The use of indentation to define blocks (among other things) has forced a number of other undesirable constraints on program structure. For example, it's the reason why a Python lambda is restricted to a single expression.
Lazy? Writing messy HTML takes more effort than writing clean XHTML. If you use a decent editor -- one that can take advantage of the structure and parseability of XML to provide validation, auto-completion, etc. on the fly -- then XHTML practically writes itself.
Wow, a choice of typing cryptic console commands or hunting through a maze of poorly-designed configuration GUIs? That sounds like Linux circa 2002. Clearly Windows is not ready for the desktop.
Casual gamers can try the game instantly, at work, in the library, anywhere.
Except they won't actually be able to do that at all. Workplaces will block these services. Libraries will block these services. And if you can afford to regularly stream HD video to a mobile device, you can probably afford a Playstation.
Try Before You Buy is a really nice model.
Except this isn't "try before you buy". It's "pay per play". Remember arcades? Well, this won't be "insert coin", it'll be "insert credit card". And you bet your life they'll take away the "buy" option as soon as they can.
I don't see "cloud" computing leaving anytime soon
I heartily agree. But only on the grounds that it's not actually possible for something to leave before it arrives.
We've been bombarded with hype about the "cloud" for a while now, but where's the beef? So far the only application that used to be run on desktops and has really taken off online is webmail. And that's ancient technology. I'd been using webmail for years before the first dotcom bubble.
It's never impossible if the PDF was created directly from a word processor document, and the creator didn't take deliberate action to make it impossible.
And, conversely, it is trivial to produce a Word document from which it is impossible to copy the text.
Magic constants?! That's dreadful! How am I supposed to know what 2 is for in that code? And, worse, what if you need to change it to something other than 2? You'd have to change it in three places. You might easily forget one and break everything.
For example, all money is fundamentally the same. All data is fundamentally different. You aren't going to get a competitive advantage from looking at the banknotes in my pocket; you might however benefit significantly from a glance at the contents of a USB stick.
Likewise, you can't look at my bank balance and say "hey, that's a great idea, I'll have a bank balance that size too!" But you could very easily look at my data and decide to copy that.
And banks have more incentive to be secure. If someone breaks into a bank and steals a whole load of money, it is the bank itself that suffers most, not the clients of that bank. If someone breaks into a data store and steals data, on the other hand, then it is the clients who suffer most, not the operators of the data store. Who will just point you to the terms and conditions you agreed to, which will say that they're not liable...
That's not what he meant. Yes, technically the index variable is changing, and it may also be used inside the loop. But the relevant questions are: "does it matter what order the iterations run in", and "does one iteration have to finish before the next can begin".
If the answer to both questions is "no", then you can run several loop bodies at once on different processors. Bingo, instant speedup.
I think ceoyoyo was referring to the use of higher-order functions like map and reduce. Absent side-effects, these can given parallelised implementations that will divide up the collection they're applied to between multiple processors.
Yes, the caller is blocked until the function returns, but the function itself is using all available processors and so the caller is blocked for linearly less time. And this is much easier to arrange than having a compiler trying to work out whether it's possible to parallelise an explicit for loop.
Oh, indeed. But this particular industry has been putting out nothing but misleading statistics for decades, now, and the policy reports they end up in have produced some of the worst laws ever written, ultimately preventing large numbers of people from doing perfectly legitimate things with products they have bought and paid for.
Now there's a risk that the media industry's lies are going to result in yet another round of laws that further restrict the freedom of law-abiding people, while still doing nothing to halt piracy. It's only right and proper that anyone who values freedom and democracy should be up in arms about this, and should do everything possible to make sure their elected representatives learn the truth and stop taking the media industry's lies at face value.
Exactly. But in the Windows world, "IDE" has always implied {IDE, compiler, libraries}, so people just say "IDE". Hence "integrated development environment". The idea being that one product contained everything you needed to develop.
This isn't just a Microsoft thing; other Windows IDEs such as Delphi were always the same.
I believe the Java world uses "IDE" to mean something slightly different, but that's a newer usage; the compiler-and-libraries-included sense was the original one.
And you can safely consider they know their job at least a little. Being pros at it and all that.
Being a pro just means you get paid for it. It doesn't mean you're good at it.
And figuring out whether it's going to be more profitable to develop for one platform or several is a particularly tricky case. The developers mostly don't have a clue about where profits come from, and the accountants mostly don't have a clue about how much effort is involved in cross-platform development. I wouldn't be at all confident that "pros" in this kind of field regularly make the right decisions.
It would be great if there was some way to find out how good a game was before buying it, wouldn't it? Like if you could get "demonstration" versions that let you play part of the game to see what it's like. Or maybe a bunch of experts could play the game first and write "reviews" that would tell you what they thought. Or you could even have some kind of online discussion rooms, let's call them "forums", where game fans could get together and share their opinions...
Well, yes, actually. Certainly US forces have done some terrible things in Iraq, murdering innocent civilians and torturing prisoners and so on, and that's clearly bad and very damaging.
But there are two big differences between that and what the Chinese do.
One is that the US military has consistently admitted its errors and prosecuted those responsible for crimes against the people of Iraq, while China continues to pretend that nothing bad has ever happened there.
The other is that most of the bad things done by US forces in Iraq have been in violation of US policy, while most of the bad things done in China have the full support and approval of their government.
I wonder how long it will be until/. users realise that online storage for information is the way to go...
That will happen once it's actually possible to connect to online storage from anywhere at any time, at no extra cost, and at a decent speed. This is currently not possible for anyone who ever steps outside their home, except in a tiny handful of major cities.
Once that's sorted out, we can start worrying about the privacy issues, and what to do if the storage company goes bust.
I would hope that all desktop OS's are used by enthusiasts. People who run Ubuntu should do so because that's what they like. People who run Mac OS X should do so because that's what they like. People who run Windows should do so because that's what they like. If people are running an OS for some other reason, then we have problems...
Nonsense. Most people don't care about what OS they use; they just use whatever came with the computer (i.e. Windows). They "like" it when it lets them see the photos of some family member's new baby, and they "dislike" it when they can't make it do something they want it to do, but most of the time they have no particular opinion about it at all.
And that's as it should be. Why should we have strong opinions about absolutely everything? Most things don't actually matter at all, and frankly operating systems largely fall into that category; it's good to have competition (since that pushes everyone to improve), and it's good to have cross-platform compatibility (because that lets everyone compete), but that's the limit of what's worth caring about.
Oh, please. You're as bad as the people who go on endlessly about "technically, a Mac is a PC". Drop the etymological reductionism and acknowledge that the meaning of a phrase is defined by its usage, not by the sum of the meanings of its components.
In the real world so unfamiliar to the endless horde of quibblers and nitpickers, there is no distinction between "laser disc" and "LaserDisc". The generic term used for media such as LDs and DVDs is "optical disc", not "laser disc".
Slashdot Mirror
The use of indentation to define blocks (among other things) has forced a number of other undesirable constraints on program structure. For example, it's the reason why a Python lambda is restricted to a single expression.
Ahh, the good old "argument from authority" fallacy.
The fact that someone famous uses something is completely irrelevant when discussing the inherent merits of that thing.
Popularity and good design are unconnected. Look upon the number of companies that are propped up by nightmarish heaps of VBA spaghetti, and despair.
Simply not true. For example, Firefox only renders the XHTML <ruby> tag if you use the XHTML MIME type that messes up IE.
Lazy? Writing messy HTML takes more effort than writing clean XHTML. If you use a decent editor -- one that can take advantage of the structure and parseability of XML to provide validation, auto-completion, etc. on the fly -- then XHTML practically writes itself.
Wow, a choice of typing cryptic console commands or hunting through a maze of poorly-designed configuration GUIs? That sounds like Linux circa 2002. Clearly Windows is not ready for the desktop.
Except they won't actually be able to do that at all. Workplaces will block these services. Libraries will block these services. And if you can afford to regularly stream HD video to a mobile device, you can probably afford a Playstation.
Except this isn't "try before you buy". It's "pay per play". Remember arcades? Well, this won't be "insert coin", it'll be "insert credit card". And you bet your life they'll take away the "buy" option as soon as they can.
I heartily agree. But only on the grounds that it's not actually possible for something to leave before it arrives.
We've been bombarded with hype about the "cloud" for a while now, but where's the beef? So far the only application that used to be run on desktops and has really taken off online is webmail. And that's ancient technology. I'd been using webmail for years before the first dotcom bubble.
They don't if the PDF was created properly.
It's never impossible if the PDF was created directly from a word processor document, and the creator didn't take deliberate action to make it impossible.
And, conversely, it is trivial to produce a Word document from which it is impossible to copy the text.
In short, the problem is not PDF.
No, it threatens to bomb Taiwan and destabilizes North Korea instead.
Magic constants?! That's dreadful! How am I supposed to know what 2 is for in that code? And, worse, what if you need to change it to something other than 2? You'd have to change it in three places. You might easily forget one and break everything.
There are big differences between data and money.
For example, all money is fundamentally the same. All data is fundamentally different. You aren't going to get a competitive advantage from looking at the banknotes in my pocket; you might however benefit significantly from a glance at the contents of a USB stick.
Likewise, you can't look at my bank balance and say "hey, that's a great idea, I'll have a bank balance that size too!" But you could very easily look at my data and decide to copy that.
And banks have more incentive to be secure. If someone breaks into a bank and steals a whole load of money, it is the bank itself that suffers most, not the clients of that bank. If someone breaks into a data store and steals data, on the other hand, then it is the clients who suffer most, not the operators of the data store. Who will just point you to the terms and conditions you agreed to, which will say that they're not liable ...
That's not what he meant. Yes, technically the index variable is changing, and it may also be used inside the loop. But the relevant questions are: "does it matter what order the iterations run in", and "does one iteration have to finish before the next can begin".
If the answer to both questions is "no", then you can run several loop bodies at once on different processors. Bingo, instant speedup.
I think ceoyoyo was referring to the use of higher-order functions like map and reduce. Absent side-effects, these can given parallelised implementations that will divide up the collection they're applied to between multiple processors.
Yes, the caller is blocked until the function returns, but the function itself is using all available processors and so the caller is blocked for linearly less time. And this is much easier to arrange than having a compiler trying to work out whether it's possible to parallelise an explicit for loop.
Yeah, because Microsoft shareholders are just desperate for yet another massive antitrust case.
Oh, indeed. But this particular industry has been putting out nothing but misleading statistics for decades, now, and the policy reports they end up in have produced some of the worst laws ever written, ultimately preventing large numbers of people from doing perfectly legitimate things with products they have bought and paid for.
Now there's a risk that the media industry's lies are going to result in yet another round of laws that further restrict the freedom of law-abiding people, while still doing nothing to halt piracy. It's only right and proper that anyone who values freedom and democracy should be up in arms about this, and should do everything possible to make sure their elected representatives learn the truth and stop taking the media industry's lies at face value.
Exactly. But in the Windows world, "IDE" has always implied {IDE, compiler, libraries}, so people just say "IDE". Hence "integrated development environment". The idea being that one product contained everything you needed to develop.
This isn't just a Microsoft thing; other Windows IDEs such as Delphi were always the same.
I believe the Java world uses "IDE" to mean something slightly different, but that's a newer usage; the compiler-and-libraries-included sense was the original one.
Being a pro just means you get paid for it. It doesn't mean you're good at it.
And figuring out whether it's going to be more profitable to develop for one platform or several is a particularly tricky case. The developers mostly don't have a clue about where profits come from, and the accountants mostly don't have a clue about how much effort is involved in cross-platform development. I wouldn't be at all confident that "pros" in this kind of field regularly make the right decisions.
Get a job.
Read a review.
Not rocket science here, folks.
It would be great if there was some way to find out how good a game was before buying it, wouldn't it? Like if you could get "demonstration" versions that let you play part of the game to see what it's like. Or maybe a bunch of experts could play the game first and write "reviews" that would tell you what they thought. Or you could even have some kind of online discussion rooms, let's call them "forums", where game fans could get together and share their opinions ...
Well, yes, actually. Certainly US forces have done some terrible things in Iraq, murdering innocent civilians and torturing prisoners and so on, and that's clearly bad and very damaging.
But there are two big differences between that and what the Chinese do.
One is that the US military has consistently admitted its errors and prosecuted those responsible for crimes against the people of Iraq, while China continues to pretend that nothing bad has ever happened there.
The other is that most of the bad things done by US forces in Iraq have been in violation of US policy, while most of the bad things done in China have the full support and approval of their government.
That will happen once it's actually possible to connect to online storage from anywhere at any time, at no extra cost, and at a decent speed. This is currently not possible for anyone who ever steps outside their home, except in a tiny handful of major cities.
Once that's sorted out, we can start worrying about the privacy issues, and what to do if the storage company goes bust.
Nonsense. Most people don't care about what OS they use; they just use whatever came with the computer (i.e. Windows). They "like" it when it lets them see the photos of some family member's new baby, and they "dislike" it when they can't make it do something they want it to do, but most of the time they have no particular opinion about it at all.
And that's as it should be. Why should we have strong opinions about absolutely everything? Most things don't actually matter at all, and frankly operating systems largely fall into that category; it's good to have competition (since that pushes everyone to improve), and it's good to have cross-platform compatibility (because that lets everyone compete), but that's the limit of what's worth caring about.
Oh, please. You're as bad as the people who go on endlessly about "technically, a Mac is a PC". Drop the etymological reductionism and acknowledge that the meaning of a phrase is defined by its usage, not by the sum of the meanings of its components.
In the real world so unfamiliar to the endless horde of quibblers and nitpickers, there is no distinction between "laser disc" and "LaserDisc". The generic term used for media such as LDs and DVDs is "optical disc", not "laser disc".
Nice try. Next you'll be expecting us to believe that Christians don't all have tonsures and habits.