So, if these math geniuses get a degree there, whats to keep them from just moving out of country? Nothing?
Helping their countries isn't nessecarily the entire point of the effort. What about the benifit to the rest of us in finding these people and nurturing their talents? I've met enough people from Africa to understand that they have the same range of intelligence as people in my country. So simple mathematics says that a large proportion of the greatest minds in the world are today being wasted simply working out how to survive from day to day.
I've run several small Free Software projects. The only one that ever got co-contributors (or even contributors) was one intended to be used by experienced programmers for a very specific purpose (OpenToken, an object-oriented compiler generator for Ada). By comparison, my SETI@Home Service project had hundreds if not thousands of users, volunteer mirrors all over the world, and as far as I know only one person other than me ever even bothered to look through the source code. I did, however, get a few bug reports and a constant barrage of support requests.
None of my other projects ever garnered much interest of any kind that I could see.
What I'm getting at here are a couple of points.
A lot depends on the type of project. A project targeted at a community of software developers is liable to generate more more interest from developers (duh!). A project targeted at more of a user community is going to get a whole lot more users, who will have typical user issues (support, bug reports, easier installers, etc).
Getting a motivated co-contributor is really rare. Its not something you can force to happen, or guilt your users into doing. You just have to be grateful when it does. Above all else, be careful to not be a PITA to someone if they start poking around your sources. If they do, you are lucky.
Its funny. As a left-handed gamer, it sounds like I ended up with exactly the same control setup as you.
Its not *that* much of a coincidence though. If you restrict yourself to mice that are comforable in a left hand, wired, laser (no gummed-up mouse rollers), and not too crappy, your selection is kinda limited.
For keyboards, a gamer again wants something wired, but not cheap and flimsy, not hand-biased, and not chock full of stupid "productivity" buttons. Again, the choices there rapidly become limited.
One unique thing about us lefties is that we really don't need those special gamer keypads. The arrow keys and the keyboard's keypad are already right there under our non-mousing hand. We just need the game to be able to use those keys. Its one of the few happy arenas where things accidentally ended up being left-hand biased.:-)
Heh. As a youngster of only 41, I have to totally agree about Buckcherry. Only CD that I've personally bought in the last 7 years I believe. However, as someone who lived through the 80's and saw cocaine take out all his heroes, I find Lit Up kind of sad. Still rocks though.
Hmmm...actually I bought a Nickleback CD too. I think the Nickleback guy is a bit misguided though. They are very good, and show spurts of actual brilliance from time to time. But Buckcherry just *rocks*.
What I've heard of Jet is really good too. Haven't listened to a whole album of theirs yet though.
Its nice to see this stuff starting to get declassified.
Back in the late 80's I worked on some electronic key management stuff for the DoD. I was told I could put TEMPEST on my resume, but I was not allowed to tell anyone what it was. On can imagine the kind of odd job-interview situations this produces.
Just this one, you guys really ought to RTFA. Every single poster here, with the solitary exception of JustinOpinion, has completely missed the point.
The author is not complaining about Cannonical making money in general. He's also not complaining about them making money off of support.
What he's complaining about is them writing and selling a network managment tool (Landscape) that requires access to a server for which they are not providing the source code. The server of course will not talk to you if you haven't paid up. Basicly, the Landscape clients may be free, but the program itself is not.
This is arguably against the spirit of the GPL (and the spirit of "umbuntu"). Its essentially the same business model as any MMO.
However, it is *not* a complaint about the meer concept of making money of of Free Software. Its a complaint about their methods of doing so in this one instance.
I was convinced that in the scientific programming world, people were still into Fortran as it grants a slight increase in speed over C for certain algorithms
Mostly its because there's a gazillion lines of perfectly working Fortran code already running in that world. It doesn't make a lot of sense to trash all that simply because some other language happens to be cooler this week.
There are some high-end number crunching apps where the parallel computation constructs in Fortran speed things up a bit, but that has more to do with Fortran compilers optimizing the stuff their customers need, rather than any inherent superiority of Fortran for this.
The problem with it is that as science advances, the gaps get smaller and then so does your God. It also unnecessarily puts religion at odds with science, when they can quite happily operate separately - Science in the land of reality, and religion everywhere else.
I mostly agree with the second sentence (minus the word "reality"), but the first is flat out wrong. As science advances, the "gaps" acually get bigger and more numerous. The more we learn, the more we realise there is that we don't know. For instance, there used to be a point where we pretty much thought we knew what the smallest particles were. Now we're beginning to realise that every time we look hard enough at a particle, we see smaller ones composing it. There's no reason whatsoever to believe this process won't continue indefinitely. However, there *is* probably a limit to our ability to look inside.
The same goes for Physics in general. Every law or theory we look hard enough at has turned out to be meerly an approximation for a set of deeper laws. Math too, for that matter. They've proven there are infinite *types* of numbers that cannot be described by our mathematics. We are limited beings, and thus there are limits to how far we will ever be able to delve into this universe of limitless complexity.
For instance, the commandment is "thou shalt not kill", but most rational people believe
Actually, no. Its "thou shall not commit murder". Some old translations used the word "kill", but few modern ones do. The hebrew word used in most of our originals is the word for murder. I'm not precisely certian how they defined "murder" at the time, but I'd bet it was at least as loose as "most rational people" feel about it. Probably a bit too loose. I wouldn't be suprised if killing a non-Jew, or perhaps even a badly misbehaving family member, was considered not to count.
Actually, its a bit of a misnomer to talk about "The 10 Commandments" anyway. The "The" is wrong, because they appear slightly differently in two different places in the bible. Also, different sects translate them differently. Even within the translations, the words are interpreted very differently by different groups.
The "10" is arguable too, as the Exodus version actually has 14 or 15 imperitive statements. Different sects divide these up into 10s differently, so there's no agreement on what numbers go with which statements either.
Many Christians also feel that Jesus essentially obsoleted them with his own two commandments.
All this of course means that anyone who wants to post "The 10 Commandments" somewhere is nessecarily taking sides in a religous dispute and promoting their version over the others.
The Wikipedia's entry on this is pretty good, but for all its length it doesn't begin to cover everything.
After displaying a horrific ignorance and having that ignorance mistaken as insight by lobotomised moderators, you then go on to accuse me of politicising the issue. F**k you, tw*t face. I wasn't talking about people coming back with conservative beliefs, I was talking about people coming back with PTSD.
I have a soccer teammate who came back from Iraq with PTSD about 3 years ago. He seems to get a bit better every year, but we all still have to constantly watch out for him.
Generally I find it annoying when someone tries to dismiss the existence of problems that are politically inconvenient to their own personal views. In this particular instance its not annoying though, its morally reprehensible. I don't care what your politics are. If 90% of us aren't gonna sacrifice a damn thing for this wonderful war we are fighting, the least we can do is take care of and pay attention to those very few who do. Otherwise, shut your pie-hole, grab an M-16, and go over there yourself, Mr. Sunshine and Light.
If anything, the above post doesn't have enough f-words.
The primary thing that pisses me off about the potential WoW movie is that from everything I have read, it looks like it's going to be told from the perspective of the Alliance
One thing not a lot of people get about Blizzard's universe is that the Horde (after the events in W2 anyway) are *not* the bad guys. They are pretty much just trying to get along, and its the Alliance that is being judgemental, racist, and self-righteous and won't leave them be. Really the Alliance are the bad guys.
Even a lot of WoW horde'ers don't get this.
Well...OK...the Blood Elves *are* evil. The Tony Snow quotes the NPCs give are sort of a dead giveaway. I note the parent doesn't like them either though (same here).
I can take that exact same stat, and say that it's given businesses a $60 billion saving. Just think how much more competitive our businesses are now that they're saving all that money!
No, there's a big difference. If you twisted the stat that way, you'd be telling the truth, rather than trying to mislead.
Actually though, there's more to it than that. In fact, looked at from the saving side, your number should be bigger. That's because the relative lack of purchasing and licensing issues means more people will be getting use out of their software than if the world had no option but to take $60 bil worth from the proprietary companies. Also, since the code is sharable, there are suddenly a lot of free programmer hours around that would otherwise have been spent reinventing wheels. Since we are (supposedly) critically short on programmers, that's a whole lot more new things that are being developed. Those "new things" have been the prime driver of productivity improvements which have allowed the US to keep up its standard of living over the last few decades.
The real issue with the article is the idea: If X is saved on proprietary software, the overall effect on the economy is Y. The article seems to be simplisticly implying that X = -Y. Many posters here are saying that instead Y = 0. I'd say that Y > 0. Most likely much greater. It would be interesting to see an economics paper on this.
VC++ has been throwing an exception on failures of new() since version 7.
...in *some* cases. Not in some others.
doubt there are many apps left that are still compiled with VC6. I think you are exaggerrating the VC issue
VC6 is what we use here. We're planning on transitioning away in 6 months or so, but we work in an industry where things have to be maintained for decades, and we have lots of tool and hardware dependancies that all have to be satisfied before we can migrate to new platforms. We don't do it when its avoidable. Perhaps this is somewhat unusual, but I know we aren't unique.
The C++ clearly states that failure of new must throw std::bad_alloc, so the original poster was wrong.
I agree that the original poster was wrong on quite a few levels, including that one. However, C++ is not a language where you can say "the standard says X, so that's the end of the matter", because some of the prime compiler implementers do not care much about the standard. You *have* to look at what the compilers being used to develop the apps are actually doing.
If you're still using a version of VC++ older than 2005 in 2008, there is something seriously wrong with you
...like you are still supporting products you delivered more than 2 years ago. I agree totally. I don't know WTF we are thinking over here. Everyone knows modern software is deliver-and-abandon. What's with this place I work at anyway?
(note. For those of you who don't happen to be using a sarcasim-sensitive web browser, pretend the above statement is outlined in lavender).
However, C has a lot going for it - it has been around for eons in computing timeframes, has a huge amount of knowledge and experience around it, huge amounts of libraries etc
Agreed on most of that, but be careful about the libraries. What a lot of C coders like to call "C libraries" are really just plain "libraries" that can be used just fine by any compiler that uses the system linker.
My real issue with the parent poster is the reactionary use of the term 'ban'
I tried to read the ancestor post, but it appears to have been modded down to hades. Judging from the heat of the responses, probably quite rightly. The problem is that a lot of the responses "oversteered" a bit.
Using C when you don't have to should not be considered a "best practice", but talk of talk banning is simply unhelpful. Nobody likes to be dictated to, least of all software developers.
Heck, the DoD even tried it for a couple of decades. Just look how well that worked out. Just about as well as Prohibition did for killing alcohol usage. Ever met someone from that generation that doesn't drink? I haven't.
The default C++ new does throw an exception rather than returning NULL, but don't let your ignorance of the language stop you from decrying it.
Hold on a minute there, Captain Ivory Tower. Perhaps *your* C++ compiler does that. Mine (VC++, probably the most used compiler on the planet) does not.
With VC++6 it returns NULL. With newer versions it *sometimes* will throw an exception, but it depends on which libraries the linker happened to pull in first. See this link for more information.
That is just silly, and demonstrates a lack of understanding of programming. High level langauges with built in checks and safties are very useful in a lot of situations, but they do not meet the needs when precision and control of the underlaying hardware is required.
Perhaps true for most such languages, but Ada just as good at doing low-level hardware banging as C. Actually its better in a lot of ways. For instance, its a lot easier to specify exactly what record fields go where in memory with Ada. It supports memory mapping and overlays too, which you have to hack in C using pointers.
The "safeties" can even be removed if you need them to be. The important thing is that they are there by default and you have to go out of your way to get rid of them, whereas in C its the opposite. Thus a lazy programmer or one who misses a case ends up with a safer program than they intended, rather than one with a security hole. Perhaps these days C has the wrong defaults?
I maintain that Ada programs tend to be huge. On small translations to a different language I've occasionally had size reductions of over 50%.
(Assuming you are talking about source file size) 50% is way too much for it to be syntax reduction. Most likely, I'd say you were doing some refactoring too. If that's the case, I'd be inclined to think the refactoring was more repsonsible for the decrease than the particular languages involved.
Then again, my experience with refactoring tends to be more along the lines of turning one 10000 line source file into fourteen 20 to 200 line source files. So %50 for a best case seems rather small.
Additionally, private variables should NOT need to be declared in files that are supposed to be shared publicly
I could agree with this as a language user. As someone who has studied compiler construction I'm not sure how you would feasibly do this though. Something has to be there to tell the compiler how large variables of that type are. Most languages (Ada included) have a trick where you can leave a machine-word sized stub (usually a pointer) in the specification file and defer the defintion of the structure to the implementation file, but it would be nice to be able to do away with that hack. I'll go look at "D" and see what it does.
Slashdot Mirror
That's only the first half of the life-cycle. The rest would be along the lines of
-> elegant code with a few special case hacks -> special case hacks with a few lines of elegant code -> crap.
Helping their countries isn't nessecarily the entire point of the effort. What about the benifit to the rest of us in finding these people and nurturing their talents? I've met enough people from Africa to understand that they have the same range of intelligence as people in my country. So simple mathematics says that a large proportion of the greatest minds in the world are today being wasted simply working out how to survive from day to day.
None of my other projects ever garnered much interest of any kind that I could see.
What I'm getting at here are a couple of points.
Its funny. As a left-handed gamer, it sounds like I ended up with exactly the same control setup as you.
:-)
Its not *that* much of a coincidence though. If you restrict yourself to mice that are comforable in a left hand, wired, laser (no gummed-up mouse rollers), and not too crappy, your selection is kinda limited.
For keyboards, a gamer again wants something wired, but not cheap and flimsy, not hand-biased, and not chock full of stupid "productivity" buttons. Again, the choices there rapidly become limited.
One unique thing about us lefties is that we really don't need those special gamer keypads. The arrow keys and the keyboard's keypad are already right there under our non-mousing hand. We just need the game to be able to use those keys. Its one of the few happy arenas where things accidentally ended up being left-hand biased.
Yeah, but I'd imagine the lag is hell when you are working all the way from Betelgeuse.
Heh. As a youngster of only 41, I have to totally agree about Buckcherry. Only CD that I've personally bought in the last 7 years I believe. However, as someone who lived through the 80's and saw cocaine take out all his heroes, I find Lit Up kind of sad. Still rocks though.
Hmmm...actually I bought a Nickleback CD too. I think the Nickleback guy is a bit misguided though. They are very good, and show spurts of actual brilliance from time to time. But Buckcherry just *rocks*.
What I've heard of Jet is really good too. Haven't listened to a whole album of theirs yet though.
Wait, I don't understand. Are you implying there's some kind of problem with that quest?
Its nice to see this stuff starting to get declassified.
Back in the late 80's I worked on some electronic key management stuff for the DoD. I was told I could put TEMPEST on my resume, but I was not allowed to tell anyone what it was. On can imagine the kind of odd job-interview situations this produces.
Just this one, you guys really ought to RTFA. Every single poster here, with the solitary exception of JustinOpinion, has completely missed the point.
The author is not complaining about Cannonical making money in general. He's also not complaining about them making money off of support.
What he's complaining about is them writing and selling a network managment tool (Landscape) that requires access to a server for which they are not providing the source code. The server of course will not talk to you if you haven't paid up. Basicly, the Landscape clients may be free, but the program itself is not.
This is arguably against the spirit of the GPL (and the spirit of "umbuntu"). Its essentially the same business model as any MMO.
However, it is *not* a complaint about the meer concept of making money of of Free Software. Its a complaint about their methods of doing so in this one instance.
Mostly its because there's a gazillion lines of perfectly working Fortran code already running in that world. It doesn't make a lot of sense to trash all that simply because some other language happens to be cooler this week.
There are some high-end number crunching apps where the parallel computation constructs in Fortran speed things up a bit, but that has more to do with Fortran compilers optimizing the stuff their customers need, rather than any inherent superiority of Fortran for this.
Back when I was doing gum'mit work, I used to have FRACAS on my resume.
I mostly agree with the second sentence (minus the word "reality"), but the first is flat out wrong. As science advances, the "gaps" acually get bigger and more numerous. The more we learn, the more we realise there is that we don't know. For instance, there used to be a point where we pretty much thought we knew what the smallest particles were. Now we're beginning to realise that every time we look hard enough at a particle, we see smaller ones composing it. There's no reason whatsoever to believe this process won't continue indefinitely. However, there *is* probably a limit to our ability to look inside.
The same goes for Physics in general. Every law or theory we look hard enough at has turned out to be meerly an approximation for a set of deeper laws. Math too, for that matter. They've proven there are infinite *types* of numbers that cannot be described by our mathematics. We are limited beings, and thus there are limits to how far we will ever be able to delve into this universe of limitless complexity.
Actually, no. Its "thou shall not commit murder". Some old translations used the word "kill", but few modern ones do. The hebrew word used in most of our originals is the word for murder. I'm not precisely certian how they defined "murder" at the time, but I'd bet it was at least as loose as "most rational people" feel about it. Probably a bit too loose. I wouldn't be suprised if killing a non-Jew, or perhaps even a badly misbehaving family member, was considered not to count.
Actually, its a bit of a misnomer to talk about "The 10 Commandments" anyway. The "The" is wrong, because they appear slightly differently in two different places in the bible. Also, different sects translate them differently. Even within the translations, the words are interpreted very differently by different groups.
The "10" is arguable too, as the Exodus version actually has 14 or 15 imperitive statements. Different sects divide these up into 10s differently, so there's no agreement on what numbers go with which statements either.
Many Christians also feel that Jesus essentially obsoleted them with his own two commandments.
All this of course means that anyone who wants to post "The 10 Commandments" somewhere is nessecarily taking sides in a religous dispute and promoting their version over the others.
The Wikipedia's entry on this is pretty good, but for all its length it doesn't begin to cover everything.
I have a soccer teammate who came back from Iraq with PTSD about 3 years ago. He seems to get a bit better every year, but we all still have to constantly watch out for him.
Generally I find it annoying when someone tries to dismiss the existence of problems that are politically inconvenient to their own personal views. In this particular instance its not annoying though, its morally reprehensible. I don't care what your politics are. If 90% of us aren't gonna sacrifice a damn thing for this wonderful war we are fighting, the least we can do is take care of and pay attention to those very few who do. Otherwise, shut your pie-hole, grab an M-16, and go over there yourself, Mr. Sunshine and Light.
If anything, the above post doesn't have enough f-words.
One thing not a lot of people get about Blizzard's universe is that the Horde (after the events in W2 anyway) are *not* the bad guys. They are pretty much just trying to get along, and its the Alliance that is being judgemental, racist, and self-righteous and won't leave them be. Really the Alliance are the bad guys.
Even a lot of WoW horde'ers don't get this.
Well...OK...the Blood Elves *are* evil. The Tony Snow quotes the NPCs give are sort of a dead giveaway. I note the parent doesn't like them either though (same here).
No, there's a big difference. If you twisted the stat that way, you'd be telling the truth, rather than trying to mislead.
Actually though, there's more to it than that. In fact, looked at from the saving side, your number should be bigger. That's because the relative lack of purchasing and licensing issues means more people will be getting use out of their software than if the world had no option but to take $60 bil worth from the proprietary companies. Also, since the code is sharable, there are suddenly a lot of free programmer hours around that would otherwise have been spent reinventing wheels. Since we are (supposedly) critically short on programmers, that's a whole lot more new things that are being developed. Those "new things" have been the prime driver of productivity improvements which have allowed the US to keep up its standard of living over the last few decades.
The real issue with the article is the idea: If X is saved on proprietary software, the overall effect on the economy is Y. The article seems to be simplisticly implying that X = -Y. Many posters here are saying that instead Y = 0. I'd say that Y > 0. Most likely much greater. It would be interesting to see an economics paper on this.
VC6 is what we use here. We're planning on transitioning away in 6 months or so, but we work in an industry where things have to be maintained for decades, and we have lots of tool and hardware dependancies that all have to be satisfied before we can migrate to new platforms. We don't do it when its avoidable. Perhaps this is somewhat unusual, but I know we aren't unique.
I agree that the original poster was wrong on quite a few levels, including that one. However, C++ is not a language where you can say "the standard says X, so that's the end of the matter", because some of the prime compiler implementers do not care much about the standard. You *have* to look at what the compilers being used to develop the apps are actually doing.
(note. For those of you who don't happen to be using a sarcasim-sensitive web browser, pretend the above statement is outlined in lavender).
Agreed on most of that, but be careful about the libraries. What a lot of C coders like to call "C libraries" are really just plain "libraries" that can be used just fine by any compiler that uses the system linker.
I tried to read the ancestor post, but it appears to have been modded down to hades. Judging from the heat of the responses, probably quite rightly. The problem is that a lot of the responses "oversteered" a bit.
Using C when you don't have to should not be considered a "best practice", but talk of talk banning is simply unhelpful. Nobody likes to be dictated to, least of all software developers.
Heck, the DoD even tried it for a couple of decades. Just look how well that worked out. Just about as well as Prohibition did for killing alcohol usage. Ever met someone from that generation that doesn't drink? I haven't.
Hold on a minute there, Captain Ivory Tower. Perhaps *your* C++ compiler does that. Mine (VC++, probably the most used compiler on the planet) does not.
With VC++6 it returns NULL. With newer versions it *sometimes* will throw an exception, but it depends on which libraries the linker happened to pull in first. See this link for more information.
Perhaps true for most such languages, but Ada just as good at doing low-level hardware banging as C. Actually its better in a lot of ways. For instance, its a lot easier to specify exactly what record fields go where in memory with Ada. It supports memory mapping and overlays too, which you have to hack in C using pointers.
The "safeties" can even be removed if you need them to be. The important thing is that they are there by default and you have to go out of your way to get rid of them, whereas in C its the opposite. Thus a lazy programmer or one who misses a case ends up with a safer program than they intended, rather than one with a security hole. Perhaps these days C has the wrong defaults?
If you are coding in C, you won't be in control of the machine for long.
They aren't saying its "too tough". They are saying it isn't lucrative enough. Margins in the server world are much better than in the desktop world.
If your home wind-power turbine is making headway, you really need to attach it to the house better.
Or worse yet, attach your house to the foundation better.
(Assuming you are talking about source file size) 50% is way too much for it to be syntax reduction. Most likely, I'd say you were doing some refactoring too. If that's the case, I'd be inclined to think the refactoring was more repsonsible for the decrease than the particular languages involved.
Then again, my experience with refactoring tends to be more along the lines of turning one 10000 line source file into fourteen 20 to 200 line source files. So %50 for a best case seems rather small.
I could agree with this as a language user. As someone who has studied compiler construction I'm not sure how you would feasibly do this though. Something has to be there to tell the compiler how large variables of that type are. Most languages (Ada included) have a trick where you can leave a machine-word sized stub (usually a pointer) in the specification file and defer the defintion of the structure to the implementation file, but it would be nice to be able to do away with that hack. I'll go look at "D" and see what it does.