mob justice maybe, but certainly not wisdom. this nonsense has turned the internet into one big soap box with very little meaningful content. So read at +4. Yes you miss a lot, mostly dupes and stupidity. A good fraction of the worthwhile stuff actually gets voted up, and certainly enough that all the major points on a topic get covered.
Oh, you're talking about Wikipedia and not Slashdot?
Tk: Tk is still a relevant and up-to-date toolkit. As of the latest release (8.5) it has a comprehensive collection of theme-able widgets that look native on Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. It looks like shit on Linux, not native. On Win and OSX, it's great. But for sure not under Ubuntu, and I bet that's also true under other Linux flavours. Additional work on themes needed I think.
The problem with TCL is that it is a single pass parser, not a normal expression (recursive descent) parser like other languages. You are aware that the language compiler uses recursive descent?
This makes it the programmers job to worry about interpolation. A real pain, getting all the evals right. Hardly anyone uses evals these days.
Just like shell programming, but then I work with people who love KSH, bash, etc. I've never understood that masochistic behavior. Tcl's different to the shells in that it does exactly one round of substitution (unless you go out of your way to run something through again, but that's possible in many languages). Shells can do many rounds of substitution on a single string as well as splitting it up into many words, and though convenient, it makes writing secure code in them very challenging. (The only time I do proper shell hacking these days is when I'm working with autoconf and friends. But I prefer to not think about auto*...)
Why you should not use Tcl Gosh, now that's an ancient reference (about 14 years old) that's full of BS (and has been for well over a decade). About the only point I'd concede is that Tcl still isn't keen on linked lists, which is on the grounds that for most code a vector (i.e. collection indexable by numeric position) is a better choice.
What happened to Perl? Well judging from the look of it, I'd say it was run over by a car, then hit by a train, then had a nasty encounter with stampeding bison, then got a nasty infection from a facehugger, then beaten up by Ripley and was then promptly nuked from orbit. It's for the best, it was in a great deal of pain and nobody wants to live like that.
Seriously though, that's one ugly language. I always got the impression it's what the inventor of Brainfuck would hallucinate about if he were actually on crystal meth. There, fixed that for you.
Now that we have Gnome/GTK, wxWidgets and KDE/QT bindings for Python, Perl, Ruby and a slew of other scripting languages, the easiest way to make a simple GUI application is with PyGTK;) (Heh! Just a little humor for you Perl/Ruby/Qt/KDE/wxWidgets/etc. people) Then it will look poor on Windows and terrible on OSX. For most professional GUI developers, those are far more important platforms than Linux. FWIW, making things look good on OSX takes quite a lot of work if you're not used to using the native tools for that platform, and OSX apps tend to look bizarre on any other platform too; porting's just a pain in all cases. (If you wish to dispute this point, do so with screenshots...)
A C compiler can still outperform a JVM under ideal conditions, but ideal conditions are becoming more scarce for C compilers. In real-world terms, the JVM is going to be able to run your average Java code far faster than your average C/C++ code. The truth is that most average code, whether in C, C++, or Java, is a pile of rubbish that's difficult for the compiler to make go really fast. The problem is usually that average programmers tend to not be aware of what operations are expensive, and hence do truly stupid things (and most string handling out there in all three languages is a classic example of this shocking tale, alas).
We know that many of our emails never reach their destination. [citation needed] I call bullshit on that one. Maybe if the author of the original story stopped sending out spam, more of his or her messages would get through.
Because 90% of stuff labeled 'mission critical' actually isn't. Also, much of what is mission critical is only that way over a longer timespan. For example, the system for paying people's salaries in most enterprises is mission critical (if it fails and people don't get paid, the excrement will truly impact the ventilator) but it can probably tolerate a downtime of a minute at nearly any time, and could arguably be taken down for several days if done at the right time of month. By contrast, a failure in an aircraft's fly-by-wire system during a flight is in a different league. But that's why avionics are far more expensive to develop.
"Mission critical" isn't a useful term unless you define the mission and the cost of failure of the mission.
[...] head straight for the telecom gear. I guarantee as you're pulling out the PBX, somebody will show up with a check for the amount owed - it's damn hard to do any business without a phone switch! Something that I've heard works well for retail businesses is to seize their cash registers when the store is open and busy.
But I do like the idea of the telecom gear. Large network switches would be another possibility; completely cutting the company off will be noticed...
And here I thought it was because Yahoo's pages are as fugly and user-hostile as Microsoft's. Yahoo's main page is terrible, but try http://search.yahoo.com/ which is like a stripped down version (!) of Google.
Yeah, you're still not getting it. The US government often likes to listen to cell phone conversations in, say, oh, I don't know, Iraq? Syria? A lot of other places where GSM is the cheapest technology available. Some governments like to do the same thing inside the USA. There aint no getting a wiretap when you're an agent for a foreign government. While this is indeed true, I'd be more worried about private-sector people from Russia or Nigeria.
Though in my case, if they listened in what they'd find out is that "I'm On The Train", and "I'm Going To Be A Bit Late". Earth-shattering stuff!
When I pay for a service that claims 'unlimited' internet access, I'd say I've payed quite enough. Don't give me shit because *gasp* Comcast doesn't (or can't) give me what I payed for. To me, it seems like one of the roots of the problem is that Comcast et al are using false advertising. If there are caps, they should say so up front, before you pay anything. If they're blocking some services, they should say so up front, before you pay anything.
The other problem is that the FCC seem to be a terrible regulator. A bigger display of craven grovelling in the general direction of those that are supposed to be regulated I've not seen since, well,... Hmm, I can't think of anything right now that's not contemporaneous. Help me out here!
Your biased, you're still pissed off at them for the flying Daleks. Not necessarily. I remember seeing that signature here well before the comparatively recent revival of Dr. Who. (Alas,/. doesn't store signatures in saved comments, so chasing down when their history is quite difficult...)
I don't want to talk about why I remember such things.
If they can't get those details right, they might as well not try to do a "native" theme at all. So the Linux look and feel will do for OSX too? Cool! Less work for them, and that means a production release sooner.
The answer, as I see it, is computer-generated metadata... at which point, why not just build that functionality into your search engine? Yahoo are already doing that. If you go to their search page, enter some search term (e.g. "linux") and search. Now, on the results page there should be a little arrow down at the bottom of the top bar; click on that and it will open up a panel that includes concepts linked to the search terms (and also possible refinements of the search). I know (from talking to the people at Yahoo) that they're deriving the concepts automatically from their spidered data, and it works really well.
How resistant is it to spam? No idea, to be honest!
Re:Make working with XML suck less...
on
The Future of XML
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· Score: 1
SOAP web services have become anything but simple; the proliferation of extensions are often abbreviated "WS-*" (AKA the WS-Death Star). Granted, many extensions do nifty things - for example, WS-Transaction adds transaction support across multiple web service calls. The base layers of WS-* (I like your name for it!) are not great, but the higher-level parts (e.g. the specs related to WS-Security and WS-Trust) are a big step forward on ReST. Or rather, if you were doing all those things in ReST, you'd have to reinvent the complexity that is in WS-* and then you'd be back where you are now. But without a hope of interoperability with anyone or anything, and probably with a whole bunch of subtle bugs. OTOH, you'll avoid WS-MetadataExchange and so won't be all that disadvantaged...
Complex stuff is complex because it is. Formatting sleight of hand can't really do much to hide that.
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?"
on
The Future of XML
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· Score: 3, Insightful
My problems with JSON are:
No schema: XML Schema not only makes it easier to unit test, but it can be fed into tools that can do useful things like automatic creation of Java classes and code to read/write. Does JSON have anything like that? Of course not, because it would defeat JSON's purpose: easy Javascript data transmission.
While I hate XML Schema, it's still better for many uses than just throwing random crap on the wire and hoping that the other end can make sense of it. And no, throwing some javascript on the wire as well doesn't help that much. I want the computer to do stuff with the data without having to ship a program specifically for the purpose; after all, I can't think of all the purposes for the data right now and I want to let others come up with new cool stuff too.
XPath. 'Nuff said. Ok, one thing: this should have replaced SAX/DOM years ago.
I use a DOM library that includes XPath support so that I can simply do a search starting at any node. It makes working with DOM much more pleasant.
I hate it when humans have to write XML to configure something though. That really ticks me off. Simpler stuff works quite well when you've got configuration of software from a single vendor, but when you've got to combine stuff from lots of sources, XML stops being quite such a bad choice. (If only people who edit config files would actually demonstrate an ability to write well-formed XML though. Idiots...)
Security in American airports is a joke, despite its invasiveness and time-consuming nature. Speaking as someone who's done quite a lot of travelling over the past few years on 3 continents, there are three main problems with security at US airports. Firstly, they're not hiring enough security staff. Secondly, too many passengers just don't believe that "shoes off", "no liquids" and "put metallic stuff through the scanner" mean just that (whether or not they're effective measures is a separate issue, but if you're prepared they take seconds). Thirdly, they don't segregate arrivals from departures (which means if there's a problem in one place, there's a problem everywhere).
The first of those problems is basically down to the fact that airports and airlines are cheapskates; you get what you pay for.
The second of those problems is a matter of passenger education and human stupidity (alas) but can be alleviated by using unified queues rather an a queue per scanner (well known result from queueing theory). And FYI it takes me less than a minute to clear security when I'm in the US during summer because I'm prepared for it (OK, it's longer during the cooler months because of the time to do my shoes up again).
The third problem is intractable without major redesign of airports; US airports simply don't do that sort of thing and don't have the space to retrofit it.
IPV6 is a net admin's worst nighmare for security, next to unpatched machines. Any admin's worst nightmare is "users". Without those pesky users, they'd be doing just fine!
Expect the big brother database to go online some time around 2050, only be able to store first names, and crash losing all data the first time someone tries to run a query. I fully expect them to build it with the assumption that first names are usable as primary keys.
Second Reality is considered by many to be the Ur-Demo, and I'm not entirely sure why; it's not a revolutionary milestone in the evolution of demomaking, merely a refinement of a lot of effects and design choices which had existed previously (notably in Future Crew's own "Panic" demo, released a couple months earlier). It's not that the demo is the most technically advanced, it's that it is a perfect combination of all the bits and pieces (especially the synching of the sound track). Demos are a form of art, and can be stupendous even if they're not at the very cutting edge; after all, there's lots of paintings out there that aren't cutting edge either, and yet they still pack a shitload of power.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, you're talking about Wikipedia and not Slashdot?
Seriously though, that's one ugly language. I always got the impression it's what the inventor of Brainfuck would hallucinate about if he were actually on crystal meth. There, fixed that for you.
"Mission critical" isn't a useful term unless you define the mission and the cost of failure of the mission.
But I do like the idea of the telecom gear. Large network switches would be another possibility; completely cutting the company off will be noticed...
Though in my case, if they listened in what they'd find out is that "I'm On The Train", and "I'm Going To Be A Bit Late". Earth-shattering stuff!
The other problem is that the FCC seem to be a terrible regulator. A bigger display of craven grovelling in the general direction of those that are supposed to be regulated I've not seen since, well,
I don't want to talk about why I remember such things.
How resistant is it to spam? No idea, to be honest!
Complex stuff is complex because it is. Formatting sleight of hand can't really do much to hide that.
- No schema: XML Schema not only makes it easier to unit test, but it can be fed into tools that can do useful things like automatic creation of Java classes and code to read/write. Does JSON have anything like that? Of course not, because it would defeat JSON's purpose: easy Javascript data transmission.
While I hate XML Schema, it's still better for many uses than just throwing random crap on the wire and hoping that the other end can make sense of it. And no, throwing some javascript on the wire as well doesn't help that much. I want the computer to do stuff with the data without having to ship a program specifically for the purpose; after all, I can't think of all the purposes for the data right now and I want to let others come up with new cool stuff too.- XPath. 'Nuff said. Ok, one thing: this should have replaced SAX/DOM years ago.
I use a DOM library that includes XPath support so that I can simply do a search starting at any node. It makes working with DOM much more pleasant. I hate it when humans have to write XML to configure something though. That really ticks me off. Simpler stuff works quite well when you've got configuration of software from a single vendor, but when you've got to combine stuff from lots of sources, XML stops being quite such a bad choice. (If only people who edit config files would actually demonstrate an ability to write well-formed XML though. Idiots...)The first of those problems is basically down to the fact that airports and airlines are cheapskates; you get what you pay for.
The second of those problems is a matter of passenger education and human stupidity (alas) but can be alleviated by using unified queues rather an a queue per scanner (well known result from queueing theory). And FYI it takes me less than a minute to clear security when I'm in the US during summer because I'm prepared for it (OK, it's longer during the cooler months because of the time to do my shoes up again).
The third problem is intractable without major redesign of airports; US airports simply don't do that sort of thing and don't have the space to retrofit it.