Who cares? Seriously--who cares that 4.126 miles is 261,486.72 inches? It doesn't matter. What matters is concrete manipulation. I can easily get a tun (256 gallons; when of water, it weighs exactly 1 ton) from a single cup: 2 cups a pint, 2 pints a quart; 2 quarts a pottle; 2 pottles a gallon; 2 gallons a peck, 2 pecks a half bushel, 2 half bushels a bushel, 2 bushels a cask, 2 casks a barrel, 2 barrels a hogshead, 2 hogsheads a butt, 2 butts a tun. I could just proceed by doubling until I'd gotten the right amount.
Or, by halving the tun and working downward, I could end up with a cup. Halving and doubling is very easy with liquids. OTOH, try to cut a litre into decilitres, or anything else. Won't work. Whereas French units have both the stere and the litre, for reasons best known to Enlightenment morons.
Our system of length is also superior, for units sized to men. Twelve inches to the foot: twelve has twice as many divisors as ten (2, 3, 4, 6 vs. 2 & 5). Three feet to the yard (three is a useful number). Two yards to the fathom. 110 fathoms to the furlong. 8 furlongs to the mile. The French system, OTOH, present a multitude of useless units: decimetres (are they ever used?), dekametres, centimetres (too small), and naught between the dekametre and the hectametre--neither of which is used much anyway.
Our system of weight, too, is superior. 16 ounces to the pound; 16 is, of course, 2^4 and 4^2, and this relation means that weighing & dividing items out on balances is greatly facilitated. OTOH, the French gram is a silly unit, poorly conceived and badly executed.
What would have made sense--which is why the Frogs didn't do it--would have been to rework the number system. Use base-12 instead of base-10, and suddenly life is much nicer. 1/3 is a non-repeating decimal, for one thing. Many of the commonly-used fractions are more obviously related. Many mathematical relations are more convenient. Duodecimal is near-infinitely better than decimal--but these great enlightened souls cast away the remnant of duodecimal numbering they had, and embraced the inane decimal system. Utter foolishness.
BTW, it's not "French units", but "SI units", which are standardized.
They were invented by the French, therefore they are French units. And they are no more standardised than are the foot, pound and quart. The beautiful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
Kids in school and students on university doing physics have to use obscure constants in most calculations to get the right result.
Obscure constants? 12--the smallest abundant number, a number divisible by the sum of its digits and the product of its digits, a semiperfect number, and integer-perfect number? 16--4^2 and 2^4? 3--the number of the Trinity, the largest number it is possible to eyeball-divide in a single step, and the largest prime with that quality (try cutting a plank in fifths by eye)? Possibly you mean obscure constants like 6.673e-11 N m^2 / kg^2 (the Newtonian gravity constant); or like 3.141594 (pi--I point it out because a user of French units is hardly likely to have a maths backgrounds); or Avogadro's number (6.022142e23); or 1 Joule = 0.2388459 calories (they measure the same thing); or for that matter that 1 kilocalorie = 1 calorie, commonly used?
On the contrary, our constants are no more obscure than those of the French system--and in many cases, much less.
Whereas you can instantly relate a mililiter to a liter, you have a slightly more difficult time relating a cup to a gallon.
Hah. Try cutting a litre into millilitres--it's not going to happen. Whereas a gallon is simply 8 cups: half, then half again and finally half again. Our entire system of liquid measurement is based on halving and doubling.
Our system of linear measurement is likewise simple. If you can cut in halves and thirds, you can break a yard into inches easily. Try turning a metre into centimetres--good luck, unless you can eyeball fifths.
The system of French units looks great on paper, but it's dumb in practise. Our system looks strange on paper, but it actually makes quite a bit of sense, and it's a joy to actually use.
Even with tiny transactions, good throughput is useful. RDBMSes are terribly inefficient and slow, even the best, and oftentimes need to scan through an entire table or set of tables just to display or update a view (which is, after all, merely a hard query). Every DBA I know swears by lots of spindles and mega-throughput numbers. No one ever lost money betting against the efficiency of an RDBMS.
Not that they're bad--they're actually quite excellent at ACID processing.
IE's way behind the times. As a webmaster (both WesternOrthodox.com, the website of my parish, and the Metropolis of Denver), I cannot tell how often I've had to work around, or simply ignore, bugs in IE. It still doesn't support the q tag (for inlined quotes). It cannot properly handle good CSS of various sorts. Of course, Mozilla has a few problems (e.g. it doesn't handle nested quotes properly), but they're minor.
My own choice has been to support web standards to the hilt, and try to make sure that users of IE (the most popular browser) at least see something decent. They get slightly degraded functionality, but that's their fault for using broken software.
Re:I don't mean to gripe but....
on
GIMP goes SVG
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· Score: 1
Well, write it yourself and submit a patch. That's the point of free software: the users have the freedom to add the features they want. The great divide between user and developer shouldn't exist--every developer is a user, and every user should be a developer. It's not that difficult--software development is just writing a set of instructions, much like a recipe.
Well, it was all just back-of-the-envelope stuff, after all. And then one gets into the question of just what exactly a war casualty is. Seven million Germans seems high for the war itself, but would make sense in the context of the famine and privation which followed thereupon. And how many of the twenty million Soviets killed a) actually existed (the USSR was never known for telling the truth) and b) were killed as a result of German, rather than Soviet, action?
And the numbers themselves are interesting, because it seems to me that big distinction regarding which areas were high-casualty was between those where the Anglosphere fought vs. those where the Soviets fought. Which brings one right back to the question of which was bloodier: Stalin or Hitler? Both a pair of wretched louses; both with utterly evil political-moral-religious philosophies.
My point about sweeping in after Germany or the USSR had a won a fight between themselves was that they wouldn't have been fighting in Western Europe. Our diplomats should have tricked them into fighting one another, contained the conflict between the two, waited for one to win, then kicked its rear all over the map. Contrary to popular belief, war isn't good for a nation, and letting the Nazis and Communists bleed themselves dry would have made both the anti-Nazi and the anti-Communist wars easier, much as the guys with the lances and spears make the matador's job easier in a bullfight.
You're right, but maybe not the way you think. Hitler was responsible for the deaths of ~6 million Jews, 2 million others (Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, mental defectives &c.), plus the death toll of the Second World War (maybe another 8 million, including deaths of Displaced Persons?), for something on the order of 15-20 million.
Stalin, OTOH, was responsible for 30-40 million deaths by the last count I've seen. He didn't kill nearly as many for their religion as Hitler, though, so one's left with a kind of morbid calculus: is it better to support the brute who's an equal-opportunity killer, or the brute who's more particular? Neither's my answer.
I think we should have figured out a way to persuade the two to fight it out, then swept in and massacred the victor. But there were too many Communists and Fascists in positions of influence at the time for us to ever do that. It would have been a great coup of diplomacy, though.
You're confused about SMTP vs. POP or IMAP. When I send you email, I send it first to a mail server, which then turns around and acts as a client to your mail server. Or I might just connect my client directly to your mail server (SMTP, not POP or IMAP).
You're right that I do not have an account in your POP or IMAP server--but that's irrelevant. Trust me on this, or read up on how email works: if I (or my designee) cannot act as a client to your mail server, I could not send you mail.
The can of food is made by people. The corporation employing those people is funded by people. It makes exactly as much sense to continue employing an expensive worker as it does to continute shopping at an expensive store, or purchasing an expensive product.
On the one hand he gladly admits that he buys the store brands because they're cheaper--and yet he complains that his employer let him go because he's too expensive. That's the essence of the free market: he was selling his labour at too high a price for what his employer could afford, exactly like the name brands are selling at too high a price for him to afford. The situations are exactly parallel.
And he should note that the recession is not Bush's fault, but Clinton's, and that the recovery is doing as well as it can, given that the public sector is as large as it is (the public sector acts as a deadweight on the economy: not too bad when it's strong, but terrible when it's weak).
They are public: they are on the internet; they accept connexions from anyone who establishes one. They are exactly parallel to mail servers, and locking out legitimate users from chat servers makes as much sense as locking out legitimate users from email. If AOL users couldn't send email to Yahoo users and vice versa, would email be nearly so useful as it is? Of course not.
My hope is that, much like SMTP slowly broke down the walled communities of Genie, CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy &c., so too will jabber slowly break down the walled communities of AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Wotsit &c.
Yes, and I've read the many materials at the FSF--and I find the latter far more reasonable. I trust software which I can modify, and others can modify, without having to fall back on kludges like distributing patches far more than software which is completely controlled by one man.
I like freedom. There's also the fact that I disagree with several of djb's technical decisions--and the fact that his software is not truly free means that if I wished to use it as a base for my own, I'd have to maintain a parallel set of patches and update them every time he updated the code. The GPL is far more user-friendly, as is the BSDL.
Sure, we all have a right to use the protocol, it's only bits and bytes and does not cost anybody anything. Who gives us the right to use their servers though?
We've as much right to use public messaging servers as we've a right to use public email servers. Imagine if there were a grazillion different email protocols, each with its own proprietary clients and its own userbase. Oh wait--we had that, and it sucked so badly that Simple Mail Transport Protocol, which is in several ways quite brain-damaged, took over the world.
So too will Jabber or something similar, given enough time and freedom.
Rather, he needs to get his act together and release his software under the GPL. Then we users can take the good and toss out the bad (slashpackage, anyone?).
Nice to see that you didn't RTFA, but merely skimmed it. Graham's not addressing Java, but `hacker radar'--that ability a hacker has to judge a language without actually using it, much like judging a book by its cover; contrary to popular belief this is very possible. To address your `points':
Hype: the Graham's point is that good languages don't need hype or ad campaigns--hackers use them because they want to, not because a marketing exec sold them on it.
You miss the point: Java is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It is afraid to be new: it uses syntax which is familiar and doesn't bother trying anything new.
The point is that Java is not pushed because it's a Really Cool Programming Language, but because it's part of Sun's anti-Microsoft plan. A good language is big because it's good, not because of its side effects (although those can be quite salutary).
No one loves Java; everyone prefers it to something else. A good language is loved because of what it is, not what it isn't.
The point is that adoption is not driven from below but from above--and that most technical directions from above are likely to be incorrect.
No good language has ever before been a product of a committee. Committees standardise; they cannot create. And regarding the `well-thought out APIs,' what's this I read about being easily able to get the number of columns but not the number of rows in a query? Plus, any language which has such bloody verbose libraries cannot be all good.
Good lanuages don't force you to use their protocols; they let you think in the terms which make the most sense for your problem.
The point is that Java's `hipness' is fake: it's not driven by hackers but by advertising.
Large orgs want to hire morons, not hackers. A good language (like a good philosophy or book) doesn't lower itself to its users' level but raises them up to its. Java panders; good languages offer.
When one's friends are bright people, and they dislike something or don't care about something, that is useful information. When something is liked by morons, that too is useful information.
When a language's controller is in trouble, the language is in trouble. A language without a controller is free from this particular risk.
The DoD is the uber-corporation; that it likes something is worrisome. It doesn't mean that the thing is bad, but that it could be bad.
Again, that's another part of Graham's point: no single one of these items is necessarily a deal-breaker. Indeed, one might even argue that just as the best poetry is written knowing the rules, but unafraid to bend or even break them for effect, so too an excellent language might need to bend or break the rules for a particular reason. But Java has a lot of strikes against it, and really nothing in its favour. And so he's not spending any time learning it.
Those who are willing to trade liberty for security deserve and will have neither.
DJB's software is not open source and is not free. Also, it uses a perverted installation system. Additionally, there have been exploits reported, just not many. Use postfix instead: truly free (it appears GPL-compatible), backed by IBM, secure, and pleasant to use.
A SSH server written in Java will have zero buffer overflows.
It will also have all the speed of a glacier advancing upon the Alps. Yes, in a dozen years maybe Java will be fast enough. It's certainly not there yet. The Freenet Project use Java, and their client is so slow as to be unusable. It could have been just as easily made cross-platform in a real language. Heck, last I checked I believe Squeak has a faster VM than Java.
Yes, we don't write in assembler because 'puters are fast enough to write in C now. We shouldn't write in Java because they're not fast enough for that yet--esp. for numeric calculations such as encryption uses. Actually, we shouldn't write in Java because it sucks as a language. Now, the Lisp-family of languages are excellent, and buffer overflows do not AFAIK occur in them. Perhaps a Common Lisp or Scheme implementation would be good.
No--it raises the question. Begging the question is a particular type of logical fallacy which does not apply in this case, so far as I can see. This usage is an error, not a neologism.
No--only sub-mental half-wits use the term kibibyte. Those of us who use real, historical, time-tested units have no problem with something meaning one thing in one use and another in another (e.g. the oz, which is both 1/8 a cup and 1/16 a pound). Those whose minds have atrophied due to use of the French system of measurement should welcome the all-too-rare opportunity to flex their once-supple mental muscles and get over it!
It's not hard to do: 1 kilobyte = 1,024 bytes, and 1 kilometre = 1,000 metres. The senses do not rebel; the mind does not quail; the body does not give up its ghost. The natural world does not fall into the neat little categories that the Enlightenment French thought it should; the computer world doesn't either, being built as it is upon such a natural thing as the binary system.
The HD companies are arguibly more correct in this case as they are using the definition that is used everywhere else.
No, they are incorrect because kilobyte means 1,024 bytes, megabyte 1,024 kilobytes, gigabyte 1,024 megabytes &c. The fact that French system of measurement happens to use those prefixes to mean something else is immaterial: in the computer world, those prefixes are used to measure bytes in base-2 derived muliples.
It always amuses me, the rigid-mindedness which users of French units soon acquire. IMHO it's part of what accounts for the lack of innovation from the Mother Continent for so long (along with socialism, of course).
Re:PowerPC Linux users had compiled boot 'scripts'
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Booting Linux Faster
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But what one gains in boot speed one loses in hackability. The shell is the natural vehicle for launching multiple progs, for handling input/output &c. Writing C to do the same thing, reliably, as a shell script would be painful. And all the nitty-gritty error handling, string-munging &c. would suck.
There's a reason for higher-level languages. C isn't as fast as assembler--but it's a lot more fun to write in, and less error-prone too. Shell isn't as fast as C--but it's a lot more fun to write in, and less error prone too.
Now, there might be a place for a shell-to-C compiler, but then the hackability of the start scripts is reduced.
But she's willing to put off starting her family until she's 25. Much as she wants kids, she wants to be rich, first.
...
Marriage and children have to wait awhile.
Alice is in for a rude awakening, if she wants kids. Peak fertility in women is 15-25, as many Americans and Europeans are finding out the hard way. Of course, if the third world started limiting its population, maybe the first world will have a chance to catch up--so it's a good thing for us...
Slashdot Mirror
Or, by halving the tun and working downward, I could end up with a cup. Halving and doubling is very easy with liquids. OTOH, try to cut a litre into decilitres, or anything else. Won't work. Whereas French units have both the stere and the litre, for reasons best known to Enlightenment morons.
Our system of length is also superior, for units sized to men. Twelve inches to the foot: twelve has twice as many divisors as ten (2, 3, 4, 6 vs. 2 & 5). Three feet to the yard (three is a useful number). Two yards to the fathom. 110 fathoms to the furlong. 8 furlongs to the mile. The French system, OTOH, present a multitude of useless units: decimetres (are they ever used?), dekametres, centimetres (too small), and naught between the dekametre and the hectametre--neither of which is used much anyway.
Our system of weight, too, is superior. 16 ounces to the pound; 16 is, of course, 2^4 and 4^2, and this relation means that weighing & dividing items out on balances is greatly facilitated. OTOH, the French gram is a silly unit, poorly conceived and badly executed.
What would have made sense--which is why the Frogs didn't do it--would have been to rework the number system. Use base-12 instead of base-10, and suddenly life is much nicer. 1/3 is a non-repeating decimal, for one thing. Many of the commonly-used fractions are more obviously related. Many mathematical relations are more convenient. Duodecimal is near-infinitely better than decimal--but these great enlightened souls cast away the remnant of duodecimal numbering they had, and embraced the inane decimal system. Utter foolishness.
BTW, it's not "French units", but "SI units", which are standardized.
They were invented by the French, therefore they are French units. And they are no more standardised than are the foot, pound and quart. The beautiful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
Kids in school and students on university doing physics have to use obscure constants in most calculations to get the right result.
Obscure constants? 12--the smallest abundant number, a number divisible by the sum of its digits and the product of its digits, a semiperfect number, and integer-perfect number? 16--4^2 and 2^4? 3--the number of the Trinity, the largest number it is possible to eyeball-divide in a single step, and the largest prime with that quality (try cutting a plank in fifths by eye)? Possibly you mean obscure constants like 6.673e-11 N m^2 / kg^2 (the Newtonian gravity constant); or like 3.141594 (pi--I point it out because a user of French units is hardly likely to have a maths backgrounds); or Avogadro's number (6.022142e23); or 1 Joule = 0.2388459 calories (they measure the same thing); or for that matter that 1 kilocalorie = 1 calorie, commonly used?
On the contrary, our constants are no more obscure than those of the French system--and in many cases, much less.
Hah. Try cutting a litre into millilitres--it's not going to happen. Whereas a gallon is simply 8 cups: half, then half again and finally half again. Our entire system of liquid measurement is based on halving and doubling.
Our system of linear measurement is likewise simple. If you can cut in halves and thirds, you can break a yard into inches easily. Try turning a metre into centimetres--good luck, unless you can eyeball fifths.
The system of French units looks great on paper, but it's dumb in practise. Our system looks strange on paper, but it actually makes quite a bit of sense, and it's a joy to actually use.
Not that they're bad--they're actually quite excellent at ACID processing.
My own choice has been to support web standards to the hilt, and try to make sure that users of IE (the most popular browser) at least see something decent. They get slightly degraded functionality, but that's their fault for using broken software.
Well, write it yourself and submit a patch. That's the point of free software: the users have the freedom to add the features they want. The great divide between user and developer shouldn't exist--every developer is a user, and every user should be a developer. It's not that difficult--software development is just writing a set of instructions, much like a recipe.
It says something when `dressed normally' means `in an Elvis suit and lots of makeup':-)
And the numbers themselves are interesting, because it seems to me that big distinction regarding which areas were high-casualty was between those where the Anglosphere fought vs. those where the Soviets fought. Which brings one right back to the question of which was bloodier: Stalin or Hitler? Both a pair of wretched louses; both with utterly evil political-moral-religious philosophies.
My point about sweeping in after Germany or the USSR had a won a fight between themselves was that they wouldn't have been fighting in Western Europe. Our diplomats should have tricked them into fighting one another, contained the conflict between the two, waited for one to win, then kicked its rear all over the map. Contrary to popular belief, war isn't good for a nation, and letting the Nazis and Communists bleed themselves dry would have made both the anti-Nazi and the anti-Communist wars easier, much as the guys with the lances and spears make the matador's job easier in a bullfight.
Stalin, OTOH, was responsible for 30-40 million deaths by the last count I've seen. He didn't kill nearly as many for their religion as Hitler, though, so one's left with a kind of morbid calculus: is it better to support the brute who's an equal-opportunity killer, or the brute who's more particular? Neither's my answer.
I think we should have figured out a way to persuade the two to fight it out, then swept in and massacred the victor. But there were too many Communists and Fascists in positions of influence at the time for us to ever do that. It would have been a great coup of diplomacy, though.
Oh well: shoulda, coulda woulda.
You're right that I do not have an account in your POP or IMAP server--but that's irrelevant. Trust me on this, or read up on how email works: if I (or my designee) cannot act as a client to your mail server, I could not send you mail.
The can of food is made by people. The corporation employing those people is funded by people. It makes exactly as much sense to continue employing an expensive worker as it does to continute shopping at an expensive store, or purchasing an expensive product.
And he should note that the recession is not Bush's fault, but Clinton's, and that the recovery is doing as well as it can, given that the public sector is as large as it is (the public sector acts as a deadweight on the economy: not too bad when it's strong, but terrible when it's weak).
My hope is that, much like SMTP slowly broke down the walled communities of Genie, CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy &c., so too will jabber slowly break down the walled communities of AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Wotsit &c.
I like freedom. There's also the fact that I disagree with several of djb's technical decisions--and the fact that his software is not truly free means that if I wished to use it as a base for my own, I'd have to maintain a parallel set of patches and update them every time he updated the code. The GPL is far more user-friendly, as is the BSDL.
We've as much right to use public messaging servers as we've a right to use public email servers. Imagine if there were a grazillion different email protocols, each with its own proprietary clients and its own userbase. Oh wait--we had that, and it sucked so badly that Simple Mail Transport Protocol, which is in several ways quite brain-damaged, took over the world.
So too will Jabber or something similar, given enough time and freedom.
Rather, he needs to get his act together and release his software under the GPL. Then we users can take the good and toss out the bad (slashpackage, anyone?).
Again, that's another part of Graham's point: no single one of these items is necessarily a deal-breaker. Indeed, one might even argue that just as the best poetry is written knowing the rules, but unafraid to bend or even break them for effect, so too an excellent language might need to bend or break the rules for a particular reason. But Java has a lot of strikes against it, and really nothing in its favour. And so he's not spending any time learning it.
DJB's software is not open source and is not free. Also, it uses a perverted installation system. Additionally, there have been exploits reported, just not many. Use postfix instead: truly free (it appears GPL-compatible), backed by IBM, secure, and pleasant to use.
It will also have all the speed of a glacier advancing upon the Alps. Yes, in a dozen years maybe Java will be fast enough. It's certainly not there yet. The Freenet Project use Java, and their client is so slow as to be unusable. It could have been just as easily made cross-platform in a real language. Heck, last I checked I believe Squeak has a faster VM than Java.
Yes, we don't write in assembler because 'puters are fast enough to write in C now. We shouldn't write in Java because they're not fast enough for that yet--esp. for numeric calculations such as encryption uses. Actually, we shouldn't write in Java because it sucks as a language. Now, the Lisp-family of languages are excellent, and buffer overflows do not AFAIK occur in them. Perhaps a Common Lisp or Scheme implementation would be good.
Creating bugs is easy; finding and fixing them is hard. That's why it's taken so long for the OpenSSH one to be found. As for lsh--it's an also-ran.
No--it raises the question. Begging the question is a particular type of logical fallacy which does not apply in this case, so far as I can see. This usage is an error, not a neologism.
It's not hard to do: 1 kilobyte = 1,024 bytes, and 1 kilometre = 1,000 metres. The senses do not rebel; the mind does not quail; the body does not give up its ghost. The natural world does not fall into the neat little categories that the Enlightenment French thought it should; the computer world doesn't either, being built as it is upon such a natural thing as the binary system.
No, they are incorrect because kilobyte means 1,024 bytes, megabyte 1,024 kilobytes, gigabyte 1,024 megabytes &c. The fact that French system of measurement happens to use those prefixes to mean something else is immaterial: in the computer world, those prefixes are used to measure bytes in base-2 derived muliples.
It always amuses me, the rigid-mindedness which users of French units soon acquire. IMHO it's part of what accounts for the lack of innovation from the Mother Continent for so long (along with socialism, of course).
There's a reason for higher-level languages. C isn't as fast as assembler--but it's a lot more fun to write in, and less error-prone too. Shell isn't as fast as C--but it's a lot more fun to write in, and less error prone too.
Now, there might be a place for a shell-to-C compiler, but then the hackability of the start scripts is reduced.
...
Marriage and children have to wait awhile.
Alice is in for a rude awakening, if she wants kids. Peak fertility in women is 15-25, as many Americans and Europeans are finding out the hard way. Of course, if the third world started limiting its population, maybe the first world will have a chance to catch up--so it's a good thing for us...