He didn't even spend much time describing his men and women sexually. Few female characters were introduced with a description of their breasts, for example, although you might learn about their cup size by and by, somewhat incidentally.
Quibbling over formatting is silly. White space formatting doesn't affect functionality of the code at all. (Unless you're using python and that's a whole different discussion) What should really happen is my editor should display the source the way I'm used to seeing it. I should be able to configure the view style and the actual in-file formatting remains unchanged. My cube mate across the way see's the source in HIS style. He's happy. I'm happy. This doesn't seem hard to me.
It might be harder than you think.
Noone will want to switch tools to accomplish this.
That includes everything that ever sees the source code,
from editors to diff(1), patch(1) and grep(1).
Your revision control system will have to be the place where
this is implemented, and you cannot share sources with anybody other than through it.
Patch files become useless, line numbers in compiler error messages become useless, printed
sources for reviews become useless...
All this may be fine, but if there's an obstacle it's so easy to say
"hell, why don't we just tell Joe to use 4-space indent like the rest of us?"
and ditch the magic reformatter.
Actors/actresses playing their own ancestors is the hokiest thing I've ever seen in television. Yes you can look like your ancestors. Yes you can look a lot like them. But you don't look (or sound) so much like them as to be identical. There's genetic code from other people there too to change stuff around.
Unless they filmed Heinlein's By His Bootstraps --
which I sincerely hope noone will ever attempt.
I live in a cold area, and during the winter I make extensive use of a 1500watt electric heater. My electric bill is maybe $120 in the coldest month, including everything else as well. Who cares about buying a 600-1000watt pc power supply, which isn't even going to be close to full load most of the time.
Yeah, but note that using electricity for heating is
expensive and wasteful, unless you have no other options for heating.
If you had used district heating or something, the
figures would have looked different.
(How different? Don't know.)
You haven't bothered looking much, have you? Fanless video cards are available for the taking. They're quite prevalent in Home Theater PC's (HTPC's) due to low noise levels, and the lack of a fan pretty much puts a very conservative upper limit on how much juice it can pull.
Depends on your viewpoint.
Some of the graphics cards I own don't even need a bloody heat-sink,
yet they do desktop things as well as cards made in the third millennium.
(Or would have, if video RAM hadn't been so expensive back in 1996).
Anyway, from that viewpoint, a huge heat-sink signals high
energy consumption.
People need to realise that a computer is fairly sophisticated and to use it properly you have to have some knowledge of computing, especially basic security.
Yes. And knowledge of basic security unfortunately requires quite a lot of computing knowledge.
Like, when I click this link, what is flowing over my Ethernet cable, and who is responsible for
creating it? Which software on my and the other side are processing it, and who are responsible
for those?
I won't hold my breath on this since the main PC operating system is in itself inherently insecure.
The problem is, I think, rather that we have spent 20 years telling users they
don't have to understand computing to use computers,
and placed colorful metaphors between the users and the screens.
We succeeded, and now the malware is exploiting the places where the metaphors break down.
And those metaphors are everywhere:
the C array which we treat as an input buffer;
the bits on a line we treat as a well-behaved full-duplex connection between two programs;
the little icons that tell people "click me and you'll see I'm a ZIP file which opens neatly in WinZip"...
Yep C is very weakly typed (some could say that it's untyped, as is ASM) as only the compiler does some sanity check, and even then it doesn't work too hard at it.
Huh?
What kind of static type checking cannot
be described as "only the compiler does some sanity check"?
Are there languages where extraterrestrials, Jehovah, or the NSA, or whoever,
helps the compiler?
I think you need to learn about type systems in various languages.
Alternatively, you could just say "I think C sucks".
This is the first valid criticism of C++ vs C I've ever seen. Most complaints about C++ are "it's not what I'm used to" from C programmers, but this is just a fundamental design flaw in C++.
What fundamental design flaw -- that malloc() is less convenient to use in C++?
For crying out loud, use new!
Ok, void pointers are less useful in C++ than in C.
In my experience, that has been a non-problem.
But then I've never tried to program in C with a C++ compiler --
I have enough problems without creating artificial ones.
In the absence of valid information during a decision making process it would be foolish not to assume the worst.
No -- it would be foolish to rule out the worst.
Assuming the worst is just paranoid.
It's the kind of thinking that would have triggered WWIII
if it had dominated.
I can assemble, manufacture and setup a bomb in international waters and there in nothing anyone can do about it. None of that is relivent when it goes kaboom within the borders of the United States or any other country [...]
There should be something like Godwin's Law for comparing
something to international terrorism and The War on Terrorism
when, in fact, it has nothing to do with it.
(Except, in this case, a threat to use violence.)
I am sure Microsoft did an unbiased evaluation of what mail server to run internally? Lol... yeah right.
Give me another company that uses it for 60,000 employees and you'd have a point (not saying there is no such company, I have no idea.)
I work for one such company. They went from sendmail to Exchange in year 2000 or so,
no doubt after an "unbiased evaluation".
Much lamentation from us Unix heads.
Still, mail delivery seems to mostly work these days.
Fuck trends. They're wrong. Every day the industry continues to stay with its current ridiculous technologies when vastly superior ones were invented decades ago infuriates me further. If it doesn't infuriate you, you're not paying close enough attention.
What infuriates me is when the industry "invents" and hypes a technology which
was invented decades ago -- and does it badly.
"Those who do not understand Unix", et cetera.
Where do people get this stupid idea that C is the antithesis of
object oriented design?
Or, for that matter, the stupid idea that object-oriented design
is the final goal that everyone should strive for.
OO is a tool. One of the more useful and important tools
for creating an understandable system when there's lot of complexity,
but it's still just a tool. And there are other tools.
How could anything be better than flint for making arrowheads?
More people probably tried to replace flint arrowheads with compressed buffalo-dung,
dried fish with pointy heads or discarded FireWire cables,
than with something that actually would have been better...
But he's on the right track. Python allows dynamic typing but nearly all of ones programs do not take advantage of it. Recognizing that is key to making it go fast I think.
I suspect that varies with the programmer.
I'm pretty certain that much of my Python code contains
things that a type deduction system (SML, Haskell) wouldn't be able to cope with.
Certainly I use duck typing a lot.
And besides, only one of maybe a hundred Python program I've written ran unacceptably slow.
And that was a quick hack for an IP packet analysis tool, which someone suddenly
wanted to feed dozens of megabytes of data.
I'd like to have type deduction -- but for static checking purposes, not speed optimizations.
You (and many other people) are trying to design INTERFACES.
Web pages (and CSS) were originally designed for marking up DOCUMENTS.
There needs to be an HTML-like variant for designing interfaces.
My browser dies totally when trying to view comments on slashdot, so I have to fire up firefox to check slashdot, sucks.
That's an Opera 9 bug triggered by the recent Slashdot change.
Postings to opera.linux suggest you upgrade to recent daily build,
and all will be well.
Though I like Emacs and currently use it, I find the standard syntax highlighting of Vim superior.
[...]
emacs only highlights variables in Perl when they are declared, and does not to highlighting on @ and % variables. In Vim all variables are highlighted anywhere.
You may be right about vim's syntax highlighting being better overall, but
you are wrong about perl.
My emacs highlights @foo and %foo well enough; they get colored and, IIRC, underlined.
There's lots of different products on the market and I'm not going to reveal which product we use, as that may be construed as giving out proprietary information. No, we didn't develop the product in-house, it's commercial, and I'm sure we pay out the butt for it.
Thus, it's something like Pointsec; http://www.pointsec.com/.
That's what they use on all laptops where I work.
This is not an endorsement, by the way; I never used it.
But seriously, I almost think the artist that created it was making a joke of the whole thing.
No, using both hands to reveal the logo on your chest
is a standard super-hero gesture.
... which opens up even scarier lines of thought.
What if Mr Goatse was (perhaps unconciously) emulating
the super-hero gesture?
Is that why we all find his picture so... memorable?
True, but the fallout's been useful. Ever used Rational XDE?
[...] Basically, it's a round-trip UML modeler: lay out your class diagram, and XDE will generate the code for it. Update the generated skeleton with "real" code, and XDE will update your model from the changes. It's much nicer than trying to do things with Rational Rose -- then again, pulling our your toenails with rust pliers is nicer than trying to do some things in Rose [...]
You have a realistic view on Rational Rose and that makes me
want to trust you...
However, since Rational promised that Rose would deliver
all that glorious UML round-trip goodness,
why should I trust them when they claim that this
"XDE" thing delivers it?
I've given Rational the benefit of the doubt too many times already.
Take ls and find, two of the most used UNIX-commands and I'm sure POSIX mentions them as well. [...]
The whole concept of the command-line of UNIX/"Linux" is antique and should be replaced with a more modern system which is consistent and builds on the same UNIX-philosophy, but do things right in a modern way.
To convince me, you should do more than compare the command-line options of ls, grep and find.
It is well-known that a handful of ancient Unix
commands (find, tar, ps... I cannot come up with any others)
treat the command-line differently.
The others either follow the normal convention
(possibly with Gnu --long-options added), or are
written by morons who cannot type "man getopt".
I would suggest making input and output available in XML, as an option.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could use Ctrl-3 which, as far as I can tell, is a traditional, pre-vim vi key.
I'm an emacs person, so I stay away from vim. But I do enjoy the more traditional vi clones, like nvi.
I take it you haven't read Number of the Beast ...
It might be harder than you think. Noone will want to switch tools to accomplish this. That includes everything that ever sees the source code, from editors to diff(1), patch(1) and grep(1).
Your revision control system will have to be the place where this is implemented, and you cannot share sources with anybody other than through it. Patch files become useless, line numbers in compiler error messages become useless, printed sources for reviews become useless ...
All this may be fine, but if there's an obstacle it's so easy to say
"hell, why don't we just tell Joe to use 4-space indent like the rest of us?"
and ditch the magic reformatter.
s/By His Bootstraps/All You Zombies/
Unless they filmed Heinlein's By His Bootstraps -- which I sincerely hope noone will ever attempt.
The Londo + G'Kar thing was of course unbeatable ...
Yeah, but note that using electricity for heating is expensive and wasteful, unless you have no other options for heating. If you had used district heating or something, the figures would have looked different. (How different? Don't know.)
Depends on your viewpoint. Some of the graphics cards I own don't even need a bloody heat-sink, yet they do desktop things as well as cards made in the third millennium. (Or would have, if video RAM hadn't been so expensive back in 1996).
Anyway, from that viewpoint, a huge heat-sink signals high energy consumption.
Yes. And knowledge of basic security unfortunately requires quite a lot of computing knowledge. Like, when I click this link, what is flowing over my Ethernet cable, and who is responsible for creating it? Which software on my and the other side are processing it, and who are responsible for those?
The problem is, I think, rather that we have spent 20 years telling users they don't have to understand computing to use computers, and placed colorful metaphors between the users and the screens. We succeeded, and now the malware is exploiting the places where the metaphors break down. And those metaphors are everywhere: the C array which we treat as an input buffer; the bits on a line we treat as a well-behaved full-duplex connection between two programs; the little icons that tell people "click me and you'll see I'm a ZIP file which opens neatly in WinZip" ...
Huh? What kind of static type checking cannot be described as "only the compiler does some sanity check"? Are there languages where extraterrestrials, Jehovah, or the NSA, or whoever, helps the compiler?
I think you need to learn about type systems in various languages. Alternatively, you could just say "I think C sucks".
What fundamental design flaw -- that malloc() is less convenient to use in C++? For crying out loud, use new!
Ok, void pointers are less useful in C++ than in C. In my experience, that has been a non-problem. But then I've never tried to program in C with a C++ compiler -- I have enough problems without creating artificial ones.
No -- it would be foolish to rule out the worst. Assuming the worst is just paranoid. It's the kind of thinking that would have triggered WWIII if it had dominated.
There should be something like Godwin's Law for comparing something to international terrorism and The War on Terrorism when, in fact, it has nothing to do with it. (Except, in this case, a threat to use violence.)
I work for one such company. They went from sendmail to Exchange in year 2000 or so, no doubt after an "unbiased evaluation". Much lamentation from us Unix heads. Still, mail delivery seems to mostly work these days.
What infuriates me is when the industry "invents" and hypes a technology which was invented decades ago -- and does it badly. "Those who do not understand Unix", et cetera.
Or, for that matter, the stupid idea that object-oriented design is the final goal that everyone should strive for.
OO is a tool. One of the more useful and important tools for creating an understandable system when there's lot of complexity, but it's still just a tool. And there are other tools.
More people probably tried to replace flint arrowheads with compressed buffalo-dung, dried fish with pointy heads or discarded FireWire cables, than with something that actually would have been better ...
I suspect that varies with the programmer. I'm pretty certain that much of my Python code contains things that a type deduction system (SML, Haskell) wouldn't be able to cope with. Certainly I use duck typing a lot.
And besides, only one of maybe a hundred Python program I've written ran unacceptably slow. And that was a quick hack for an IP packet analysis tool, which someone suddenly wanted to feed dozens of megabytes of data.
I'd like to have type deduction -- but for static checking purposes, not speed optimizations.
You may be right about vim's syntax highlighting being better overall, but you are wrong about perl. My emacs highlights @foo and %foo well enough; they get colored and, IIRC, underlined.
Thus, it's something like Pointsec; http://www.pointsec.com/. That's what they use on all laptops where I work. This is not an endorsement, by the way; I never used it.
No, using both hands to reveal the logo on your chest is a standard super-hero gesture.
You have a realistic view on Rational Rose and that makes me want to trust you ...
However, since Rational promised that Rose would deliver all that glorious UML round-trip goodness, why should I trust them when they claim that this "XDE" thing delivers it? I've given Rational the benefit of the doubt too many times already.
To convince me, you should do more than compare the command-line options of ls, grep and find.
It is well-known that a handful of ancient Unix commands (find, tar, ps ... I cannot come up with any others)
treat the command-line differently.
The others either follow the normal convention
(possibly with Gnu --long-options added), or are
written by morons who cannot type "man getopt".
I would suggest making input and output available in XML, as an option.
Aaaargh!