If you make a mistake, ever, in your life, don't worry. He will rescue you. Get a loan you can't afford? No problem! Make bad decisions that lead to failure? Glad to help! Want a free lunch? Here you go!
Yeah... that's exactly the same as trying to stave off a recession that could rival the great depression.::rollseyes::
Actually, it's not a tough call at all. You bail the fuck out. A deep, long recession is *far* worse, and the government should be doing whatever it can to prevent it. Anyone who doesn't understand this is simply advocating cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Re:Well, we ought to get proof of the sunspot theo
on
The Quietest Sun
·
· Score: 1
When you talk about a 90% reduction in CO2
They do? Citation please.
you are not talking about efficiency, you are talking about impoverishment.
Oooh, I see, so the government is out to impoverish everyone.
How's that tinfoil hat fitting?
Correlation doesn't mean anything.
Umm... what? Correlation is a *necessary condition* to prove causation.
It means we're going to be in for some very cold weather in the near future.
Ah, so you must be a top-notch climatologist or something? Because you seem so very sure about this... despite the fact that, according to the article, the scientific community is "unsure of the significance of this unusual calm". Maybe you should publish a paper, I'm sure they'd love to read about your theories.
Re:Well, we ought to get proof of the sunspot theo
on
The Quietest Sun
·
· Score: 1
this would become evident AFTER we've blown ten trillion dollars to lower our CO2.
1) I can only assume you aren't American. Last I checked, the US had given the finger to the rest of the world on the whole carbon reduction thing.
2) I fail to see how that money is "blown". Energy efficiency *saves* money, while lowering CO2 emissions in the process. Green technology is *good* for the economy, not bad.
3) A reduction in sunspots has fuck-all to do with GW. The amount of solar variation isn't nearly enough to account for the global increase in temperature over the last 50 years, and that's ignoring the fact that over said 50 years, the solar cycle has been uncorrelated with global temperature trends. Look it up, the facts are there if you want to find them.
Yeah... in the end, she basically said "no", but I suspect that's not what her base actually wants to hear.
It's no different than the debate moderator (who's name escapes me) asking Harper if he'd vow to never raise taxes. Harper dilly-dallied over that question and never really answered it because, guess what, he *can't* say "yes", even if his electorate wants him to.
Not a chance - she was rude, hectoring, and constantly interrupting Harper.
Yeah, I agree. But IMHO, she also came across as informed and educated. She was one of the few that actually cited numbers and real evidence, both when attacking her opponents and supporting her own positions.
Then again, in that group, that's really damning with faint praise...
In contrast, while Harper certainly came across as calm, I also thought he came across as superficial... he had a tough time defending his non-interventionist economic policies, and given that's the heart of their economic platform, I expected better. Similarly, Dion couldn't really articulate and defend their platform, and Layton came across as a bitchy asshole.
And I agree re Duceppe. I actually thought he did pretty well, as well (although his tendency to refuse to let Harper ignore his questions got annoying at times). If they weren't, you know, a separatists party, their soft-left regionalist policies might actually go over well with the Canadian electorate...
Or you could spend less money and just buy a decent pair of canalphones. The noise isolation is better than any electronic gimmick, and because it's passive it doesn't require any power, either.
The economy would have done well with or without him
As evidenced by the fact that it's clear, particularly after the debate, that his economic policies are to just let things kinda tick along and let whatever happens happen.
I agree about May, though. I think she was one of the best performing politicians in the debate (specifically the English language debate, which is the one I watched). Layton, by contrast, spent the entire time doing his best to paint Harper as the spawn of the devil, and neglected to actually outline what his own party would do. I was, to say the least, unimpressed...
Re:Current Limiting?
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
·
· Score: 2, Informative
2) If you're using a laptop (or any desktop more recent than 2000) you have a 99.99% chance of hibernation working flawlessly in any Linux distro.
Ha ha ha. Right. Sure.
For the record, on my T61, hibernation in Ubuntu has *never ever worked*. Ever.
1) The kernel/Linux has long been doing an excellent job on using power-saving features of processors and peripherals
But this I agree with. Linux actually consumes less power than Windows Vista does, which surprised the heck out of me. On my rather power hungry T61, after a fair bit of tuning to enable low power mode for various devices (audio chipset, SATA hosts, wireless, and USB, including removing the UHCI USB driver entirely), along with some other tweaks, Linux consumes around 13.4 watts idle, give or take. By comparison, for all my extensive tuning, Vista has never ever dropped below 14.8 or so.
You have done nothing to debunk those Republican talking points other than to quote a Clinton Administrator, a member of the Fed, and a CRA compliance counsel
No, I cited numbers. Here, let me quote them again:
He noted that approximately 50% of the subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies that were not regulated by the CRA. Another 25% to 30% came from only partially CRA regulated bank subsidiaries and affiliates.
That means that CRA loans account for no more than 20% of subprime loans. Maybe. And in case you forgot this part:
According to Janet L. Yellen, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, independent mortgage companies made "high-priced loans" at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts
None of this is opinion. It is pure, hard fact. You may not like the facts. You may ignore them because they don't match your own opinions. But they are facts. And thus, the fact is, the CRA had little to nothing to do with the subprime crisis.
Neither you nor I could lay out step by step how we got in this mess, so it is a waste of time to keep discussing it.
Okay, so now you're saying that government involvement may or may not have been the cause, but you really don't know. But since those opinions I cited don't match yours (even though they're back by actual numbers, you're gonna go with an ad hominem attack instead.
Well, I guess that's a start... sort of.
As long as the government prevented collusion and promoted competition then regulation would not be necessary.
Umm... that bit about preventing collusion? Yeah. That *is* regulation.
In the future you should consider a more composed response when you are participating in a rational debate.
And in the future, you should try and respond to my counterpoints, instead attacking my debating style.
Incidentally, the nature of my response is a consequence of frustration at having to constantly debunk what are, absolutely, simple republican talking points. You may not realize that's what you're parroting, but it's the truth. The "blame the CRA" and "blame F&F" lines are pure, unadulterated lines straight out of the Republican playbook, in an effort to shift blame away from the real culprit: financial deregulation.
My argument was that the government should not be involved in the private market.
Right. And you supported that argument with faulty evidence. So unless you can provide other evidence that government intervention caused the financial collapse, or can somehow counter my points, I think it's safe to say your argument is bunk.
and to somehow compare the financial crisis to net neutrality is nonsensical.
Bullshit. My argument is this: there are situations in which the market fails, such as the financial industry, where regulation is necessary in order to protect consumers, and in some cases, the nation at large.
My contention is that telecom is also one of those industries.
The reason net neutrality is even an issue is because broadband providers have virtually no competition,
Hardly. Local ISP competition won't solve this problem, as eventually, all traffic must travel over the large backbones that exist today, backbones operated by a small number of entities who may choose to charge Google for preferential service. So, unless you plan to have competition between various, separate Internets, regulation is the only true solution to the problem.
You mean the fact that Fannie and Freddie were allowed to socialize their risk while privatizing their profit had nothing to do with our current situation?
Fannie and Freddie were barely involved in the subprime market before things started really getting crazy. Look it up. It wasn't until fairly late in the game that Fannie and Freddie really started trading in high-risk instruments, and only because the market was beginning to turn sour and the feds looked to them to stabilize things.
Sorry, bub, but while it's a great conservative talking point, you're *dead wrong* on this one.
How about the fact that Clinton forced the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to include a provision strengthening the Community Reinvestment Act?
I've said it before, and I'll repeat myself *yet again*... CRA had very little to do with the US's current financial woes. Here, read this. Since you probably won't, I'll quote:
He noted that approximately 50% of the subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies that were not regulated by the CRA. Another 25% to 30% came from only partially CRA regulated bank subsidiaries and affiliates.
Further:
According to Janet L. Yellen, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, independent mortgage companies made "high-priced loans" at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts; most CRA loans were responsibly made, and were not the higher-priced loans that have contributed to the current crisis.
And in case that wasn't enough:
A 2008 study by Traiger & Hinckley LLP, a law firm that counsels financial institutions on CRA compliance, found that CRA regulated institutions were less likely to make subprime loans, and when they did the interest rates were lower. CRA banks were also half as likely to resell the loans.[62]
So, once again, nice conservative talking point, but dead wrong. Shocker there.
No, my ISP charging Google, who is located in California, for "enhanced" service is *most definitely* interstate commerce. Hell, this is an excellent example of *precisely* what the interstate commerce clause exists to deal with: causes where policy decisions can have wide-ranging impacts on the business interests of those in other states.
Clearly you simply have no idea wtf you're talking about.
Net Neutrality == the idea that if I visit a website, that website won't get preferential treatment (in terms of bandwidth or latency priority) because they've paid my ISP for the privilege. Or: all content is created equal. Note: this does *not* rule out QoS to, for example, reduce latency for real-time applications, at the expense of increased latency for bulk transfers, as per Comcast's recent announcement, as that prioritization is not based on the source or destination of the data, but instead on the protocol being employed.
This definition says *nothing* how this fairness comes about. However, given the stances that telecom companies have taken recently, my belief is that the government may need to step in and impose regulation in order to ensure that net neutrality is preserved. And this just so happens to be Obama's stance. McCain, however, would prefer to leave private industry to sort things out on their own. 'course, given how that's worked for the financial world... well, colour me skeptical.
but I find the whitespace significance very nice and makes reading existing python code very pleasant.
Until you need to move a block of code from one level of scope to the other and discover your editor can no longer help you get the indentation right because the language doesn't provide block scope delimiters. And if you do try to use the editor, it can actually introduce semantic bugs by accidentally placing lines of code at the wrong lexical level. Awesome.
Sorry, but no thanks. I have absolutely no problems formatting my code properly and don't need a language enforcing it's standards on me (in fact, any programmer that *does* need a crutch like that should be drummed out of the industry for the hack they are). Meanwhile, I regularly use my editor for automatic indentation, and any language that makes that impossible (or unnecessarily difficult) is out of the running.
Well, until I see proof otherwise, I see no reason why the percentage of crapware on CPAN is any different than the percentage of crapware on PyPi. And heck, even if 50% of CPAN was crapware and the entirety of PyPi was pure gold, CPAN would *still* win out in terms of number of quality packages available.
All that said, you are right, much of it comes down to, is what I need there? Problem is, that answer depends based on the problem domain. And I'm willing to bet that, based purely on the sheer number of packages available in CPAN, it's more likely to cover obscure topics, in addition to the more popular subjects that both CPAN and PyPi are likely to cover adequately.
I'm now tossing up whether to learn Ruby or Python.
Meh, six of one, a half dozen of the other. You either pick a seriously half-assed Smalltalk, or whitespace significance and broken closures. In the end it's basically a wash, IMHO.
Not when the opposition has an equivalent tool/repository/i>
Ha ha ha ha! Oh god, that's good. No, seriously, that's hilarious. There are 4890 packages on PyPi (granted, a non-trivial number). On the other hand, there are 14 *thousand* modules on CPAN.
Why? Last I checked, the only difference between Perl's OOP and any other language is that it has a far more flexible implementation. Aside from that, it's no different:
sub new {
my $class = shift;
my $instance = {};
bless $instance, $class;
return $instance; }
sub method {
my $self = shift;
__do_stuff_here__ }
--
my $obj = new My::Object();
$obj->method();
Now what's so "non-OOP" about that?
and you end up with really ugly code that isn't very maintainable
Why? I've written plenty of OOP Perl, and it's no more or less maintainable than any other language. Well, assuming you aren't a moron, anyway.
Well, while exceptions have made pass-by-reference less useful (since you no longer return status codes to indicate errors), there is still the odd time where it's useful. For example, the.NET Dictionary's TryGetValue uses an out parameter for storing the result, which means this idiom:
if (! dictionary.TryGetValue(name, out value)) {
value = defaultValue; }
is cleaner and simpler than the alternative:
if (dictionary.ContainsKey(name)) {
value = dictionary[name]; } else {
value = defaultValue; }
And the fact that you have to annotate the parameter in the call means that my one complaint about pass-by-reference (that it's unclear on the calling side) is eliminated.
It's just a shame that there's nothing out there that can rip a DVD to MPEG4 *and* preserve all the menus and additional content. The Mastroka container can, in theory, support menuing, and apparently it's implementation is a near-carbon-copy of the DVD standard, but alas a) nothing out there can reliably create them automatically based on a DVD rip, and b) nothing can reliably play them back.
So, for now, I live with DVDs. But, perhaps one day...
Its a MS port of Java with extra bits added mainly in the realm of the GUI and interop with legacy COM and Win32.
What the hell are you talking about? As a person who's worked extensively with both Java and C# (and Smalltalk, Perl, Python, a bit of Lisp, and probably a few others I can't remember right now), C# has some awfully nice features in a single package. It is, without a doubt, entirely derivative, but it took some of the nice things in Java, and then added things like:
1. Properties. Yeah, they're fancy getters and setters, but they're very nice syntactic sugar. 2. Real annotations. Being able to attach metadata (say, descriptions to enumerated type values) is very nice. 3. Generics. 4. Delegates. All the power of function pointers, plus type safety. This is *really* nice for event-driven apps. 5. Real, honest-to-god closures. This is the killer feature for me. I *refuse* to work in a high-level language that doesn't support higher-order functions.
And that's just off the top of my head.
Sorry bud, but you're just wrong. C# is, in my mind, the next logical step for a Java-like language, and I think it's very well executed. The class libraries, not so much, but the language itself is excellent and I'd choose it over Java any day of the week.
Slashdot Mirror
If you make a mistake, ever, in your life, don't worry. He will rescue you. Get a loan you can't afford? No problem! Make bad decisions that lead to failure? Glad to help! Want a free lunch? Here you go!
Yeah... that's exactly the same as trying to stave off a recession that could rival the great depression. ::rollseyes::
Actually, it's not a tough call at all. You bail the fuck out. A deep, long recession is *far* worse, and the government should be doing whatever it can to prevent it. Anyone who doesn't understand this is simply advocating cutting off their nose to spite their face.
When you talk about a 90% reduction in CO2
They do? Citation please.
you are not talking about efficiency, you are talking about impoverishment.
Oooh, I see, so the government is out to impoverish everyone.
How's that tinfoil hat fitting?
Correlation doesn't mean anything.
Umm... what? Correlation is a *necessary condition* to prove causation.
It means we're going to be in for some very cold weather in the near future.
Ah, so you must be a top-notch climatologist or something? Because you seem so very sure about this... despite the fact that, according to the article, the scientific community is "unsure of the significance of this unusual calm". Maybe you should publish a paper, I'm sure they'd love to read about your theories.
this would become evident AFTER we've blown ten trillion dollars to lower our CO2.
1) I can only assume you aren't American. Last I checked, the US had given the finger to the rest of the world on the whole carbon reduction thing.
2) I fail to see how that money is "blown". Energy efficiency *saves* money, while lowering CO2 emissions in the process. Green technology is *good* for the economy, not bad.
3) A reduction in sunspots has fuck-all to do with GW. The amount of solar variation isn't nearly enough to account for the global increase in temperature over the last 50 years, and that's ignoring the fact that over said 50 years, the solar cycle has been uncorrelated with global temperature trends. Look it up, the facts are there if you want to find them.
Yeah... in the end, she basically said "no", but I suspect that's not what her base actually wants to hear.
It's no different than the debate moderator (who's name escapes me) asking Harper if he'd vow to never raise taxes. Harper dilly-dallied over that question and never really answered it because, guess what, he *can't* say "yes", even if his electorate wants him to.
Not a chance - she was rude, hectoring, and constantly interrupting Harper.
Yeah, I agree. But IMHO, she also came across as informed and educated. She was one of the few that actually cited numbers and real evidence, both when attacking her opponents and supporting her own positions.
Then again, in that group, that's really damning with faint praise...
In contrast, while Harper certainly came across as calm, I also thought he came across as superficial... he had a tough time defending his non-interventionist economic policies, and given that's the heart of their economic platform, I expected better. Similarly, Dion couldn't really articulate and defend their platform, and Layton came across as a bitchy asshole.
And I agree re Duceppe. I actually thought he did pretty well, as well (although his tendency to refuse to let Harper ignore his questions got annoying at times). If they weren't, you know, a separatists party, their soft-left regionalist policies might actually go over well with the Canadian electorate...
Or you could spend less money and just buy a decent pair of canalphones. The noise isolation is better than any electronic gimmick, and because it's passive it doesn't require any power, either.
The economy would have done well with or without him
As evidenced by the fact that it's clear, particularly after the debate, that his economic policies are to just let things kinda tick along and let whatever happens happen.
I agree about May, though. I think she was one of the best performing politicians in the debate (specifically the English language debate, which is the one I watched). Layton, by contrast, spent the entire time doing his best to paint Harper as the spawn of the devil, and neglected to actually outline what his own party would do. I was, to say the least, unimpressed...
2) If you're using a laptop (or any desktop more recent than 2000) you have a 99.99% chance of hibernation working flawlessly in any Linux distro.
Ha ha ha. Right. Sure.
For the record, on my T61, hibernation in Ubuntu has *never ever worked*. Ever.
1) The kernel/Linux has long been doing an excellent job on using power-saving features of processors and peripherals
But this I agree with. Linux actually consumes less power than Windows Vista does, which surprised the heck out of me. On my rather power hungry T61, after a fair bit of tuning to enable low power mode for various devices (audio chipset, SATA hosts, wireless, and USB, including removing the UHCI USB driver entirely), along with some other tweaks, Linux consumes around 13.4 watts idle, give or take. By comparison, for all my extensive tuning, Vista has never ever dropped below 14.8 or so.
You have done nothing to debunk those Republican talking points other than to quote a Clinton Administrator, a member of the Fed, and a CRA compliance counsel
No, I cited numbers. Here, let me quote them again:
That means that CRA loans account for no more than 20% of subprime loans. Maybe. And in case you forgot this part:
According to Janet L. Yellen, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, independent mortgage companies made "high-priced loans" at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts
None of this is opinion. It is pure, hard fact. You may not like the facts. You may ignore them because they don't match your own opinions. But they are facts. And thus, the fact is, the CRA had little to nothing to do with the subprime crisis.
Neither you nor I could lay out step by step how we got in this mess, so it is a waste of time to keep discussing it.
Okay, so now you're saying that government involvement may or may not have been the cause, but you really don't know. But since those opinions I cited don't match yours (even though they're back by actual numbers, you're gonna go with an ad hominem attack instead.
Well, I guess that's a start... sort of.
As long as the government prevented collusion and promoted competition then regulation would not be necessary.
Umm... that bit about preventing collusion? Yeah. That *is* regulation.
In the future you should consider a more composed response when you are participating in a rational debate.
And in the future, you should try and respond to my counterpoints, instead attacking my debating style.
Incidentally, the nature of my response is a consequence of frustration at having to constantly debunk what are, absolutely, simple republican talking points. You may not realize that's what you're parroting, but it's the truth. The "blame the CRA" and "blame F&F" lines are pure, unadulterated lines straight out of the Republican playbook, in an effort to shift blame away from the real culprit: financial deregulation.
My argument was that the government should not be involved in the private market.
Right. And you supported that argument with faulty evidence. So unless you can provide other evidence that government intervention caused the financial collapse, or can somehow counter my points, I think it's safe to say your argument is bunk.
and to somehow compare the financial crisis to net neutrality is nonsensical.
Bullshit. My argument is this: there are situations in which the market fails, such as the financial industry, where regulation is necessary in order to protect consumers, and in some cases, the nation at large.
My contention is that telecom is also one of those industries.
The reason net neutrality is even an issue is because broadband providers have virtually no competition,
Hardly. Local ISP competition won't solve this problem, as eventually, all traffic must travel over the large backbones that exist today, backbones operated by a small number of entities who may choose to charge Google for preferential service. So, unless you plan to have competition between various, separate Internets, regulation is the only true solution to the problem.
You mean the fact that Fannie and Freddie were allowed to socialize their risk while privatizing their profit had nothing to do with our current situation?
Fannie and Freddie were barely involved in the subprime market before things started really getting crazy. Look it up. It wasn't until fairly late in the game that Fannie and Freddie really started trading in high-risk instruments, and only because the market was beginning to turn sour and the feds looked to them to stabilize things.
Sorry, bub, but while it's a great conservative talking point, you're *dead wrong* on this one.
How about the fact that Clinton forced the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to include a provision strengthening the Community Reinvestment Act?
I've said it before, and I'll repeat myself *yet again*... CRA had very little to do with the US's current financial woes. Here, read this. Since you probably won't, I'll quote:
Further:
And in case that wasn't enough:
So, once again, nice conservative talking point, but dead wrong. Shocker there.
Good try, though.
*This* is interstate commerce?
No, my ISP charging Google, who is located in California, for "enhanced" service is *most definitely* interstate commerce. Hell, this is an excellent example of *precisely* what the interstate commerce clause exists to deal with: causes where policy decisions can have wide-ranging impacts on the business interests of those in other states.
What's the Constitutionality of network neutrality legislation?
I fail to see how it doesn't *clearly* fall into the realm of interstate commerce.
Clearly you simply have no idea wtf you're talking about.
Net Neutrality == the idea that if I visit a website, that website won't get preferential treatment (in terms of bandwidth or latency priority) because they've paid my ISP for the privilege. Or: all content is created equal. Note: this does *not* rule out QoS to, for example, reduce latency for real-time applications, at the expense of increased latency for bulk transfers, as per Comcast's recent announcement, as that prioritization is not based on the source or destination of the data, but instead on the protocol being employed.
This definition says *nothing* how this fairness comes about. However, given the stances that telecom companies have taken recently, my belief is that the government may need to step in and impose regulation in order to ensure that net neutrality is preserved. And this just so happens to be Obama's stance. McCain, however, would prefer to leave private industry to sort things out on their own. 'course, given how that's worked for the financial world... well, colour me skeptical.
Apparently some mod out there doesn't understand that "Flamebait" does not, in fact, equate to "I disagree with this guy"...
but I find the whitespace significance very nice and makes reading existing python code very pleasant.
Until you need to move a block of code from one level of scope to the other and discover your editor can no longer help you get the indentation right because the language doesn't provide block scope delimiters. And if you do try to use the editor, it can actually introduce semantic bugs by accidentally placing lines of code at the wrong lexical level. Awesome.
Sorry, but no thanks. I have absolutely no problems formatting my code properly and don't need a language enforcing it's standards on me (in fact, any programmer that *does* need a crutch like that should be drummed out of the industry for the hack they are). Meanwhile, I regularly use my editor for automatic indentation, and any language that makes that impossible (or unnecessarily difficult) is out of the running.
Well, until I see proof otherwise, I see no reason why the percentage of crapware on CPAN is any different than the percentage of crapware on PyPi. And heck, even if 50% of CPAN was crapware and the entirety of PyPi was pure gold, CPAN would *still* win out in terms of number of quality packages available.
All that said, you are right, much of it comes down to, is what I need there? Problem is, that answer depends based on the problem domain. And I'm willing to bet that, based purely on the sheer number of packages available in CPAN, it's more likely to cover obscure topics, in addition to the more popular subjects that both CPAN and PyPi are likely to cover adequately.
I'm now tossing up whether to learn Ruby or Python.
Meh, six of one, a half dozen of the other. You either pick a seriously half-assed Smalltalk, or whitespace significance and broken closures. In the end it's basically a wash, IMHO.
Not when the opposition has an equivalent tool/repository/i>
Ha ha ha ha! Oh god, that's good. No, seriously, that's hilarious. There are 4890 packages on PyPi (granted, a non-trivial number). On the other hand, there are 14 *thousand* modules on CPAN.
As such, I'm not sure I'd call PyPi "equivalent".
OOP is just a bad hack in Perl
Why? Last I checked, the only difference between Perl's OOP and any other language is that it has a far more flexible implementation. Aside from that, it's no different:
sub new
{
my $class = shift;
my $instance = {};
bless $instance, $class;
return $instance;
}
sub method
{
my $self = shift;
__do_stuff_here__
}
--
my $obj = new My::Object();
$obj->method();
Now what's so "non-OOP" about that?
and you end up with really ugly code that isn't very maintainable
Why? I've written plenty of OOP Perl, and it's no more or less maintainable than any other language. Well, assuming you aren't a moron, anyway.
Well, while exceptions have made pass-by-reference less useful (since you no longer return status codes to indicate errors), there is still the odd time where it's useful. For example, the .NET Dictionary's TryGetValue uses an out parameter for storing the result, which means this idiom:
if (! dictionary.TryGetValue(name, out value))
{
value = defaultValue;
}
is cleaner and simpler than the alternative:
if (dictionary.ContainsKey(name))
{
value = dictionary[name];
}
else
{
value = defaultValue;
}
And the fact that you have to annotate the parameter in the call means that my one complaint about pass-by-reference (that it's unclear on the calling side) is eliminated.
It's just a shame that there's nothing out there that can rip a DVD to MPEG4 *and* preserve all the menus and additional content. The Mastroka container can, in theory, support menuing, and apparently it's implementation is a near-carbon-copy of the DVD standard, but alas a) nothing out there can reliably create them automatically based on a DVD rip, and b) nothing can reliably play them back.
So, for now, I live with DVDs. But, perhaps one day...
Its a MS port of Java with extra bits added mainly in the realm of the GUI and interop with legacy COM and Win32.
What the hell are you talking about? As a person who's worked extensively with both Java and C# (and Smalltalk, Perl, Python, a bit of Lisp, and probably a few others I can't remember right now), C# has some awfully nice features in a single package. It is, without a doubt, entirely derivative, but it took some of the nice things in Java, and then added things like:
1. Properties. Yeah, they're fancy getters and setters, but they're very nice syntactic sugar.
2. Real annotations. Being able to attach metadata (say, descriptions to enumerated type values) is very nice.
3. Generics.
4. Delegates. All the power of function pointers, plus type safety. This is *really* nice for event-driven apps.
5. Real, honest-to-god closures. This is the killer feature for me. I *refuse* to work in a high-level language that doesn't support higher-order functions.
And that's just off the top of my head.
Sorry bud, but you're just wrong. C# is, in my mind, the next logical step for a Java-like language, and I think it's very well executed. The class libraries, not so much, but the language itself is excellent and I'd choose it over Java any day of the week.