I dont' get this relativistic ideas everyone seems to understand, except me. 22 light years means it takes _light_ 22 years to get there. Therefore, if you are on a ship travelling at the speed of light and counted 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, you should reach that planet when you get to 277522560 Mississippi (18 years +4 leap years in seconds). Same for coming back to Earth. Does that sound like "much less" that 44 years to you?
I really enjoyed using XML with Actionscript. It's just more natural that Javascript's dreaded DOM API. CSS3 selectors are OK, but I think they're implemented in Javascript, not native code.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
on
Occupy Flash?
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· Score: 1
Before I start ranting (though I'm just stating my opinions, really), I want you to keep in mind that I have built my own FreeBSD distribution, I release most of my work under the BSD or GPL licenses and I frequently make use of Ubuntu/CentOS for servers. However, the following biased rant is about Linux on the desktop, so just keep that in the back of your head, while reading.
Drivers: My colleague and I have the same laptops. He runs Ubuntu, I run Windows 7. We both ssh into Ubuntu workstations to do our work, but at the end of the day, he can't put his laptop to sleep and I can. He has to double check that when he plugs in his headphones, the speakers are automatically turned off. He has to spend 5 minutes every morning to reconfigure his monitors, because GNOME is not auto configuring them correctly. Again, I can see someone saying: "big deal", but it's the little things that make a difference for me. You can tell me KIA and BMW are both cars, but choosing BMW is a no-brainer. I bet you 100$ Steve Jobs would go nuts if he couldn't put his laptop to sleep. QA-ing the hell out of their hardware/software is essentially why Macs "just work". The user experience is better.
UI:I just don't like the way Gnome looks (I prefer KDE when I'm using Linux). Most of you would say: "what's the big deal?", yet probably everyone will nod when I'll say that the OS X UI is just superior to both Windows and GNOME/KDE UIs in terms of visual quality (maybe in usability too, but not in my case). So if you can accept that, by applying the same criteria for determining the quality of a UI, you must agree GTK UIs are inferior to Windows Aero (even if it's stolen/copied/inspired from Aqua)?
Bugs:
Bugs in the driver. Bugs in the UI. Bugs in the software. Perpetual alphas. The truth is, I don't want to tinker with _everything_. I want to tinker with some specific software I'm into, and it happens that fixing bugs in Compiz is just not my thing. And the desktop is not only about individual tools, it's also about these tools working together to accomplish a certain task (you know, the "unix philosophy"). It works great for CLI tools, but on the UI side.. god forbid Firefox didn't crash as often.
Free as in beer: No it's not. It's not free. My time is not free. I'm paying in tiny pieces of my life - that's the currency. And those tiny pieces of my life should not go to waste because Ubuntu happens to have libcairo v.x.y.z which has a bug on 64bit machines which causes a segfault. What do I care? I want the end product to work because my life is important to me, I don't want excuses. If libcairo is crashing, find something else that doesn't (good luck) or write your own, Mozilla. "Ask for your money back" I hear some of you say. Well, SCREW YOU is what I'll reply to your arrogant, condescending statement. Don't tell me "Linux is so great" and then "ask for your money back" when it doesn't work. Guess what? If it doesn't work, it's not as great as you claim it is and you shouldn't be surprised when people tell you what you're advertising is junk.
I have two comparisons to support that claim:
1. Religious people telling you their denomination's God is so great (rings a bell?). Please, go away. I have an innate ability to assess the value of an entity myself (i.e. 'logic') and I'm also allergic to bullshit.
2. Imagine Coca-Cola advertising Coke that's good for your heart and giving it away for free. Then, when people have heart-attacks they'd say: "don't complain, it was free".
So, why don't you try to sell you're awesome piece of software? Ah, that's right, because nobody will pay a dime for such _greatness_.
The ugly truth is you can't sell it. Now, don't get me wrong, I'll be the first in line to buy a [GNU/]Linux distribution that did not have most issues I'm mentioning here. I'd pay more than for a Windows license. But right now, my choice is either free Windows (because it's on the company laptop which was given to me) or free
Kriston, if there are no candies at the store, the store has no candies for sale. That's not to say there couldn't be any candies left in a drawer by accident, but, no one knows if they exist, hence the above still holds true: the store has no candies for sale. There is no need for an external audit, because, even if you found some candies in a drawer as a result of the audit, the store still had no candies for sale at the time when they claimed they didn't have candies for sale (unless the audit finds tons of candies not disclosed to the public, which is not the case here).
Your argument about the community doesn't hold either. Here's a counter-example: I'm part of an extremely small group of people dealing with a specialized web application. There are only about 20 people in the world using it. I've found at least 10 critical security holes in the default install, just by using it. I've patched about 20 minor bugs, and I'm just a user, I'm not on the developer/QA team. When a product has issues, the community (regardless of size) will still find a percentage of the total issues available. The fact that OpenBSD had 3 issues found in the default install in a decade is impressive, especially since they have _way more_ than 20 users in the entire world AND OpenBSD, as a package, is enormous, with hundreds of utilities and dozens of services waiting to be exploited. But, where are the exploits? That's right.
So, in that context, it's a hell of a lot more secure than other OSes. q.e.d.
"not that great"? speak for yourself.
I've been traveling, and I've hit their recognition software with different accents, high winds, loud intersections, you name it. It got 90% right, mostly. If that's not great, I don't know what is.
Generic statements are going to be generic. I've read a few in the past few days:
"it's a nation state, we're not going to tell you which" (or you're just bullshitting)
"the public is going to be amazed when they find out the secret interpretation of the amendment. It's so horrible. I know what the secret interpretation is, but when you'll find out, you will be in awe." (FUD)
"we killed Osama, but didn't take any pictures and dumped the body in the ocean" (ORLY?)
I shouldn't be surprised though, given the number of people that believe there's an invisible man in the sky. Compared to that, the statements above seem like facts.
the patent laws. If "storing a calendar on a PDA device" is patentable, then I don't care what Good Things (tm) patents bring to the table, the current patent system has to be sent to/dev/null.
$400 per hour is insane. It's about time AI drove these prices down. I bet you're going to see a ton of complaining in the future: "how am I supposed to live with less than $400/hour? Who's going to pay for my Porsche?".
So far, when all previous articles had "skynet" tags, I was thinking: "yeah, but it's not that close to being true". Now, this article, on the other hand, is getting CLOSE. I mean, holy crap close! I am hereby tagging this article with SKYNET and WHATCOULDPOSSIBLYGOWRONG.
Also, phantomfive, what the hell are you talking about? Do you really need examples of things people invented that were a proof-of-concept at first and then got perfected so much that they went far and beyond what the initial prototype was able to do? You do, huh? Ok, so, off the top of my head: airplanes, computers, weapons and... let me think here.. yeah.. uhm, robots!
Now put airplanes+computers+weapons+robots together and you get: SKYNET.
I'm not panicking, I'm saying that as a software developer, I know the purpose of a proof of concept. It's to build the REAL thing. So, you know what, I won't have to wake you up when they find camouflaged tanks in the forest, because flying american drones will wake you up, saying: "!"
Because only the application knows how to split its own inputs so that multiple worker threads can each work independently on an input chunk. The job of the OS is to figure out how much CPU time each worker gets, based on a variety of factors (such as thread and process priority/nice-ness). If you have multiple CPUs and they're not at 100% usage, this results in parallel processing of those inputs.
All languages are syntactic sugar for the IR code that gets generated. Fundamentally, all compilers translate from a Source language to a Target language (machine language in a lot of cases).
Whether the compiler checks that the types match, that there will be overflow, that you're doing signed vs unsigned comparison - it's up to the compiler and its developers. Clearly, one compiler can have more features than the other one. To access those new features, the compiler needs to see syntactic constructs in the source code. If you can't extend Javascript (or it's not feasible, or you just don't want) to incorporate those syntax changes, you can always develop a new language, such as Dash (or Dart?), with the risk that it will fail, but with the opportunity of fixing the bad things in Javascript and add the features that you want.
This is just a natural way of language evolution (in the broad scope of translating source code to machine code). You can't anticipate all the requirements of the future, so you design a language that solves all previous problems (or a relevant subset) and the current ones. In time, it will become obsolete, as people will build on top of your language to solve the problems they'll face at that point in time.
Obviously, everyone hates change. I say: Give it a shot! At least don't dismiss it till you've looked at it and figured out how it may or may not help you. If it doesn't, stick with what works for you. If it does, hey, you're now better off. Chances are, people aren't wasting their time to develop a new language, unless it solves someone's problem (their problem, your problem, everyone's problem - depends on the goals of that language).
I, for one, always welcome a new programming language, just to see what it brings to the table.
- we bribe the doctors. If you don't bribe them, they don't treat you and most won't even diagnose you. It's because "their salaries are low".
- most doctors drink their way through medical school.
- many doctors fail their exams again and again and attempt to buy the medical degree (and those who have enough money succeed in buying it).
- lie their asses off to get your money and then prescribe a ton of drugs, more than you need, just to make the pharmacies happy.
- do _not_ stay up to date with the latest in medical research.
- there are a handful of good, honest doctors who want to treat people and are forced to do magic with the few antiquated tools they have. Access to the only MRI scanner in the country, which also happens to be the most advanced piece of medical technology we have, is controlled by the private clinic that owns it and... no, you're not getting scanned unless you're the president's son or you're filthy rich.
Slashdot Mirror
I dont' get this relativistic ideas everyone seems to understand, except me. 22 light years means it takes _light_ 22 years to get there. Therefore, if you are on a ship travelling at the speed of light and counted 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, you should reach that planet when you get to 277522560 Mississippi (18 years +4 leap years in seconds). Same for coming back to Earth. Does that sound like "much less" that 44 years to you?
there's the definition of judgmental for everyone to see.
wasn't there a similar article a while ago? Is my memory playing tricks on me?
I really enjoyed using XML with Actionscript. It's just more natural that Javascript's dreaded DOM API. CSS3 selectors are OK, but I think they're implemented in Javascript, not native code.
I would love to see some benchmarks.
I have two comparisons to support that claim:
So, why don't you try to sell you're awesome piece of software? Ah, that's right, because nobody will pay a dime for such _greatness_.
The ugly truth is you can't sell it. Now, don't get me wrong, I'll be the first in line to buy a [GNU/]Linux distribution that did not have most issues I'm mentioning here. I'd pay more than for a Windows license. But right now, my choice is either free Windows (because it's on the company laptop which was given to me) or free
And what are your qualifications to judge the design of a programming language exactly?
Before the PHP haters start posting comments, I would just like to say: haters gonna hate.
Since Halloween was yesterday:
Kriston, if there are no candies at the store, the store has no candies for sale. That's not to say there couldn't be any candies left in a drawer by accident, but, no one knows if they exist, hence the above still holds true: the store has no candies for sale. There is no need for an external audit, because, even if you found some candies in a drawer as a result of the audit, the store still had no candies for sale at the time when they claimed they didn't have candies for sale (unless the audit finds tons of candies not disclosed to the public, which is not the case here).
Your argument about the community doesn't hold either. Here's a counter-example: I'm part of an extremely small group of people dealing with a specialized web application. There are only about 20 people in the world using it. I've found at least 10 critical security holes in the default install, just by using it. I've patched about 20 minor bugs, and I'm just a user, I'm not on the developer/QA team. When a product has issues, the community (regardless of size) will still find a percentage of the total issues available. The fact that OpenBSD had 3 issues found in the default install in a decade is impressive, especially since they have _way more_ than 20 users in the entire world AND OpenBSD, as a package, is enormous, with hundreds of utilities and dozens of services waiting to be exploited. But, where are the exploits? That's right.
So, in that context, it's a hell of a lot more secure than other OSes. q.e.d.
"falling satellites from the sky" is the new thing to be afraid of. So long, "terrorism".
"not that great"? speak for yourself. I've been traveling, and I've hit their recognition software with different accents, high winds, loud intersections, you name it. It got 90% right, mostly. If that's not great, I don't know what is.
Generic statements are going to be generic. I've read a few in the past few days:
"it's a nation state, we're not going to tell you which" (or you're just bullshitting)
"the public is going to be amazed when they find out the secret interpretation of the amendment. It's so horrible. I know what the secret interpretation is, but when you'll find out, you will be in awe." (FUD)
"we killed Osama, but didn't take any pictures and dumped the body in the ocean" (ORLY?)
I shouldn't be surprised though, given the number of people that believe there's an invisible man in the sky. Compared to that, the statements above seem like facts.
the patent laws. If "storing a calendar on a PDA device" is patentable, then I don't care what Good Things (tm) patents bring to the table, the current patent system has to be sent to /dev/null.
No wonder. Want low-power? Look at ARM. CISC devices cannot consume as little power as RISC - they have to pay for the extra features.
"couch"
$400 per hour is insane. It's about time AI drove these prices down. I bet you're going to see a ton of complaining in the future: "how am I supposed to live with less than $400/hour? Who's going to pay for my Porsche?".
are obsolete now?
Hold on, I just need to wipe the dust off of this LHC I keep in my garage and then we can try to replicate their findings.
saying: "All your base are belong to us!" (in Simplified Chinese chars, which apparently got ignored by Slashdot) :/
So far, when all previous articles had "skynet" tags, I was thinking: "yeah, but it's not that close to being true". Now, this article, on the other hand, is getting CLOSE. I mean, holy crap close! I am hereby tagging this article with SKYNET and WHATCOULDPOSSIBLYGOWRONG.
... let me think here.. yeah.. uhm, robots!
Also, phantomfive, what the hell are you talking about? Do you really need examples of things people invented that were a proof-of-concept at first and then got perfected so much that they went far and beyond what the initial prototype was able to do? You do, huh? Ok, so, off the top of my head: airplanes, computers, weapons and
Now put airplanes+computers+weapons+robots together and you get: SKYNET.
I'm not panicking, I'm saying that as a software developer, I know the purpose of a proof of concept. It's to build the REAL thing. So, you know what, I won't have to wake you up when they find camouflaged tanks in the forest, because flying american drones will wake you up, saying: "!"
Because only the application knows how to split its own inputs so that multiple worker threads can each work independently on an input chunk. The job of the OS is to figure out how much CPU time each worker gets, based on a variety of factors (such as thread and process priority/nice-ness). If you have multiple CPUs and they're not at 100% usage, this results in parallel processing of those inputs.
Prove it.
All languages are syntactic sugar for the IR code that gets generated. Fundamentally, all compilers translate from a Source language to a Target language (machine language in a lot of cases).
Whether the compiler checks that the types match, that there will be overflow, that you're doing signed vs unsigned comparison - it's up to the compiler and its developers. Clearly, one compiler can have more features than the other one. To access those new features, the compiler needs to see syntactic constructs in the source code. If you can't extend Javascript (or it's not feasible, or you just don't want) to incorporate those syntax changes, you can always develop a new language, such as Dash (or Dart?), with the risk that it will fail, but with the opportunity of fixing the bad things in Javascript and add the features that you want.
This is just a natural way of language evolution (in the broad scope of translating source code to machine code). You can't anticipate all the requirements of the future, so you design a language that solves all previous problems (or a relevant subset) and the current ones. In time, it will become obsolete, as people will build on top of your language to solve the problems they'll face at that point in time.
Obviously, everyone hates change. I say: Give it a shot! At least don't dismiss it till you've looked at it and figured out how it may or may not help you. If it doesn't, stick with what works for you. If it does, hey, you're now better off. Chances are, people aren't wasting their time to develop a new language, unless it solves someone's problem (their problem, your problem, everyone's problem - depends on the goals of that language).
I, for one, always welcome a new programming language, just to see what it brings to the table.
I'll take Watson's diagnosis any day of the week!
for fragmentation. ffs.