Next you'd have people changing their legal names just so they could get coveted domain names. Maybe that was Yahoo Serious's plan all along!
Believe or not it's happened. I heard a report a while ago of a guy hear in Australia that was changing his name by deed pool to try and bolster his chances of keeping the websites he was cybersquatting on.
We've now got the evidence that smoking causes lung cancer... but it's still a multi-billion dollar industry.;-( So no, even if they do publish that the mobiles are generating dangerous levels of radiation, I seriously doubt that people will stop using them.
Multiple inheritance - there are very few cases where MI is actually usefull. In most cases where you have a MI based object model, you'll probably find if you look closely that it shouldn't be MI in the first place, but rather embedded objects.
bull shit. I have worked on projects where MI is extremely useful. Replacing it with embedded objects would be extremely ugly.
No need for rude comments. You'll notice that I didn't say *all* circumstances. It's understandable you may happen to be passionately for MI; there are certainly enough Delphi programmers who feel the same way, which is why we have flamewars on the subject in the first place. All I'm saying is that frequently, what you think may be best represented by a MI style can just as easily be represented by embedded objects or an overall container wrapping around several objects.
Templates - It is unlikely this will ever be included in Delphi for the simple reason of compilation speed. Anyone who's ever compared compilation speed of comparable projects between Delphi and C++ will notice how much longer C++ takes.
Now this is a completely clueless statement. You are saying that a language should not include an extremely useful feature just because of increased compilation speed? Good one!
No, I'm saying that when adding new features there needs to be a balance between the aedvantages that the new feature will provide, versus the cost of implementing it. If the addition of templates caused Delphi, for example, to double the compilation time for general projects, then I for one would consider that "enhancement" to be worthless.
However, a previous poster was right in pointing out that I was focusing too much on C++ style templates - as long as Delphi implemented templates in a manner that didn't require a preprocessor to go over the source code first, there shouldn't be any reason, speedwise, why Delphi couldn't include templates.
It's certainly better, from a legality standpoint, then the previous idea being touted on the anti-Napster sites of taking the real song and inserting anti-pirating messages in the middle of it. It amused me that they didn't see anything wrong with freely distributing part of a copyrighted song, but were against the distribution of the full song [and they would be violating copyright except if they had direct permission from the appropriate artist].
However, since this method requires the originator to know the *exact* size of the commonly available song dump, doesn't that require them to have downloaded a copy of it, just to make sure it really is the song because they make the "cukoo" facsimilie - or are we to believe the authors of these files would legally have a copy of every song they're creating dummies of [so they can determine what size to make it].
Delphi is the full-blown compiler, with which you can write a 10-table database GUI program in one day, where the final program will only be one.exe file (on Windows), that doesn't need special DLL's to be installed.
Oh my yes. I can't count the number of times over the years I've installed a program only to have the message "Cannot find vbrunXXX.dll" pop up at me. One of the best things about Delphi is what it compiles is all you need to distribute.
Well, in the case of your database program you would need to distribute the Borland Database Engine runtime system. But I still agree with your point.;-)
Well, these very features have been discussed extensively, and the consensus seems to be:
Multiple inheritance - there are very few cases where MI is actually usefull. In most cases where you have a MI based object model, you'll probably find if you look closely that it shouldn't be MI in the first place, but rather embedded objects. Besides which, the more recent versions of Delphi have strong support for interfaces, and the implementation of interfaces by automatic delegation to another object (see the 'implements' keyword), so if you really want MI it's fairly easy to implement.
Templates - It is unlikely this will ever be included in Delphi for the simple reason of compilation speed. Anyone who's ever compared compilation speed of comparable projects between Delphi and C++ will notice how much longer C++ takes. This is due, more than any other reason, to it needing to preparse all the files and expand any macros and fill in templates.
Operator overloading - this is something I actually do miss in Delphi, but the traditional position of Borland has been that it would do more harm in obfuscating code than it would provide benefits for.
Borland has really made major changes to the Pascal syntax since the days of Wirth, so Delphi's language really is "Object Pascal" as opposed to just Wirth Pascal. One of the major strengths in Delphi is that it doesn't have to conform to a committee, so you don't have to wait for half a decade for cool new features to be included.;-)
That's presuming that you consider there to be only one Signal 11. Take my nick for instance, DreamMaster. I've had it for about fifteen years, and it easily predates my connecting to the internet. Now that I'm on, I find that are quite a few "DreamMasters" out there. Does the fact that I (probably;-)) had my nick longer than them automatically make them "faking" my identity?
Slashdot seems to allow multiple people to register with the same nickname, and I for one am glad of it. There's nothing that pisses me off more than trying to register for some service only to find that every variation on my nickname is already allocated and "unavailable".
Not the same caliber movie, but, along the same lines would be revealing whether the Total Recall thing was real or imagined. it's just not fun if you can't argue with your friends afterwards.
As far as Total Recall goes, I've always thought that it was definitely real, because at least of one thing:
Some scenes featured only the Baddy(TM) and his underling, such as when he was chewing him off for trying to kill Howser. Arnie wasn't present in those scenes, and obviously had no knowledge of them, so if it was a fantasy they just couldn't fit in.
Well, for one thing, with a photonic based system you don't have to worry about electromagnetic interference between adjacent data tracks. That's one of the main stumbling blocks to compressing the size of circuits at the moment - at some point the individual tracks start behaving like capacitors relative to each other [that's all a capacitor is - two metal plates with a small gap between them].
With light beams on the other hand, you can even have the beams shine through each other, and it won't have any effect. That in itself would be very usefull in designing circuits. What today takes several layers could be compressed onto a single layer.
They probably started calling it C-hash because they ran out of words starting with "e-". In the words of Captain Picard, "There's plenty of letters left in the Alphabet."
Non-installable CD versions of software would also cut down on piracy. It's more desirable to pirate if you can have every pirated app all on your HD for easy access.
Great - so we have a situation were every CD-only application needs to be shipped with copy protection to prevent it even being copied to the hard disk. I just think of the leading copy protection mechanisms (SafeDisc), and I shudder.
BTW: For those of you who aren't aware, Generic Safedisc is a leading copy protection method for CDs. The only problem is that the technique it relies on to validate the CD is an original copy doesn't work on a significant percentage of existing CD-ROM drives. There's been numerous flamethreads against game companys on Usenet in the past, with people having to resort to sites like GameCopyWorld to get copy protection cracks just so they can play the d*mn game they bought.
I can just imagine the following statement being issued by Japan:
Due to the tecnical specification for the Nintendo Gameboy being released, we feel that there is an unacceptable risk that the hardware could now be used for controlling missiles. There will thusly be a ban on exporting more than a single unit at a time.;-)
If you were in a country that didn't respect the original patents ('cause not all do) or that don't have laws against reverse engineering - and then you released the info as an "open source" project... would the cat be out of the bag?
Pretty much yes. A point raised in the recent MS-Kerboros discussion was that China didn't have protection for Trade Secrets. Thus someone could download it in China and, not being bound by the click agreement, republish it.
Although, remember, this is trade secrets we're talking about - which is different from patents. I may be wrong, but providing information on how a patented system works isn't illegal, it's only illegal to duplicate it in a competing product whilst the patent is in force. If it wasn't, we couldn't have public patent listings in the first place.;-)
But wouldnt it be even better if we could develop applications and network protocols that would garantee privacy?
It's a knotty issue. On one side, I'd certainly agree with it - it's personally disturbing to me to see more and more free speech on the Internet being censored by those with the money. A good case in point in DeCSS - completely legal, but the MPAA goes out and starts sending threatening letters to every site that hosts it around the world, and most of them pull it. That's why a truly anonymous file sharing system like Freenet will a godsend to free speech on the Internet.
On the other hand, the Internet does need some kind of more set user identification, if only to find the origin of all those spammers.;-)
I had no idea, Europe Leads the US in online policy? What's next? Soon they'll be telling us that our form of government is imperfect?
I sure hope for your sake you're being sarcastic there. Seriously, and without it intending to be a flame, the US will always lag behind the rest of the world in privacy issues so long as it continues to pander to the interests of Big Business above that of it's citizen's.
That's why we sure the absurdly complicated negotiations between the US and the EU so they could share data - the US government simply wasn't willing to risk offending local businesses by forcing them to respet people's privacy (to meet the EU data sharing requirements).
Remember a while ago there was a big fuss because a disgruntled employee put the Southpark concept clip (Santa Claus vs Jesus) into the company's game - set to go off on a certain date. I think it was a Golf game.
I'm sorry I can't remember any more details then that, but I'm sure some other Slashdotter can recall more details.
This raises the issue of what exactly the App company would get to take with them. As far as I can see, the distinction isn't exactly easy.
For example, I'd consider that DirectX is part of the operating system, but you include it in your list of applications. Also Media Player, as far as I'm aware, is pretty much bound into the operating system - so how much of Media Player goes to the App company, and how much stays as operating system; and will they need to do some costly "surgery" to MP to actually separate into two independant fragments.
What I'm getting at, apart from distinction questions, is that irrespective of your opinions on the matter, if they are forced to split they'll have a massive effort trying to break all the propriatary chains they've made between their apps and the OS. IE will be a nightmare: they've spent the better part of several years trying to integrate it so tightly into the OS so it can't be separated - it will be no easy task for them to undo that.
You probably just weren't the first to post it, or didn't give the best description of the issue. As it says in the FAQ, for popular issues they may get up to fifty submissions on the one topic, and obviously only one of them can be "accepted".
Seriously, I don't think I've ever seen vbscript in a word doc or email that wasn't a virus. I guess that's innovation for you.
I regularly use VBScript in my Word documents, but rarely for much more than automated paragraph formatting. But I agree that some of the stuff you can do with VBScript these days is *scary*.
It's a pity Microsoft didn't put more consideration into security issues when they expanded from Wordbasic to full VBScript - now they have the situation where they have to keep releasing patch after patch to try and plug each new security leak.
Basically this is the beginning of a Virus that could have a direct and expensive impact on a large number of people.
There have already been viruses along those lines. Anyone remember the trojan horse program that silently reassigned the dialup number Windows used to be an overseas ISP? Infected people were getting *huge* phone bills.
Does anyone recall any more specific information about it?
Slashdot Mirror
England has to be the most anal country about everything
Followed closely by Australia! ;-(
Next you'd have people changing their legal names just so they could get coveted domain names. Maybe that was Yahoo Serious's plan all along!
Believe or not it's happened. I heard a report a while ago of a guy hear in Australia that was changing his name by deed pool to try and bolster his chances of keeping the websites he was cybersquatting on.
Surely I'm not the only one who remembers smart-ass Lord British getting fried in Ultima Online? ;-)
We've now got the evidence that smoking causes lung cancer... but it's still a multi-billion dollar industry. ;-( So no, even if they do publish that the mobiles are generating dangerous levels of radiation, I seriously doubt that people will stop using them.
No need for rude comments. You'll notice that I didn't say *all* circumstances. It's understandable you may happen to be passionately for MI; there are certainly enough Delphi programmers who feel the same way, which is why we have flamewars on the subject in the first place. All I'm saying is that frequently, what you think may be best represented by a MI style can just as easily be represented by embedded objects or an overall container wrapping around several objects.
No, I'm saying that when adding new features there needs to be a balance between the aedvantages that the new feature will provide, versus the cost of implementing it. If the addition of templates caused Delphi, for example, to double the compilation time for general projects, then I for one would consider that "enhancement" to be worthless.
However, a previous poster was right in pointing out that I was focusing too much on C++ style templates - as long as Delphi implemented templates in a manner that didn't require a preprocessor to go over the source code first, there shouldn't be any reason, speedwise, why Delphi couldn't include templates.
It's certainly better, from a legality standpoint, then the previous idea being touted on the anti-Napster sites of taking the real song and inserting anti-pirating messages in the middle of it. It amused me that they didn't see anything wrong with freely distributing part of a copyrighted song, but were against the distribution of the full song [and they would be violating copyright except if they had direct permission from the appropriate artist].
However, since this method requires the originator to know the *exact* size of the commonly available song dump, doesn't that require them to have downloaded a copy of it, just to make sure it really is the song because they make the "cukoo" facsimilie - or are we to believe the authors of these files would legally have a copy of every song they're creating dummies of [so they can determine what size to make it].
Delphi is the full-blown compiler, with which you can write a 10-table database GUI program in one day, where the final program will only be one .exe file (on Windows), that doesn't need special DLL's to be installed.
Oh my yes. I can't count the number of times over the years I've installed a program only to have the message "Cannot find vbrunXXX.dll" pop up at me. One of the best things about Delphi is what it compiles is all you need to distribute.
Well, in the case of your database program you would need to distribute the Borland Database Engine runtime system. But I still agree with your point. ;-)
Well, these very features have been discussed extensively, and the consensus seems to be:
Besides which, the more recent versions of Delphi have strong support for interfaces, and the implementation of interfaces by automatic delegation to another object (see the 'implements' keyword), so if you really want MI it's fairly easy to implement.
Borland has really made major changes to the Pascal syntax since the days of Wirth, so Delphi's language really is "Object Pascal" as opposed to just Wirth Pascal. One of the major strengths in Delphi is that it doesn't have to conform to a committee, so you don't have to wait for half a decade for cool new features to be included. ;-)
They're also releasing, near the end of the year, a Linux version of Delphi, codenamed Kylix.
This guy is obviously a fake
That's presuming that you consider there to be only one Signal 11. Take my nick for instance, DreamMaster. I've had it for about fifteen years, and it easily predates my connecting to the internet. Now that I'm on, I find that are quite a few "DreamMasters" out there. Does the fact that I (probably ;-)) had my nick longer than them automatically make them "faking" my identity?
Slashdot seems to allow multiple people to register with the same nickname, and I for one am glad of it. There's nothing that pisses me off more than trying to register for some service only to find that every variation on my nickname is already allocated and "unavailable".
Not the same caliber movie, but, along the same lines would be revealing whether the Total Recall thing was real or imagined. it's just not fun if you can't argue with your friends afterwards.
As far as Total Recall goes, I've always thought that it was definitely real, because at least of one thing:
Some scenes featured only the Baddy(TM) and his underling, such as when he was chewing him off for trying to kill Howser. Arnie wasn't present in those scenes, and obviously had no knowledge of them, so if it was a fantasy they just couldn't fit in.
So, is there anyway to save the stream locally so I can watch it again later without having to connect to the website again?
What's the point of a photonic motherboard?
Well, for one thing, with a photonic based system you don't have to worry about electromagnetic interference between adjacent data tracks. That's one of the main stumbling blocks to compressing the size of circuits at the moment - at some point the individual tracks start behaving like capacitors relative to each other [that's all a capacitor is - two metal plates with a small gap between them].
With light beams on the other hand, you can even have the beams shine through each other, and it won't have any effect. That in itself would be very usefull in designing circuits. What today takes several layers could be compressed onto a single layer.
Time to spend another 13 thousand dollars.. Any idea if Intel is EVER going to change the name? I doubt it.
Well, they're certainly not going to go back to the x86 format... not since they discovered they couldn't trademark numbers. ;-)
They probably started calling it C-hash because they ran out of words starting with "e-". In the words of Captain Picard, "There's plenty of letters left in the Alphabet."
Non-installable CD versions of software would also cut down on piracy. It's more desirable to pirate if you can have every pirated app all on your HD for easy access.
Great - so we have a situation were every CD-only application needs to be shipped with copy protection to prevent it even being copied to the hard disk. I just think of the leading copy protection mechanisms (SafeDisc), and I shudder.
BTW: For those of you who aren't aware, Generic Safedisc is a leading copy protection method for CDs. The only problem is that the technique it relies on to validate the CD is an original copy doesn't work on a significant percentage of existing CD-ROM drives. There's been numerous flamethreads against game companys on Usenet in the past, with people having to resort to sites like GameCopyWorld to get copy protection cracks just so they can play the d*mn game they bought.
I can just imagine the following statement being issued by Japan:
Due to the tecnical specification for the Nintendo Gameboy being released, we feel that there is an unacceptable risk that the hardware could now be used for controlling missiles. There will thusly be a ban on exporting more than a single unit at a time. ;-)
If you were in a country that didn't respect the original patents ('cause not all do) or that don't have laws against reverse engineering - and then you released the info as an "open source" project... would the cat be out of the bag?
Pretty much yes. A point raised in the recent MS-Kerboros discussion was that China didn't have protection for Trade Secrets. Thus someone could download it in China and, not being bound by the click agreement, republish it.
Although, remember, this is trade secrets we're talking about - which is different from patents. I may be wrong, but providing information on how a patented system works isn't illegal, it's only illegal to duplicate it in a competing product whilst the patent is in force. If it wasn't, we couldn't have public patent listings in the first place. ;-)
But wouldnt it be even better if we could develop applications and network protocols that would garantee privacy?
It's a knotty issue. On one side, I'd certainly agree with it - it's personally disturbing to me to see more and more free speech on the Internet being censored by those with the money. A good case in point in DeCSS - completely legal, but the MPAA goes out and starts sending threatening letters to every site that hosts it around the world, and most of them pull it. That's why a truly anonymous file sharing system like Freenet will a godsend to free speech on the Internet.
On the other hand, the Internet does need some kind of more set user identification, if only to find the origin of all those spammers. ;-)
That sure is a shock!
I had no idea, Europe Leads the US in online policy? What's next? Soon they'll be telling us that our form of government is imperfect?
I sure hope for your sake you're being sarcastic there. Seriously, and without it intending to be a flame, the US will always lag behind the rest of the world in privacy issues so long as it continues to pander to the interests of Big Business above that of it's citizen's.
That's why we sure the absurdly complicated negotiations between the US and the EU so they could share data - the US government simply wasn't willing to risk offending local businesses by forcing them to respet people's privacy (to meet the EU data sharing requirements).
I'm sorry I can't remember any more details then that, but I'm sure some other Slashdotter can recall more details.
For example, I'd consider that DirectX is part of the operating system, but you include it in your list of applications. Also Media Player, as far as I'm aware, is pretty much bound into the operating system - so how much of Media Player goes to the App company, and how much stays as operating system; and will they need to do some costly "surgery" to MP to actually separate into two independant fragments.
What I'm getting at, apart from distinction questions, is that irrespective of your opinions on the matter, if they are forced to split they'll have a massive effort trying to break all the propriatary chains they've made between their apps and the OS. IE will be a nightmare: they've spent the better part of several years trying to integrate it so tightly into the OS so it can't be separated - it will be no easy task for them to undo that.
You probably just weren't the first to post it, or didn't give the best description of the issue. As it says in the FAQ, for popular issues they may get up to fifty submissions on the one topic, and obviously only one of them can be "accepted".
I regularly use VBScript in my Word documents, but rarely for much more than automated paragraph formatting. But I agree that some of the stuff you can do with VBScript these days is *scary*.
It's a pity Microsoft didn't put more consideration into security issues when they expanded from Wordbasic to full VBScript - now they have the situation where they have to keep releasing patch after patch to try and plug each new security leak.
There have already been viruses along those lines. Anyone remember the trojan horse program that silently reassigned the dialup number Windows used to be an overseas ISP? Infected people were getting *huge* phone bills.
Does anyone recall any more specific information about it?