You make a lot of good points but on balance, I'd far rather have a GC than not. Most of the time I want to work with objects that's exactly what I want to treat them as: objects, not memory allocations which have to be tracked as part of the design. That breaks down sometimes, sure, but that's when your "backup mechanism" would come into place. GC without a backup is annoying but having neither is just stupid and the evidence is all around us in the millions of C++ programs which leak memory.
I wish I had a moderation point left, I'd vote for troll;-)
I tell you what though, C++ is still around after all this time.
Mostly because it allows sloppy, C-style, programming which is easy. It also leaks like a sieve most of the time and has all the security problems seen in C. It doesn't HAVE to but its design means that it does. And it's ugly as hell.
Easy programming languages always hang around longer than they're needed because most programmers, sad to say, are uninterested in quality and very interested in meeting deadlines.
There is still no successor to C++.
That may be true, but it doesn't make C++ any better.
Control it by simply not producing it. the after effect of 9/11 showed the world that the US military is guilty of having and selling anthrax while having stores of it outside of the country.
To be fair, the world already knew that. When Rumsfeld met with Saddam to sell him anthrax, west nile virus and the rest it was considered so un-sensitive that the receipt for them was published in the Senate Banking Commitee's report without the slightest hint of the old black marker or any need for a FoI application.
It was common knowledge in the ruling classes that the US was supplying military dictators with weapons of mass destruction and that the CIA was supplying agents to calibrate those weapons based on their actual battlefield use against countries like Iran (I wonder why Iran doesn't like America).
It's only since 911 that the US and its allies have found that they need a moral high ground from which to pretend that such weapons (and people like their old friend and ex-puppet Saddam) are something that they could never tolerate as civilised people.
As to the system being abused by one person, I'm sure you know the story of how America held on to its smallpox supplies even after claiming to have desposed of them and being inspected to make sure.
Never believe anything the American military or its supporters tells you: lying is a habit they just can't kick, as we saw in some detail in the run up to invading Iraq. I particularly liked the bit where they showed British weather ballon trucks, sold with US permission, and claimed they were mobile chemical warfare labs. I keep imaging US troops being hit by a shell who's only effect is to make them speak in squeeky voices. Sadly, the trucks turned out to generate hydrogen rather than helium but I still think there's room on the modern battlefield for such a device.
If someone had a product called "Macintosh Defender", how would this be any different
Well, for one thing, Macintosh is not a generic term. Windows is (this case is not in the States where some dozy or corrupt judge allowed the trademarking of an everyday object), and was in use for windowed GUIs long before Bill released the crap that was MS Windows 1.0. If he had called it "Microsoft Defender" then MS would be well within their rights.
This sad and inflammatory post is typical as to the supposed wisdom and scientific merits of many evolutionists.
Oh, we're supposed to waste time debating fairy stories? Why do we have to make the effort to deal with your delusions? How does it become the responsibility of the scientific community to cope with fictional and fairly random explanations of the world made up by people with no idea of what they are talking about? It's like letting your dog crap on the neighbour's lawn and then writing to him to complain about the mess his lawn's in.
The document you linked to is garbage by an idiot. The abstract establishes this, with his self-defined idea of "irreducibly complex" and systems which collapse if one component is removed. This is ancient stuff and is just a rehash of the watchmaker argument, which has long since been dealt with.
Even if it hadn't been, the idea that someone can say "I don't understand how that works, therefore God exists" and not be laughed out of the room says a lot more about the room than his childish argument.
they don't know how to respond to the ID people
Well, that's the whole point of the ID scam. By putting forward totally irrational arguments the supporters of this superstitious drivel can then point to the inability to build a rational rebuttal as "proof" that there's something to it. The correct response to ID is Pauli's famous quote "This isn't right. It's not even wrong". It is nonsense in the literal meaning of that word.
Trying to engage its "arguments" is doomed to failure. If I tell you that I believe that Winnie-the-Pooh was a real bear who could walk and talk and really did live in the Hundred-acre Wood, there is no point in entering a debate as I am clearly mad and no argument would suffice. The same holds true with ID. There is no evidence whatsoever for it; it is simply a statement of faith: I don't understand this, therefore it can not and will never be understood by anyone therefore something greater than even my titanic mind must have designed it. Like I said: garbage.
Your education was truely wasted if you've fallen for this con-trick.
Why would talking to the people that wrote the fairy stories make them any more real? They're still fairy stories made up by a primitive people that thought the creator of the entire fucking universe would get upset if they don't cut their foreskin off.
Yeah, that's the sort of people I'd go to for reliable information about the origins of space and time. Slaughter me another goat, why don't you?
The bottom line is that we are all born with no concept of gods or santa claus. There is no reason to move from that point other than propaganda, and once you get to be an adult you should be able to see through that. I mean, for goodness' sake: they even tell you the santa claus thing is a lie! DUH!
TWW
The choices are: a binary API with drivers for a wide range of hardware which will have lots of bugs and be badly written junk and totally impossible to get fixed as soon as the parent company moves onto the next version of the hardware (and that's if you're lucky), OR no binary API with a lot fewer drivers whose writers will have their code exposed to the world and if it breaks down there's a good chance of a fix within a day or two.
No contest. I've used Windows often enough to know that binary drivers that really work and work well are very very rare.
There simply is no excuse for binary drivers, either under Linux or any other OS. Windows users should be asking why they have to put up with it rather than Linux users asking to be included in the shitefest that is binary-only drivers.
It has nothing to do with Open Source ideals and everything to do with security and control of your investment.
As mentioned above, this story was also covered by CBSNews and Yahoo News, among other mainstream media organs. Google News: {Cheyenne wind vertical}
What CBS News doesn't know about science would fill all the science books in the world, and already does. Yahoo is no better and Google News is a robot. Big kudos there.
Why would talking to the people that wrote the fairy stories make them any more real? They're still fairy stories made up by a primitive people that thought the creator of the entire fucking universe would get upset if they don't cut their foreskin off.
Yeah, that's the sort of people I'd go to for reliable information about the origins of space and time. Slaughter me another goat, why don't you?
The bottom line is that we are all born with no concept of gods or santa claus. There is no reason to move from that point other than propaganda, and once you get to be an adult you should be able to see through that. I mean, for goodness' sake: they even tell you the santa claus thing is a lie! DUH!
The vehemence of the rejection of these ideas without serious examination reeks of dogma.
ID and fundamentalist Christian arse-wipe are not new. They are old, old ideas which the ignorant and stupid have pushed for thousands of years. The rejection of them came at the end of a long and often bloody examination of their ideas and the evidence. ID has been waved about again recently simply to try and pretend that religion has not lost every argument and is not in fact a hollow vessel devoid of ideas an value. But it is. And that's a considered opinion, not dogma. Show me some evidence to the contrary and I'll consider it. Repeat the same old claptrap again and I'm happy to dismiss it out of hand. It is not my responsibility to keep wasting time on someone else's drivel which has already been delt with in great detail.
Scientists should not be afraid of testing their theories.
Here's the ID theory: god exists. How do I test it? I can't. Intelligent Design (AKA god-lite) is specifically intended to be untestable. Since it can't be tested, just as the existence of Peter Pan can not be tested, it can not be disproved, just as I can not prove that Peter Pan does not exist. This does not change the fact that anyone believing either that Peter Pan really exists or that ID explains anything is either a child or an idiot.
Life on Earth is abundant with examples that show that if it was designed it was not "intelligent", nor for that matter by anything which was beneficent. Octopus eyes, the black death, whales' legs, the human back, the human birth process, the appendix, the dodo, mass extinctions, etc etc. None of this is the work of any rational creator.
What makes this case interesting is the length of time this "hoax" has persisted.
The water-powered car is a scam that's been going since the 70's but it's still a scam - which claimed two victims I know only this year.
All these wonder-machines have one simple way of shutting us nay-sayers up: demonstrate it in public and let the demo machine be dissected afterwards (or before if it can be re-assembled) and duplicated by a third party who then repeats the demo.
Until then it is, at absolute best, a new Mechanical Turk.
I think that you have a point about what happened, but it was pure accident, not design and I think that being given a contract to supply IBM with a product that MS didn't actually have counts as more than a "bit" lucky! The breaking of the link was an important development but it was at least as much because IBM goofed and lost control (and, more importantly, gave control to a single supplier) as it was because MS had some great insight.
One more note, by insisting on binary compatibility, MS has managed to maintain their dominance (and at the same time fostered the cheap hardware revolution) all the way to today.
It may have been hard-won but not on a technical level. Gates famously hated open-source in the days when there wasn't even a name for it because it was the way everyone worked: you bought a package, you got the source code. Gate's aristocratic background had raised him with a "never share with plebes" mentality and he lobbied hard to change this model and widen the scope of copyright on software - even while admiting that he used stolen source code to learn how "great programmers do it". Once copyright laws were changed and the no-source model established, binary compatibility - and chip design stagnation - was built into the market since users could no longer compile, and thus port, their applications. This is why MS was able to hold back computing by at least a decade and we're all excited because AMD make chips which are only half as out of date as Intel.
Going back to that "hard won" point again, it's hard to see where the difficulty was when you look at Windows 1.0,2.0 and 3.0. In a free market where share was hard won those turkeys would have sunk like a lead balloon on Mars, they were simply shit. Anyone allowed to compete, whether by IBM or Apple's lawsuits, would have wiped the board with MS's laughable efforts. Fortunately for MS, they had the market to themselves and got away with it. So I'm not sure which part was hard. Perhaps counting the money while they laughed was tricky.
You can say all you want about MS business practises, and the quality, security and stability problems with their software, but you cannot deny their significant role in laying the foundations for cheap, compatible hardware which enabled things like FOSS and Linux to emerge.
Indeed. If MS had not been standing on the road of development like a 10 mile tailback, Linux would never have happened because we would never have reached the level of frustration that drove its adoption, and FOSS would be a puzzle since no one would have introduced any other model that so handcuffed the user.
But somehow I don't think that's what you had in mind.
Seriously, do we really want governments mandating the use of a particular OS? That *cannot* be a good thing.
I agree, but there is a wider picture. If the givernment mandates Linspire that's bad, but mandating Linux - with Lindows being the initial distro of choice would be a much more positive thing.
There is an important difference between mandating "Windows" and "Linux". In the first case you are supporting a, third-rate, monopoly OS. In the second you are supporting a large number of competing supplers. There is still an issue even so, but the second is by far the better option in terms of value and long-term security of investment.
Windows has to have special rules applied to it anyway since, as you said, it is capable of wiping out competing products simply by supplying a - usually un-debugged and crappy - service or application as a bundle with the OS. WMP is the classic example of this: utter shite but a massive power in the market place because it rides on the coat-tails of Windows itself which, of course, only got where it is today by riding on the coat-tails of DOS, which rode on the coat-tails of the IBM-PC. Microsoft have almost no experience of competing on quality, the best they have been able to do is buy it in, as they did with Office, and then screw it up over a period of exposure to their hopeless programmers.
If Windows was competing on quality there would be no need to mandate anything, since MS would long since have ceased to exist.
According to NASA's map whatever is called Palestine just belongs to Jordan, the rest to israel:P What does that tell you?
It tells you that NASA are following the world's convention. Hardly any countries recognise the existance of Palistine as to do so would run the risk of being branded "terror states". What does that tell you?
The libraries purchased from the authors the right to catalog the authors' works when the libraries purchased the authors' books. The libraries exercise that right through an agency with Google. The libraries are completely within their rights.
That is a total and deliberate misrepresentation of the situation. The libraries are not simply allowing an agent to catalogue their books, they have allowed a company to copy their books and sell advertising based on the fact that the company holds those copies. The libraries gain nothing from this that is not shared with every person in the world with an internet connection - it is clear that the libraries in question have "gone rogue" and are facilitating the company's business aims. If the situation was as you claim, then the index so created would be keyed to the individual library which holds the book in question. It is not. There is no way in which the libraries gained, through any means, the right to give away copies of their books to an outside company for the purposes of that company making money off the resulting whole copies - not a mere "index" - of the books which the company has retained.
You are consistantly attempting to justify the actions both of Google and the libraries by saying what they would be allowed do do. However, since that is not what they are actually doing, your argument simply boils down to obfuscation and misdirection, and it seems that you are determined, for reasons which are unclear to maintain that stance even in the face of the clearest evidence possible: that of Google's website where the violation of copyright is on display for the world to see.
Google has copied entire books without permission of the copyright holders, and it is retaining and using those copies for profit in ways which go beyond the aim of simply indexing any individual library.
So, in that light, I withdraw from this pointless thread.
Slashdot Mirror
That is what I said, yes.
TWW
I wish I had a moderation point left, I'd vote for troll ;-)
Me too.
TWW
Mostly because it allows sloppy, C-style, programming which is easy. It also leaks like a sieve most of the time and has all the security problems seen in C. It doesn't HAVE to but its design means that it does. And it's ugly as hell.
Easy programming languages always hang around longer than they're needed because most programmers, sad to say, are uninterested in quality and very interested in meeting deadlines.
There is still no successor to C++.
That may be true, but it doesn't make C++ any better.
TWW
In fact, forget it; just use an actual OO language instead.
TWW
To be fair, the world already knew that. When Rumsfeld met with Saddam to sell him anthrax, west nile virus and the rest it was considered so un-sensitive that the receipt for them was published in the Senate Banking Commitee's report without the slightest hint of the old black marker or any need for a FoI application.
It was common knowledge in the ruling classes that the US was supplying military dictators with weapons of mass destruction and that the CIA was supplying agents to calibrate those weapons based on their actual battlefield use against countries like Iran (I wonder why Iran doesn't like America).
It's only since 911 that the US and its allies have found that they need a moral high ground from which to pretend that such weapons (and people like their old friend and ex-puppet Saddam) are something that they could never tolerate as civilised people.
As to the system being abused by one person, I'm sure you know the story of how America held on to its smallpox supplies even after claiming to have desposed of them and being inspected to make sure.
Never believe anything the American military or its supporters tells you: lying is a habit they just can't kick, as we saw in some detail in the run up to invading Iraq. I particularly liked the bit where they showed British weather ballon trucks, sold with US permission, and claimed they were mobile chemical warfare labs. I keep imaging US troops being hit by a shell who's only effect is to make them speak in squeeky voices. Sadly, the trucks turned out to generate hydrogen rather than helium but I still think there's room on the modern battlefield for such a device.
TWW
It's up to them to prove it, not me to disprove it. If we were born with a religion then it'd be the other way around.
TWW
TWW
You're being overly critical of your...oh, never mind.
TWW
Well, I've never heard of them! Are they a particularly American variety?
TWW
Well, for one thing, Macintosh is not a generic term. Windows is (this case is not in the States where some dozy or corrupt judge allowed the trademarking of an everyday object), and was in use for windowed GUIs long before Bill released the crap that was MS Windows 1.0. If he had called it "Microsoft Defender" then MS would be well within their rights.
TWW
Oh, we're supposed to waste time debating fairy stories? Why do we have to make the effort to deal with your delusions? How does it become the responsibility of the scientific community to cope with fictional and fairly random explanations of the world made up by people with no idea of what they are talking about? It's like letting your dog crap on the neighbour's lawn and then writing to him to complain about the mess his lawn's in.
The document you linked to is garbage by an idiot. The abstract establishes this, with his self-defined idea of "irreducibly complex" and systems which collapse if one component is removed. This is ancient stuff and is just a rehash of the watchmaker argument, which has long since been dealt with.
Even if it hadn't been, the idea that someone can say "I don't understand how that works, therefore God exists" and not be laughed out of the room says a lot more about the room than his childish argument.
they don't know how to respond to the ID people
Well, that's the whole point of the ID scam. By putting forward totally irrational arguments the supporters of this superstitious drivel can then point to the inability to build a rational rebuttal as "proof" that there's something to it. The correct response to ID is Pauli's famous quote "This isn't right. It's not even wrong". It is nonsense in the literal meaning of that word.
Trying to engage its "arguments" is doomed to failure. If I tell you that I believe that Winnie-the-Pooh was a real bear who could walk and talk and really did live in the Hundred-acre Wood, there is no point in entering a debate as I am clearly mad and no argument would suffice. The same holds true with ID. There is no evidence whatsoever for it; it is simply a statement of faith: I don't understand this, therefore it can not and will never be understood by anyone therefore something greater than even my titanic mind must have designed it. Like I said: garbage.
Your education was truely wasted if you've fallen for this con-trick.
TWW
Facts may be important, the uninformed opinion of ignorant child-buggering self-appointed ju-ju worshippers in fancy dress isn't.
TWW
Why would talking to the people that wrote the fairy stories make them any more real? They're still fairy stories made up by a primitive people that thought the creator of the entire fucking universe would get upset if they don't cut their foreskin off. Yeah, that's the sort of people I'd go to for reliable information about the origins of space and time. Slaughter me another goat, why don't you? The bottom line is that we are all born with no concept of gods or santa claus. There is no reason to move from that point other than propaganda, and once you get to be an adult you should be able to see through that. I mean, for goodness' sake: they even tell you the santa claus thing is a lie! DUH! TWW
No contest. I've used Windows often enough to know that binary drivers that really work and work well are very very rare.
There simply is no excuse for binary drivers, either under Linux or any other OS. Windows users should be asking why they have to put up with it rather than Linux users asking to be included in the shitefest that is binary-only drivers.
It has nothing to do with Open Source ideals and everything to do with security and control of your investment.
TWW
What CBS News doesn't know about science would fill all the science books in the world, and already does. Yahoo is no better and Google News is a robot. Big kudos there.
TWW
Yeah, that's the sort of people I'd go to for reliable information about the origins of space and time. Slaughter me another goat, why don't you?
The bottom line is that we are all born with no concept of gods or santa claus. There is no reason to move from that point other than propaganda, and once you get to be an adult you should be able to see through that. I mean, for goodness' sake: they even tell you the santa claus thing is a lie! DUH!
TWW
ID and fundamentalist Christian arse-wipe are not new. They are old, old ideas which the ignorant and stupid have pushed for thousands of years. The rejection of them came at the end of a long and often bloody examination of their ideas and the evidence. ID has been waved about again recently simply to try and pretend that religion has not lost every argument and is not in fact a hollow vessel devoid of ideas an value. But it is. And that's a considered opinion, not dogma. Show me some evidence to the contrary and I'll consider it. Repeat the same old claptrap again and I'm happy to dismiss it out of hand. It is not my responsibility to keep wasting time on someone else's drivel which has already been delt with in great detail.
Scientists should not be afraid of testing their theories.
Here's the ID theory: god exists. How do I test it? I can't. Intelligent Design (AKA god-lite) is specifically intended to be untestable. Since it can't be tested, just as the existence of Peter Pan can not be tested, it can not be disproved, just as I can not prove that Peter Pan does not exist. This does not change the fact that anyone believing either that Peter Pan really exists or that ID explains anything is either a child or an idiot.
Life on Earth is abundant with examples that show that if it was designed it was not "intelligent", nor for that matter by anything which was beneficent. Octopus eyes, the black death, whales' legs, the human back, the human birth process, the appendix, the dodo, mass extinctions, etc etc. None of this is the work of any rational creator.
TWW
The water-powered car is a scam that's been going since the 70's but it's still a scam - which claimed two victims I know only this year.
All these wonder-machines have one simple way of shutting us nay-sayers up: demonstrate it in public and let the demo machine be dissected afterwards (or before if it can be re-assembled) and duplicated by a third party who then repeats the demo.
Until then it is, at absolute best, a new Mechanical Turk.
TWW
If he's using Intel, then 1984 would be advanced technology. Intel: the longest running joke in computing.
TWW
Indeed. I can't imagine why anyone would willingly use this crap.
TWW
One more note, by insisting on binary compatibility, MS has managed to maintain their dominance (and at the same time fostered the cheap hardware revolution) all the way to today.
It may have been hard-won but not on a technical level. Gates famously hated open-source in the days when there wasn't even a name for it because it was the way everyone worked: you bought a package, you got the source code. Gate's aristocratic background had raised him with a "never share with plebes" mentality and he lobbied hard to change this model and widen the scope of copyright on software - even while admiting that he used stolen source code to learn how "great programmers do it". Once copyright laws were changed and the no-source model established, binary compatibility - and chip design stagnation - was built into the market since users could no longer compile, and thus port, their applications. This is why MS was able to hold back computing by at least a decade and we're all excited because AMD make chips which are only half as out of date as Intel.
Going back to that "hard won" point again, it's hard to see where the difficulty was when you look at Windows 1.0,2.0 and 3.0. In a free market where share was hard won those turkeys would have sunk like a lead balloon on Mars, they were simply shit. Anyone allowed to compete, whether by IBM or Apple's lawsuits, would have wiped the board with MS's laughable efforts. Fortunately for MS, they had the market to themselves and got away with it. So I'm not sure which part was hard. Perhaps counting the money while they laughed was tricky.
You can say all you want about MS business practises, and the quality, security and stability problems with their software, but you cannot deny their significant role in laying the foundations for cheap, compatible hardware which enabled things like FOSS and Linux to emerge.
Indeed. If MS had not been standing on the road of development like a 10 mile tailback, Linux would never have happened because we would never have reached the level of frustration that drove its adoption, and FOSS would be a puzzle since no one would have introduced any other model that so handcuffed the user.
But somehow I don't think that's what you had in mind.
TWW
I agree, but there is a wider picture. If the givernment mandates Linspire that's bad, but mandating Linux - with Lindows being the initial distro of choice would be a much more positive thing.
There is an important difference between mandating "Windows" and "Linux". In the first case you are supporting a, third-rate, monopoly OS. In the second you are supporting a large number of competing supplers. There is still an issue even so, but the second is by far the better option in terms of value and long-term security of investment.
Windows has to have special rules applied to it anyway since, as you said, it is capable of wiping out competing products simply by supplying a - usually un-debugged and crappy - service or application as a bundle with the OS. WMP is the classic example of this: utter shite but a massive power in the market place because it rides on the coat-tails of Windows itself which, of course, only got where it is today by riding on the coat-tails of DOS, which rode on the coat-tails of the IBM-PC. Microsoft have almost no experience of competing on quality, the best they have been able to do is buy it in, as they did with Office, and then screw it up over a period of exposure to their hopeless programmers.
If Windows was competing on quality there would be no need to mandate anything, since MS would long since have ceased to exist.
TWW
Fricking lasers! That's what would improve SQL - frickin' lasers!
It tells you that NASA are following the world's convention. Hardly any countries recognise the existance of Palistine as to do so would run the risk of being branded "terror states". What does that tell you?
TWW
That is a total and deliberate misrepresentation of the situation. The libraries are not simply allowing an agent to catalogue their books, they have allowed a company to copy their books and sell advertising based on the fact that the company holds those copies. The libraries gain nothing from this that is not shared with every person in the world with an internet connection - it is clear that the libraries in question have "gone rogue" and are facilitating the company's business aims. If the situation was as you claim, then the index so created would be keyed to the individual library which holds the book in question. It is not. There is no way in which the libraries gained, through any means, the right to give away copies of their books to an outside company for the purposes of that company making money off the resulting whole copies - not a mere "index" - of the books which the company has retained.
You are consistantly attempting to justify the actions both of Google and the libraries by saying what they would be allowed do do. However, since that is not what they are actually doing, your argument simply boils down to obfuscation and misdirection, and it seems that you are determined, for reasons which are unclear to maintain that stance even in the face of the clearest evidence possible: that of Google's website where the violation of copyright is on display for the world to see.
Google has copied entire books without permission of the copyright holders, and it is retaining and using those copies for profit in ways which go beyond the aim of simply indexing any individual library.
So, in that light, I withdraw from this pointless thread.
TWW