The Obje platform works with all standards, including those that have not yet been defined. It requires no central coordination, pre-configuring, or special set-up, and can be easily used by people with no technical expertise.
So, it's omniscient as well as omnipotent ? Singularity is here !
The hot chicks at the bar don't care about what I think, what I do, or even what I look like. They only care about one thing: what kind of car can I buy with all the money I made from proprietary software. Clearly, then, I should immediately cease all activity that does not result in earning megabucks, and focus my life on one thing, and one thing only: making the payments on that new Z3.
Er... I must confess, I find it hard to understand your "names" code without the code example:-( Damn you, whitespace filter !
I agree that methods can grow 2 or even 3 screens long, but in practice this happens rarely -- and, even when it does, it's usually still pretty clear what's going on. The method serves some specific, limited purpose, and thus there's very little room for confusion.
BTW, I don't think you're exactly right about calling vec.size() in a loop: AFAIK, the compiler is smart enough to optimize such calls away for you. We tested this on Sun's own JVM a couple years ago, and this turned out to be true... Of course, I can't speak for any other JVM out there, but I suspect most of them perform loop unrolling, subexpression collapsing (or whatever it's called), etc.
I agree that this real-time code-mutating thingy is pretty cool. But... why ? You take a moderate-to-major performance hit (all that code won't morph itself), and for what ? To stop people from reverse-engineering your program ? Why not just write it in a secure manner to begin with, so that reverse-engineering is not a threat ? It works for OpenSSH, after all, it can work for anyone else too.
I have always thought that if you need Hungarian notation to tell if "userName" is an integer or a string, then your program is too messy. Instead of using "lpszfoobarName", it would be better to organize the program to use smaller functions (methods, whatever) and more compact modules.
Hungarian notation is only truly useful in classic Win32 programming, because by now it's really its own programming language based loosely on C, where lpszfoobar takes the place of strong typing. But, if you're starting a project from scratch, you don't need to support legacy LPARAM/WPARAM/WPARAM_which_is_really_LPARAM, and thus there's no need for hungarian notation. Especially if you use a strongly-typed OOP language such as Java, and, AFAIK, C#.
Have you noticed how the main point this press release tries to push is "this memory is very hard to copy" ? It's kind of sad when our technology is specifically designed to be useless, just to appease the RIAA.
I use Trillian, and it works fine for me. Which part of it is bloated ? In fact, IMO it doesn't have enough features -- I want full-HTML logging and better file transfer support. Still, the features that are there are good enough for me, and it certainly beats trying to get GAIM to work on Windows.
How is this AOL's fault ? It seems that buddylinks is just exploiting their client (or some Windows vulnerability) to send viruses to people. I don't blame McDonalds for making me fat, and I don't blame AOL for making me install other people's backdoors.
Note that it doesn't matter how evil McDonalds or AOL are; some things just aren't their fault. They're the user's fault.
You and the other posters are also right: some technologies find niche applications where they're the best tool for the job (until something better comes along). This is the case with typewriters in third-world countries, vacuum tubes in military radar installations, analog-looking UI to a digital watch, etc.
Still, I would pronounce these technologies "mostly dead". Almost no one is designing new vacuum tubes, faster mechanical typewriters, or smaller fully-analog clocks (unless you maybe count nanotech, I'm sure there's someone somewhere who is making watches out of nanotubules). These technologies are pretty much doomed to stay in their niches until the end of time (or until something displaces them).
I mean, strictly speaking, no technology ever dies out fully -- it either finds a niche (like vacuum tubes), or becomes transformed (like the memory chip mentioned on slashdot a while ago which uses miniscule cantilever beams). Still, I don't think anyone can claim that vacuum tubes or dot-matrix printers are as vibrantly alive today as they were just a few decades ago.
It sounds to me like vacuum tubes have not died, per se, but instead they have found a few niche applications (EMP-proof military hardware and amps) where they do a better job. That's fine, but I don't think anyone would claim that vacuum tubes are still as alive as, say, wheels are. Same thing with dot-matrix printers (cheap, quick triplicate forms) and analog watches (taking a pulse).
These technologies aren't dead, just "mostly dead". Nothing wrong with that -- "best tool for the job" has always been my favorite slogan.
It seems that most of the technologies that "refuse to die" are in fact dying out -- but slowly, at the human pace, along with their users. I personally prefer digital watches to analog (they tell me the exact time, date and day of week, not some weird polar coordinate thing), I could never go back to using typewriters (one word: undo), and I couldn't care less about how many vacuum tubes were used to record the music I listen to, as long as I can get it on mp3. All of these technologies are still in use because they invoke some sort of a sentimental response from their users, sort of like vinyl does for audiohphyles. In other words, the value of the technology is not intrinsic; what has value are the memories of the user. For someone who doesn't have the same memories, the technology loses its retro appeal.
Of course, no technology can ever truly die -- we still use fire and plows, after all. Still, I think if you compare the sales of manual typewriters (~500k/year, according to the article) with the sales of computers, I think you can pretty much pronounce them "mostly dead".
Hey ! Don't go around dissing the GAZ-21, the official vehicle of the KGB. I actually got to ride in it during my youth (no, I was not part of the KGB, nor was the KGB after me... long story). That thing was built like a tank; you could bounce modern-day Toyotas off of it like ping-pong balls. It was also extremely easy to service -- none of these little tricks like "remove the battery to change the headlights" that modern cars have. The car did break down occasionally, but this was due to the decrepit state of the Soviet manufacturing pipeline, not due to bad design. And actually, GAZ-21 broke down a lot less than, say, the Moskvich. And of course, it was sturdy enough to go offroad any time -- which, in practice, meant "as soon as you get out of Moscow", Soviet roads being what they are.
Is GAZ-21 a good car by today's standards ? No. It's an old, old car made in the 60s. But it still was a great car for its time, especially considering the enormous challenge of making any kind of car in the USSR.
Automated tools are not incompatible with manual learning. For example, I have a pretty good idea on how to use a pencil. I can sharpen a pencil armed with nothing but my pocket knife, or, if I somehow lose both my knife and my multitool, armed with nothing but my teeth. However, I still prefer using mechanical pencils. Sure, they can theoretically jam, or run out of lead, or whatever, but in practice they're faster, easier to use and cleaner.
It's like this with everything we humans come up with. Yes, it's theoretically possible to live off the land and build your own house out of logs, but in practice we have these things called "technology" and "civilization", which allow us to automate our basic tasks so that we can concentrate on more interesting things.
It looks like the world of Shadowrun (and other cyberpunkish books) has arrived ahead of schedule. It won't be long before RIAA starts arming its thugs (you know, for self-defence from the evil pirates), and thus gets its own private army. It's a good deal for them -- they aren't bound by any kind of silly legal constraints, they can do whatever it takes to destroy the pirate scourge.
Buy RIAA music, citizen. It is your duty. Cooperation will be rewarded, resistance will be punished. Have a nice day.
Why not just have a cart on wheels, or a similar cart, but on caterpillar treads ? Or maybe an internal-combustion-powered vehicle with 4-wheel drive; I heard some people call these mystical devices "jeeps". Sounds like that would be a lot cheaper, minus the coolness factor. Obviously, mules are even cheaper, but I guess the PETA is against using them in combat or something.
But, if you absolutely must build something mechanical with legs, why not a robot bug instead of a robot dog ? Unlike dogs, bugs have 6 legs, which means that they can always keep 3 legs on the ground, which makes them easier to build.
Yeah. With Linux, it would take a full week, not some measly 11 hours. You know, seeing as setting the screen resolution alone takes 2 hours, and it gets worse from there...
According to the article, Ralsky admitted to "hijacking" other people's computers to send his spam. I could be wrong, but isn't this sort of thing illegal now ? Or is it only illegal when 12-year-old kids do it ? If American anti-hacking laws are truly fair and effective, shouldn't Mr. Ralsky be in jail by now ?
The amazing thing about Harry Potter is that it manages to address important issues without shoving them down your throat. Instead, you follow Harry Potter and his friends/enemies throughout the book, get attached to the characters, get drawn into the story... That's right: instead of teaching you the moral lesson of the day (tm), the book makes you experience it. That's what separartes fiction from Oracle DBA manuals, and what separates great fiction from moralizing crap.
Actually, I'd nominate Quicksilver for worst book of the year. Sure, it has everything -- sex, adventure, politics, etc. -- but all this stuff is so jumbled, random, disorganized and pretentious that reading the book feels like nothing more than a tedious chore. At least Cryptonomicon had encryption in it. Bah.
The next logical step would be to augment HTTP itself to piggypack on top of BT (as suggested by multiple people earlier on this site); this will make slashdotting go away for good. I can see three major problems to both the RSS+BT and HTTP+BT integration schemes: leeching, cracking and discovery. If everyone starts to leech, then BT's advantages are nullified. If someone cracks the client, they can corrupt portions of the feed/website that is being served (checksums solve this problem, but AFAIK they rely on the majority of users being honest). Then there's also the chicken-and-egg problem of discovering the.torrent file (or its equivalent) in the first place: someone still has to serve it so that you can jump-start your torrent madness, and that someone can get slashdotted easily.
These problems are not insurmountable, but they are not insignificant, either. Thus, I don't think that RSS+BT is the instant-gratification, no-risk paradise that the Yahoo article makes it out to be.
I am not sure if you're being sarcastic or not... But I think all these inventions are still good. BASIC is an ok "intro to programming" language; kind of like what a tricycle is to an 18-wheeler (the 18-wheeler being C++). Microwaves are great for popcorn, defrosting chickens, and when you need something semi-edible in a hurry. WebTV... um... hm, there's actually no redeeming feature there, but I digress. My point is, all these things can still be useful, either as a training tool or as a weak solution to a weak problem. The disaster happens when you try to write an application server in BASIC, or to cook a six-course meal in the microwave, or to use PowerPoint (and solely that) to discuss structural weaknesses in shuttle design. I mean, toothpicks are great too, but you won't normally use them to build a house.
...I beg to differ. It seems that the main problem NASA had was that
When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle.
If you don't know how to create a clear, meaningful visual aid, then no amount of software will help you. I have seen people who drew their slides by hand, with ink and paper, and they had so many bullet points and arrows that the paper was literally falling apart in places. I got a headache just by looking at it through my peripheral vision.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, the problem is not with PowerPoint -- it's with the people who use it. It would be tempting to say, "See, M$ makes you dumb, use OpenOffice", but in this case, the Evil Empire (tm) is not to blame.
Yes yes, we all feel sad for the poor religious granny etc. Moving on: it's clear that spammers are feeling the burn. What we need to do now is to come out with better spam filters; something like PopFile, but so easy to use that even the granny (the nice one who deletes penis spam, not the nasty spammy one) can use it... Perhaps a version of PopFile that does not require training at all, due to a large p2p corpus database, with a one-click installer. Then, the spammers will eventually shrivel up and die, because no one will actually look at their spam long enough to buy anything.
Important distinction: the people who use this stuff should be put in prison. Outlaw certain kinds of writing, and you're no better than Ashcroft and the DMCA.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, it's so clear now. Thank you, Mr. Clemens !
I agree that methods can grow 2 or even 3 screens long, but in practice this happens rarely -- and, even when it does, it's usually still pretty clear what's going on. The method serves some specific, limited purpose, and thus there's very little room for confusion.
BTW, I don't think you're exactly right about calling vec.size() in a loop: AFAIK, the compiler is smart enough to optimize such calls away for you. We tested this on Sun's own JVM a couple years ago, and this turned out to be true... Of course, I can't speak for any other JVM out there, but I suspect most of them perform loop unrolling, subexpression collapsing (or whatever it's called), etc.
I agree that this real-time code-mutating thingy is pretty cool. But... why ? You take a moderate-to-major performance hit (all that code won't morph itself), and for what ? To stop people from reverse-engineering your program ? Why not just write it in a secure manner to begin with, so that reverse-engineering is not a threat ? It works for OpenSSH, after all, it can work for anyone else too.
Hungarian notation is only truly useful in classic Win32 programming, because by now it's really its own programming language based loosely on C, where lpszfoobar takes the place of strong typing. But, if you're starting a project from scratch, you don't need to support legacy LPARAM/WPARAM/WPARAM_which_is_really_LPARAM, and thus there's no need for hungarian notation. Especially if you use a strongly-typed OOP language such as Java, and, AFAIK, C#.
Have you noticed how the main point this press release tries to push is "this memory is very hard to copy" ? It's kind of sad when our technology is specifically designed to be useless, just to appease the RIAA.
I use Trillian, and it works fine for me. Which part of it is bloated ? In fact, IMO it doesn't have enough features -- I want full-HTML logging and better file transfer support. Still, the features that are there are good enough for me, and it certainly beats trying to get GAIM to work on Windows.
Note that it doesn't matter how evil McDonalds or AOL are; some things just aren't their fault. They're the user's fault.
Still, I would pronounce these technologies "mostly dead". Almost no one is designing new vacuum tubes, faster mechanical typewriters, or smaller fully-analog clocks (unless you maybe count nanotech, I'm sure there's someone somewhere who is making watches out of nanotubules). These technologies are pretty much doomed to stay in their niches until the end of time (or until something displaces them).
I mean, strictly speaking, no technology ever dies out fully -- it either finds a niche (like vacuum tubes), or becomes transformed (like the memory chip mentioned on slashdot a while ago which uses miniscule cantilever beams). Still, I don't think anyone can claim that vacuum tubes or dot-matrix printers are as vibrantly alive today as they were just a few decades ago.
These technologies aren't dead, just "mostly dead". Nothing wrong with that -- "best tool for the job" has always been my favorite slogan.
Then your watch isn't technology -- it's art. Art will never die (or so I hope), but it's not covered by the scope of the article.
Of course, no technology can ever truly die -- we still use fire and plows, after all. Still, I think if you compare the sales of manual typewriters (~500k/year, according to the article) with the sales of computers, I think you can pretty much pronounce them "mostly dead".
Is GAZ-21 a good car by today's standards ? No. It's an old, old car made in the 60s. But it still was a great car for its time, especially considering the enormous challenge of making any kind of car in the USSR.
It's like this with everything we humans come up with. Yes, it's theoretically possible to live off the land and build your own house out of logs, but in practice we have these things called "technology" and "civilization", which allow us to automate our basic tasks so that we can concentrate on more interesting things.
Buy RIAA music, citizen. It is your duty. Cooperation will be rewarded, resistance will be punished. Have a nice day.
But, if you absolutely must build something mechanical with legs, why not a robot bug instead of a robot dog ? Unlike dogs, bugs have 6 legs, which means that they can always keep 3 legs on the ground, which makes them easier to build.
Yeah. With Linux, it would take a full week, not some measly 11 hours. You know, seeing as setting the screen resolution alone takes 2 hours, and it gets worse from there...
According to the article, Ralsky admitted to "hijacking" other people's computers to send his spam. I could be wrong, but isn't this sort of thing illegal now ? Or is it only illegal when 12-year-old kids do it ? If American anti-hacking laws are truly fair and effective, shouldn't Mr. Ralsky be in jail by now ?
The amazing thing about Harry Potter is that it manages to address important issues without shoving them down your throat. Instead, you follow Harry Potter and his friends/enemies throughout the book, get attached to the characters, get drawn into the story... That's right: instead of teaching you the moral lesson of the day (tm), the book makes you experience it. That's what separartes fiction from Oracle DBA manuals, and what separates great fiction from moralizing crap.
Actually, I'd nominate Quicksilver for worst book of the year. Sure, it has everything -- sex, adventure, politics, etc. -- but all this stuff is so jumbled, random, disorganized and pretentious that reading the book feels like nothing more than a tedious chore. At least Cryptonomicon had encryption in it. Bah.
These problems are not insurmountable, but they are not insignificant, either. Thus, I don't think that RSS+BT is the instant-gratification, no-risk paradise that the Yahoo article makes it out to be.
I am not sure if you're being sarcastic or not... But I think all these inventions are still good. BASIC is an ok "intro to programming" language; kind of like what a tricycle is to an 18-wheeler (the 18-wheeler being C++). Microwaves are great for popcorn, defrosting chickens, and when you need something semi-edible in a hurry. WebTV... um... hm, there's actually no redeeming feature there, but I digress. My point is, all these things can still be useful, either as a training tool or as a weak solution to a weak problem. The disaster happens when you try to write an application server in BASIC, or to cook a six-course meal in the microwave, or to use PowerPoint (and solely that) to discuss structural weaknesses in shuttle design. I mean, toothpicks are great too, but you won't normally use them to build a house.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, the problem is not with PowerPoint -- it's with the people who use it. It would be tempting to say, "See, M$ makes you dumb, use OpenOffice", but in this case, the Evil Empire (tm) is not to blame.
Yes yes, we all feel sad for the poor religious granny etc. Moving on: it's clear that spammers are feeling the burn. What we need to do now is to come out with better spam filters; something like PopFile, but so easy to use that even the granny (the nice one who deletes penis spam, not the nasty spammy one) can use it... Perhaps a version of PopFile that does not require training at all, due to a large p2p corpus database, with a one-click installer. Then, the spammers will eventually shrivel up and die, because no one will actually look at their spam long enough to buy anything.
Important distinction: the people who use this stuff should be put in prison. Outlaw certain kinds of writing, and you're no better than Ashcroft and the DMCA.