But.net made VB a respectable programming language
Respectable, maybe. Desirable? I don't think so.
No matter what they replace VBA with, it will have to be a gradual migration. Both will be supported for at least some period of time. So why not replace it with something that has nothing to do with Microsoft's Windows-only legacy language? Get that crap outta there!
I know that the only reason I ever write any VBA is because I have to write macros for Word or Excel. Every single time I do that, it's back to the manual, because I don't use VBA for anything else. Often I'll start out by recording a macro and tweaking it in the editor, because I'm not even sure of the basic syntax. I'd be much more comfortable with the whole thing if I knew I could do it in JavaScript.
Also, you may not be aware that Office for Mac OS X gave up VBA some time ago. I use Office on Windows; lots of my coworkers use it on Macs. If I come up with some way to do my work more efficiently, I can't share it with any of the Mac users, because they can't run VBA macros. Switching to JavaScript would almost certainly be something that happens across both versions of Office, since there are plenty of high-quality, cross-platform JavaScript engines available for Microsoft to license, or even use for free.
In fact, anything that gets Microsoft a little further away from being an ivory-tower proprietary software ecosystem, toward a company that uses open languages and document formats, is a good thing and should be applauded. (In fact, I'm a little surprised that most of the comments here have been negative. Microsoft wants to switch from Visual Basic to JavaScript and that's bad?)
1.) How come neighborhoods blacks live in become run down, crime ridden, & drug infested hell holes most every time (from what I have seen around here that is certain)?
They become run down because black neighborhoods are marginalized by the political process (think gerrymandering). They also become run down because they are poor (think property taxes). They become crime ridden and drug infested because the people who live there are poor, have few opportunities, and can find no way to escape (think Detroit).
2.) How come whites came to this nation & fluorished by comparison largely (creating the nation of the USA in all its greatness, yes, even now)??
Are you out of your mind? Whites "fluorished" because they built this nation on free slave labor. Blacks came to this nation in chains. You see the difference, yes?
3.) Explain what is here then:
Really? You expect me to explain what's on a site called "Niggermania.net"? Explain your racism and ignorance yourself, because I have no excuses for you.
Now - You complain of slavery, but the africans themselves also sold their own people as slaves
You are an ignorant racist. Learn your history.
Well, they tried to rob my & my neighbors' home, destroyed properties of mine when I notified I am evicting them (going on now in fact), & more (calling me "cracker m'fer" & more etc.) as well as threatening my life & properties... apk
And if it was a white guy who tried to rob you, what "them" would you be talking about? Your life is a tragic case, all right... seek counseling for your rage issues, then educate yourself.
Why does anyone need a programming language embedded in documents? Seems like that would be ripe for potential security/privacy violations, viruses, etc.
Office already has reasonable security controls over VBA macros. They aren't executed automatically if a document came from an untrusted source. Like so many things, if you're going to willfully execute malicious code, nobody can help you. But the problem of Word macro viruses and the like has been around for a long time and has largely been addressed by a combination of modern antivirus software and Office's own security controls.
That said, if I want to write macros to make my use of Office more efficient, who are you to say it's a bad idea? I'm not going to write macros that violate my own security or privacy. I have VBA macros that I use every time I open Word. I've written macros for Photoshop as well -- the difference being, those are written in JavaScript. I'd be more than happy to translate my VBA macros away from that rather shoddy and awkward language into a language that I use all the time for all sorts of things.
But its time to call it like it is folks, and admit there is a reason why even though blacks have only 10% of the population they are more than 30% of the jail pop and it AIN'T racism. it is because you have this huge "thug life baby, thug life 4ever!" culture coupled with ZERO shame for having a half a dozen kids and not even knowing who the father is or having a male even involved in the child's life.
I'm not going to "call it" like any of this.
For one thing, who are the biggest consumers of rap music? White kids. That is a fact: Whites buy more rap music than anybody else, including the "thug life 4ever" music you describe. It only makes sense, because whites are the majority.
But white appetite for gangsta rap music is significant, because various black leaders over the years, including (just for example) Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy, have criticized gangsta rap as a fabrication created by the (white-owned) record labels to pander to white prejudices and bigotry. Gangsta rap music perpetuates the same kind of stereotypes first put forth by the "blacksploitation" movies of the 1970s: Black man as thug, black man as criminal, black man as sexual predator. Those movies were made by whites and white audiences ate them up.
And those stereotypes didn't come out of nowhere. They are essentially the same stereotypes that were created as a way to reinforce the institution of slavery: Don't trust the Negro. He has no intelligence, only criminality. His only interest is to steal whatever he can (which is hilarious, considering black slaves were systematically deprived every possible material possession, up to and including their own bodies). He covets white women, don't let your women near him. If you see a Negro walking unaccompanied, call the police. And so on.
To your second point, about black families not having father figures, guess what? This is America. I grew up in the white suburbs in California, and from the 1970s onward, divorce was positively endemic in that community. I barely knew anybody who grew up in a two-parent household. Judges tended to award custody to mothers, and many fathers (mine, for example) were more than happy with that situation. Most white kids tended to see their fathers on weekends, or at least a couple times a month. But that might be true of "fatherless" black kids, too -- that doesn't make their fathers into "father figures." And as for abandoning their kids? My dad was a doctor, making a six-figure salary, and my mom eventually gave up trying to collect child support for her two kids.
So what's the difference? The difference is that when compared to blacks, whites are disproportionately born into the middle class or higher. They live in communities with better schools and better access to opportunities. They live in communities that don't foster an atmosphere of criminality, hostility, and disrespect -- but that's largely because even the most disadvantaged of their peers is probably doing pretty OK, while kids who grow up in poor neighborhoods are likely to have friends who are literally living on the streets by the time they are teenagers.
The difference is that, however much you might want to wave your hand and vanish it all into the cornfield, blacks still must contend with the legacy institutionalized racism. They are still born into communities that inherit the poverty that came from discrimination, segregation, intimidation, marginalization, disenfranchisement, and all the inequalities to which blacks were subjected just 50 years ago.
Seriously, you do realize that there are probably people reading/. who were born in an era where it was actually legal to deny someone a job because they were black, right? Or for that matter, to deny them the use of a public toilet for the same reason? That doesn't just disappear overnight.
A lot of the change has to come from within the black community, true. But what
Actually the proposal seems to rest on more than that. Internet Explorer is "free" in the sense that every consumer who installs Windows gets a working copy of it for no additional charge. Android is "free" only in the sense that mobile carriers are free to use it, if they wish. I don't recall ever being able to walk into a mobile phone store, plunk down $50 for prepaid service, and walk away with my choice of any Android phone for no additional charge. Last I heard, mobile phone vendors used the Android OS to build mobile phones, which they then sold for hundreds of dollars in a highly competitive marketplace. The parallel to Microsoft, the exclusive provider of IE, giving it directly to end consumers to use for free, hardly seems accurate.
Google provides a lot of services. Internet search, Maps, E-mail, Productivity, Browser, Mobile OS, and the like, but they don't require one to use all.
But it does integrate them rather closely to one another, and it tie them very closely to Android. If I'm not mistaken, Honeycomb tablets require you to sign on with a Google account before you can even use them. I don't know whether 2.x handsets do the same -- certainly all don't. (Mine required you to sign in with a Motorola account.) Once you have a Google account, though, that makes you more likely to use that same account to access Google services on other devices. Said services are money-makers for Google, through advertising and data mining.
That said... Google has never been accused of having a monopoly on Web-based services, so you can hardly accuse it of abusing a monopoly here. Can you use other search engines with an Android phone? Yes. I remember hearing one of the U.S. telcos was shipping Android phones with search preconfigured for Bing. Do you have to use Gmail, Google Maps, and other services? No...
And yet Google does make it easy. Which ironically seems to prove the opposite of what Thurrot is claiming. Google isn't giving away anything. It makes money off Android by integrating it with its online services. What difference does it make if a company funds its operations one way versus another way? Google's core business happens to be advertising.
But owning thousands of patents for countersuits is not really ethically equivalent to suing competitors.
I think it kind of is. Shooting me in the face is a lot more serious a crime than brandishing a firearm, of course. But you said "ethically." Is threatening me with a gun really ethically better than shooting me, if it achieves the same end? If I'm an independent developer and I find out that Google seems to be holding a patent that might overlap with something that I'm doing, do I think, "Oh, but it's Google, they won't sue?"
Google has been arguing for patent reform, but some of its arguments sound more like "we don't deserve to be sued" than "patents are damaging to competition." Who is on Google's board of directors and how do they feel about patent reform really? What approaches do their own companies take to intellectual property?
Unfortunately for them, patents are only useful in countersuits if your opponent produces products.
I've heard this said but I wonder whether it's strictly true. Can patents not be used to establish prior art for claims in other patents? If so, that might make even a patent troll think twice about litigating.
Open Source is not a dumping ground for old and useless shit.
According to Wikipedia, an id Tech 4 game was released this year and there's another one scheduled for next year.
Good for John Carmack. This code base is past the point where it offers serious competitive advantage. The value of an id Tech 4 game today is based on how good the game is, which is really as it should be. So there isn't really much reason why it shouldn't be open sourced -- except that most companies "just don't do that."
Even if the code was "old and useless shit" (which it obviously is not), how many companies actually throw away their old and useless shit? Most hoard it like it's diamonds. So kudos to Carmack and co. for sticking to their guns continuing to challenge the industry to move forward.
And you wonder why we won't touch mono or c# with a ten foot pole, and why we think Miguel is an evil little Billy G cocksuck?
I do wonder a little bit, since "Billy G" doesn't even work for that company anymore and hasn't since 2008. He sits on the board, but you would too if that many billions of dollars of your money was tied up in it.
It seemed like there was more momentum behind Mono back when it seemed as if Sun was never seriously going to open-source Java. Now the main debate seems to be whether you prefer C# or Java (and most non-Windows programmers prefer Java because they've had no experience with C#), and whether you trust Microsoft not to sink Mono with patent claims vs. whether you trust Oracle not to sink Java into the ocean in a giant safe that only Larry Ellison knows the combination to.
Actually, I don't think he is. Unity3D is a pretty popular cross-platform game development environment. Guess what? It uses Mono for game scripting. Just because you can't think of a use for a tool doesn't mean there is no use for a tool.
Good point. We should have all the people currently hacking on the Kinect or using the SDK to just stop all work and abandon it all because PCM2 can't see any important applications for the hardware. With such definitive evidence on the uselessness of the Kinect, this SDK or any apps currently written or being worked on, I can't see how any could argue against these conclusions.
My God, you have read my mind! You should find some scientists, I'm sure there is important research to be done on your uncanny abilities.
The robotics community has, almost overnight, dropped work on many other kinds of input sensors to focus on the Kinect because it's so much more useful
First I've heard of it. The way the summaries are always worded, to the uninitiated it always sounds like the same story: Kinect hacker hacks Kinect!
In all seriousness, why all the stories about the Kinect? I don't play videogames, so that aspect doesn't interest me. Getting it to do stuff it wasn't made to do is a cool hack, and I can appreciate that. I can picture some important applications for the disabled, I guess. Is there anything more to it than that? Am I missing something?
That could be. But have you ever seen Google sue anyone for patent infringement?
They just bought over 1,000 patents from IBM, so they're definitely playing the game. Maybe they don't have a choice, but you can't logically pretend they'll always take the high road just because they're Google.
I would venture that most people really don't give a rat's ass... as long as they know he's just going to turn back into Peter Parker again anyway, since this is just a stupid publicity stunt. I doubt there's a single human being on Earth who expects to still be reading about this incarnation of Spider-Man three years from now.
.NET was never meant to replace VB. That would be C#.
I think you misunderstand. The last version of regular Visual Basic was Visual Basic 6. Visual Basic 7 wasn't called that; it was called Visual Basic.Net. Microsoft ended all support for Visual Basic 6 in 2008. So if you were a Visual Basic programmer, you were indeed forced to use.Net, and for all intents and purposes,.Net replaced Visual Basic.
Just wish to point out that Ritchie is citing Kernighan here with regards to Pascal's strings, which is akin to Ballmer citing Gates with regards to Macintosh.
Really? You just compared the creators of C to Ballmer and Gates? Are we to infer that you actually liked Pascal's 255-character strings?
It is interesting to compare C's approach with that of two nearly contemporaneous languages, Algol 68 and Pascal [Jensen 74]. Arrays in Algol 68 either have fixed bounds, or are `flexible:' considerable mechanism is required both in the language definition, and in compilers, to accommodate flexible arrays (and not all compilers fully implement them.) Original Pascal had only fixed-sized arrays and strings, and this proved confining [Kernighan 81]. Later, this was partially fixed, though the resulting language is not yet universally available.
C treats strings as arrays of characters conventionally terminated by a marker. Aside from one special rule about initialization by string literals, the semantics of strings are fully subsumed by more general rules governing all arrays, and as a result the language is simpler to describe and to translate than one incorporating the string as a unique data type. Some costs accrue from its approach: certain string operations are more expensive than in other designs because application code or a library routine must occasionally search for the end of a string, because few built-in operations are available, and because the burden of storage management for strings falls more heavily on the user. Nevertheless, C's approach to strings works well.
I didn't say it's about the state of Gnash vs Web Browsers, it's about the existence of software that conforms to open specifications and that just because the spec is open doesn't mean you'll get a conformant implementation
Amazing, though, that Adobe is able to create a conformant (not a real word) implementation when nobody else can -- isn't it?
And if you did then you'd have posted it, but it's obvious you don't.
And what is it you want me to post, exactly? Do you want me to scour the Web for sites written using HTML5 on the off chance that they might not work in one of the modern, HTML5-supporting Web browsers? Would that make you happy? If you found one HTML5 Web site that rendered weirdly in your browser, will you consider your point proven?
Meanwhile, Gnash cannot play Flash content created using Flash 10 features. Not one single Web site written using Flash 10 features will work on Gnash. The same is true of any site that uses certain features of Flash 7, 8, and 9. If you can't see the difference between that and how Web browsers support HTML5, you are truly blind. The simple fact is that there is not one single implementation of the supposedly "open" Flash standard that can reliably play Flash content, except one -- Adobe's. And when Adobe comes out with Flash 11 the open source implementations will fall even further behind.
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But .net made VB a respectable programming language
Respectable, maybe. Desirable? I don't think so.
No matter what they replace VBA with, it will have to be a gradual migration. Both will be supported for at least some period of time. So why not replace it with something that has nothing to do with Microsoft's Windows-only legacy language? Get that crap outta there!
I know that the only reason I ever write any VBA is because I have to write macros for Word or Excel. Every single time I do that, it's back to the manual, because I don't use VBA for anything else. Often I'll start out by recording a macro and tweaking it in the editor, because I'm not even sure of the basic syntax. I'd be much more comfortable with the whole thing if I knew I could do it in JavaScript.
Also, you may not be aware that Office for Mac OS X gave up VBA some time ago. I use Office on Windows; lots of my coworkers use it on Macs. If I come up with some way to do my work more efficiently, I can't share it with any of the Mac users, because they can't run VBA macros. Switching to JavaScript would almost certainly be something that happens across both versions of Office, since there are plenty of high-quality, cross-platform JavaScript engines available for Microsoft to license, or even use for free.
In fact, anything that gets Microsoft a little further away from being an ivory-tower proprietary software ecosystem, toward a company that uses open languages and document formats, is a good thing and should be applauded. (In fact, I'm a little surprised that most of the comments here have been negative. Microsoft wants to switch from Visual Basic to JavaScript and that's bad?)
1.) How come neighborhoods blacks live in become run down, crime ridden, & drug infested hell holes most every time (from what I have seen around here that is certain)?
They become run down because black neighborhoods are marginalized by the political process (think gerrymandering). They also become run down because they are poor (think property taxes). They become crime ridden and drug infested because the people who live there are poor, have few opportunities, and can find no way to escape (think Detroit).
2.) How come whites came to this nation & fluorished by comparison largely (creating the nation of the USA in all its greatness, yes, even now)??
Are you out of your mind? Whites "fluorished" because they built this nation on free slave labor. Blacks came to this nation in chains. You see the difference, yes?
3.) Explain what is here then:
Really? You expect me to explain what's on a site called "Niggermania.net"? Explain your racism and ignorance yourself, because I have no excuses for you.
Now - You complain of slavery, but the africans themselves also sold their own people as slaves
You are an ignorant racist. Learn your history.
Well, they tried to rob my & my neighbors' home, destroyed properties of mine when I notified I am evicting them (going on now in fact), & more (calling me "cracker m'fer" & more etc.) as well as threatening my life & properties... apk
And if it was a white guy who tried to rob you, what "them" would you be talking about? Your life is a tragic case, all right ... seek counseling for your rage issues, then educate yourself.
Why does anyone need a programming language embedded in documents? Seems like that would be ripe for potential security/privacy violations, viruses, etc.
Office already has reasonable security controls over VBA macros. They aren't executed automatically if a document came from an untrusted source. Like so many things, if you're going to willfully execute malicious code, nobody can help you. But the problem of Word macro viruses and the like has been around for a long time and has largely been addressed by a combination of modern antivirus software and Office's own security controls.
That said, if I want to write macros to make my use of Office more efficient, who are you to say it's a bad idea? I'm not going to write macros that violate my own security or privacy. I have VBA macros that I use every time I open Word. I've written macros for Photoshop as well -- the difference being, those are written in JavaScript. I'd be more than happy to translate my VBA macros away from that rather shoddy and awkward language into a language that I use all the time for all sorts of things.
When they talk about mounting USB .... it means mounting the USB as a drive (as in accessing the data in a USB flash drive).
Have you ever used the Chromebook file manager? This is no great benefit.
But its time to call it like it is folks, and admit there is a reason why even though blacks have only 10% of the population they are more than 30% of the jail pop and it AIN'T racism. it is because you have this huge "thug life baby, thug life 4ever!" culture coupled with ZERO shame for having a half a dozen kids and not even knowing who the father is or having a male even involved in the child's life.
I'm not going to "call it" like any of this.
For one thing, who are the biggest consumers of rap music? White kids. That is a fact: Whites buy more rap music than anybody else, including the "thug life 4ever" music you describe. It only makes sense, because whites are the majority.
But white appetite for gangsta rap music is significant, because various black leaders over the years, including (just for example) Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy, have criticized gangsta rap as a fabrication created by the (white-owned) record labels to pander to white prejudices and bigotry. Gangsta rap music perpetuates the same kind of stereotypes first put forth by the "blacksploitation" movies of the 1970s: Black man as thug, black man as criminal, black man as sexual predator. Those movies were made by whites and white audiences ate them up.
And those stereotypes didn't come out of nowhere. They are essentially the same stereotypes that were created as a way to reinforce the institution of slavery: Don't trust the Negro. He has no intelligence, only criminality. His only interest is to steal whatever he can (which is hilarious, considering black slaves were systematically deprived every possible material possession, up to and including their own bodies). He covets white women, don't let your women near him. If you see a Negro walking unaccompanied, call the police. And so on.
To your second point, about black families not having father figures, guess what? This is America. I grew up in the white suburbs in California, and from the 1970s onward, divorce was positively endemic in that community. I barely knew anybody who grew up in a two-parent household. Judges tended to award custody to mothers, and many fathers (mine, for example) were more than happy with that situation. Most white kids tended to see their fathers on weekends, or at least a couple times a month. But that might be true of "fatherless" black kids, too -- that doesn't make their fathers into "father figures." And as for abandoning their kids? My dad was a doctor, making a six-figure salary, and my mom eventually gave up trying to collect child support for her two kids.
So what's the difference? The difference is that when compared to blacks, whites are disproportionately born into the middle class or higher. They live in communities with better schools and better access to opportunities. They live in communities that don't foster an atmosphere of criminality, hostility, and disrespect -- but that's largely because even the most disadvantaged of their peers is probably doing pretty OK, while kids who grow up in poor neighborhoods are likely to have friends who are literally living on the streets by the time they are teenagers.
The difference is that, however much you might want to wave your hand and vanish it all into the cornfield, blacks still must contend with the legacy institutionalized racism. They are still born into communities that inherit the poverty that came from discrimination, segregation, intimidation, marginalization, disenfranchisement, and all the inequalities to which blacks were subjected just 50 years ago.
Seriously, you do realize that there are probably people reading /. who were born in an era where it was actually legal to deny someone a job because they were black, right? Or for that matter, to deny them the use of a public toilet for the same reason? That doesn't just disappear overnight.
A lot of the change has to come from within the black community, true. But what
So can anyone explain to me WHY I would want to mount Android on my Chromebook via USB -- let alone why it's the "most needed feature"?
Actually the proposal seems to rest on more than that. Internet Explorer is "free" in the sense that every consumer who installs Windows gets a working copy of it for no additional charge. Android is "free" only in the sense that mobile carriers are free to use it, if they wish. I don't recall ever being able to walk into a mobile phone store, plunk down $50 for prepaid service, and walk away with my choice of any Android phone for no additional charge. Last I heard, mobile phone vendors used the Android OS to build mobile phones, which they then sold for hundreds of dollars in a highly competitive marketplace. The parallel to Microsoft, the exclusive provider of IE, giving it directly to end consumers to use for free, hardly seems accurate.
Google provides a lot of services. Internet search, Maps, E-mail, Productivity, Browser, Mobile OS, and the like, but they don't require one to use all.
But it does integrate them rather closely to one another, and it tie them very closely to Android. If I'm not mistaken, Honeycomb tablets require you to sign on with a Google account before you can even use them. I don't know whether 2.x handsets do the same -- certainly all don't. (Mine required you to sign in with a Motorola account.) Once you have a Google account, though, that makes you more likely to use that same account to access Google services on other devices. Said services are money-makers for Google, through advertising and data mining.
That said ... Google has never been accused of having a monopoly on Web-based services, so you can hardly accuse it of abusing a monopoly here. Can you use other search engines with an Android phone? Yes. I remember hearing one of the U.S. telcos was shipping Android phones with search preconfigured for Bing. Do you have to use Gmail, Google Maps, and other services? No...
And yet Google does make it easy. Which ironically seems to prove the opposite of what Thurrot is claiming. Google isn't giving away anything. It makes money off Android by integrating it with its online services. What difference does it make if a company funds its operations one way versus another way? Google's core business happens to be advertising.
But owning thousands of patents for countersuits is not really ethically equivalent to suing competitors.
I think it kind of is. Shooting me in the face is a lot more serious a crime than brandishing a firearm, of course. But you said "ethically." Is threatening me with a gun really ethically better than shooting me, if it achieves the same end? If I'm an independent developer and I find out that Google seems to be holding a patent that might overlap with something that I'm doing, do I think, "Oh, but it's Google, they won't sue?"
Google has been arguing for patent reform, but some of its arguments sound more like "we don't deserve to be sued" than "patents are damaging to competition." Who is on Google's board of directors and how do they feel about patent reform really? What approaches do their own companies take to intellectual property?
Unfortunately for them, patents are only useful in countersuits if your opponent produces products.
I've heard this said but I wonder whether it's strictly true. Can patents not be used to establish prior art for claims in other patents? If so, that might make even a patent troll think twice about litigating.
Open Source is not a dumping ground for old and useless shit.
According to Wikipedia, an id Tech 4 game was released this year and there's another one scheduled for next year.
Good for John Carmack. This code base is past the point where it offers serious competitive advantage. The value of an id Tech 4 game today is based on how good the game is, which is really as it should be. So there isn't really much reason why it shouldn't be open sourced -- except that most companies "just don't do that."
Even if the code was "old and useless shit" (which it obviously is not), how many companies actually throw away their old and useless shit? Most hoard it like it's diamonds. So kudos to Carmack and co. for sticking to their guns continuing to challenge the industry to move forward.
Apparently, despite having the same punctuation, the point of your post was not the same as the point of my post, which was to ask a question.
And you wonder why we won't touch mono or c# with a ten foot pole, and why we think Miguel is an evil little Billy G cocksuck?
I do wonder a little bit, since "Billy G" doesn't even work for that company anymore and hasn't since 2008. He sits on the board, but you would too if that many billions of dollars of your money was tied up in it.
It seemed like there was more momentum behind Mono back when it seemed as if Sun was never seriously going to open-source Java. Now the main debate seems to be whether you prefer C# or Java (and most non-Windows programmers prefer Java because they've had no experience with C#), and whether you trust Microsoft not to sink Mono with patent claims vs. whether you trust Oracle not to sink Java into the ocean in a giant safe that only Larry Ellison knows the combination to.
Actually, I don't think he is. Unity3D is a pretty popular cross-platform game development environment. Guess what? It uses Mono for game scripting. Just because you can't think of a use for a tool doesn't mean there is no use for a tool.
Good point. We should have all the people currently hacking on the Kinect or using the SDK to just stop all work and abandon it all because PCM2 can't see any important applications for the hardware. With such definitive evidence on the uselessness of the Kinect, this SDK or any apps currently written or being worked on, I can't see how any could argue against these conclusions.
My God, you have read my mind! You should find some scientists, I'm sure there is important research to be done on your uncanny abilities.
The robotics community has, almost overnight, dropped work on many other kinds of input sensors to focus on the Kinect because it's so much more useful
First I've heard of it. The way the summaries are always worded, to the uninitiated it always sounds like the same story: Kinect hacker hacks Kinect!
In all seriousness, why all the stories about the Kinect? I don't play videogames, so that aspect doesn't interest me. Getting it to do stuff it wasn't made to do is a cool hack, and I can appreciate that. I can picture some important applications for the disabled, I guess. Is there anything more to it than that? Am I missing something?
Initial testers found only one gesture they could make at the Microsoft device that triggered any response.
That could be. But have you ever seen Google sue anyone for patent infringement?
They just bought over 1,000 patents from IBM, so they're definitely playing the game. Maybe they don't have a choice, but you can't logically pretend they'll always take the high road just because they're Google.
Race card? I was always under the impression that being Jewish was a religion, not a "race".
As with most things, it's very easy to make up your mind if you choose to ignore the last hundred years of debate and scholarship on the topic.
I would venture that most people really don't give a rat's ass ... as long as they know he's just going to turn back into Peter Parker again anyway, since this is just a stupid publicity stunt. I doubt there's a single human being on Earth who expects to still be reading about this incarnation of Spider-Man three years from now.
.NET was never meant to replace VB. That would be C#.
I think you misunderstand. The last version of regular Visual Basic was Visual Basic 6. Visual Basic 7 wasn't called that; it was called Visual Basic .Net. Microsoft ended all support for Visual Basic 6 in 2008. So if you were a Visual Basic programmer, you were indeed forced to use .Net, and for all intents and purposes, .Net replaced Visual Basic.
Just wish to point out that Ritchie is citing Kernighan here with regards to Pascal's strings, which is akin to Ballmer citing Gates with regards to Macintosh.
Really? You just compared the creators of C to Ballmer and Gates? Are we to infer that you actually liked Pascal's 255-character strings?
Beyond those points:
It is interesting to compare C's approach with that of two nearly contemporaneous languages, Algol 68 and Pascal [Jensen 74]. Arrays in Algol 68 either have fixed bounds, or are `flexible:' considerable mechanism is required both in the language definition, and in compilers, to accommodate flexible arrays (and not all compilers fully implement them.) Original Pascal had only fixed-sized arrays and strings, and this proved confining [Kernighan 81]. Later, this was partially fixed, though the resulting language is not yet universally available.
C treats strings as arrays of characters conventionally terminated by a marker. Aside from one special rule about initialization by string literals, the semantics of strings are fully subsumed by more general rules governing all arrays, and as a result the language is simpler to describe and to translate than one incorporating the string as a unique data type. Some costs accrue from its approach: certain string operations are more expensive than in other designs because application code or a library routine must occasionally search for the end of a string, because few built-in operations are available, and because the burden of storage management for strings falls more heavily on the user. Nevertheless, C's approach to strings works well.
And that's coming from Dennis Ritchie, who was there.
I didn't say it's about the state of Gnash vs Web Browsers, it's about the existence of software that conforms to open specifications and that just because the spec is open doesn't mean you'll get a conformant implementation
Amazing, though, that Adobe is able to create a conformant (not a real word) implementation when nobody else can -- isn't it?
And if you did then you'd have posted it, but it's obvious you don't.
And what is it you want me to post, exactly? Do you want me to scour the Web for sites written using HTML5 on the off chance that they might not work in one of the modern, HTML5-supporting Web browsers? Would that make you happy? If you found one HTML5 Web site that rendered weirdly in your browser, will you consider your point proven?
Meanwhile, Gnash cannot play Flash content created using Flash 10 features. Not one single Web site written using Flash 10 features will work on Gnash. The same is true of any site that uses certain features of Flash 7, 8, and 9. If you can't see the difference between that and how Web browsers support HTML5, you are truly blind. The simple fact is that there is not one single implementation of the supposedly "open" Flash standard that can reliably play Flash content, except one -- Adobe's. And when Adobe comes out with Flash 11 the open source implementations will fall even further behind.