For example: American Indians at the hands of the United States, ca. 1600-19xx India at the hands of Britain, ca. 1800. China at the hands of Japan, ca. 1940. France at the hands of Germany, ca. 1940. South Korea at the hands of North Korea and Chian, ca. 1950.
You are essentially saying that there are lots of regulations that pertain to social issues. It's largely true.
However, economically there is much less regulation than in Europe. If I wanted to start a business it would cost me less than $50 and it would take me less than 4 hours to do it.
Economic freedom is the more important part of freedom in my view. Most of the other stuff, drinking under 21, no gay marriage, drug laws, etc... is secondary. I would not trade my ability to start a business for $50 and in less than 4 hours for all of it. Much of Europe has and to its detriment, I believe. Most of your citizens seem to be wards of the state, from the cradle to the grave. At least France and Sweden are good examples of this.
But yes, you are right, the United States has many more social regulations.
Lots of good points... The government is too big and wields too much power.
* Stem-cell research is under fire. Why should the government fund this or any other research? That they fund so much other crap and not this is a bit of an embarassment... * Self-decided abortion is controversial. Yeah, some people see it as murder. Arguably it is at some point. Certainly "aborting" a "fetus" late in a pregnancy, (i.e. after a time when many premature babies live) is murder. Earlier in the process perhaps not. My take on early-term abortions is if you're against abortion, don't have one. But you have to realize there is a lot of emotion in this and many Americans are very spiritual people who view life as a gift from God, that the gift is bestowed at conception and to destroy it is to commit the worst of crimes.
* Gay marriage is controversial. What purpose does gay marriage serve? Why should society bestow this benefit without getting anything in return? Marriage between a man and a woman serves society positively, in that it provides the most conducive institution for raising well-adjusted children. Why sanction and give privlege to something that does not and can not benefit society?
* You need to be 18 to have sex, 21 for a beer. You don't have to be 18 to have sex, well actually that varies from state to state, as it should. Washington D.C. does not have the power to regulate such things, nor should it. I believe the age of consent where I live, in New Mexico, is 16. The alochol thing, well I don't know.... There's so much irreponsibility surrounding it even with "mature" people that prohibiting it until 21 doesn't seem all that bad, at least sales of it. What you do in your own home really should be your own business though. As long as you don't plan to go out driving I don't care how old you are if you want to get drunk and your parents condone it.
* Huge parts of certain population-groups are imprisoned, many for small drug-offences. If huge parts of certain population-groups commit crimes they should be imprisonsed. If they commit more crimes than other population-groups then they should pay for that. Everyone needs to learn to be responsible for their own actions. No one can make your life better but you. If you were dealt a bad hand it is possible to overcome it. God knows I've known many people who have. By the same token I've known people who were dealt marvelous hands and pissed it all away. Everyone has a choice and the decsions we make are ours to deal with. A person didn't have to pull the trigger, they didn't have to take that first shot, they didn't have to rob that house or that store. What they have to be is accountable for their actions. Excuses are a dime a dozen.
Others may be willing to help us from time to time, but no one should be forced to. That said we all should be willing to help, but we should never be forced to. I think about my life and the people I've known and if it weren't for a few choices I made when I was 18 I could very easily have ended up a junkie, just like many of my friends from that time. (For the record I'm 29 now).
Imprisoning people for minor drug offenses is a huge waste of tax-payer money. We should stop doing that. Agreed.
* It's illegal to tell people how to break certain types of locks. Even if the lock protect their own property. Yup and that's a crock.
* You have to give up a huge amount of personal info, including biometrics, to even be allowed into the USA. As a tourist, an immigrant or what?
* It's attempted again and again to outlaw or seriously hamper acts of speech, such as publishing a video-game. Not selling vulgar things to minors does not seem like a bad thing. If we could define minor as under-16 that would be better, but stil...
* SLAPs where getting so much out of hand that several states saw fit to enact special anti-SLAP laws. What is SLAP?
By the way there are tons of regulations governing mega-corporations. Books and books and books to be sure. Peopl
I don't think that higher productivity or more profit is the goal. I'm not sure where you got that from my reply...
The principle, or the goal if you will, is that the freedom to associate trumps any perceived right to work. That's not to say business should be completely unregulated, but that we should tread lightly. Legislation to regulate business is sweeping, while using the courts and a mentality of strict liability for damages could be better. This of course breaks down when plantiffs, (e.g. injured workers, or people downstream of a chemical plant), bring suit to a large company as the smaller parties don't have the resources to be heard properly. The one size fits all legislative approach leaves something to be desired, however. The lost time spent complying with the rules, (i.e. paperwork and buearucratic machinations), even if you were never going to break them, is a significant drain.
On a side, what about the goal of creating a better future? What great inventions have been lost because of over-regulation? This is not to say I favor lots of air polution or water polution. I don't. It's just something to consider. Would you trade a cure for all cancer for a totally corrupted lake?
Now, mega-corporations are hard to deal with, but certainly with small businesses are little more cut and dry. A small restaurant owner, for example, should not have to justiy her employment practices to anyone, much less the government.
What the Norwegian's do is their business. Certainly we have enough problems of our own without worrying about the nuances of their domestic laws. I was merely commeting on how I don't agree as it was in the context of a debate I was interested in.:)
Yet there's not really much evidence supporting this. If you look at countries like Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Norway that have strong worker-protection laws, it's hard to show that they experience less productivity or less growth than comparable countries with weak worker-protection laws.
Consider India or China for a moment and their growth. This does not seem to be true.
Also check out the GDP Per Capita numbers. The only country to mention that is above the United States (#6) is Norway (#5). The next closest is Iceland at #11. Anyway I'm not sure you're right on this point. I think the United States treads a pretty nice line between over-regulation and non-regulation. Like the difference between France and China for example.
The Norweigan law is not so good. You should be able to be fired for any reason. A person does not have the right to work for anyone. All employment is and should be by the will of both parties only. Who you hire and fire and why should be an entirely private decision. The government should not interfere in any case what so ever.
This particular case of being required to train your offshore replacements is a major breech of trust on BofA's part. However, it's not and it should not be illegal. If you're being forced to train your replacement you have two choices, do it or quit. Perhaps if you got enough people to walk with you you'd at least have the knowledge you gave BofA a big fuck you before leaving. Still I don't recommend quitting any but the most screwed up jobs without having another lined up.
Still, I guess a third option would be to train your replacements poorly, but that would be a breech of ethics on your part...
Thanks for all of the great information. Common Lisp seems like an industrial strength language as compared to Scheme. I'll have to check it out again. Like I said I've done a lot of Scheme over the years. I've only prorammed in Lisp for about 4 weeks during college.
I've taken no offense what so ever to this conversation. This is interesting stuff. I really like Lisp and Scheme. They are very interesting languages, though I must say I know Scheme much better.
Some reasons I would not recommend scheme besides maintainence costs are: 1. Speed for some things, but if that's not important then it doesn't matter, though with Scheme you can always write the performance critical pieces in C or C++ and write an extension. 2. Lack on an object system. 3. I'll talk about the maintainence costs again. Pyton, perl and other interpretted languages seem better at catching errors when loading the source code. This may just be the implementation of Scheme I have used (ELK). This definitely does not say anything about LISP. 4. The exception mechanism is very rough. Error recovery in general is funny, though you can write your own very elegant error handling mechanisms. 5. Lack of data structures such as O(log(n)) maps and sets, though you can roll your own... 6. Lack of 3rd party libraries. 7. I/O is the most painful thing you will do with Scheme.
Some reasons I like Scheme. 1. It's very flexible. Like I said you can write your own exception mechanism. 2. Continuations are cool and you can do great things with them. 3. Recursion is better than looping in that you can write more compact and IMHO more readable and more intuitive programs. 4. It's very expressive if you can get over the parentheses. 5. Lists are actually very powerful...
I've used Scheme as an extension language to a fairly large C++ program for about 8 years. It's been a while since I wrote a "real" program in it though. I'm not sure I would write such a program with Scheme or even Lisp. As much as I like the languages I think they are impractical, especially with respect to lack of 3rd party libraries. They just can't touch C/C++, Perl, or Python. Still they are very elegant...
Qt is very nice for commercial development. It's fairly cheap, on the order of $2000/developer/year. There are no royalties. Their preprocessor is a bit of a pain in the ass, but once you understand it you live with it.
I don't know wx, so I don't know what it provides, however, Qt is much more than a GUI development toolkit. It has portable network libraries, regular expressions, threads, of course GUI elements, a great string class. It's a solid cross platform development tool kit.
It's better than MFC because you can tweak the source if you must, which my company has. In that regard it has been very useful.
Qt's support is responsive if you have a commercial license, though I have to say I've only used it about three times in as many years. The documentation is outstanding.
I would argue not using VB on the basis that it is not cross platform. Yes, Microsoft is not going anywhere, but there is some possibility that OS X or Linux could be big enough markets to consider. Especially if you are writing from scratch, why not consider a cross platform solution? It's a little more work, but it pays off in several ways. Larger audience, but more importantly different OSes catch different bugs. You wouldn't even have to target multiple platforms at the get go, but it would make porting it a hell of a lot easier down the road. However, it is VERY easy to write unportable code, especially with a compiled language, for example C++.
To that end: Python and C++ are generally good choices. They each have their place. I really like my C++, but rapid development is somewhat of a joke. It takes years and years to master and even after using it for close to 8 years on a daily basis I'm still amazed at what I don't know sometimes. However, you can do anything with C++. If you can think of something, there is already probably a library out there to do it. I don't recommend it to novices or people who want rapid development, however if you want a rock solid well performing system it really can't be beat.
If you're doing GUI stuff, you would have to take a VERY serious look at the combination of Python and Qt. Qt is the de facto cross platform toolkit. It has everything from GUI libraries to network libraries to regular expressions, xml parsers, you name it. It's very good. It's also very good with C++.
I don't know much about C#, but with Mono you at least have the possibility of it being cross platform. I'm not a big Java fan. After being a C++ guy for so many years it just seems like crap. It lacks the good things from C++ with all of the syntax overhead, and it lacks the flexibility of Python.
If you didn't guess I write almost everything it Python or C++. They are my dual golden hammers.:) I say that partly in jest, they complement each other very well.
I do a lot of Scheme too, but I'd be an idiot to recommend that to you!
Perl is glorified shell. I wouldn't touch it except for the smallest most throw away programs, if even for that anymore. Still I know people who swear by it, mostly sysadmin types.
I've played with Ruby a bit. It has some definite strengths, but the library support, or lack thereof is a big minus. Syntactically it reeks of Perl and IMHO lacks the elegance of Python. Still it's got some really cool unique stuff.
Overall I would recommend Python, but like another post mentioned, what are you trying to accomplish? You should fit the tool to the task not the task to the tool.
I said a person. For example, if I don't like what someone says I can choose not to associate with them. So others, for example your employer's can fire you for what you say. For example, if I leak trade secrets I could be fired, most especially if I have a contract. The government may not take action, but the government in its role as an employer may and in a nutshell this is what this case was all about, the hyperbole surrounding it not withstanding.
Thank you for the correction. I wasn't sure... I guess a little fact checking before a Slashdot post would be appropriate. I mean, everyone's doing it these days.:)
Hey thanks! And I just finished reading the opinion of the court. It's pretty narrowly defined. The concuring opinion is 16 of the 43 pages. This is not a bad ruling.
Funny thing about the eminent domain rulings, in particular the New London case. The conservatives, i.e. Scalia and Thomas oppossed the ruling, but Ginsberg and the liberal cliche, including O'Conner, I believe, supported it. Exactly the opposite of this decision.
On the surface this ruling might seem bad too, but I'm not so sure. From what I read it means that government employees can be fired for what they say at work. Just like me in my private sector job. This seems like a no brainer to me.
You would think it was the end of the world by the headline. From what I understood of the article government employees should behave like private sector employees. That is, if I shoot my mouth off at work I might get fired. This seems like a no brainer. The speech seems to directly relate to what is said at work, not what is said in public about work. Big difference.
The thing about free speech is this. Your words have consequences, which might include you losing your job. There is no first amendment guarantee to others not taking action against you because of your words.
You make lots of good points. However, software is generally not written from scratch. That is, more people are maintaining existing systems than writing new ones.
Second, software is maleable. It grows over time. Unlike the bridge, which is static. After the initial release you add to it. Oftentimes in ways that were unintended by the original designers.
We do not have Brooklyn Bridge 2.0.
So yes, everything you mention would improve quality, but because of its maleable nature, software will always be different than things in the physical world.
[G]overnment's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. -Ronald Reagan
Here here. Similar results for me on a Dell Inspiron 8600 using the release candidate. Everything but the wireless card anyway. The broadcomm wireless card was loaded up with the bc43xx driver, which does not work. I had to do some hand stitching to get ndiswrapper going and ensure the system did not load bc43xx at start up time. Other than that and the total lack of multi-media capability out of the box this is a stunning release.
VPN worked out of the box. The multi-media keys. Ability to browse samba shares, though I still can't figure out how to login.... I can only browse public ones. What was totally amazing is that I had 3D acceleration out of the box for my ATI Mobile Radeon 9600! The external monitor doesn't work yet. I'll have to hand stitch that one, but still. This is huge step forward.
It would be nice if by default a chess game was installed, but that is easily remedied...
After a little tweaking I have full multi-media support.
What's really nice is the user experience and having just installed Suse 10.1, I notice a huge difference. On Suse it's very confusing as to where I should look for a particular admin task. On Ubuntu, it's under "system". When I want to launch a Terminal on Suse, I go three levels of menus down and then get to select one of four choices. Unbuntu just gives me one adequate choice. Same with web browsers and everything else. Because they are not trying to be everything to everybody they make things very slick. It would be nice to see XGL in Dapper by default, but I much more appreciate the stability and correct by default autoconfiguration. That's really nice.
I'm very impressed with Dapper. This is the best distro I have ever seen, other than perhaps my hand-crafted Gentoo boxes.:) However, it's certainly the best of out the box one.
The thing about the PS3 is it will probably be the first and chepeast way to have a Cell Workstation... That more than anything is what I'm gunning for. AFAIK it's still shipping with Linux, but even if its not the Cell patch has been in the kernel tree since 2.6.15 or.16 I think. Anyway it's in there now.
Now, I like games okay. I play a few a year, but the PS3 hardware, that's where it's at. Certainly I don't represent the mass market on this one though...
So anyway with the PS3 I'll have a DVD player, which will replace my PS2, which is my only DVD player. It'll play all of my PS1 and PS2 games, so I only have to have one box sitting there. It'll do Blu-Ray, which I'm still not sure about, but since I only rent movies I don't really care about movie DRM too much. Whatever, those are all just bonus things. I get a cell workstation. That's the best part.
My PS2 is my only DVD player. I have a first-gen PS2. I did have some issues playing DVDs from the Escaflone series, but since then no problem. One thing I found dismally unacceptable was that because I was using an aftermarket S-Video cable Sony said my warranty was voided when I called them about why the DVD wouldn't play. Poor customer service and companies that don't stand behind their products are par for the course no matter who you buy from these days.
Anyway, my PS3 will be my only DVD and Blu-Ray player. I just hope Blu-Ray wins out...
This is the basic problem with big government in Washington. I simply can not afford to protest it. Washington is pretty much 2000 miles from my house. I don't have the time or money. Power should be kept as close to home as possible so that it can be appropriately watched. If I HAD to I could protest at my state capital daily or at least weekly. It's about a 50 mile drive.
The answer to our problems is to progressively, but drastically cut the size and scope of the federal government. That means less military, less social programs, everything. Let the states deal with the social programs. Unfortunately we are going the exact opposite direction and are always accelerating the pace. This means more corruption, more abuse and less freedom. The republicans are taking us toward a police state. The democrats are taking us toward communism. Liberty and freedom are in serious danger.
What I've always found funny is that people/the media people are genuinely supprised to find our there is corruption in Washington. With 3 trillion dollars to be spent every year I would be suprised to NOT find any corruption or abuse of power.
Slashdot Mirror
For example:
American Indians at the hands of the United States, ca. 1600-19xx
India at the hands of Britain, ca. 1800.
China at the hands of Japan, ca. 1940.
France at the hands of Germany, ca. 1940.
South Korea at the hands of North Korea and Chian, ca. 1950.
The list goes on and on and on.
You've misunderstood me. The first thing that matters is being able to provide for yourself. Everything else is moot without that freedom.
You are essentially saying that there are lots of regulations that pertain to social issues. It's largely true.
However, economically there is much less regulation than in Europe. If I wanted to start a business it would cost me less than $50 and it would take me less than 4 hours to do it.
Economic freedom is the more important part of freedom in my view. Most of the other stuff, drinking under 21, no gay marriage, drug laws, etc... is secondary. I would not trade my ability to start a business for $50 and in less than 4 hours for all of it. Much of Europe has and to its detriment, I believe. Most of your citizens seem to be wards of the state, from the cradle to the grave. At least France and Sweden are good examples of this.
But yes, you are right, the United States has many more social regulations.
Lots of good points... The government is too big and wields too much power.
* Stem-cell research is under fire.
Why should the government fund this or any other research? That they fund so much other crap and not this is a bit of an embarassment...
* Self-decided abortion is controversial.
Yeah, some people see it as murder. Arguably it is at some point. Certainly "aborting" a "fetus" late in a pregnancy, (i.e. after a time when many premature babies live) is murder. Earlier in the process perhaps not. My take on early-term abortions is if you're against abortion, don't have one. But you have to realize there is a lot of emotion in this and many Americans are very spiritual people who view life as a gift from God, that the gift is bestowed at conception and to destroy it is to commit the worst of crimes.
* Gay marriage is controversial.
What purpose does gay marriage serve? Why should society bestow this benefit without getting anything in return? Marriage between a man and a woman serves society positively, in that it provides the most conducive institution for raising well-adjusted children. Why sanction and give privlege to something that does not and can not benefit society?
* You need to be 18 to have sex, 21 for a beer.
You don't have to be 18 to have sex, well actually that varies from state to state, as it should. Washington D.C. does not have the power to regulate such things, nor should it. I believe the age of consent where I live, in New Mexico, is 16. The alochol thing, well I don't know.... There's so much irreponsibility surrounding it even with "mature" people that prohibiting it until 21 doesn't seem all that bad, at least sales of it. What you do in your own home really should be your own business though. As long as you don't plan to go out driving I don't care how old you are if you want to get drunk and your parents condone it.
* Huge parts of certain population-groups are imprisoned, many for small drug-offences.
If huge parts of certain population-groups commit crimes they should be imprisonsed. If they commit more crimes than other population-groups then they should pay for that. Everyone needs to learn to be responsible for their own actions. No one can make your life better but you. If you were dealt a bad hand it is possible to overcome it. God knows I've known many people who have. By the same token I've known people who were dealt marvelous hands and pissed it all away. Everyone has a choice and the decsions we make are ours to deal with. A person didn't have to pull the trigger, they didn't have to take that first shot, they didn't have to rob that house or that store. What they have to be is accountable for their actions. Excuses are a dime a dozen.
Others may be willing to help us from time to time, but no one should be forced to. That said we all should be willing to help, but we should never be forced to. I think about my life and the people I've known and if it weren't for a few choices I made when I was 18 I could very easily have ended up a junkie, just like many of my friends from that time. (For the record I'm 29 now).
Imprisoning people for minor drug offenses is a huge waste of tax-payer money. We should stop doing that. Agreed.
* It's illegal to tell people how to break certain types of locks. Even if the lock protect their own property.
Yup and that's a crock.
* You have to give up a huge amount of personal info, including biometrics, to even be allowed into the USA.
As a tourist, an immigrant or what?
* It's attempted again and again to outlaw or seriously hamper acts of speech, such as publishing a video-game.
Not selling vulgar things to minors does not seem like a bad thing. If we could define minor as under-16 that would be better, but stil...
* SLAPs where getting so much out of hand that several states saw fit to enact special anti-SLAP laws.
What is SLAP?
By the way there are tons of regulations governing mega-corporations. Books and books and books to be sure. Peopl
I don't think that higher productivity or more profit is the goal. I'm not sure where you got that from my reply...
:)
The principle, or the goal if you will, is that the freedom to associate trumps any perceived right to work. That's not to say business should be completely unregulated, but that we should tread lightly. Legislation to regulate business is sweeping, while using the courts and a mentality of strict liability for damages could be better. This of course breaks down when plantiffs, (e.g. injured workers, or people downstream of a chemical plant), bring suit to a large company as the smaller parties don't have the resources to be heard properly. The one size fits all legislative approach leaves something to be desired, however. The lost time spent complying with the rules, (i.e. paperwork and buearucratic machinations), even if you were never going to break them, is a significant drain.
On a side, what about the goal of creating a better future? What great inventions have been lost because of over-regulation? This is not to say I favor lots of air polution or water polution. I don't. It's just something to consider. Would you trade a cure for all cancer for a totally corrupted lake?
Now, mega-corporations are hard to deal with, but certainly with small businesses are little more cut and dry. A small restaurant owner, for example, should not have to justiy her employment practices to anyone, much less the government.
What the Norwegian's do is their business. Certainly we have enough problems of our own without worrying about the nuances of their domestic laws. I was merely commeting on how I don't agree as it was in the context of a debate I was interested in.
Yet there's not really much evidence supporting this. If you look at countries like Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Norway that have strong worker-protection laws, it's hard to show that they experience less productivity or less growth than comparable countries with weak worker-protection laws.
Consider India or China for a moment and their growth. This does not seem to be true.
Also check out the GDP Per Capita numbers. The only country to mention that is above the United States (#6) is Norway (#5). The next closest is Iceland at #11. Anyway I'm not sure you're right on this point. I think the United States treads a pretty nice line between over-regulation and non-regulation. Like the difference between France and China for example.
Nope, freedom of association is all that matters.
The Norweigan law is not so good. You should be able to be fired for any reason. A person does not have the right to work for anyone. All employment is and should be by the will of both parties only. Who you hire and fire and why should be an entirely private decision. The government should not interfere in any case what so ever.
This particular case of being required to train your offshore replacements is a major breech of trust on BofA's part. However, it's not and it should not be illegal. If you're being forced to train your replacement you have two choices, do it or quit. Perhaps if you got enough people to walk with you you'd at least have the knowledge you gave BofA a big fuck you before leaving. Still I don't recommend quitting any but the most screwed up jobs without having another lined up.
Still, I guess a third option would be to train your replacements poorly, but that would be a breech of ethics on your part...
Thanks for all of the great information. Common Lisp seems like an industrial strength language as compared to Scheme. I'll have to check it out again. Like I said I've done a lot of Scheme over the years. I've only prorammed in Lisp for about 4 weeks during college.
Thanks again!
I've taken no offense what so ever to this conversation. This is interesting stuff. I really like Lisp and Scheme. They are very interesting languages, though I must say I know Scheme much better.
Some reasons I would not recommend scheme besides maintainence costs are:
1. Speed for some things, but if that's not important then it doesn't matter, though with Scheme you can always write the performance critical pieces in C or C++ and write an extension.
2. Lack on an object system.
3. I'll talk about the maintainence costs again. Pyton, perl and other interpretted languages seem better at catching errors when loading the source code. This may just be the implementation of Scheme I have used (ELK). This definitely does not say anything about LISP.
4. The exception mechanism is very rough. Error recovery in general is funny, though you can write your own very elegant error handling mechanisms.
5. Lack of data structures such as O(log(n)) maps and sets, though you can roll your own...
6. Lack of 3rd party libraries.
7. I/O is the most painful thing you will do with Scheme.
Some reasons I like Scheme.
1. It's very flexible. Like I said you can write your own exception mechanism.
2. Continuations are cool and you can do great things with them.
3. Recursion is better than looping in that you can write more compact and IMHO more readable and more intuitive programs.
4. It's very expressive if you can get over the parentheses.
5. Lists are actually very powerful...
I've used Scheme as an extension language to a fairly large C++ program for about 8 years. It's been a while since I wrote a "real" program in it though. I'm not sure I would write such a program with Scheme or even Lisp. As much as I like the languages I think they are impractical, especially with respect to lack of 3rd party libraries. They just can't touch C/C++, Perl, or Python. Still they are very elegant...
The reason I would not recommend Scheme is because of maintainence costs. How do you think this Common Lisp implementation stacks up in that regard?
Qt is very nice for commercial development. It's fairly cheap, on the order of $2000/developer/year. There are no royalties. Their preprocessor is a bit of a pain in the ass, but once you understand it you live with it.
I don't know wx, so I don't know what it provides, however, Qt is much more than a GUI development toolkit. It has portable network libraries, regular expressions, threads, of course GUI elements, a great string class. It's a solid cross platform development tool kit.
It's better than MFC because you can tweak the source if you must, which my company has. In that regard it has been very useful.
Qt's support is responsive if you have a commercial license, though I have to say I've only used it about three times in as many years. The documentation is outstanding.
I would argue not using VB on the basis that it is not cross platform. Yes, Microsoft is not going anywhere, but there is some possibility that OS X or Linux could be big enough markets to consider. Especially if you are writing from scratch, why not consider a cross platform solution? It's a little more work, but it pays off in several ways. Larger audience, but more importantly different OSes catch different bugs. You wouldn't even have to target multiple platforms at the get go, but it would make porting it a hell of a lot easier down the road. However, it is VERY easy to write unportable code, especially with a compiled language, for example C++.
:) I say that partly in jest, they complement each other very well.
To that end: Python and C++ are generally good choices. They each have their place. I really like my C++, but rapid development is somewhat of a joke. It takes years and years to master and even after using it for close to 8 years on a daily basis I'm still amazed at what I don't know sometimes. However, you can do anything with C++. If you can think of something, there is already probably a library out there to do it. I don't recommend it to novices or people who want rapid development, however if you want a rock solid well performing system it really can't be beat.
If you're doing GUI stuff, you would have to take a VERY serious look at the combination of Python and Qt. Qt is the de facto cross platform toolkit. It has everything from GUI libraries to network libraries to regular expressions, xml parsers, you name it. It's very good. It's also very good with C++.
I don't know much about C#, but with Mono you at least have the possibility of it being cross platform. I'm not a big Java fan. After being a C++ guy for so many years it just seems like crap. It lacks the good things from C++ with all of the syntax overhead, and it lacks the flexibility of Python.
If you didn't guess I write almost everything it Python or C++. They are my dual golden hammers.
I do a lot of Scheme too, but I'd be an idiot to recommend that to you!
Perl is glorified shell. I wouldn't touch it except for the smallest most throw away programs, if even for that anymore. Still I know people who swear by it, mostly sysadmin types.
I've played with Ruby a bit. It has some definite strengths, but the library support, or lack thereof is a big minus. Syntactically it reeks of Perl and IMHO lacks the elegance of Python. Still it's got some really cool unique stuff.
Overall I would recommend Python, but like another post mentioned, what are you trying to accomplish? You should fit the tool to the task not the task to the tool.
I said a person. For example, if I don't like what someone says I can choose not to associate with them. So others, for example your employer's can fire you for what you say. For example, if I leak trade secrets I could be fired, most especially if I have a contract. The government may not take action, but the government in its role as an employer may and in a nutshell this is what this case was all about, the hyperbole surrounding it not withstanding.
Thank you for the correction. I wasn't sure... I guess a little fact checking before a Slashdot post would be appropriate. I mean, everyone's doing it these days. :)
It actually doesn't. I invite you to read the ruling. The concurring opinion is like 16 of the 43 pages.
Hey thanks! And I just finished reading the opinion of the court. It's pretty narrowly defined. The concuring opinion is 16 of the 43 pages. This is not a bad ruling.
Funny thing about the eminent domain rulings, in particular the New London case. The conservatives, i.e. Scalia and Thomas oppossed the ruling, but Ginsberg and the liberal cliche, including O'Conner, I believe, supported it. Exactly the opposite of this decision.
On the surface this ruling might seem bad too, but I'm not so sure. From what I read it means that government employees can be fired for what they say at work. Just like me in my private sector job. This seems like a no brainer to me.
You would think it was the end of the world by the headline. From what I understood of the article government employees should behave like private sector employees. That is, if I shoot my mouth off at work I might get fired. This seems like a no brainer. The speech seems to directly relate to what is said at work, not what is said in public about work. Big difference.
The thing about free speech is this. Your words have consequences, which might include you losing your job. There is no first amendment guarantee to others not taking action against you because of your words.
Not only that, the government has proven time and again that practically everything it touches turns to shit.
You make lots of good points. However, software is generally not written from scratch. That is, more people are maintaining existing systems than writing new ones.
Second, software is maleable. It grows over time. Unlike the bridge, which is static. After the initial release you add to it. Oftentimes in ways that were unintended by the original designers.
We do not have Brooklyn Bridge 2.0.
So yes, everything you mention would improve quality, but because of its maleable nature, software will always be different than things in the physical world.
Here here.
This quote seems appropriate:
[G]overnment's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. -Ronald Reagan
Here here. Similar results for me on a Dell Inspiron 8600 using the release candidate. Everything but the wireless card anyway. The broadcomm wireless card was loaded up with the bc43xx driver, which does not work. I had to do some hand stitching to get ndiswrapper going and ensure the system did not load bc43xx at start up time. Other than that and the total lack of multi-media capability out of the box this is a stunning release.
:) However, it's certainly the best of out the box one.
VPN worked out of the box. The multi-media keys. Ability to browse samba shares, though I still can't figure out how to login.... I can only browse public ones. What was totally amazing is that I had 3D acceleration out of the box for my ATI Mobile Radeon 9600! The external monitor doesn't work yet. I'll have to hand stitch that one, but still. This is huge step forward.
It would be nice if by default a chess game was installed, but that is easily remedied...
After a little tweaking I have full multi-media support.
What's really nice is the user experience and having just installed Suse 10.1, I notice a huge difference. On Suse it's very confusing as to where I should look for a particular admin task. On Ubuntu, it's under "system". When I want to launch a Terminal on Suse, I go three levels of menus down and then get to select one of four choices. Unbuntu just gives me one adequate choice. Same with web browsers and everything else. Because they are not trying to be everything to everybody they make things very slick. It would be nice to see XGL in Dapper by default, but I much more appreciate the stability and correct by default autoconfiguration. That's really nice.
I'm very impressed with Dapper. This is the best distro I have ever seen, other than perhaps my hand-crafted Gentoo boxes.
The thing about the PS3 is it will probably be the first and chepeast way to have a Cell Workstation... That more than anything is what I'm gunning for. AFAIK it's still shipping with Linux, but even if its not the Cell patch has been in the kernel tree since 2.6.15 or .16 I think. Anyway it's in there now.
Now, I like games okay. I play a few a year, but the PS3 hardware, that's where it's at. Certainly I don't represent the mass market on this one though...
So anyway with the PS3 I'll have a DVD player, which will replace my PS2, which is my only DVD player. It'll play all of my PS1 and PS2 games, so I only have to have one box sitting there. It'll do Blu-Ray, which I'm still not sure about, but since I only rent movies I don't really care about movie DRM too much. Whatever, those are all just bonus things. I get a cell workstation. That's the best part.
My PS2 is my only DVD player. I have a first-gen PS2. I did have some issues playing DVDs from the Escaflone series, but since then no problem. One thing I found dismally unacceptable was that because I was using an aftermarket S-Video cable Sony said my warranty was voided when I called them about why the DVD wouldn't play. Poor customer service and companies that don't stand behind their products are par for the course no matter who you buy from these days.
Anyway, my PS3 will be my only DVD and Blu-Ray player. I just hope Blu-Ray wins out...
This is the basic problem with big government in Washington. I simply can not afford to protest it. Washington is pretty much 2000 miles from my house. I don't have the time or money. Power should be kept as close to home as possible so that it can be appropriately watched. If I HAD to I could protest at my state capital daily or at least weekly. It's about a 50 mile drive.
The answer to our problems is to progressively, but drastically cut the size and scope of the federal government. That means less military, less social programs, everything. Let the states deal with the social programs. Unfortunately we are going the exact opposite direction and are always accelerating the pace. This means more corruption, more abuse and less freedom. The republicans are taking us toward a police state. The democrats are taking us toward communism. Liberty and freedom are in serious danger.
What I've always found funny is that people/the media people are genuinely supprised to find our there is corruption in Washington. With 3 trillion dollars to be spent every year I would be suprised to NOT find any corruption or abuse of power.