And the thread gets stupider by the minute. Most predicted disasters end up not happening, therefore there's no need to worry about disasters? I assume you don't live in Iowa.
I said that we cared. I didn't say we cared effectively.
Or maybe we did. Look in your wallet, see if there's a draft card. There isn't? Are any of your co-workers non-white? Women in traditionally male jobs? Openly gay? So maybe we did accomplish a thing or two.
That seems to be a popular strategy these days: if an argument makes you uncomfortable, just insult the person who makes it. But how can I be properly chastened when your insults are so unimaginative? Come on, you can do better than "lighten up" and "high horse". That's grade school stuff!
I could argue with you point by point, but I don't feel like rehashing all these issues One More Time. If you google around, you can find the standard arguments on both sides. Every issue you raise has been answered before, so If you really want to hear counterarguments, they're there for you to examine.
On the other hand, if you just want to do the standard ignorant sniping that's the favorite sport in the blogosophere, then dude, you are certainly part of the problem.
Ah yes, the post-modern slacker approach to global crisis. If you worry at all about the impending extinction of the human race, or (more likely) its continued existence in a degraded state on planet that's become a very unpleasant, well then, you're just taking yourself too seriously.
Alas, I hail from an earlier time, when people thought that what they did mattered, and that the future was somehow our responsibility. I find the idea of pursuing a life of social onanism and moral solipsism too depressing for words.
A lady I know once asked me about penguins in the arctic. She was stunned when I told her there were no wild penguins north of the equator. "There go all my Canadian thanksgiving jokes."
I actually started to read that one. You don't actually have to read the whole thing to discover its bogusity. Early on, it talks about how the Chinese solved the longitude problem with clever astronomical observations. Thing is, that technique is not exactly news: it just doesn't work when you're on a ship in the middleof the ocean! You need a stable platform.
Jeez, this is the most asinine thread I've ever read. We start with some tasteless jokes about dying animals and end up with the argument that it's all no big deal because a little coastal flooding now and then is good. Let's not deal with the hard stuff, like the extinction of thousands of species, the loss of cropland, the reversal of the carbon cycle, increase in catastrophic weather, and the faint (but real) possibility that the whole thing will cycle out of control and render the planet uninhabitable. No, that would require giving up some smugness. And we at Slashdot value our smugness!
Right you are. And note that how TFA cherry-picks its data. They point out what percentage of hits each browser has, and how much traffic has shifted from older versions to FF3 (with a huge emphasis on the latter). But they say nothing about FF versus IE trends over time. Without which, how can they possibly say "Watch out Redmond"?
And let's not forget this is just one site.
I'm a loyal FF user, but I get really tired of bogus statistics that "prove" IE's days are numbered. FF does seem to have some encouraging growth, but unless it grows a lot faster, it won't be the majority browser in my lifetime. People who breathlessly report this nonsense are only feeding the mainstream stereotype of OSS enthusiasts as a bunch of clueless dweebs.
Given that the JDK/JRE have always been no cost software from the beginning I just don't see this whole thing changing my life one bit.
It may be no cost to download but you can't redistribute it. That's not a big deal if your code only has to run on Windows, for which Sun maintains a free download/update service. But if you're targeting Linux, you really want Linux distros to bundle Sun's JRE. Until that JRE has a compliant open-source license, that's not going to happen.
And remember, OSS is not just about cost. If you have any improvements that you want to see in the Java platform, you'll probably seem them faster when the Java reference implementation ceases to be bound by Sun's (increasingly limited) resources.
Other than porting, compatibility layers or emulators are the best ways to keep old software running. Instead of wasting time porting each and every program, you can write a single program that can essentially make everything work.
When I first learned to program in the early 70s, the leading machine was the IBM 360. Guess what the leading compiler was for that system. Fortran? PL/1? Algol? No, it was a program that translated legacy IBM 7090 machine code!
Right you are. And as a professional nitpicker (officially: technical writer) I can't really complain. But I have to point out that compulsive nitpickers have really pathetic social lives.
And before somebody asks: yes, I do speak from experience.
Sure, people solve "insoluable" technical problems all the time. But the problem here not is that it's too hard to emulate Windows APIs. (It is hard, but not insolubly so.) It's that there are so darn many of them, each with its own unique, quirky behavior.
You could certainly do it if you had really deep pockets and a talented, well-organized team of programmers to throw at the problem. But nobody's going to do that, because they'd never make their investment back.
Note that WINE took fifteen years to get from first conception to what their own developers considered a 1.0 release. And that's still not a universal plug-and-play solution. What it is is an economically sustainable project that has matured just in time to capitalize on the Vista debacle. That's a pretty cool achievement, and it wouldn't have happened if WINE's creators has not set themselves realistic goals.
Carpentry and software development are very different in this respect: carpentry is old (one carpenter better known for his religious teachings lived 20 centuries ago, and it was an old craft even then) and software development was invented within the memory of people still alive. Carpenters have had a long time to refine their toolset, whereas programming tools are very much a work in progress.
Also, "sufficient" is not a meaningful concept here. Any Turing-complete programming language is sufficient to write any program. There's a sort of quasi-sufficiency issue with low-level languages (doing a serious modern software project in machine language would consumer many lifetimes), but once you get past a certain point, all languages are sufficient, even the poorly designed ones. It's just a matter of whether the tool meets the particular programmer's needs.
You're asking for an objective answer to a subjective question. What's "superior" in this context? A Java person would say code that easy to debug and maintain. A C++ person would say code that's expressive and concise. Both are right — within their own circle of peers.
Multiple inheritance was left out for the same reason you can't overload +: it creates more problems than it solves. Or at least that's the Java philosophy.
And I'm not even going to go near that tired old "Java is too slow" crap again.
Yeah, as soon as I clicked "Submit" I know somebody would pick that nit. So all right, WINE is a compatibility layer, not an CPU emulator.
But consider the way I was using the word: In my final sentence I wasn't talking about CPU emulators, and I wasn't talking about compatibility layers. I was making a generalization about things that make one thing act like another thing. What's a good word for that? I think "emulator" is fine.
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And the thread gets stupider by the minute. Most predicted disasters end up not happening, therefore there's no need to worry about disasters? I assume you don't live in Iowa.
I said that we cared. I didn't say we cared effectively.
Or maybe we did. Look in your wallet, see if there's a draft card. There isn't? Are any of your co-workers non-white? Women in traditionally male jobs? Openly gay? So maybe we did accomplish a thing or two.
Dude, if the "theoritcal climate change" happens, were talking deaths in the millions. Nobody will even remember the fall of the twin towers.
And we're way beyond theory now. The polar cape is almost gone. That hasn't happen any time since the end of the last ice age.
That seems to be a popular strategy these days: if an argument makes you uncomfortable, just insult the person who makes it. But how can I be properly chastened when your insults are so unimaginative? Come on, you can do better than "lighten up" and "high horse". That's grade school stuff!
Redundant post.
I could argue with you point by point, but I don't feel like rehashing all these issues One More Time. If you google around, you can find the standard arguments on both sides. Every issue you raise has been answered before, so If you really want to hear counterarguments, they're there for you to examine.
On the other hand, if you just want to do the standard ignorant sniping that's the favorite sport in the blogosophere, then dude, you are certainly part of the problem.
I'd rather go extinct than subsist on MREs.
Ah yes, the post-modern slacker approach to global crisis. If you worry at all about the impending extinction of the human race, or (more likely) its continued existence in a degraded state on planet that's become a very unpleasant, well then, you're just taking yourself too seriously.
Alas, I hail from an earlier time, when people thought that what they did mattered, and that the future was somehow our responsibility. I find the idea of pursuing a life of social onanism and moral solipsism too depressing for words.
Cod? Probably gone in our lifetime. More a matter of overfishing than climate change, but it's all the same if you like fish.
I hope you like krill. Cause that's probably gonna be it for seafood.
It's a not a matter of planning.
A lady I know once asked me about penguins in the arctic. She was stunned when I told her there were no wild penguins north of the equator. "There go all my Canadian thanksgiving jokes."
I actually started to read that one. You don't actually have to read the whole thing to discover its bogusity. Early on, it talks about how the Chinese solved the longitude problem with clever astronomical observations. Thing is, that technique is not exactly news: it just doesn't work when you're on a ship in the middleof the ocean! You need a stable platform.
Jeez, this is the most asinine thread I've ever read. We start with some tasteless jokes about dying animals and end up with the argument that it's all no big deal because a little coastal flooding now and then is good. Let's not deal with the hard stuff, like the extinction of thousands of species, the loss of cropland, the reversal of the carbon cycle, increase in catastrophic weather, and the faint (but real) possibility that the whole thing will cycle out of control and render the planet uninhabitable. No, that would require giving up some smugness. And we at Slashdot value our smugness!
The same reason you won't let us forget about the whole twitter sockpuppet issue: the need to prove you were Right All Along.
What, you think that there are computer users that aren't total technonerds? Who let you in?
Right you are. And note that how TFA cherry-picks its data. They point out what percentage of hits each browser has, and how much traffic has shifted from older versions to FF3 (with a huge emphasis on the latter). But they say nothing about FF versus IE trends over time. Without which, how can they possibly say "Watch out Redmond"?
And let's not forget this is just one site.
I'm a loyal FF user, but I get really tired of bogus statistics that "prove" IE's days are numbered. FF does seem to have some encouraging growth, but unless it grows a lot faster, it won't be the majority browser in my lifetime. People who breathlessly report this nonsense are only feeding the mainstream stereotype of OSS enthusiasts as a bunch of clueless dweebs.
If you shoot all the C++ programmers, you might get arrested. Moral issues aside, the economic impact would be pretty extreme.
Given that the JDK/JRE have always been no cost software from the beginning I just don't see this whole thing changing my life one bit.
It may be no cost to download but you can't redistribute it. That's not a big deal if your code only has to run on Windows, for which Sun maintains a free download/update service. But if you're targeting Linux, you really want Linux distros to bundle Sun's JRE. Until that JRE has a compliant open-source license, that's not going to happen.
And remember, OSS is not just about cost. If you have any improvements that you want to see in the Java platform, you'll probably seem them faster when the Java reference implementation ceases to be bound by Sun's (increasingly limited) resources.
Other than porting, compatibility layers or emulators are the best ways to keep old software running. Instead of wasting time porting each and every program, you can write a single program that can essentially make everything work.
When I first learned to program in the early 70s, the leading machine was the IBM 360. Guess what the leading compiler was for that system. Fortran? PL/1? Algol? No, it was a program that translated legacy IBM 7090 machine code!
Right you are. And as a professional nitpicker (officially: technical writer) I can't really complain. But I have to point out that compulsive nitpickers have really pathetic social lives.
And before somebody asks: yes, I do speak from experience.
Sure, people solve "insoluable" technical problems all the time. But the problem here not is that it's too hard to emulate Windows APIs. (It is hard, but not insolubly so.) It's that there are so darn many of them, each with its own unique, quirky behavior.
You could certainly do it if you had really deep pockets and a talented, well-organized team of programmers to throw at the problem. But nobody's going to do that, because they'd never make their investment back.
Note that WINE took fifteen years to get from first conception to what their own developers considered a 1.0 release. And that's still not a universal plug-and-play solution. What it is is an economically sustainable project that has matured just in time to capitalize on the Vista debacle. That's a pretty cool achievement, and it wouldn't have happened if WINE's creators has not set themselves realistic goals.
Carpentry and software development are very different in this respect: carpentry is old (one carpenter better known for his religious teachings lived 20 centuries ago, and it was an old craft even then) and software development was invented within the memory of people still alive. Carpenters have had a long time to refine their toolset, whereas programming tools are very much a work in progress.
Also, "sufficient" is not a meaningful concept here. Any Turing-complete programming language is sufficient to write any program. There's a sort of quasi-sufficiency issue with low-level languages (doing a serious modern software project in machine language would consumer many lifetimes), but once you get past a certain point, all languages are sufficient, even the poorly designed ones. It's just a matter of whether the tool meets the particular programmer's needs.
You're asking for an objective answer to a subjective question. What's "superior" in this context? A Java person would say code that easy to debug and maintain. A C++ person would say code that's expressive and concise. Both are right — within their own circle of peers.
Multiple inheritance was left out for the same reason you can't overload +: it creates more problems than it solves. Or at least that's the Java philosophy.
And I'm not even going to go near that tired old "Java is too slow" crap again.
Yeah, as soon as I clicked "Submit" I know somebody would pick that nit. So all right, WINE is a compatibility layer, not an CPU emulator.
But consider the way I was using the word: In my final sentence I wasn't talking about CPU emulators, and I wasn't talking about compatibility layers. I was making a generalization about things that make one thing act like another thing. What's a good word for that? I think "emulator" is fine.