I did not claim it was as readable. My post was about the claim of 90% reduction in code size.
Few languages require such "byzantine constructions" to do this task, provided it is permitted to use a library designed to the task. It would be trivial to make a java library that allows one to write something like:
new WordParser(theString).line(5).word(2).chars(0,3)
If it was very useful that library already exists somewhere.
Having powerful tools available means you are not stuck when your custom word parser library suddenly does not fit the task at hand. It might require a higher level of education or experience to use such more powerful tools. Anyone with that education or experience would not want to use a simplified language like this.
I do not think they have a XML parser build into the standard library. So how exactly would one make a one liner to extract some value from a XML file? Any language with xpath support can do that with a one liner. Choosing a one liner that fits your language and standard library does not really prove or show anything much about your language compared to others.
Apologies for using "real". There is nothing "not real" about any application. However Microsoft never tried to marketing VB as something it isn't. These guys do.
What I meant is that these are languages that are mostly used in a specialized niche. Mostly for making easy GUIs for custom applications on top of office applications or asp.
If you had a language that really could reduce code by 90%, I would want to use that for everything, including system programming. It appears only their marketing people believe this language could do that. It is clearly not designed to be general purpose.
One of the astro-turf comments in TFA reads like this:
"Even though ‘90-per cent less code than traditional languages’ reads like a big claim, it is valid one.
If you have a string you want to extract the first 3 characters of the second word on the 5ths line from and display it in an alert box, how many lines of code would you need to write in traditional languages? In rev this is a one-liner.
answer char 1 to 3 of word 2 of line 5 of theString/* where theString is a variable that holds the content */"
Of course any competent programmer can do the same in just as little code. For java it would be something like this:
This is roughly the same amount of code. Not 90% less.
"Text processing" is apparently touted as one of the strong points of the language. Yet, I am sure old fashioned perl and regular expressions are likely more concise and powerful. As shown above, even java can compete.
How would this fare with real programming tasks? First order functions? List comprehension? Closures? A sound typesystem? You could go on forever.
These topics seem to be ignored. This is a VisualBasic clone, not an attempt at a language that you would create "real" programs in.
If you ARE a language inventor and reading my comment, answer this: can you write a cache/MMU interface or an interrupt handler in your language? If the answer is no, go back to the drawing board.
So there is zero assembler code in the Linux kernel because C can do it all? Not so.
You do not need explicit memory management or pointer arithmetic to do these things. To write a device driver you might need the ability to access memory directly, but that could easily be done by mapping the memory region to an array.
There are incremental garbage collectors that guarantee real time performance.
It would probably be a huge benefit if the OS was written in a better language than C. One that takes a whole host of bugs out of the equation by not allowing manual memory management and pointer arithmetic.
The history of selling GPL software is long and should not surprise you. Your software has already been sold by numerous Linux distributions (RedHat et al).
What makes these guys any different?
If you want to cash out the $99 you should definitely put it up for sale for free.
If not, you should not complain about someone making money distributing GPL software - they stand on the shoulders of giants doing exactly that.
This is of course going to be different all over the globe, but it is not uncommon that the power company has to pay for the land for the poles. What made you think they didn't?
Even if said land is free, the poles and associated power lines are not. Someone needs to pay for maintenance when you sell your power to your neighbor through those lines.
If you are paid exactly the same for your selling as your neighbor pays for buying, there is nothing left to pay for the network.
So the search comes up with 6 links to torrents. What it doesn't come up with is a link to buy the same book as an electronically downloadable non-DRM version with no bullshit.
There is very little you can do to stop the torrents. I am sure there are a lot of students that will use the torrent option. But you need to put them in the same category as students that choose to buy the book from an older student or use the local library: you make no money on those guys no matter what.
But you can make sure you do not unnecessarily push buyers that are willing to buy to download torrents. You need to supply the same easy and no fuss download options as the torrents. Forget about supplying a crippled product with DRM - it goes against the idea of supplying the better product and there is no point anyway as you discovered.
There is a small trick I have seen for textbooks: Make some extras available on your site that requires a unique code from the book. Block any code you find in pirated copies. You can detect pirated codes simply by number of uses.
A smart device might do things a bit differently. It will not do your described cycle of read-block/change-data/erase/write-same-block. Instead it will buffer up enough changes until it has a full block and then write it to a _different_ block. One that is already preerased. There is no need to store sectors in the original order - just keep a table with sector locations.
A small capacitor makes it safe to delay writting by storing enough power to do emergency flush during powerloss.
I am sure makers of these device are putting much into making better algorithms to optimizing the write patterns and even online defragmentation of the device. Those algorithms is what sets the premium devices from Intel et al appart from the cheap crap.
I say it is not accurate that NAND needs to go away as you claim. We just need more mature strategies to handle these devices and Intel is doing pretty good already IMHO.
By selling Windows XP you can bundle in a lot of trial versions of programs like Microsoft Office, virus scan etc. New computers are stuffed up with adware these days.
This means the effective price of Windows XP is actually negative. Something Linux can not compete with. Who wants to pay to bundle a trial of an office package with Linux that comes with Open Office preinstalled?
"If the ABL achieves its design goals, it could destroy liquid-fueled ICBMs up to 600 km away. Tougher solid-fueled ICBM destruction range would likely be limited to 300 km"
However blimbs do not blow up just because you make a small pinsized hole in them. It might be much harder to destroy a blimb with a laser than a missile.
Why do you assume blimps are not tough to this kind of damage?
Ubuntu and Debian are related siblings. I consider Ubuntu to be what Debian stable should have been.
The answer is no. Anything Ubuntu creates will be backported to Debian. Go with Debian if you want all the new stuff faster. Go with Ubuntu if you want a stable system, yet updated more often than Debian stable.
I also believe Ubuntu brings more QA to the table. They put considerable resources into making sure each release is good.
Why? It is fast, it has tools integration and it can be used in much the same way as subversion/CVS. It is much easier to learn and just as powerful as something like GIT.
There might be reasons to use GIT for extreme projects like the Linux kernel, but I believe Bazaar will do just fine for all reasonably sized projects.
No, you have proven nothing. That would require you to provide links to documentation for your claims. All you have is pure speculation. You have not even owned on of these devices and had it fail on you (as far as you have informed us).
As it is, you will be proven wrong by time. In a year or two everyone will using SSD in place of harddrives. You included.
All those laptops sold today with SSD do have swap enabled. And they do not seem to fail within weeks.
The SSD can not tolerate writes or swap is no longer true. End of story.
Besides, my machine has 4 GB of swap. The OS has chosen to use 0 bytes of it. Why? Because before you spend a fortune on a SSD drive, you will buy enough RAM that you do not need to swap. Swap is SLOW if you did not notice.
It is possible you just selected the wrong drive. I have similar workload to what you describe, and I have very much considered the Mtron PRO devices. They can supposedly do random writes in small blocks efficiently.
You are not very informed. The Mtron device tested has a write endurance of 140 years at 50 GB/day writing. Yes, you will probably claim that you write more than that (unlikely), but you can write terrabytes per day on average, and still not have a problem.
It will be less than a year before every top of the line system has SSD for performance reasons. The only downside is the price, but that has never bothered the people buying top of the line.
I "own" one or two audible audiobooks. Or used to anyway, I doubt I am still able to listen to them.
They lost me as customer. I will never buy from them again, unless they offer a DRM free option.
They _are_ losing business. There _will_ be other outlets that start in the audiobooks marked, and the DRM strategy will allow those other outlets to squeeze in where Audible otherwise hold the marked.
Slashdot Mirror
I did not claim it was as readable. My post was about the claim of 90% reduction in code size.
Few languages require such "byzantine constructions" to do this task, provided it is permitted to use a library designed to the task. It would be trivial to make a java library that allows one to write something like:
new WordParser(theString).line(5).word(2).chars(0,3)
If it was very useful that library already exists somewhere.
Having powerful tools available means you are not stuck when your custom word parser library suddenly does not fit the task at hand. It might require a higher level of education or experience to use such more powerful tools. Anyone with that education or experience would not want to use a simplified language like this.
I do not think they have a XML parser build into the standard library. So how exactly would one make a one liner to extract some value from a XML file? Any language with xpath support can do that with a one liner. Choosing a one liner that fits your language and standard library does not really prove or show anything much about your language compared to others.
Apologies for using "real". There is nothing "not real" about any application. However Microsoft never tried to marketing VB as something it isn't. These guys do.
What I meant is that these are languages that are mostly used in a specialized niche. Mostly for making easy GUIs for custom applications on top of office applications or asp.
If you had a language that really could reduce code by 90%, I would want to use that for everything, including system programming. It appears only their marketing people believe this language could do that. It is clearly not designed to be general purpose.
One of the astro-turf comments in TFA reads like this:
"Even though ‘90-per cent less code than traditional languages’ reads like a big claim, it is valid one.
If you have a string you want to extract the first 3 characters of the second word on the 5ths line from and display it in an alert box, how many lines of code would you need to write in traditional languages? In rev this is a one-liner.
answer char 1 to 3 of word 2 of line 5 of theString /* where theString is a variable that holds the content */"
Of course any competent programmer can do the same in just as little code. For java it would be something like this:
alert(theString.replaceFirst("(.*\n){4}\\s*\\S+\\s+","").substring(0,3));
or
alert(theString.split("\n")[4].trim().split(" +")[1].substring(0,3));
This is roughly the same amount of code. Not 90% less.
"Text processing" is apparently touted as one of the strong points of the language. Yet, I am sure old fashioned perl and regular expressions are likely more concise and powerful. As shown above, even java can compete.
How would this fare with real programming tasks? First order functions? List comprehension? Closures? A sound typesystem? You could go on forever.
These topics seem to be ignored. This is a VisualBasic clone, not an attempt at a language that you would create "real" programs in.
If you ARE a language inventor and reading my comment, answer this: can you write a cache/MMU interface or an interrupt handler in your language? If the answer is no, go back to the drawing board.
So there is zero assembler code in the Linux kernel because C can do it all? Not so.
You do not need explicit memory management or pointer arithmetic to do these things. To write a device driver you might need the ability to access memory directly, but that could easily be done by mapping the memory region to an array.
There are incremental garbage collectors that guarantee real time performance.
It would probably be a huge benefit if the OS was written in a better language than C. One that takes a whole host of bugs out of the equation by not allowing manual memory management and pointer arithmetic.
I think EVs need to be more strictly regulated in their mileage claims. Let them go on the same treadmill as they gasoline/diesel cars must ride.
The Tesla Roadster was tested that way.
The history of selling GPL software is long and should not surprise you. Your software has already been sold by numerous Linux distributions (RedHat et al).
What makes these guys any different?
If you want to cash out the $99 you should definitely put it up for sale for free.
If not, you should not complain about someone making money distributing GPL software - they stand on the shoulders of giants doing exactly that.
This is of course going to be different all over the globe, but it is not uncommon that the power company has to pay for the land for the poles. What made you think they didn't?
Even if said land is free, the poles and associated power lines are not. Someone needs to pay for maintenance when you sell your power to your neighbor through those lines.
If you are paid exactly the same for your selling as your neighbor pays for buying, there is nothing left to pay for the network.
So the search comes up with 6 links to torrents. What it doesn't come up with is a link to buy the same book as an electronically downloadable non-DRM version with no bullshit.
There is very little you can do to stop the torrents. I am sure there are a lot of students that will use the torrent option. But you need to put them in the same category as students that choose to buy the book from an older student or use the local library: you make no money on those guys no matter what.
But you can make sure you do not unnecessarily push buyers that are willing to buy to download torrents. You need to supply the same easy and no fuss download options as the torrents. Forget about supplying a crippled product with DRM - it goes against the idea of supplying the better product and there is no point anyway as you discovered.
There is a small trick I have seen for textbooks: Make some extras available on your site that requires a unique code from the book. Block any code you find in pirated copies. You can detect pirated codes simply by number of uses.
A smart device might do things a bit differently. It will not do your described cycle of read-block/change-data/erase/write-same-block. Instead it will buffer up enough changes until it has a full block and then write it to a _different_ block. One that is already preerased. There is no need to store sectors in the original order - just keep a table with sector locations.
A small capacitor makes it safe to delay writting by storing enough power to do emergency flush during powerloss.
I am sure makers of these device are putting much into making better algorithms to optimizing the write patterns and even online defragmentation of the device. Those algorithms is what sets the premium devices from Intel et al appart from the cheap crap.
I say it is not accurate that NAND needs to go away as you claim. We just need more mature strategies to handle these devices and Intel is doing pretty good already IMHO.
By selling Windows XP you can bundle in a lot of trial versions of programs like Microsoft Office, virus scan etc. New computers are stuffed up with adware these days.
This means the effective price of Windows XP is actually negative. Something Linux can not compete with. Who wants to pay to bundle a trial of an office package with Linux that comes with Open Office preinstalled?
"If the ABL achieves its design goals, it could destroy liquid-fueled ICBMs up to 600 km away. Tougher solid-fueled ICBM destruction range would likely be limited to 300 km"
However blimbs do not blow up just because you make a small pinsized hole in them. It might be much harder to destroy a blimb with a laser than a missile.
Why do you assume blimps are not tough to this kind of damage?
Absolute zero is -273.15C.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin
Is Linux really this desperate?
Yes. We already made everything else better. It is the only thing left to do.
Ubuntu and Debian are related siblings. I consider Ubuntu to be what Debian stable should have been.
The answer is no. Anything Ubuntu creates will be backported to Debian. Go with Debian if you want all the new stuff faster. Go with Ubuntu if you want a stable system, yet updated more often than Debian stable.
I also believe Ubuntu brings more QA to the table. They put considerable resources into making sure each release is good.
I found the Bazaar system to be superior to all other version control systems I have tried, including subversion and GIT.
http://bazaar-vcs.org/
Why? It is fast, it has tools integration and it can be used in much the same way as subversion/CVS. It is much easier to learn and just as powerful as something like GIT.
There might be reasons to use GIT for extreme projects like the Linux kernel, but I believe Bazaar will do just fine for all reasonably sized projects.
Good for you. I guess you have not had to use that backup from a total SAN failure yet. Likely you never will as I assume you have good equipment.
If you where to scale up your setup to gmail size, that would have happened. And you would not have been able to claim only two hours downtime.
They only lifted 165 kg. But they claim Falcon 1 can lift 420 kg to an orbit of 185 km. How much farther up can it go with 255 kg less load?
Maybe it was more important to demonstrate high altitude than heavy cargo capability.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To-XOPgaGsQ
This shows the fourht launch.
The video on spacex.com is for previous launches. I suppose they are all getting drunk now, instead of updating the website.
You were probably looking at the video of the second launch attempt. That launch failed due to those oscillations.
The video of the fourth and successful launch does not seem to be available yet.
In anycase, I think I've proven my point.
No, you have proven nothing. That would require you to provide links to documentation for your claims. All you have is pure speculation. You have not even owned on of these devices and had it fail on you (as far as you have informed us).
As it is, you will be proven wrong by time. In a year or two everyone will using SSD in place of harddrives. You included.
All those laptops sold today with SSD do have swap enabled. And they do not seem to fail within weeks.
The SSD can not tolerate writes or swap is no longer true. End of story.
Besides, my machine has 4 GB of swap. The OS has chosen to use 0 bytes of it. Why? Because before you spend a fortune on a SSD drive, you will buy enough RAM that you do not need to swap. Swap is SLOW if you did not notice.
It is possible you just selected the wrong drive. I have similar workload to what you describe, and I have very much considered the Mtron PRO devices. They can supposedly do random writes in small blocks efficiently.
You are not very informed. The Mtron device tested has a write endurance of 140 years at 50 GB/day writing. Yes, you will probably claim that you write more than that (unlikely), but you can write terrabytes per day on average, and still not have a problem.
It will be less than a year before every top of the line system has SSD for performance reasons. The only downside is the price, but that has never bothered the people buying top of the line.
Which means that USA is publishing a list of which objects to watch.
Anything big, but not on the US list -> its a spy satelite. Better cover everything up when it passes overhead.
Sometimes policies like this are just stupid.
I "own" one or two audible audiobooks. Or used to anyway, I doubt I am still able to listen to them.
They lost me as customer. I will never buy from them again, unless they offer a DRM free option.
They _are_ losing business. There _will_ be other outlets that start in the audiobooks marked, and the DRM strategy will allow those other outlets to squeeze in where Audible otherwise hold the marked.