Remember how they got busted for always showing pictures of soup with the few measly pathetic little veggie bits standing on the surface of the soup because the bowls were always filled with GLASS MARBLES to hold up the little fragments of orange-gray carrots and caved-in peas?
No, I don't remember it. Neither does anybody else. That's what you get for believing what you see on Usenet. My father worked for 30 years in the advertising business, and I recall having this exact conversation with him. He told me that there are extremely strict government regulations regarding truth in advertising, up to and including having an observer on the set making sure everything is done to the letter. Besides, anyone who did something like this would be dead in the industry if it ever came out. It would not be worth it just to get a good shot.
Of course, the whole business of retouching pictures of orgies into the ice in liquor ads and skulls into cigarette ads? That really happens. Yup.
Every time I see that ad I wonder "what porn site is he going to?"
I don't expect IE to ever block popups as it comes out of the box, but I'm sure some enterprising hacker will add it in some day. There is an API for munging it, after. Remember the whole change-the-link display thing?
By the way, the beta of Opera 7 has the option to only display requested popups, which is exactly what I've been waiting for. Good news for the 27 of us who use Opera!
Netscape 6 was bad, bad, mindbogglingly amazingly bad, at least on a machine with only 24MB of RAM. 6.1 or 6.2 was much closer to usable, at least on my machines with 64MB, but by then Mozilla was working adequately. If Netscape 7.0 is fast, a large part of it is probably from using lots of memory to accelerate other functions.
Good lord, man, what system are you running that runs a GUI in 24 meg of memory? I didn't realize that Netscape 6 ran on Windows 3.1.
I should think that the only browser you could run in such circumstances would be Lynx (or Links). Or maybe Opera 3.
Thanks for the response. It is an unexpected treat to see a coherent post in response to my drivel;)
Well thank you... I appreciate that someone reads these and thinks they're useful.
Other than templates and function (and operator) overloading, I'm not sold on many of the C++ features I've seen. As you replied to my post in an abnormally coherent manner, I'd definitely appreciate further input on what features _you_ personally find useful on a regular basis.
Okay, here goes. In no particular order:
* Function overloading: I can have 3 different versions of a function that take 3 different sets of arguments without having to write
foo1(int); foo2(char *, int); foo3();
* Default arguments: Got a function that takes 3 arguments, two of which are usually empty? Just do (in the prototype only!)
foo(int p1, int p2 = 0, int p3 = 0);
* Constructors and destructors: If you have a struct that needs to be initialized before you use it, or needs to clean up stuff before it goes away, these are for you. Constructors are just like any other function, so you can have as many of 'em as you want:
class yada { yada();// default yada(int i);// initialize with i yada(blarf * b);// use a struct to init
// and so on... };
One cool thing is to write a class that does nothing but grab a resource (critical section, open a file, etc.) in the ctor and release it in the dtor. Then just declare one at the top of the block that uses said resource, and hey presto - you never need to remember to grab/free again:
int foo() { cLockResource lr;// ctor locks whatever
// code to use whatever
}// on block exit, whatever is released by dtor
The really handy thing is that no matter how you exit the block, even via an exception, the freeing happens. Very handy.
* Comments// like this
* Being able to declare variables anywhere, not just at the top of a block. Declare them where you use them, not 50 lines before.
* Conversion operators: Use an object as if it was another type altogether. This is debatably useful if you have accessor functions, but it comes in handy:
class blah { int m_i; //.... operator int () { return m_i; }// pardon my syntax... };
// elsewhere... blah b;
// assume void func(int i);
func(b);// instead of func(b.get_i()) or func(b.m_i)
Again, not always necessary, but it keeps the caller from having to know any more about 'blah' than they have to. Besides, it just looks cleaner.
I know I've overlooked a lot. Try picking up one of Bruce Myers' books (Effective C++, More Effective C++) - he explains it all much better than I can. Beware, though. C++ is a really complicated language, and there are a lot of subtle things that can bite you in the ass. Don't try doing everything at once. Just explore a feature at a time. Consider the assbiting a learning experience. The Annotated C++ reference is a good book to look at. I think Stroustrup has one out.
Oh - and you can do amazing tricks with templates - a few years back, C/C++ Users Journal had a set of templates that converted strings of 1s and 0s ("110010") into integers *at compile time* - no more than 25 lines of code. Way way cool.
Anyway, I hope this was useful. Keep with it - you'll be glad you did.
[Grumpy comments about templates needing to be in headers files and not source files to link successfully, and about Sun dicking with the Java spec in parent post]
Hey, I know what you're going through, and I agree, it sucks. I got bit by the templates-must-be-in-header-files thing the exact same way when I first started using them. Yeah, it sucks, and you're right, the spec doesn't require it. But that's the state of the technology right now. When I use templates, I just suck it up and put them in headers.
I'm sorry for your bad timing with Java, but unless all you ever do is GUI code, there's still a whole useful language to use. Besides, even if AWT *is* deprecated, it's not going to go away anytime soon - it's *deprecated*, not *removed*. You can still use it to your heart's content, and learn Swing over time.
The point is, you can't give up on a technology just because you had a bad experience with it. I'm sorry C++ is hard to learn, and I'm sorry Sun has chaotic roadmaps, but shit, man - you can't stop learning. Remember how hellish pointers and addresses were to learn in C? If you take that attitude, you'll be using BASIC the rest of your life.
Go ahead, try C++ again. Forget about templates until you actually need them. I think you'll find it to be a lot more productive, and pretty soon you'll wonder how you could ever go back to using C for everything.
Oh, and I got hosed by the "characters per line" nonsense just the other day. I completely agree, it's bullshit. Instead of telling me that it's currently 38.2, try telling me how many it should be. Or, perhaps, just let the moderators do their job.
I know Eiffel, Java, Ada, Common Lisp, and Scheme can produce compiled binaries without linking in anything that could be considered a complete interpreter.
If that's the case, then I apologize for misspeaking. I've only encountered these as interpreted languages (Except for Ada, which is another thing altogether. I didn't know anyone used it any more outside of the DOD.) I know Java can be compiled, but that's not really what people usually do.
btw, what's it like to use Ada on a daily basis? My only experience was in school, where it impressed me as the most anal-retentive language in existence. It made Pascal look like pre-ANSI C. I know it was designed to be bulletproof and usable for huge projects by huge teams. I also was under the impression that it was pretty much dropped, quietly, after a few years. What's the story?
Even worse, how about people that get Kanji characters tattooed in the back of their necks? Did you ever wonder if the tattoo guy decided to fuck with them by putting "stupid shithead" on their skin?
Sorry. Now back to the original thread, already in progress.
That's the way it used to be here, back when we had vinyl and you could buy a 45 for 65 cents. Here, sonny, sit down and let grampa tell you all about it. Hey, where you going? Damn kids!
Well, just the fact that they're limited editions makes them (potentially) valuable, assuming that some collector's market appears. Of course, this won't mean any additional profit for the labels, but for the aftermarket, as it were.
That said, the "Special Collectors Editions" of albums and DVDs that keep appearing like lint seem to make a shitload of money for the industry, so perhaps they're on this as well.
Funny you should mention the cherry-picking effect, though. You're saying that the prices SHOULD offset the produced music that did NOT sell? The music that is not sold should NOT be produced!
This is how the record insustry has always worked, up until recently. The label signs 100 artists, most of whom sell a little, 10 of which sell a lot. The vast profits form the 10 top sellers cover the costs of keeping the other 90 around, which slowly and steadily sell over time. In the end, everybody wins.
However, today the model has changed. Labels only care about the 5% that are megasellers, dropping everyone else after one non-platinum album. They're no longer interested in maintaining a back-catalog, just in the top-10 hits. This may be a Good Thing from a pure-capitalism-theoretical-economics point of view, but it's not a viable model for providing a product in the real world. This, and the ~17 dollar selling price for a CD, is why record sales are dropping, not rampant file sharing.
A car manufacturer that produces cars that are not sold, can not expect to raise the price of the better cars to offset the losses? Why should RIAA?
Yeah, that's what all companies do - raise prices to cover losses (of course, the difference is that it's a lot cheaper to make a CD and keep it sitting around the warehouse than to make and keep a car that doesn't sell).
OK, so that subject's a little inflammatory. But my god, I don't see why anybody is still writing new code in C in this day and age. C++ has been a fast, stable, standardized language for what - 10 years now? All the problems with buffer overflows that require hokey, kludgey workarounds in C are cleanly solved with any well-written string library (like, say, the one in the STL). Memory pools can be nicely wrapped with a class that pushes in the ctor and pops in the dtor, so you don't have to remember to call them in the right order everywhere (just declare an object at the top on the block).
The arguments I've seen against C++ seem to fall into the following categories:
* It adds bloat and it's slow No, not since optimizing compilers were perfected in the 90s. You can add a lot of overhead to your app by abusing the STL, but for non-trivial applications, you'll never notice it. GCC (at least for the pre-3.0 series) has a really unoptimized template implementation, where "Hello, world" using cout would make a multi-megabyte executable (and be forever compiling it), but more modern compilers, like VC++ and Intel's compiler, do a lot better. Either way, for a real-world app, any size increase will be unnoticable. As for speed, with an optimizing compiler and judicious use of inlining, a C++ program will run just as fast as one written in C.
These complaints may have been true in the days of the Cfront preprocessor, but not today. I don't know about you, but I no longer write code for a 386 with 4 meg of memory.
* I don't like/need/want to learn OOP You don't need OOP to use C++, but it helps. A class is just a struct where everything's private by default. If you know C, it takes about a day to learn the basics of constructors and destructors, references, and exceptions. Templates and STL will take a bit longer. One great about C++ is that you can just use small bits here and there if you don't want a full-blown OO program.
* It's not as good as Perl/Python/Ocaml/Eiffel/Java/whatever That's not the point. It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be as good or better than C. If you want a standalone-executable without linking in a complete interpreter and you don't need a lot of string parsing or regexps, you were using C anyway.
* It won't let me write libraries that work with other languages Just declare all of your external APIs using 'extern C' and make sure they only use C types in their signatures. Done.
The main reason not to use C++ in new development seems to be "I don't want to learn it" or "I don't know anything about it". If you use either one, I don't ever want to work with you.
No offense, but who gives a fuck what he thinks about Linux or open source or anything to do with computers? He's an *actor*.
I'd rather ask him whether, if he could do it over again, he would have turned down Star Trek and gone on to have a somewhat-normal career, instead of being Captain Kirk for ever. Or what his reaction was when he did his first convention. Was it a fit of depression - "holy shit - am I gonna have to do *this* for the rest of my life?" Or even what the hell he was thinking when he recorded 'The Unteleported Man' (and what the record label was thinking).
Yeah, I can imagine Wil Wheaton was calling up so often asking "So, in episode 37, what were you thinking when you ordered that hyperspace jump?" that Bill had to use caller ID to block him...
Every decision I make has ramifications, certainly. But it's a stretch to say they are political ramifications, simply because you can link politics to a chain of thought somewhere.
Well, yes, they are political. A decision to by products from China supports the Chinese government and its policies. A decision to buy Coors beer mans that you're supporting their right wing, anti-union agenda. Dealing with corporations that spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to loosen environmental regulations supports those actions. And so on. Yes, the affects may be subtle, but they're there. However, it may be more appropriate to say that every decision has sociological ramifications.
Actually, it's quite possible to have 1000%. I could give you 1000% of my annual bank account's interest, for example, or give you "1000% extra corn chips free" (just before I went out of the corn chip business). But the original was just a typo.
You can have 1000% *more* of something, but you can't give more than 100% *of* anything. But since that was a typo, I'll rescind this rant and save it for another time.
Let's face it. So far as USE goes, it's a 'gentlemans' licence. You're not going to know what the person is using it for, and if the user is violating human rights, do you really think that they are going to care about the license?
While I agree completely with everything in your post, I have to say - ALL open source licenses are really gentlemens' agreements. What's to stop me, BigEvilCorp, from taking the source to some GPL program, incorporating it into my application, selling it for $3000 a seat, and *not telling anyone about it*? It's not like the FSF has an enforcement arm (visions of RMS and ESR kicking down my door, armed to the teeth, demanding a full audit -- eek)
Any license is predicated, at least somewhat, on trust. The only thing that keeps many small (and large) shops from installing one copy of Windows and Office on a hundred machines is the fear of the SPA dropping by for an audit. In this case, Microsoft trusts them to be honest based on this fear, even if they know that they can realistically only enforce a small percentage of licenses.
Free software will never have this power unless someone offers to donate a whole bunch of lawyers. So there's activism for you - give your old lawyers to the FSF whenever you upgrade. It's simple, easy, it makes you feel good, and you get a nice tax writeoff to boot!
Everything is NOT fucking political. What I choose to eat for breakfast is absolutely 1000% unpolitical. If you disagree, kindly point out the political considerations in my choosing tasty wheat this morning. Point out the politics of my choosing a left sock and a right sock to wear.
Actually, everything *is* political. Every decision you make has political ramifications, even if they're subtle. If your bowl of tasty wheat was produced by a corporation that pours industrial waste into the river, or uses vast amounts of political contributions to corrupt legislators into ignoring its illegal accounting practices, then you implicitly support those actions. If those socks are made by an international conglomerate that has moved its corporate headquarters to the Seychelles to avoid paying corporate income taxes, and shipped all of its manufacturing to third-world sweatshops, putting 30,000 people out of work, then you implicitly support them. If you eat fast food, you support the conditions of the factory farms that grow their beef. And so on.
Everything you buy, and, to a lesser extent, everything you do, has an effect on the rest of society and the rest of the world. You make your decisions based on what your conscience tells you is right or wrong. I don't buy products made in China, because I don't want to support a totalitarian government. I don't buy from Amazon or Walmart - I'd rather support independent local businesses. As an American, I buy American-made products whenever possible.
Yes, this is hard to do. Sometimes it's impossible, since 90% of consumer products seem to be made in China these days. You can't have a phone, drive a car, or use electricity without supporting massive, anticompetitive corporations. But small things make a difference. If everyone made the same choices, the world might change for the better.
I don't expect everyone else to agree, or to come to the same philosophical decisions. I would, however, like more people to think about their decisions and consider their implications. Maybe it seems silly. Maybe one individual decision is too small to make any difference. But it lets me sleep better at night, and that's the point.
(OTPersonalRant: There's no such thing as 1000% of anything. You can't give 110%. Please don't do this anymore. Thank you.)
Add(A, B): a function call, the preferred form for C++ except for built-in types
Slight nit, but this is the basic form in non-OO languages and braindead OO ones like Java. In C++ you just overload the + operator and write A + B like you would expect. At the compiled level, yeah, it's a function call (and you can write it as A.+(B) [or something like that] if you really want to).
To me, the concept of addition is best represented by A + B, mainly because that best reflects the way we inherently think of the operation.
No, I'm afraid that AI would only have been a good movie if Stanley Kubrik hadn't dropped dead in the middle of production. You can see his influence in the beautifully set and shot scenes in the first half of the movie, but absolutely everything else is Spielberg at his schmaltzy worst. The first half, up until the robot kid gets dropped off in the woods, is pretty good, but my god, the rest is crap. The ending, from the time the kid goes underwater, is just stupefyingly bad. Look, Ma - Speilberg aliens! Right off the the ET ship! Awww, the kid's been staring at the magic fairy for 3000 years, and now he gets his wish! Awwwww! But he can't have it, 'cause we have to teach a lesson! But he's a cute Speilberg kid, so it's really really hearttuggingly SWEET. And just to put the sugar on top, so to speak, we've got this pretentious voiceover that can hit you over the head with how staggeringly sweet and cute and touching it all is, just in case you missed it.
Yeah, it could have been a great movie, if Kubrik had done it. In a just world, Speilberg wouldn't have been allowed on the set.
Now I didn't think Borland bought dBase until after (or just before) IV came out. As I recall, they bought it and announced with great fanfare that they were doing a Windows version of it, then proceeded to disappear it for the next few years.
Or maybe that was still Ashton-Tate. I dunno. It was a long time ago.
Yes, it's true - there are more than two. There is, for instance, the Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport, off I-80, just west of the Flaming Gorge Recreational Area in Green River, Wyoming. I found this in Delorme's Street Atlas last year when I drove across the country. Hereare some pictures.
I think the locals are missing a big opportunity here - this should be used for something more than smuggling. Admittedly, it's not as unpopulated as West Texas, but someone could start the Open Source Space Shuttle project or something here. At the very least, it needs a visitors' center.
Yes, I realize this could just be an Easter egg in Street Atlas. Where's your sense of imagination?
Mind you, this is the guy that in mid-1999 announced that he was selling his house, pulling out of the stock market, and moving to a farm in the middle of Montana or someplace, before the societal upheaval hit, "just in case". I remember wondering at the time what he was going to do if the apocalypse *didn't* come, since he wasn't going to have any credibility left. I guess this is what happens - people have really short memories.
He's definitely a smart, sometimes clueful guy, but the sky is always falling.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember how they got busted for always showing pictures of soup with the few measly pathetic little veggie bits standing on the surface of the soup because the bowls were always filled with GLASS MARBLES to hold up the little fragments of orange-gray carrots and caved-in peas?
No, I don't remember it. Neither does anybody else. That's what you get for believing what you see on Usenet. My father worked for 30 years in the advertising business, and I recall having this exact conversation with him. He told me that there are extremely strict government regulations regarding truth in advertising, up to and including having an observer on the set making sure everything is done to the letter. Besides, anyone who did something like this would be dead in the industry if it ever came out. It would not be worth it just to get a good shot.
Of course, the whole business of retouching pictures of orgies into the ice in liquor ads and skulls into cigarette ads? That really happens. Yup.
Every time I see that ad I wonder "what porn site is he going to?"
I don't expect IE to ever block popups as it comes out of the box, but I'm sure some enterprising hacker will add it in some day. There is an API for munging it, after. Remember the whole change-the-link display thing?
By the way, the beta of Opera 7 has the option to only display requested popups, which is exactly what I've been waiting for. Good news for the 27 of us who use Opera!
Good lord, man, what system are you running that runs a GUI in 24 meg of memory? I didn't realize that Netscape 6 ran on Windows 3.1.
I should think that the only browser you could run in such circumstances would be Lynx (or Links). Or maybe Opera 3.
Well thank you... I appreciate that someone reads these and thinks they're useful.
Other than templates and function (and operator) overloading, I'm not sold on many of the C++ features I've seen. As you replied to my post in an abnormally coherent manner, I'd definitely appreciate further input on what features _you_ personally find useful on a regular basis.
Okay, here goes. In no particular order:
* Default arguments: Got a function that takes 3 arguments, two of which are usually empty? Just do (in the prototype only!)* Constructors and destructors: If you have a struct that needs to be initialized before you use it, or needs to clean up stuff before it goes away, these are for you. Constructors are just like any other function, so you can have as many of 'em as you want:One cool thing is to write a class that does nothing but grab a resource (critical section, open a file, etc.) in the ctor and release it in the dtor. Then just declare one at the top of the block that uses said resource, and hey presto - you never need to remember to grab/free again:The really handy thing is that no matter how you exit the block, even via an exception, the freeing happens. Very handy.* Function overloading: I can have 3 different versions of a function that take 3 different sets of arguments without having to write
* Comments
* Being able to declare variables anywhere, not just at the top of a block. Declare them where you use them, not 50 lines before.
* Conversion operators: Use an object as if it was another type altogether. This is debatably useful if you have accessor functions, but it comes in handy:Again, not always necessary, but it keeps the caller from having to know any more about 'blah' than they have to. Besides, it just looks cleaner.
I know I've overlooked a lot. Try picking up one of Bruce Myers' books (Effective C++, More Effective C++) - he explains it all much better than I can. Beware, though. C++ is a really complicated language, and there are a lot of subtle things that can bite you in the ass. Don't try doing everything at once. Just explore a feature at a time. Consider the assbiting a learning experience. The Annotated C++ reference is a good book to look at. I think Stroustrup has one out.
Oh - and you can do amazing tricks with templates - a few years back, C/C++ Users Journal had a set of templates that converted strings of 1s and 0s ("110010") into integers *at compile time* - no more than 25 lines of code. Way way cool.
Anyway, I hope this was useful. Keep with it - you'll be glad you did.
I doubt anyone will ever see this, but...
[Grumpy comments about templates needing to be in headers files and not source files to link successfully, and about Sun dicking with the Java spec in parent post]
Hey, I know what you're going through, and I agree, it sucks. I got bit by the templates-must-be-in-header-files thing the exact same way when I first started using them. Yeah, it sucks, and you're right, the spec doesn't require it. But that's the state of the technology right now. When I use templates, I just suck it up and put them in headers.
I'm sorry for your bad timing with Java, but unless all you ever do is GUI code, there's still a whole useful language to use. Besides, even if AWT *is* deprecated, it's not going to go away anytime soon - it's *deprecated*, not *removed*. You can still use it to your heart's content, and learn Swing over time.
The point is, you can't give up on a technology just because you had a bad experience with it. I'm sorry C++ is hard to learn, and I'm sorry Sun has chaotic roadmaps, but shit, man - you can't stop learning. Remember how hellish pointers and addresses were to learn in C? If you take that attitude, you'll be using BASIC the rest of your life.
Go ahead, try C++ again. Forget about templates until you actually need them. I think you'll find it to be a lot more productive, and pretty soon you'll wonder how you could ever go back to using C for everything.
Oh, and I got hosed by the "characters per line" nonsense just the other day. I completely agree, it's bullshit. Instead of telling me that it's currently 38.2, try telling me how many it should be. Or, perhaps, just let the moderators do their job.
I know Eiffel, Java, Ada, Common Lisp, and Scheme can produce compiled binaries without linking in anything that could be considered a complete interpreter.
If that's the case, then I apologize for misspeaking. I've only encountered these as interpreted languages (Except for Ada, which is another thing altogether. I didn't know anyone used it any more outside of the DOD.) I know Java can be compiled, but that's not really what people usually do.
btw, what's it like to use Ada on a daily basis? My only experience was in school, where it impressed me as the most anal-retentive language in existence. It made Pascal look like pre-ANSI C. I know it was designed to be bulletproof and usable for huge projects by huge teams. I also was under the impression that it was pretty much dropped, quietly, after a few years. What's the story?
Even worse, how about people that get Kanji characters tattooed in the back of their necks? Did you ever wonder if the tattoo guy decided to fuck with them by putting "stupid shithead" on their skin?
Sorry. Now back to the original thread, already in progress.
That's the way it used to be here, back when we had vinyl and you could buy a 45 for 65 cents. Here, sonny, sit down and let grampa tell you all about it. Hey, where you going? Damn kids!
Well, just the fact that they're limited editions makes them (potentially) valuable, assuming that some collector's market appears. Of course, this won't mean any additional profit for the labels, but for the aftermarket, as it were.
That said, the "Special Collectors Editions" of albums and DVDs that keep appearing like lint seem to make a shitload of money for the industry, so perhaps they're on this as well.
Funny you should mention the cherry-picking effect, though. You're saying that the prices SHOULD offset the produced music that did NOT sell? The music that is not sold should NOT be produced!
This is how the record insustry has always worked, up until recently. The label signs 100 artists, most of whom sell a little, 10 of which sell a lot. The vast profits form the 10 top sellers cover the costs of keeping the other 90 around, which slowly and steadily sell over time. In the end, everybody wins.
However, today the model has changed. Labels only care about the 5% that are megasellers, dropping everyone else after one non-platinum album. They're no longer interested in maintaining a back-catalog, just in the top-10 hits. This may be a Good Thing from a pure-capitalism-theoretical-economics point of view, but it's not a viable model for providing a product in the real world. This, and the ~17 dollar selling price for a CD, is why record sales are dropping, not rampant file sharing.
A car manufacturer that produces cars that are not sold, can not expect to raise the price of the better cars to offset the losses? Why should RIAA?
Yeah, that's what all companies do - raise prices to cover losses (of course, the difference is that it's a lot cheaper to make a CD and keep it sitting around the warehouse than to make and keep a car that doesn't sell).
OK, so that subject's a little inflammatory. But my god, I don't see why anybody is still writing new code in C in this day and age. C++ has been a fast, stable, standardized language for what - 10 years now? All the problems with buffer overflows that require hokey, kludgey workarounds in C are cleanly solved with any well-written string library (like, say, the one in the STL). Memory pools can be nicely wrapped with a class that pushes in the ctor and pops in the dtor, so you don't have to remember to call them in the right order everywhere (just declare an object at the top on the block).
The arguments I've seen against C++ seem to fall into the following categories:
* It adds bloat and it's slow
No, not since optimizing compilers were perfected in the 90s. You can add a lot of overhead to your app by abusing the STL, but for non-trivial applications, you'll never notice it. GCC (at least for the pre-3.0 series) has a really unoptimized template implementation, where "Hello, world" using cout would make a multi-megabyte executable (and be forever compiling it), but more modern compilers, like VC++ and Intel's compiler, do a lot better. Either way, for a real-world app, any size increase will be unnoticable. As for speed, with an optimizing compiler and judicious use of inlining, a C++ program will run just as fast as one written in C.
These complaints may have been true in the days of the Cfront preprocessor, but not today. I don't know about you, but I no longer write code for a 386 with 4 meg of memory.
* I don't like/need/want to learn OOP
You don't need OOP to use C++, but it helps. A class is just a struct where everything's private by default. If you know C, it takes about a day to learn the basics of constructors and destructors, references, and exceptions. Templates and STL will take a bit longer. One great about C++ is that you can just use small bits here and there if you don't want a full-blown OO program.
* It's not as good as Perl/Python/Ocaml/Eiffel/Java/whatever
That's not the point. It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be as good or better than C. If you want a standalone-executable without linking in a complete interpreter and you don't need a lot of string parsing or regexps, you were using C anyway.
* It won't let me write libraries that work with other languages
Just declare all of your external APIs using 'extern C' and make sure they only use C types in their signatures. Done.
The main reason not to use C++ in new development seems to be "I don't want to learn it" or "I don't know anything about it". If you use either one, I don't ever want to work with you.
No offense, but who gives a fuck what he thinks about Linux or open source or anything to do with computers? He's an *actor*.
I'd rather ask him whether, if he could do it over again, he would have turned down Star Trek and gone on to have a somewhat-normal career, instead of being Captain Kirk for ever. Or what his reaction was when he did his first convention. Was it a fit of depression - "holy shit - am I gonna have to do *this* for the rest of my life?" Or even what the hell he was thinking when he recorded 'The Unteleported Man' (and what the record label was thinking).
Yeah, I can imagine Wil Wheaton was calling up so often asking "So, in episode 37, what were you thinking when you ordered that hyperspace jump?" that Bill had to use caller ID to block him...
Due to his extremely chipper demenaor and the fact that his routine rarely changed, he became an annoying cliche.
Yeah, that and the fact that he's one of the least funny people on the face of the planet. Him, and whoever writes those goat-boy skits on SNL.
Well, yes, they are political. A decision to by products from China supports the Chinese government and its policies. A decision to buy Coors beer mans that you're supporting their right wing, anti-union agenda. Dealing with corporations that spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to loosen environmental regulations supports those actions. And so on. Yes, the affects may be subtle, but they're there. However, it may be more appropriate to say that every decision has sociological ramifications.
Actually, it's quite possible to have 1000%. I could give you 1000% of my annual bank account's interest, for example, or give you "1000% extra corn chips free" (just before I went out of the corn chip business). But the original was just a typo.
You can have 1000% *more* of something, but you can't give more than 100% *of* anything. But since that was a typo, I'll rescind this rant and save it for another time.
While I agree completely with everything in your post, I have to say - ALL open source licenses are really gentlemens' agreements. What's to stop me, BigEvilCorp, from taking the source to some GPL program, incorporating it into my application, selling it for $3000 a seat, and *not telling anyone about it*? It's not like the FSF has an enforcement arm (visions of RMS and ESR kicking down my door, armed to the teeth, demanding a full audit -- eek)
Any license is predicated, at least somewhat, on trust. The only thing that keeps many small (and large) shops from installing one copy of Windows and Office on a hundred machines is the fear of the SPA dropping by for an audit. In this case, Microsoft trusts them to be honest based on this fear, even if they know that they can realistically only enforce a small percentage of licenses.
Free software will never have this power unless someone offers to donate a whole bunch of lawyers. So there's activism for you - give your old lawyers to the FSF whenever you upgrade. It's simple, easy, it makes you feel good, and you get a nice tax writeoff to boot!
Everything is NOT fucking political. What I choose to eat for breakfast is absolutely 1000% unpolitical. If you disagree, kindly point out the political considerations in my choosing tasty wheat this morning. Point out the politics of my choosing a left sock and a right sock to wear.
Actually, everything *is* political. Every decision you make has political ramifications, even if they're subtle. If your bowl of tasty wheat was produced by a corporation that pours industrial waste into the river, or uses vast amounts of political contributions to corrupt legislators into ignoring its illegal accounting practices, then you implicitly support those actions. If those socks are made by an international conglomerate that has moved its corporate headquarters to the Seychelles to avoid paying corporate income taxes, and shipped all of its manufacturing to third-world sweatshops, putting 30,000 people out of work, then you implicitly support them. If you eat fast food, you support the conditions of the factory farms that grow their beef. And so on.
Everything you buy, and, to a lesser extent, everything you do, has an effect on the rest of society and the rest of the world. You make your decisions based on what your conscience tells you is right or wrong. I don't buy products made in China, because I don't want to support a totalitarian government. I don't buy from Amazon or Walmart - I'd rather support independent local businesses. As an American, I buy American-made products whenever possible.
Yes, this is hard to do. Sometimes it's impossible, since 90% of consumer products seem to be made in China these days. You can't have a phone, drive a car, or use electricity without supporting massive, anticompetitive corporations. But small things make a difference. If everyone made the same choices, the world might change for the better.
I don't expect everyone else to agree, or to come to the same philosophical decisions. I would, however, like more people to think about their decisions and consider their implications. Maybe it seems silly. Maybe one individual decision is too small to make any difference. But it lets me sleep better at night, and that's the point.
(OTPersonalRant: There's no such thing as 1000% of anything. You can't give 110%. Please don't do this anymore. Thank you.)
Slight nit, but this is the basic form in non-OO languages and braindead OO ones like Java. In C++ you just overload the + operator and write A + B like you would expect. At the compiled level, yeah, it's a function call (and you can write it as A.+(B) [or something like that] if you really want to).
To me, the concept of addition is best represented by A + B, mainly because that best reflects the way we inherently think of the operation.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a replacement for Jon Katz...
In other news, it has been reported that some people are grumpy and have no sense of humor...
No, I'm afraid that AI would only have been a good movie if Stanley Kubrik hadn't dropped dead in the middle of production. You can see his influence in the beautifully set and shot scenes in the first half of the movie, but absolutely everything else is Spielberg at his schmaltzy worst. The first half, up until the robot kid gets dropped off in the woods, is pretty good, but my god, the rest is crap. The ending, from the time the kid goes underwater, is just stupefyingly bad. Look, Ma - Speilberg aliens! Right off the the ET ship! Awww, the kid's been staring at the magic fairy for 3000 years, and now he gets his wish! Awwwww! But he can't have it, 'cause we have to teach a lesson! But he's a cute Speilberg kid, so it's really really hearttuggingly SWEET. And just to put the sugar on top, so to speak, we've got this pretentious voiceover that can hit you over the head with how staggeringly sweet and cute and touching it all is, just in case you missed it.
Yeah, it could have been a great movie, if Kubrik had done it. In a just world, Speilberg wouldn't have been allowed on the set.
Now I didn't think Borland bought dBase until after (or just before) IV came out. As I recall, they bought it and announced with great fanfare that they were doing a Windows version of it, then proceeded to disappear it for the next few years.
Or maybe that was still Ashton-Tate. I dunno. It was a long time ago.
Sounds like a great girlfriend you have there. It's good of you to stick with the old girl...
I think the locals are missing a big opportunity here - this should be used for something more than smuggling. Admittedly, it's not as unpopulated as West Texas, but someone could start the Open Source Space Shuttle project or something here. At the very least, it needs a visitors' center.
Yes, I realize this could just be an Easter egg in Street Atlas. Where's your sense of imagination?
Mind you, this is the guy that in mid-1999 announced that he was selling his house, pulling out of the stock market, and moving to a farm in the middle of Montana or someplace, before the societal upheaval hit, "just in case". I remember wondering at the time what he was going to do if the apocalypse *didn't* come, since he wasn't going to have any credibility left. I guess this is what happens - people have really short memories.
He's definitely a smart, sometimes clueful guy, but the sky is always falling.