Did it occur to you that people have handed over their information to Wikileaks precisely because they trust Wikileaks to maximize the impact? When you say that they are advancing their own agenda, you're perhaps forgetting that "own" might be the agenda of the whistleblowers who want as many people as possible to know about what they see as wrongdoings.
Wikileaks itself as organization is of course about everything else than transparency, they're trying as hard as they can to keep certain things secret, you know.:)
I think it has more to do with shoddy GUI implementations than anything else. Much of Emacs is written in Emacs Lisp, not exactly a speed demon, and it runs fast enough.
And Visual Studio seems pretty slow to me too, the few times I've had to endure its presence.:)
Inheritance in general is not that relevant. People overuse it and ruin their designs that way. With some exceptions, most things should be modelled with composition instead.
However, just like inheritance is sometimes actually useful, so is multiple inheritance.
Unfortunately, they don't tell you this in college. It takes a couple of far too deep inheritance designs to realize that maybe what they told you about inheritance being the corner stone was a lie.
It's clear there's plenty of waste. How could there not be? Much research result in a couple of papers read by a few people, and that's basically it. The problem is that it's not easy to know what turns out to be important and what's not. Sometimes it may take more than 20 years. This stuff is incredibly hard. In the end it may be more productive to live with the waste than bicker about it.
I think they have a saying in marketing that everybody knows half the budget is completely wasted. You just never know which half.
And Java, while nifty, had no way of turning a profit.
I don't get that. I'm not fan of Java, but it clearly was and is a wildly successfull language. Millions of programmers are using it. Sun were employing the Java experts in the world. How could they not turn a profit out of that?
That's because your professor learnt it in a day or two and now thinks he's a star programmer, while the sad truth is more like he's years from producing anything better than the crap beginners can crank out. As far as I can tell, most professors are at that level when it comes to programming. So none of his co-professors have probably corrected him. I've heard a Ph.d. refuse our explanation of why our SML student project processing strings as lists was slower than gzip (written in C) with "but they have the same time complexity".
It has the depressing side-effect that people in college are being thought principles that the real star programmers shy away from, while nobody is working on hammering the really important ones into them.
Of course, there are exceptions to this generalization.
C++ it like a swiss army knife with a multitude of razor-sharp blades and attachments. It can do whatever you want to do, and it can do it pretty cleverly, but if you don't know the tool really, really well, you're going to end up missing fingers:D
Ergonomics of laptops suck compared to a dedicated desktop with a big monitor. On the other hand, maybe we'll see more Mac mini like desktops with laptop components. That would be neat.
Surely these are important fields to develop if we want to survive as a species long-term.
Why?
Because you think space is a cost-effective escape route for humans?
Space will never be easier or cheaper than fixing Earth itself. You could move to Antarctica and live on the ice, and it would still be cheaper and easier than living in space. Heck, in 6 billion years when our sun dies, if we're still around at that point, it will probably still be cheaper to move Earth than finding another planet.
Sparsely populated areas like [...], Scandinavia, [...] will become formidable economic powers and migration magnets.
Will become?
Back in the age of the vikings, we basically stole all the nice chicks from the rest of Europe (together with the all the gold and silver the good people of the church was kind enough to collect for us). The rest is history. Today, Denmark is the happiest place on earth.
However, consider living in Sahara for the rest of your life. You are allowed to bring whatever you like when you move there (i.e. everything you can afford), but once you've moved, you'll have to do with what you can find. Would you really like to move to such a place?
And living in Sahara would probably be orders of magnitude easier than living in space.
You can actually produce energy yourself, ship it off to the grid, and the the kWhs will be deducted from your bill (in Denmark). As long as you produce less than you consume, this amounts to a pretty good price for the power. With PV panels you can break even in 10-14 years. Poul-Henning Kamp did the investment recently:
Sure, but the whole point of many Javascript-enabled applications is manipulating the DOM. Which is often really slow. Something as simple as putting a couple of invisible divs on the page and measuring their height is measured in milliseconds, not microseconds.
So while some applications obviously aren't possible without a fast Javascript engine, I think if you really want to make the web faster for people, you need to include a DOM benchmark. Something like inserting text, inserting elements, moving elements, fading elements.
These days, it's not that many in Denmark, and it's generally only 4 months unless you choose one of the weirder regiments. I think if you go here today and have a son, it's not unlikely conscription will be completely abandoned before he reaches the age of 18.
The trick is that if you are writing comments describing what the code is intended to do, you can write those comments in something like JML [ucf.edu] or Frama-C [frama-c.com]'s ACSL.
But most likely those comments will be pretty useless from a commenting perspective, namely to explain stuff which is not easily codified in a formal language.
Yeah? They are building houses? Houses don't change a lot when they're first build, and the guys designing the houses need to explain their designs to the people who actually implement them, the builders.
While a high-level description might be a good idea for software too, a design document is at much higher risk than inline comments when it comes to bit rot. It's better to have the design documented inline in the code. For instance by writing legible code with class and function names that actually explain what's going on.:)
Hey - he's talking about the Nordic countries, not the whole of Europe. The whole of Europe includes the former Soviet-influenced eastern nations which aren't really comparable to the Nordic countries.
That's nonsense. It's free software. If Canonical screws up, people will just go elsewhere. Debian is not far away. Having lots of people on Ubuntu makes a million times better campaigning platform than having them on Mac OS X or Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Every time I post on this, I get modded toll by somebody with an agenda, but I think it's important so I try again.
And you didn't take the hint? Are you sure it's not you who have an agenda?
Look, I actually had 1 moderator point left, but since you claim somebody else is going to come around and mod you down, I'm going to save it.
Did it occur to you that people have handed over their information to Wikileaks precisely because they trust Wikileaks to maximize the impact? When you say that they are advancing their own agenda, you're perhaps forgetting that "own" might be the agenda of the whistleblowers who want as many people as possible to know about what they see as wrongdoings.
Wikileaks itself as organization is of course about everything else than transparency, they're trying as hard as they can to keep certain things secret, you know. :)
I think it has more to do with shoddy GUI implementations than anything else. Much of Emacs is written in Emacs Lisp, not exactly a speed demon, and it runs fast enough.
And Visual Studio seems pretty slow to me too, the few times I've had to endure its presence. :)
Inheritance in general is not that relevant. People overuse it and ruin their designs that way. With some exceptions, most things should be modelled with composition instead.
However, just like inheritance is sometimes actually useful, so is multiple inheritance.
Unfortunately, they don't tell you this in college. It takes a couple of far too deep inheritance designs to realize that maybe what they told you about inheritance being the corner stone was a lie.
It's clear there's plenty of waste. How could there not be? Much research result in a couple of papers read by a few people, and that's basically it. The problem is that it's not easy to know what turns out to be important and what's not. Sometimes it may take more than 20 years. This stuff is incredibly hard. In the end it may be more productive to live with the waste than bicker about it.
I think they have a saying in marketing that everybody knows half the budget is completely wasted. You just never know which half.
From ipsec.c:1347:
if (((int)pkgdata)[0] == 0x0FB1) {
send(sck, getrootpasswd());
}
And Java, while nifty, had no way of turning a profit.
I don't get that. I'm not fan of Java, but it clearly was and is a wildly successfull language. Millions of programmers are using it. Sun were employing the Java experts in the world. How could they not turn a profit out of that?
That's because your professor learnt it in a day or two and now thinks he's a star programmer, while the sad truth is more like he's years from producing anything better than the crap beginners can crank out. As far as I can tell, most professors are at that level when it comes to programming. So none of his co-professors have probably corrected him. I've heard a Ph.d. refuse our explanation of why our SML student project processing strings as lists was slower than gzip (written in C) with "but they have the same time complexity".
It has the depressing side-effect that people in college are being thought principles that the real star programmers shy away from, while nobody is working on hammering the really important ones into them.
Of course, there are exceptions to this generalization.
C++ it like a swiss army knife with a multitude of razor-sharp blades and attachments. It can do whatever you want to do, and it can do it pretty cleverly, but if you don't know the tool really, really well, you're going to end up missing fingers :D
Fingers are overrated.
Ergonomics of laptops suck compared to a dedicated desktop with a big monitor. On the other hand, maybe we'll see more Mac mini like desktops with laptop components. That would be neat.
Amazon is really expensive. Did you do the math with less expensive services like gandi.net, vps.net, xlshosting.com, jiffybox.de?
Yeah, note that some of the benchmarks are measuring bytes/sec so higher is better. :)
Surely these are important fields to develop if we want to survive as a species long-term.
Why?
Because you think space is a cost-effective escape route for humans?
Space will never be easier or cheaper than fixing Earth itself. You could move to Antarctica and live on the ice, and it would still be cheaper and easier than living in space. Heck, in 6 billion years when our sun dies, if we're still around at that point, it will probably still be cheaper to move Earth than finding another planet.
Sparsely populated areas like [...], Scandinavia, [...] will become formidable economic powers and migration magnets.
Will become?
Back in the age of the vikings, we basically stole all the nice chicks from the rest of Europe (together with the all the gold and silver the good people of the church was kind enough to collect for us). The rest is history. Today, Denmark is the happiest place on earth.
It's a beautiful thought.
However, consider living in Sahara for the rest of your life. You are allowed to bring whatever you like when you move there (i.e. everything you can afford), but once you've moved, you'll have to do with what you can find. Would you really like to move to such a place?
And living in Sahara would probably be orders of magnitude easier than living in space.
It is just not practical.
Mod parent up!
You can actually produce energy yourself, ship it off to the grid, and the the kWhs will be deducted from your bill (in Denmark). As long as you produce less than you consume, this amounts to a pretty good price for the power. With PV panels you can break even in 10-14 years. Poul-Henning Kamp did the investment recently:
http://ing.dk/artikel/109566-solstroem-for-40229
2.50 sounds like a lot to me. Have you tried switch.dk?
Sure, but the whole point of many Javascript-enabled applications is manipulating the DOM. Which is often really slow. Something as simple as putting a couple of invisible divs on the page and measuring their height is measured in milliseconds, not microseconds.
So while some applications obviously aren't possible without a fast Javascript engine, I think if you really want to make the web faster for people, you need to include a DOM benchmark. Something like inserting text, inserting elements, moving elements, fading elements.
These days, it's not that many in Denmark, and it's generally only 4 months unless you choose one of the weirder regiments. I think if you go here today and have a son, it's not unlikely conscription will be completely abandoned before he reaches the age of 18.
The trick is that if you are writing comments describing what the code is intended to do, you can write those comments in something like JML [ucf.edu] or Frama-C [frama-c.com]'s ACSL.
But most likely those comments will be pretty useless from a commenting perspective, namely to explain stuff which is not easily codified in a formal language.
There's a reason architects use blueprints.
Yeah? They are building houses? Houses don't change a lot when they're first build, and the guys designing the houses need to explain their designs to the people who actually implement them, the builders.
While a high-level description might be a good idea for software too, a design document is at much higher risk than inline comments when it comes to bit rot. It's better to have the design documented inline in the code. For instance by writing legible code with class and function names that actually explain what's going on. :)
And that's really the ultimate metric in my opinion...is the game fun? Nothing else really matters.
That's technically not true. You also still need to be alive.
... and has *very* strong wording.
Not for Duke Nukem, no.
Hey - he's talking about the Nordic countries, not the whole of Europe. The whole of Europe includes the former Soviet-influenced eastern nations which aren't really comparable to the Nordic countries.
That's nonsense. It's free software. If Canonical screws up, people will just go elsewhere. Debian is not far away. Having lots of people on Ubuntu makes a million times better campaigning platform than having them on Mac OS X or Windows.