The people that think that are correct, of course. Slackware and Ubuntu (to pick two) are different operating systems. And Linux is referred to as Linux, although it's more often referred to as the "Linux kernel" to avoid confusion. Some people mistakenly believe there's such thing as an operating system called Linux, so throwing "kernel" in helps make it clear when you're talking about Linux that you're just talking about Linux, and not any of the operating systems that use it.
Can we move past that metaphor? It's a really, really, really dumb one. It doesn't really make sense; if it were to work at all it would have to be changed to "free as in beer which happens to be free for some unspecified reason."
...
No.
A common feature of human communications is that not every last little detail is explicitly spelled out. Often times, a world of meaning is implicit, but understood in context by competent speakers of the language. "Free as in beer" makes every bit as much sense as the unnecessarily long phrase you suggested it would have to be changed to. It doesn't have to be changed, because its meaning is quite clearly defined and understood by those who talk about it, and indeed is readily inferred even by people who've never heard it before. The range of possible meanings for the phrase, combined with the context of the discussions in which it is used, guarantee that anyone who isn't being deliberately obtuse will have no difficulty at all determining the speaker's intended meaning.
Indeed. They can afford to, because they make money. Most non-profit organizations make money, they just don't make a profit. Being "non-profit" doesn't mean you can't make money, it just means you can't make a profit. It limits how much money you can make (no more than you need or can use).
The US has a quarter of the world's prisoners but has less than 5% of the world's population.
That's because in a lot of other countries, they just kill instead of imprisoning. What?! No it's not! That's ridiculous! That fact alone would not even come close to accounting for the huge number of prisoners we have compared to other populous countries. Especially when you consider that, among the world's more populous countries, and setting China aside, we kill *more* of our criminals, not less. India, with over a billion people, executes less people per decade than Texas alone does per year. Most of the other populous nations don't execute people at all. In a nation where we kill more criminals than is typical, we still have a larger prison population. The size of our prison population is more certainly not because they kill more people in other countries. There are some countries where they do kill people more frequently, but the numbers don't come anywhere even remotely close to making your claim anything less than utterly preposterous.
What I would do is, write up a year's worth of blog entries for the future first. Just to freak people out as my blog stays active long after I'm gone.
wait.. what? People still use Usenet? I used to be a regular, but I quit when it became unusable due to the noise... that was like eight or nine years ago.
Mod up parent! These are serious concerns, should not be swept under the rug. As much as I dislike the design of the Shuttle, it's the only one capable of carrying that sort of heavy payload to the ISS' orbit (LEO).
Is Wikipedia on crack again, or are there no less than four other currently operational launch systems with nearly identical payload capacity to the shuttle?
...it's not the real world. Start talking to the physical world... Most of today's software doesn't talk to the physical world. It's database management, document formatting, user interface design.[!!!]
:o Have faith, program. The Users are real. They do exist.
lol srsly! You seem to have turned "talking to the real world" on its head -- you seem to be defining it as the opposite of talking to the real world.
I think you're essentially agreeing. It was fashionable once to write high level apps in C++. Obviously it's never going to be replaced in those areas where other languags *cannot* do what it does. But as a general purpose, high-level language, yeah, it's a lot less fashionable than it once was.
As for who cares what is in fashion, the answer is, anyone who doesn't suffer from "not invented here" syndrome. If you want to write everything from scratch, C++ is the way to go -- because you can do anything with it. But if you want to just get the job done quickly and efficiently without reinventing the wheel, you care what's in fashion, because whatever's in fashion is going to be what's most likely to have the tools available to just drop into your project and use. Indeed, the more fashionable it is, the more likely you'll have a rich smorgasbord of libraries and such to choose from, picking one that best suits your needs, minimizing your own work in adapting it to your purposes. It pays to be up with the latest fashion in this case.
I've seen quite a few places where chunks of C code do most the of the real work, and a higher level language like Python or Java are used simply to control data flow and provide interfaces.
Considering most libraries (and most languages) are written in C or C++, I think this is essentially true the majority of the time. We code our basic, low-level ops once in C and then don't worry about it anymore, using the higher level language to deal with the higher level logic. All the higher level language is doing is directing what bits of C code get executed when.
And if you're really lucky, you can log in today and rez something to put a script in!:p
I actually used to hate LSL, and I still hate many things about it, but it's got a few adorable quirks, especially if you like state-machines -- you can write them in any language, but when the language explicitly supports them, it can clean up and beautify a lot of code.
Now if only we had arrays, hashtables, and structs... or even decent list syntax (I don't care if it'd just be syntactic sugar, I want my sugar!) And boolean ops that short circuit. Grr. I hate LSL...
Heh. Very true. I use to have the old "C: God's Programming Language" as my desktop wallpaper. I still consider it my favorite language. But I was struck the other day by the fact that I haven't actually used C for anything in the last three years. I used to bang out quick C programs for many little tasks, but these days I usually end up using whatever scripting language best suits the need, and for larger projects, whatever has the best libraries and support for the needs. If I were going to do it all from scratch, I'd want to start from C, but I've long since gotten over the "not invented here"/"not written by me" syndrome.
I wonder if it's related to my slowly changing attitude where I went from viewing coding as a calling and an art form to viewing it as a means to get a job done.
80x25?! You young'uns has the easy life! We thought we were living in luxury when we got our 40-column displays after having been forced to eek out on 22-columns for years. And that's when we even HAD monitors! Try editing your code when your "display" is a printer!
(Wow, flashback -- I actually did use computers connected to printers with no monitors at one time, and wonderful phones that you actually dialed and put the handset over the acoustic coupler to connect to the MECC system. Ah, those were the days. Funny how we get nostalgic for things that, honestly, really sucked.)
A proper coder can write a pretty info kiosk app or an unseen device driver, a database frontend or a file system, a dynamic web page or an HTTP server, a quick shell script or an operating system from scratch. He or she can extract the nth element of a list using nothing but car and cdr, or generate a complete app with a few clicks in the latest visual framework, and can write elegant code in Ruby, Smalltalk, C++, Java, Fortran, assembly language, and even BASIC. Specialization is for insects.;)
How sturdy/complete *is* Mono? How much does stuff have to be reworked in order to fly on it?
In my experience, hardly anything ever needs to be reworked, but that's because I code in the other direction -- develop under Mono, then make sure it runs under M$ stuff too.
Although, TBH, I only do this for a couple of projects where Mono/.NET is a requirement. If it were entirely up to me, the whole project in question would be Perl/PHP/Ruby/Python/C++/oh-my-gods-anything-but-Mono-halp!!!
Assembly is still needed, but no one in their right mind would, say, write an entire OS in assembly. http://www.menuetos.net/
Okay, is that link supposed to be an illustration of the truth of that statement, or a counter-example intended to disprove it? It could be read either way...
For the record, I consider it a given that in modern times, no one in their right mind would write an entire OS (regardless of language). And I this as someone who's written one. I certainly know I'm nuts...
There are libraries out there available to just install and link to. But it certainly would be nice if some of this stuff got into the Standard C libs, so that all you needed was something like:
#include <stdgcmem.h>
... and off you go on your merry way.
The argument against would be that not everyone has the same needs from such a library, but it's a spurious one. Not everyone has the same needs from an I/O library, which is why there are a million alternatives to <stdio.h>, that doesn't mean you can't provide at least one standard library, and let those with other needs link to something else instead.
Indeed. With many languages, I don't really know exactly what kind of machine code will be generated from a statement, and looking at the output with a disassembler can be shocking. With C, I can pretty much tell you exactly what machine code is going to be generated (assuming I'm familiar with the target processor), and generally the output from a disassembler looks like something somewhere between "pretty much what I thought" and "exactly what I thought", with the tendency being towards the latter. Without using "asm" you don't have direct access to the target processor's unique features, but that's beside the point -- C pretty much really is portable assembly language, you only use "asm" when you're deliberately doing something non-portable.
Sooner or later, everything comes down to machine code, so at the heart of any system you're going to find some sort of assembly language, no matter what becomes popular at the higher levels. To date, no one's come up with a better portable assembler than C, so its place in the grand scheme of things is pretty secure.
I think they do understand. That's why they're doing in this way. Knowing that $3 mil isn't going to cover the costs, they're instead letting the developer charge real money for a real game, something the developer couldn't do if NASA paid them the paltry $3 mil.
Ha, yeah that was my question. Pardon me for thinking there's no such thing as a weapon that's both lethal and humane. Killing people in inhumane no matter how you slice it.
Recycling is a boondoggle. It takes more energy to recycle glass or bimetal than to just make new stuff.
Is your second sentence a non sequitur, or are you asserting that the only good reason to recycle things is to save energy? I've actually never heard that as a reason. Usually, the reason for recycling is to avoid depleting a resource (we're going to run out of that metal eventually if we keep this up), or despoiling the environment further (sure there's plenty more of that metal around, but do we want more strip-mines?), or just filling landfills unnecessarily (glass is silicon, the most abundant element on earth -- sure we're never going to run out and don't need to destroy the environment mining it, but why keep filling landfills with it if we can find something else to do with it?). Saving energy is not even in the top three reasons for recycling, although if there are cases where you *can* save energy by doing so, that's a pretty nice benefit.
If this were the case, the entire moon's surface-particles floating above the planet 6 days each month, we would have already seen it. If not with naked eyes then with telescopes. We can see localized dust storms on Mars, I can only imagine what a planet-wide de-surfacing would look like. Ridiculous.
No one's suggesting Martian-scale mega-dust-storms. Rising on electrostatic repulsion alone, and lacking any great wind to blow it about, this would not be visible with any telescope from Earth, or even from lunar orbit.
Slashdot Mirror
o.O
It does work across multiple platforms. Any platform that supports TrueType fonts, which is more than one, hence "multiple".
Are you sure that's the progression? I thought Web 3.1 would be followed by Web 3.11, and then by Web for Workgroups.
The people that think that are correct, of course. Slackware and Ubuntu (to pick two) are different operating systems. And Linux is referred to as Linux, although it's more often referred to as the "Linux kernel" to avoid confusion. Some people mistakenly believe there's such thing as an operating system called Linux, so throwing "kernel" in helps make it clear when you're talking about Linux that you're just talking about Linux, and not any of the operating systems that use it.
...
No.
A common feature of human communications is that not every last little detail is explicitly spelled out. Often times, a world of meaning is implicit, but understood in context by competent speakers of the language. "Free as in beer" makes every bit as much sense as the unnecessarily long phrase you suggested it would have to be changed to. It doesn't have to be changed, because its meaning is quite clearly defined and understood by those who talk about it, and indeed is readily inferred even by people who've never heard it before. The range of possible meanings for the phrase, combined with the context of the discussions in which it is used, guarantee that anyone who isn't being deliberately obtuse will have no difficulty at all determining the speaker's intended meaning.
Indeed. They can afford to, because they make money. Most non-profit organizations make money, they just don't make a profit. Being "non-profit" doesn't mean you can't make money, it just means you can't make a profit. It limits how much money you can make (no more than you need or can use).
What I would do is, write up a year's worth of blog entries for the future first. Just to freak people out as my blog stays active long after I'm gone.
wait.. what? People still use Usenet? I used to be a regular, but I quit when it became unusable due to the noise... that was like eight or nine years ago.
Comparison of heavy lift launch systems
Is Wikipedia on crack again, or are there no less than four other currently operational launch systems with nearly identical payload capacity to the shuttle?
:o Have faith, program. The Users are real. They do exist.
lol srsly! You seem to have turned "talking to the real world" on its head -- you seem to be defining it as the opposite of talking to the real world.
I think you're essentially agreeing. It was fashionable once to write high level apps in C++. Obviously it's never going to be replaced in those areas where other languags *cannot* do what it does. But as a general purpose, high-level language, yeah, it's a lot less fashionable than it once was.
As for who cares what is in fashion, the answer is, anyone who doesn't suffer from "not invented here" syndrome. If you want to write everything from scratch, C++ is the way to go -- because you can do anything with it. But if you want to just get the job done quickly and efficiently without reinventing the wheel, you care what's in fashion, because whatever's in fashion is going to be what's most likely to have the tools available to just drop into your project and use. Indeed, the more fashionable it is, the more likely you'll have a rich smorgasbord of libraries and such to choose from, picking one that best suits your needs, minimizing your own work in adapting it to your purposes. It pays to be up with the latest fashion in this case.
Considering most libraries (and most languages) are written in C or C++, I think this is essentially true the majority of the time. We code our basic, low-level ops once in C and then don't worry about it anymore, using the higher level language to deal with the higher level logic. All the higher level language is doing is directing what bits of C code get executed when.
And if you're really lucky, you can log in today and rez something to put a script in! :p
I actually used to hate LSL, and I still hate many things about it, but it's got a few adorable quirks, especially if you like state-machines -- you can write them in any language, but when the language explicitly supports them, it can clean up and beautify a lot of code.
Now if only we had arrays, hashtables, and structs... or even decent list syntax (I don't care if it'd just be syntactic sugar, I want my sugar!) And boolean ops that short circuit. Grr. I hate LSL...
Heh. Very true. I use to have the old "C: God's Programming Language" as my desktop wallpaper. I still consider it my favorite language. But I was struck the other day by the fact that I haven't actually used C for anything in the last three years. I used to bang out quick C programs for many little tasks, but these days I usually end up using whatever scripting language best suits the need, and for larger projects, whatever has the best libraries and support for the needs. If I were going to do it all from scratch, I'd want to start from C, but I've long since gotten over the "not invented here"/"not written by me" syndrome.
I wonder if it's related to my slowly changing attitude where I went from viewing coding as a calling and an art form to viewing it as a means to get a job done.
But "cynical old man?" Ouch...
80x25?! You young'uns has the easy life! We thought we were living in luxury when we got our 40-column displays after having been forced to eek out on 22-columns for years. And that's when we even HAD monitors! Try editing your code when your "display" is a printer!
(Wow, flashback -- I actually did use computers connected to printers with no monitors at one time, and wonderful phones that you actually dialed and put the handset over the acoustic coupler to connect to the MECC system. Ah, those were the days. Funny how we get nostalgic for things that, honestly, really sucked.)
A proper coder can write a pretty info kiosk app or an unseen device driver, a database frontend or a file system, a dynamic web page or an HTTP server, a quick shell script or an operating system from scratch. He or she can extract the nth element of a list using nothing but car and cdr, or generate a complete app with a few clicks in the latest visual framework, and can write elegant code in Ruby, Smalltalk, C++, Java, Fortran, assembly language, and even BASIC. Specialization is for insects. ;)
Bwahahahaha! Good one... thanks.
On a related note: people still take benchmarks seriously? Seriously?! After all this time? Do we never learn? *sigh*
In my experience, hardly anything ever needs to be reworked, but that's because I code in the other direction -- develop under Mono, then make sure it runs under M$ stuff too.
Although, TBH, I only do this for a couple of projects where Mono/.NET is a requirement. If it were entirely up to me, the whole project in question would be Perl/PHP/Ruby/Python/C++/oh-my-gods-anything-but-Mono-halp!!!
Okay, is that link supposed to be an illustration of the truth of that statement, or a counter-example intended to disprove it? It could be read either way...
For the record, I consider it a given that in modern times, no one in their right mind would write an entire OS (regardless of language). And I this as someone who's written one. I certainly know I'm nuts...
There are libraries out there available to just install and link to. But it certainly would be nice if some of this stuff got into the Standard C libs, so that all you needed was something like:
#include <stdgcmem.h>
... and off you go on your merry way.
The argument against would be that not everyone has the same needs from such a library, but it's a spurious one. Not everyone has the same needs from an I/O library, which is why there are a million alternatives to <stdio.h>, that doesn't mean you can't provide at least one standard library, and let those with other needs link to something else instead.
Indeed. With many languages, I don't really know exactly what kind of machine code will be generated from a statement, and looking at the output with a disassembler can be shocking. With C, I can pretty much tell you exactly what machine code is going to be generated (assuming I'm familiar with the target processor), and generally the output from a disassembler looks like something somewhere between "pretty much what I thought" and "exactly what I thought", with the tendency being towards the latter. Without using "asm" you don't have direct access to the target processor's unique features, but that's beside the point -- C pretty much really is portable assembly language, you only use "asm" when you're deliberately doing something non-portable.
Sooner or later, everything comes down to machine code, so at the heart of any system you're going to find some sort of assembly language, no matter what becomes popular at the higher levels. To date, no one's come up with a better portable assembler than C, so its place in the grand scheme of things is pretty secure.
I think they do understand. That's why they're doing in this way. Knowing that $3 mil isn't going to cover the costs, they're instead letting the developer charge real money for a real game, something the developer couldn't do if NASA paid them the paltry $3 mil.
Ha, yeah that was my question. Pardon me for thinking there's no such thing as a weapon that's both lethal and humane. Killing people in inhumane no matter how you slice it.
Is your second sentence a non sequitur, or are you asserting that the only good reason to recycle things is to save energy? I've actually never heard that as a reason. Usually, the reason for recycling is to avoid depleting a resource (we're going to run out of that metal eventually if we keep this up), or despoiling the environment further (sure there's plenty more of that metal around, but do we want more strip-mines?), or just filling landfills unnecessarily (glass is silicon, the most abundant element on earth -- sure we're never going to run out and don't need to destroy the environment mining it, but why keep filling landfills with it if we can find something else to do with it?). Saving energy is not even in the top three reasons for recycling, although if there are cases where you *can* save energy by doing so, that's a pretty nice benefit.
No one's suggesting Martian-scale mega-dust-storms. Rising on electrostatic repulsion alone, and lacking any great wind to blow it about, this would not be visible with any telescope from Earth, or even from lunar orbit.