Blair is a CENTRIST politician who belongs to a party with a leftist tradition. The far-left is just as ideologically driven as the far-right. Just because Blair practices pragmatism doesn't mean left-wing/socialist ideology has gone away.
Please reread his comment, particularly noting his phrase "at this point". He never said left-wing ideology has 'gone away'.
If you've been paying attention, there are more and more hybrid cars and SUVs hitting the market, some can get up to 60MPH, so what you are saying needs to happen is happening, it just takes time.
Average gas mileage is lower today than is was in the early 1980s. Car makers are absolutely standing in the way of higher fuel efficiency, and they have been lobbying for decades to oppose it.
Qt was around years before KDE. And Trolltech was a smaller, but still successful, company back then. I was programming Qt back in 1997? 98? It was rock-solid even then. GTK+, which, I might add, was being developed for political reasons, was kind of a permanent, bloody migrane to work in. And let's focus in on the reasons again. Qt was there. Then KDE happened. Then Miguel and co pitched a fit that this well-designed app was becoming a new Linux standard, and screamed bloody hell that it was based on a non-GPLed toolkit. Qt was free on Linux, but That Wasn't Good Enough. They borrowed the toolkit from GIMP, called GTK internally, renamed it as GTK+, decided to keep it in C, and started work on it and GNOME in order to preserve GPL sanctity on the Linux desktop. Scroll forward two years. You find that KDE has continued lightyears ahead of GNOME, and that in response to the GNOMEitistas, Trolltech has first created the QPL, which the OSI rated as open-source, but since That Wasn't Good Enough, Trolltech then released Qt under the GPL, but somehow that STILL Wasn't Good Enough for the GNOMEitistas, and so the silly war continued...
I don't know if you've been around that long. But there's the background on the FUD. There's a bit of a tendency in the slashdot crowd to just accept the years old FUD and not think about it too much.
"The community at large" I guess kind of means whatever you want it to mean. If you mean "GUI developers", then, no, C is not the standard, C++ has been the standard for years. Passing C++ references and calling object methods is the way most GUI programming is done, not writing preprocessor macros to magically objectify sickeninly complex C structs and chasing function pointers around the app. If you mean, "open source programmers", then no, C is still not the standard, C++ and Java compete with all the scripting toolkits out there now. If you mean "slashdot bigots with poor grasp of history", then yes, you could say that C is the standard.
Has all the expensive "modern" digital studio retracking and remixing made the music we get any better? I don't think so.
Sure. Pick up any indie rock disc made in the last 5 years. Start with The Flaming Lips' "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots". Music is made now that might have been impossible to make a couple decades ago, at least for cost reasons...
Your post bites on a red herring. Big-label albums cost millions to produce for political reasons, not technical ones. Political reason #1 is that there is incentive for the label to push up the recording costs as high as possible -- it's all recoupable to the artist, which in turn increases the label's leverage.
P.R.#2: style. The producers run their clocks while the label debates whether or not the current cut reflects the style they're shooting for -- generally identical to the current pop phase. Small labels don't have the cash or clout to try to play this game. And it's often a useless cycle: the editor will use his taste and experience on a cut, it will run around the label staff, they'll ask for changes, then changes on that, again and again and it will often come back around to close to the editor's first cut.
P.R.#3: favors. An actress wants to 'break into music'; some big director has a nephew who plays bass; etc, etc. What can they bring into the studio? How much practice, songwriting, rapport with their band, etc; or is it a pretty face with 6 months of voice lessons using someone else's songs and backed by session musicians? Compare to a band who played & toured together for a few years: they have a huge repetoire of music, and the familiarity to be flexible with it and each other, improvise on the spot, etc. Not usually so with the Hollywood charity cases - so the editor slaves over every take to assemble them into something approaching music, driving the costs up again.
P.R.#4 is just that it's a big stupid company. A 4 person band can spend a week in the studio with an editor, producer, sound guy, & maybe a label rep and basically finish a disc. A big company will have many more people involved in the process, more people onsite, more people working on 'image', more marketing, more management with stakes in the band who keep 'in the loop'; every small decision can become a major debate. It's not that they're stupid or inured to incompetence or anything; it's just a structural problem of having so many people involved.
And tell me where to find a good dealer who can keep me informed on quality gear. You're talking about reproduction/distortion concepts that, although I could look up in a few minutes, I (almost most everyone else) doesn't understand how they interrelate to produce quality audio.
The reason being is that the h/l compiler can reason about, and thus optimize over, larger components than the C compiler.
Links man, come on! This is Slashdot, you can't just make wild assertions without backing them up with facts. Or at least a random opionion off the web... there must be one out there somewhere.
How is that a wild assertion? A higher level compiler can make more global optimizations than a lower-level one. Welcome to introductory CS... For example, C has the concept of structs; assembly doesn't; a C compiler can optimize a struct for packing, alignment, access speed, etc; the assembler can't make those kinds of decisions intelligently. This pattern is repeated all over computing...What are some things (affecting execution speed, let's ignore all the other cool things) that a high-level language can reason about that a C-level lang can't? Try memory management, real numbers, exception handling, real types (no casting), tail recursion stack elimination, co-recursion, lambda expressions, a large base of first class types, etc....
I'd love to see evidence of a functional (or any other) program that can outperform the naive C equivalent.
Why is that difficult? Dammit, Jim, almost anything done carefully can outperform the naive C equivalent -- C is only fast and effective when it is done as carefully as assembly usually warrants. C can be faster, if you can hold all the myriad low-level details in your mind and optimize all of it correctly; h/l/ls can reason about much of that themselves, assuring good mean optimization and leaving you to focus on fewer components. In practice, this dichotomy is noticed in that in a large random sample of programs written in a variety of languages, low level langs like C have a very large standard deviation - the lower point of the curve are very, very, fast programs, but the curve is so broad, you'll find C programs way out in O(n^3) land; the h/l/ls are a bit above the bottom, but their s.d. is much smaller - so they are more predictably fast than a product full of reinvented wheels.
As for bypassing the proto- stage and going straight to completed app using ML, if it's such a good idea, why doesn't this happen? Is it just because nobody ever released "MFC4ML"? Or are half the binaries I buy actually compiled Lisp? I doubt it...
It happens, but not that often. There are the issues of available coders ("how do I find people") which is usually a red herring; language bigotry from VCs, middle managers, & press ("you use what??") - example: since the AI Winter of the mid 80's, Lisp has been a dirty word; delivery method (desktop guis have a very strong impetus to write apps in the OS language, aka, C/C++); and a few others. There are successful companies developing software in advanced languages, and they tend to have a few things in common: they work with very small teams, they don't tell anyone what they dev with, and they write server apps or desktop apps for niche markets. Suffice it to say that popularity != quality. And how often, where you work, have you been able to choose tools regardless of the marketing-informed opinions of the suits? Programming is a wierd field where the actual craftsmen are often unable to control the choice of their tools.
Anyway, would the/. kiddies please read a little history of computing? C is not the beginning and end of languages....
Prototyping in a higher-level language (c# is easy, java everyone knows) is a superb idea, provided you
- can release the final product as interpreted, with slow execution speed
- can afford the time to port all to C, in which case DO, this is an excellent way to make a watertight C program
Sir! I wish to introduce to you to the strange new-fangled notion of compiled high-level languages! Yes, languages with higher-than-C-level abstractions have been sneakily producing native machine code for some time now. Some of the most popular are listed below:
O'Caml is a marvel of strongly typed object orientation, but you'd hardly know it from using it -- there are almost no C-style type declarations; as a ML child, O'Caml uses type inferencing to prove powerful assertions about program validity and improve programmer convenience. It's compiled! And if you watch the ICFP's, you might note that it consistently beats C compilers for speed of execution. '92, if I recall.
I never really bought OO, so S/ML is fine by me. Still compiled, since 1984.
And they both descend from ML, started in 1973.
Lisp was compiled in 59 or 62 (mccarthy or 1.5, chose your valid date). But then, I suppose it'd have to be compiled, since the notion of interpreted code hadn't been concieved of yet!
Erlang is the last, best, word in concurrent programming. If you want to write a high throughput, reliable threaded application, you shouldn't even think of the word 'C'. This broke out of its lab in '87, first compiler in '91.
Scheme is often thought of as a testbed for interpreted language concepts, but even it can be compiled, and with concepts such as continuations that can actually make a C programmer's head explode! Since 1982, commercial grade compilers have been available.
Even haskell is compiled, but as monadic programming is less than 10 years old, no one knows how to always write really fast code in it yet. Leave your number, we'll call you in 2034, right before you gear up to deal with your year 2038 rollover crisis.
Welcome to the late 1970's! We look forward to your eventual arrival in the 80's and early 90's. Please enjoy your stay!
ps. As modern coding is more about the manipulation of very complex structures, rather than how to say, walk a linked list; a higher level language, with native support for more complex constructs, has the potential for creating much faster applications than something on the level of C. The reason being is that the h/l compiler can reason about, and thus optimize over, larger components than the C compiler.
Hmm.. you make an excellent point, and illuminate it better than I did. But I think we are still in agreement: I think that Columbus set the shots up poorly, and tried to fix all that in the edits. What I got wrong was focusing too much on movement as the prime indicator for a well-framed shot. Forgive me, I'm still new at this.
There are a wealth of reasons to dislike the first Potter movie. It was, on the technical level, a piece of crap.
First and foremost, Chris Columbus's direction of shot construction. That movie had the least mobile camerawork of any film I can remember. Even "My Dinner With Andre" was more fluid, and it's just two guys sitting around a table! I can't overstate how significant this is: working the camera *into* a scene, instead of locking it down and having characters face the camera and narrate, is the very foundation of a good scene. Hell, half the movies discussed here on/. are notable b/c the staff are mostly camera nerds: the Matrix brothers had to hack together their systems for the stop-n-rotate scenes, there's so much being done with DVcam for portability, etc. Go watch the Potter movie again, and see if you can count more than 5 tracking shots in the whole freakin' film. Columbus had full lockdown for almost all footage, and tried to fake fluidity in editing. He's a hack.
The casting was mostly remarkable, except for Dumbledore. The guy playing him isn't going to live to the third movie! What was Columbus thinking? Oh, wait, we covered that deficiency already. Nevermind that for a minute. The actors were very good, but they were constrained by camerawork that was no better than a TV soundstage. So excellent casting and delivery, hobbled by poor framing.
Similarly, the stunts were crap. In the Quidditch scene, did anyone else get the feeling they were watching a late-80's graphics demo? Like from 2nd Reality or something?
The score was repetitive and totally forgettable. I intellectually recall the existence of background music, but can recall and feel none of it whatsoever. The best score this year, btw, is in The Bourne Identity, if you like scores.
Costumes & set construction was unusual: I wasn't expecting steampunk. But that's only stylistic, and not a point of contention, unlike the stupid 'flying staircases' scenes: they 1) weren't in the books, and 2) didn't develop anyone's character. It was typical kids-movie tripe: pointless onscreen toys for gefingerpoken und mittengrubben. Besides that, I was thinking, "didn't I already see this in Labyrinth?" Although, if they added David Bowie in tight pants to the later films, you bet you'd find me in the theater more often.
Yes and no. Certainly, there was some tenement construction 100 years ago that simply couldn't survive to today, but they explicity *were* tenements, not fully-fledged homes for long term usage. Non-tenement construction before WW2 aimed at designing buildings to last 200 years; a very substantial motivating factor was that construction costs were high enough to warrant building to last -- we just couldn't afford the 'build for 20 years' mentality prevalent after the war. Homes built now (or even worse, the 50's-70's) are not designed to last that long, although recent years of 'green' urban construction has started to reverse that trend.
Another substantial problem is legal: zoning laws over the past 60 years have grown to make 1910-style construction more or less impossible. You can't build brownstones, Victorian row houses; you can't build a house without a huge strip of lawn around all side, there are modern parking demands you are constrainted to build, mixed-use neighborhoods are forbidden, and there are huge packages of material and design constraints. This is a huge topic, easily dwarfing this NYC thread. But believe me when I say that affection for 1910-style construction is more than just nostalgia.
I just want to point out that I took first semester physics (Mechanics) with StandardDeviant, and he never seemed to master these spatial problems. So don't take him up on any car/box offers.
Time is the thing 'holding it back'. As Paul Graham pointed out, "Inventors of wonderful new things are often surprised to discover this, but you need time to get any message through to people.... It's not when people notice you're there that they pay attention; it's when they notice you're still there." No matter the benefits of SAPDB (which I have not used), it still has to keep hacking it while people subconciously adjust to the existense of another valid product. This inertia is everywhere, it is the normal thing to do... 3 years back, even when it was obvious that Postgres kicked MySQL's ass 6 ways from Sunday, many people kept using MySQL. It was a known quantity, and this new thing was just something with some wild claims that users didn't take time to validate. A couple years later, the LAMP crowd is/has finally moving/moved towards Postgres; it's not b/c of anything developed last year, it's just that users have realized that it's not going away. Same problem here, scaled back several years.
The originator of the thread should learn that technology doesn't change overnight, and certainly not without the kind of marketing budgets behind Java & C#. Change takes time.
As another answer, I'd ask what is the driving point behind SAPDB? MySQL has/had noteriety for being a very simple system; Postgres had noteriety for advanced research into ORDBMS'es as well as coming out of a university lab that produced two very successful commercial DBs in the past. What's the big focus with SAPDB? All I know so far is that it was an in-house thing that worked for SAP. No idea what that's supposed to mean to me. Maybe someone should answer that first.
Actually, I think MS expected it to do well off the bat in Japan -- the.jp launch was huge, more expensive than the PS2 launch if I remember correctly, and for the first few weeks they posted excellent sales numbers. A big part of their failure was them acting like typical MS. A few weeks after launch, it became apparent that the Xboxes produced for the japanese market were defective: they actually destroyed the game DVDs during play. MS went through its normal flailing about for someone else to blame, including denying the problem existed and blaming users for 'incorrectly using their Xbox', amongst others. This was reported nationally, and sales immediately hit a brick wall. They haven't recovered since.
Other fine choices were made, such as assuming that 'all you need is Halo' and associated myopia, but really it's their habit of treating the customer as the enemy that did them in. It turns out that the PS2's "home court advantage" was the smallest factor in the Xbox's failure.
Does anyone know where to get the briefs for this case? One line in the article bothered me:
He was charged after an RCMP investigation found he was selling a line of 413 pirated video games and charging $30 to install "mod chips" in Sony PlayStation video game consoles.
....and then the rest of the article is grandstanding about mod chips from various, easily bribed parties. From first glance, this looks like they had a cut-and-dried case of copyright infringement because he was selling copied games (thus copying & deriving profit from such), but some groups are trying to cast this case into a ruling on mod chip legality -- which would be a much harder case to prosecute. Has anyone seen this case in detail?
I believe the parent poster was trying to point out that the US emphasizes prosecution of what are considered social 'crimes', like marijuana possession, prostitution, etc; as well as politically fruitful crimes like computer hacking (life sentence, baby!) and hate crimes; and that these are often frequently prioritized over violent crimes. Whereas the Netherlands allows the social 'crimes' and cracks down on the violent crimes with vigor. In the US, this is largely a result of federal mandatory sentencing on politically hot issues, which is basically Congressmen playing judge for the votes, but for whatever reason, the results are striking: drug possession offenders serve time in prison roughly equal to murderers, longer than rapists, and substantially longer than robbery inmates. Our policies have had some interesting effects: amongst Western democracies, we have the highest violent crime rate, the largest percentage of population living in poverty, and the largest percent of population in prison (actually, we have the overall world record on this one). I cannot speak for the Netherlands sentencing length numbers, but I do know that they have 1/10 the rate of violent crime per population as is present in the US; and their prison population is equally low. Given the lack of distracting things their prosecutors have to deal with, I think we can draw a causal connection.
So I can have J2EE in any color I want, as long as it's black?
Just because Java is what you know doesn't mean that it's the only thing going in computing. Nor does my dislike for it indicate that I have not spent the requisite years in Java purgatory. The rest of your message was similarly trite, so I won't bother with it. Come back when you can log in and avoid ad hominems. An actual meaty discussion is pointless until then.
Ha, ha, only serious. No, really, work with me here.
So you've got a collection of programmers. You spend $700 per progger on WebObjects to get 'production quality'. And you expect the site to be up, when, exactly?
Let's see what now has to happen:
The programmers have to learn or brush up on J2EE & Java.
They need to learn how to interact with WebObjects, the APIs, the quirks, the bugs, the misfeatures.
They need to learn to hack around WebObjects when it gets in the way of something they want to do, because they don't have the source code and even if they did they don't know it at all.
The administrators need to learn how to keep it up and running, how to tune it, how to get specific logging, etc.
Everyone has to wade through an enormous volume of typically low-quality documentation to filter out the 95% of the framework that they don't need.
The admins need to figure out why WebObjects' "patented object-relational mapping" is absolutely destroying performance on the DB server and how to get around it.
None of these things are free; you will invest substantial time in learning an app if you go that route.
Now let's say you have a collection of programmers who 1) prefer things other than Java, 2) aren't afraid of SQL, 3) know the web, and 4) like to intimate with their code? (Improbable, I know; there are only a few tens of thousands of us out there.) This team can roll from scratch their own system to do the smallest set of functionality they need, and work up from there. They can admin it in confidence because they wrote it and know how it operates. They can reliably say where performance hits are, and they can do it all in their language of choice.
The question is really: spend time trying to understand someone else's product, or spend time writing a product you understand implictly? For some (most) projects, the former is desirable, for some, the latter is a better choice. For writing an application in a rapidly evolving field, impenetrable closed-sourced middleware is frequently a loss in terms of time usage.
The "core" of LISP is the eval function.. no more, no less...
No, it really isn't, considering that 'eval' doesn't operate within a surrounding lexical context. The core of LISP is s-exprs, atom?, car, cdr, cons, lambda, progn, cond, quote, and function application.
But what I meant was "a generic Common LISP image without loading any modules", but the terminology is a bit unwieldy.
In any case your premise appears to be that "real CS" == large scale software engineering. I respectfully disagree... this is certainly *one* of the major areas of CS... but its not even close to the whole field.
You completely missed what I was trying to say, which is fine.
Considering that that's right there in the core, I should think not.
But more importantly, CS != Programming.
But a big problem w/a CS "exam" is that the timescales are totally absurd. CS draws on several disciplines: HCI, EE, set maths, complexity theory, etc; and establishes many of its own: code translation (compiling), algorithmic efficiency (math has algorithms but not O(f(x)) concerns), data representation. A computer science advancement tends to draw on all of the above, and sounds something like: "using these techniques, we can devise a new method/language for programming that cleanly solves these algorithmic difficulties, produce extremely fast code, and present the user with a simple abstraction to the whole design." That's not something you do on a two hour exam. That's something you prototype in a semester, cover your ass in a year, and make production-capable in 3 years.
Could some of us generate a new programming language with a very restrictive set of operators in 2 hours? Sure. Will it compile? Hell no.
The exams discussed on this story are not CS. They don't even resemble CS. And for real CS, the idea of an undergraduate final exam is just ridiculous.
Cost per mile in a car: 12 cents for gas and amortized repairs.
Cost per mile on a train: variable over range, 10 cents I suppose for an average trip ($4 for a 40 miler down the peninsula). And no fees for parking.
So the government's involved. Did you forget to notice the expenditure on road construction? For 2002, the US DOT is granted 32 billion for highway subsidies. In practice, the federal subsidy is usually 1/4 to 1/5 of a total project cost, the remainder being composed of state and local bond issues and some chunk of the tax base. So, hey, $150 billion this year on highways. Sounds inexpensive to me. Oh, and that's just the standard road package. There are other line-item pork packages that more than double that number.
I'll just avoid the trivial measure of quantifying environmental costs. One day soon, those, too will be in every cost project sheet. Some pollution credits are already traded on the open market between the G7 & NATO states. Add that, and the 'car per person, everywhere' lifestyle gets pricey.
Putting it under government control can 'hide the losses', if by 'hide' you mean 'place budget in full public access'. For private sector loss hiding, Enron was the rule rather than the exception, they were just overzealous.
Any study of rail in the U.S. would be well advised to examine the SF Bay Area, where we have 3 different train systems: Caltrain (Amtrak), BART (a municipal consortium of the local cities), and VTC (some South Bay thing.... I forget). The management of these trains are unusual. The Caltrain is enormous, goes once an hour, and carries a couple thousand people. It's frequently shut down, has a higher rate of suicides than the other trains (~ 30 per year), and has only the one corridor, straight down the peninsula. The BART has a train every 10 minutes or so, they travel much faster, and have an almost perfect safety record. I know in theory they must shut down at some point, I've just never seen it happen. Interestingly enough, the BART is less expensive than the Caltrain.
Contrary to post-Regean political thought, I bring these two up to point out that a private company does not automatically implement things better than a public agency. In this case, the city government did much, much better, and have been for 25 years. (An amusing side-note is that BART is extending its lines down into Caltrain turf, and Amtrak sued to stop them.) We (the US) have a long and sordid history of propping up Amtrak, just to keep the rail system going. We should get some actual engineering talent into relevant government agency and then construct the trains via the public sector rather than the private. It's been done before.
In 1998 guys at Super-Kamiokande in Takayama, Japan found solid evidence for neutrinos having mass, which is a bit of a problem since the Standard Model defines the neutrinos (all of them) as massless. Subsequent experiments have validated these results.
When CERN's next accelerator comes on line in, IIRC, 2006, we can break it a little more by continuing to find the Higgs boson, which is the Standard Model's carrier particle for mass, and has been embarrassingly elusive. Soon after, I'm hoping to collect on my bets that it won't be found.
The Standard Model has been amazingly useful. It is one of the great knowledge unifications of our time. But many working physicists will be glad to see it go, as there are too many magic numbers required, and some troublingly unexplained patterns. Physicists, too, value simplicity.
Yet the more implausible they seem, the more I suspect them of being over-convoluted theories that just _happen_ to match the results. Some things that seem implausible from a macro (visible, Newtonian) point of view are believable, but a lot of the quantum-level theories are just guesswork, as far as I'm concerned.
And yet, they're not guesswork. They are powerful predictive models that have enabled the construction of devices such as the one you are typing garbage into.
Physicists must publish _something_ to keep their jobs, and that's what I think drives too much of the recent scientific theorizing.
Every competent university physicist could easily double their salaries by going into industry. Not everyone in the world is as cynical and trite as yourself.
Yes, academic credentialism is driven by publishing. So? How does that translate into your assumption that all the 'recent theorizing' is bunk? Publishing is hard work. You don't just make up crap and watch is magically traverse the gauntlet of peer review.
For example, fusion research is all simply a massive boondoggle.
Oh, right, because there's no such thing as fusion. That's why we know it's a boondoggle. Oh wait. It seems fusion is actually a common physical process! Maybe we should look into it. If, you know, that's all right with you.
Another interpretation is that the space-time warp of gravity is a big illusion... that gravity isn't about mass but about energy (and mass and energy are related, thus the illusion). Thus the photons which have no mass _do_ have its analog... energy, and thats what gravity acts upon to bend the path.
Work up the math, develop a consistent theory with provable axioms, then we'll talk. This isn't consultancy, s390, this is science. Golf, blowjobs, and 'intuition' won't cut it. Oh, and physics on LSD went out 20 years ago.
Have you actually *read* the General Theory of Relativity? Go get Wheeler's "Gravitation". It deals with your confused theory, and much more besides, all coherently.
We need free thinkers in the physical sciences, but... the entire structure of academia is built to enforce conformity. Some few people survive it and think "outside the box" as it were (Feynmann comes to mind), but the majority are just buried in conformity.
There are things to be said in favor of conformity. Science was created in a time of mystics and frauds. Actually having to prove what you claim was a big jump, and conformity is a natural side-effect of that. On the other hand, there is too much conformity in the university environment these days, but for that the blame can be laid at the doors of the administration. Nationwide, administration staff has doubled relative to student&faculty populations. All the bone-headed management theories that the private sector spent the last decade or two working through have trickled into the Uni, and all the 'free thinkers' fear for their jobs. Tenure, the great bulwark of high-performance original thinkers, is on the way out.
The bottom line for me is that I'm not convinced that they're not just playing with irrelevant and really fantastic math that will never work right. When they go outside five dimensions (3 space, 1 time, 1 energy), I lose interest.
Work through the math, get back to us.
But my scientific intuition is not satisfied by the embarrassing worldwide failure to integrate General Relativity with the Standard Model of Quantum Theory. It's an intellectual debacle that the so-called "best minds" of science haven't been able to work this out for going on a century here.
Perhaps if your 'scientific intuition' was better grounded in, say, math and science, then you wouldn't troll with this garbage. Oh, we broke the Standard Model 3 years ago. Better update your notes.
But then there's audience too to calculate in too. I dare say that if Microsoft were to behave nicely and come out with a superier product that was priced fairly, some one here would find something to bitch about.
Certainly. The platform, for one. Were you suggesting that M$ would come out with a 'superior product that was priced fairly' that ran on multiple platforms (PC, Mac, Un*x, Linux for start), operated in a relatively self-contained mode that didn't require extensive library rework on the non-MS machines, played fairly and constructively with other applications, talked on open procols and file formats, and was generally friendly to being controlled by scripts or broken into components?
I'll believe it when I see it.
The problem with M$, besides being convicted monopoly abusers and yadayada, is their refusal to interoperate with as much as they can get away with. They demand complete adherence across your network, and give interoperability only grudgingly, and frequently with lawsuits. To persons with or in control of large, heterogeneous networks, this behavior is rather irksome, as we grow rather risk-averse, where 'risk' is defined as: reinstalling everything in the building and tossing a decade of experience. Not fun, or worthwhile.
Yes, we're a curmudgeonly audience who are almost totally opposed to Microsoft. But quite a few of us have valid, and very expensive, reasons.
Yes, I am calling "bullshit" on this thread, in case you were wondering.
Oh, gee, like I couldn't tell. While you're at it, please tell me why I keep arguing with children on/.
In which state was the last execution of a person under the age of eighteen? In what year? What was the kid's name?
Last week, Tuesday May 28; Napolean Beazely was put to death by the State of Texas. Beazely was 17 at the time of the crime. That brings up to 10 the number of persons executed by Texas for offenses committed before the age of majority. There are currently 30 juvenile offenders on death row in Texas, with two up in August, if you want to get your vicarious murderer rocks off. Texas is the leader, but by no means alone - 22 other states allow juvenile executions. Do you need a body count on each one?
As a side note, there are cases pending in the US Supreme Court regarding Texas' shockingly poor representation for capital defense; Calvin Burdine's appointed lawyer actually slept through court proceedings. They lead on the international front as well: since 1993 Texas has executed five foreign nationals while denying them consular rights in violation of international law. Just a little side note.
On the bright side, the feds stopped executing juvenile offenders a few years ago. Meanwhile, the number of states that ban the death penalty has risen to 12. If we're really lucky, the Feds might remember the mess of international conventions that they have signed, ratified, and sometimes even written; all of which explicitly forbid juvenile executions.
You need not bother responding to this post. I've already heard enough redneck vitrol and bloodlust for one day. Good night.
Slashdot Mirror
Blair is a CENTRIST politician who belongs to a party with a leftist tradition. The far-left is just as ideologically driven as the far-right. Just because Blair practices pragmatism doesn't mean left-wing/socialist ideology has gone away.
Please reread his comment, particularly noting his phrase "at this point". He never said left-wing ideology has 'gone away'.
If you've been paying attention, there are more and more hybrid cars and SUVs hitting the market, some can get up to 60MPH, so what you are saying needs to happen is happening, it just takes time.
Average gas mileage is lower today than is was in the early 1980s. Car makers are absolutely standing in the way of higher fuel efficiency, and they have been lobbying for decades to oppose it.
Hi.
Qt was around years before KDE. And Trolltech was a smaller, but still successful, company back then. I was programming Qt back in 1997? 98? It was rock-solid even then. GTK+, which, I might add, was being developed for political reasons, was kind of a permanent, bloody migrane to work in. And let's focus in on the reasons again. Qt was there. Then KDE happened. Then Miguel and co pitched a fit that this well-designed app was becoming a new Linux standard, and screamed bloody hell that it was based on a non-GPLed toolkit. Qt was free on Linux, but That Wasn't Good Enough. They borrowed the toolkit from GIMP, called GTK internally, renamed it as GTK+, decided to keep it in C, and started work on it and GNOME in order to preserve GPL sanctity on the Linux desktop. Scroll forward two years. You find that KDE has continued lightyears ahead of GNOME, and that in response to the GNOMEitistas, Trolltech has first created the QPL, which the OSI rated as open-source, but since That Wasn't Good Enough, Trolltech then released Qt under the GPL, but somehow that STILL Wasn't Good Enough for the GNOMEitistas, and so the silly war continued...
I don't know if you've been around that long. But there's the background on the FUD. There's a bit of a tendency in the slashdot crowd to just accept the years old FUD and not think about it too much.
"The community at large" I guess kind of means whatever you want it to mean. If you mean "GUI developers", then, no, C is not the standard, C++ has been the standard for years. Passing C++ references and calling object methods is the way most GUI programming is done, not writing preprocessor macros to magically objectify sickeninly complex C structs and chasing function pointers around the app. If you mean, "open source programmers", then no, C is still not the standard, C++ and Java compete with all the scripting toolkits out there now. If you mean "slashdot bigots with poor grasp of history", then yes, you could say that C is the standard.
Your post bites on a red herring. Big-label albums cost millions to produce for political reasons, not technical ones. Political reason #1 is that there is incentive for the label to push up the recording costs as high as possible -- it's all recoupable to the artist, which in turn increases the label's leverage.
P.R.#2: style. The producers run their clocks while the label debates whether or not the current cut reflects the style they're shooting for -- generally identical to the current pop phase. Small labels don't have the cash or clout to try to play this game. And it's often a useless cycle: the editor will use his taste and experience on a cut, it will run around the label staff, they'll ask for changes, then changes on that, again and again and it will often come back around to close to the editor's first cut.
P.R.#3: favors. An actress wants to 'break into music'; some big director has a nephew who plays bass; etc, etc. What can they bring into the studio? How much practice, songwriting, rapport with their band, etc; or is it a pretty face with 6 months of voice lessons using someone else's songs and backed by session musicians? Compare to a band who played & toured together for a few years: they have a huge repetoire of music, and the familiarity to be flexible with it and each other, improvise on the spot, etc. Not usually so with the Hollywood charity cases - so the editor slaves over every take to assemble them into something approaching music, driving the costs up again.
P.R.#4 is just that it's a big stupid company. A 4 person band can spend a week in the studio with an editor, producer, sound guy, & maybe a label rep and basically finish a disc. A big company will have many more people involved in the process, more people onsite, more people working on 'image', more marketing, more management with stakes in the band who keep 'in the loop'; every small decision can become a major debate. It's not that they're stupid or inured to incompetence or anything; it's just a structural problem of having so many people involved.
Kiss me, you crazy fool.
And tell me where to find a good dealer who can keep me informed on quality gear. You're talking about reproduction/distortion concepts that, although I could look up in a few minutes, I (almost most everyone else) doesn't understand how they interrelate to produce quality audio.
Anyway, would the /. kiddies please read a little history of computing? C is not the beginning and end of languages....
- O'Caml is a marvel of strongly typed object orientation, but you'd hardly know it from using it -- there are almost no C-style type declarations; as a ML child, O'Caml uses type inferencing to prove powerful assertions about program validity and improve programmer convenience. It's compiled! And if you watch the ICFP's, you might note that it consistently beats C compilers for speed of execution. '92, if I recall.
- I never really bought OO, so S/ML is fine by me. Still compiled, since 1984.
- And they both descend from ML, started in 1973.
- Lisp was compiled in 59 or 62 (mccarthy or 1.5, chose your valid date). But then, I suppose it'd have to be compiled, since the notion of interpreted code hadn't been concieved of yet!
- Erlang is the last, best, word in concurrent programming. If you want to write a high throughput, reliable threaded application, you shouldn't even think of the word 'C'. This broke out of its lab in '87, first compiler in '91.
- Scheme is often thought of as a testbed for interpreted language concepts, but even it can be compiled, and with concepts such as continuations that can actually make a C programmer's head explode! Since 1982, commercial grade compilers have been available.
- Even haskell is compiled, but as monadic programming is less than 10 years old, no one knows how to always write really fast code in it yet. Leave your number, we'll call you in 2034, right before you gear up to deal with your year 2038 rollover crisis.
Welcome to the late 1970's! We look forward to your eventual arrival in the 80's and early 90's. Please enjoy your stay!ps. As modern coding is more about the manipulation of very complex structures, rather than how to say, walk a linked list; a higher level language, with native support for more complex constructs, has the potential for creating much faster applications than something on the level of C. The reason being is that the h/l compiler can reason about, and thus optimize over, larger components than the C compiler.
Hmm.. you make an excellent point, and illuminate it better than I did. But I think we are still in agreement: I think that Columbus set the shots up poorly, and tried to fix all that in the edits. What I got wrong was focusing too much on movement as the prime indicator for a well-framed shot. Forgive me, I'm still new at this.
There are a wealth of reasons to dislike the first Potter movie. It was, on the technical level, a piece of crap.
/. are notable b/c the staff are mostly camera nerds: the Matrix brothers had to hack together their systems for the stop-n-rotate scenes, there's so much being done with DVcam for portability, etc. Go watch the Potter movie again, and see if you can count more than 5 tracking shots in the whole freakin' film. Columbus had full lockdown for almost all footage, and tried to fake fluidity in editing. He's a hack.
First and foremost, Chris Columbus's direction of shot construction. That movie had the least mobile camerawork of any film I can remember. Even "My Dinner With Andre" was more fluid, and it's just two guys sitting around a table! I can't overstate how significant this is: working the camera *into* a scene, instead of locking it down and having characters face the camera and narrate, is the very foundation of a good scene. Hell, half the movies discussed here on
The casting was mostly remarkable, except for Dumbledore. The guy playing him isn't going to live to the third movie! What was Columbus thinking? Oh, wait, we covered that deficiency already. Nevermind that for a minute. The actors were very good, but they were constrained by camerawork that was no better than a TV soundstage. So excellent casting and delivery, hobbled by poor framing.
Similarly, the stunts were crap. In the Quidditch scene, did anyone else get the feeling they were watching a late-80's graphics demo? Like from 2nd Reality or something?
The score was repetitive and totally forgettable. I intellectually recall the existence of background music, but can recall and feel none of it whatsoever. The best score this year, btw, is in The Bourne Identity, if you like scores.
Costumes & set construction was unusual: I wasn't expecting steampunk. But that's only stylistic, and not a point of contention, unlike the stupid 'flying staircases' scenes: they 1) weren't in the books, and 2) didn't develop anyone's character. It was typical kids-movie tripe: pointless onscreen toys for gefingerpoken und mittengrubben. Besides that, I was thinking, "didn't I already see this in Labyrinth?" Although, if they added David Bowie in tight pants to the later films, you bet you'd find me in the theater more often.
Yes and no. Certainly, there was some tenement construction 100 years ago that simply couldn't survive to today, but they explicity *were* tenements, not fully-fledged homes for long term usage. Non-tenement construction before WW2 aimed at designing buildings to last 200 years; a very substantial motivating factor was that construction costs were high enough to warrant building to last -- we just couldn't afford the 'build for 20 years' mentality prevalent after the war. Homes built now (or even worse, the 50's-70's) are not designed to last that long, although recent years of 'green' urban construction has started to reverse that trend.
Another substantial problem is legal: zoning laws over the past 60 years have grown to make 1910-style construction more or less impossible. You can't build brownstones, Victorian row houses; you can't build a house without a huge strip of lawn around all side, there are modern parking demands you are constrainted to build, mixed-use neighborhoods are forbidden, and there are huge packages of material and design constraints. This is a huge topic, easily dwarfing this NYC thread. But believe me when I say that affection for 1910-style construction is more than just nostalgia.
I just want to point out that I took first semester physics (Mechanics) with StandardDeviant, and he never seemed to master these spatial problems. So don't take him up on any car/box offers.
Still worth drinking with the guy, though.
The originator of the thread should learn that technology doesn't change overnight, and certainly not without the kind of marketing budgets behind Java & C#. Change takes time.
As another answer, I'd ask what is the driving point behind SAPDB? MySQL has/had noteriety for being a very simple system; Postgres had noteriety for advanced research into ORDBMS'es as well as coming out of a university lab that produced two very successful commercial DBs in the past. What's the big focus with SAPDB? All I know so far is that it was an in-house thing that worked for SAP. No idea what that's supposed to mean to me. Maybe someone should answer that first.
Other fine choices were made, such as assuming that 'all you need is Halo' and associated myopia, but really it's their habit of treating the customer as the enemy that did them in. It turns out that the PS2's "home court advantage" was the smallest factor in the Xbox's failure.
I believe the parent poster was trying to point out that the US emphasizes prosecution of what are considered social 'crimes', like marijuana possession, prostitution, etc; as well as politically fruitful crimes like computer hacking (life sentence, baby!) and hate crimes; and that these are often frequently prioritized over violent crimes. Whereas the Netherlands allows the social 'crimes' and cracks down on the violent crimes with vigor. In the US, this is largely a result of federal mandatory sentencing on politically hot issues, which is basically Congressmen playing judge for the votes, but for whatever reason, the results are striking: drug possession offenders serve time in prison roughly equal to murderers, longer than rapists, and substantially longer than robbery inmates. Our policies have had some interesting effects: amongst Western democracies, we have the highest violent crime rate, the largest percentage of population living in poverty, and the largest percent of population in prison (actually, we have the overall world record on this one). I cannot speak for the Netherlands sentencing length numbers, but I do know that they have 1/10 the rate of violent crime per population as is present in the US; and their prison population is equally low. Given the lack of distracting things their prosecutors have to deal with, I think we can draw a causal connection.
Just because Java is what you know doesn't mean that it's the only thing going in computing. Nor does my dislike for it indicate that I have not spent the requisite years in Java purgatory. The rest of your message was similarly trite, so I won't bother with it. Come back when you can log in and avoid ad hominems. An actual meaty discussion is pointless until then.
Ha, ha, only serious. No, really, work with me here.
So you've got a collection of programmers. You spend $700 per progger on WebObjects to get 'production quality'. And you expect the site to be up, when, exactly?
Let's see what now has to happen:
- The programmers have to learn or brush up on J2EE & Java.
- They need to learn how to interact with WebObjects, the APIs, the quirks, the bugs, the misfeatures.
- They need to learn to hack around WebObjects when it gets in the way of something they want to do, because they don't have the source code and even if they did they don't know it at all.
- The administrators need to learn how to keep it up and running, how to tune it, how to get specific logging, etc.
- Everyone has to wade through an enormous volume of typically low-quality documentation to filter out the 95% of the framework that they don't need.
- The admins need to figure out why WebObjects' "patented object-relational mapping" is absolutely destroying performance on the DB server and how to get around it.
None of these things are free; you will invest substantial time in learning an app if you go that route.Now let's say you have a collection of programmers who 1) prefer things other than Java, 2) aren't afraid of SQL, 3) know the web, and 4) like to intimate with their code? (Improbable, I know; there are only a few tens of thousands of us out there.) This team can roll from scratch their own system to do the smallest set of functionality they need, and work up from there. They can admin it in confidence because they wrote it and know how it operates. They can reliably say where performance hits are, and they can do it all in their language of choice.
The question is really: spend time trying to understand someone else's product, or spend time writing a product you understand implictly? For some (most) projects, the former is desirable, for some, the latter is a better choice. For writing an application in a rapidly evolving field, impenetrable closed-sourced middleware is frequently a loss in terms of time usage.
But what I meant was "a generic Common LISP image without loading any modules", but the terminology is a bit unwieldy.
You completely missed what I was trying to say, which is fine.But more importantly, CS != Programming.
But a big problem w/a CS "exam" is that the timescales are totally absurd. CS draws on several disciplines: HCI, EE, set maths, complexity theory, etc; and establishes many of its own: code translation (compiling), algorithmic efficiency (math has algorithms but not O(f(x)) concerns), data representation. A computer science advancement tends to draw on all of the above, and sounds something like: "using these techniques, we can devise a new method/language for programming that cleanly solves these algorithmic difficulties, produce extremely fast code, and present the user with a simple abstraction to the whole design." That's not something you do on a two hour exam. That's something you prototype in a semester, cover your ass in a year, and make production-capable in 3 years.
Could some of us generate a new programming language with a very restrictive set of operators in 2 hours? Sure. Will it compile? Hell no.
The exams discussed on this story are not CS. They don't even resemble CS. And for real CS, the idea of an undergraduate final exam is just ridiculous.
Cost per mile on a train: variable over range, 10 cents I suppose for an average trip ($4 for a 40 miler down the peninsula). And no fees for parking.
So the government's involved. Did you forget to notice the expenditure on road construction? For 2002, the US DOT is granted 32 billion for highway subsidies. In practice, the federal subsidy is usually 1/4 to 1/5 of a total project cost, the remainder being composed of state and local bond issues and some chunk of the tax base. So, hey, $150 billion this year on highways. Sounds inexpensive to me. Oh, and that's just the standard road package. There are other line-item pork packages that more than double that number.
I'll just avoid the trivial measure of quantifying environmental costs. One day soon, those, too will be in every cost project sheet. Some pollution credits are already traded on the open market between the G7 & NATO states. Add that, and the 'car per person, everywhere' lifestyle gets pricey.
Putting it under government control can 'hide the losses', if by 'hide' you mean 'place budget in full public access'. For private sector loss hiding, Enron was the rule rather than the exception, they were just overzealous.
Contrary to post-Regean political thought, I bring these two up to point out that a private company does not automatically implement things better than a public agency. In this case, the city government did much, much better, and have been for 25 years. (An amusing side-note is that BART is extending its lines down into Caltrain turf, and Amtrak sued to stop them.) We (the US) have a long and sordid history of propping up Amtrak, just to keep the rail system going. We should get some actual engineering talent into relevant government agency and then construct the trains via the public sector rather than the private. It's been done before.
When CERN's next accelerator comes on line in, IIRC, 2006, we can break it a little more by continuing to find the Higgs boson, which is the Standard Model's carrier particle for mass, and has been embarrassingly elusive. Soon after, I'm hoping to collect on my bets that it won't be found.
The Standard Model has been amazingly useful. It is one of the great knowledge unifications of our time. But many working physicists will be glad to see it go, as there are too many magic numbers required, and some troublingly unexplained patterns. Physicists, too, value simplicity.
Yes, academic credentialism is driven by publishing. So? How does that translate into your assumption that all the 'recent theorizing' is bunk? Publishing is hard work. You don't just make up crap and watch is magically traverse the gauntlet of peer review.
Oh, right, because there's no such thing as fusion. That's why we know it's a boondoggle. Oh wait. It seems fusion is actually a common physical process! Maybe we should look into it. If, you know, that's all right with you. Work up the math, develop a consistent theory with provable axioms, then we'll talk. This isn't consultancy, s390, this is science. Golf, blowjobs, and 'intuition' won't cut it. Oh, and physics on LSD went out 20 years ago.Have you actually *read* the General Theory of Relativity? Go get Wheeler's "Gravitation". It deals with your confused theory, and much more besides, all coherently.
There are things to be said in favor of conformity. Science was created in a time of mystics and frauds. Actually having to prove what you claim was a big jump, and conformity is a natural side-effect of that. On the other hand, there is too much conformity in the university environment these days, but for that the blame can be laid at the doors of the administration. Nationwide, administration staff has doubled relative to student&faculty populations. All the bone-headed management theories that the private sector spent the last decade or two working through have trickled into the Uni, and all the 'free thinkers' fear for their jobs. Tenure, the great bulwark of high-performance original thinkers, is on the way out. Work through the math, get back to us. Perhaps if your 'scientific intuition' was better grounded in, say, math and science, then you wouldn't troll with this garbage. Oh, we broke the Standard Model 3 years ago. Better update your notes.I'll believe it when I see it.
The problem with M$, besides being convicted monopoly abusers and yadayada, is their refusal to interoperate with as much as they can get away with. They demand complete adherence across your network, and give interoperability only grudgingly, and frequently with lawsuits. To persons with or in control of large, heterogeneous networks, this behavior is rather irksome, as we grow rather risk-averse, where 'risk' is defined as: reinstalling everything in the building and tossing a decade of experience. Not fun, or worthwhile.
Yes, we're a curmudgeonly audience who are almost totally opposed to Microsoft. But quite a few of us have valid, and very expensive, reasons.
As a side note, there are cases pending in the US Supreme Court regarding Texas' shockingly poor representation for capital defense; Calvin Burdine's appointed lawyer actually slept through court proceedings. They lead on the international front as well: since 1993 Texas has executed five foreign nationals while denying them consular rights in violation of international law. Just a little side note.
On the bright side, the feds stopped executing juvenile offenders a few years ago. Meanwhile, the number of states that ban the death penalty has risen to 12. If we're really lucky, the Feds might remember the mess of international conventions that they have signed, ratified, and sometimes even written; all of which explicitly forbid juvenile executions.
You need not bother responding to this post. I've already heard enough redneck vitrol and bloodlust for one day. Good night.