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User: Grant_Watson

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  1. Re:We got rid of flash and applets on Major Browsers Add Experimental Support For WebAssembly (thestack.com) · · Score: 1

    For the love of holy things, why would I want multiple competing, incompatible, implementations of a programming runtime environment?

    Because you remember what a single-browser hegemony was like and you don't want us to go through that again.

  2. Re: People actually *like* Python whitespace? on The Swift Programming Language's Most Commonly Rejected Changes (github.com) · · Score: 1, Informative

    Indentation is how you communicate block structure to a human reader. You're going to indent your code anyway, and eliminating the extra delimiters prevents the structure humans see from getting out of sync with the structure the language implementation sees. There's a perennial C logic bug where you take an if statement with a one-line body and add a second line without adding braces to denote a block; that never happens in Python.

    That said, I'm happy with either syntax.

  3. Re:Ada had this in 1995 on Bjarne Stroustrup Announces the C++ Core Guidelines · · Score: 2

    C++ grew somewhat organically out of C. C is (IMHO) an excellent language, but its goals often differ from C++'s goals.

    I won't argue with your conclusion; it's true. But a lot of what was achieved in the research and design of the '80s and '90s was achieved by burning down the software stack and starting over. (Take Smalltalk for example.) People are rediscovering those things in a context where the existing stack matters and tackling the hard work of reconciling those developments with what we already have in a coherent way.

  4. Re:Instrumenting c++ to behave like Rust on Bjarne Stroustrup Announces the C++ Core Guidelines · · Score: 2

    Half century? Are you counting from Algol?

    That said, the cruftiness of C++ is one of the things that keeps me from bothering to properly learn it, however much I respect its newer developments. Another is that its place on the scale of abstraction isn't often a place that I need to go personally: C or Python usually makes more sense for me.

    Where on that scale would you say Rust lies? Is its target use software that lies on the boundry between systems software and applications, e.g., web servers?

  5. Re: more reason for https as default for all sites on Fixing Verizon's Supercookie · · Score: 1

    The GP's point is that if you contract with the makers of the phones, you can insert your own root certificate and make yourself a CA without anyone else signing your root cert. You'd expect third-party browsers on Android to reject the MITM though, and I doubt whether you could suborn Apple into helping you on iOS; it's possible in principle, but it looks pretty unlikely to me.

  6. Re: Sheeit, journalist on Donald Knuth Worried About the "Dumbing Down" of Computer Science History · · Score: 1

    I thought the article unfairly patronized Knuth too, but it makes an interesting point -- that if the kind of history Knuth wants to see is to continue, it will have to be done in Computer Science departments. It also provides examples of other disciplines, like mathematics, that have made space for historians internally.

    I'd love to see this happen, but I don't know if it's politically viable within the academy.

  7. Re: Slackware on What's Been the Best Linux Distro of 2014? · · Score: 1

    I've never done it, but if you're managing that many FreeBSD servers you can use poudriere to build packages from ports with your preferred options and then deploy them as binaries. That should give you the best of both worlds.

  8. Re: Slackware on What's Been the Best Linux Distro of 2014? · · Score: 1

    I don't know why they still use sendmail. I wrote a sendmail configuration file once in my life: never again.

    Also, you should check out the new package system if you haven't already. (It was called pkgng while in development; now it's just pkg, but pkgng is probably more googleable.) Ports still work fine, but there's been a lot of movement toward making binary packages the "cultural default" now that the tooling is better.

  9. Re: Slackware on What's Been the Best Linux Distro of 2014? · · Score: 1

    Indeed it has. Check out freebsd-update.

  10. I wrote a toy Lisp interpreter in Objective-C, on Linux without any of the NS* libraries. It was great for that, because it gave polymorphism while at the same time letting you mess with object internals. My root class had a method that would overwrite the object's isa pointer, changing it into an object of another class, for use by the garbage collector; try that in most languages.

    The basic layer is C, which is a small and relatively clean language, with a small and relatively clean Smalltalkish object model layered on top of it, with tools that let you bridge the gap when you need to do so. That's awesome. But Apple wants people to use it as an application language, and so they keep layering features and tying syntax to their runtime libraries to make up for the fact that it's a systems language at heart. Modern, Apple-influenced Objective-C is much less beautiful than the old language, though it may be more convenient for application development.

  11. Re:The FSF/GNU folks overreached with GPL v3 ... on LLVM 3.5 Brings C++1y Improvements, Unified 64-bit ARM Backend · · Score: 2

    I don't follow the compilers very closely, so my recollection may be fuzzy, but I think this is what the grandparent was getting at:

    In the past some people have proposed giving GCC a clear, serializable intermediate code so that one could use GCC front ends and back ends independently of the rest of GCC. The leadership viewed this as an end run around the GPL, because whatever produced or consumed this intermediate code would not need to link to the invoked portions of GCC. Tight coupling between the front ends and back ends was therefore treated as something to be encouraged for licensing reasons.

    LLVM's design by contrast centers around its bytecode. Since it has a BSD-like license the question of whether you link to the compiler's code or fork/exec it is unimportant.

    Since the emergence of LLVM, it's my understanding that the GCC leadership have softened their views -- the alternative to invoking GCC in a separate process is now to use LLVM, rather than to link to GCC and release one's source code; thus purely technical concerns can determine the design of GCC also.

  12. Re:And any idiot with a soldering iron can bypass on A Look at Smart Gun Technology · · Score: 1

    Until I see someone cite an actual statistic of how many people are disarmed and shot with their own weapons, I'm going to continue to see these sorts of claims as hyperbole, and rightfully so.

    I agree that this is a silly concern for the average citizen; for policemen it's a real concern -- in that they often have to grapple with resisting people while their sidearms are in plain sight -- and it's telling that police departments are totally uninterested in smart guns.

  13. Re:Marriage is about property and other rights. on Was Eich a Threat To Mozilla's $1B Google "Trust Fund"? · · Score: 1

    In the old days, people would get married by the state (coiurt house or whatever) and then have another marriage in the church.

    It was condensed later on.

    This has never been the tradition in the English-speaking world. Some European countries have moved to this model since the nineteenth century.

  14. Re:So... on Was Eich a Threat To Mozilla's $1B Google "Trust Fund"? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    His donation to Proposition 8 has been known literally for years. He was CTO before his promotion to CEO; he had a seat on the board of the Mozilla Foundation, as is natural for its co-founder. None of his gay subordinates or coworkers seems to have levied any accusations of unfairness against him in all that time. One of the Mozilla bigwigs commented that she was surprised to learn of the donation when it came out, because Eich's friendliness and evenhandedness toward gay employees defied her stereotype of a Proposition 8 supporter.

    Eich had no trouble getting along with those who didn't share his views, but it seems that not everyone reciprocated.

  15. Re:Liberal arts professors' worst nightmare on College Board To Rethink the SAT, Partner With Khan Academy · · Score: 1

    A paragraph that uses the 3 part structure that is overemphasized in elementary school, i.e.: opening statement, middle sentences, summary. It results a fractured flow between paragraphs, with unnecessary summary, and an overemphasis on length instead of brevity.

    As for your score, the average SAT score was 1498 in 2013, take from that what you want.

    Well yeah, that's because they added an essay portion that's scored separately. You'd expect the average score for the two-part test to be about 1,000 and the average score for the three-part test to be about 1,500.

  16. Re:That's not a student loan, it's Pay It Forward on Oklahoma Schools Required To Teach Students Personal Finance · · Score: 1

    If there is no risk to the bank whatsoever, then why do they deserve any profit through interest payments?

    They are offering the use of their money, which they could otherwise invest in some profitable enterprise; that is worth some interest. Without risk, one would expect it to be low interest -- like treasury bonds -- but certainly nonzero.

  17. Re:Freakin' Riders. on Incandescent Bulbs Get a Reprieve · · Score: 1

    That's fair. I used to think I hated the blueness of common CFLs when what I actually hated was their terrible color rendering. I'm disappointed that there's not more of an emphasis on support for the full color spectrum in CFLs and LEDs.

  18. Re:Firefux on Firefox 25 Arrives With Web Audio API Support, Guest Browsing On Android · · Score: 4, Informative

    Your tone is flamebait, but your question is valid. Firefox has a project called MemShrink whose focus has been on reducing memory usage. In the time they've been going they have found and fixed leaks in Firefox; come up with better ways to find leaks in add-ons, which were the biggest culprit; changed how Firefox handles memory used by add-ons to eliminate virtually all such leaks; and optimized Firefox's memory management in a bunch of non-buggy cases.

    So yes, if memory usage is what drove you away from Firefox you should take another look.

  19. Re:They still dont get it on Nvidia Removed Linux Driver Feature For Feature Parity With Windows · · Score: 1

    I believe that this is the discussion being referred to, where Linus expresses his frustration with nVidia.

  20. Re:It doesn't pay to be the first on Jonathon Fletcher: The Forgotten Father of the Search Engine · · Score: 1

    They also weren't a portal. Remember what the Excite home page came to look like?

  21. Re:I don't get it. on Version 2.0 of 3D-Printed Rifle Successfully Fires 14 Rounds · · Score: 2

    I don't know about Britain (where carrying pistols was hardly unheard of in the nineteenth century), but I don't know that I've ever heard this as an argument for gun control in the U.S. It seems an odd argument: It would definitely work to make carrying a weapon more difficult for the law-abiding, but the only way to make it less desirable would be if it indeed made it nearly impossible for criminals to get access to weapons.

    And British gun control has led to knife crime and to forms of knife control that look downright silly from this side of the pond.

  22. Re:A limey writes on Judge Rules In Favor of Volkswagen and Silences Scientist · · Score: 1

    Er, yes we do. We had it first.

    And our (the American) revolution was largely inspired by its principles.

  23. Re:Prior use on ITU To Choose Emergency Line For Mobiles: 911, or 112? · · Score: 1

    It's hard to tell from context whether you're not from the US or you're an American who has never used seven-digit dialing.

    In the US, the first three digits of a ten-digit telephone number are the area code. Traditionally if you were calling someone who was in the same area code you were in you would not dial the area code but only the last seven digits of the telephone number. If you needed to call someone outside your area code, pressing 1 first allowed the telephone network to know that you were dialing a ten-digit number.

    It used to be that when an area code ran out of telephone numbers, it would be split into multiple area codes. This meant that some numbers would change in the first three digits, which is inconvenient. The modern practice is to add a new area code that applies to the same geographical area as the old one, but that means that someone living next door to you may have a different area code than you do; the solution is to make everyone dial the full ten digits regardless of area code.

    I think landline practice (7- or 10-digit dialing) still varies by region, but all modern cell phones use ten-digit dialing.

  24. Re:The other side of the coin on Do Recreational Drugs Help Programmers? · · Score: 1

    Canada is becoming a free country after all! When did they change the rules on caffeine and non-brown soda?

  25. Re:critical thinking on Obama Wants $1 Billion For "Master Teachers Corps" · · Score: 2

    There are plenty of people who are legally in the country without being US citizens.