Don't you remember Jurassic Park? The small chick (I can't remember her name), who had to labouriously explain each situation to anyone in the room ("This is Unix! I know this!") was using an SGI box with a 3D filemanager.
While your assertions are usually correct, they are not always correct (all of them will be wrong on at least one Cray, for example). What C does guarantee is that:
Yes I don't think there was any greater motivation for programmer (in my generation, anyway) than the source code for Nibbles and Gorrilla Wars in QBasic. It's a real shame that Microsoft has stopped shipping QBasic along with the source to those great games; they could at least ship a stripped down VBasic and some new games (dare I say Nibbles 2?).
Oh yes, don't you know? Kids today are losing all their senses except sight (which is why they need to play that Satanic music so loud). Their sense of sight is so important that their brains are entirely devoted to it except for small regions devoted to sexual indecency and Satanic behaviour. Leave them without flashing colours for five minutes and they'll undoubtedly turn to pornography rings and serial killing.
I disagree generally, though BASIC might not be a bad choice. Choosing a language on how English-like it is seems like a pretty horrible idea. If anything, it'll hinder them because they'll expect it to be like English in ways that it's not.
C would be fine, except its pointers are a bit difficult to grasp. I would say either do one end or the other (high or low), such as Python or BASIC or Assembly. Anyone who says that it's hard to code in assembly language has obviously never used assembly language. It's much easier to follow and much easier to understand than, say, C or Pascal or something like that (IMO). Once you get into those "middle languages", like C or Pascal, you really have to know what's going on behind the scenes (e.g. what pointers are, how they're stored, how they're used, how the stack works) in order to do anything serious with it and make sense of it.
Although, as in all forms of education, it depends on the kid.
OK that was way melodramatic, and kind of missed the point. The previous poister was saying that it was bad because the author (Kurt?) was doing something that had *already been done many times before*. Of course I'm not sure many of us have had much time to take a look at AtheOS, so I'm sure there's *something* new and exciting in there, but at first glance it's just the same old.
IIRC, office LANs started taking over the world (well, according to the commercials) as soon as Xerox released their coax Ethernet. Actually LANs probably started cropping up long before that, but it seems like they were pretty prevelant in the 70's, and Macs didn't appear until the early 80's IIRC.
Note that I'm too young to actually have experienced any of this, so a lot of it could be wrong.
FWIW, I thought both proponents did a horrible job. The Mac lady touts Mac's allowing you to change the colours on the GUI?! The Mac has a great UI and I'm sure any sane person could have picked much better points (i.e. ones that KDE doesn't do better).
Note that Canada isn't exactly a paradise for legal marijuana users. There are something like 35 or 40 people living in Canada who have been given permission to use marijuana. There have been stories of them getting mistakenly arrested (because, I believe, the police departments don't have any sort of official list of who's allowed and who's not), not to mention that they have a hell of a time trying to find it (many of them reportedly have to resort to buying it off a dealer on the street). I think the government (especially the NDP) is looking to improve the situation, but, generally speaking, the government still seems to be a bit nervous around the word "marijuana".
Ya I think this shows that the law you mentioned wasn't very well thought out, since it's pretty hard to categorise drug paraphernalia. Bongs don't seem like extremely hard things to make (though I guess, as is in most things in life, the hard part is trying to make it *good*), so in order to be really effective they'd have to outlaw pretty well all kinds of tubing (which isn't practical).
Yes well since ANSI accepted C99 yesterday, we can all blissfully ignore C89 (well OK, maybe not until a C99 compiler comes out).
BTW that's interesting about the poor wording in C89. I have to say the implicit return is my most hated feature of C99 (and there are a few questionable ones in there). If this continues, C might be on its road to serious feature creep. Mind you with 10 years between each update, it won't be quite so bad:).
Though you should note that under both C and C++ (you were talking from a C++ perspective, I assume), declaring main() to be int and exiting without returning a value is defined since the compiler has to add an implicit "return 0;" at the bottom.
To quote the standard: [#1] The function called at program startup is named main. The implementation declares no prototype for this function. It shall be defined with a return type of int and with no parameters:
int main(void) {/*... */ }
or with two parameters (referred to here as argc and argv, though any names may be used, as they are local to the function in which they are declared):
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {/*... */ }
or equivalent;8) or in some other implementation-defined manner. That said, some compilers will allow main() to be defined to return void and still have a defined termination status (FWIW, gcc is *not* one of them. Declaring main() to return void will leave you with undefined behaviour under gcc).
The point is, declaring main() to return anything other than int on a hosted environment is not portable and, most importantly, not useful. If you disagree, I suggest you follow up at comp.lang.c and see what kind of reaction you get.
Not really. If copyrights were not existent, then public domain software would be effectively GPL'd software. In other words, if it were made impossible to have proprietary software, there would be no incentive to have binary-only software. That's the theory, anyway. Note that RMS supports things like the use of software patents when used defensively, even though the famously hates the US patent office and software patents in general.
No, the record labels do that. While there is a huge overlap between the record labels and the RIAA, they are not one and the same. I personally don't see any reason for the RIAA to exist.
The OP said that the Gimp had no efficient anti-aliased font rendering. Mind you font rendering in the Gimp usually conists of about three words, which takes all of about 100ms, no matter how inefficient the algorithm.
Yes I'm afraid to inform you that I am indeed a great idiot. Still, the point holds that I did follow the link without any great catastrophe happening.
First of all I didn't get the "here's your browser thing". Why does it dump a bunch of garbage about Netscape 4.7? If you're going to make up stuff, do your research. Most people who have any respect for software quality would not be using Netscape products. And I don't see how writing some random HTTP header that was completely made up counts as a "security hole".
Also, that other "Slashdot" security hole where people can supposedly post for you doesn't work for me either, despite the fact I have my cookie security settings on the most insecure possible for my browser.
I think from now on you should s/Slashdot/shitty browser/g when talking about security holes.
Haha ya they have interesting priorities. I can just see AC taking a break from kernel development because X is lacking a decent analogue clock (admittedly xclock isn't very pretty).
No, he doesn't like the BSD licence because it doesn't offer an incentive (i.e. legal restriction) for people to make public changes free software. That's beside the point, though. The thing he's talking about is something which I think he's considered paramount to the GPL since its beginning: if you make private changes to code, they can remain private.
Yes that's why I said that there needed to be other restrictions put in place. Obviously opening the Windows API isn't going to do much good if Microsoft is just allowed to say "well we've decided to start using our new SecretWin API instead of the old Windows API" since we'd be essentially back where we started (as you said). The reason I'm not so gung-ho about the break-up idea is because I don't really use Windows, so any added competition in the Windows software market isn't going to affect me a lot. What I want is for Microsoft software in general to play nice with everyone else, so that I can open a.doc file, so that I can connect to someone's website without having ActiveConnect or what have you.
Note that the voltage drop across a superconducter is zero. Zero voltage drop means zero power (though I suppose zero times infinity can be just about anything you want it to be, but in this case, I think I want it to be zero).
Also note that the current will not actually be infinite (duh). Current is defined as the time rate of charge (IIRC), which translates into the time rate of electrons. Unfortunately, electrons are bound by that nasty speed of light thing.
Just because people disagree with you, it doesn't mean they're wrong or ignorant. I oppose the Microsoft break-up too. Big deal. That doesn't mean I work for Microsoft or want to join their army to enslave all the socialists (I think their army is pretty disorganised right now anyway). AFAICS, a break-up would be a punishment, i.e. completely useless, not to mention infantile (the US government has an image to maintain, you know).
Some of the other solutions suggested (opening up the APIs, opening the source to their DLLs) seem like better solutions to me, as long as there were other restrictions put in to keep them from weaseling out.
I agree about the MS Lookout thing, though: people aren't getting fair warning about the poor defaults (and arguably poor engineering choices).
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, the 3D filemanager she was using (besides being useless) was entirely real. It can be downloaded at http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3 d_navigator.html.
While your assertions are usually correct, they are not always correct (all of them will be wrong on at least one Cray, for example). What C does guarantee is that:
CHAR_BIT >= 8
sizeof(char) == 1
sizeof(short) * CHAR_BIT >= 16
sizeof(int) * CHAR_BIT >= 16
sizeof(int) >= sizeof(short)
sizeof(long) * CHAR_BIT >= 32
sizeof(long) >= sizeof(int)
#if __STDC_VERSION__ >= 199901L
sizeof(long long) * CHAR_BIT >= 64
sizeof(long long) >= sizeof(long)
#endif
IIRC, sizeof(char), sizeof(short), sizeof(int) and sizeof(long) on at least one of the Crays are all equal to 1, and CHAR_BIT is equal to 32.
Actually, as of Monday, May 22, 2000, long long is required by both ISO C and ANSI C.
Yes I don't think there was any greater motivation for programmer (in my generation, anyway) than the source code for Nibbles and Gorrilla Wars in QBasic. It's a real shame that Microsoft has stopped shipping QBasic along with the source to those great games; they could at least ship a stripped down VBasic and some new games (dare I say Nibbles 2?).
Oh yes, don't you know? Kids today are losing all their senses except sight (which is why they need to play that Satanic music so loud). Their sense of sight is so important that their brains are entirely devoted to it except for small regions devoted to sexual indecency and Satanic behaviour. Leave them without flashing colours for five minutes and they'll undoubtedly turn to pornography rings and serial killing.
I disagree generally, though BASIC might not be a bad choice. Choosing a language on how English-like it is seems like a pretty horrible idea. If anything, it'll hinder them because they'll expect it to be like English in ways that it's not.
C would be fine, except its pointers are a bit difficult to grasp. I would say either do one end or the other (high or low), such as Python or BASIC or Assembly. Anyone who says that it's hard to code in assembly language has obviously never used assembly language. It's much easier to follow and much easier to understand than, say, C or Pascal or something like that (IMO). Once you get into those "middle languages", like C or Pascal, you really have to know what's going on behind the scenes (e.g. what pointers are, how they're stored, how they're used, how the stack works) in order to do anything serious with it and make sense of it.
Although, as in all forms of education, it depends on the kid.
OK that was way melodramatic, and kind of missed the point. The previous poister was saying that it was bad because the author (Kurt?) was doing something that had *already been done many times before*. Of course I'm not sure many of us have had much time to take a look at AtheOS, so I'm sure there's *something* new and exciting in there, but at first glance it's just the same old.
IIRC, office LANs started taking over the world (well, according to the commercials) as soon as Xerox released their coax Ethernet. Actually LANs probably started cropping up long before that, but it seems like they were pretty prevelant in the 70's, and Macs didn't appear until the early 80's IIRC.
Note that I'm too young to actually have experienced any of this, so a lot of it could be wrong.
FWIW, I thought both proponents did a horrible job. The Mac lady touts Mac's allowing you to change the colours on the GUI?! The Mac has a great UI and I'm sure any sane person could have picked much better points (i.e. ones that KDE doesn't do better).
Note that Canada isn't exactly a paradise for legal marijuana users. There are something like 35 or 40 people living in Canada who have been given permission to use marijuana. There have been stories of them getting mistakenly arrested (because, I believe, the police departments don't have any sort of official list of who's allowed and who's not), not to mention that they have a hell of a time trying to find it (many of them reportedly have to resort to buying it off a dealer on the street). I think the government (especially the NDP) is looking to improve the situation, but, generally speaking, the government still seems to be a bit nervous around the word "marijuana".
Ya I think this shows that the law you mentioned wasn't very well thought out, since it's pretty hard to categorise drug paraphernalia. Bongs don't seem like extremely hard things to make (though I guess, as is in most things in life, the hard part is trying to make it *good*), so in order to be really effective they'd have to outlaw pretty well all kinds of tubing (which isn't practical).
Yes well since ANSI accepted C99 yesterday, we can all blissfully ignore C89 (well OK, maybe not until a C99 compiler comes out).
:).
BTW that's interesting about the poor wording in C89. I have to say the implicit return is my most hated feature of C99 (and there are a few questionable ones in there). If this continues, C might be on its road to serious feature creep. Mind you with 10 years between each update, it won't be quite so bad
It's non-standard, and even by Unix hackers (whose decendents created it), it's considered obsolete since getenv() came along.
OK, that's fair.
Though you should note that under both C and C++ (you were talking from a C++ perspective, I assume), declaring main() to be int and exiting without returning a value is defined since the compiler has to add an implicit "return 0;" at the bottom.
To quote the standard:
/* ... */ }
/* ... */ }
[#1] The function called at program startup is named main.
The implementation declares no prototype for this function.
It shall be defined with a return type of int and with no
parameters:
int main(void) {
or with two parameters (referred to here as argc and argv,
though any names may be used, as they are local to the
function in which they are declared):
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
or equivalent;8) or in some other implementation-defined
manner.
That said, some compilers will allow main() to be defined to return void and still have a defined termination status (FWIW, gcc is *not* one of them. Declaring main() to return void will leave you with undefined behaviour under gcc).
The point is, declaring main() to return anything other than int on a hosted environment is not portable and, most importantly, not useful. If you disagree, I suggest you follow up at comp.lang.c and see what kind of reaction you get.
Not really. If copyrights were not existent, then public domain software would be effectively GPL'd software. In other words, if it were made impossible to have proprietary software, there would be no incentive to have binary-only software. That's the theory, anyway. Note that RMS supports things like the use of software patents when used defensively, even though the famously hates the US patent office and software patents in general.
No, the record labels do that. While there is a huge overlap between the record labels and the RIAA, they are not one and the same. I personally don't see any reason for the RIAA to exist.
The OP said that the Gimp had no efficient anti-aliased font rendering. Mind you font rendering in the Gimp usually conists of about three words, which takes all of about 100ms, no matter how inefficient the algorithm.
Yes I'm afraid to inform you that I am indeed a great idiot. Still, the point holds that I did follow the link without any great catastrophe happening.
First of all I didn't get the "here's your browser thing". Why does it dump a bunch of garbage about Netscape 4.7? If you're going to make up stuff, do your research. Most people who have any respect for software quality would not be using Netscape products. And I don't see how writing some random HTTP header that was completely made up counts as a "security hole".
Also, that other "Slashdot" security hole where people can supposedly post for you doesn't work for me either, despite the fact I have my cookie security settings on the most insecure possible for my browser.
I think from now on you should s/Slashdot/shitty browser/g when talking about security holes.
Haha ya they have interesting priorities. I can just see AC taking a break from kernel development because X is lacking a decent analogue clock (admittedly xclock isn't very pretty).
No, he doesn't like the BSD licence because it doesn't offer an incentive (i.e. legal restriction) for people to make public changes free software. That's beside the point, though. The thing he's talking about is something which I think he's considered paramount to the GPL since its beginning: if you make private changes to code, they can remain private.
Yes that's why I said that there needed to be other restrictions put in place. Obviously opening the Windows API isn't going to do much good if Microsoft is just allowed to say "well we've decided to start using our new SecretWin API instead of the old Windows API" since we'd be essentially back where we started (as you said). The reason I'm not so gung-ho about the break-up idea is because I don't really use Windows, so any added competition in the Windows software market isn't going to affect me a lot. What I want is for Microsoft software in general to play nice with everyone else, so that I can open a .doc file, so that I can connect to someone's website without having ActiveConnect or what have you.
Forgot the standard disclaimer: IANAEEAIKNASC.
Note that the voltage drop across a superconducter is zero. Zero voltage drop means zero power (though I suppose zero times infinity can be just about anything you want it to be, but in this case, I think I want it to be zero).
Also note that the current will not actually be infinite (duh). Current is defined as the time rate of charge (IIRC), which translates into the time rate of electrons. Unfortunately, electrons are bound by that nasty speed of light thing.
Just because people disagree with you, it doesn't mean they're wrong or ignorant. I oppose the Microsoft break-up too. Big deal. That doesn't mean I work for Microsoft or want to join their army to enslave all the socialists (I think their army is pretty disorganised right now anyway). AFAICS, a break-up would be a punishment, i.e. completely useless, not to mention infantile (the US government has an image to maintain, you know).
Some of the other solutions suggested (opening up the APIs, opening the source to their DLLs) seem like better solutions to me, as long as there were other restrictions put in to keep them from weaseling out.
I agree about the MS Lookout thing, though: people aren't getting fair warning about the poor defaults (and arguably poor engineering choices).