the idea is that if you let people get really rich of something, it'll trickle back down to the people they need to do their business (e.g. close shrinkwrap software).
But they might trickle on India instead, or go into another business, etc. etc.
Engineers should prefer what's good for engineering (and by extension, science which feeds it all), and have some modicum of faith that benefits follow from that.
there are many reasons to expect the benefits to follow if you do good engineering, so it's not -merely- faith.
so many here are going back to "Larry is within his rights".
Um. No shit! He totally is within his rights.
That's the problem. Free software is about setting up a different right schema where on guy can't get impetuous or scared and screw over the rest, hold them hostage, etc.
He is within his rights and this is the problem with that type of software. It build dependencies.
It's not just personal decisions, in my experience usually the problem, this very problem but from different causes, comes from a business going out of business or, more often, being bought by a competitor.
Buying a comercial business is like buying the customers... as with Oracle buying PeopleSoft.
This is what I like about open source more than anything else, some reliability. A tool I'm using might grow stale if interest wanes, but it's bound to be smoother and the tool will NOT be taken away and I have avenues to personally extend its life if I want to take on the costs of that in time or money.
Saying "it's Larry's right!" is no different from pointing out that it was Jefferson's property right to sleep with his slave too. So what.
Do you guys know we invented these rights? In the state of nature you get the right to property you can defend yourself... nothing more. Everything else is a human invention and we can chose how to invent or, in this case, re-invent.
the point is that they are perfectly within their rights.
let's say I'm perfectly in my rights to take your car I sold you back.
You might not want to buy a car from me. It says in the contract I can take it back.
Is anyone saying BitKeeper is beyond its perfect rights? no, just that it sucks. If they were going beyond their rights there would be some legal remedy. As it is the only remedy is to scramble.
the last thing I want is every page on a search result preloaded... sometimes I don't want to put my IP there! egad! run for the hills... shit, the hills are on fire!!!
I won't argue with your point over all, because it's obviously true. Things like VB serve a role and deserve life.
I'm saying a few things.
(1) C++ gives higher abstraction than C, but it shares a philosophy from the portable assembler idea, while C tranlsates into assembly very directly, C++ translates into C fairly directly. By no means are these languages the end all be all, but they are in the image of the machine. VM based machines impose a translation from a virtual machine to a real machine. That translation must be awkward, because if it were not, you would not even need the VM and would use the machine's paradigm directly.
(2) I'm saying I anticipate an optimization stage when suddenly we really do want that 20% (or whatever it is), and we will rewrite in a compiled language. Does that argument extend to assembly... will some day everything be written in assembly. No. Why? C already is so like the machine that the compiler writes the assembly, the advantage is not of the same scale. However, it does imply some stuff will be done in structured C style rather that using other C++ paradigms... note that C-style is one of the supported paradigms of C++.
(3) embedded VMs have not worked because the VM is not a hardware design. If you build it in hardware, it doesn't see as much improvement as people thing. Things don't run fast in hardware because they are hardware, they run fast because they resolve to circuit flow... electricity running around. The limits of circuit design are why these machines didn't already have the characteristics desired in VMs. However, I do think this is the net effect when we add together VM progress, it will influence hardware design, and we will see machines built with some of the benefits VMs can demonstrate.
and this is all speculation... who knows what the future will bring.
I didn't MFC... but when comparing to VB... why not?
in general it got in the way of what we wanted to do.
what I especially didn't like about it was the fact that using one class meant you pulled in just about everything.
I think we're getting to why it doesn't satisfy the people that wanted VB... people that like C++ don't like MFC... leaving people that don't like C++... why would they use it.
well, yeah, it would use MFC, and this was one reason I rarely used it, because we didn't want MFC in our application (I mean back when I was doing Windows software)... but as bad as it was from a hardcore C++ perspective, it works, and it gives the hooks for the IDE to generate code, etc, and in the end it's still better than Visual Basic... people act like it didn't exist.
I'm not interested in flame wars on the subject... but I wonder where the future lies.
Let's say everything was in a byte interpreted language. If C++ is still faster, then we eventually get to an optimization step where we don't want a heavy runtime, or we can use the last 20% (or whatever, I'm tempted to use a higher percentage but... it's not a real number anyway) of performance increase.
sometimes it's as if some software engineers hate real machines and are sure they could do much better than hardware engineers so they build virtual machines. We are told they will be better than real machines some time soon.
We of course look forward to the day we can throw out the real machine entirely and just use the virtual machine.
I never understood the VB thing considering you could graphically create applications with C++ using Visual Studio if you want. What was the benefit exactly? Not the ability to draw the dialogs and right click to go to the code... but C++ is scary I guess.
I can admit C++ is scary but I thought VB was absolutely terrifying!!!
Slashdot Mirror
the explanation says the surface is warm to the touch.
obviously there is something they havn't told us.
Bush has gotten man to Mars! Gooooo Leader!
it's all trickle down logic.
the idea is that if you let people get really rich of something, it'll trickle back down to the people they need to do their business (e.g. close shrinkwrap software).
But they might trickle on India instead, or go into another business, etc. etc.
Engineers should prefer what's good for engineering (and by extension, science which feeds it all), and have some modicum of faith that benefits follow from that.
there are many reasons to expect the benefits to follow if you do good engineering, so it's not -merely- faith.
you run a chance of getting burned... your reply seems to answer the idea that we should fork a commercial code base... did someone say that?
to be exact.
you are welcome to your opinion... but now must die.
sorry, but thanks for all the fish.
so many here are going back to "Larry is within his rights".
Um. No shit! He totally is within his rights.
That's the problem. Free software is about setting up a different right schema where on guy can't get impetuous or scared and screw over the rest, hold them hostage, etc.
He is within his rights and this is the problem with that type of software. It build dependencies.
It's not just personal decisions, in my experience usually the problem, this very problem but from different causes, comes from a business going out of business or, more often, being bought by a competitor.
Buying a comercial business is like buying the customers... as with Oracle buying PeopleSoft.
This is what I like about open source more than anything else, some reliability. A tool I'm using might grow stale if interest wanes, but it's bound to be smoother and the tool will NOT be taken away and I have avenues to personally extend its life if I want to take on the costs of that in time or money.
Saying "it's Larry's right!" is no different from pointing out that it was Jefferson's property right to sleep with his slave too. So what.
Do you guys know we invented these rights? In the state of nature you get the right to property you can defend yourself... nothing more. Everything else is a human invention and we can chose how to invent or, in this case, re-invent.
the point is that they are perfectly within their rights.
let's say I'm perfectly in my rights to take your car I sold you back.
You might not want to buy a car from me. It says in the contract I can take it back.
Is anyone saying BitKeeper is beyond its perfect rights? no, just that it sucks. If they were going beyond their rights there would be some legal remedy. As it is the only remedy is to scramble.
where... ?
and that was the error.
monopole attract like charge!!!
and the cats married the fishes and we all lived happilly ever before.
it's April Fools day.
official holiday of geekdom.
I saw the Google Drink link at Google and I... wait no, I don't have to admit that.
it's fine! don't worry!
it's great to have millions of high speed electrons sprayed at your head all day!
it's good for you.
it gives your brain conditioning... like a nano-massage... and a tan, you're brain gets a tan.
Also really good? letting a pitching machine hurl baseballs at your face.
the last thing I want is every page on a search result preloaded... sometimes I don't want to put my IP there! egad! run for the hills... shit, the hills are on fire!!!
"Let me start by saying that, odds are, you get the respect you deserve."
welcome to our planet! you have a lot to learn but at least you're trying!
no on this planet you don't get the respect you deserve or earn except as a special case...
some people call me cynical, but everyone calls me realistic.
I won't argue with your point over all, because it's obviously true. Things like VB serve a role and deserve life.
I'm saying a few things.
(1) C++ gives higher abstraction than C, but it shares a philosophy from the portable assembler idea, while C tranlsates into assembly very directly, C++ translates into C fairly directly. By no means are these languages the end all be all, but they are in the image of the machine. VM based machines impose a translation from a virtual machine to a real machine. That translation must be awkward, because if it were not, you would not even need the VM and would use the machine's paradigm directly.
(2) I'm saying I anticipate an optimization stage when suddenly we really do want that 20% (or whatever it is), and we will rewrite in a compiled language. Does that argument extend to assembly... will some day everything be written in assembly. No. Why? C already is so like the machine that the compiler writes the assembly, the advantage is not of the same scale. However, it does imply some stuff will be done in structured C style rather that using other C++ paradigms... note that C-style is one of the supported paradigms of C++.
(3) embedded VMs have not worked because the VM is not a hardware design. If you build it in hardware, it doesn't see as much improvement as people thing. Things don't run fast in hardware because they are hardware, they run fast because they resolve to circuit flow... electricity running around. The limits of circuit design are why these machines didn't already have the characteristics desired in VMs. However, I do think this is the net effect when we add together VM progress, it will influence hardware design, and we will see machines built with some of the benefits VMs can demonstrate.
and this is all speculation... who knows what the future will bring.
if you watch TV shows produced in that state.
google is removing France from Google Maps...
I didn't MFC... but when comparing to VB... why not?
in general it got in the way of what we wanted to do.
what I especially didn't like about it was the fact that using one class meant you pulled in just about everything.
I think we're getting to why it doesn't satisfy the people that wanted VB... people that like C++ don't like MFC... leaving people that don't like C++... why would they use it.
I guess.
well, yeah, it would use MFC, and this was one reason I rarely used it, because we didn't want MFC in our application (I mean back when I was doing Windows software)... but as bad as it was from a hardcore C++ perspective, it works, and it gives the hooks for the IDE to generate code, etc, and in the end it's still better than Visual Basic... people act like it didn't exist.
ok... got that out of my system.
what I really mean is, "do whatever you like... it's all good!"
I'm not interested in flame wars on the subject... but I wonder where the future lies.
Let's say everything was in a byte interpreted language. If C++ is still faster, then we eventually get to an optimization step where we don't want a heavy runtime, or we can use the last 20% (or whatever, I'm tempted to use a higher percentage but... it's not a real number anyway) of performance increase.
sometimes it's as if some software engineers hate real machines and are sure they could do much better than hardware engineers so they build virtual machines. We are told they will be better than real machines some time soon.
We of course look forward to the day we can throw out the real machine entirely and just use the virtual machine.
>What is the point in taking jabs at people when you have no idea what the situation was?
it's a rhetorical question.
>I ask because a lot of your complaints have been at least partially addressed in the new release.
nothing personal, but that response is classice.
As is the "but hey, the first hit is free! you have no excuse to not try heroin!".
but whatever floats your boat...
I never understood the VB thing considering you could graphically create applications with C++ using Visual Studio if you want. What was the benefit exactly? Not the ability to draw the dialogs and right click to go to the code... but C++ is scary I guess.
I can admit C++ is scary but I thought VB was absolutely terrifying!!!
I think *this* is equivalent to "*this*", but without the quotes.