To make a SOAP call, one's software must build an XML document and an HTTP request, and send them together.
So? It's just an HTTP POST request. The XML document is probably less than 500 bytes long. It's no more expensive than POST-ing a typical HTML form (which is what browsers do for a living).
To handle a SOAP request, the software must not only handle the HTTP protocol, but also build a DOM tree from the request body and act on the nodes of that tree.
So? Acting on the request itself (e.g. "buy 10 roses") is likely to be 100x slower than building the DOM tree. DOM trees get built all the time for HTML documents. Why is building an XML DOM tree any worse?
The point is that while SOAP may not be the most lightning-fast way to accomplish a particular remote method invocation, it is extremely scalable and flexible. Just like web browsing. Or maybe you think the web is already a serious abuse of CPU power?
You may or may not like.NET, but SOAP web services are very likely to be the architecture for distributed, cross-platform, firewall-friendly development in the near future.
Nope -- distributing source only works for open source projects (duh)..NET will not require/support apps that distribute their source code. This would require everyone to have the.NET compilers on their desktops, which will not happen.
What you're thinking of is the fact that.NET will compile down to bytecodes that are interpreted by a "common language runtime" engine. Nothing new here -- it's just like a Java VM.
First of all, parameterized types come from C++, not C, so you'd be introducing part of something foreign to the language without introducing all of it (e.g. mystruct<long>).
Second, the whole idea of short, int, and long is source-level (not binary) portability -- so there is no standard size for any of them. All that you can assume is that sizeof(long) <= sizeof(int) <= sizeof(short). I'm not saying this was necessarily the best idea (hence all the typedefs for INT32, etc.), but it is pretty neat if you have to write a C compiler on a platform with, say, 29-bit words. So specifying the size of the type as you suggest would run counter to the C philosohpy.
Remember that electoral votes are allocated to states based on their population. Thus, eliminating the winner-takes-all allocation of electoral votes would result in a system that is nearly identical to a direct popular election. As you suggest, this would serve to reinforce the dominance of urban centers in populous states. (The only difference being the rounding errors introduced when divvying up each state's electoral votes.)
IMO, this is one of the best arguments for Free software -- figuring out what you're supposedlly allowed to do with a piece of non-free software gets to be like figuring the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
Mmm-hmm. And figuring out what you can and can't do with GPL'ed software is like having to name each angel after you've counted it.
First of all, even an evil company that does these horrible things (gasp, new file formats!) can't force you to buy new software.
Second, you seem to think there's some sort of magical pixie dust that OSS developers sprinkle on their software that makes it immune from these same issues. To take a small example from the Lego Mindstorm world, consider the incompatibility between NQC 1.1. and 2.0 -- I don't think anyone's accusing the NQC author of evilly forcing users to upgrade. The simple truth is that introducing incompatiblity into new software is sometimes an unfortunate necessity (the grace with which this problem is handled is a good indication of the developers' skills -- consider the Office 95->97 debacle).
Deluded thinking like this (not to mention the lunkheaded Score:3, Insightful moderation) does nothing but cast doubt on the Slashdot community's objectivity and the entire OSS movement.
It's true that there are only 3 input "ports", but it's possible to pile more than one sensor on a single port. For example, you can put a touch sensor and a light sensor on the same port and then use a little logic in the code to distinguish between the two. (I've never tried this, but that's the theory anyway.)
No. Radioactivity is a an atomic-level property that is unaffected by chemical re-arrangement of said atoms.
The article actually says that "the superbug does not neutralize radioactivity in metals", but only after strongly implying the opposite. Poor writing.
This double standard can be seen on Slashdot daily: Simply witness open source advocates boasting that "all bugs are shallow" because so many people review the source code. Then, when an embarrassing bug is pointed out, witness the same advocates chiding us to pity the poor programmers who work for free -- if we really cared, they say, we'd join the project instead of critizing them.
No, it's like saying that hammers are dangerous because if you hit too many nails with them, you'll start encountering lots more nails that can't be hammered. This can be a big problem if you need to hammer nails.
Handy rule of thumb: Never underestimate the power of evolution.
After all wouldn't 98 take up a horrendous amount of space?
Do you mean space on the display, space in memory, or space on the hard drive?
I know it's physically small, but I wouldn't really compare this thing to a handheld. It's got a 10 inch "virtual" screen, which gives plenty of real estate (enough to make WinCE look silly, I'd think). It's got 64MB of memory -- also more than enough for Win98. They don't state the size of the hard drive, but, as we all know, you can pack plenty of storage in a small volume these days.
BTW, thank you for the reasonable reply. It sure would be nice to see/. become a bastion of truly free thought (not as in beer) rather than being limited to politically correct flamewars about how many angels can dance on the head of a software license.
At least you attempted to make a point, rather than just throw mud around.
So please do tell me how Win98 is "cumbersome" for such a device. And in comparison to what? Would you prefer a lean, mean CLI for this keyboardless system?
Is it really necessary to say "ick" (or something similar) every time a MS product is mentioned? I think most of the folks visiting Slashdot know enough about software to have our own opinions of, say, Win98. Hopefully, most of us can also see both the bad and the good in such products, and don't need CmdrTaco coaching us.
Bottom line: It's juvenile, and it makes Slashdot look bad.
The big bang was still an explosion -- just an explosion of space, not an explosion in space.
If you're not careful, the balloon analogy shows how a 2D universe (the surface of the balloon) expands from the viewpoint of a 3D observer outside the universe. (Pause for headscratching.) To get the right effect, you have to imagine that you're a 2D creature experiencing the expansion from a point on the surface of the balloon.
The analogy is particularly appropriate for this discussion because it also demonstrates how a universe can have curvature. In the case of a balloon, the curvature of the surface is positive. 2D creatures living is such a universe could deduce this fact by measuring the angles of a triangle and noticing that their sum is greater than 180 degrees.
Translation of the analogy -- from a positive-curvature 2D ballon universe to our flat 3D real universe -- is left as an excerise for the reader...
The trailer is well worth watching. It's interesting to single-step through the opening frames as they flip through the channels on the tube. There are shots of the chess guy who shows up later on in the movie, the original desk lamp short (sorry I don't know the names of the shorts), and a very well-built blonde... selling sunglasses? Lot's of other weird stuff, too. I'd be interested to know where it all came from.
Thanks for the response. You sending press releases to Slashdot doesn't really bother me. I just wish that you and/. had made it clearer that it was not you who "browsed through ZDNet" one day, but rather that you were the OSO webmaster publicising your site.
I felt deceived, simple as that. No biggie, but worth pointing out, I think. Maybe you're right that my beef is with/. editors more than you.
Slashdot Mirror
To make a SOAP call, one's software must build an XML document and an HTTP request, and send them together.
So? It's just an HTTP POST request. The XML document is probably less than 500 bytes long. It's no more expensive than POST-ing a typical HTML form (which is what browsers do for a living).
To handle a SOAP request, the software must not only handle the HTTP protocol, but also build a DOM tree from the request body and act on the nodes of that tree.
So? Acting on the request itself (e.g. "buy 10 roses") is likely to be 100x slower than building the DOM tree. DOM trees get built all the time for HTML documents. Why is building an XML DOM tree any worse?
The point is that while SOAP may not be the most lightning-fast way to accomplish a particular remote method invocation, it is extremely scalable and flexible. Just like web browsing. Or maybe you think the web is already a serious abuse of CPU power?
-- Brian
You may or may not like .NET, but SOAP web services are very likely to be the architecture for distributed, cross-platform, firewall-friendly development in the near future.
Check out XMethods for live examples.
-- Brian
Nope -- distributing source only works for open source projects (duh). .NET will not require/support apps that distribute their source code. This would require everyone to have the .NET compilers on their desktops, which will not happen.
What you're thinking of is the fact that .NET will compile down to bytecodes that are interpreted by a "common language runtime" engine. Nothing new here -- it's just like a Java VM.
-- Brian
"Precompiled binaries"? As if there were some other kind of binary?
-- Brian
First of all, parameterized types come from C++, not C, so you'd be introducing part of something foreign to the language without introducing all of it (e.g. mystruct<long>).
Second, the whole idea of short, int, and long is source-level (not binary) portability -- so there is no standard size for any of them. All that you can assume is that sizeof(long) <= sizeof(int) <= sizeof(short). I'm not saying this was necessarily the best idea (hence all the typedefs for INT32, etc.), but it is pretty neat if you have to write a C compiler on a platform with, say, 29-bit words. So specifying the size of the type as you suggest would run counter to the C philosohpy.
Other than that, it's a great idea.<grin>
Remember that electoral votes are allocated to states based on their population. Thus, eliminating the winner-takes-all allocation of electoral votes would result in a system that is nearly identical to a direct popular election. As you suggest, this would serve to reinforce the dominance of urban centers in populous states. (The only difference being the rounding errors introduced when divvying up each state's electoral votes.)
-- BrianIMO, this is one of the best arguments for Free software -- figuring out what you're supposedlly allowed to do with a piece of non-free software gets to be like figuring the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.
Mmm-hmm. And figuring out what you can and can't do with GPL'ed software is like having to name each angel after you've counted it.
Talk about nitpicky. Next you'll tell us that the area of a circle isn't pi*r^2, but actually 0 because a circle is "all planar curve".
I think it's commonly understood that the "volume of a sphere" denotes the volume of the space enclosed by the sphere.
Grammar-check too. I'm still trying to figure out what "Sony Plans To A New Toy: Airboard" means.
First of all, even an evil company that does these horrible things (gasp, new file formats!) can't force you to buy new software.
Second, you seem to think there's some sort of magical pixie dust that OSS developers sprinkle on their software that makes it immune from these same issues. To take a small example from the Lego Mindstorm world, consider the incompatibility between NQC 1.1. and 2.0 -- I don't think anyone's accusing the NQC author of evilly forcing users to upgrade. The simple truth is that introducing incompatiblity into new software is sometimes an unfortunate necessity (the grace with which this problem is handled is a good indication of the developers' skills -- consider the Office 95->97 debacle).
Deluded thinking like this (not to mention the lunkheaded Score:3, Insightful moderation) does nothing but cast doubt on the Slashdot community's objectivity and the entire OSS movement.
It's true that there are only 3 input "ports", but it's possible to pile more than one sensor on a single port. For example, you can put a touch sensor and a light sensor on the same port and then use a little logic in the code to distinguish between the two. (I've never tried this, but that's the theory anyway.)
Give me a break. What does that have to do with OSS? No one can really force you to upgrade closed software either, right?
No. Radioactivity is a an atomic-level property that is unaffected by chemical re-arrangement of said atoms.
The article actually says that "the superbug does not neutralize radioactivity in metals", but only after strongly implying the opposite. Poor writing.
-- Brian
This double standard can be seen on Slashdot daily: Simply witness open source advocates boasting that "all bugs are shallow" because so many people review the source code. Then, when an embarrassing bug is pointed out, witness the same advocates chiding us to pity the poor programmers who work for free -- if we really cared, they say, we'd join the project instead of critizing them.
Feh.
No, it's like saying that hammers are dangerous because if you hit too many nails with them, you'll start encountering lots more nails that can't be hammered. This can be a big problem if you need to hammer nails.
Handy rule of thumb: Never underestimate the power of evolution.
--Brian
Don't forget about Cool, Microsoft's rumored clean-room Java knock-off.
Waiting for the other shoe to drop...
-- Brian
No fair padding your homework by repeating the same text over and over.
I count 10 occurrences of the paragraph that begins "How did this ever happen?". Methinks an editing goof has occurred.
-- Brian
I didn't know the resolution was only 320x240. Where does it say that?
-- Brian
CLI = Command Line Interface
-- Brian
After all wouldn't 98 take up a horrendous amount of space?
Do you mean space on the display, space in memory, or space on the hard drive?
I know it's physically small, but I wouldn't really compare this thing to a handheld. It's got a 10 inch "virtual" screen, which gives plenty of real estate (enough to make WinCE look silly, I'd think). It's got 64MB of memory -- also more than enough for Win98. They don't state the size of the hard drive, but, as we all know, you can pack plenty of storage in a small volume these days.
BTW, thank you for the reasonable reply. It sure would be nice to see /. become a bastion of truly free thought (not as in beer) rather than being limited to politically correct flamewars about how many angels can dance on the head of a software license.
-- Brian
At least you attempted to make a point, rather than just throw mud around.
So please do tell me how Win98 is "cumbersome" for such a device. And in comparison to what? Would you prefer a lean, mean CLI for this keyboardless system?
-- Brian
Is it really necessary to say "ick" (or something similar) every time a MS product is mentioned? I think most of the folks visiting Slashdot know enough about software to have our own opinions of, say, Win98. Hopefully, most of us can also see both the bad and the good in such products, and don't need CmdrTaco coaching us.
Bottom line: It's juvenile, and it makes Slashdot look bad.
-- Brian
The big bang was still an explosion -- just an explosion of space, not an explosion in space.
If you're not careful, the balloon analogy shows how a 2D universe (the surface of the balloon) expands from the viewpoint of a 3D observer outside the universe. (Pause for headscratching.) To get the right effect, you have to imagine that you're a 2D creature experiencing the expansion from a point on the surface of the balloon.
The analogy is particularly appropriate for this discussion because it also demonstrates how a universe can have curvature. In the case of a balloon, the curvature of the surface is positive. 2D creatures living is such a universe could deduce this fact by measuring the angles of a triangle and noticing that their sum is greater than 180 degrees.
Translation of the analogy -- from a positive-curvature 2D ballon universe to our flat 3D real universe -- is left as an excerise for the reader...
The trailer is well worth watching. It's interesting to single-step through the opening frames as they flip through the channels on the tube. There are shots of the chess guy who shows up later on in the movie, the original desk lamp short (sorry I don't know the names of the shorts), and a very well-built blonde... selling sunglasses? Lot's of other weird stuff, too. I'd be interested to know where it all came from.
--Brian
Thanks for the response. You sending press releases to Slashdot doesn't really bother me. I just wish that you and /. had made it clearer that it was not you who "browsed through ZDNet" one day, but rather that you were the OSO webmaster publicising your site.
/. editors more than you.
I felt deceived, simple as that. No biggie, but worth pointing out, I think. Maybe you're right that my beef is with
-- Brian