Yes. Stop making a law for every possible way you can not focus on driving (e.g. law against texting and driving, law against talking on phone and driving, etc.). Just make driving erratic a crime commensurate with a DUI and be done with it.
I've heard this complaint more times than I can count, especially from the slashdot crowd. I used to agree with the sentiment, even. After all, why have 17 laws when you can have one that abstractly covers all the cases?
I'll tell you why: Because legal code is not computer code, and code size is not one of the factors being optimized. The seventeen laws aren't there for the sake of efficiency. The seventeen laws are there to remind people in very explicit terms (rather than abstract ones) that the thing they are doing is against the law. Texting on your cell phone is the same as distracted driving, sure. But by enumerating it explicitly, the redundant-but-specific law drives home the point that [i]this specific thing is against the law[/i]. It also generally results in news announcements reminding motorists that the new law goes into effect next month, which further drives home the point and reduces accidents.
And that's the point of these laws. To reduce accidents. Just because it is contrary to efficient coding practices does not mean that it is without merit.
Suppose the OS provides multiple interfaces: interface S, which is an industry standard and interface P that has more innovative features but is proprietary. The developer now has a choice whether he wants the features bad enough to use interface P and write multiple ports of his app, or just stick to interface S and write a single source app that works on all platforms.
I think that's a great idea! We'll call interface S "the web" and interface P "apps".
So glad we could come to an agreement on this thorny point.
Standardization means the web developer does not have to develop a one unique webpage for each browser+OS combination. Instead he develops for just one standard.
You've just described Java. Which has had limited (not nonexistent, but limited) success in the application space.
There is no fundamental difference other than the webpages are standardized and the interface between apps and the OS is not standardized. They are fundamentally the same -- apps can be converted to websites and vice versa.
If you really, truly believe this, you've never developed anything more than a trivial example of an application or a web page. Or you're (as someone else accused you of being) John Chen. A complete idiot.
A webpage works the same on Windows, Linux and OSX and works in many browsers as well.
I think you're being deliberately obtuse. But I'll play along, just because I enjoy taunting obtuse people.
Strictly speaking, your statement is false. Subtle and even not-so-subtle differences exist in the rendering and even behavior of web pages as they appear on different platforms, much to the consternation of web developers everywhere. That said, these differences have become less-so over time, partially as a result of consolidation of the main two browsers on a single code base, which in fact has now split and will probably diverge again in the near future.
But for the sake of argument, let's ignore those differences.
So if OS APIs were to be similarly standardized like the web, a developer would not have to port his app to a different platform -- it would work on multiple OSes without any change in source.
Ignoring the fact that it took two decades to get to this level of standardization in the web space, and ignoring the fact that web standards move at a glacial pace compared to the rest of the computer industry, the main problem with your suggestion is that (as I have said elsewhere) you are now stuck with a lowest-common-denominator situation, where developers can't really take advantage of platform-specific features until the standardization catches up. That removes almost ALL the incentive for one platform to innovate or otherwise distinguish itself from another platform. Which is exactly the situation we have with the web today.
And voila! You got your wish. Widespread standardization across all platforms. It's called the web.
So the Blackberry CEO is right that OS APIs should be uniform (or neutral) across of all mobile devices so as to allow small OS vendors entering the market and reducing development and increasing profits for developers.
That arrangement conveniently ignores that a uniform OS API would effectively reduce all platforms to the lowest-common-denominator. It would also eliminate any chance of one platform doing anything to stand out against the sea of other platforms, which would in turn eliminate competition on all points except price. Goodbye, innovation. Goodbye, progress.
It's quite a bit like the Android hardware landscape right now, in fact. Yuck.
Why are you for net neutrality and against app neutrality (or whatever it's called)? This CEO should be applauded for bringing up this issue.
Because they are fundamentally different than each other. Net neutrality requires inaction on the part of the ISPs, i.e. "do not favor one service over another". This so-called "app neutrality" requires that anyone developing an application is obligated to provide it for all platforms, independent of whether it is in their best interests to do so, and independent of whether the developer has the resources to meet that obligation.
It is only by ignoring this fundamental difference that you can even attempt to equate net neutrality and "app neutrality". It is, however, intellectually dishonest to do so.
It also helps blind people who might need to cross the street.
And what if they are deaf as well as blind? What accommodations should we make for those pedestrians?
Perhaps we should mandate that all electric cards must shoot a stream of water 100 feet ahead of them at all times, just in case a deaf and blind pedestrian happens to be present.
So the Blackberry CEO is right that OS APIs should be uniform (or neutral) across of all mobile devices so as to allow small OS vendors entering the market and reducing development and increasing profits for developers.
A Christian who commits the mortal sin of killing another human may still seek forgiveness from God. You seem to be arguing that between the moment that person commits the sin and the point where they are forgiven by God (which is in itself an indistinct boundary), that person is not a Christian. This is simply not the case, nor the way any rational person would define the faith of that sinner. If they were Christian before they committed the sin and they are remorsefully seeking forgiveness, they are still Christian in any and every way that matters.
Seriously, you cannot kill as a Christian, because 1. you can't kill 2. being Christian is defined by your actions, not your label.
How convenient! Also, utterly and completely without merit. Killing in Christianity is undoubtedly a sin (and a grave one at that), but being a sinner does not in any way exclude one from being a Christian.
Honestly, you win the Most Transparent Attempt at Deception award for that post.
Marxism is not a religion in any way. It has similar qualities of a religion, just like you can find similarities between a truck and a wheel barrel, but they are very different.
There is a reason why faith and religion are different words in the English language. Just because something requires faith does not make it religious in nature.
Highlighting is mine. Penguinisto qualified his statement, which you willfully ignored.
Except that in the UK, the ban -- which they take very, very seriously -- actually DOES result in significantly less gun violence.
You may be personally opposed to a ban, but you can't argue in good faith that a bans can't EVER work when we have very clear examples of bans doing exactly what they set out to do.
How much would it cost you to buy a (lawful) copy of the entire library available through Pandora or Spotify?
I don't think that's really a meaningful question. The much better question is: how much would it cost you to buy a lawful copy of everything you might reasonably listen to on Pandora?
If the corporations were actually in violation of tax laws, your statement might be meaningful. If you want corporations to pay more taxes, that's fine. Tell your congresscritter to change the laws. Alleging that they are not paying taxes that the law requires them to pay, however, does not square with the known facts.
A language is low level if almost all of the features of the hardware can be directly translated into the language. See, you've got it backwards. You want it to be the other way around, but when its the way you want then its trivial to get to the argument that BASIC is low level too.
Another segment of the "C is low level" crowd focuses on pointers. You are all wrong. Was paying attention when the language was invented. Always understood to be a high level language until the snobs came.
"Low level" is relative. Yes, C was understood to be a high level language when it was invented over 40 years ago. Times have changed. If you were paying attention to anything since then, you'd realize that C occupies a space pretty low down in the language landscape.
(And yes, I am a C programmer, first and foremost).
But your sig tells me all I need to know about you.
Even further off-topic... And an ad-hominem to boot.
IMHO, That's not actually an ad hominem. The conclusion that gunnnnslinger reached based on your sig was unstated. Your interpretation was that said conclusion was negative. That's on you, and perhaps says something additional about you that your sig didn't.
And for the record, I don't happen to think that making profits is inherently evil.
I'd much rather live in a world with a made-up "Intel monopoly" that doesn't exist where Intel is literally the largest contributor to the Linux kernel that isn't a Linux-specific company (look it up, Intel is usually #3 right after the Linux foundation & Red Hat) vs. the very real ARM monopoly of intellectual property minefields, backdoored binary firmward blobs, opaque drivers, and poor support.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Stop making a law for every possible way you can not focus on driving (e.g. law against texting and driving, law against talking on phone and driving, etc.). Just make driving erratic a crime commensurate with a DUI and be done with it.
I've heard this complaint more times than I can count, especially from the slashdot crowd. I used to agree with the sentiment, even. After all, why have 17 laws when you can have one that abstractly covers all the cases?
I'll tell you why: Because legal code is not computer code, and code size is not one of the factors being optimized. The seventeen laws aren't there for the sake of efficiency. The seventeen laws are there to remind people in very explicit terms (rather than abstract ones) that the thing they are doing is against the law. Texting on your cell phone is the same as distracted driving, sure. But by enumerating it explicitly, the redundant-but-specific law drives home the point that [i]this specific thing is against the law[/i]. It also generally results in news announcements reminding motorists that the new law goes into effect next month, which further drives home the point and reduces accidents.
And that's the point of these laws. To reduce accidents. Just because it is contrary to efficient coding practices does not mean that it is without merit.
Suppose the OS provides multiple interfaces: interface S, which is an industry standard and interface P that has more innovative features but is proprietary. The developer now has a choice whether he wants the features bad enough to use interface P and write multiple ports of his app, or just stick to interface S and write a single source app that works on all platforms.
I think that's a great idea! We'll call interface S "the web" and interface P "apps".
So glad we could come to an agreement on this thorny point.
Additional commentary:
Standardization means the web developer does not have to develop a one unique webpage for each browser+OS combination. Instead he develops for just one standard.
You've just described Java. Which has had limited (not nonexistent, but limited) success in the application space.
There is no fundamental difference other than the webpages are standardized and the interface between apps and the OS is not standardized. They are fundamentally the same -- apps can be converted to websites and vice versa.
If you really, truly believe this, you've never developed anything more than a trivial example of an application or a web page. Or you're (as someone else accused you of being) John Chen. A complete idiot.
A webpage works the same on Windows, Linux and OSX and works in many browsers as well.
I think you're being deliberately obtuse. But I'll play along, just because I enjoy taunting obtuse people.
Strictly speaking, your statement is false. Subtle and even not-so-subtle differences exist in the rendering and even behavior of web pages as they appear on different platforms, much to the consternation of web developers everywhere. That said, these differences have become less-so over time, partially as a result of consolidation of the main two browsers on a single code base, which in fact has now split and will probably diverge again in the near future.
But for the sake of argument, let's ignore those differences.
So if OS APIs were to be similarly standardized like the web, a developer would not have to port his app to a different platform -- it would work on multiple OSes without any change in source.
Ignoring the fact that it took two decades to get to this level of standardization in the web space, and ignoring the fact that web standards move at a glacial pace compared to the rest of the computer industry, the main problem with your suggestion is that (as I have said elsewhere) you are now stuck with a lowest-common-denominator situation, where developers can't really take advantage of platform-specific features until the standardization catches up. That removes almost ALL the incentive for one platform to innovate or otherwise distinguish itself from another platform. Which is exactly the situation we have with the web today.
And voila! You got your wish. Widespread standardization across all platforms. It's called the web.
So the Blackberry CEO is right that OS APIs should be uniform (or neutral) across of all mobile devices so as to allow small OS vendors entering the market and reducing development and increasing profits for developers.
That arrangement conveniently ignores that a uniform OS API would effectively reduce all platforms to the lowest-common-denominator. It would also eliminate any chance of one platform doing anything to stand out against the sea of other platforms, which would in turn eliminate competition on all points except price. Goodbye, innovation. Goodbye, progress.
It's quite a bit like the Android hardware landscape right now, in fact. Yuck.
Why are you for net neutrality and against app neutrality (or whatever it's called)? This CEO should be applauded for bringing up this issue.
Because they are fundamentally different than each other. Net neutrality requires inaction on the part of the ISPs, i.e. "do not favor one service over another". This so-called "app neutrality" requires that anyone developing an application is obligated to provide it for all platforms, independent of whether it is in their best interests to do so, and independent of whether the developer has the resources to meet that obligation.
It is only by ignoring this fundamental difference that you can even attempt to equate net neutrality and "app neutrality". It is, however, intellectually dishonest to do so.
It also helps blind people who might need to cross the street.
And what if they are deaf as well as blind? What accommodations should we make for those pedestrians?
Perhaps we should mandate that all electric cards must shoot a stream of water 100 feet ahead of them at all times, just in case a deaf and blind pedestrian happens to be present.
He thinks his company's shareholders idiots. Like most CEOs.
If they're still holding BB shares, then they are, in fact, idiots. In this sense, he has correctly assessed the intelligence of his audience.
So the Blackberry CEO is right that OS APIs should be uniform (or neutral) across of all mobile devices so as to allow small OS vendors entering the market and reducing development and increasing profits for developers.
Good luck with that.
He is not an idiot, he is a politician trying to twist the meaning of the word "Net" and make it mean "Application".
That makes him an idiot.
A Christian who commits the mortal sin of killing another human may still seek forgiveness from God. You seem to be arguing that between the moment that person commits the sin and the point where they are forgiven by God (which is in itself an indistinct boundary), that person is not a Christian. This is simply not the case, nor the way any rational person would define the faith of that sinner. If they were Christian before they committed the sin and they are remorsefully seeking forgiveness, they are still Christian in any and every way that matters.
Seriously, you cannot kill as a Christian, because 1. you can't kill 2. being Christian is defined by your actions, not your label.
How convenient! Also, utterly and completely without merit. Killing in Christianity is undoubtedly a sin (and a grave one at that), but being a sinner does not in any way exclude one from being a Christian.
Honestly, you win the Most Transparent Attempt at Deception award for that post.
Marxism is a religion in a way
Marxism is not a religion in any way. It has similar qualities of a religion, just like you can find similarities between a truck and a wheel barrel, but they are very different.
There is a reason why faith and religion are different words in the English language. Just because something requires faith does not make it religious in nature.
Highlighting is mine. Penguinisto qualified his statement, which you willfully ignored.
Except that in the UK, the ban -- which they take very, very seriously -- actually DOES result in significantly less gun violence.
You may be personally opposed to a ban, but you can't argue in good faith that a bans can't EVER work when we have very clear examples of bans doing exactly what they set out to do.
And "raft" but I'm not sure I see either your or my point, unless you're confusing coincidence with reason.
Sounds like someone hit a nerve.
How much would it cost you to buy a (lawful) copy of the entire library available through Pandora or Spotify?
I don't think that's really a meaningful question. The much better question is: how much would it cost you to buy a lawful copy of everything you might reasonably listen to on Pandora?
Perhaps you need to re-examine what is important in life, then. Hate is just a waste of life.
If the corporations were actually in violation of tax laws, your statement might be meaningful. If you want corporations to pay more taxes, that's fine. Tell your congresscritter to change the laws. Alleging that they are not paying taxes that the law requires them to pay, however, does not square with the known facts.
A language is low level if almost all of the features of the hardware can be directly translated into the language. See, you've got it backwards. You want it to be the other way around, but when its the way you want then its trivial to get to the argument that BASIC is low level too.
Another segment of the "C is low level" crowd focuses on pointers. You are all wrong. Was paying attention when the language was invented. Always understood to be a high level language until the snobs came.
"Low level" is relative. Yes, C was understood to be a high level language when it was invented over 40 years ago. Times have changed. If you were paying attention to anything since then, you'd realize that C occupies a space pretty low down in the language landscape.
(And yes, I am a C programmer, first and foremost).
If you use ML to mean machine language, and not the language ML, you must be quite old or quite young..
FWIW, I've never even heard of the language "ML", and took ML to mean Machine Language.
(Late forties, if you must know).
Even further off-topic... And an ad-hominem to boot.
IMHO, That's not actually an ad hominem. The conclusion that gunnnnslinger reached based on your sig was unstated. Your interpretation was that said conclusion was negative. That's on you, and perhaps says something additional about you that your sig didn't.
You're a 6-digit uid noob yourself. You've never been to the slashdot that was worth reading either.
Says the anonymous coward.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
A signature like that is strongly suggestive of someone prone to be an asshole in public, then.
the program to secretly collect American phone records wasn't providing enough intelligence to justify the backlash it would cause if revealed
File that under "duh".
Uh.. I thought companies making profits was evil. Shouldn't we be applauding Intel for not making any money?
There's not making any money, and then there's hemorrhaging billions in a vain effort to break into the market.
And for the record, I don't happen to think that making profits is inherently evil.
I'd much rather live in a world with a made-up "Intel monopoly" that doesn't exist where Intel is literally the largest contributor to the Linux kernel that isn't a Linux-specific company (look it up, Intel is usually #3 right after the Linux foundation & Red Hat) vs. the very real ARM monopoly of intellectual property minefields, backdoored binary firmward blobs, opaque drivers, and poor support.
Try to stay on topic.