A GOOD Java developer will easily create thousands of files with 2 lines of code
With common indentation, that would amount to thousands of empty classes of the form:
class X { }
(Count'em, two lines.)
Which is why comparisons between Java and Perl (and probably Php, as discussed here) should factor out the boilerplate ratio, which, in the trivial worst case is:
import java.io.*;
class Hello {
public static void main(string args[]) {
System.out.println("Hello, World");
} }
compared to: print "Hello, World\n";
ie. a 7:1 ratio. Let's reduce that arbitrarily to 4:1 for non-worst, non-trivial. If that's the right ratio, a 100K line Java app compares to a 25K line Perl app.
There is a remedy for that. You need an expensive piece of hardware, a passive device called a tripod. All it does is stand still, so it's not very versatile, but what it does, it usually does well.
I don't know any hi-tech solution for the lens cap problem, though.
For a permutation to be understandable, it's important that the first and last letter are in the right place, according to the previous slashdot article. So ssldahot should clash with slashdot, but adhlosst should not clash. Thus cbs and sbc would be allowed to co-exist.
Ideally, you want to maximise the Payload, and minimize both Fuel and Vehicle, preferrably using only exactly the energy necessary to move the Payload in the desired manner (speed, path).
The only reason the Vehicle is necessary is in order to control the application of the Fuel to the Payload, in a way such that the Payload is actually transported to its destination (or along the desired path, in case you want it to return to Earth) instead of blowing up (small fragments of Payload moving in all directions at once) or going elsewhere.
However, a larger Vehicle requires more Fuel - from a Transportation POV this is just wasted energy. Having a Reusable Vehicle only makes sense if the cost of repeatedly building a suitable nonreusable Vehicle exceeds the added Fuel cost of moving the larger Reusable Vehicle.
The actual lifesupport systems required for manned spaceflight should be considered part of the Payload. Again, there are tradeoffs - is it sufficient to have shorttime lifesupport in shape of pressurized spacesuits, or do you need living conditions for a long period of time?
This argumentation chain was also - AFAIK - the reason for using multiple-stage rockets. Why would you bring along an empty fuel container when you can just drop it off?
Sure, a SSTO (Single-Stage To Orbit) is nice, but only if it is fuel/cost-efficient, or if it can be combined with reusable payload, such as luxury lifesupport systems containing wealthy people. Air transportation is a good example of this - you can have fast systems with little comfort (jet fighters) or slower systems with lots of comfort (widebody passenger jets). You can also have unbearably slow and uncomfortable systems (ultralights) and fast and extremely comfortable systems (Concorde) which are very cheap and very expensive, respectively.
The Shuttle does not seem to be a very cost-efficient vehicle today.
Being one of the Half Percent of the population with this life-threatening allergy, I know that even a dust sized particle could be fatal
So if I grind a few bags of peanuts into powder, and sprinkle it over a sufficiently large crowd, I could manage to kill 5 out of a thousand? Wow! What a brilliant terrorist weapon! When will peanuts be outlawed in the US?
The pope is against contraception and water is wet. BSD is dying. So is the Internet. Academia is getting progressively stupid. Bill Gates rules the world, people don't care, coz' they are too stupid to care.
a nuclear holocaust would have been a prettier ending to humanity than this. What a shame...
I largely agree with your points, except about regexps.
Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?
No, given the power of Perl6 regexps, a comparison to lex+yacc would be more appropriate. And I think this is one good thing, too. Strong parsing of data is IMO a very good thing to have tightly integrated into a language.
If I had to choose between implementing a LISP in C or implementing a LISP in C++ I definitely wouldn't pick C++ (or I'd stick to its ANSI C subset). Given that the C++ template system is Turing complete in its own right, I'd risk the compilation would never terminate!
Why, if you can afford to be picky about your customers, by all means. I don't care. That reminds me of when I wanted to buy my first PC, having a Mac already. One store's website plainly said: "you got a Mac, our website does not support Macs. Go away." Which I happily did, their loss.
Last time I checked on this, I got the impression that there was a certain limit. If a UK (or other EU) business sold for over that limit to a particular other EU country, then it is obliged to add that country's VAT. So if I order a book from amazon.co.uk, which probably sells _many_ books to Denmark, they add 25% Danish moms (VAT), whereas if I ordered from some little UK specialty bookstore, they would just add UK VAT, which I believe is 0 (or at least rather low) for books.
As I haven't seen the matrix, I cannot judge it, but from reading the linked CSM story, I get a feeling it is thematically close to a novel from the sixties: Simulacron-3 by Daniel Francis Galouye.
Searching for this book on Google gave this:
Filmed as THE l3TH FLOOR and released in l999, produced by Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin. Directed by Josef Rusnak with Armin Mueller-Stahl, Vincent DOnfrio, Craig Bierko, Gretchen Mol and Bob Glendenin. Originally produced in Germany as an episodic, extended television series, THE l3TH FLOOR compresses sprawling events into two hour running time. Here, the narrative takes place almost wholly in the constructed, historic New Orleans and Hall (Vincent DOnfrio) is faced by a deadline and a situation of increasing, desperate urgency in the "real" world. In retrospect, THE l3TH FLOOR is seen as an early draft for the more successful l998 film, THE MATRIX. The themes of virtual reality and an imagined, consensual reality are similar as is the quest for a killer. SIMULACRON -3 thus anticipated, might have even been a source for THE MATRIX 34 years earlier.
I can heartily recommend the book (having only read the German translation, alas) and definitely the 1973 TV-serialization (well, two parts, total duration 205 minutes according to imdb) if you can find it. This is one book I would not be surprised if I opened it one day to reread it, only to find all text has disappeared - deleted.
As for the Matrix (reloaded or not), I don't think I will bother. No amount of Kung Foo can be a match for the psychological mindbending acting by Klaus Loewitsch under Fassbinder's direction.
With ID4 being a remake of the 1950'es movie version of WotW, itself being a mediocre US-centric movie-rendition of H.G. Wells' classic, and so on and so forth, I am coming to the conclusion that good sf has not really been made since the 70'es.
'Microsoft's 2005 version of its Windows operating system, apes features that have been in Apple's OS X operating system since 2001.'
My, they are catching up; back in 1995 it was "Windows 95 = Mac 85". So the difference is down to just four years now? Amazing -- perhaps they will be head-to-head with Apple by 2015 or thereabout?
(I'm still dismayed to see a greater-than character in front of "From" when it's the first word on a line in an email message. There's just no excuse for that in 2003.) And I'm a die-hard Unix lover (logged on using a Silent 700 when I was in 3rd grade).
That's an artifact of the mbox-based MUA you use, not Unix. (Use something with Maildir support instead!) Eudora also used mbox files, but used IIRC quoted-printable to escape the F in lines beginning with From. Not that there wasn't other braindead implementation bugs in Unix.
I recall one in particular, which earned me a few flames from one of the original MIME RFC authors.
At the time, I was a student and assistant sysadmin at my university department. We used Macs, and had an A/UX (Apple Unix, "SVR3 Unix with some BSD and SVR4 features") server (at the time I think it was still an '030 Mac IIfx) running our mail server. MIME and Q-P was a godsend for us, as in Denmark, we tend to use æøå quite a lot. But sometimes mails would get cut off in inexplicable ways, when transmitted as Q-P.
It took some experimentation before I discovered that/bin/mail -- used for local delivery -- was braindamaged. It would assume a mail was ending when it saw a single period on a line by itself. This convention is also used by SMTP, but there such actual periods are escaped, not so when sendmail piped mail for local delivery to/bin/mail.
We were hit hard by this because with Q-P (and possibly Eudora), a period at the end of a long line would sometimes be wrapped onto a line by itself. The error manifested itself on other Unix variants too, and could most easily be solved by using procmail or some other program for local delivery. (I suppose I could have solved the problem even by just doing echo '%s#/bin/mail#/usr/ucb/mailx#'|ex/etc/sendmail.cf -- but I wasn't so clever back then.)
I earned the flames because I bitched about this on the MIME newsgroup; after all, MIME had allegedly been designed in a way so that existing mail transports could be safely used, despite any known bugs and deficiencies, and yet here it caused a situation in which some systems would happily throw away a large part of a message!
In any case, Unix and Macs have always been related in my mind -- I like the best of both worlds, so to speak. But of course both have faults -- Alan Kay once said that the Mac was the only computer system worth criticizing. I'm tempted to add that Unix (including BSD's, Linux and Mac OS X) is the only OS it is worthwhile improving on.
Iraq had nothing to do with al quada. In fact there are probably more al quada cells in germany then there are in iraq.
Don't tell Bush. Fortunately he's too stupid to figure this out himself, otherwise your bombers would have turned Hamburg and Berlin to rubble already.
The IP-stuff may be bad, but actually I think the following section on "Communication Services" is far worse:
We are not under any obligation to monitor the Communication Services.
However, we reserve the right at all times to review messages and materials transmitted and accessed through a Communication Service and to disclose any information as we deem necessary to satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process, governmental request or code, or to edit, refuse to post or to remove any message or materials, in whole or in part, in our sole discretion.
So they may edit, forge and censor your PRIVATE E-MAIL (explicitly including in the preceding paragraph) as they please! I doubt that TOS can be legal, even in NZ.
15 years ago was 1988. In february that year, Apple released A/UX 1.0, which combined a SVR Unix with Macintosh system software 6 (it wasn't called MacOS then.) Probably you would run in on some variant of Macintosh II (first released in 1987!), which had six NuBus slots into which you could plug extension cards, such as 8bit and 24bit! graphics cards and network cards. The OS supported multiple displays.
So while the PC-world was still struggling with DOS and pre-3.11 Windows, we Mac-people could enjoy Unix, vivid colors, multiple monitors, and of course the pleasant experience of using the Macintosh interface.
Now tell me which computer type *really* sucked in 1988?
Slashdot Mirror
A GOOD Java developer will easily create thousands of files with 2 lines of code
With common indentation, that would amount to thousands of empty classes of the form:
class X {
}
(Count'em, two lines.)
Which is why comparisons between Java and Perl (and probably Php, as discussed here) should factor out the boilerplate ratio, which, in the trivial worst case is:
import java.io.*;
class Hello {
public static void main(string args[]) {
System.out.println("Hello, World");
}
}
compared to:
print "Hello, World\n";
ie. a 7:1 ratio. Let's reduce that arbitrarily to 4:1 for non-worst, non-trivial. If that's the right ratio, a 100K line Java app compares to a 25K line Perl app.
-Lasse
Sadly, I still jiggle the goddam camera,
There is a remedy for that. You need an expensive piece of hardware, a passive device called a tripod. All it does is stand still, so it's not very versatile, but what it does, it usually does well.
I don't know any hi-tech solution for the lens cap problem, though.
-Lasse
For a permutation to be understandable, it's important that the first and last letter are in the right place, according to the previous slashdot article. So ssldahot should clash with slashdot, but adhlosst should not clash. Thus cbs and sbc would be allowed to co-exist.
Cool! I had not seen taht.
-Lsase
And then what about for example cbs.com and sbc.com?
If you allow TLA domains, how large a T > 3 would you allow before rejecting permutations?
-Lasse
Underscore "_" is not a legal character in domain names.
-Lasse
Transportation = Fuel (Energy) + Payload (including lifesupport) + Vehicle (Carrier).
Ideally, you want to maximise the Payload, and minimize both Fuel and Vehicle, preferrably using only exactly the energy necessary to move the Payload in the desired manner (speed, path).
The only reason the Vehicle is necessary is in order to control the application of the Fuel to the Payload, in a way such that the Payload is actually transported to its destination (or along the desired path, in case you want it to return to Earth) instead of blowing up (small fragments of Payload moving in all directions at once) or going elsewhere.
However, a larger Vehicle requires more Fuel - from a Transportation POV this is just wasted energy. Having a Reusable Vehicle only makes sense if the cost of repeatedly building a suitable nonreusable Vehicle exceeds the added Fuel cost of moving the larger Reusable Vehicle.
The actual lifesupport systems required for manned spaceflight should be considered part of the Payload. Again, there are tradeoffs - is it sufficient to have shorttime lifesupport in shape of pressurized spacesuits, or do you need living conditions for a long period of time?
This argumentation chain was also - AFAIK - the reason for using multiple-stage rockets. Why would you bring along an empty fuel container when you can just drop it off?
Sure, a SSTO (Single-Stage To Orbit) is nice, but only if it is fuel/cost-efficient, or if it can be combined with reusable payload, such as luxury lifesupport systems containing wealthy people. Air transportation is a good example of this - you can have fast systems with little comfort (jet fighters) or slower systems with lots of comfort (widebody passenger jets). You can also have unbearably slow and uncomfortable systems (ultralights) and fast and extremely comfortable systems (Concorde) which are very cheap and very expensive, respectively.
The Shuttle does not seem to be a very cost-efficient vehicle today.
-Lasse
Being one of the Half Percent of the population with this life-threatening allergy, I know that even a dust sized particle could be fatal
So if I grind a few bags of peanuts into powder, and sprinkle it over a sufficiently large crowd, I could manage to kill 5 out of a thousand?
Wow! What a brilliant terrorist weapon! When will peanuts be outlawed in the US?
-Lasse
The pope is against contraception and water is wet.
BSD is dying. So is the Internet. Academia is getting progressively stupid. Bill Gates rules the world, people don't care, coz' they are too stupid to care.
a nuclear holocaust would have been a prettier ending to humanity than this. What a shame...
Computers suck. Nerds suck. Nothing matters anymore.
Die.
-Lasse
While you are probably right, you could have used fewer words:
"netbsd works fine".
-Lasse
(Running NetBSD on my PCs, my good old MacIIci, and my iMac DV Special Edition)
I largely agree with your points, except about regexps.
Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?
No, given the power of Perl6 regexps, a comparison to lex+yacc would be more appropriate. And I think this is one good thing, too. Strong parsing of data is IMO a very good thing to have tightly integrated into a language.
-Lasse
If I had to choose between implementing a LISP in C or implementing a LISP in C++ I definitely wouldn't pick C++ (or I'd stick to its ANSI C subset). Given that the C++ template system is Turing complete in its own right, I'd risk the compilation would never terminate!
-Lasse
Why, if you can afford to be picky about your customers, by all means. I don't care. That reminds me of when I wanted to buy my first PC, having a Mac already. One store's website plainly said: "you got a Mac, our website does not support Macs. Go away." Which I happily did, their loss.
-Lasse
Last time I checked on this, I got the impression that there was a certain limit. If a UK (or other EU) business sold for over that limit to a particular other EU country, then it is obliged to add that country's VAT. So if I order a book from amazon.co.uk, which probably sells _many_ books to Denmark, they add 25% Danish moms (VAT), whereas if I ordered from some little UK specialty bookstore, they would just add UK VAT, which I believe is 0 (or at least rather low) for books.
-Lasse
Belgian beer sucks.
You, sir, ought to be sentenced to drink only lukewarm piss for the rest of your life for saying that. Except you would probably enjoy it.
-Lasse
Searching for this book on Google gave this:
I can heartily recommend the book (having only read the German translation, alas) and definitely the 1973 TV-serialization (well, two parts, total duration 205 minutes according to imdb) if you can find it. This is one book I would not be surprised if I opened it one day to reread it, only to find all text has disappeared - deleted.
As for the Matrix (reloaded or not), I don't think I will bother. No amount of Kung Foo can be a match for the psychological mindbending acting by Klaus Loewitsch under Fassbinder's direction.
With ID4 being a remake of the 1950'es movie version of WotW, itself being a mediocre US-centric movie-rendition of H.G. Wells' classic, and so on and so forth, I am coming to the conclusion that good sf has not really been made since the 70'es.
By all means, prove me false.
-Lasse
'Microsoft's 2005 version of its Windows operating system, apes features that have been in Apple's OS X operating system since 2001.'
My, they are catching up; back in 1995 it was "Windows 95 = Mac 85". So the difference is down to just four years now? Amazing -- perhaps they will be head-to-head with Apple by 2015 or thereabout?
-Lasse
MkLinux is Mach kernel Linux. Look it up, then please insert your foot in your mouth and bite hard, Mr. Coward.
-Lasse
(I'm still dismayed to see a greater-than character in front of "From" when it's the first word on a line in an email message. There's just no excuse for that in 2003.) And I'm a die-hard Unix lover (logged on using a Silent 700 when I was in 3rd grade).
/bin/mail -- used for local delivery -- was braindamaged. It would assume a mail was ending when it saw a single period on a line by itself. This convention is also used by SMTP, but there such actual periods are escaped, not so when sendmail piped mail for local delivery to /bin/mail.
/etc/sendmail.cf -- but I wasn't so clever back then.)
That's an artifact of the mbox-based MUA you use, not Unix. (Use something with Maildir support instead!) Eudora also used mbox files, but used IIRC quoted-printable to escape the F in lines beginning with From. Not that there wasn't other braindead implementation bugs in Unix.
I recall one in particular, which earned me a few flames from one of the original MIME RFC authors.
At the time, I was a student and assistant sysadmin at my university department. We used Macs, and had an A/UX (Apple Unix, "SVR3 Unix with some BSD and SVR4 features") server (at the time I think it was still an '030 Mac IIfx) running our mail server. MIME and Q-P was a godsend for us, as in Denmark, we tend to use æøå quite a lot. But sometimes mails would get cut off in inexplicable ways, when transmitted as Q-P.
It took some experimentation before I discovered that
We were hit hard by this because with Q-P (and possibly Eudora), a period at the end of a long line would sometimes be wrapped onto a line by itself. The error manifested itself on other Unix variants too, and could most easily be solved by using procmail or some other program for local delivery. (I suppose I could have solved the problem even by just doing echo '%s#/bin/mail#/usr/ucb/mailx#'|ex
I earned the flames because I bitched about this on the MIME newsgroup; after all, MIME had allegedly been designed in a way so that existing mail transports could be safely used, despite any known bugs and deficiencies, and yet here it caused a situation in which some systems would happily throw away a large part of a message!
In any case, Unix and Macs have always been related in my mind -- I like the best of both worlds, so to speak. But of course both have faults -- Alan Kay once said that the Mac was the only computer system worth criticizing. I'm tempted to add that Unix (including BSD's, Linux and Mac OS X) is the only OS it is worthwhile improving on.
-Lasse
Iraq had nothing to do with al quada. In fact there are probably more al quada cells in germany then there are in iraq.
Don't tell Bush. Fortunately he's too stupid to figure this out himself, otherwise your bombers would have turned Hamburg and Berlin to rubble already.
-Lasse
So they may edit, forge and censor your PRIVATE E-MAIL (explicitly including in the preceding paragraph) as they please! I doubt that TOS can be legal, even in NZ.
-Lasse
15 years ago was 1988. In february that year, Apple released A/UX 1.0, which combined a SVR Unix with Macintosh system software 6 (it wasn't called MacOS then.) Probably you would run in on some variant of Macintosh II (first released in 1987!), which had six NuBus slots into which you could plug extension cards, such as 8bit and 24bit! graphics cards and network cards. The OS supported multiple displays.
So while the PC-world was still struggling with DOS and pre-3.11 Windows, we Mac-people could enjoy Unix, vivid colors, multiple monitors, and of course the pleasant experience of using the Macintosh interface.
Now tell me which computer type *really* sucked in 1988?
-Lasse
Sadly enough, I know a couple of people that said that they wouldn't buy a computer that looks like a lamp becuase they aren't esthetically pleasing.
They truly live in the dark then, I suppose?
As if lamps couldn't be aestetically pleasing...
-Lasse
"What would be really useful is a quantum link between No. 10 and the White House, but that's a little beyond current technology,"
I don't see how that is useful. With Tony Blair's tongue so close to George W. Bush's anus, they could just as easily whisper to each other.
-Lasse
I guess that would make them lotophagi?
-Lasse
He *could* be thinking of the 3" floppy...
(yes, there was such a thing. Amstrad, among others, used it.)
-Lasse