grossly misstating the position. Both Python2 and Python3 are currently supported, and, as much as feasible, fixes to Python3 are backported to Python2. A lot of people still use and develop in Python2, but it's no longer recommended for new projects. (It will be EOLed in a year or so. I believe 2.8 is intended to be the last version, but it could be 2.7, as I haven't kept current.) That said, 2.7 is stable and well supported on all major systems. But it's more inconvenient to use, e.g., unicode strings in Python2 than in Python3, and Python3 is generally faster (though not hugely so).
However, the two languages have been kept similar enough that it's often possible to write programs that work in both. If you're looking for help, however, it *is* useful to say which version you are using. And even which sub-version. And it's quite feasible to have BOTH installed on the same computer.
Personally, I prefer Python3, so I acknowledge that I'm a bit biased in that direction. But the main advantage that I see in Python2 is that there are libraries and tools (like Epydoc) that haven't been ported to Python3 yet. If you need one of those, you should choose Python2.
The main reason I don't like C++ (and C, for that matter) is the way they handle unicode. The next reason is the way they handle pointers. (For C++, Templates come in there, too.)
Vala keeps promising to be a good language, but it's been between alpha and beta quality for 5 years now. D is pretty good, but lacks library support. (You can roll your own to C or C++, but it's a real disincentive. And can be quite difficult if your header files have macros.) Ada is ok, and has decent library support, but it's quite verbose, and hard to document (I'm talking about developer documentation, like Javadoc or Doxygen, or even RDoc, not end user documentation). Also, I really like garbage collection, though that's partially a matter of taste.
If I don't need the performance, I generally pick Python as the "least bad". It's not as good as D, but it usually supports the libraries that I need. It's not as good as Vala promises to be, but it's working and well documented NOW. But even Ada has better unicode support than do C and C++.
How are you going to string the network wires without government interference in privately owned property? Without government interference there could not exist telephones systems. Without government interference there could not exist a broadcast industry. Etc.
And I'm not even talking about subsidies, I'm talking about standards setting, eminent domain, etc. You can't get the right-of-way to run a large network without govenment intervention. Someone will refuse. Or someone will set up another station broadcasting on the same frequency that you were going to use. (And no, spread-spectrum won't let you get around that.)
Given that you've got to have government interference, how do you make it beneficial to society, rather than just to a few friends of the king? (Or do you? The traditional answer is that the friends of the king get their way, and we hope that it also benefits the rest of society. Standards setting, at least, often does.)
Over time this "friends of the king" becomes traditional, and terms like "land lord" are used to describe them. The king said that they had control over that piece of land, so the "own" it, unless the king changes his mind. Their heirs consider it their right, and it becomes more and more difficult for the king to change his mind. Eventually the king is replaced by the government, but there's not other change.
You don't understand what a radical piece of legislation the homestead act was. And also how profoundly the US changed when the homesteadable land was filled, and the act was revoked. Ever since then the government has become much more, what the grandparent called "crony capitalism", because there was, essentially, no longer any way to escape from the landlords (i.e. the descendants in interest of the king's friends).
Yes, the history was a lot more complex, and this is just following one particular thread of it. But it's one of the pieces of how we got here.
I think what you're missing is that destruction is a lot easier than creation. So the damage that one armed corrupt cop can do will not be undone by the work of a hundred honest cops.
Unfortunately, the culture of the police is such that the "honest" cops defend the corrupt ones. Which, effectively, means that there are no honest cops. (There are a few exceptions, but remarkably few. If a police department is to be cleansed of malefactors, the action must almost always come from outside.)
That was centuries later. I'm talking about before the fall of Rome. Even Byzantium did things differently. (They were more interested in horse racing.)
Sorry, but it actually supports global warming. This does mean that some areas get colder at times. It also means that some areas get wetter, and other areas get dryer. Global warming only makes sense as a measurement of an AVERAGE temperature. Actually, it only makes sense as an estimate of the total thermal energy over the entire world. If the oceans are getting warmer (and they are...though more in some places than in others) this changes LOTS of weather patterns.
OTOH, if what you're talking about is what can be detected locally, then yes, change is the correct term.
FWIW, one of the more global changes is that there has been a decrease in difference between the temperatures in the arctics and at the equator. This causes the jet stream to slow, and become more irregular. This causes weather patterns to be "sluggish", i.e. to tend to linger in places longer than they used to. And THAT results in occasional spells of extreme heat, cold, wet, etc. But you can't point to any one event and say "This was caused by global warming", because it only alters the probabilities. Loading the dice doesn't cause some number to come up, not unless you use a really heavy hand. It merely changes the probabilities.
Or Christians feeding Pagans to the lions. That seems to always get forgotten, but the change of state religion didn't get rid of the arena, it just changed who were the victims.
Sorry, but as far as I am concerned a "goal sharing service" could be nearly anything.... Well, OK, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's a vague enough term that it could include email or document creation or flowcharting or.... weill, *lots* of different things. If probably doesn't include selling dog food...at least not directly, but that's not exactly a description.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that was a part of his point.
Just think of all the free mail and e-mail you get without ever asking for it. More! Calling it junk mail and spam is just being abusively hurtful.
Thanks. That's VERY good to hear.
Also note that the Apache Portable Runtime is highly lacking in introcuctory documentation. What it has is DOxygen generated comments for poorly documented routines. They're probably quite adequate if you already know what they do, and just need reminding, but otherwise....sheesh!
Sorry, but which version of Gtk? Gtk3 is pretty much incompatible with Gtk2. so I've stopped paying either version much attention. (The last time I checked, Gtk3 had mad many of the things I was doing with Gtk2 not work, so I stopped active development on the Gtk projects...or switched to other libraries. Admittedly that was several years ago, but I haven't heard many people singing the praises of Gtk since then. Qt, yes, and it has many nice features, along with some I rather dislike, but not Gtk...of course Qt is C++. There's much to be said in favor of C libraries, I'm a lot less convinced about much to be said in favor of Gtk.)
That's pretty much irrelevant. He's talking about using the Chrome libraries, so the linker will strip out any unused functions.
What this means is that it's likely providing a bunch of useful functions above and beyond the standard library. The problem is, he only talks about those routines in such general terms that you can't figure out whether they're useful, and he doesn't give any links to documentation, so you don't even know if they're documented.
N.B.: You *could* check the source and see if it was documented, if you were interested enough, but why pick this set of libraries instead of the ones you already know about? You need to be pretty much sold ahead of time. My wild guess is that they don't have any decent documentation, or he would have linked to it, but that *is* just a WAG.
Qt has many advantages. I, however, don't like 16-bit characters. (Possibly this is because of experiences with Java.) Either they should use utf-8 or utf-32. Or both. And the heavy emphasis on latin1 in the documentation of Qt is a real turnoff. (Yes, you can avoid it, but yeesh...the only useful thing to do with latin1 is to convert it into utf...either 8 or 32, depending on your purpose.)
OTOH, I've no reason to believe that Chrome libraries are any better. If the *have* a documented API, he didn't mention it, and didn't provide any links. Also, although he was pushing it as a C library, in the comments he reveals that much (most?) of the library code is in C++.
What's wrong with the approach is that there isn't a link to API documentation, so you can't quickly judge how well it would fit your project. Source code takes a LOT longer to review.
If I were convinced enough, I could download the source and run it through DOxygen, but that's not much good unless the code has been properly documented. Is it? Not a clue. Yes, if I get convinced I can do it myself, but I take a lot more convincing if I can't see the API ahead of time.
This was a piece of PR fluff. Well done, but shy of all useful details. Yes, libraries are a very good idea. Why should I prefer *this* set of libraries? He doesn't say. He just says "Hey, it's great!". (Well, he does say in *very* general terms, but because they are so general, you can't prove hime wrong, which means he's not usefully right, either.)
They used to do that with jingles on the radio. I still remember several of them, because they used catchy tunes. Don't think I've ever bought anything because of one, though. But...
"Use Ajax,
The foaming clenser,
Wash the dirt
Right down the drain, boo-ba-do-(something or other)."
It's been at least a decade since I've bough any, probably longer, because I have no idea whether it is any good or not. I may never have bought any. Does remembering the jingle do them any good?
You don't get it. We don't trust you to verify the integrity of the software you are trying to force on us. I don't really care that you would prefer to have delivered it yourself, I care that it's malware. And I don't want it.
If your site requires that I have malware installed on my computer to use it, then your site, and the company attached to it, can just drop dead.
Actually, most of the sites I visit WERE around before the advertisers got thick. True, I used Alta-Vista rather than Google, but Google existed. I'm not really convinced that Javascript was a good idea, even though now most sites can barely be used without it. That doesn't mean they need it. It means they were redesigned to take advantage of the "new hot way to deliver web content". I'm not impressed. And I'm so unimpressed by Flash that I refuse to install it.
Well, most of my experience with 16-bit chars is with Java, since if I have the option of avoiding them I do. So perhaps I am being unfairly harsh on 16-bit characters. But, personally, I see no justification for them. If I need compactness, I use utf-8. If I need consistency, I use utf-32. And I'll switch back and forth between representations in the same program if there's enough reason. (Usually, however, if I'm going to use utf-32, the only conversions happen at I/O time, as I always use utf-8 on disk. Still, there are occasions where I'll decode a small chunk of a string from utf-8 into utf-32 to work with it. It's extremely rare that I will then re-encode the altered version into utf-8. If I were to need to do that, I'd probably just do all the work in utf-32 except the I/O.)
There are, indeed, people with that opinion. Some of them are quite voceriferous. I don't, however, believe that there is any substantial number of them. If they are, then they are welcome to fork the code from my point of view. I don't know whether they would be allowed to keep the name, though.
As for backporting the Python3 features to 2.8...my understanding was that the reason that they weren't backported to 2.7 is that there wasn't any reasonable way to do so.
QChars are 16-bit chars. This is indefensible. Utf-8 is defensible. Utf-32 is defensible. Utf-16 is ... is only defensible on CPUs with 16-bit registers.
The Qt libraries seem to have been badly sabotaged by historical continuity. At one point there were good reasons for 16-bit characters. They no longer exist. Now the only reason is to be consistent with what they've been doing. (And I must also admit that I really dislike C++ iterators. Python, D, and Ruby have well designed iterators. C++ doesn't. Probably because it was the first to implement them. Again, it's being treated savagely by historical continuity. That's probably also the only reason it has that attrocious macro processor, and the abyssmal use of pointers. (C++ does at least allow ref references instead of pointers. C doesn't even allow that, or didn't the last time I checked.)
Additionally, the error messages are atrocious. This is partially the compiler, but it's also partially that the language design discourages intelligible error messages. (Still, some compilers manage decent error messages in many contexts. IIRC this is one of the arguments in favor of Clang.)
P.S.: Yes, I know that MSWind uses 16-bit characters. So does Java. This was once a reasonable choice, but is no longer such. Latin1 only covers a fraction of the characters that one must deal with. True, it's usually a very large fraction, but that doesn't suffice. Missing even one character is often intolerable, and it rarely happens that just one is missed. (That said, even full unicode doesn't cover everything. There are, e.g., Japanese poetic forms that aren't covered even by full unicode. But it's the closest we have without going into specialized character sets that while they cover one area more deeply, are narrow in their coverage.)
Sorry, but it's more like they didn't want to bother. The story makes it probable (not quite certain) that they already knew that it was the password to other devices that he had used.
Also, was he a terrorist? Could be. The story says he was serving time for planning attacks on the UK, but that could be fraud as easily as violence. If I were interested enough, I'd look it up, as it is I'm just commenting on the slipshod nature of reporting (which I'm assuming matches the original story without checking). I did note that an earlier post asserted that he was a terrorist, while another asserted that he was just a fraudster, and that BOTH assertions were reasonably compatible with the summary.
Saying "the Python culture is embroiled in a civil war with 2.x vs 3.x" is grossly misstating the position. Both Python2 and Python3 are currently supported, and, as much as feasible, fixes to Python3 are backported to Python2. A lot of people still use and develop in Python2, but it's no longer recommended for new projects. (It will be EOLed in a year or so. I believe 2.8 is intended to be the last version, but it could be 2.7, as I haven't kept current.) That said, 2.7 is stable and well supported on all major systems. But it's more inconvenient to use, e.g., unicode strings in Python2 than in Python3, and Python3 is generally faster (though not hugely so).
However, the two languages have been kept similar enough that it's often possible to write programs that work in both. If you're looking for help, however, it *is* useful to say which version you are using. And even which sub-version. And it's quite feasible to have BOTH installed on the same computer.
Personally, I prefer Python3, so I acknowledge that I'm a bit biased in that direction. But the main advantage that I see in Python2 is that there are libraries and tools (like Epydoc) that haven't been ported to Python3 yet. If you need one of those, you should choose Python2.
The main reason I don't like C++ (and C, for that matter) is the way they handle unicode. The next reason is the way they handle pointers. (For C++, Templates come in there, too.)
Vala keeps promising to be a good language, but it's been between alpha and beta quality for 5 years now. D is pretty good, but lacks library support. (You can roll your own to C or C++, but it's a real disincentive. And can be quite difficult if your header files have macros.) Ada is ok, and has decent library support, but it's quite verbose, and hard to document (I'm talking about developer documentation, like Javadoc or Doxygen, or even RDoc, not end user documentation). Also, I really like garbage collection, though that's partially a matter of taste.
If I don't need the performance, I generally pick Python as the "least bad". It's not as good as D, but it usually supports the libraries that I need. It's not as good as Vala promises to be, but it's working and well documented NOW. But even Ada has better unicode support than do C and C++.
You're using a very loose definition of war. War is different from competition. In competition the goal is to dominate. In war the goal is to destroy.
How are you going to string the network wires without government interference in privately owned property?
Without government interference there could not exist telephones systems. Without government interference there could not exist a broadcast industry. Etc.
And I'm not even talking about subsidies, I'm talking about standards setting, eminent domain, etc. You can't get the right-of-way to run a large network without govenment intervention. Someone will refuse. Or someone will set up another station broadcasting on the same frequency that you were going to use. (And no, spread-spectrum won't let you get around that.)
Given that you've got to have government interference, how do you make it beneficial to society, rather than just to a few friends of the king? (Or do you? The traditional answer is that the friends of the king get their way, and we hope that it also benefits the rest of society. Standards setting, at least, often does.)
Over time this "friends of the king" becomes traditional, and terms like "land lord" are used to describe them. The king said that they had control over that piece of land, so the "own" it, unless the king changes his mind. Their heirs consider it their right, and it becomes more and more difficult for the king to change his mind. Eventually the king is replaced by the government, but there's not other change.
You don't understand what a radical piece of legislation the homestead act was. And also how profoundly the US changed when the homesteadable land was filled, and the act was revoked. Ever since then the government has become much more, what the grandparent called "crony capitalism", because there was, essentially, no longer any way to escape from the landlords (i.e. the descendants in interest of the king's friends).
Yes, the history was a lot more complex, and this is just following one particular thread of it. But it's one of the pieces of how we got here.
That's true, but you know that wasn't what he was saying.
I think what you're missing is that destruction is a lot easier than creation. So the damage that one armed corrupt cop can do will not be undone by the work of a hundred honest cops.
Unfortunately, the culture of the police is such that the "honest" cops defend the corrupt ones. Which, effectively, means that there are no honest cops. (There are a few exceptions, but remarkably few. If a police department is to be cleansed of malefactors, the action must almost always come from outside.)
That was centuries later. I'm talking about before the fall of Rome. Even Byzantium did things differently. (They were more interested in horse racing.)
Sorry, but it actually supports global warming. This does mean that some areas get colder at times. It also means that some areas get wetter, and other areas get dryer. Global warming only makes sense as a measurement of an AVERAGE temperature. Actually, it only makes sense as an estimate of the total thermal energy over the entire world. If the oceans are getting warmer (and they are...though more in some places than in others) this changes LOTS of weather patterns.
OTOH, if what you're talking about is what can be detected locally, then yes, change is the correct term.
FWIW, one of the more global changes is that there has been a decrease in difference between the temperatures in the arctics and at the equator. This causes the jet stream to slow, and become more irregular. This causes weather patterns to be "sluggish", i.e. to tend to linger in places longer than they used to. And THAT results in occasional spells of extreme heat, cold, wet, etc. But you can't point to any one event and say "This was caused by global warming", because it only alters the probabilities. Loading the dice doesn't cause some number to come up, not unless you use a really heavy hand. It merely changes the probabilities.
Or Christians feeding Pagans to the lions. That seems to always get forgotten, but the change of state religion didn't get rid of the arena, it just changed who were the victims.
Sorry, but as far as I am concerned a "goal sharing service" could be nearly anything. ... Well, OK, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's a vague enough term that it could include email or document creation or flowcharting or.... weill, *lots* of different things. If probably doesn't include selling dog food...at least not directly, but that's not exactly a description.