Whatever language they choose, they definitely should include a dictionary, one that translates to and from Galactic Standard. That should be good for at least a few million more years, and when it's revised (as those bureaucrats at Galactic Center have been threatening for the past million years), there will certainly be translators provided for backwards compatibility.
It'd be better if it could be to/from Universal Standard, but of course, they're only been working on their first release for 12 billion years, so it's no surprise that they're not quite there yet. It can sometimes be a real pain to rely on all those billions of standard languages, one per galaxy. But you know how long government bureaucrats can take to accomplish anything useful such as universal standards.
Yup. But note that the earlier hypotheses were based on different kinds of evidence than this. So this is what in scientific circles is called "independent confirmation". For things as conjectural as how many "waves" of immigration to the Americas have happened, the scientific process typically refuses to consider an idea valid until several different kinds of evidence have been examined, and all of them are consistent with the hypothesis.
In particular, this one seems to show a strong connection between DNA and language group (na-Dene, Eskimo/Aleut, "everyone else"). This is a bit surprising, since language isn't genetic. But it's not the only place in the world where such a connection exists.
In any case, the scientific mantra "Further Research Is Needed" applies.
There have been a number of attempts to find humor in this story. Has anyone heard any good Higgs Boson jokes?
So far the best one I've heard is a take-off on the growing body of "... walks into a bar..." jokes:
A Higgs boson walks into a (Catholic) church, but the priest says "Hey, we don't allow Higgs bosons in here!". The HB replies "So how can you have mass without me?"
I think you mean "That's not what information hiding is supposed to be.";-)
I understand quite well what it's supposed to mean. But I was talking about the way it's used in the Real World of corporate IT. Call me cynical if you like, but I think lots of people know what I'm talking about. In some organizations, the OO approach has done a lot of good. In other organizations, it has contributed greatly to the building of software horror stories that end up as examples in The Daily WTF. C++ and java are great tools for misuse by people with a bureaucratic bent, and can easily be used to build software that's incomprehensible to all but the original authors.
I'm guessing that this is what has led to the decisions to stick with C, despite all its problems. C was designed as a "structured assembly language", after all, for writing low-level OS code that has to be close to the hardware. Using C as a higher-level language is essentially a violation of its original design, and others have explained why it's not very good as a general-purpose language. But when C's supposed successors produce bureaucratic messes that an organization can't fix, it's easy for people to blame the language and decide to stick with the more basic tool that people think they understand better.
I've read of it being used for a number of very minor languages in the Philippines and Indonesia, though I don't think any of these would qualify as "official" because the languages have no official standing. A quick google turned up the Cia-Cia language in Sulawesi, with all of 60,000 speakers. There's even a youtube video about it, showing a couple of children's books for teaching hangul.
I think the situation with these languages is that they previously had no written form at all, and couldn't get any sort of official support for a literacy program in a country that wanted them all to switch to the official language(s). It would make sense to adopt a writing system that's easy to learn. I'd also expect that that they might need to make a few minor changes to hangul to fit a language's phonetics. Or they could adopt kludges similar to the phonetic mapping for pinyin, where the sounds of the letters in Madarin don't exactly match any European language. Similarly, some of the hangul phoneme symbols could be mapped differently in another language with different phonemes than Korean.
I wonder if there are any language that have adopted IPA? That would a bit of a challenge for printers, but with the world slowly moving to laser/inkjet printing for everything, that's getting to be less of a problem than it was even a few years ago.;-)
From Alan Kay, who coined the term and is the authoritative source on what it means:
OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things.
Heh. I've occasionally used that and other similar quotes to explain why "OO" projects take so damn long to get working right.
The critical concept is "information hiding". What this often means in practice is that things bog down trying to debug something that doesn't work the way the programmers insists it must, but they can't find the problem, because it's carefully hidden from them by the structure of the language. From a debugging viewpoint, "information hiding" is a bug, not a feature. It often means that the needed information is hidden from the debuggers. This hiding was provided intentionally by the language designers.
It can also be "interesting" to face situations where result of a simple-looking operation is due to the interaction of a large number of details, each "inherited" from chunks of code scattered across a hundred or more small source files.
So maybe a preference for "plain C" is based on the experience that it's difficult for your programmers to hide things from each other in C. They can find bugs and get things working sooner in a language that doesn't provide tools for hiding what's going on from the people working on other parts of the code.
... Chinese characters are like an alphabet, albeit with characters which represent complete syllables rather than individual sounds...
And we've long had a word for that sort of writing, it's called a "syllabary" writing system. Lots of other languages have used syllabary writing. Japanese has two of them.;-)
It can be funny reading things written about Chinese, with people going through all sort of convoluted explanations that could be instantly simplified if they only knew that we actually have a word for symbols that represent syllables rather than phonemes (or concepts or whatever). Once you know the right terminology, the Chinese writing system makes sense, sorta. Except that it's a historical mish-mash, with no consistent internal structure to the complex characters.
OTOH, there's also Korean, which some time back replaced the messy Chinese system with a home-grown syllabary in which each character consists of little pieces that represent the phonemes in a syllable. So they have a fully phonetic writing system that's very easy to learn (and has been adopted by a few other east-Asian languages).
Now if/. only permitted UTF-8-encoded text, so we could actually give examples using non-European characters...
There's a recent bio of James Watt that has got lots of references. Watt seems like the prototype of a good engineer who tried to use his patents to quash the competition. But he mostly managed to delay the "steam revolution" for a few decades with his lawsuits against other developers. Then, after his main patents ran out, he got down to running a manufacturing business, and became fairly wealthy as a result. I've read a number of other variants on this story; that book is just the latest addition to the list.
(Actually, I think I first ran across a good description of this case history here on/. a few years back.;-)
I thought the original intention of patents was really to protect and enhance manufacturing.
Nah; assorted historians have pointed out that the primary function of patent law has always been to block manufacturing and development. Really, the only thing you can do with a patent is deny others the legal right to build anything based on whatever your patent covers. In theory, you can also collect royalties from licenses, but this is historically insignificant compared to the use of patents to block whatever competitors are trying to manufacture.
Historians have also pointed out that most patent holders have only rarely profited from owning a patent before the patent runs out. Typically they lose money paying for legal actions to block others' use of the patent. After it expires, however, they tend to profit because they're the experts on it, and can thus produce products based on it sooner than their competitors can.
The idea that patents are for providing income to the inventors is just a bit of legal propaganda to keep people confused enough to prevent improving the patent laws. In the real world, it hardly ever works for the patent holder's benefit. (But lawyers often make lots of money in legal patent battles.;-)
it was unexpected to see so many detractors here, especially considering that it is slashdot. sharing of insight is ALWAYS better...
I'd suspect that, to understand this discussion, you should always keep Poe's Law (q.v.) in mind. The default assumption here should be that we're all including a good dose of verbal irony in our comments. Yes, even those of us who have no idea what "irony" even means.
In particular, any suggestion here that it's best that we not learn how "malware" works should be read as a parody of the way that legislative and management minds work.
Of course, it's always possible that some/. readers will post such things seriously.
In any case, I'm expecting to chuckle a lot at the comments here...
Before commenting on this story, people might want to re-read the story about the Onigawa power station's survival that was posted here last March. There's pretty clear evidence that at least some managers of Japanese nuclear-power stations understood the tsunami danger and prepared for it. So the main questions should be: Why wasn't this understood by the entire management chain? And what are they doing to make sure they're preparing for the next such disaster?
I'd think that people in Japan should be checking on which of their power system's managers are busy studying this and related stories, and putting those people in charge of the surviving plants. If they don't, then it's just going to happen again at some unknown future date.
Similar comments would apply in most of the other volcanic zones on the planet. Here in the US, we might be checking to see which managers of critical infrastructure on the West Coast are aware of the story and studying it. We may not have the 1000-year history that the Japanese have, but we do have geological information about similar events along our coast.
What would they be using if Linux didn't exist? How much longer would it have taken if they'd had to use BSD? Or Windows?
Good points. One of my favorite ways of explaining it to non-geeks is to mention a job I had in the early 1990s, at a company that was building software that ran on either Sun or Apollo workstations, depending on the group. There were ongoing discussions between these two factions, mostly based on the fact that the Suns cost roughly twice what the Apollos did, for similar hardware capabilities. But the teams using Suns generally won out, for a simple reason: When the Apollo users had serious bugs that led down to the OS and "system" libraries, queries to Apollo CS typically got the reply "We can't tell you; it's proprietary."
OTOH, when the Sun users had bugs that led down into the OS, they'd ask about it on various public forums (mailing lists and newsgroups), and most of the time they'd get an answer from someone inside Sun. Quite often the Sun engineer would simply post the code that dealt with the question, and say "This is exactly how it works".
The result was that the teams using the expensive Sun got their stuff to market quickly, while the Apollo users were still beating their heads against the wall of "proprietary". Stuff that works sells a lot better that stuff that can't be made to work.
Apollo has long since disappeared from view. With time, Sun slowly went the proprietary route, and I haven't used it for over a decade. It wasn't much of a surprise when they got gobbled up by one of the most rapacious corporations in the industry. But this didn't matter, because those of us interested in rapid software development had long since migrated over to Linux or *BSD, for exactly the same reason that we'd used Sun workstations a decade or so earlier. Nowadays, google can typically find you the code that implements whatever error messages you're getting on those systems. With all of google's problems, this is orders of magnitude faster than solving problems on proprietary systems. And stuff that works still sells better than stuff that can't be made to work.
It's no surprise that "aware" non-geeks like Apple's stuff. It's shiny. And some geeks are still using it, though we're drifting away as Apple moves back into its walled garden. But if you're part of the tech crowd, which pretty much included all real scientists and engineers, it make a lot of sense to use the most open computer systems you can get your hands on. These days, the poster child for openness is linux, so you are probably using that.
Still, there are systems like OpenBSD and FreeBSD (and iTron;-) that are also quite open. Probably not soon, but some day, it's quite possible that some gang of professional managers and legal types will manage to capture Linux and take it proprietary. We should be looking over our shoulders for such corporate IP raiders, and be prepared for abandoning ship for whatever has managed to remain open. Or, more likely, the linux gang may bog down in the complexity of their attempts to steal "the desktop" from MS, and make their stuff more and more difficult to use. When this happens, we should know what our alternatives are, if we want computer systems that are easily usable in technical arenas.
Yep, and it is also occasionally pointed out that most vitamins are toxic compounds. They're typical textbook examples of the "J-shaped response curve", required for good health in tiny quantities, but with seriously negative consequenses in overdose quantities.
Google can find you lots of info about the fatal dosage for caffeine. It's generally estimated as an LD50 of around 150 mg/kg, which (depending on your weight) is on the order of 100 to 200 cups of regular coffee. So if you keep your consumption down to only 3 or 4 cups per day, you probably shouldn't worry about claims that caffeine is "toxic". Your vitamin pills might also kill you if you swallowed 50 of them at one sitting.
C++ virtual method call 1.1 ns
Objective C message send 4.9 ns
4.9/1.1 ~ 4.5 times slower.
I don't know where you're getting 10 times slower from.
It's called an "order of magnitude" estimate. 4.5 differs from 10 by less than a factor or 10, so they're the same number.
It's a very popular method of estimation among people who don't care for precision. You should try it sometime; it's fun. You can get geeky types who know the numbers really upset with you, while management types are giving you approving smiles. But you do seem to have "cherry picking" down pat, so you're well on your way to a career in media/political/management abuse of statistics. You just need a few more deceptive techniques in your portfolio. If you ask nice, there are lots of people here who can help you.
If it's something you guys like but others don't, it should be allowed to exist.
If it's something others like but you guys don't, it must die, die, die.
Okay, I think I've got it.
Hey, I think you've reached an important understanding of human psychology.;-)
Once you understand the above, you understand a lot of human history.
Using a string literal as not const is very bad form.
Don't know much about C, do we?;-)
If I saw the above declaration, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a later command like:
post = "second";// Or perhaps some computed value
If the declaration had contained a const, this would be a syntax error, since the variable post has been declared a constant.
Any competent C programmer would use the const only when it's appropriate, to tell the compiler that a symbol isn't a variable.
I've seen any number of cases of managers imposing bogus "rules" like this, causing any number of problems for the programmers. One of my favorites, because of its sheer silly cluelessness, is the managers who insisted that if commands must always have an else clause. Really. I've seen this on a number of projects. Of course, you can always put a do-nothing command there, if your language doesn't allow empty else clauses, but it doesn't endear you to later readers who have to try to figure out why there are utterly pointless commands scattered around in the code, making it bigger for no good reason other than to interfere with readability.
Come on, Gnome is written by a guy with a hard on for Bill Gates, what do you expect? Which part of Windows did they not try to implement?
It would appear that KDE is as well.
Well, what would you expect after all these years of people asking when various unix/POSIX/linux systems will take over the "desktop"? This is and always has been code for out-competing Microsoft, and most people interpret it as requiring that we mimic Windows exactly. This has always been infeasible, of course, because MS (and their sponsor IBM) has always had a marketing budget greater than all their competitors combined. And to MS customers, why would you buy a cheap knock-off of MS Windows, when for a few bucks more, you can get the Real Thing? If they are indistinguishable to the customers, this is really all you need to know. And you can't mimic them successfully anyway, because MS Windows changes significantly with every major release. To succeed, you'd have to write a system that mimics whatever Windows system the user came from. This would be a major AI project, and simply isn't feasible.
There have always been two "computer" markets that have relatively little overlap. There's the IBM/MS axis, which has always sold to people with no knowledge of computers, and no interest in the geeky internal stuff. Managers, business people, and eventually the masses who just want "a computer" and have no interest in distinguishing them. And there's the tech community, which wants to understand their tools, and has always supported a flock of smaller companies, each of which provides computers that are especially good at some things, and which are fairly "open" to customers who want to know about the internals, write their own software, etc.
You'd think the linux crowd would have learned by now that they can't win by mimicing the Big Guys. If you get too good at mimicing MS, they squash you by buying you out or (if you won't sell) bankrupting you in court. But there's a lot of money to be made by building technically good stuff and selling it to the people who understand the difference.
This topic is a clear example of this lack of understanding. It doesn't take any deep study to know that there are some things that a GUI does well, and other things that a CLI does well. In the tech market, you'd better have both of them, else your stuff will lose out to your competitors that have better tools. This isn't changing. I'm actually typing this on a Macbook Pro, and of the 10 windows visible on the (1920x1200) screen, only two have any images at all. This FF window has icons in the nav toolbar, and the adjacent Safari window has a google result page with a few similar icons. All the rest is text (some of which is in French, Italian or Chinese;-). What I'm doing in those windows can't be done (reasonably or at all) with GUI tools. My wife has an iPad, but I don't, because a few tests showed that most of the things I want to do can't be done easily there.
So, yes, the CLI may be going away -- on "computers" that really are just appliances for email, browsing, facebook, etc. If that's where you want to do business (and will lose out to MS and Apple), sure, build a system with only GUI tools. But as someone who wants a real "computer" that I can use as a general info-processing tool, the absence of good CLI tools is a useful way of excluding systems from my list of prospective purchases. In the "tech" part of the computer market, the Command Line isn't going away, because there are too many useful tasks for which it's the best tool.
What would be really useful is a design that makes it easier to combine the CLI and GUI approaches. Currently, combining them is difficult and clumsy. Rather than saying that one should go away, the real win would be coming up with good bridges across the chasms between them.
Odd bit of trivia is that the Pacific end of the Panama canal is about 20cm higher than the Atlantic end.
Others have pointed out that that difference is insignificant because it's overpowered by some bigger numbers: The tides. Actually, the tides at the Atlantic end are only about 30 cm, but at the Pacific end, they're around 6 m. And they're about 180Â out of phase. This comes up in discussions about building a sea-level canal across Central America, though it would probably be built other places than Panama. The tidal difference would produce significant currents in alternate directions, resulting in the sea life on both sides being pulled through, mixing the populations on both sides.
But this doesn't have much to do with planet-wide sea-level rises. The only real
connection is that sea-level changes would be expected to alter the tides somewhat, in unpredictable ways. This would be especially true in the Caribbean, where the tides are strongly influenced by bottom topography, and less so on on the Pacific side of Panama where the sea bottom just gets deep a short distance from shore.
The sea levels are rising on the east coast of the US because all the fat Americans are causing a shift in mass distribution and locally higher gravitational forces.
That really is the only logical explanation.
Actually, there's an older phenomenon that we've long been warned about: Every home in America has a subscription to National Geographic, and they all keep every issue (typically on a shelf in the basement). Due to the high-quality paper used, this periodical is also quite dense. Most of the US population lives along the East Coast (with a second concentration in California). Thus, the accumulated mass of all those magazines has added materially to the weight bearing down on the East Coast, which is starting to sink beneath the load.
Of course, this added mass also increases the local gravity, so actually both of these phenomena are adding to the problem of rising sea level. Which is the more serious mass increase will require further research. We can expect to read about it here on/., probably sometime in the next few weeks.
This sounds like a bunch of baloney, or possibly something that happens in some sort of tyrannical country. Things like this don't happen within the country that I live in, where people are involved with government and demand due process and accountability from their public servants.
So what country do you live in? Your ID sounds Japanese, but that doesn't mean much on the Net.;-)
Anyway, here in the US, it certainly does happen. Example: Back in the late 1960s, I was a student at the U of Wisconsin, in Madison. This was one of the many places with a strong "town vs. gown" structure, and a city government that was at the time run by politicians whose main campaign was based on student- and intellectual-baiting. There were a lot of anti-war demonstrations there, and after one such, the news got out the next day that some large number of demonstrators had been nabbed and held incommunicado overnight in the city jail. There were lots of witnesses to the arrests, and lots of "testimony" in the local media, but no court charges were ever filed. The reason was that in the morning, the police tossed them all out, and when asked, insisted that they hadn't arrested anyone. There were no official records of any sort showing that anyone had been arrested.
This produced quite a lot of "interesting" discussion within the community. The "it can't happen here" attitude was widespread, but it was difficult to deny all the testimony of people who had mysteriously disappeared overnight, with nobody able to find any evidence of where they'd all been, but they'd all been last seen in the custody of the police. It slowly got through to at least the student population that such things did happen in the US. And some of the contributors to the discussion described cases in other cities where people had been similarly held, sometimes for months, with the legally-mandated phone call(s) denied.
Something that probably helped get the idea across was the lawyers who calmly explained that the situation was simple: Since the demonstrators had been held incommunicado, in violation of US law, it meant that the police couldn't be forced by political pressure to file any charges. This was because, since the arrestees had been held illegally, the courts would reject charges filed by city agencies. The police also had done a good job of not recording any evidence, and the arrestees couldn't file charges either without evidence that they'd been held in jail. The lawyers described this as an ideal situation for the authorities: Anyone can be arrested and held "illegally", and as a result, no court tests will ever be allowed to happen. (This is a bit of an over-simplification, of course, but correct legalese would make this message far too long for most readers.;-)
The whole incident was a real eye-opener to many of the middle-class white students, who had believed that such things didn't happen in the US. The non-white (and poorer white) students didn't have to be convinced, of course; they mostly knew about it all along. It was hardly anything unique to that city; it was (and still is) common practice in much of the US when people are causing trouble for the authorities. I recall doing a lot of grinning when reading about it, thinking of the education in How Things Really Work that so many of the students were getting.
So where in the world do you live, where (you claim) such things don't happen? Curious readers want to know...
Citizens are not required to carry "papers" or identification of any kind. However, if police are unable to confirm your identity, you can be detained pending confirmation of that information.
I keep hearing that, but it's not clear how I, as an American citizen, could prove my identity if I'm being held in a jail cell. If they can hold me there until I provide proof, and none of my friends or relatives know what jail I'm in, how would I go about proving anything at all?
Similarly, I do have a copy of my birth certificate. Two copies, actually. But when I read them, I don't see anything I could use to prove that they are actually my birth certificates. They have some names and dates, but how would I go about proving from my jail cell, using only tools I have on my person (that haven't been confiscated), that I have any connection to the information on such pieces of paper?
If the cops don't want to believe my story, and claim that my documents are forged or stolen, what's my strategy?
There's a law in the states that citizens are not required to carry identification. Thus all a foreigner has to do is state that they are a resident and there's not much an officer can do about it.
Kinda naive, aren't we?;-) If you're a citizen, but don't "look right", there's a lot that any police officer can do to you.
Fact is, the officer can arrest anyone, for any reason, or for no reason at all. If you object or resist, you'll be held overnight or longer. Then, when they're tired of harassing you, they kick you out. If you try to file charges, you find that there's no record you were ever there, and they all insist that they've never seen you before. This isn't at all a hypothetical scenario. It's pretty well understood by most non-white Americans over the age of 5.
There's always lots a police officer can do to you if he wants to make your life difficult.
(If you have some witnesses, perhaps you can file charges against them. But chances are, your friends won't be too quick to volunteer as a witness. That would result in their names being in the police department's records.;-)
Content-Encoding header is what you really need,...
How so? I don't see how it has anything to do with what I was describing. How would one use it in a situation where you have a number of different format converters, and you want to let a client select one of them?
As far as I can tell, Content-Encoding merely lets me tell a client what format/language I'm sending. I don't see any way it can be used on the client side to select from a list of formats. Maybe I'm missing something...
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever language they choose, they definitely should include a dictionary, one that translates to and from Galactic Standard. That should be good for at least a few million more years, and when it's revised (as those bureaucrats at Galactic Center have been threatening for the past million years), there will certainly be translators provided for backwards compatibility.
It'd be better if it could be to/from Universal Standard, but of course, they're only been working on their first release for 12 billion years, so it's no surprise that they're not quite there yet. It can sometimes be a real pain to rely on all those billions of standard languages, one per galaxy. But you know how long government bureaucrats can take to accomplish anything useful such as universal standards.
Yeah. Very old news.
Yup. But note that the earlier hypotheses were based on different kinds of evidence than this. So this is what in scientific circles is called "independent confirmation". For things as conjectural as how many "waves" of immigration to the Americas have happened, the scientific process typically refuses to consider an idea valid until several different kinds of evidence have been examined, and all of them are consistent with the hypothesis.
In particular, this one seems to show a strong connection between DNA and language group (na-Dene, Eskimo/Aleut, "everyone else"). This is a bit surprising, since language isn't genetic. But it's not the only place in the world where such a connection exists.
In any case, the scientific mantra "Further Research Is Needed" applies.
There have been a number of attempts to find humor in this story. Has anyone heard any good Higgs Boson jokes?
So far the best one I've heard is a take-off on the growing body of "... walks into a bar ..." jokes:
A Higgs boson walks into a (Catholic) church, but the priest says "Hey, we don't allow Higgs bosons in here!". The HB replies "So how can you have mass without me?"
There's gotta be some others ...
I think you mean "That's not what information hiding is supposed to be." ;-)
I understand quite well what it's supposed to mean. But I was talking about the way it's used in the Real World of corporate IT. Call me cynical if you like, but I think lots of people know what I'm talking about. In some organizations, the OO approach has done a lot of good. In other organizations, it has contributed greatly to the building of software horror stories that end up as examples in The Daily WTF. C++ and java are great tools for misuse by people with a bureaucratic bent, and can easily be used to build software that's incomprehensible to all but the original authors.
I'm guessing that this is what has led to the decisions to stick with C, despite all its problems. C was designed as a "structured assembly language", after all, for writing low-level OS code that has to be close to the hardware. Using C as a higher-level language is essentially a violation of its original design, and others have explained why it's not very good as a general-purpose language. But when C's supposed successors produce bureaucratic messes that an organization can't fix, it's easy for people to blame the language and decide to stick with the more basic tool that people think they understand better.
I've read of it being used for a number of very minor languages in the Philippines and Indonesia, though I don't think any of these would qualify as "official" because the languages have no official standing. A quick google turned up the Cia-Cia language in Sulawesi, with all of 60,000 speakers. There's even a youtube video about it, showing a couple of children's books for teaching hangul.
I think the situation with these languages is that they previously had no written form at all, and couldn't get any sort of official support for a literacy program in a country that wanted them all to switch to the official language(s). It would make sense to adopt a writing system that's easy to learn. I'd also expect that that they might need to make a few minor changes to hangul to fit a language's phonetics. Or they could adopt kludges similar to the phonetic mapping for pinyin, where the sounds of the letters in Madarin don't exactly match any European language. Similarly, some of the hangul phoneme symbols could be mapped differently in another language with different phonemes than Korean.
I wonder if there are any language that have adopted IPA? That would a bit of a challenge for printers, but with the world slowly moving to laser/inkjet printing for everything, that's getting to be less of a problem than it was even a few years ago. ;-)
From Alan Kay, who coined the term and is the authoritative source on what it means:
OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things.
Heh. I've occasionally used that and other similar quotes to explain why "OO" projects take so damn long to get working right.
The critical concept is "information hiding". What this often means in practice is that things bog down trying to debug something that doesn't work the way the programmers insists it must, but they can't find the problem, because it's carefully hidden from them by the structure of the language. From a debugging viewpoint, "information hiding" is a bug, not a feature. It often means that the needed information is hidden from the debuggers. This hiding was provided intentionally by the language designers.
It can also be "interesting" to face situations where result of a simple-looking operation is due to the interaction of a large number of details, each "inherited" from chunks of code scattered across a hundred or more small source files.
So maybe a preference for "plain C" is based on the experience that it's difficult for your programmers to hide things from each other in C. They can find bugs and get things working sooner in a language that doesn't provide tools for hiding what's going on from the people working on other parts of the code.
... Chinese characters are like an alphabet, albeit with characters which represent complete syllables rather than individual sounds ...
And we've long had a word for that sort of writing, it's called a "syllabary" writing system. Lots of other languages have used syllabary writing. Japanese has two of them. ;-)
It can be funny reading things written about Chinese, with people going through all sort of convoluted explanations that could be instantly simplified if they only knew that we actually have a word for symbols that represent syllables rather than phonemes (or concepts or whatever). Once you know the right terminology, the Chinese writing system makes sense, sorta. Except that it's a historical mish-mash, with no consistent internal structure to the complex characters.
OTOH, there's also Korean, which some time back replaced the messy Chinese system with a home-grown syllabary in which each character consists of little pieces that represent the phonemes in a syllable. So they have a fully phonetic writing system that's very easy to learn (and has been adopted by a few other east-Asian languages).
Now if /. only permitted UTF-8-encoded text, so we could actually give examples using non-European characters ...
(Actually, I think I first ran across a good description of this case history here on /. a few years back. ;-)
I thought the original intention of patents was really to protect and enhance manufacturing.
Nah; assorted historians have pointed out that the primary function of patent law has always been to block manufacturing and development. Really, the only thing you can do with a patent is deny others the legal right to build anything based on whatever your patent covers. In theory, you can also collect royalties from licenses, but this is historically insignificant compared to the use of patents to block whatever competitors are trying to manufacture.
Historians have also pointed out that most patent holders have only rarely profited from owning a patent before the patent runs out. Typically they lose money paying for legal actions to block others' use of the patent. After it expires, however, they tend to profit because they're the experts on it, and can thus produce products based on it sooner than their competitors can.
The idea that patents are for providing income to the inventors is just a bit of legal propaganda to keep people confused enough to prevent improving the patent laws. In the real world, it hardly ever works for the patent holder's benefit. (But lawyers often make lots of money in legal patent battles. ;-)
it was unexpected to see so many detractors here, especially considering that it is slashdot. sharing of insight is ALWAYS better ...
I'd suspect that, to understand this discussion, you should always keep Poe's Law (q.v.) in mind. The default assumption here should be that we're all including a good dose of verbal irony in our comments. Yes, even those of us who have no idea what "irony" even means.
In particular, any suggestion here that it's best that we not learn how "malware" works should be read as a parody of the way that legislative and management minds work.
Of course, it's always possible that some /. readers will post such things seriously.
In any case, I'm expecting to chuckle a lot at the comments here ...
Before commenting on this story, people might want to re-read the story about the Onigawa power station's survival that was posted here last March. There's pretty clear evidence that at least some managers of Japanese nuclear-power stations understood the tsunami danger and prepared for it. So the main questions should be: Why wasn't this understood by the entire management chain? And what are they doing to make sure they're preparing for the next such disaster?
I'd think that people in Japan should be checking on which of their power system's managers are busy studying this and related stories, and putting those people in charge of the surviving plants. If they don't, then it's just going to happen again at some unknown future date.
Similar comments would apply in most of the other volcanic zones on the planet. Here in the US, we might be checking to see which managers of critical infrastructure on the West Coast are aware of the story and studying it. We may not have the 1000-year history that the Japanese have, but we do have geological information about similar events along our coast.
What would they be using if Linux didn't exist? How much longer would it have taken if they'd had to use BSD? Or Windows?
Good points. One of my favorite ways of explaining it to non-geeks is to mention a job I had in the early 1990s, at a company that was building software that ran on either Sun or Apollo workstations, depending on the group. There were ongoing discussions between these two factions, mostly based on the fact that the Suns cost roughly twice what the Apollos did, for similar hardware capabilities. But the teams using Suns generally won out, for a simple reason: When the Apollo users had serious bugs that led down to the OS and "system" libraries, queries to Apollo CS typically got the reply "We can't tell you; it's proprietary."
OTOH, when the Sun users had bugs that led down into the OS, they'd ask about it on various public forums (mailing lists and newsgroups), and most of the time they'd get an answer from someone inside Sun. Quite often the Sun engineer would simply post the code that dealt with the question, and say "This is exactly how it works".
The result was that the teams using the expensive Sun got their stuff to market quickly, while the Apollo users were still beating their heads against the wall of "proprietary". Stuff that works sells a lot better that stuff that can't be made to work.
Apollo has long since disappeared from view. With time, Sun slowly went the proprietary route, and I haven't used it for over a decade. It wasn't much of a surprise when they got gobbled up by one of the most rapacious corporations in the industry. But this didn't matter, because those of us interested in rapid software development had long since migrated over to Linux or *BSD, for exactly the same reason that we'd used Sun workstations a decade or so earlier. Nowadays, google can typically find you the code that implements whatever error messages you're getting on those systems. With all of google's problems, this is orders of magnitude faster than solving problems on proprietary systems. And stuff that works still sells better than stuff that can't be made to work.
It's no surprise that "aware" non-geeks like Apple's stuff. It's shiny. And some geeks are still using it, though we're drifting away as Apple moves back into its walled garden. But if you're part of the tech crowd, which pretty much included all real scientists and engineers, it make a lot of sense to use the most open computer systems you can get your hands on. These days, the poster child for openness is linux, so you are probably using that.
Still, there are systems like OpenBSD and FreeBSD (and iTron ;-) that are also quite open. Probably not soon, but some day, it's quite possible that some gang of professional managers and legal types will manage to capture Linux and take it proprietary. We should be looking over our shoulders for such corporate IP raiders, and be prepared for abandoning ship for whatever has managed to remain open. Or, more likely, the linux gang may bog down in the complexity of their attempts to steal "the desktop" from MS, and make their stuff more and more difficult to use. When this happens, we should know what our alternatives are, if we want computer systems that are easily usable in technical arenas.
Where are my "mod up" points when I need 'em?
Heh; I got 'em!
(... Oh, wait ...;-)
And technically caffeine is a toxic alkaloid, so.
Yep, and it is also occasionally pointed out that most vitamins are toxic compounds. They're typical textbook examples of the "J-shaped response curve", required for good health in tiny quantities, but with seriously negative consequenses in overdose quantities.
Google can find you lots of info about the fatal dosage for caffeine. It's generally estimated as an LD50 of around 150 mg/kg, which (depending on your weight) is on the order of 100 to 200 cups of regular coffee. So if you keep your consumption down to only 3 or 4 cups per day, you probably shouldn't worry about claims that caffeine is "toxic". Your vitamin pills might also kill you if you swallowed 50 of them at one sitting.
C++ virtual method call 1.1 ns
Objective C message send 4.9 ns
4.9/1.1 ~ 4.5 times slower.
I don't know where you're getting 10 times slower from.
It's called an "order of magnitude" estimate. 4.5 differs from 10 by less than a factor or 10, so they're the same number.
It's a very popular method of estimation among people who don't care for precision. You should try it sometime; it's fun. You can get geeky types who know the numbers really upset with you, while management types are giving you approving smiles. But you do seem to have "cherry picking" down pat, so you're well on your way to a career in media/political/management abuse of statistics. You just need a few more deceptive techniques in your portfolio. If you ask nice, there are lots of people here who can help you.
If it's something you guys like but others don't, it should be allowed to exist.
If it's something others like but you guys don't, it must die, die, die.
Okay, I think I've got it.
Hey, I think you've reached an important understanding of human psychology. ;-)
Once you understand the above, you understand a lot of human history.
char *post = "first";
Using a string literal as not const is very bad form.
Don't know much about C, do we? ;-)
If I saw the above declaration, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a later command like:
post = "second"; // Or perhaps some computed value
If the declaration had contained a const, this would be a syntax error, since the variable post has been declared a constant.
Any competent C programmer would use the const only when it's appropriate, to tell the compiler that a symbol isn't a variable.
I've seen any number of cases of managers imposing bogus "rules" like this, causing any number of problems for the programmers. One of my favorites, because of its sheer silly cluelessness, is the managers who insisted that if commands must always have an else clause. Really. I've seen this on a number of projects. Of course, you can always put a do-nothing command there, if your language doesn't allow empty else clauses, but it doesn't endear you to later readers who have to try to figure out why there are utterly pointless commands scattered around in the code, making it bigger for no good reason other than to interfere with readability.
Come on, Gnome is written by a guy with a hard on for Bill Gates, what do you expect? Which part of Windows did they not try to implement?
It would appear that KDE is as well.
Well, what would you expect after all these years of people asking when various unix/POSIX/linux systems will take over the "desktop"? This is and always has been code for out-competing Microsoft, and most people interpret it as requiring that we mimic Windows exactly. This has always been infeasible, of course, because MS (and their sponsor IBM) has always had a marketing budget greater than all their competitors combined. And to MS customers, why would you buy a cheap knock-off of MS Windows, when for a few bucks more, you can get the Real Thing? If they are indistinguishable to the customers, this is really all you need to know. And you can't mimic them successfully anyway, because MS Windows changes significantly with every major release. To succeed, you'd have to write a system that mimics whatever Windows system the user came from. This would be a major AI project, and simply isn't feasible.
There have always been two "computer" markets that have relatively little overlap. There's the IBM/MS axis, which has always sold to people with no knowledge of computers, and no interest in the geeky internal stuff. Managers, business people, and eventually the masses who just want "a computer" and have no interest in distinguishing them. And there's the tech community, which wants to understand their tools, and has always supported a flock of smaller companies, each of which provides computers that are especially good at some things, and which are fairly "open" to customers who want to know about the internals, write their own software, etc.
You'd think the linux crowd would have learned by now that they can't win by mimicing the Big Guys. If you get too good at mimicing MS, they squash you by buying you out or (if you won't sell) bankrupting you in court. But there's a lot of money to be made by building technically good stuff and selling it to the people who understand the difference.
This topic is a clear example of this lack of understanding. It doesn't take any deep study to know that there are some things that a GUI does well, and other things that a CLI does well. In the tech market, you'd better have both of them, else your stuff will lose out to your competitors that have better tools. This isn't changing. I'm actually typing this on a Macbook Pro, and of the 10 windows visible on the (1920x1200) screen, only two have any images at all. This FF window has icons in the nav toolbar, and the adjacent Safari window has a google result page with a few similar icons. All the rest is text (some of which is in French, Italian or Chinese ;-). What I'm doing in those windows can't be done (reasonably or at all) with GUI tools. My wife has an iPad, but I don't, because a few tests showed that most of the things I want to do can't be done easily there.
So, yes, the CLI may be going away -- on "computers" that really are just appliances for email, browsing, facebook, etc. If that's where you want to do business (and will lose out to MS and Apple), sure, build a system with only GUI tools. But as someone who wants a real "computer" that I can use as a general info-processing tool, the absence of good CLI tools is a useful way of excluding systems from my list of prospective purchases. In the "tech" part of the computer market, the Command Line isn't going away, because there are too many useful tasks for which it's the best tool.
What would be really useful is a design that makes it easier to combine the CLI and GUI approaches. Currently, combining them is difficult and clumsy. Rather than saying that one should go away, the real win would be coming up with good bridges across the chasms between them.
Odd bit of trivia is that the Pacific end of the Panama canal is about 20cm higher than the Atlantic end.
Others have pointed out that that difference is insignificant because it's overpowered by some bigger numbers: The tides. Actually, the tides at the Atlantic end are only about 30 cm, but at the Pacific end, they're around 6 m. And they're about 180Â out of phase. This comes up in discussions about building a sea-level canal across Central America, though it would probably be built other places than Panama. The tidal difference would produce significant currents in alternate directions, resulting in the sea life on both sides being pulled through, mixing the populations on both sides.
But this doesn't have much to do with planet-wide sea-level rises. The only real connection is that sea-level changes would be expected to alter the tides somewhat, in unpredictable ways. This would be especially true in the Caribbean, where the tides are strongly influenced by bottom topography, and less so on on the Pacific side of Panama where the sea bottom just gets deep a short distance from shore.
The sea levels are rising on the east coast of the US because all the fat Americans are causing a shift in mass distribution and locally higher gravitational forces.
That really is the only logical explanation.
Actually, there's an older phenomenon that we've long been warned about: Every home in America has a subscription to National Geographic, and they all keep every issue (typically on a shelf in the basement). Due to the high-quality paper used, this periodical is also quite dense. Most of the US population lives along the East Coast (with a second concentration in California). Thus, the accumulated mass of all those magazines has added materially to the weight bearing down on the East Coast, which is starting to sink beneath the load.
Of course, this added mass also increases the local gravity, so actually both of these phenomena are adding to the problem of rising sea level. Which is the more serious mass increase will require further research. We can expect to read about it here on /., probably sometime in the next few weeks.
The biggest problem with Slashdot is the whining.
You apparently have no sense of irony.
That'll be taken care of when the ironing lady comes by, shortly after the maid leaves.
This sounds like a bunch of baloney, or possibly something that happens in some sort of tyrannical country. Things like this don't happen within the country that I live in, where people are involved with government and demand due process and accountability from their public servants.
So what country do you live in? Your ID sounds Japanese, but that doesn't mean much on the Net. ;-)
Anyway, here in the US, it certainly does happen. Example: Back in the late 1960s, I was a student at the U of Wisconsin, in Madison. This was one of the many places with a strong "town vs. gown" structure, and a city government that was at the time run by politicians whose main campaign was based on student- and intellectual-baiting. There were a lot of anti-war demonstrations there, and after one such, the news got out the next day that some large number of demonstrators had been nabbed and held incommunicado overnight in the city jail. There were lots of witnesses to the arrests, and lots of "testimony" in the local media, but no court charges were ever filed. The reason was that in the morning, the police tossed them all out, and when asked, insisted that they hadn't arrested anyone. There were no official records of any sort showing that anyone had been arrested.
This produced quite a lot of "interesting" discussion within the community. The "it can't happen here" attitude was widespread, but it was difficult to deny all the testimony of people who had mysteriously disappeared overnight, with nobody able to find any evidence of where they'd all been, but they'd all been last seen in the custody of the police. It slowly got through to at least the student population that such things did happen in the US. And some of the contributors to the discussion described cases in other cities where people had been similarly held, sometimes for months, with the legally-mandated phone call(s) denied.
Something that probably helped get the idea across was the lawyers who calmly explained that the situation was simple: Since the demonstrators had been held incommunicado, in violation of US law, it meant that the police couldn't be forced by political pressure to file any charges. This was because, since the arrestees had been held illegally, the courts would reject charges filed by city agencies. The police also had done a good job of not recording any evidence, and the arrestees couldn't file charges either without evidence that they'd been held in jail. The lawyers described this as an ideal situation for the authorities: Anyone can be arrested and held "illegally", and as a result, no court tests will ever be allowed to happen. (This is a bit of an over-simplification, of course, but correct legalese would make this message far too long for most readers. ;-)
The whole incident was a real eye-opener to many of the middle-class white students, who had believed that such things didn't happen in the US. The non-white (and poorer white) students didn't have to be convinced, of course; they mostly knew about it all along. It was hardly anything unique to that city; it was (and still is) common practice in much of the US when people are causing trouble for the authorities. I recall doing a lot of grinning when reading about it, thinking of the education in How Things Really Work that so many of the students were getting.
So where in the world do you live, where (you claim) such things don't happen? Curious readers want to know ...
Citizens are not required to carry "papers" or identification of any kind. However, if police are unable to confirm your identity, you can be detained pending confirmation of that information.
I keep hearing that, but it's not clear how I, as an American citizen, could prove my identity if I'm being held in a jail cell. If they can hold me there until I provide proof, and none of my friends or relatives know what jail I'm in, how would I go about proving anything at all?
Similarly, I do have a copy of my birth certificate. Two copies, actually. But when I read them, I don't see anything I could use to prove that they are actually my birth certificates. They have some names and dates, but how would I go about proving from my jail cell, using only tools I have on my person (that haven't been confiscated), that I have any connection to the information on such pieces of paper?
If the cops don't want to believe my story, and claim that my documents are forged or stolen, what's my strategy?
There's a law in the states that citizens are not required to carry identification. Thus all a foreigner has to do is state that they are a resident and there's not much an officer can do about it.
Kinda naive, aren't we? ;-) If you're a citizen, but don't "look right", there's a lot that any police officer can do to you.
Fact is, the officer can arrest anyone, for any reason, or for no reason at all. If you object or resist, you'll be held overnight or longer. Then, when they're tired of harassing you, they kick you out. If you try to file charges, you find that there's no record you were ever there, and they all insist that they've never seen you before. This isn't at all a hypothetical scenario. It's pretty well understood by most non-white Americans over the age of 5.
There's always lots a police officer can do to you if he wants to make your life difficult.
(If you have some witnesses, perhaps you can file charges against them. But chances are, your friends won't be too quick to volunteer as a witness. That would result in their names being in the police department's records. ;-)
Content-Encoding header is what you really need, ...
How so? I don't see how it has anything to do with what I was describing. How would one use it in a situation where you have a number of different format converters, and you want to let a client select one of them?
As far as I can tell, Content-Encoding merely lets me tell a client what format/language I'm sending. I don't see any way it can be used on the client side to select from a list of formats. Maybe I'm missing something ...