Nothing prevents C++ tools from having the same features you're talking about. It's all a matter of what the IDE developers decide to include in the IDE.
While I agree in principle with what you are saying, nothing prevents C++ tools from having the same features, I wonder if the reason I do not see these features in, say Visual C++, is because the job is exponentially more difficult in C++ than Java.
An example of why this could be problematic for C++, consider changing a typedef or macro used in a template. The IDE would have to consider the expansion of all templates based on the change in the typedef. This is a substantially more complex situation than Java allows.
Actually I was doing an IDE comparison, based on language features. Someone who has so much experience programming would normally learn to read better.
So what was it you were doing full time in Java 9 years ago?
There are quite some conditions that C++ and any other proper language catches at compiletime while they are only caught at runtime in Java.
Ummm, okay. That may be correct, but you've given nothing to go on. There are many conditions that Java will at least catch that most "proper" languages never do, and go unnoticed until someone has root access to your box.
Also, if you put enough compiler-like intelligence in your IDE, then the same is possible with C++, and I have no doubt it has been done.
Template expanding, typedefs, overloaded operators and macros can easily make C/C++ impossible to read to the casual observer. It would not suprise me to find that no C++ IDE has reached the sophistication of IDEA. IDEA manages it because Java is a simpler language.
I prefer my compiler telling me whats wrong thop. It has a better idea because it is actually doing the compilation, and the errors I will get are specific to the current implementation of the compiler that I am using.
I think I can correctly ascertain from that, you've never used IDEA or Eclipse for editing a Java program of any substantial size. The comment does not make sense in context.
Getting the same type of errors from two different things is just confusing, people will see it as two different things while in fact they are the same thing.
I've never heard anybody make this complaint. Probably because they never get errors from the compiler. Their only source is the IDE which not only tells them what the error is, but will also suggest how to fix it and can do the fix automatically.
For example, if you make a call to an IO function, you need to catch or throw the exception java.io.IOException. IDEA will catch this, underline in red the problem code, and if you click the little lightbulb on the problem line, will offer to auto-fix the error by either surrounding the code in a try/catch block, or adding IOException to the method throws clause. For me, forgetting exactly which checked exceptions a method throws or whether or not I had the correct imports were the more common sources of compiler errors.
IDEA is kind of like having a junior programmer/code monkey at my disposal. He makes suggestions on how to fix the simplistic issues of my code, and I choose whether or not to sign off on one or to do a more intelligent fix myself.
I dunno. For windows workstations, I primarily use Win2K pro now (though I do have XP Pro machines as well). I used NT 4 before that. I didn't notice that XP was substantially faster at booting than either of its predecessors. Is it?
Experienced programmers used to working with C or C++ know about this and write code where this isn't a problem.
I'd like to believe that was true, but my experience has been that even experienced programmers tend to do something like:
* write code to load in hunk of data from file * write more code assuming data has been loaded correctly. * test to make sure data and code using it is functioning according to requirements * move on to next problem
Unless "works on big, little and mixed endian" is in the requirements (and it usually isn't) the naive approach is usually taken, even by programmers with 15 years of experience. Making sure the code is endian neutral often means replacing 1 line with 10-50.
Someone mentioned on Slashdot that the Windows API can accept either a forward or back slash, but I don't personally know.
I'm not sure that's correct. I just tried opening a file from notepad and a command prompt and mixing slash directions. I'm sure there are some windows api functions that are okay we whichever slash you use, but I would expect widgets that use that underlying API to mirror that insensitivity.
Writing portable code in C, C++, or Java requires that the programmer know how to do it.
"know how to do it" in Java boils down to maybe 1 or 2 rules of thumb. In C and C++, the issues from Java exist (e.g. path separator), but so do others (e.g. endianness). It is easier to write cross platform code in Java.
Java has a shitload more overhead than C/C++ (JVM and all).
True, but the lion's share of this overhead is paid for once during startup. One of the lessons of windows is that people are willing to wait extra time for something to start as long as it works well once started.
If you mean overhead in terms of memory footprint.. Medium to large java apps chew up about the same resources as their C/C++ counterparts.
And there isn't anything you can do about it.
Partially true. You can tweak the JVM parameters so that you either pay most of the start-up overhead up front, or as you go. For server apps, up front is always better. For other apps, it kind of depends.
Java is a poor choice for application development no matter how you look at it.
Entirely incorrect. The larger a C/C++ application becomes, the more prone it becomes to a gamut of bugs which are not possible in Java. (More prone because the larger the application, the more difficult debugging becomes)
Another big plus with Java, and maybe this exists with C/C++ and I don't know it, is the way the rigidity of the language has enabled fairly advanced tools to be created. I nearly never have compile time errors any more because my development environment of choice, IDEA, catches them all before I've saved the file I'm working on. For someone like me who loves the XP-style of coding where you write a test case before you write the class, this is a huge boon. When I'm done writing the test case, the IDE has highlighted all the method calls I've made which do not exist in the target class. A couple mouse clicks will take me to the class file and insert a stubbed method definition. The IDE takes care of the form, allowing me to concentrate on function.
I have worked since 1998 on Java software with a focus on UI and portability. Although OS X has never been on my radar, I have worked extensively on other people's code when it was "working fine in windows" but partially or completely broken in Solaris (later Linux as servers migrating over).
All the compatibility problems broke down to one of three problems:
1) Solaris patching. I don't know if Sun has fixed this, but patching of Solaris and patching of Java to work on Solaris was a true nightmare. The Solaris JVM was awful (was, I haven't touched it since 1.3 so I like to think it is all better now).
2) Hardcoding of directory separator characters instead of using File.separatorChar
3) Fonts. The UI issues on the Unix variants for early Java were huge. Swing didn't hardly fix anything because the underlying problem was truly hideous fonts. To the best of my knowledge, 1.4 has completely fixed this problem.
To the best of my knowledge #1 and #3 are fixed now. #2 is something you usually only see from recent grads or people new to Java programming.
I can't remember the last time anything I wrote in Java and packaged as a jar had trouble working in Windows or Linux. Certainly has not happened since 1.4 came out.
I've worked recently with C/C++ code and experienced C/C++ portability fun between platforms. The code was used for reading a writing DNA chromatogram format files. Worked perfectly in Solaris. Wrote out 4 gigabyte blank files in Linux in the odd circumstance when it would actually run at all. The problem turned out to be endian handling. This problem doesn't occur in Java, however in C/C++ when you simply tell the machine to write out blocks of memory (that happen to be data structures) the resulting byte order is whatever the machine natively uses. The IO routines don't know if one piece is a double, another a long and yet another a short.
Java is really portable. It's also quite fast. Nearly all complaints about Java's speed these days come from Swing, which is really caused by an overdesign of Swing (from a design stand point, Swing is very, very nice. Unfortunately what makes it nice also makes it quite slow)
"look how smart I am I figured out he's manipulating film" stance, while at the same time taking the "everyone else is too stupid to see that it's manipulated, therefore it's bad" stance.
What bothers me is that you didn't notice that the "look how smart I am" stance came about because some people who wrote the film off as utter propaganda noticed average people writing movie reviews wherein they bought the package hook, line and sinker. The 48 hours bit, the Heston speech bit... everything. Only after that did I notice anyone criticizing the accuracy of the film pop up and say "what are you guys talking about, none of that was true as shown."
You give people too little credit.
You oughtta do more research. It was only after people started spouting "facts" from the movie that the nay sayers said nay.
No it wasn't. If you had read both with a critical eye, you'd realize that the K5 article was a weak apologist ranting. Everything is passed off as "regular film editing." Documentaries should not do "regular film editing" if such editing would lead the public to believe something decidedly different had actually occurred.
The best example of this is the Heston speech in Colorado after the Columbine shootings. How a reasonable person could look at the actual speech delivered and then what Moore did to it and not conclude this was extremely dishonest "film editing" of a documentary escapes me.
Another great example was buying ammo in the Canadian Wal-Mart. Moore wasn't just "a regular citizen", he's a regular citizen who obtained a firearms importation license in Canada. Through "regular film editing," that part was never mentioned by Moore.
That alone makes it alright to risk any number of animals to save the life of one human.
There's actually a bigger bonus to using the rats that I'm not seeing mentioned much. Most of us would consider it okay to sacrifice 10 or 20 rats for the sake of 1 child.
The reality of the situation is: for every rat that is killed, 4 or 5 children might be saved.
The rats are not heavy enough to set off a normal mine, so if one does die it is unusual. And that rat has a high probability of finding a couple mines that would have otherwise killed or maimed a child.
proving that the RIAA was right all along and p2p technologies are all about theft of services!
I think RIAA is very close to losing the ability to use that argument and be taken seriously. P2P, notably bit torrent, is being used increasingly by producers who can't afford a fat pipe for the whole world to download their stuff and by consumers who are tired of waiting in line at fileplanet.
The lion's share of P2P traffic is still illegal stuff, but if it can be shown that there are legitimate business models built using P2P for file distribution, RIAA's argument is effectively muted.
The only reason most implementations of 'transparency' isn't 'real' (only one layer and/or non-realistic blending and/or not affecting certain surfaces (such as video) is because the CPU/GPUs haven't been fast enought to implement it, not because no-one thought of it.
Very true. In 1999 (.com boom heydey) the company I was working for hired a graphic design company to come up with a new "look" to our product. The designs that came back looked kind of average, but notably included windows with alpha blended backgrounds. Since I was the lead Human Interface / User Interface guy, it fell on me to prototype the design.
IIRC I just extended JInternalFrame and used Graphics2D's alpha-blended drawing capabilities. It took me maybe two hours from when I started thinking about it until I had a working demo.
It didn't seem that novel at the time. I don't know of anybody else who did it. But it didn't make it out of the prototype phase because, well, Java - at least back then - was dog slow at doing this sort of image processing.
This isn't exactly what apple patented, but I know at least 5 years ago I was toying around with the idea but stopped for exactly what you said: The CPU just wasn't fast enough.
Yes. Craig Barret, like Carly Fiorina, has found a PR whipping boy. The public knows that Math & Science K-12 education is very poor. It's really just a red herring. Every one of the white collar jobs they ship over seas requires a college education, and he admits is the university system is healthy.
They are lobbying for reforms to K-12 not because they actually care whether or not K-12 education gets better but because it would take years to happen and in the meantime they can continue finding ways to increase the bottom line. If you're laying off people here to send the jobs over there, you are admitting that you have people who could do it over here regardless of the state of K12 education.
This is all true. You may not know the vast difference in materials used for CD's.
If the CD feels sticky around the edges, it may (may) mean a low quality glue was used. It provides a potential path for fungus to migrate into your CD.
Gold reflecting layers (very rare to find anymore) are the absolute best. Gold generally doesn't react with the stuff in the atmosphere.
High quality archival stabilized dye layers are also hard to find anymore. Phthalocyanine was the absolute best last I looked (a few years ago) with an estimated stable lifetime of 200 years.
A CD that you want to hold data for 100 years should have a quality glue job, gold reflective layer and Pthalocyanine dye. I know of only two brands that have ever been made to this quality. One was Kodak Gold (some marketing suffix here), but it went out of production several years ago. The other is Mitsui Gold, which cost about $1 each in 100 packs.
And no matter how nice the CD manufacture is, it will not last unless properly stored. The three tenets of archival storage are: Cool, Dry and Dark. Don't leave your CD-R's on the shores of a tropical beach.
Claiborne really isn't saying he's quiting because the military uses Linux. I think he may have been going in that direction until he stopped and thought how silly that sounds.
Honestly I'm having a terrible time figuring out what he is trying to say:
My one regret is that more and more [LULA] has become an insular collection of geeks that can get along just fine without me.
Okay, sounds like his real reason is that he doesn't feel appreciated.
I cannot attend Tuesday night's meeting, in fact I would be ashamed to in view of what our country is doing in Iraq...
Hmmm, okay, so may he's quitting because the other members don't subscribe to his political ideology?
I think the question of military use of Linux needs a vigorous debate in the Linux community. It is just now happening. I don't think that Linux should be used for killing
Okay, now it sounds like the issue is he's a hardcore anti-war advocate and is trying to bring attention to his cause by resigning.
Your syllogism is correct, you are just distorting it to suggest that deionized water is noticeably worse for you than tap water.
1. Drinking too much water can flush electrolytes and cause sickness and/or death (from information you provided)
Yes. Too much is around 4 gallons of water per day. It does not matter if it is deionized water, or tap water.
2. Deionized water sucks up electrolytes, even dissolving metal to do so
Yes. Tap water does as well. You can test this by pouring a small amount of table salt into both and noting that it dissolves in both.
3. Because drinking water and losing electrolytes is bad, and deionized water causes immediate loss of electrolytes, drinking deoinized water is bad.
Drinking water is actually necessary for life. Drinking several gallons a day, however is toxic. Tap water will remove electrolytes from your blood stream at essentially the same rate as deionized water. Your proposition was that drinking deionized water in the same quantities as one would drink tap water is toxic. It isn't.
The only time tap and deionized water show a marked difference in reaction rates is when the availability of ions is very low (such as in a plastic container). In your blood, the availability of ions is very high.
I grant that these are the kinds of questions a user will ask, but they are not things that the computer can possibly tell them. [...] If I write code that calls a function, and the function fails, it is reasonable to have the code report the function that failed, and what error it returned. But it is impossible to explain WHY the function was called.
Since nobody is going to argue that any portion of KDE represents artificial intelligence, the computer is not going to tell or do anything except as directed by a programmer. Therefore to buy what you are saying I would have to buy that a human can tell the computer to perform some action (start an io-slave) but cannot articulate why this is necessary. I categorically reject that assertion.
I can think of many ways which a better error message could be articulated than "failed to start." There is always a reason something failed to start. Now you could argue that within the kernel sometimes the only thing you are allowed to return is -EINVAL (I've written one of the modules in the kernel and have seen this), and the software has no practical way of determining exactly what caused the error because the kernel lacks a mechanism for feedback, but this is a failing of the kernel, not computer science.
I spent several years in software engineering as a lead human interface designer. I've found that proper use of exceptions in very complex systems is extremely useful for reporting the causes of all manner of errors. But more than anything, working in user interface taught me about the average user. When you throw highly technical information that they have no chance of deciphering at them, they assume things are much worse than they may be. A subtle message with a "more info" button is far less likely to throw their heart into arrhythmia and scare them from Linux. (And I very much do not want them scared from Linux because I want Linux to succeed)
"Distillation removes both ionic and nonionic organic contaminants" and "Distillation removes all ionic and nonionic organic contaminants."
From the link I provided:
So far as quality goes, distilled is better than deionized.
When talking about quality in this case (using for washing in a chem lab), fewer contaminants = higher quality.
I am also curious how you know Calder is a "scientist at Argonne National Labs" and not a high school geometry teacher: (from your link) "NEWTON is an electronic community for Science, Math, and Computer Science K-12 Educators." I just find this funny because you took issue with my citing the site for a furnishing industry earlier.
What are the first 3 words on the link I provided? Up top on the header, in h1 tags. The first 3 words.
If distillation does produce water as pure as deionized water, I have four peer reviewed journal articles supporting my position (from the urban legends page) and you have ZERO supporting yours. Your entire position hinges on deionized water being more pure than distilled water. Nothing you posted supports that position (note that the only statistic on purity you got came from distillation). The material I posted specifically says distillation is more pure than deionized.
In contrast, distilled water is actually boiled in a still and the
condensate collected and distributed. Distillation removes both ionic and nonionic organic contaminants.
Do you know something scientists at Argonne National Labs don't?
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing prevents C++ tools from having the same features you're talking about. It's all a matter of what the IDE developers decide to include in the IDE.
While I agree in principle with what you are saying, nothing prevents C++ tools from having the same features, I wonder if the reason I do not see these features in, say Visual C++, is because the job is exponentially more difficult in C++ than Java.
An example of why this could be problematic for C++, consider changing a typedef or macro used in a template. The IDE would have to consider the expansion of all templates based on the change in the typedef. This is a substantially more complex situation than Java allows.
Actually I was doing an IDE comparison, based on language features. Someone who has so much experience programming would normally learn to read better.
So what was it you were doing full time in Java 9 years ago?
There are quite some conditions that C++ and any other proper language catches at compiletime while they are only caught at runtime in Java.
Ummm, okay. That may be correct, but you've given nothing to go on. There are many conditions that Java will at least catch that most "proper" languages never do, and go unnoticed until someone has root access to your box.
Also, if you put enough compiler-like intelligence in your IDE, then the same is possible with C++, and I have no doubt it has been done.
Template expanding, typedefs, overloaded operators and macros can easily make C/C++ impossible to read to the casual observer. It would not suprise me to find that no C++ IDE has reached the sophistication of IDEA. IDEA manages it because Java is a simpler language.
I prefer my compiler telling me whats wrong thop. It has a better idea because it is actually doing the compilation, and the errors I will get are specific to the current implementation of the compiler that I am using.
I think I can correctly ascertain from that, you've never used IDEA or Eclipse for editing a Java program of any substantial size. The comment does not make sense in context.
Getting the same type of errors from two different things is just confusing, people will see it as two different things while in fact they are the same thing.
I've never heard anybody make this complaint. Probably because they never get errors from the compiler. Their only source is the IDE which not only tells them what the error is, but will also suggest how to fix it and can do the fix automatically.
For example, if you make a call to an IO function, you need to catch or throw the exception java.io.IOException. IDEA will catch this, underline in red the problem code, and if you click the little lightbulb on the problem line, will offer to auto-fix the error by either surrounding the code in a try/catch block, or adding IOException to the method throws clause. For me, forgetting exactly which checked exceptions a method throws or whether or not I had the correct imports were the more common sources of compiler errors.
IDEA is kind of like having a junior programmer/code monkey at my disposal. He makes suggestions on how to fix the simplistic issues of my code, and I choose whether or not to sign off on one or to do a more intelligent fix myself.
I dunno. For windows workstations, I primarily use Win2K pro now (though I do have XP Pro machines as well). I used NT 4 before that. I didn't notice that XP was substantially faster at booting than either of its predecessors. Is it?
Experienced programmers used to working with C or C++ know about this and write code where this isn't a problem.
I'd like to believe that was true, but my experience has been that even experienced programmers tend to do something like:
* write code to load in hunk of data from file
* write more code assuming data has been loaded correctly.
* test to make sure data and code using it is functioning according to requirements
* move on to next problem
Unless "works on big, little and mixed endian" is in the requirements (and it usually isn't) the naive approach is usually taken, even by programmers with 15 years of experience. Making sure the code is endian neutral often means replacing 1 line with 10-50.
Someone mentioned on Slashdot that the Windows API can accept either a forward or back slash, but I don't personally know.
I'm not sure that's correct. I just tried opening a file from notepad and a command prompt and mixing slash directions. I'm sure there are some windows api functions that are okay we whichever slash you use, but I would expect widgets that use that underlying API to mirror that insensitivity.
Writing portable code in C, C++, or Java requires that the programmer know how to do it.
"know how to do it" in Java boils down to maybe 1 or 2 rules of thumb. In C and C++, the issues from Java exist (e.g. path separator), but so do others (e.g. endianness). It is easier to write cross platform code in Java.
Java has a shitload more overhead than C/C++ (JVM and all).
True, but the lion's share of this overhead is paid for once during startup. One of the lessons of windows is that people are willing to wait extra time for something to start as long as it works well once started.
If you mean overhead in terms of memory footprint.. Medium to large java apps chew up about the same resources as their C/C++ counterparts.
And there isn't anything you can do about it.
Partially true. You can tweak the JVM parameters so that you either pay most of the start-up overhead up front, or as you go. For server apps, up front is always better. For other apps, it kind of depends.
Java is a poor choice for application development no matter how you look at it.
Entirely incorrect. The larger a C/C++ application becomes, the more prone it becomes to a gamut of bugs which are not possible in Java. (More prone because the larger the application, the more difficult debugging becomes)
Another big plus with Java, and maybe this exists with C/C++ and I don't know it, is the way the rigidity of the language has enabled fairly advanced tools to be created. I nearly never have compile time errors any more because my development environment of choice, IDEA, catches them all before I've saved the file I'm working on. For someone like me who loves the XP-style of coding where you write a test case before you write the class, this is a huge boon. When I'm done writing the test case, the IDE has highlighted all the method calls I've made which do not exist in the target class. A couple mouse clicks will take me to the class file and insert a stubbed method definition. The IDE takes care of the form, allowing me to concentrate on function.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but...
well, you see, Java really isn't that portable.
I have worked since 1998 on Java software with a focus on UI and portability. Although OS X has never been on my radar, I have worked extensively on other people's code when it was "working fine in windows" but partially or completely broken in Solaris (later Linux as servers migrating over).
All the compatibility problems broke down to one of three problems:
1) Solaris patching. I don't know if Sun has fixed this, but patching of Solaris and patching of Java to work on Solaris was a true nightmare. The Solaris JVM was awful (was, I haven't touched it since 1.3 so I like to think it is all better now).
2) Hardcoding of directory separator characters instead of using File.separatorChar
3) Fonts. The UI issues on the Unix variants for early Java were huge. Swing didn't hardly fix anything because the underlying problem was truly hideous fonts. To the best of my knowledge, 1.4 has completely fixed this problem.
To the best of my knowledge #1 and #3 are fixed now. #2 is something you usually only see from recent grads or people new to Java programming.
I can't remember the last time anything I wrote in Java and packaged as a jar had trouble working in Windows or Linux. Certainly has not happened since 1.4 came out.
I've worked recently with C/C++ code and experienced C/C++ portability fun between platforms. The code was used for reading a writing DNA chromatogram format files. Worked perfectly in Solaris. Wrote out 4 gigabyte blank files in Linux in the odd circumstance when it would actually run at all. The problem turned out to be endian handling. This problem doesn't occur in Java, however in C/C++ when you simply tell the machine to write out blocks of memory (that happen to be data structures) the resulting byte order is whatever the machine natively uses. The IO routines don't know if one piece is a double, another a long and yet another a short.
Java is really portable. It's also quite fast. Nearly all complaints about Java's speed these days come from Swing, which is really caused by an overdesign of Swing (from a design stand point, Swing is very, very nice. Unfortunately what makes it nice also makes it quite slow)
What if we're talking about a heterosexual man and woman, and one of them has AIDs and the other no insurance?
Should we make all sex illegal since it's possible that the spread of diseases (even curable ones) potentially steals from society?
Wow! I hadn't connected Paris Hilton and Ellen Feiss, but now that you mention it...
0.82 GBP/L * 3.78 L/gal * 1.79 USD/GBP ~= $5.55 US/gal
My exchange rate might be off, my source was last updated 4 days ago.
The sun just isn't a viable solution it will burn out in a few million years, then where will we be?
We'll be writing books about how the Sun burning out is contributing to global warming.
I'm sure nobody would really notice if they killed a butterfly...
"look how smart I am I figured out he's manipulating film" stance, while at the same time taking the "everyone else is too stupid to see that it's manipulated, therefore it's bad" stance.
What bothers me is that you didn't notice that the "look how smart I am" stance came about because some people who wrote the film off as utter propaganda noticed average people writing movie reviews wherein they bought the package hook, line and sinker. The 48 hours bit, the Heston speech bit... everything. Only after that did I notice anyone criticizing the accuracy of the film pop up and say "what are you guys talking about, none of that was true as shown."
You give people too little credit.
You oughtta do more research. It was only after people started spouting "facts" from the movie that the nay sayers said nay.
No it wasn't. If you had read both with a critical eye, you'd realize that the K5 article was a weak apologist ranting. Everything is passed off as "regular film editing." Documentaries should not do "regular film editing" if such editing would lead the public to believe something decidedly different had actually occurred.
The best example of this is the Heston speech in Colorado after the Columbine shootings. How a reasonable person could look at the actual speech delivered and then what Moore did to it and not conclude this was extremely dishonest "film editing" of a documentary escapes me.
Another great example was buying ammo in the Canadian Wal-Mart. Moore wasn't just "a regular citizen", he's a regular citizen who obtained a firearms importation license in Canada. Through "regular film editing," that part was never mentioned by Moore.
They were both served? Then it's on!
That alone makes it alright to risk any number of animals to save the life of one human.
There's actually a bigger bonus to using the rats that I'm not seeing mentioned much. Most of us would consider it okay to sacrifice 10 or 20 rats for the sake of 1 child.
The reality of the situation is: for every rat that is killed, 4 or 5 children might be saved.
The rats are not heavy enough to set off a normal mine, so if one does die it is unusual. And that rat has a high probability of finding a couple mines that would have otherwise killed or maimed a child.
It sounds like a good exchange to me.
proving that the RIAA was right all along and p2p technologies are all about theft of services!
I think RIAA is very close to losing the ability to use that argument and be taken seriously. P2P, notably bit torrent, is being used increasingly by producers who can't afford a fat pipe for the whole world to download their stuff and by consumers who are tired of waiting in line at fileplanet.
The lion's share of P2P traffic is still illegal stuff, but if it can be shown that there are legitimate business models built using P2P for file distribution, RIAA's argument is effectively muted.
The only reason most implementations of 'transparency' isn't 'real' (only one layer and/or non-realistic blending and/or not affecting certain surfaces (such as video) is because the CPU/GPUs haven't been fast enought to implement it, not because no-one thought of it.
Very true. In 1999 (.com boom heydey) the company I was working for hired a graphic design company to come up with a new "look" to our product. The designs that came back looked kind of average, but notably included windows with alpha blended backgrounds. Since I was the lead Human Interface / User Interface guy, it fell on me to prototype the design.
IIRC I just extended JInternalFrame and used Graphics2D's alpha-blended drawing capabilities. It took me maybe two hours from when I started thinking about it until I had a working demo.
It didn't seem that novel at the time. I don't know of anybody else who did it. But it didn't make it out of the prototype phase because, well, Java - at least back then - was dog slow at doing this sort of image processing.
This isn't exactly what apple patented, but I know at least 5 years ago I was toying around with the idea but stopped for exactly what you said: The CPU just wasn't fast enough.
Yes. Craig Barret, like Carly Fiorina, has found a PR whipping boy. The public knows that Math & Science K-12 education is very poor. It's really just a red herring. Every one of the white collar jobs they ship over seas requires a college education, and he admits is the university system is healthy.
They are lobbying for reforms to K-12 not because they actually care whether or not K-12 education gets better but because it would take years to happen and in the meantime they can continue finding ways to increase the bottom line. If you're laying off people here to send the jobs over there, you are admitting that you have people who could do it over here regardless of the state of K12 education.
This is all true. You may not know the vast difference in materials used for CD's.
If the CD feels sticky around the edges, it may (may) mean a low quality glue was used. It provides a potential path for fungus to migrate into your CD.
Gold reflecting layers (very rare to find anymore) are the absolute best. Gold generally doesn't react with the stuff in the atmosphere.
High quality archival stabilized dye layers are also hard to find anymore. Phthalocyanine was the absolute best last I looked (a few years ago) with an estimated stable lifetime of 200 years.
A CD that you want to hold data for 100 years should have a quality glue job, gold reflective layer and Pthalocyanine dye. I know of only two brands that have ever been made to this quality. One was Kodak Gold (some marketing suffix here), but it went out of production several years ago. The other is Mitsui Gold, which cost about $1 each in 100 packs.
And no matter how nice the CD manufacture is, it will not last unless properly stored. The three tenets of archival storage are: Cool, Dry and Dark. Don't leave your CD-R's on the shores of a tropical beach.
Honestly I'm having a terrible time figuring out what he is trying to say:Okay, sounds like his real reason is that he doesn't feel appreciated.Hmmm, okay, so may he's quitting because the other members don't subscribe to his political ideology?Okay, now it sounds like the issue is he's a hardcore anti-war advocate and is trying to bring attention to his cause by resigning.
Your syllogism is correct, you are just distorting it to suggest that deionized water is noticeably worse for you than tap water.
1. Drinking too much water can flush electrolytes and cause sickness and/or death (from information you provided)
Yes. Too much is around 4 gallons of water per day. It does not matter if it is deionized water, or tap water.
2. Deionized water sucks up electrolytes, even dissolving metal to do so
Yes. Tap water does as well. You can test this by pouring a small amount of table salt into both and noting that it dissolves in both.
3. Because drinking water and losing electrolytes is bad, and deionized water causes immediate loss of electrolytes, drinking deoinized water is bad.
Drinking water is actually necessary for life. Drinking several gallons a day, however is toxic. Tap water will remove electrolytes from your blood stream at essentially the same rate as deionized water. Your proposition was that drinking deionized water in the same quantities as one would drink tap water is toxic. It isn't.
The only time tap and deionized water show a marked difference in reaction rates is when the availability of ions is very low (such as in a plastic container). In your blood, the availability of ions is very high.
I grant that these are the kinds of questions a user will ask, but they are not things that the computer can possibly tell them.
[...]
If I write code that calls a function, and the function fails, it is reasonable to have the code report the function that failed, and what error it returned. But it is impossible to explain WHY the function was called.
Since nobody is going to argue that any portion of KDE represents artificial intelligence, the computer is not going to tell or do anything except as directed by a programmer. Therefore to buy what you are saying I would have to buy that a human can tell the computer to perform some action (start an io-slave) but cannot articulate why this is necessary. I categorically reject that assertion.
I can think of many ways which a better error message could be articulated than "failed to start." There is always a reason something failed to start. Now you could argue that within the kernel sometimes the only thing you are allowed to return is -EINVAL (I've written one of the modules in the kernel and have seen this), and the software has no practical way of determining exactly what caused the error because the kernel lacks a mechanism for feedback, but this is a failing of the kernel, not computer science.
I spent several years in software engineering as a lead human interface designer. I've found that proper use of exceptions in very complex systems is extremely useful for reporting the causes of all manner of errors. But more than anything, working in user interface taught me about the average user. When you throw highly technical information that they have no chance of deciphering at them, they assume things are much worse than they may be. A subtle message with a "more info" button is far less likely to throw their heart into arrhythmia and scare them from Linux. (And I very much do not want them scared from Linux because I want Linux to succeed)
From the link I provided:When talking about quality in this case (using for washing in a chem lab), fewer contaminants = higher quality.
I am also curious how you know Calder is a "scientist at Argonne National Labs" and not a high school geometry teacher: (from your link) "NEWTON is an electronic community for Science, Math, and Computer Science K-12 Educators." I just find this funny because you took issue with my citing the site for a furnishing industry earlier.
What are the first 3 words on the link I provided? Up top on the header, in h1 tags. The first 3 words.
If distillation does produce water as pure as deionized water, I have four peer reviewed journal articles supporting my position (from the urban legends page) and you have ZERO supporting yours. Your entire position hinges on deionized water being more pure than distilled water. Nothing you posted supports that position (note that the only statistic on purity you got came from distillation). The material I posted specifically says distillation is more pure than deionized.
Yes. I also work with biochemistry Ph.D.'s.
Destillation simply means boiling it and collecting the condensate.
Yes.
That does not give a pure sample, and that most certainly does not deionize it.
Wrong. This says otherwise. To wit: Do you know something scientists at Argonne National Labs don't?