Or at least his style is now very similar to pro-Microsoft trolls. He has to fix one mistake though -- it's not "farmers" but "dirty hippies". Maybe he thought that by insulting farmers he would be better understood, but he completely forgot that in countries that can't exploit their colonial empires like US does, it's usually pretty well understood that farming is an important part of the world's economy, much more important than anything his little scam in Redmond ever produced.
So, to investigate this twisted logic, I've got to think that Palm software is worse than Newton software merely because, in your opinion, the Newton had a "better" cpu?
Just the opposite -- Palm software is better because it's more suitable for a handheld.
And what on earth have embedded cpus got to do with anything? The "software" for embedded use is the simplest because it has to be. Of course, neither of these opinions address the relative quality of software, other than to junk everything together under broad categories sorted by cpu "betterness."
Embedded software improves just like everything else -- it just doesn't make demands for CPU performance increase without justification, as opposed to, say, Windows.
You have yet to explain why better software can't be written for better cpus, and that's where your argument (I'm being charitable) disintegrates.
I have claimed no such thing. Are you a spin doctor?
In fact, the whole concept behind building better cpus is that of writing better software.
What? The whols concept behind building better cpus is to make them run faster. This can be either for increasing performance and functionality, or for running less efficient software (Windows and Word, for example -- their performance is constant, functionality increases marginally with subsequent releases, however demands to processing power grow exponentially).
Surely, positively, you cannot believe that MS-DOS 3.2 is "better software" than Win2K or WinXP???
I have said no such thing. One can write bad software for anything, and MS-DOS is equally bad on all CPUs. However I am comparing changes that Microsoft makes in the same line of software -- like Windows 95=>98=>Me, NT 3.51=>4=>2k=>XP, Office, etc. -- all those changes incurred hugely increased demands for resources while functionality and performance changed just barely. So to get basically the same thing at different times consumer has to buy hardware with the amount of processing power increasing with time accordingly, and this was keeping hardware prices constant while they are supposed to be dropping. Good for hardware makers, bad for consumers.
Your logic is simply impenetrable. There's no "so what?" to talk about. Software developers holler year after year for better hardware, and as the technology is available, the hardware companies oblige to the extent they can.
I am a developer, and I NEVER EVER asked anyone for better hardware. I have asked for cheaper low-performance hardware a lot though, and never was able to get any -- when it becomes cheap enough to be used widely enough for some applications it "mysteriously" goes out of production, being replaced by more powerful but also much more expensive equivalent, thus keeping the whole possible areas of software from developing --they would appear if more consumers had cheaper hardware, but alas, you can easily buy Athlon XP 1800+ but can't buy for a justifieable price (like, <$100) a small board with 486DX2-50, or low-end ARM/MIPS/PPC/... that would be perfect for cheap embedded things that don't need that freaking performance. I would be happy to develop for those things, but they aren't here.
The existence of UNIX, California, etc., might well be the result of the things you mention above (very argumentative, though), but the *continuation* of all of those things surely is not. UNIX, California, and the rest have long outlived what you deem as their causes. Sorry, but neither you nor anyone else is going to put me on a silly guilt trip about history I had no part in writing.
Strawman is your favorite propaganda trick, isn't it? I have asked one simple question -- does it mean that the cause was a good thing -- and all you can argue with is the figment of your imagination about your guilt. Yes, Microsoft managed to create an unnatural demand for things people wouldn't need or want otherwise, and that saved me and some other people who needed high-performance computers few thousands of bucks. My point is, this is not a valid justification for what Microsoft did to the progress in computer science and software industry, and very likely if Microsoft didn't exist, at least similar healthy demand would be created if the advances in computer science produced the task that actually demands all that processing power doing something more productive than printing out Herbalife ads.
I think it makes perfect sense (and parses OK, too.) The point there was that "open-source" advocates are like the horse behind the carrot. The horse is ever running toward the carrot held before him by extension of his harness, yet he never gets it, but he runs all the same. They believe in this vague, nebulous ideal of "open source" which, when pressed, they confess to not being able to understand all that well themselves. That's because "open-source" is a myth--a legend--almost a religion, to some.
Open source is not an ideological doctrine that all open source software authors subscribe to -- it never was meant to be created this way. rms may write open source software for one reason, Linus Torvalds may do it for a completely different reason, and I can do it for something that differs from both of them. However this does not change the fact that all this activity created a large amount of great software, and that despite differences in reasons and ideology, open source authors co-operate working as a community. This may make no sense for a shallow observer that sees any kind of "community" as one based on religiously followed philosophy, however for us it certainly makes sense because it works. Even the worst assholes of open source community (djb, deraadt and jwz, to name a few) co-operate with the rest of it in their own way, still producing software that works, not to mention nicer and naturally more co-operative people. If open source is a myth, then how is all that software created? By Santa's elves?
C++ standard is stabilized, its proper implementation is nowhere in sight (especially by Microsoft, no matter what they proclaim as their goal -- was February supposed to be the month the whole company had to spend entirely on fixing security bugs?), so it doesn't matter what those people are doing.
Of course absolutely idiotic idea that someone's cumbersome library is a part of the language, gives a lot of fuel to the "progress", but I hope, programmers will learn soon that TEMPLATES EXIST FOR THEM TO USE, NOT TO MAKE STL WORK. That will, of course, happen when enough smart people will start using C++ -- right now C++ is mostly being used by people too dumb to use C, or ones that had misfortune to get some crippling course that teaches C++ without C, thus making otherwise good language a domain of ignorant people.
The problem is, the conversation is hard to parse, so people will end up unsuccessfully trying to coerce the poorly cooperative bot to give the results they need. I have just pasted "How do I get red wine out of a yellow towel?" to askjeeves.com, and the results are absolutely worthless -- why would a bot do any better?
Conversation is a good way to interact with something that can parse the language and keep the context, so subsequent expressions actually can build some representation of ideas involved. Humans are good at that but computers are not, and even the theory that should be used for this isn't developed yet. So all bots can do is imitate things and pretend that they keep more context than what they are capable of. The end result is inferior to almost any kind of keyword-based search, leave alone a good menu-driven interface.
If a web site designers are too stupid to make information that the users need, accessible, it's their fault. They must understand that if someone taken a trouble to go to their web site they definitely are not there to see something they would see in a TV ad -- TV ad is to put something a person is not looking for, into his field of view and give something that can make him interested. Web site, unless it's supposed to show its main page as a popup, doesn't appear in front of someone's eyes unless he is already interested in things, so fluff, flash intros, slogans, images of happy customers, etc. are useless there. It's also very unlikely that the viewer is an investor, so prominent links to financial information and solicitation of investors won't be of any help unless link to "products and services" and "support" are ten times more noticeable than "investor's information". Same applies to press releases -- no, users do not go to the web page to read press releases, they more likely CAME from something derived from a press release than that they actually want to read anything of that kind, so please, no press releases on the home page, no "news" links more prominent than "Products" and certainly no scrolling Java or Flash with press releases. Or company history -- if you are so proud of it, make a link, but please don't flash it (literally and figuratively) in users' faces. Also it's very, very likely that the user is not going to look for announcement or especially pre-announcements of new products before going to the catalogs or support page, so please no giant vaporware announcement or even rotating "click here to see the future of dsyzsgepqrfsamication!" buttons. Users go to companies' web sites mostly to do something with products -- they do not go there to look at the "art" of the site design, or out of respect to the company, to recite press releases, history or biographies of executives -- and if you have executives' photos, be prepared to be the subject of "is he/she %@#$able?" thread at forum.%@#$edcompany.com.
Give a reasonable interface to:
1. Products/services catalog. This is what user very likely came to look at, and what is most likely to generate sales for you. You know, it's a new great idea -- that to sell something you have to offer it first.
2. Support information. This is another thing user will want to see there, and the more information he will get there, the less he will mumble on the phone with your minimum-wage customer support, or with overpaid but still brainless sales representative. And if you are by any chance in the technology business, expect that this area will be very popular at night, when engineers work, and your customer support or sales drones don't.
3. Contact information. If you have a web site, you want people to do something with you, and without being able to contact you it's rather pointless. If you dare to put "contact the local reseller, and no, we don't even know who they are" there, you can just as well shut down the site and spend the money on espresso machine for a break room instead instead of hosting or lines' fees -- it will be more useful for your business. Heck, even spending them on aeron chair would be more useful for your business.
4. Everything else is optional, however if you need money, no matter how much you will try to bring attention to "investor information", it will gain you nothing -- people who want to invest, will do so anyway, everyone else will be only annoyed. OTOH, if you need to hire someone, make a "jobs" section, and put there a reasonable job ad -- potential employees are likely to look at your site, if not in search of your "jobs" section then just because they work in the same or related business and need your products, or are curious about what you are doing. If they will see that the company makes something interesting and offers a job doing it, they may accept it.
5. If you are absolutely sure that your history or set of executives will impress someone, you can add "about us" section. However be aware that "startup B2B software company with Oracle, Intel and BEA as investors" or "five years in steel business" is nowhere close to "impressive", and neither is a photo of a CEO on a scooter or a horse, no matter how much he believes that his looks alone will impress people.
Who cares about "major vendors"? All they are good for is making weird deviations from standards, so upgrades will be a hell on earth (ex: Compaq).
Seriously, I do. Today I worked on a prototype dual-dual box (two dual-CPU motherboards squeezed into 1u -- yes, cooling that is a bitch, but this problem is solved) that my company is going to put into mass production this summer. The CPUs on the prototype are Athlon MP.
If Sanders expects that testifying in Bill's favor will sell those monsters in desktops he should better personally start designing a ActiveX module that acts as a 3d VR-style file manager that will run a viewer in a flying icon for every file within three levels of directory hierarchy.
But when they do, some buy hundreds and thousands of them. Like, say, Yahoo or Google. And those people are picky, so if a company has no chance to out-advertise the competitor (and AMD has absolutely no such chance for at least a decade), it should better try to appeal to those users rather than to the "lemmings" that may be a large number of users, but are too expensive to acquire, and of little help for repeat business.
The problem with automated plagiarism tests is that they can only work with things where there are a lot of possibilities to express the same thing with the same quality with no real preference for some particular expression. But CS is one of things where it's not the case. How many ways there is to maintain, say, a set of multiple structures? Actually, a lot. But in most of cases a programmer can almost immediately decide if, say, having an array of them will be preferrable to a list, or array of pointers to them.
But after such a decision is made, the implementation is almost completely predefined -- there is one way that works well, very few variations that make things slightly worse or better, and a shitload of ways how to do it inefficiently or plain wrong -- say, if someone is maintaining an array of structures, he should better do allocation using
and not anything else. And if he will ever need to add more of them he should better do
tmpptr=(struct mystruct*)realloc(mystructarray,sizeof(struct mystruct)*new_n); if(tmpptr){ mystructarray=tmpptr; /* possibly do something between n and new_n */ n=new_n; /* do something */ }else{ /* no memory for you */ }
. With "plagiarism checks" in place it's possible that people will try to be "original", will find the wrong solution, and wouldn't even notice that because they will be worried too much about plagiarism check to be concerned about program working. I don't think, writing things like
saveptr=mystructarray;
saved_n=n;
n=new_n;
mystructarray=realloc(mystructarray,sizeof(struct mystruct)*n); if(mystructarray==NULL){
mystructarray=saveptr;
n=saved_n; /* no memory for you */
} /*do something */
should be encouraged, even though it's harmless, and certainly
n=new_n;
mystructarray=(struct mystruct*)malloc(sizeof(struct mystruct)*n); if(mystructarray==NULL){ /* no memory for you */ } /* do something while all the data is lost in the formerly allocated but now impossible to access array, and crash horribly in the process */
is terribly wrong, but this is a kind of "creativity" that this practice will encourage.
Even the names of variables aren't likely to be different -- there are a bunch of traditions -- use of i,j, m and n as indexes originates from mathematical use of them, and use of k and l for integers is an old tradition that originated in Fortran, and a lot of people that follow it aren't even aware of its origins. Microsofties love hungarian notation, and even though I believe that it's hideous and counterproductive, it certainly is responsible for a lot of similar (hideous) names.
As for studying C [C++] properly... my nickname was Bjarnie. You don't get a nickname like that unless you are a purist. I can almost cite ARM with the best of them;-)
Bjarne Stroustrup obviously knows C++ well (doesn't automatically translate to you though), but he is pretty ignorant about the philosophy of C design, he just built his own language on top of it.
The problem is, what they are using in a transaction, isn't their in the first place -- not ethically at least. It's a protocol that found its way in multiple standards and implementation, and they encouraged it. They also used a shitload of others' ideas and software (ex: kerberos) and touted compatibility and compliance, so it's only natural to demand from them to keep their part of the bargain, comply with the definition of "openness" that exists in the world outside their company because this is what they exploit in the first place. This is why we have to find a way around their "transaction" that will keep open things open no matter how "legal" they made their restrictions look. If the only way to accomplish that would be assassination of Gates and Ballmer, I would advocate that, but fortunately this is not the case, and there are better (and certainly more legal) means at our disposal.
OK, you tell me--which current hardware company today--not dependent on M$--is shipping "better software with worse cpus"...??? Come...on...let it out! I wanna' know! Whose cpus are worse today than they were a decade ago???
Palm and all palm-like things. Current Palm CPUs are, I think, inferior even to Netwon ones when CPU functionality is concerned. Also a lot of embedded systems remain with slow CPUs or even become slow.
Like it or not, there is an x86 hardware market which began long ago. There were and are also several other computer hardware markets that began around the same period--SUN, Apple, etc. ad infinitum. They are ALL making better cpus today than they used to make. Am I supposed to think that this means they are ALL writing worse software? Man, that's got to be the weirdest attempt at a correlation I've ever heard.
None of those CPUs types even constitute separate market, such as x86 CPUs/Wintel. None of companies that make OS for those CPUs (and happen to be hardware companies themselves) even get a noticeable profit from software -- Sun probably loses money on Solaris and Java and only recovers them through hardware sales. And yes, Java is a great example of shitty software that is necessary to justify wide use of overblown CPUs.
he hypocrisy of people is utterly unbelievable. They'll stick with x86 hardware because they have by far the best choices in hardware available, not to mention the best prices, not to mention more software--and yet...and yet...they still manage to convince themselves that the house that M$ built is the least free of them all. That standardization sucks. You think so? Go SUN, then and learn. Go Apple and be reborn! I'm gonna' puke.
The existence of cheap overblown CPUs is a positive result of consumers being fed shitty software. So what? A lot of medical information is a positive result of expreiments made in the death camps, but this hardly justifies Nazi. The existence of Unix is a positive result of the AT&T monopoly, and a result of existence of UCB, what is the result of existence of California as a state within US, what is the result of bloody wars, and, earlier in the history, a result of extermination of native population. Good justification for those things, too?
Is AMD indebted to M$--you BETCHA'! To whom else might AMD BE indebted? Got a port done by Apple at Apple's own expense that runs OSX on Athlon platforms? Where's SUN's software compiled for x86 and AMD that's really given AMD a shot in the arm? I don't SEE 'UM.....
Why would a company have to be indebted to anyone? Especially at the extent of forcing a blatant perjury by its CEO?
"Turned around," indeed. What needs to be "turned around" in this whole pitiful circus is the idea that M$ is "doing things" it's competitors aren't
Saying a lie with a lot of venom doesn't make it true.
--indeed, that M$ is even *matching* the sort of closed-shop hardware & software envrironment its competitors are running.
Like, demanding hardware companies to abandon ISA bus when all PCI modems were inferior Windows-only models? Demanding ACPI to be enabled even though it's still buggy?
Which only brings us full circle to the reasons WHY most people choose x86/Windows/Linux, whatever--to anything Apple or SUN ever produced. But hell, who cares about being open-minded so long as we can have the carrot of "open-source" dangled in front of us? A horse-and-carrot story this truly is.
That doesn't even parse without errors, leave alone making sense.
and presented as an evidence that Microsoft only gets supporters from _other_ industries, that benefit from software industry being hurt (worse software needs better CPUs, less software demands easier to design CPUs), and/or that Microsoft has an unjustified influence outside its industry.
any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form;
GPL demands no such thing. "Distributed with" != "derivative work", and for example, Linux distributions include a lot of software that is not distributed in the source form -- NS 4.x, for example. If Microsoft lawyers can't read GPL it's their problem, not ours.
That was the point -- if Microsoft is out to play games, and won't accept open source, we can play the same stupid game and make something "closed" by excluding them.
All reimplementations of this then will be released under a different license that is an exact copy of GPL, plus an additional clause that Microsoft or any entity that is owned by Microsoft is prohibited from using it. Technically it will be perfectly ok under Microsoft's license -- it's not GPL at all, it's not even compatible with GPL.
The course on Unix that will fit into that time, taught to people that just received a dose of Microsoft propaganda will be like teaching geography to someone who believes that maps are meant to be drawn with America in the middle. Those people were learning Windows for decades. They believe that "double-click launches things" is the law of nature. They think of Windows ways of doing everything as "intuitive" because this is what was burned into their brains over the years of using it.
The course that they have just received only reinforced that, plus given then a lot of "knowledge" about how to reproduce someone's performance of trivial tasks -- in Windows, using Microsoft tools, speaking Microsoft terminology, and with Microsoft step-by-step explanations. If it prepared them to anything, it's certainly not thinking about anything outside Microsoft world, or independent thinking of any kind, anywhere.
Whatever you can tell them will only enable them to say "yeah, I know Unix" -- and then cause a spectacular mess when actually trying to use it. I believe that the only way to make those people less dangerous for Unix users is by humiliating them thoroughly and mercilessly, so every time they will see or hear anything about Unix (or anything advanced at all) they would get the painful feeling of their intellectual inferiority, and will shut up, so others can complete their work without them interfering or trying to convert yet another thing to Windows.
Currently WiFi devices are expensive and out of reach of many.
And it's great. Because the current generation of the protocol (802.11b, for example) can neither scale in a large network nor survive the high density of users with physically intersecting separate networks, and even without physical saturation of the bandwidth users will step on each other's toes. Another problem will be the possibility for buggy drivers to cause absolutely intolerable interference, ruining the network for everyone in a 300ft range from a lamer.
Hmmm... have you ever tried to write a real multi-threaded app. in C/C++?
Multithreading _is_ one of the ideas, Java is poisoned with, at the expense of such alternatives as asynchronous processing and multiple processes, that both were superior solutions for everything that I have seen.
What about a cross platform (I don't mean BI platform) networked application in C/C++?
Did nothing but those things for at least six years.
Hello, have you written a caching immutable string factory?
More poisoning. It's not the language's fault that it doesn't come with everything a developer thinks, he wants -- but templates mechanism (that has nothing to do with STL -- STL is, if anything, an example of its abuse) allows to do that, and more easily.
Sorry dude, picking proprietary libraries or rolling your own is just bad business sense,
I don't give a [damn] about "business sense" if it involves hiring large number of incompetent people as "programmers" and looking for a language that will cover up their stupidity and ignorance. I can, and did write code that was cross-platform, efficient, or even both, and C/C++ never caused me, or any programmer that I know, any trouble. If inferior minds have problem with this, they should get a job that matches their intellectual abilities.
and saying that languages perks are pushing agendas or solutions looking for problems only shows ignorance [by definition] on your part.
Just the opposite. What you see as a perk, I see as a bad idea, being promoted by making a language that doesn't allow you to use any alternative -- but since you (and other "java developers" that were kept from studying C properly) never were exposed to any other ideas, you cheerfully eat half-chewed for you language, thinking that this is actually a good design.
...that he isn't a FUD-monger, everybody will just buy all the FUD that he wrote. Then he is being more naive than his readers.
Okay, how many of you think I've abandoned all hope for Java and have gone to the dark side? I suspect some of you are questioning my loyalties at this precise moment, wondering if I'm fit to occupy my role as EIC. Well, don't panic, I'm merely being a realist and looking at it from all angles. You'd be the first ones to complain if I buried my head in the sand and just ignored the threat. We have to look at this together and come up with a strategy that will enable us to effectively take on C#. We'll be getting a lot of heat from all over and we need to be armed with the information and prepared to go back to the drawing board and reeducate the masses. Sadly, they are being led a merry dance by Pied Piper Gates.
I personally believe that Java and C# both suck by themselves, both are "poisoned technologies" (ones that carry arbitrary idiosyncrasies built into them just to advance the agenda of their creators -- the only positive example of "poisoned technology" that I have seen is fictional -- it's Asimov's robots, and even they aren't completely positive), that they pretend to solve existing problems while actually solving the problems that people have yet to invent. However the amount of FUD (ex: C# on Linux? Without a single Win32-only library that every usable C# program is going to depend on?) makes me feel bad for Java -- if it has friends like that, enemies are completely unnecessary.
...or today two of more or less famous among computer-using population people for, both named Bruce, and with last names starting with "S" (Bruce Sterling, a writer, and Bruce Schneier, a cryptographist, of "Applied Cryptography" fame) made absolutely inane statements, performing the acts of nearly the worst ass-kissing that ever was mentioned on Slashdot?
Is someone going through the list (sorted first name first, like every ignorant person will do) and doing something to those people? Is there something in common? Or everyone and his dog suddenly became a patriot of the Corporate States of America, so those coincidences are merely a result of high density of this ?
To be honest, I would be equally disgusted in both cases, so I'll rather stick with the hypothesis of my insanity.
Re:Pax Americana, Arms and World Domination
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For all our power and influence, we don't have the aggressive expansionist policy the Romans, Greek, or Baybalonian empires did. And no, it's not because you're stopping us ^__^
You do. And this claim, that OUR empire is better than all previous ones, is just about as old as empires themselves.
And what is particulary funny...
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about usual US self-congratulatory propaganda? Have I missed some sarcasm? And why american propagansa STILL insists that duplication of American space-based military technology driven Russians "broke" while it's obvious that USSR neither had any program to put any offensive weapons in space, nor had to spend enormous amounts of money or effort on its space program, and was dissolved entirely for political reasons?
Americans feel the need to morally support their morally bankrupt army and government (well known to be cowards in uniform and crooks in suits)? They need to sell themselves the idea that they are the smartest people in the world? Or they expect to scare everyone else with this? They believe that China, Russia or a bunch of other countries can't turn their precious government into a hole in the ground if it will piss them off sufficiently?
I am not a diplomat, so my answer to this would be "They can kiss my ass".
Slashdot Mirror
Or at least his style is now very similar to pro-Microsoft trolls. He has to fix one mistake though -- it's not "farmers" but "dirty hippies". Maybe he thought that by insulting farmers he would be better understood, but he completely forgot that in countries that can't exploit their colonial empires like US does, it's usually pretty well understood that farming is an important part of the world's economy, much more important than anything his little scam in Redmond ever produced.
So, to investigate this twisted logic, I've got to think that Palm software is worse than Newton software merely because, in your opinion, the Newton had a "better" cpu?
Just the opposite -- Palm software is better because it's more suitable for a handheld.
And what on earth have embedded cpus got to do with anything? The "software" for embedded use is the simplest because it has to be. Of course, neither of these opinions address the relative quality of software, other than to junk everything together under broad categories sorted by cpu "betterness."
Embedded software improves just like everything else -- it just doesn't make demands for CPU performance increase without justification, as opposed to, say, Windows.
You have yet to explain why better software can't be written for better cpus, and that's where your argument (I'm being charitable) disintegrates.
I have claimed no such thing. Are you a spin doctor?
In fact, the whole concept behind building better cpus is that of writing better software.
What? The whols concept behind building better cpus is to make them run faster. This can be either for increasing performance and functionality, or for running less efficient software (Windows and Word, for example -- their performance is constant, functionality increases marginally with subsequent releases, however demands to processing power grow exponentially).
Surely, positively, you cannot believe that MS-DOS 3.2 is "better software" than Win2K or WinXP???
I have said no such thing. One can write bad software for anything, and MS-DOS is equally bad on all CPUs. However I am comparing changes that Microsoft makes in the same line of software -- like Windows 95=>98=>Me, NT 3.51=>4=>2k=>XP, Office, etc. -- all those changes incurred hugely increased demands for resources while functionality and performance changed just barely. So to get basically the same thing at different times consumer has to buy hardware with the amount of processing power increasing with time accordingly, and this was keeping hardware prices constant while they are supposed to be dropping. Good for hardware makers, bad for consumers.
Your logic is simply impenetrable. There's no "so what?" to talk about. Software developers holler year after year for better hardware, and as the technology is available, the hardware companies oblige to the extent they can.
I am a developer, and I NEVER EVER asked anyone for better hardware. I have asked for cheaper low-performance hardware a lot though, and never was able to get any -- when it becomes cheap enough to be used widely enough for some applications it "mysteriously" goes out of production, being replaced by more powerful but also much more expensive equivalent, thus keeping the whole possible areas of software from developing --they would appear if more consumers had cheaper hardware, but alas, you can easily buy Athlon XP 1800+ but can't buy for a justifieable price (like, <$100) a small board with 486DX2-50, or low-end ARM/MIPS/PPC/... that would be perfect for cheap embedded things that don't need that freaking performance. I would be happy to develop for those things, but they aren't here.
The existence of UNIX, California, etc., might well be the result of the things you mention above (very argumentative, though), but the *continuation* of all of those things surely is not. UNIX, California, and the rest have long outlived what you deem as their causes. Sorry, but neither you nor anyone else is going to put me on a silly guilt trip about history I had no part in writing.
Strawman is your favorite propaganda trick, isn't it? I have asked one simple question -- does it mean that the cause was a good thing -- and all you can argue with is the figment of your imagination about your guilt. Yes, Microsoft managed to create an unnatural demand for things people wouldn't need or want otherwise, and that saved me and some other people who needed high-performance computers few thousands of bucks. My point is, this is not a valid justification for what Microsoft did to the progress in computer science and software industry, and very likely if Microsoft didn't exist, at least similar healthy demand would be created if the advances in computer science produced the task that actually demands all that processing power doing something more productive than printing out Herbalife ads.
I think it makes perfect sense (and parses OK, too.) The point there was that "open-source" advocates are like the horse behind the carrot. The horse is ever running toward the carrot held before him by extension of his harness, yet he never gets it, but he runs all the same. They believe in this vague, nebulous ideal of "open source" which, when pressed, they confess to not being able to understand all that well themselves. That's because "open-source" is a myth--a legend--almost a religion, to some.
Open source is not an ideological doctrine that all open source software authors subscribe to -- it never was meant to be created this way. rms may write open source software for one reason, Linus Torvalds may do it for a completely different reason, and I can do it for something that differs from both of them. However this does not change the fact that all this activity created a large amount of great software, and that despite differences in reasons and ideology, open source authors co-operate working as a community. This may make no sense for a shallow observer that sees any kind of "community" as one based on religiously followed philosophy, however for us it certainly makes sense because it works. Even the worst assholes of open source community (djb, deraadt and jwz, to name a few) co-operate with the rest of it in their own way, still producing software that works, not to mention nicer and naturally more co-operative people. If open source is a myth, then how is all that software created? By Santa's elves?
That would create inconsistency -- "---able" just doesn't sound right ;-)
C++ standard is stabilized, its proper implementation is nowhere in sight (especially by Microsoft, no matter what they proclaim as their goal -- was February supposed to be the month the whole company had to spend entirely on fixing security bugs?), so it doesn't matter what those people are doing.
Of course absolutely idiotic idea that someone's cumbersome library is a part of the language, gives a lot of fuel to the "progress", but I hope, programmers will learn soon that TEMPLATES EXIST FOR THEM TO USE, NOT TO MAKE STL WORK. That will, of course, happen when enough smart people will start using C++ -- right now C++ is mostly being used by people too dumb to use C, or ones that had misfortune to get some crippling course that teaches C++ without C, thus making otherwise good language a domain of ignorant people.
The problem is, the conversation is hard to parse, so people will end up unsuccessfully trying to coerce the poorly cooperative bot to give the results they need. I have just pasted "How do I get red wine out of a yellow towel?" to askjeeves.com, and the results are absolutely worthless -- why would a bot do any better?
Conversation is a good way to interact with something that can parse the language and keep the context, so subsequent expressions actually can build some representation of ideas involved. Humans are good at that but computers are not, and even the theory that should be used for this isn't developed yet. So all bots can do is imitate things and pretend that they keep more context than what they are capable of. The end result is inferior to almost any kind of keyword-based search, leave alone a good menu-driven interface.
If a web site designers are too stupid to make information that the users need, accessible, it's their fault. They must understand that if someone taken a trouble to go to their web site they definitely are not there to see something they would see in a TV ad -- TV ad is to put something a person is not looking for, into his field of view and give something that can make him interested. Web site, unless it's supposed to show its main page as a popup, doesn't appear in front of someone's eyes unless he is already interested in things, so fluff, flash intros, slogans, images of happy customers, etc. are useless there. It's also very unlikely that the viewer is an investor, so prominent links to financial information and solicitation of investors won't be of any help unless link to "products and services" and "support" are ten times more noticeable than "investor's information". Same applies to press releases -- no, users do not go to the web page to read press releases, they more likely CAME from something derived from a press release than that they actually want to read anything of that kind, so please, no press releases on the home page, no "news" links more prominent than "Products" and certainly no scrolling Java or Flash with press releases. Or company history -- if you are so proud of it, make a link, but please don't flash it (literally and figuratively) in users' faces. Also it's very, very likely that the user is not going to look for announcement or especially pre-announcements of new products before going to the catalogs or support page, so please no giant vaporware announcement or even rotating "click here to see the future of dsyzsgepqrfsamication!" buttons. Users go to companies' web sites mostly to do something with products -- they do not go there to look at the "art" of the site design, or out of respect to the company, to recite press releases, history or biographies of executives -- and if you have executives' photos, be prepared to be the subject of "is he/she %@#$able?" thread at forum.%@#$edcompany.com.
Give a reasonable interface to:
1. Products/services catalog. This is what user very likely came to look at, and what is most likely to generate sales for you. You know, it's a new great idea -- that to sell something you have to offer it first.
2. Support information. This is another thing user will want to see there, and the more information he will get there, the less he will mumble on the phone with your minimum-wage customer support, or with overpaid but still brainless sales representative. And if you are by any chance in the technology business, expect that this area will be very popular at night, when engineers work, and your customer support or sales drones don't.
3. Contact information. If you have a web site, you want people to do something with you, and without being able to contact you it's rather pointless. If you dare to put "contact the local reseller, and no, we don't even know who they are" there, you can just as well shut down the site and spend the money on espresso machine for a break room instead instead of hosting or lines' fees -- it will be more useful for your business. Heck, even spending them on aeron chair would be more useful for your business.
4. Everything else is optional, however if you need money, no matter how much you will try to bring attention to "investor information", it will gain you nothing -- people who want to invest, will do so anyway, everyone else will be only annoyed. OTOH, if you need to hire someone, make a "jobs" section, and put there a reasonable job ad -- potential employees are likely to look at your site, if not in search of your "jobs" section then just because they work in the same or related business and need your products, or are curious about what you are doing. If they will see that the company makes something interesting and offers a job doing it, they may accept it.
5. If you are absolutely sure that your history or set of executives will impress someone, you can add "about us" section. However be aware that "startup B2B software company with Oracle, Intel and BEA as investors" or "five years in steel business" is nowhere close to "impressive", and neither is a photo of a CEO on a scooter or a horse, no matter how much he believes that his looks alone will impress people.
Who cares about "major vendors"? All they are good for is making weird deviations from standards, so upgrades will be a hell on earth (ex: Compaq).
Seriously, I do. Today I worked on a prototype dual-dual box (two dual-CPU motherboards squeezed into 1u -- yes, cooling that is a bitch, but this problem is solved) that my company is going to put into mass production this summer. The CPUs on the prototype are Athlon MP.
If Sanders expects that testifying in Bill's favor will sell those monsters in desktops he should better personally start designing a ActiveX module that acts as a 3d VR-style file manager that will run a viewer in a flying icon for every file within three levels of directory hierarchy.
But when they do, some buy hundreds and thousands of them. Like, say, Yahoo or Google. And those people are picky, so if a company has no chance to out-advertise the competitor (and AMD has absolutely no such chance for at least a decade), it should better try to appeal to those users rather than to the "lemmings" that may be a large number of users, but are too expensive to acquire, and of little help for repeat business.
The problem with automated plagiarism tests is that they can only work with things where there are a lot of possibilities to express the same thing with the same quality with no real preference for some particular expression. But CS is one of things where it's not the case. How many ways there is to maintain, say, a set of multiple structures? Actually, a lot. But in most of cases a programmer can almost immediately decide if, say, having an array of them will be preferrable to a list, or array of pointers to them.
But after such a decision is made, the implementation is almost completely predefined -- there is one way that works well, very few variations that make things slightly worse or better, and a shitload of ways how to do it inefficiently or plain wrong -- say, if someone is maintaining an array of structures, he should better do allocation using
/* no memory for you */
/*do something */
/* no memory for you */
/* do something while all the data is lost in the formerly allocated but now impossible to access array, and crash horribly in the process */
mystructarray=(struct mystruct*)malloc(sizeof(struct mystruct)*n);
and not anything else. And if he will ever need to add more of them he should better do
tmpptr=(struct mystruct*)realloc(mystructarray,sizeof(struct mystruct)*new_n);
if(tmpptr){
mystructarray=tmpptr;
/* possibly do something between n and new_n */
n=new_n;
/* do something */
}else{
/* no memory for you */
}
. With "plagiarism checks" in place it's possible that people will try to be "original", will find the wrong solution, and wouldn't even notice that because they will be worried too much about plagiarism check to be concerned about program working. I don't think, writing things like
saveptr=mystructarray;
saved_n=n;
n=new_n;
mystructarray=realloc(mystructarray,sizeof(struct mystruct)*n);
if(mystructarray==NULL){
mystructarray=saveptr;
n=saved_n;
}
should be encouraged, even though it's harmless, and certainly
n=new_n;
mystructarray=(struct mystruct*)malloc(sizeof(struct mystruct)*n);
if(mystructarray==NULL){
}
is terribly wrong, but this is a kind of "creativity" that this practice will encourage.
Even the names of variables aren't likely to be different -- there are a bunch of traditions -- use of i,j, m and n as indexes originates from mathematical use of them, and use of k and l for integers is an old tradition that originated in Fortran, and a lot of people that follow it aren't even aware of its origins. Microsofties love hungarian notation, and even though I believe that it's hideous and counterproductive, it certainly is responsible for a lot of similar (hideous) names.
As for studying C [C++] properly... my nickname was Bjarnie. You don't get a nickname like that unless you are a purist. I can almost cite ARM with the best of them ;-)
Bjarne Stroustrup obviously knows C++ well (doesn't automatically translate to you though), but he is pretty ignorant about the philosophy of C design, he just built his own language on top of it.
The problem is, what they are using in a transaction, isn't their in the first place -- not ethically at least. It's a protocol that found its way in multiple standards and implementation, and they encouraged it. They also used a shitload of others' ideas and software (ex: kerberos) and touted compatibility and compliance, so it's only natural to demand from them to keep their part of the bargain, comply with the definition of "openness" that exists in the world outside their company because this is what they exploit in the first place. This is why we have to find a way around their "transaction" that will keep open things open no matter how "legal" they made their restrictions look. If the only way to accomplish that would be assassination of Gates and Ballmer, I would advocate that, but fortunately this is not the case, and there are better (and certainly more legal) means at our disposal.
OK, you tell me--which current hardware company today--not dependent on M$--is shipping "better software with worse cpus"...??? Come...on...let it out! I wanna' know! Whose cpus are worse today than they were a decade ago???
Palm and all palm-like things. Current Palm CPUs are, I think, inferior even to Netwon ones when CPU functionality is concerned. Also a lot of embedded systems remain with slow CPUs or even become slow.
Like it or not, there is an x86 hardware market which began long ago. There were and are also several other computer hardware markets that began around the same period--SUN, Apple, etc. ad infinitum. They are ALL making better cpus today than they used to make. Am I supposed to think that this means they are ALL writing worse software? Man, that's got to be the weirdest attempt at a correlation I've ever heard.
None of those CPUs types even constitute separate market, such as x86 CPUs/Wintel. None of companies that make OS for those CPUs (and happen to be hardware companies themselves) even get a noticeable profit from software -- Sun probably loses money on Solaris and Java and only recovers them through hardware sales. And yes, Java is a great example of shitty software that is necessary to justify wide use of overblown CPUs.
he hypocrisy of people is utterly unbelievable. They'll stick with x86 hardware because they have by far the best choices in hardware available, not to mention the best prices, not to mention more software--and yet...and yet...they still manage to convince themselves that the house that M$ built is the least free of them all. That standardization sucks. You think so? Go SUN, then and learn. Go Apple and be reborn! I'm gonna' puke.
The existence of cheap overblown CPUs is a positive result of consumers being fed shitty software. So what? A lot of medical information is a positive result of expreiments made in the death camps, but this hardly justifies Nazi. The existence of Unix is a positive result of the AT&T monopoly, and a result of existence of UCB, what is the result of existence of California as a state within US, what is the result of bloody wars, and, earlier in the history, a result of extermination of native population. Good justification for those things, too?
Is AMD indebted to M$--you BETCHA'! To whom else might AMD BE indebted? Got a port done by Apple at Apple's own expense that runs OSX on Athlon platforms? Where's SUN's software compiled for x86 and AMD that's really given AMD a shot in the arm? I don't SEE 'UM.....
Why would a company have to be indebted to anyone? Especially at the extent of forcing a blatant perjury by its CEO?
"Turned around," indeed. What needs to be "turned around" in this whole pitiful circus is the idea that M$ is "doing things" it's competitors aren't
Saying a lie with a lot of venom doesn't make it true.
--indeed, that M$ is even *matching* the sort of closed-shop hardware & software envrironment its competitors are running.
Like, demanding hardware companies to abandon ISA bus when all PCI modems were inferior Windows-only models? Demanding ACPI to be enabled even though it's still buggy?
Which only brings us full circle to the reasons WHY most people choose x86/Windows/Linux, whatever--to anything Apple or SUN ever produced. But hell, who cares about being open-minded so long as we can have the carrot of "open-source" dangled in front of us? A horse-and-carrot story this truly is.
That doesn't even parse without errors, leave alone making sense.
The funny thing is, I think, that will be _still_ compliant.
Their "innovations" are in protocol, not algorithms -- those are arbitrary changes that made only to break the compatibility.
and presented as an evidence that Microsoft only gets supporters from _other_ industries, that benefit from software industry being hurt (worse software needs better CPUs, less software demands easier to design CPUs), and/or that Microsoft has an unjustified influence outside its industry.
any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form;
GPL demands no such thing. "Distributed with" != "derivative work", and for example, Linux distributions include a lot of software that is not distributed in the source form -- NS 4.x, for example. If Microsoft lawyers can't read GPL it's their problem, not ours.
That was the point -- if Microsoft is out to play games, and won't accept open source, we can play the same stupid game and make something "closed" by excluding them.
This probably requires clarification -- it complies with the license because distribution is no longer free -- Microsoft is excluded.
All reimplementations of this then will be released under a different license that is an exact copy of GPL, plus an additional clause that Microsoft or any entity that is owned by Microsoft is prohibited from using it. Technically it will be perfectly ok under Microsoft's license -- it's not GPL at all, it's not even compatible with GPL.
The course on Unix that will fit into that time, taught to people that just received a dose of Microsoft propaganda will be like teaching geography to someone who believes that maps are meant to be drawn with America in the middle. Those people were learning Windows for decades. They believe that "double-click launches things" is the law of nature. They think of Windows ways of doing everything as "intuitive" because this is what was burned into their brains over the years of using it.
The course that they have just received only reinforced that, plus given then a lot of "knowledge" about how to reproduce someone's performance of trivial tasks -- in Windows, using Microsoft tools, speaking Microsoft terminology, and with Microsoft step-by-step explanations. If it prepared them to anything, it's certainly not thinking about anything outside Microsoft world, or independent thinking of any kind, anywhere.
Whatever you can tell them will only enable them to say "yeah, I know Unix" -- and then cause a spectacular mess when actually trying to use it. I believe that the only way to make those people less dangerous for Unix users is by humiliating them thoroughly and mercilessly, so every time they will see or hear anything about Unix (or anything advanced at all) they would get the painful feeling of their intellectual inferiority, and will shut up, so others can complete their work without them interfering or trying to convert yet another thing to Windows.
Currently WiFi devices are expensive and out of reach of many.
And it's great. Because the current generation of the protocol (802.11b, for example) can neither scale in a large network nor survive the high density of users with physically intersecting separate networks, and even without physical saturation of the bandwidth users will step on each other's toes. Another problem will be the possibility for buggy drivers to cause absolutely intolerable interference, ruining the network for everyone in a 300ft range from a lamer.
Hmmm... have you ever tried to write a real multi-threaded app. in C/C++?
Multithreading _is_ one of the ideas, Java is poisoned with, at the expense of such alternatives as asynchronous processing and multiple processes, that both were superior solutions for everything that I have seen.
What about a cross platform (I don't mean BI platform) networked application in C/C++?
Did nothing but those things for at least six years.
Hello, have you written a caching immutable string factory?
More poisoning. It's not the language's fault that it doesn't come with everything a developer thinks, he wants -- but templates mechanism (that has nothing to do with STL -- STL is, if anything, an example of its abuse) allows to do that, and more easily.
Sorry dude, picking proprietary libraries or rolling your own is just bad business sense,
I don't give a [damn] about "business sense" if it involves hiring large number of incompetent people as "programmers" and looking for a language that will cover up their stupidity and ignorance. I can, and did write code that was cross-platform, efficient, or even both, and C/C++ never caused me, or any programmer that I know, any trouble. If inferior minds have problem with this, they should get a job that matches their intellectual abilities.and saying that languages perks are pushing agendas or solutions looking for problems only shows ignorance [by definition] on your part.
Just the opposite. What you see as a perk, I see as a bad idea, being promoted by making a language that doesn't allow you to use any alternative -- but since you (and other "java developers" that were kept from studying C properly) never were exposed to any other ideas, you cheerfully eat half-chewed for you language, thinking that this is actually a good design.
...that he isn't a FUD-monger, everybody will just buy all the FUD that he wrote. Then he is being more naive than his readers.
Okay, how many of you think I've abandoned all hope for Java and have gone to the dark side? I suspect some of you are questioning my loyalties at this precise moment, wondering if I'm fit to occupy my role as EIC. Well, don't panic, I'm merely being a realist and looking at it from all angles. You'd be the first ones to complain if I buried my head in the sand and just ignored the threat. We have to look at this together and come up with a strategy that will enable us to effectively take on C#. We'll be getting a lot of heat from all over and we need to be armed with the information and prepared to go back to the drawing board and reeducate the masses. Sadly, they are being led a merry dance by Pied Piper Gates.
I personally believe that Java and C# both suck by themselves, both are "poisoned technologies" (ones that carry arbitrary idiosyncrasies built into them just to advance the agenda of their creators -- the only positive example of "poisoned technology" that I have seen is fictional -- it's Asimov's robots, and even they aren't completely positive), that they pretend to solve existing problems while actually solving the problems that people have yet to invent. However the amount of FUD (ex: C# on Linux? Without a single Win32-only library that every usable C# program is going to depend on?) makes me feel bad for Java -- if it has friends like that, enemies are completely unnecessary.
...or today two of more or less famous among computer-using population people for, both named Bruce, and with last names starting with "S" (Bruce Sterling, a writer, and Bruce Schneier, a cryptographist, of "Applied Cryptography" fame) made absolutely inane statements, performing the acts of nearly the worst ass-kissing that ever was mentioned on Slashdot?
Is someone going through the list (sorted first name first, like every ignorant person will do) and doing something to those people? Is there something in common? Or everyone and his dog suddenly became a patriot of the Corporate States of America, so those coincidences are merely a result of high density of this ?
To be honest, I would be equally disgusted in both cases, so I'll rather stick with the hypothesis of my insanity.
For all our power and influence, we don't have the aggressive expansionist policy the Romans, Greek, or Baybalonian empires did. And no, it's not because you're stopping us ^__^
You do. And this claim, that OUR empire is better than all previous ones, is just about as old as empires themselves.
about usual US self-congratulatory propaganda? Have I missed some sarcasm? And why american propagansa STILL insists that duplication of American space-based military technology driven Russians "broke" while it's obvious that USSR neither had any program to put any offensive weapons in space, nor had to spend enormous amounts of money or effort on its space program, and was dissolved entirely for political reasons?
Americans feel the need to morally support their morally bankrupt army and government (well known to be cowards in uniform and crooks in suits)? They need to sell themselves the idea that they are the smartest people in the world? Or they expect to scare everyone else with this? They believe that China, Russia or a bunch of other countries can't turn their precious government into a hole in the ground if it will piss them off sufficiently?
I am not a diplomat, so my answer to this would be "They can kiss my ass".