What could it be that gives a small group of people the right to own progress?
Perhaps the fact that said "progress" was the direct product of their physical and/or intellectual efforts, and that the feasibility of said "progress" to have an impact on mankind depends on their voluntarily sharing it with those who didn't produce it?
Whenever "mankind" discovers how to use a new universal tool, from fire to computers, the incentive to actually use it and "progress" has been the power leverage it provides for the discoverers over the short term, their communities (towns, tribes, nations) in the medium term, mankind in the long term.
Without any such incentive, it can be abandoned. The less immediate and less personal the incentives are, the more likely the discovery is abandoned or kept private. Many times it is. History is not a relentless march forward. There's no "forward", to begin with.
Smart people do not ignore the relations of power that determine the application and popularity of technologies, and brought them to the world in the first place.
They may like them or dislike them, use them or attempt to neutralize them, follow their rules or make a better offer, but they don't pretend they don't exist.
Will ANYONE point me to the petition where these people claimed to anybody to be "representatives"?
What they did was sign their name on a petition they agreed with.
Are they wrong? Maybe, but it's not the point.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that they included the first line of their mission statement with the signature as a description: "Initiative to accelerate the market take up of Open Source Software(OSS)".
Is it silly? Yes.
Is it pointless? Definitely.
Is it really corny? Absolutely.
Is it a problem to anyone that can read a dozen words in English and understand a simple sentence? NO.
Apparently that demographic doesn't include Slashdot readers.
I can just imagine the discussion between marketdroids and/or interns that led to that decision "for clarification".
Probably went something like this: - We agree with this, it would be really cool to sign it, support it, and join the cool people behind this. - But no one knows who we are, how will they recognize us from the signature? - No one knows who GrowthPlus are, but they're signing all the same. - Growth who? - Exactly. - They're putting a description with the signature: "Europe's 500 fastest growing something". - That's it! We just given them a spin of who we are! - But who are we? - We're people supporting Open Source! - Yes, but that would be confusing. We're not all people supporting open source, we're not doing open source... we're just a specific group that wants to increase market share of Open Source Software. - Well, in this orientation thingie they gave me it says we're an "Initiative to market take up of Open Source Software (OSS)". We can put that. - That's it! A clear description of who we are. I'm so glad! That way no one will ever be confused.
A trespasser is by definition someone who breaks into your property.
There is an implicit risk whenever someone breaks into your property, i.e.: trespass. The trespasser is an uninvited intruder which can and usually is considered a threat.
I don't think there is a legal difference if it's "your home", "your office" or "your piece of land". And I don't think there is a legal difference on the intention of the trespasser because said intention cannot be defined without an accompanying act.
Hence, if you can shoot someone that broke into your property before they attack you or even steal something, it must be BECAUSE they broke into your property, not because some imaginary cause. And yes, you can.
As I said, first you have to prove they were trespassing and that's another matter. Depending on the local legislature, that may or may not include providing a fair warning and clear demarcation of the property.
In many cases, a fair warning can very well be a "Trespassers will be shot" sign.
But as far as I know, if the property is fenced and the signs are there, they can shot you on sight.
I don't know if they should, but I think they are.
As a matter of fact, that's why you can kill the stranger that broke into your house before you seen him stealing, or say, trying to rape/kill you.
It's also one of the reasons police have to identify themselves before barging into people's houses.
Owners and/or guardians of a property CAN shoot unauthorized intruders at will.
Of course, they might have some problems while proving that the other person was effectively trespassing (there was no implicit or explicit invitation, etc. ) and there will be no lack of legal hassle, but the same thing applies to other human-death justifications: self-defense, accidents, etc.
The fact that most landowners don't go shooting every door-to-door salesman that appears on their property, and most private security guards don't go postal on local teenage vandals has more to do with common sense and lawyer's bills than fear of actually breaking the law.
You don't need the "top people" to sell the ideas to the "bottom people" to see change.
Although people fear change, new generations lack the fear of their parents unless they are well ingrained in strong traditional cultures; and strong traditional cultures have been deemed inflexible and counterproductive in the west since the last century.
The same changes people fear the most can happen spontaneously in a couple of decades as one generation cedes power, or social majority, to another. Even against the wishes of those who hold power.
One of the same stigmas that you mention is an excellent example:
Smoking a joint to take the edge off a stressful day is not stigmatized among the last few generations, not by any means. Smoking it AFTER work is considered normal, and in some circles almost expected, just like in some circles it's usual fare to go for some drinks after work. The non-pot-smoker can feel like the "guy who doesn't drink and goes home to his wife" in some situations.
Not smoking it at coffee break is a rule kept due to legal/workplace consequences.
Just like having a few drinks, people can notice if you're slightly inebriated/stoned, and you can get fired/arrested because it's harder to tell how drunk/stoned you are. You don't need a study to know that a drunk/stoned person is not productive, and can actually be dangerous at work, or in many other places for that matter.
For decades, the top leaders have sold more fears about marijuana than could be justified even in the most biased study/report. Yet its consumption is as habitual and social as alcohol during the Prohibition, probably even more.
The question is not whether the leaders can sell it to the people. The question is whether the next generation of people would be willing to try it (very probable) and whether it's cheap enough for most of them to try it (very unlikely).
As long as any of those two things is false, there will be a majority that is afraid of it and does not or cannot participate, and the stigma will remain, probably with legal backing (since the majority sees it as a threat).
Can multiple monitors share the same base station?
If yes, can multiple monitors share the base station the signal but still show different channels?
If both answers are affirmative, I can see the use of this. You put the base station wherever you put all your A/V equipment, which can very well be in the basement, and then you put monitors wherever you want a TV.
Otherwise, it seems like useless novelty to me.
I mean, if you can't share base stations, I REALLY don't see the point of the wireless TV. It's not like the TV wiring is a problem in any modern house, and it's not like connecting the base station is that much less of a hassle than connecting the LCD screen in the first place.
And let's face it, how many of us really need to put their TV on the ceiling?
If you can share base stations but can only watch one channel/video at a time (I think this is the case) I can see some limited use outside of the consumer market: bars, crappy restaurants, airplanes, office-buildings... wherever you actually want to show the same video source on multiple screens in inconveniently located places.
But as a consumer, I would find it a pain. "It would be like a sportsbar", I can hear a certain TV-ad character say.
Really, we're not talking LAN cabling, which most modern houses don't have incorporated. We're talking TV antennas.
How far do you have to go in a modern house to get to a TV outlet?
And this is different from other crimes because... ?
Most people are not criminals because they like crime. It's just that what they like happens to involve crime in some way, as either a means or as part of the process itself.
And most people who do ANYTHING with any skill like the challenges and the opportunity to test their "kung-fu", as you call it.
This applies to sports, manual craftsmen labor, or M4d Accounting Skillz, or anything that can be called a "profession".
All involve talent in some way, and often vast knowledge and intellect arsenals. All take pride in their work if it is complex and well done, from software developers and architects, to carpenters and mechanics.
Yet the martial arts expert doesn't go picking fights against security guards, cops don't engage in gunfights for fun, and microbiologists don't release new strains of microorganisms at random to test their skillz.
Sometimes there is no clear venue to test their skills, and people go out of their way to find new ways to challenge themselves against their peers more creatively. Engineers build robots that fight in cheesy arenas, solar vehicles to race each other, etc.
What makes hacking so different and more worthy of indulgence than other activities?
What makes a 15-year old computer geek that takes control of your computer different than the 15-year old that steals your car for a joy ride?
Criminal Hacking is NOT different from other crimes, and SHOULD NEVER be treated differently.
In order to get rid of the misperception that all hackers are criminals, to get a reasonable treatment for hackers that engage in criminal activities, with trials and sentences that are proportional to the crimes, the hacker community has to abandon the myth that "hacking" by definition is somehow inherently noble, that hackers have the inherent right to mess with systems they don't own, and that non-technical rules don't apply to them.
Only when hacking stops being an "exceptional case" will the punishments stop being equally "exceptional".
Let me reiterate: it's not the action what legitimizes you politically, it's what you do before or after those actions what legimitizes you, and the criminal action.
Is breaking into a bank, pointing guns at people and stealing money "freedom fighting"? No. It's called robbery. Common criminals do it all the time.
Is kidnapping innocent tourists for ransom money a revolutionary action? No. It's called kidnapping. Common criminals do it all the time.
Is killing a CEO and act of social justice? No, it's murder. Or perhaps armed robbery and murder (you might at least get his wallet).
Is up to history whether your OTHER actions justify the robbery/kidnapping/murder... if you used the money for X political cause, or sent a political message in Y way, or somehow saved a bunch of people by killing Z, or defined killing Q as an 'execution' backed by a number of legal intrincacies.
Fortunately history has a more strict criteria than you have.
Hacking an MS box is not freedom fighting by any means. It's not a crime either, although hacking SOMEONE ELSE's MS box without permission is.
You're not hurting Microsoft. You're hurting the owner of the machine.
Perhaps you meant hacking Microsoft, but then, why would it be "freedom fighting"? What are you going to achieve with said action? Are you going to publicize a dangerous security flaw? Or are you going to sit on the information in great satisfaction at your cleverness and leave everyone just as exposed? Or are you going to sell the information to someone else?
Re:OOP is frequently the wrong answer
on
The Post-OOP Paradigm
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't think OOP is dead. Certainly these languages don't have the foundation necessary to overtake OOP's good features: inheritance, (and thus code reuse) and methods.
I'm confused... Languages?
The article discusses paradigms, approaches to programming. And then makes sure to clarify that modern "paradigm shifts", unlike the drastic jump to structured programming, are complementary to OOP rather than replacements.
Besides that, I don't think inheritance and code re-use are the "good features" of OOP.
Sure, they're great, but I think they're overrated when taken as the main goal of OOP, and lead to the typical problems people complain about: confusing, multiple-layer hierarchies with ridiculous levels of abstraction in an attempt to reuse, or make reusable, the most lines of code.
IMNSHO, the main "good feature" of OOP is that it can make a program semantically clear: use the language of the problem to code the solution. This makes extension, and code re-use easier, but first of all leads to a cleaner program that is more likely to solve the problem.
However most OOP programmers try to over-OO everything.
That is true, and there's also a similar sin: over-design everything. In OOP sometimes it's not easy to differentiate, but there IS a difference.
The problem is that it's not easy to see where you're over-doing it, and it's very easy, and common, to regret not going far enough a few days later.
XP has a refreshing, if a bit anal (in theory), approach to this.
For example I had a consultant working (briefly) with me who wrote several thousand lines of code that would edit colon delimited files (like/etc/passwd, for example) when a simple strtok in C or split() in perl would have done the trick in a few lines, without all that code to debug.
Well, that description may be fair or unfair to the consultant depending on the project.
A custom tokenizer that is more flexible and powerful than the ones provided by the language (and yet is not a regex engine with all the overhead it implies) seems to be a common need.
On the other hand, it's not like there's plenty of libraries and available components if you really needed something like that.
And 99.99% of the time you don't (which is why languages include simple, more efficient tokenizers).
It's this kind of instruction that leads to programmers writing whole object-oriented interfaces to things that can be very easily manipulated without all the overhead.
No. What makes programmers write OO APIs to non-OO low-level procedures that can be used without the overhead, is that they know you'll need to use them from within some other, probably OO-ed, project soon and reimplementing them is silly.
At least that's the good reason to write OO APIs to your utility libraries.
More often than not, they'll find that they higher level languages are too much.
Funny, I would think higher-level languages tend to be "much less" due to abstraction, and therefore it's rare for them to become "too much".
Often it becomes "too much" because you're reinventing the wheel: the string tokenizer example. If the project was not to actually build a string tokenizer, and one is building a string tokenizer as a sub-project to meet the actual goal, it's a good idea to check whether you really don't have one laying around somewhere.
Other times it becomes too much because, as you mention, you're OO-ing or designing too much, and end up with an algorithm that is too general (and requires general tools).
How this relates to the "high level language" per se, I don't know. I would think you could be equally stupid and try to reinvent the wheel with assembler. But you do have a point that OO programmers seem more vulnerable to this.
And security experts find exploits, test them, inform the company responsible, and publicize them later.
They do not use them for personal kicks or gains in secret for months.
They do not inform other Freedom Fighters of the flaw before the victim, so they can use it for their own kicks and fun.
You see, the problem with "hackers" in this context is the same problem that "Freedom Fighter" has as a term... wherever you have "Freedom Fighters", you also have common criminals or worse using the term to legitimize themselves.
Breaking into a system does not make you a computer security hero, just like robbing a bank does not make you a political hero. It's the other stuff you do what may or may not justify those actions.
Regarding your questions, physical property is probably a bad metaphor to use for your argument:
1- Yes, if a business leaves the door unlocked or open and you walk in without permission, they can put you in jail.
They don't even need a door. It's called trespassing.
If you leave the door to your house open, a thief is still trespassing. It's private property.
2- You got the question backwards. You should be asking: is there any indication that the business is open and this is a common area?
For most businesses, there is such an indication: from parking lots to front desks there is an implicit contract that customers are welcome during business hours. This contract can be terminated at any point: they give you a notice (ask you to leave), and if you reappear, you're trespassing.
However, this implicit contract does not apply to premises that are never open to customers in the first place.
If you're caught sneaking into an internal office, or specially into the maintenance rooms, sewer system, ventilation, etc. you can be charged with trespassing.
You may have some defense if you can argue that you were confused, lost, etc. And it is very likely that the owner of a property wouldn't bother to press charges for typical tresspasing.
But don't keep any illusions that they can't put you into jail for entering an unlocked office without permission.
1) There is such a thing as a stable price in the market, that is, a price fixed by the market itself.
Just because prices don't drop any more as the market expands does not mean the price is being "fixed" by the providers. MAYBE dropping the price is not cost-effective any more, MAYBE it wouldn't win enough new clients to offset the lost revenue, and they wouldn't lose clients by keeping the current price.
Companies are not obligated to reduce prices in a free market, they will do so only if it's in their best interest. Currently people ARE willing to pay 50 bucks for broadband, and the lack of competition means no one is making a better offer.
The problem is a lack of suppliers (monopoly if you will), not a cartel.
2) Broadband is a relatively new product with relatively new problems. It is not rare for the supplier to refine the restrictions of the service if, say, P2P sharing completely changes their forecasted costs. Their alternative is to raise the prices.
Remember that the "broadband market" defined pricing according to the telephone market, which arrived at its current pricing after a long time of evolution.
This brought a whole set of advantages and problems that may or may not be useful to apply to broadband: constant per-month fees instead of charging per bandwidth , PPPoE and similar contraptions to simulate a dial-up connection, which I assume lets them count minutes and some average bandwidth to calculate an average cost per client, to calculate the flat fee.
They didn't name that flat price thinking you would use more bandwidth as a Kazaa user than your typical commercial website (which pays for bandwidth through the nose). And it does cost money.
I know they are often draconian and show the insight of a panicked mob in a burning movie theater, but these restrictions are not an artificial way of raising the prices as you seem to indicate, and are not an exclusive problem of Telecoms. Universities have had to do the same when they found that P2P among students was consuming all the bandwidth, which they needed for research and university-stuff (you know, the stuff that gets you grants and pays for the bandwidth in the first place).
3) Just because telephony companies in India are providing broadband affordable to US citizens doesn't mean that it's affordable, or even comparatively lower-priced, for Indians.
Before thinkind "damn, that's cheap" consider your salary. Then use google to find the salary for your position somewhere in India. Repeat for 10 or 15 other countries.
Then, if you still think the comparison makes sense, find out how much a hamburger costs in those 15 other countries compared with the cost in the US.
A dollar does not have the same value anywhere in the world. The very prosperity that gives the US a technological and economic advantage means that the cost of life will be higher, if compared dollar by dollar, with the rest of the world... because acquiring said dollars is easier and less costly, and therefore the dollar has less value.
4) There are other reasons besides cost to adopt a new technology.
Maybe other uses that don't apply to the US makes them popular: in much of Latin America, the Telecomms are so bad that having a cellular phone is a necessity. They are more expensive than in the US, both in service and hardware, but traditional phones are unreliable and/or more expensive (no flat fee).
Maybe different lifestyles have translated in different tastes for different products: the popularity of wireless devices in Japan may have to do with their unbridled consumerism (which puts the US to shame), or with the obsession of Japanese pop culture with cute tiny things, or with the fact that the general purpose workstation (PC) was not as popular out of the office as function specific devices... or all of these.
Maybe availability is harder to achieve in the US than in other countries. Get a
Note that it is not just a pencil, it's a Russian pencil.
And then note that it is not Russia, it's just the pencil.
I'm having trouble imagining the negotiations:
NASA: Okay, Mr. Pencil, when do you think we can send our boys to Mars? PENCIL:... NASA: Hmmm... I see. I guess we'll have to keep a flexible schedule then. But I'm assuming you have the technology to contribute, right? PENCIL:... NASA: Damn it, you're a harsh negotiator, Pencil! We'll put in the rockets and all that, then. What kind of crew were you planning to send?...
And then a couple of weeks later:
NASA: We're proud to announce that we have reached an agreement with a pencil to send a manned mission to Mars! This is a great victory in both space exploration and international relations, and disproves the theory that the US is acting alone in the world.
REPORTER: But what about the Europeans, or the Russians, or the Chinese? Why not join in a mission with them?
NASA: We were unable to reach an agreement with those powers due to their anti-American attitude. But the Pencil IS Russian, so I guess that counts.
REPORTER: What will be the composition of the crew?
NASA: We're counting on 6 crew members. It is unclear how many will be US astronauts and how many will be pencils. We know for sure the Russian Pencil is in, but we are in negotiations to include as many as 2 other of his pencil friends, as long as they can complete the training and physical examination in time...
I don't know if Microsoft is as happy as you suggest.
The target of this seems to be a subset of Microsoft's well-publicized next target: Office applications as a network-delivered, subscription-based, package. Not the home users, who won't buy Websphere in the first place and can't afford to lose compatibility with their company's documents, but the corporations, who are Websphere clients already and also can affor to make the transition to another Office suite.
Microsoft is moving away from retail for various reasons, among them the fact that software is becoming more and more of a commodity, and people are less eager to upgrade to the next version of MS Office next year for a gazillion dollars.
They figure if you can pay them a smaller monthly fee for a centralized, network-served Office suite and never own the software they won't have that problem.
Then here comes IBM and says: hey, if you CAN pay a gazillion dollars you can get your centralized, network-served Office suite AND own the software.
Is the transition costly? Of course. But so is any transition that businesses have undertaken: changing programming languages, changing OSes, switching information systems... they'll do it if they think it's worth it.
Why would they think it's worth it now and not before with the Lotus or Corel products?
Because:
I) We're talking about choosing between similar products:
Switching to a network-served suite will have its own advantages and disadvantages. Where before it was a matter of "well, they pretty much do the same thing so why take the risk?" now there's a functional difference to go along with the pricing difference.
II) It's not a voluntary transition:
Microsoft is planning to force them to move in that direction. They've been fighting it, but at some point they'll have to either switch Office suite providers or give in.
If you're forced to "switch", either to another Office, or to a different paradigm (and pricing) for your Office needs, you'll be more open to options that involve switching in both senses.
True, IBM has experience killing off retail software, like SmartSuite.
But they also have experience dealing well with server software, like Websphere.
This is not competition for today's bloated Microsoft Office running on your desktop. This is competition for tomorrow's subscription Microsoft Office running on your company's big iron server.
Bloat is a not that much of an issue there (and at the Websphere price scale), and I don't expect it to be that bloated, memory-wise. It's likely to have less graphic candy, wizards, and certainly less "covert OS upgrade components" than MS Office.
GUI support is almost certainly a non-issue too. This is Websphere we're talking about: thin-clients, J2EE, Servlets, EJB and Web Services... that kind of stuff. If IBM chooses Applets for their GUI they should be beaten to a pulp literally, and probably will metaphorically. But that is doubtful, unless SWT is much better than it looks right now.
They'll likely use a big, complex Web interface and just require all users to use IE or Mozilla 18.whatever (probably the later for flexibility's sake), which is certainly less than a requirement to install some other custom client OR an Office suite.
I can already hear the complaints: "What? They force me to install a particular browser instead of a 1GB Office Suite? Oh no!". I'm just speculating, but that sounds to me like the sensible solution.
There's a broad market of options for Web-based interfaces that work quite well if you don't have to deal with compatibility issues, your application logic is not the issue, and you have the resources to debug them properly as an application (as opposed to as 'just a website').
This passes the GUI requirements to the browser support of whatever you're using for GUI: Javascript and DHTML works fine. Or maybe they could go for one of those new fancy XML-based 'web-app GUI' projects that one keeps hearing about in Slashdot. Or they can go the plug-in way.
Whatever they find works best for their Websphere market, which is what matters to them here.
Actually, my point is that "The Iraq situation" is as compelling as it is, whether it was "created as a direct protest" or not. The original motive of the author is irrelevant. In a year or two, no one will remember it.
Either it's good art and stands by itself, or it doesn't.
If the drama is not compelling, it has to do with the bad art, not with the motive. True, "direct political protests" tend to create bad art, but that's because *ANY MOTIVATION AT ALL* tends to create bad art.
There are too many people trying to use art as a form of political expression and too few people with talent.
The motivation and background adds value for analysis later, if the art is really that good, for historical purposes. It helps to understand it, as art, better.
On the other hand, recommending a fiction book because "it was a protest against X" shows the same artistic taste as recommending a book because "it talks about puppies, and I like puppies". Rejecting a fiction book for similar reasons falls into the same trap.
Not really, unless you're just following crappy magazine critics or community-college professors, most of whom happen to be "from the Left" in the US since the 60s. I'm sure we'll be complaining about the same imbalance in a generation or two when they're all "from the Right".
Art, however, is judged on its own depth and character regardless of the political bias of the author(s).
Borges has been accused of everything you say, specially in his own Argentina, but he's still considered a master of fiction by any critic with two neurons. The same can be said of Dostoyevski. Heck, Nietzche, as misinterpreted as he's been, still fits the bill, but the artistic and philosophical importance of his work is not contested.
This is no different from considering Garcia Marquez one of the best authors alive. Few contest that. Even among those who consider his politics flawed and/or hypocritical.
Perhaps there is a true imbalance, a demographic imbalance, that justifies the misperception among popular critics: most people who train themselves "in the arts" have left-leaning politics these days, form left-leaning circles, and end up as left-leaning professionals.
I have seen few good examples of "conservative art" these days. I have seen more than enough "leftist art" with no value, depth or character, and it's usually recognized as such and thrown away... But I have seen almost no recent competent art with a "rightist message" these days. It doesn't help when Ayn Rand is used as an example of high-quality literature.
Perhaps you can put the blame on postmodernism's effects on the critic as a professional. Any pretense of objectivity can be thrown away, and analysis can be reduced to whatever the critic likes. It seems some English-List/Liberal-Arts majors spend their college years deconstructing their skills so they can write just like they did in 9th grade.
I'm thinking of Salon's "this movie is really bad but I got a crush on the actor/actress and I just had some apple pie so go see it" reviews in this case.
In this case, this speaks more about the poster than about the artist.
I don't know if Oran was created as a "direct protest" (this thing has been running for about two years) or to exploit a great dramatic situation. To me, it seemed like the second case.
The artists are very much on the left, no doubt, but the characters are no simple strawmen for their political arguments.
I disagree with their political stance on Iraq, as with a lot of their politics in general (feels too Salon-ish for me), but Oran is one of my favorite characters. The Iraq situation provides him with a lot of background and a great hook to put him in the story, as compared to others whose plots feel more contrived.
Broken Saints is a drama with a political voice. You may or may not agree with it, but it's very well done. Like all political fictions, it manipulates its world to express a political message, to use it as an model of ideas.
Oran, like all other characters, "speaks" about the political argument idealized in the fictional world.
You may even agree with the argument within the context of the fictional world, but find there's no connection between the fictional world (and the argument) with reality.
Or you may not agree with the argument at all, but find the fictional world so well done it's deserving appreciation as fiction.
You don't have to fear Big Brother is about to take over the world to appreciate "1984", believe the banality of American consumerism is the end of civilization to like "Brave New World", or have an anachronistic appreciation for chivalric tradition to understand "Don Quixote".
Or, perhaps closer to the media, you don't have to believe the world is being taken over by the secret societies operating under the UN and corporations to bring a New World Order to think Deus Ex had a great plot.
20% sounds like an inflated number. The typical app spends most of its time waiting for I/O or doing silly stuff for user interaction. A 20% overall difference would imply what, 50%, 100% slower when it's actually working?
There's some overhead, but it's never that bad. Sure, the overhead matters, which is why there's an investment on improving VM technology, providing access to native operations, etc.
But also the worst overhead offenders are not VM issues, but application design issues: blocking I/O, threading bugs, NOT using multithreading when you should, etc. Also, using Swing/AWT in a non-trivial GUI. I'm beginning to consider Swing/AWT just a giant bug.
However, let's assume the 20% speed difference in an application...
It's not that constant factors don't matter at all, it's that they matter the least. And when you have so many more important problems to fix, they take the last place in the priority list.
By definition, choosing your implementation language is an early decision that takes place long before that list is filled up. Although speed is always a concern, algorithmic speed is more important than PL speed, and independent of it. So PL speed shouldn't have that much to do with the decision.
Saving 20% in hardware is great, and the efficiency marketing advantage is important too. But those advantages are worth nothing if your application is buggier, less extendable, less flexible than your competitors, and specially if it gets to the market AFTER your competitors.
Developing applications in C is more expensive and complicated than developing them in Java, and the difference is typically more than the difference in speed. (I'm not saying that C applications are inherently worse than Java apps, just that to develop the same application with the same extensibility, features and stability takes more time, and a bunch of non-standard libraries).
Development costs add much more quickly than hardware costs, and unlike hardware costs, development costs are not guaranteed a return in performance. These are not dollars and cents, but hundreds and tens of dollars: development is more expensive than hardware.
Then you go to the client 6 months after your competitors and try to sell them the application. If they haven't already bought from the competition, you'll try to convince them that although your application is more expensive, and altough it hasn't been tested in the market for as long as the other ones, and although they'll need a C programmer versed in your favorite non-standard libraries to maintain it (you do give them API documentation and the tools to maintain it, right?), your application will save them a few bucks in hardware.
Unless the difference in hardware costs has more than 4 digits, I think your customer will advice you to take an accounting class.
If the difference is more than 4 digits, you are pushing the technology and you need to care about constant factors.
Either that or you're not dealing with a typical application. For example, a scientific analysis program that spends most of its time in pure computation needs all the juice it can get. Although I understand Java works fine for pure computational tasks.
Now, if you can make your applications in C as cheap, fast, and safely as with Java, then you have great C developers so you should just keep doing that. Most people can't.
Funny, every UML book where i have read something about statecharts mentions they're just state diagrams for finite automata.
"State machines aren't that complicated. The UML people are just burying them under a mess of jargon."
They are?
It seems to me this is necessary, as it is in other UMLized diagrams, in order to generalize it so it can be useful out of the context they got it from in the first place. It's part of the "universalizing" process.
For example, class diagrams are much more complicated, and have more jargon, than the ER diagrams they got them from, but are also more flexible and embrace a wider context.
It's not like Finite Automata are not full of their own jargon, which tends to be technical and/or academic and much more complicated to understand for someone without the CS background.
"UML is a reasonable idea that's turning into a management fad and is being used to sell overpriced tools."
Quite true, but I don't think this has much to do with the "UML crowd". I think it has more to do with managers who don't know what UML is exactly, but are wooed by promises of code-generation, productivity increases, etc.
The "UML crowd" love UML but know what it is: a STANDARD notation for design and modelling diagrams.
Expensive or inexpensive tools are actually quite good these days, but until relatively recently I did my UML diagrams in a pre-MS version of Visio (1998) using standard polygons, stick figures and connectors. I could very well have used a cheaper diagraming tool, Paint, or do it by hand.
After all these years of Java hype and Java development, compiled vs interpreted, VM vs cold steel, one wonders why all this deep and complex discussions about "performance tuning" end up being mostly about String and StringBuffer.
I mean, yes, it's an important tip for the beginner, but surely there are more and newer insights to the matter!
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the fact that said "progress" was the direct product of their physical and/or intellectual efforts, and that the feasibility of said "progress" to have an impact on mankind depends on their voluntarily sharing it with those who didn't produce it?
Whenever "mankind" discovers how to use a new universal tool, from fire to computers, the incentive to actually use it and "progress" has been the power leverage it provides for the discoverers over the short term, their communities (towns, tribes, nations) in the medium term, mankind in the long term.
Without any such incentive, it can be abandoned. The less immediate and less personal the incentives are, the more likely the discovery is abandoned or kept private. Many times it is. History is not a relentless march forward. There's no "forward", to begin with.
Smart people do not ignore the relations of power that determine the application and popularity of technologies, and brought them to the world in the first place.
They may like them or dislike them, use them or attempt to neutralize them, follow their rules or make a better offer, but they don't pretend they don't exist.
Will ANYONE point me to the petition where these people claimed to anybody to be "representatives"?
What they did was sign their name on a petition they agreed with.
Are they wrong? Maybe, but it's not the point.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that they included the first line of their mission statement with the signature as a description: "Initiative to accelerate the market take up of Open Source Software(OSS)".
Is it silly? Yes.
Is it pointless? Definitely.
Is it really corny? Absolutely.
Is it a problem to anyone that can read a dozen words in English and understand a simple sentence? NO.
Apparently that demographic doesn't include Slashdot readers.
I can just imagine the discussion between marketdroids and/or interns that led to that decision "for clarification".
Probably went something like this:
- We agree with this, it would be really cool to sign it, support it, and join the cool people behind this.
- But no one knows who we are, how will they recognize us from the signature?
- No one knows who GrowthPlus are, but they're signing all the same.
- Growth who?
- Exactly.
- They're putting a description with the signature: "Europe's 500 fastest growing something".
- That's it! We just given them a spin of who we are!
- But who are we?
- We're people supporting Open Source!
- Yes, but that would be confusing. We're not all people supporting open source, we're not doing open source... we're just a specific group that wants to increase market share of Open Source Software.
- Well, in this orientation thingie they gave me it says we're an "Initiative to market take up of Open Source Software (OSS)". We can put that.
- That's it! A clear description of who we are. I'm so glad! That way no one will ever be confused.
One gets the impression from the blurb that each planet gets an Internet address...
Wouldn't a Planetary NAT box be a bit too much of a hack?
Maybe it's just the wording...
A trespasser is by definition someone who breaks into your property.
There is an implicit risk whenever someone breaks into your property, i.e.: trespass. The trespasser is an uninvited intruder which can and usually is considered a threat.
I don't think there is a legal difference if it's "your home", "your office" or "your piece of land". And I don't think there is a legal difference on the intention of the trespasser because said intention cannot be defined without an accompanying act.
Hence, if you can shoot someone that broke into your property before they attack you or even steal something, it must be BECAUSE they broke into your property, not because some imaginary cause. And yes, you can.
As I said, first you have to prove they were trespassing and that's another matter. Depending on the local legislature, that may or may not include providing a fair warning and clear demarcation of the property.
In many cases, a fair warning can very well be a "Trespassers will be shot" sign.
But as far as I know, if the property is fenced and the signs are there, they can shot you on sight.
I don't know if they should, but I think they are.
As a matter of fact, that's why you can kill the stranger that broke into your house before you seen him stealing, or say, trying to rape/kill you.
It's also one of the reasons police have to identify themselves before barging into people's houses.
Owners and/or guardians of a property CAN shoot unauthorized intruders at will.
Of course, they might have some problems while proving that the other person was effectively trespassing (there was no implicit or explicit invitation, etc. ) and there will be no lack of legal hassle, but the same thing applies to other human-death justifications: self-defense, accidents, etc.
The fact that most landowners don't go shooting every door-to-door salesman that appears on their property, and most private security guards don't go postal on local teenage vandals has more to do with common sense and lawyer's bills than fear of actually breaking the law.
You don't need the "top people" to sell the ideas to the "bottom people" to see change.
Although people fear change, new generations lack the fear of their parents unless they are well ingrained in strong traditional cultures; and strong traditional cultures have been deemed inflexible and counterproductive in the west since the last century.
The same changes people fear the most can happen spontaneously in a couple of decades as one generation cedes power, or social majority, to another. Even against the wishes of those who hold power.
One of the same stigmas that you mention is an excellent example:
Smoking a joint to take the edge off a stressful day is not stigmatized among the last few generations, not by any means. Smoking it AFTER work is considered normal, and in some circles almost expected, just like in some circles it's usual fare to go for some drinks after work. The non-pot-smoker can feel like the "guy who doesn't drink and goes home to his wife" in some situations.
Not smoking it at coffee break is a rule kept due to legal/workplace consequences.
Just like having a few drinks, people can notice if you're slightly inebriated/stoned, and you can get fired/arrested because it's harder to tell how drunk/stoned you are. You don't need a study to know that a drunk/stoned person is not productive, and can actually be dangerous at work, or in many other places for that matter.
For decades, the top leaders have sold more fears about marijuana than could be justified even in the most biased study/report. Yet its consumption is as habitual and social as alcohol during the Prohibition, probably even more.
The question is not whether the leaders can sell it to the people. The question is whether the next generation of people would be willing to try it (very probable) and whether it's cheap enough for most of them to try it (very unlikely).
As long as any of those two things is false, there will be a majority that is afraid of it and does not or cannot participate, and the stigma will remain, probably with legal backing (since the majority sees it as a threat).
Can multiple monitors share the same base station?
If yes, can multiple monitors share the base station the signal but still show different channels?
If both answers are affirmative, I can see the use of this. You put the base station wherever you put all your A/V equipment, which can very well be in the basement, and then you put monitors wherever you want a TV.
Otherwise, it seems like useless novelty to me.
I mean, if you can't share base stations, I REALLY don't see the point of the wireless TV. It's not like the TV wiring is a problem in any modern house, and it's not like connecting the base station is that much less of a hassle than connecting the LCD screen in the first place.
And let's face it, how many of us really need to put their TV on the ceiling?
If you can share base stations but can only watch one channel/video at a time (I think this is the case) I can see some limited use outside of the consumer market: bars, crappy restaurants, airplanes, office-buildings... wherever you actually want to show the same video source on multiple screens in inconveniently located places.
But as a consumer, I would find it a pain. "It would be like a sportsbar", I can hear a certain TV-ad character say.
Really, we're not talking LAN cabling, which most modern houses don't have incorporated. We're talking TV antennas.
How far do you have to go in a modern house to get to a TV outlet?
You mean it isnt?
And this is different from other crimes because... ?
Most people are not criminals because they like crime. It's just that what they like happens to involve crime in some way, as either a means or as part of the process itself.
And most people who do ANYTHING with any skill like the challenges and the opportunity to test their "kung-fu", as you call it.
This applies to sports, manual craftsmen labor, or M4d Accounting Skillz, or anything that can be called a "profession".
All involve talent in some way, and often vast knowledge and intellect arsenals. All take pride in their work if it is complex and well done, from software developers and architects, to carpenters and mechanics.
Yet the martial arts expert doesn't go picking fights against security guards, cops don't engage in gunfights for fun, and microbiologists don't release new strains of microorganisms at random to test their skillz.
Sometimes there is no clear venue to test their skills, and people go out of their way to find new ways to challenge themselves against their peers more creatively. Engineers build robots that fight in cheesy arenas, solar vehicles to race each other, etc.
What makes hacking so different and more worthy of indulgence than other activities?
What makes a 15-year old computer geek that takes control of your computer different than the 15-year old that steals your car for a joy ride?
Criminal Hacking is NOT different from other crimes, and SHOULD NEVER be treated differently.
In order to get rid of the misperception that all hackers are criminals, to get a reasonable treatment for hackers that engage in criminal activities, with trials and sentences that are proportional to the crimes, the hacker community has to abandon the myth that "hacking" by definition is somehow inherently noble, that hackers have the inherent right to mess with systems they don't own, and that non-technical rules don't apply to them.
Only when hacking stops being an "exceptional case" will the punishments stop being equally "exceptional".
Let me reiterate: it's not the action what legitimizes you politically, it's what you do before or after those actions what legimitizes you, and the criminal action.
Is breaking into a bank, pointing guns at people and stealing money "freedom fighting"? No. It's called robbery. Common criminals do it all the time.
Is kidnapping innocent tourists for ransom money a revolutionary action? No. It's called kidnapping. Common criminals do it all the time.
Is killing a CEO and act of social justice? No, it's murder. Or perhaps armed robbery and murder (you might at least get his wallet).
Is up to history whether your OTHER actions justify the robbery/kidnapping/murder... if you used the money for X political cause, or sent a political message in Y way, or somehow saved a bunch of people by killing Z, or defined killing Q as an 'execution' backed by a number of legal intrincacies.
Fortunately history has a more strict criteria than you have.
Hacking an MS box is not freedom fighting by any means. It's not a crime either, although hacking SOMEONE ELSE's MS box without permission is.
You're not hurting Microsoft. You're hurting the owner of the machine.
Perhaps you meant hacking Microsoft, but then, why would it be "freedom fighting"? What are you going to achieve with said action? Are you going to publicize a dangerous security flaw? Or are you going to sit on the information in great satisfaction at your cleverness and leave everyone just as exposed? Or are you going to sell the information to someone else?
I'm confused... Languages?
The article discusses paradigms, approaches to programming. And then makes sure to clarify that modern "paradigm shifts", unlike the drastic jump to structured programming, are complementary to OOP rather than replacements.
Besides that, I don't think inheritance and code re-use are the "good features" of OOP.
Sure, they're great, but I think they're overrated when taken as the main goal of OOP, and lead to the typical problems people complain about: confusing, multiple-layer hierarchies with ridiculous levels of abstraction in an attempt to reuse, or make reusable, the most lines of code.
IMNSHO, the main "good feature" of OOP is that it can make a program semantically clear: use the language of the problem to code the solution. This makes extension, and code re-use easier, but first of all leads to a cleaner program that is more likely to solve the problem.
That is true, and there's also a similar sin: over-design everything. In OOP sometimes it's not easy to differentiate, but there IS a difference.
The problem is that it's not easy to see where you're over-doing it, and it's very easy, and common, to regret not going far enough a few days later.
XP has a refreshing, if a bit anal (in theory), approach to this.
Well, that description may be fair or unfair to the consultant depending on the project.
A custom tokenizer that is more flexible and powerful than the ones provided by the language (and yet is not a regex engine with all the overhead it implies) seems to be a common need.
On the other hand, it's not like there's plenty of libraries and available components if you really needed something like that.
And 99.99% of the time you don't (which is why languages include simple, more efficient tokenizers).
No. What makes programmers write OO APIs to non-OO low-level procedures that can be used without the overhead, is that they know you'll need to use them from within some other, probably OO-ed, project soon and reimplementing them is silly.
At least that's the good reason to write OO APIs to your utility libraries.
Funny, I would think higher-level languages tend to be "much less" due to abstraction, and therefore it's rare for them to become "too much".
Often it becomes "too much" because you're reinventing the wheel: the string tokenizer example. If the project was not to actually build a string tokenizer, and one is building a string tokenizer as a sub-project to meet the actual goal, it's a good idea to check whether you really don't have one laying around somewhere.
Other times it becomes too much because, as you mention, you're OO-ing or designing too much, and end up with an algorithm that is too general (and requires general tools).
How this relates to the "high level language" per se, I don't know. I would think you could be equally stupid and try to reinvent the wheel with assembler. But you do have a point that OO programmers seem more vulnerable to this.
And security experts find exploits, test them, inform the company responsible, and publicize them later.
They do not use them for personal kicks or gains in secret for months.
They do not inform other Freedom Fighters of the flaw before the victim, so they can use it for their own kicks and fun.
You see, the problem with "hackers" in this context is the same problem that "Freedom Fighter" has as a term... wherever you have "Freedom Fighters", you also have common criminals or worse using the term to legitimize themselves.
Breaking into a system does not make you a computer security hero, just like robbing a bank does not make you a political hero. It's the other stuff you do what may or may not justify those actions.
Regarding your questions, physical property is probably a bad metaphor to use for your argument:
1- Yes, if a business leaves the door unlocked or open and you walk in without permission, they can put you in jail.
They don't even need a door. It's called trespassing.
If you leave the door to your house open, a thief is still trespassing. It's private property.
2- You got the question backwards. You should be asking: is there any indication that the business is open and this is a common area?
For most businesses, there is such an indication: from parking lots to front desks there is an implicit contract that customers are welcome during business hours. This contract can be terminated at any point: they give you a notice (ask you to leave), and if you reappear, you're trespassing.
However, this implicit contract does not apply to premises that are never open to customers in the first place.
If you're caught sneaking into an internal office, or specially into the maintenance rooms, sewer system, ventilation, etc. you can be charged with trespassing.
You may have some defense if you can argue that you were confused, lost, etc. And it is very likely that the owner of a property wouldn't bother to press charges for typical tresspasing.
But don't keep any illusions that they can't put you into jail for entering an unlocked office without permission.
This seems a bit simplistic.
Let's go over this step by step:
1) There is such a thing as a stable price in the market, that is, a price fixed by the market itself.
Just because prices don't drop any more as the market expands does not mean the price is being "fixed" by the providers. MAYBE dropping the price is not cost-effective any more, MAYBE it wouldn't win enough new clients to offset the lost revenue, and they wouldn't lose clients by keeping the current price.
Companies are not obligated to reduce prices in a free market, they will do so only if it's in their best interest. Currently people ARE willing to pay 50 bucks for broadband, and the lack of competition means no one is making a better offer.
The problem is a lack of suppliers (monopoly if you will), not a cartel.
2) Broadband is a relatively new product with relatively new problems. It is not rare for the supplier to refine the restrictions of the service if, say, P2P sharing completely changes their forecasted costs. Their alternative is to raise the prices.
Remember that the "broadband market" defined pricing according to the telephone market, which arrived at its current pricing after a long time of evolution.
This brought a whole set of advantages and problems that may or may not be useful to apply to broadband: constant per-month fees instead of charging per bandwidth , PPPoE and similar contraptions to simulate a dial-up connection, which I assume lets them count minutes and some average bandwidth to calculate an average cost per client, to calculate the flat fee.
They didn't name that flat price thinking you would use more bandwidth as a Kazaa user than your typical commercial website (which pays for bandwidth through the nose). And it does cost money.
I know they are often draconian and show the insight of a panicked mob in a burning movie theater, but these restrictions are not an artificial way of raising the prices as you seem to indicate, and are not an exclusive problem of Telecoms. Universities have had to do the same when they found that P2P among students was consuming all the bandwidth, which they needed for research and university-stuff (you know, the stuff that gets you grants and pays for the bandwidth in the first place).
3) Just because telephony companies in India are providing broadband affordable to US citizens doesn't mean that it's affordable, or even comparatively lower-priced, for Indians.
Before thinkind "damn, that's cheap" consider your salary. Then use google to find the salary for your position somewhere in India. Repeat for 10 or 15 other countries.
Then, if you still think the comparison makes sense, find out how much a hamburger costs in those 15 other countries compared with the cost in the US.
A dollar does not have the same value anywhere in the world. The very prosperity that gives the US a technological and economic advantage means that the cost of life will be higher, if compared dollar by dollar, with the rest of the world... because acquiring said dollars is easier and less costly, and therefore the dollar has less value.
4) There are other reasons besides cost to adopt a new technology.
Maybe other uses that don't apply to the US makes them popular: in much of Latin America, the Telecomms are so bad that having a cellular phone is a necessity. They are more expensive than in the US, both in service and hardware, but traditional phones are unreliable and/or more expensive (no flat fee).
Maybe different lifestyles have translated in different tastes for different products: the popularity of wireless devices in Japan may have to do with their unbridled consumerism (which puts the US to shame), or with the obsession of Japanese pop culture with cute tiny things, or with the fact that the general purpose workstation (PC) was not as popular out of the office as function specific devices... or all of these.
Maybe availability is harder to achieve in the US than in other countries. Get a
Note that it is not just a pencil, it's a Russian pencil.
... ... ...
And then note that it is not Russia, it's just the pencil.
I'm having trouble imagining the negotiations:
NASA: Okay, Mr. Pencil, when do you think we can send our boys to Mars?
PENCIL:
NASA: Hmmm... I see. I guess we'll have to keep a flexible schedule then. But I'm assuming you have the technology to contribute, right?
PENCIL:
NASA: Damn it, you're a harsh negotiator, Pencil! We'll put in the rockets and all that, then. What kind of crew were you planning to send?
And then a couple of weeks later:
NASA: We're proud to announce that we have reached an agreement with a pencil to send a manned mission to Mars! This is a great victory in both space exploration and international relations, and disproves the theory that the US is acting alone in the world.
REPORTER: But what about the Europeans, or the Russians, or the Chinese? Why not join in a mission with them?
NASA: We were unable to reach an agreement with those powers due to their anti-American attitude. But the Pencil IS Russian, so I guess that counts.
REPORTER: What will be the composition of the crew?
NASA: We're counting on 6 crew members. It is unclear how many will be US astronauts and how many will be pencils. We know for sure the Russian Pencil is in, but we are in negotiations to include as many as 2 other of his pencil friends, as long as they can complete the training and physical examination in time...
You could send in a trained monkey to actually handle the scientific part of the mission...
On the other hand, you better keep that monkey in a separate capsule. Unless you're targetting the really, really hardcore audience.
I don't know if Microsoft is as happy as you suggest.
The target of this seems to be a subset of Microsoft's well-publicized next target: Office applications as a network-delivered, subscription-based, package. Not the home users, who won't buy Websphere in the first place and can't afford to lose compatibility with their company's documents, but the corporations, who are Websphere clients already and also can affor to make the transition to another Office suite.
Microsoft is moving away from retail for various reasons, among them the fact that software is becoming more and more of a commodity, and people are less eager to upgrade to the next version of MS Office next year for a gazillion dollars.
They figure if you can pay them a smaller monthly fee for a centralized, network-served Office suite and never own the software they won't have that problem.
Then here comes IBM and says: hey, if you CAN pay a gazillion dollars you can get your centralized, network-served Office suite AND own the software.
Is the transition costly? Of course. But so is any transition that businesses have undertaken: changing programming languages, changing OSes, switching information systems... they'll do it if they think it's worth it.
Why would they think it's worth it now and not before with the Lotus or Corel products?
Because:
I) We're talking about choosing between similar products:
Switching to a network-served suite will have its own advantages and disadvantages. Where before it was a matter of "well, they pretty much do the same thing so why take the risk?" now there's a functional difference to go along with the pricing difference.
II) It's not a voluntary transition:
Microsoft is planning to force them to move in that direction. They've been fighting it, but at some point they'll have to either switch Office suite providers or give in.
If you're forced to "switch", either to another Office, or to a different paradigm (and pricing) for your Office needs, you'll be more open to options that involve switching in both senses.
True, IBM has experience killing off retail software, like SmartSuite.
But they also have experience dealing well with server software, like Websphere.
This is not competition for today's bloated Microsoft Office running on your desktop. This is competition for tomorrow's subscription Microsoft Office running on your company's big iron server.
Bloat is a not that much of an issue there (and at the Websphere price scale), and I don't expect it to be that bloated, memory-wise. It's likely to have less graphic candy, wizards, and certainly less "covert OS upgrade components" than MS Office.
GUI support is almost certainly a non-issue too. This is Websphere we're talking about: thin-clients, J2EE, Servlets, EJB and Web Services... that kind of stuff. If IBM chooses Applets for their GUI they should be beaten to a pulp literally, and probably will metaphorically. But that is doubtful, unless SWT is much better than it looks right now.
They'll likely use a big, complex Web interface and just require all users to use IE or Mozilla 18.whatever (probably the later for flexibility's sake), which is certainly less than a requirement to install some other custom client OR an Office suite.
I can already hear the complaints: "What? They force me to install a particular browser instead of a 1GB Office Suite? Oh no!". I'm just speculating, but that sounds to me like the sensible solution.
There's a broad market of options for Web-based interfaces that work quite well if you don't have to deal with compatibility issues, your application logic is not the issue, and you have the resources to debug them properly as an application (as opposed to as 'just a website').
This passes the GUI requirements to the browser support of whatever you're using for GUI: Javascript and DHTML works fine. Or maybe they could go for one of those new fancy XML-based 'web-app GUI' projects that one keeps hearing about in Slashdot. Or they can go the plug-in way.
Whatever they find works best for their Websphere market, which is what matters to them here.
Actually, my point is that "The Iraq situation" is as compelling as it is, whether it was "created as a direct protest" or not. The original motive of the author is irrelevant. In a year or two, no one will remember it.
Either it's good art and stands by itself, or it doesn't.
If the drama is not compelling, it has to do with the bad art, not with the motive. True, "direct political protests" tend to create bad art, but that's because *ANY MOTIVATION AT ALL* tends to create bad art.
There are too many people trying to use art as a form of political expression and too few people with talent.
The motivation and background adds value for analysis later, if the art is really that good, for historical purposes. It helps to understand it, as art, better.
On the other hand, recommending a fiction book because "it was a protest against X" shows the same artistic taste as recommending a book because "it talks about puppies, and I like puppies". Rejecting a fiction book for similar reasons falls into the same trap.
Not really, unless you're just following crappy magazine critics or community-college professors, most of whom happen to be "from the Left" in the US since the 60s. I'm sure we'll be complaining about the same imbalance in a generation or two when they're all "from the Right".
Art, however, is judged on its own depth and character regardless of the political bias of the author(s).
Borges has been accused of everything you say, specially in his own Argentina, but he's still considered a master of fiction by any critic with two neurons. The same can be said of Dostoyevski. Heck, Nietzche, as misinterpreted as he's been, still fits the bill, but the artistic and philosophical importance of his work is not contested.
This is no different from considering Garcia Marquez one of the best authors alive. Few contest that. Even among those who consider his politics flawed and/or hypocritical.
Perhaps there is a true imbalance, a demographic imbalance, that justifies the misperception among popular critics: most people who train themselves "in the arts" have left-leaning politics these days, form left-leaning circles, and end up as left-leaning professionals.
I have seen few good examples of "conservative art" these days. I have seen more than enough "leftist art" with no value, depth or character, and it's usually recognized as such and thrown away... But I have seen almost no recent competent art with a "rightist message" these days. It doesn't help when Ayn Rand is used as an example of high-quality literature.
Perhaps you can put the blame on postmodernism's effects on the critic as a professional. Any pretense of objectivity can be thrown away, and analysis can be reduced to whatever the critic likes. It seems some English-List/Liberal-Arts majors spend their college years deconstructing their skills so they can write just like they did in 9th grade.
I'm thinking of Salon's "this movie is really bad but I got a crush on the actor/actress and I just had some apple pie so go see it" reviews in this case.
In this case, this speaks more about the poster than about the artist.
I don't know if Oran was created as a "direct protest" (this thing has been running for about two years) or to exploit a great dramatic situation. To me, it seemed like the second case.
The artists are very much on the left, no doubt, but the characters are no simple strawmen for their political arguments.
I disagree with their political stance on Iraq, as with a lot of their politics in general (feels too Salon-ish for me), but Oran is one of my favorite characters. The Iraq situation provides him with a lot of background and a great hook to put him in the story, as compared to others whose plots feel more contrived.
Broken Saints is a drama with a political voice. You may or may not agree with it, but it's very well done. Like all political fictions, it manipulates its world to express a political message, to use it as an model of ideas.
Oran, like all other characters, "speaks" about the political argument idealized in the fictional world.
You may even agree with the argument within the context of the fictional world, but find there's no connection between the fictional world (and the argument) with reality.
Or you may not agree with the argument at all, but find the fictional world so well done it's deserving appreciation as fiction.
You don't have to fear Big Brother is about to take over the world to appreciate "1984", believe the banality of American consumerism is the end of civilization to like "Brave New World", or have an anachronistic appreciation for chivalric tradition to understand "Don Quixote".
Or, perhaps closer to the media, you don't have to believe the world is being taken over by the secret societies operating under the UN and corporations to bring a New World Order to think Deus Ex had a great plot.
Broken Saints is not anime. It's animation.
First we had to deal with people who thought all animations were cartoons, and so thought anime was about cartoons.
Now we have to deal with people who think all animation is anime, and so think all animations and cartoons are anime...
Broken Saints is animated drama. It has more to do with the US/European non-superhero comic media than with anime in terms of style.
I love Broken Saints, it's one of the best WORKING examples of using the web to deliver dramatic media.
They're utterly deserving of whatever graphic Slashdot brings to the site.
However, I don't think "Penultimate Episode About to Be Release Soon, But Not Yet!" is "news", even in the Slashdot sense.
As a link, cool. The press-release feel of the post is kind of silly, though.
20% sounds like an inflated number. The typical app spends most of its time waiting for I/O or doing silly stuff for user interaction. A 20% overall difference would imply what, 50%, 100% slower when it's actually working?
There's some overhead, but it's never that bad. Sure, the overhead matters, which is why there's an investment on improving VM technology, providing access to native operations, etc.
But also the worst overhead offenders are not VM issues, but application design issues: blocking I/O, threading bugs, NOT using multithreading when you should, etc. Also, using Swing/AWT in a non-trivial GUI. I'm beginning to consider Swing/AWT just a giant bug.
However, let's assume the 20% speed difference in an application...
It's not that constant factors don't matter at all, it's that they matter the least. And when you have so many more important problems to fix, they take the last place in the priority list.
By definition, choosing your implementation language is an early decision that takes place long before that list is filled up. Although speed is always a concern, algorithmic speed is more important than PL speed, and independent of it. So PL speed shouldn't have that much to do with the decision.
Saving 20% in hardware is great, and the efficiency marketing advantage is important too. But those advantages are worth nothing if your application is buggier, less extendable, less flexible than your competitors, and specially if it gets to the market AFTER your competitors.
Developing applications in C is more expensive and complicated than developing them in Java, and the difference is typically more than the difference in speed. (I'm not saying that C applications are inherently worse than Java apps, just that to develop the same application with the same extensibility, features and stability takes more time, and a bunch of non-standard libraries).
Development costs add much more quickly than hardware costs, and unlike hardware costs, development costs are not guaranteed a return in performance. These are not dollars and cents, but hundreds and tens of dollars: development is more expensive than hardware.
Then you go to the client 6 months after your competitors and try to sell them the application. If they haven't already bought from the competition, you'll try to convince them that although your application is more expensive, and altough it hasn't been tested in the market for as long as the other ones, and although they'll need a C programmer versed in your favorite non-standard libraries to maintain it (you do give them API documentation and the tools to maintain it, right?), your application will save them a few bucks in hardware.
Unless the difference in hardware costs has more than 4 digits, I think your customer will advice you to take an accounting class.
If the difference is more than 4 digits, you are pushing the technology and you need to care about constant factors.
Either that or you're not dealing with a typical application. For example, a scientific analysis program that spends most of its time in pure computation needs all the juice it can get. Although I understand Java works fine for pure computational tasks.
Now, if you can make your applications in C as cheap, fast, and safely as with Java, then you have great C developers so you should just keep doing that. Most people can't.
"...and act like they invented them."
They do?
Funny, every UML book where i have read something about statecharts mentions they're just state diagrams for finite automata.
"State machines aren't that complicated. The UML people are just burying them under a mess of jargon."
They are?
It seems to me this is necessary, as it is in other UMLized diagrams, in order to generalize it so it can be useful out of the context they got it from in the first place. It's part of the "universalizing" process.
For example, class diagrams are much more complicated, and have more jargon, than the ER diagrams they got them from, but are also more flexible and embrace a wider context.
It's not like Finite Automata are not full of their own jargon, which tends to be technical and/or academic and much more complicated to understand for someone without the CS background.
"UML is a reasonable idea that's turning into a management fad and is being used to sell overpriced tools."
Quite true, but I don't think this has much to do with the "UML crowd". I think it has more to do with managers who don't know what UML is exactly, but are wooed by promises of code-generation, productivity increases, etc.
The "UML crowd" love UML but know what it is: a STANDARD notation for design and modelling diagrams.
Expensive or inexpensive tools are actually quite good these days, but until relatively recently I did my UML diagrams in a pre-MS version of Visio (1998) using standard polygons, stick figures and connectors. I could very well have used a cheaper diagraming tool, Paint, or do it by hand.
The diagrams were still very useful.
Now there's a good question.
After all these years of Java hype and Java development, compiled vs interpreted, VM vs cold steel, one wonders why all this deep and complex discussions about "performance tuning" end up being mostly about String and StringBuffer.
I mean, yes, it's an important tip for the beginner, but surely there are more and newer insights to the matter!