And of course, the STL was originally developed independent of C++ by Alex Stepanov and Meng Lee. When Stepanov was first throwing around the underlying ideas, C++ didn't even have templates yet.
If by "on more than the bleeding edge platforms" you mean "on something other than MSVC," then yes. Microsoft's compiler was tremendously shitty when it came to standards conformance until.NET 2003 edition (I believe).
Your prejudice is showing. Visual C++ has pretty consistently been among the most standard-compliant compilers since forever. It fell behind a little in the early 2000s, since VC++6 was actually released before the C++ standard was finalised, but remember that we're talking about the GCC 2.95 days there, and the average UNIX platform compiler wasn't even on the chart at that point.
You're definitely a Windows developer, aren't you? You're just suffering from the fact that Boost isn't really built with or for MSVC, and the Windows development process is very non-standard with respect to every other OS out there.
Irony #1: My C++ code probably gets compiled on more platforms than code written by most, maybe even all, of the other participants in this discussion.
Irony #2: While Windows may be the "odd one out" relative to the Linux world, the Visual C++ command line compiler and makefiles pretty much work like every other platform.
Irony #3: Visual C++ is the only compiler on which I have actually seen real world code that makes extensive use of Boost compile properly out of the box.
As for the licensing terms, this is the boost software license. It is three (short) paragraphs long.
It doesn't matter what it says. There is a licence, which imposes a restriction. That in itself it enough to trigger a need for approval by the legal people in many companies.
Should I mention the fact that boost is the code base for much of the additions to the next generation of the C++ STL? I know templates can be big and scary, but really...
Do you think adding substandard lambda expressions and a funky parser library using template wizardry are more important than providing, say, standard facilities for working with networking, database interaction, heck, even console I/O? This is what the C++ in-crowd have brought us: an emphasis on using clever tricks to provide facilities that still aren't as good as what numerous other languages do anyway, instead of plugging gaping holes in the basic provisions of the standard library. I don't have anything against templates (well, not on this scale, anyway) but I do have a big problem with directing an entire development community's efforts towards overcoming mostly self-made problems with templates and the rest of C++ rather than getting the basics into the state they should have been in ten years ago.
Well, obviously there could be a bad apple in the bunch, but FWIW I've been a witness in a Magistrates' Court a couple of times, and frankly I would far rather have a case against me judged by people with the dedication and serious consideration exhibited by the Magistrates I observed than by anyone with political connections. They were, without exception, exemplary in the conduct, fair in their reasoning and obviously trying to get to the bottom of things so that they could give a ruling in the interests of justice for those involved, and generally a credit to the legal system they represent.
It's also worth pointing out that Magistrates are now required to give the reasons for their decisions at the end of a trial, so appealing something obviously unreasonable seems quite plausible. Also, IIRC Magistrates' Court decisions do not set any sort of precedent, and in any event statute law cannot be amended by case law over time in the UK legal system the way that AIUI it can in the US, so one bad decision can't start an unhealthy slide either.
Maybe they understand something you don't
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I understand that trolls exist and that they will always be with us. I understand that ignorant people will continue to post until the end of time. What I don't understand is that the/. community apparently agrees with them.
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs... they probably know something you don't.
You, and a few other posters who have labelled all the critical posts as trolls, seem to be assuming that those who make those criticisms are incompetent and/or uninformed. Why do you assume this? It is clear from the comments that many of the critics have used (or tried to use) Boost in various circumstances, and found it isn't the silver bullet so many of its advocates seem to make out. The criticisms I'm seeing of portability, compile-time performance, cryptic error messages, variable quality of documentation and the like are all fair.
Ultimately, Boost is a bit of a strange beast. C++ has a lot of merit as a practical, pragmatic language where you can get stuff done, but it's not a high level language by contemporary standards. Unless you actually need the low level flexibility and/or seriously high performance, it's usually a bad choice for new projects. Boost seeks to add the sort of high-level functionality C++ lacks and to work around some of the more serious limitations of the underlying language, but it's like a scary parody of Greenspun's tenth. If you really need to use C++, it has its place (but at a cost), but for most people who need that kind of functionality, there are numerous much better ways to get it (or to avoid the need for it in the first place) by choosing a more appropriate programming language.
Re:Boost epitomizes everything that is wrong with
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Boost targets implementations which actually implement the C++ standard
And how many of those are there, exactly?
(As far as I'm aware, the answer to that question is still "one", and that one only fairly recently.)
Anyone who had seen Boost source code knows that there are plenty of old hacks and workarounds in it specifically to make it work (to some documented extent) on such archaic compilers as VC6 and g++ 2.95.
Sure, but those are by far the biggest targets. How many little hacks were in there to support the native compilers on IBM, Sun or HP workstations, or even older Macs before GCC took off there?
Sounds like the kind of people who might be surprised that C++ is already out of draft for some time, then.
You judge too quickly. The problem isn't a lack of understanding; some of the people I'm thinking of are among the smartest C++ hackers I've ever met, the kind of people who have been following the C++ newsgroups since some way back into the last century, been to their fair share of ACCU conferences, even filed the odd defect report against the C++ standard. Rather, the problem is that what the standard says and what was actually portable without excessive effort across a wide range of compilers were worlds apart for such a long time (and I don't just mean export).
Oh, and I wonder - how do you "screw up exceptions"?
That's worth at least a blog post, if not a book, but I'm certainly not thinking of forgetting to enforce pairing of new and delete if that's what you're assuming.
For one thing, this is a prime example of varying compiler support. Techniques are known for implementing exceptions with almost zero overhead unless they are actually thrown. However, those techniques have only been implemented in compilers relatively recently, and as usual the big names have been better at it for the most part.
Then there's the little issue of retrofitting: techniques for working safely with exceptions weren't well known when the feature first became available, and a lot of projects got stung and then avoided them. That may have been a poor choice with hindsight, but retrofitting exceptions onto an existing project that wasn't written with them in mind is challenging, to say that least.
And then of course, there's the fact that it's not always as simple as RAII in C++: there was some discussion on another forum recently about the sanity (or lack thereof) in the popping from a stack problem in C++, for example.
Are these people from commercial sellers of C++ libraries saying bad things about Boost?
Yes, absolutely. There is no possibility that someone simply has different experiences to you that have caused them to criticise something based on objective reasons. Anyone who disagrees with you must have a vested interest.
It's not like I'm new here. Go ahead and check my posting history. You'll find I've got plenty of hours logged writing C++, and as surprising as you might find it, I do actually know what I'm talking about.
Be a good chap and pick up the tin-foil hat on the way out, would you?
Most half-decent compilers don't have problems with boost
Ah, the no true Scotsman argument.
Unfortunately, the reality is that compilers outside of the mainstream ones like Visual C++ or GCC have only reached the level of support required for much of the wizardry in Boost relatively recently. If you're working on portable code and your project is more than a couple of years old, you are unlikely to have been able to use Boost when you started it.
the license consists of 5 sentences
That doesn't matter. In some businesses, including almost all large ones in my experience, any use of external software requires formal approval of the licensing terms by the legal staff. Just getting a lawyer to look at the damn thing is often more trouble than it's worth, and little details like the attribution can really mess things up if you are writing a library shipped as source yourself, because it may have implications that you have to pass on to your customers, which in turn is likely to make your lawyers throw a fit.
how exactly can you screw up the installation of a mostly header-only library?
But Boost isn't just headers these days, is it? Some of the most useful aspects of it require hoop-jumping to pre-build them.
I'm sorry that you, and a couple of other people, seem to have assumed I was trolling. I wasn't. My comments are born of bitter experience using (or rather, not being able to use) Boost and other well-known libraries because of exactly the sort of technical and legal hurdles I alluded to. Moreover, when we looked into these things at the time, we found we were far from alone.
In fact, I have never seen Boost used in an established commercial C++ product so far, though I'm aware that it has been considered in several projects I've been involved with. Heck, go look on Sourceforge, which even has a Boost page these days, and look how many of the C++ projects there use it. It's hardly "almost every" one, as the post I criticised claimed, and this is Sourceforge, where the level of enthusiasm and flexibility on the serious projects is probably significantly beyond what you get in your average coding shop.
Almost every modern C++ codebase uses Boost somewhere
[Citation needed]
Boost is created and used by a highly vocal minority of C++ supergeeks. You can play with the definition of "modern", but it's only been in the recent past that Boost even compiled on more than the bleeding edge platforms. Most of the C++ projects I've worked on professionally are still worrying about whether to allow non-trivial use of templates or how to avoid screwing up exceptions, never mind trying to fight through the mess that is getting Boost installed and running these days and spending time getting lawyers to review the licensing terms.
It depends what you mean by government, I suppose.
At a general election, the people elect MPs to the House of Commons, which is the main part of the legislature. The second part is the House of Lords, but under the Parliament Act they must (eventually) defer to the Commons if a conflict arises.
The leader of the party with the largest number of MPs in the Commons is appointed Prime Minister, and formally invited by the Queen (our official head of state, but relatively powerless in reality) to form a government. Essentially, that refers to the executive, since the PM appoints Secretaries and Ministers of State. Normally, these people are drawn from members of the Commons and sometimes the Lords, so we don't have the same kind of separation of powers that countries like the US are supposed to have: almost by definition, those with ministerial or secretarial office come from the party that also has the biggest say in the Commons, so in practice as well as holding executive office they also set the direction of most parliamentary debates. (There is some scope for both the Opposition and individual MPs to bring motions for debate as well, but they get less of the available time.)
There are a few exceptional cases that will probably be cleared up, but other than that, no-one can hold both a parliamentary office and a judicial one, so judges are independent in that sense. In fact, in a Magistrates' Court, which is what we're talking about here, the court is run by three lay people (the Magistrates, one of whom will be senior to the other two) who are basically volunteers who very possibly have other day jobs and donate some of their time to the courts. Since the Magistrates aren't formally trained in the same way as a lawyer, they tend to rely (from what I've seen when I've been to Magistrates' Courts) on the Clerk of the Court, who is so trained, to provide professional advice as needed.
Magistrates' Courts are limited in what types of cases they can hear and what punishments they can hand out, and usually deal with low level crimes. It's somewhat similar to the misdemeanour/felony distinction in the US in terms of where the standard falls. Under various circumstances, a case may be transferred to a Crown Court, where it will be heard by a full judge and jury. (More serious cases would go there by default anyway.) Those judges cannot be serving Ministers or Secretaries of State at the same time either, and there are some restrictions on jury service to prevent conflicts of interest. The same goes for the High Court and Court of Appeal, the next highest levels.
We start to get into serious conflict after that, because then things wind up with the House of Lords/Law Lords, who are also part of the legislature. There's also a question at the moment over the status of the Attorney General, who is in some senses accountable to the government of the day and is their chief legal advisor, yet who supervises the public prosecuting authority, the Crown Prosecution Service, which is effectively a judicial role given the power that organisation wields in practice.
However, on this matter as I understand it, we are talking only about the penalties available to Magistrates for cases heard in a Magistrates' Court, so it's unlikely any cases on this scale would get anywhere near the level where conflicts of interest might arise between the judiciary and legislature/executive government. That would be a bit like the US Supreme Court hearing a case of petty theft, totally disproportionate. So I think it is fair to claim here that while the courts are ultimately administered using public funds etc., there is no direct say by the current administration in the outcome of this sort of case beyond setting the legal and punitive boundaries within which a Magistrates' Court must operate.
(Be warned that I am by no means a legal expert of scholar of government processes, so any of the above may be somewhat misleading or outright untrue in specific circumstances. I imagine Wikipedia and the like will have copious extra details if you're interested.)
Exactly. Maybe employment contracts are different in the US, but in the UK it's pretty standard to have a clause saying that any rights to work you do in the course of your employment belong to the employer and you agree to do anything necessary to help them claim those rights, give or take a bit of legalese. I suspect that not only could they fire you for refusing to co-operate (breach of contract), they could also sue you for damages if you wilfully undermined a patent claim, and withold salary if you used company time to do it (on the basis of gross misconduct). IANAL etc., but the wording in every contract I've ever had has been straightforward and this all seems quite reasonable: they are paying you to create that intellectual property, after all.
Well, right now the tendencies on this side of the pond are all things I'm pretty happy with: increasing legalisation of fair personal uses, more realistic penalties available for the worst offenders, and a stay on extending the duration despite extension lobbying by Big Media. I'm not worried about lawyers redefining words that haven't even been formally written yet; there will be plenty of time and scrutiny given to the specific details later. For now, I'll settle for aiming in the right direction, given how much of the world apparently isn't.
Having the law so divorced from reasonability that I could have statutory liability greater than the present sale value of my house for this act is frankly unconscionable.
You make good points, but I just want to reply to the above, because on this one I really do disagree with you. I would far rather have laws that permit a wide range of penalties if they are broken, and trust that a court with the facts of the specific case will decide an appropriate level in those particular circumstances, than have the legislation mandate a certain level of penalty based on whatever Parliament happened to consider at the time the law was written. If an unreasonable penalty were handed down by the magistrates or the court proceedings somehow deviated from acceptable practice, there are several levels of higher court to which an appeal could be made. The maximum penalty in this case isn't something that is automatically awarded by default, without the copyright holder having to prove anything. It is simply that now a Magistrates' Court can give a more representative penalty to small-time commercial operators whose damage may exceed the previous £5,000 cap.
1/10th of our populaton admit to regularly pirating and don't see anything wrong with it.
For one thing, the latter does not follow from the former. A substantial proportion of those who admit to pirating also agree that it is unethical, but continue to do so because they expect to get away with it. A further substantial proportion are ignorant of the law.
For another thing, 10% of your population doing something does not make it a "norm" of your society. If this was a 55%/45% thing, you might have some kind of case, but if 90% of the population don't do something illegal and 10% do, it's a pretty big leap to argue that the law is unjust and goes against the will of the people.
Piracy is a norm, just as much as breaking the speed limit.
While that statement is true, I'm not sure it's true for the reason you thought. In fact, both illegal activities are consistently opposed by the majority of the population. The responses submitted to Gowers are even on-line (unless someone explicitly asked for their reply not to be), so you can see how many people who felt strongly enough to write in objected to the basic principle of copyright: almost none. And note that large numbers did object, often rather strongly, to the idea of extending the duration and to the idea of any extension being retroactive, so the respondents weren't just people on Big Media's side.
Getting back to your comparison, it's also interesting that a substantial fraction of the minority who do break the law either agree that their behaviour is unethical when asked (and admit that they only do it because they expect to get away with it) or do so because they are ignorant of the law (hence, presumably, the high profile advertising campaigns by Big Media that explain very clearly that copying a CD or DVD and sharing it with others is illegal).
Finally, note that in both cases, members of the law-breaking group typically exhibit an unrealistic understanding of the situation. For example, drivers who routinely do 80mph on a motorway often claim that this is common, when in fact the mean speed of cars on a clear motorway is almost exactly 70mph, the legal limit, and the proportion of drivers who deviate by more than 10mph from that limit in either direction is very small.
You think permitting a maximum fine of £5,000 when someone is found guilty, in a court, of deliberately infringing someone else's copyright for personal financial gain, possibly making far more than £5,000 in profit at the legitimate rightsholder's expense, is "just"? Wow, that's pretty far to stretch.
Who said anything about increasing the length of copyright? The big attempt to do that during the same process failed, spectacularly, after a high proportion of the public responses to Gowers rejected the idea and the Review and subsequent government position followed the same pattern. Is there something else you were referring to, or are you just spreading FUD?
The point of this law is to bring the penalties available to a court for commercial copyright infringement on-line to the same levels at those already available for off-line copyright infringement. It is closing a loophole. There is nothing to say that courts must arbitrarily hand out fines of 50k for infringement that did not deserve that level of penalty. There is nothing new in the scale of the maximum penalty, either.
Also, this is only the cap on what a Magistrates' Court can impose. It is normal under the legal system here that higher courts have access to higher sentences for more serious illegal behaviour. Magistrates' Courts, being run only by lay people rather than legally trained judges and without the use of a jury, are limited in the punishments they can impose.
What is your problem here? Do you think that not only must the legislature be inherently corrupt, but now the judicial system is as well? What next, every member of the population who doesn't agree with your personal right to freeload is also wrong and a danger to humanity? Get some perspective, for goodness' sake, and at least understand the basics of what you're criticising before you post knee-jerk flamebait like that.
So as long as it only takes six degrees of P2P separation to distribute the latest blockbuster movie to the entire world, you think it's OK for a movie studio to invest $100,000,000 in making it and be able to sue one guy who leaks it into bankruptcy and recover at least 0.001% of the damages? That's hardly incentivising production and distribution of new works, is it?
It makes sense for if I am selling pirated books knowing that they were pirated I might have to pay a $500 fine to the copyright holders and give them all of my income from those books. Not I have to pay a $100,000 fine.
Surely it depends on the scale of the infringement? It wouldn't be much of a deterrent if the fine for catching a train without a ticket was only the ticket price + 10%. It wouldn't be much of a deterrent if the penalty for fraud were only returning what you had illegally taken plus a $10 court fee. Statutory, punitive fines like these are only worth anything as deterrents, and they have to be set on a scale that reflects this.
I see a reason to hate it. It takes the UK that much closer to imposing higher fines on ordinary, not-profit-seeking citizens who download movies and music.
How? In what way — any way — does this apply to Joe Average? Did you even read the summary?
And if you're going for a slippery slope argument, that's pretty much doomed here as well. This move is based on the recommendations of the Gowers Review. In case you weren't aware, Gowers made a whole load of recommendations. Another one that is being supported by the government, for example, legitimising format shifting under certain circumstances. Do you consider that a step towards removing copyright altogether?
Spare us the FUD. These decisions will be made in a court, and in the lowest court at that. The government has no direct say in such cases; government ministers wouldn't even get out of bed to attend this sort of case.
And for the record, as someone who has actually seen a Magistrates' Court in action, they are IME sombre, serious places where the decisions are made carefully and with extreme care. It's a side effect of getting lay people to make the decision: they tend to consult their legal advisor frequently, but come from an outside perspective.
If they have a problem with photographers, they're certainly entitled to ask you to leave (and you'd be trespassing if you don't comply) but that's about the extent of it.
What if they have signs up at the entrances saying "no photography allowed"?
If a mall is a public place because there is implied permission for the public to enter, then that pretty clearly denies that permission to anyone who is entering to take a photograph.
And the IPO are now going to the Court of Appeal, after which I could believe something as fundamental at this would reach the House of Lords.
And of course, whether the European Patent Office should actually have awarded that patent in the first place is subject to debate. The European Parliament has repeatedly denied attempts to legitimise software patents, so while the EPO has awarded this (and a few others) that might be interpreted that way, there's doubt about whether they would stand up even at European level.
The thing is, the absurd abuses of the system by local councils and the like are currently fairly high profile, and anyone who tries it again is likely to see the world from the perspective of a head rolling down a hill shortly afterwards.
Oh, and a lot of the data being held by ISPs and such is far from voluntary, because the framework for doing a lot of this dirty work was set up under RIPA several years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Boost is created and maintained by, among other people, the people who created and maintained the C++ STL.
Well, yes and no. Although Boost was begun by members of the C++ Standards Committee Library Working Group, participation has expanded to include thousands of programmers from the C++ community at large.
And of course, the STL was originally developed independent of C++ by Alex Stepanov and Meng Lee. When Stepanov was first throwing around the underlying ideas, C++ didn't even have templates yet.
If by "on more than the bleeding edge platforms" you mean "on something other than MSVC," then yes. Microsoft's compiler was tremendously shitty when it came to standards conformance until .NET 2003 edition (I believe).
Your prejudice is showing. Visual C++ has pretty consistently been among the most standard-compliant compilers since forever. It fell behind a little in the early 2000s, since VC++6 was actually released before the C++ standard was finalised, but remember that we're talking about the GCC 2.95 days there, and the average UNIX platform compiler wasn't even on the chart at that point.
You're definitely a Windows developer, aren't you? You're just suffering from the fact that Boost isn't really built with or for MSVC, and the Windows development process is very non-standard with respect to every other OS out there.
Irony #1: My C++ code probably gets compiled on more platforms than code written by most, maybe even all, of the other participants in this discussion.
Irony #2: While Windows may be the "odd one out" relative to the Linux world, the Visual C++ command line compiler and makefiles pretty much work like every other platform.
Irony #3: Visual C++ is the only compiler on which I have actually seen real world code that makes extensive use of Boost compile properly out of the box.
As for the licensing terms, this is the boost software license. It is three (short) paragraphs long.
It doesn't matter what it says. There is a licence, which imposes a restriction. That in itself it enough to trigger a need for approval by the legal people in many companies.
Should I mention the fact that boost is the code base for much of the additions to the next generation of the C++ STL? I know templates can be big and scary, but really...
Do you think adding substandard lambda expressions and a funky parser library using template wizardry are more important than providing, say, standard facilities for working with networking, database interaction, heck, even console I/O? This is what the C++ in-crowd have brought us: an emphasis on using clever tricks to provide facilities that still aren't as good as what numerous other languages do anyway, instead of plugging gaping holes in the basic provisions of the standard library. I don't have anything against templates (well, not on this scale, anyway) but I do have a big problem with directing an entire development community's efforts towards overcoming mostly self-made problems with templates and the rest of C++ rather than getting the basics into the state they should have been in ten years ago.
Well, obviously there could be a bad apple in the bunch, but FWIW I've been a witness in a Magistrates' Court a couple of times, and frankly I would far rather have a case against me judged by people with the dedication and serious consideration exhibited by the Magistrates I observed than by anyone with political connections. They were, without exception, exemplary in the conduct, fair in their reasoning and obviously trying to get to the bottom of things so that they could give a ruling in the interests of justice for those involved, and generally a credit to the legal system they represent.
It's also worth pointing out that Magistrates are now required to give the reasons for their decisions at the end of a trial, so appealing something obviously unreasonable seems quite plausible. Also, IIRC Magistrates' Court decisions do not set any sort of precedent, and in any event statute law cannot be amended by case law over time in the UK legal system the way that AIUI it can in the US, so one bad decision can't start an unhealthy slide either.
I understand that trolls exist and that they will always be with us. I understand that ignorant people will continue to post until the end of time. What I don't understand is that the /. community apparently agrees with them.
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs... they probably know something you don't.
You, and a few other posters who have labelled all the critical posts as trolls, seem to be assuming that those who make those criticisms are incompetent and/or uninformed. Why do you assume this? It is clear from the comments that many of the critics have used (or tried to use) Boost in various circumstances, and found it isn't the silver bullet so many of its advocates seem to make out. The criticisms I'm seeing of portability, compile-time performance, cryptic error messages, variable quality of documentation and the like are all fair.
Ultimately, Boost is a bit of a strange beast. C++ has a lot of merit as a practical, pragmatic language where you can get stuff done, but it's not a high level language by contemporary standards. Unless you actually need the low level flexibility and/or seriously high performance, it's usually a bad choice for new projects. Boost seeks to add the sort of high-level functionality C++ lacks and to work around some of the more serious limitations of the underlying language, but it's like a scary parody of Greenspun's tenth. If you really need to use C++, it has its place (but at a cost), but for most people who need that kind of functionality, there are numerous much better ways to get it (or to avoid the need for it in the first place) by choosing a more appropriate programming language.
Boost targets implementations which actually implement the C++ standard
And how many of those are there, exactly?
(As far as I'm aware, the answer to that question is still "one", and that one only fairly recently.)
Anyone who had seen Boost source code knows that there are plenty of old hacks and workarounds in it specifically to make it work (to some documented extent) on such archaic compilers as VC6 and g++ 2.95.
Sure, but those are by far the biggest targets. How many little hacks were in there to support the native compilers on IBM, Sun or HP workstations, or even older Macs before GCC took off there?
Sounds like the kind of people who might be surprised that C++ is already out of draft for some time, then.
You judge too quickly. The problem isn't a lack of understanding; some of the people I'm thinking of are among the smartest C++ hackers I've ever met, the kind of people who have been following the C++ newsgroups since some way back into the last century, been to their fair share of ACCU conferences, even filed the odd defect report against the C++ standard. Rather, the problem is that what the standard says and what was actually portable without excessive effort across a wide range of compilers were worlds apart for such a long time (and I don't just mean export).
Oh, and I wonder - how do you "screw up exceptions"?
That's worth at least a blog post, if not a book, but I'm certainly not thinking of forgetting to enforce pairing of new and delete if that's what you're assuming.
For one thing, this is a prime example of varying compiler support. Techniques are known for implementing exceptions with almost zero overhead unless they are actually thrown. However, those techniques have only been implemented in compilers relatively recently, and as usual the big names have been better at it for the most part.
Then there's the little issue of retrofitting: techniques for working safely with exceptions weren't well known when the feature first became available, and a lot of projects got stung and then avoided them. That may have been a poor choice with hindsight, but retrofitting exceptions onto an existing project that wasn't written with them in mind is challenging, to say that least.
And then of course, there's the fact that it's not always as simple as RAII in C++: there was some discussion on another forum recently about the sanity (or lack thereof) in the popping from a stack problem in C++, for example.
Are these people from commercial sellers of C++ libraries saying bad things about Boost?
Yes, absolutely. There is no possibility that someone simply has different experiences to you that have caused them to criticise something based on objective reasons. Anyone who disagrees with you must have a vested interest.
It's not like I'm new here. Go ahead and check my posting history. You'll find I've got plenty of hours logged writing C++, and as surprising as you might find it, I do actually know what I'm talking about.
Be a good chap and pick up the tin-foil hat on the way out, would you?
Most half-decent compilers don't have problems with boost
Ah, the no true Scotsman argument.
Unfortunately, the reality is that compilers outside of the mainstream ones like Visual C++ or GCC have only reached the level of support required for much of the wizardry in Boost relatively recently. If you're working on portable code and your project is more than a couple of years old, you are unlikely to have been able to use Boost when you started it.
the license consists of 5 sentences
That doesn't matter. In some businesses, including almost all large ones in my experience, any use of external software requires formal approval of the licensing terms by the legal staff. Just getting a lawyer to look at the damn thing is often more trouble than it's worth, and little details like the attribution can really mess things up if you are writing a library shipped as source yourself, because it may have implications that you have to pass on to your customers, which in turn is likely to make your lawyers throw a fit.
how exactly can you screw up the installation of a mostly header-only library?
But Boost isn't just headers these days, is it? Some of the most useful aspects of it require hoop-jumping to pre-build them.
I'm sorry that you, and a couple of other people, seem to have assumed I was trolling. I wasn't. My comments are born of bitter experience using (or rather, not being able to use) Boost and other well-known libraries because of exactly the sort of technical and legal hurdles I alluded to. Moreover, when we looked into these things at the time, we found we were far from alone.
In fact, I have never seen Boost used in an established commercial C++ product so far, though I'm aware that it has been considered in several projects I've been involved with. Heck, go look on Sourceforge, which even has a Boost page these days, and look how many of the C++ projects there use it. It's hardly "almost every" one, as the post I criticised claimed, and this is Sourceforge, where the level of enthusiasm and flexibility on the serious projects is probably significantly beyond what you get in your average coding shop.
Almost every modern C++ codebase uses Boost somewhere
[Citation needed]
Boost is created and used by a highly vocal minority of C++ supergeeks. You can play with the definition of "modern", but it's only been in the recent past that Boost even compiled on more than the bleeding edge platforms. Most of the C++ projects I've worked on professionally are still worrying about whether to allow non-trivial use of templates or how to avoid screwing up exceptions, never mind trying to fight through the mess that is getting Boost installed and running these days and spending time getting lawyers to review the licensing terms.
It depends what you mean by government, I suppose.
At a general election, the people elect MPs to the House of Commons, which is the main part of the legislature. The second part is the House of Lords, but under the Parliament Act they must (eventually) defer to the Commons if a conflict arises.
The leader of the party with the largest number of MPs in the Commons is appointed Prime Minister, and formally invited by the Queen (our official head of state, but relatively powerless in reality) to form a government. Essentially, that refers to the executive, since the PM appoints Secretaries and Ministers of State. Normally, these people are drawn from members of the Commons and sometimes the Lords, so we don't have the same kind of separation of powers that countries like the US are supposed to have: almost by definition, those with ministerial or secretarial office come from the party that also has the biggest say in the Commons, so in practice as well as holding executive office they also set the direction of most parliamentary debates. (There is some scope for both the Opposition and individual MPs to bring motions for debate as well, but they get less of the available time.)
There are a few exceptional cases that will probably be cleared up, but other than that, no-one can hold both a parliamentary office and a judicial one, so judges are independent in that sense. In fact, in a Magistrates' Court, which is what we're talking about here, the court is run by three lay people (the Magistrates, one of whom will be senior to the other two) who are basically volunteers who very possibly have other day jobs and donate some of their time to the courts. Since the Magistrates aren't formally trained in the same way as a lawyer, they tend to rely (from what I've seen when I've been to Magistrates' Courts) on the Clerk of the Court, who is so trained, to provide professional advice as needed.
Magistrates' Courts are limited in what types of cases they can hear and what punishments they can hand out, and usually deal with low level crimes. It's somewhat similar to the misdemeanour/felony distinction in the US in terms of where the standard falls. Under various circumstances, a case may be transferred to a Crown Court, where it will be heard by a full judge and jury. (More serious cases would go there by default anyway.) Those judges cannot be serving Ministers or Secretaries of State at the same time either, and there are some restrictions on jury service to prevent conflicts of interest. The same goes for the High Court and Court of Appeal, the next highest levels.
We start to get into serious conflict after that, because then things wind up with the House of Lords/Law Lords, who are also part of the legislature. There's also a question at the moment over the status of the Attorney General, who is in some senses accountable to the government of the day and is their chief legal advisor, yet who supervises the public prosecuting authority, the Crown Prosecution Service, which is effectively a judicial role given the power that organisation wields in practice.
However, on this matter as I understand it, we are talking only about the penalties available to Magistrates for cases heard in a Magistrates' Court, so it's unlikely any cases on this scale would get anywhere near the level where conflicts of interest might arise between the judiciary and legislature/executive government. That would be a bit like the US Supreme Court hearing a case of petty theft, totally disproportionate. So I think it is fair to claim here that while the courts are ultimately administered using public funds etc., there is no direct say by the current administration in the outcome of this sort of case beyond setting the legal and punitive boundaries within which a Magistrates' Court must operate.
(Be warned that I am by no means a legal expert of scholar of government processes, so any of the above may be somewhat misleading or outright untrue in specific circumstances. I imagine Wikipedia and the like will have copious extra details if you're interested.)
At work, play the game.
Exactly. Maybe employment contracts are different in the US, but in the UK it's pretty standard to have a clause saying that any rights to work you do in the course of your employment belong to the employer and you agree to do anything necessary to help them claim those rights, give or take a bit of legalese. I suspect that not only could they fire you for refusing to co-operate (breach of contract), they could also sue you for damages if you wilfully undermined a patent claim, and withold salary if you used company time to do it (on the basis of gross misconduct). IANAL etc., but the wording in every contract I've ever had has been straightforward and this all seems quite reasonable: they are paying you to create that intellectual property, after all.
Well, right now the tendencies on this side of the pond are all things I'm pretty happy with: increasing legalisation of fair personal uses, more realistic penalties available for the worst offenders, and a stay on extending the duration despite extension lobbying by Big Media. I'm not worried about lawyers redefining words that haven't even been formally written yet; there will be plenty of time and scrutiny given to the specific details later. For now, I'll settle for aiming in the right direction, given how much of the world apparently isn't.
Having the law so divorced from reasonability that I could have statutory liability greater than the present sale value of my house for this act is frankly unconscionable.
You make good points, but I just want to reply to the above, because on this one I really do disagree with you. I would far rather have laws that permit a wide range of penalties if they are broken, and trust that a court with the facts of the specific case will decide an appropriate level in those particular circumstances, than have the legislation mandate a certain level of penalty based on whatever Parliament happened to consider at the time the law was written. If an unreasonable penalty were handed down by the magistrates or the court proceedings somehow deviated from acceptable practice, there are several levels of higher court to which an appeal could be made. The maximum penalty in this case isn't something that is automatically awarded by default, without the copyright holder having to prove anything. It is simply that now a Magistrates' Court can give a more representative penalty to small-time commercial operators whose damage may exceed the previous £5,000 cap.
1/10th of our populaton admit to regularly pirating and don't see anything wrong with it.
For one thing, the latter does not follow from the former. A substantial proportion of those who admit to pirating also agree that it is unethical, but continue to do so because they expect to get away with it. A further substantial proportion are ignorant of the law.
For another thing, 10% of your population doing something does not make it a "norm" of your society. If this was a 55%/45% thing, you might have some kind of case, but if 90% of the population don't do something illegal and 10% do, it's a pretty big leap to argue that the law is unjust and goes against the will of the people.
Piracy is a norm, just as much as breaking the speed limit.
While that statement is true, I'm not sure it's true for the reason you thought. In fact, both illegal activities are consistently opposed by the majority of the population. The responses submitted to Gowers are even on-line (unless someone explicitly asked for their reply not to be), so you can see how many people who felt strongly enough to write in objected to the basic principle of copyright: almost none. And note that large numbers did object, often rather strongly, to the idea of extending the duration and to the idea of any extension being retroactive, so the respondents weren't just people on Big Media's side.
Getting back to your comparison, it's also interesting that a substantial fraction of the minority who do break the law either agree that their behaviour is unethical when asked (and admit that they only do it because they expect to get away with it) or do so because they are ignorant of the law (hence, presumably, the high profile advertising campaigns by Big Media that explain very clearly that copying a CD or DVD and sharing it with others is illegal).
Finally, note that in both cases, members of the law-breaking group typically exhibit an unrealistic understanding of the situation. For example, drivers who routinely do 80mph on a motorway often claim that this is common, when in fact the mean speed of cars on a clear motorway is almost exactly 70mph, the legal limit, and the proportion of drivers who deviate by more than 10mph from that limit in either direction is very small.
You think permitting a maximum fine of £5,000 when someone is found guilty, in a court, of deliberately infringing someone else's copyright for personal financial gain, possibly making far more than £5,000 in profit at the legitimate rightsholder's expense, is "just"? Wow, that's pretty far to stretch.
Who said anything about increasing the length of copyright? The big attempt to do that during the same process failed, spectacularly, after a high proportion of the public responses to Gowers rejected the idea and the Review and subsequent government position followed the same pattern. Is there something else you were referring to, or are you just spreading FUD?
Oh, for goodness' sake, get some perspective.
The point of this law is to bring the penalties available to a court for commercial copyright infringement on-line to the same levels at those already available for off-line copyright infringement. It is closing a loophole. There is nothing to say that courts must arbitrarily hand out fines of 50k for infringement that did not deserve that level of penalty. There is nothing new in the scale of the maximum penalty, either.
Also, this is only the cap on what a Magistrates' Court can impose. It is normal under the legal system here that higher courts have access to higher sentences for more serious illegal behaviour. Magistrates' Courts, being run only by lay people rather than legally trained judges and without the use of a jury, are limited in the punishments they can impose.
What is your problem here? Do you think that not only must the legislature be inherently corrupt, but now the judicial system is as well? What next, every member of the population who doesn't agree with your personal right to freeload is also wrong and a danger to humanity? Get some perspective, for goodness' sake, and at least understand the basics of what you're criticising before you post knee-jerk flamebait like that.
Well, no, I don't mean anything like that. Perhaps you noticed that this is a story about the UK?
So as long as it only takes six degrees of P2P separation to distribute the latest blockbuster movie to the entire world, you think it's OK for a movie studio to invest $100,000,000 in making it and be able to sue one guy who leaks it into bankruptcy and recover at least 0.001% of the damages? That's hardly incentivising production and distribution of new works, is it?
It makes sense for if I am selling pirated books knowing that they were pirated I might have to pay a $500 fine to the copyright holders and give them all of my income from those books. Not I have to pay a $100,000 fine.
Surely it depends on the scale of the infringement? It wouldn't be much of a deterrent if the fine for catching a train without a ticket was only the ticket price + 10%. It wouldn't be much of a deterrent if the penalty for fraud were only returning what you had illegally taken plus a $10 court fee. Statutory, punitive fines like these are only worth anything as deterrents, and they have to be set on a scale that reflects this.
I see a reason to hate it. It takes the UK that much closer to imposing higher fines on ordinary, not-profit-seeking citizens who download movies and music.
How? In what way — any way — does this apply to Joe Average? Did you even read the summary?
And if you're going for a slippery slope argument, that's pretty much doomed here as well. This move is based on the recommendations of the Gowers Review. In case you weren't aware, Gowers made a whole load of recommendations. Another one that is being supported by the government, for example, legitimising format shifting under certain circumstances. Do you consider that a step towards removing copyright altogether?
Spare us the FUD. These decisions will be made in a court, and in the lowest court at that. The government has no direct say in such cases; government ministers wouldn't even get out of bed to attend this sort of case.
And for the record, as someone who has actually seen a Magistrates' Court in action, they are IME sombre, serious places where the decisions are made carefully and with extreme care. It's a side effect of getting lay people to make the decision: they tend to consult their legal advisor frequently, but come from an outside perspective.
If they have a problem with photographers, they're certainly entitled to ask you to leave (and you'd be trespassing if you don't comply) but that's about the extent of it.
What if they have signs up at the entrances saying "no photography allowed"?
If a mall is a public place because there is implied permission for the public to enter, then that pretty clearly denies that permission to anyone who is entering to take a photograph.
And the IPO are now going to the Court of Appeal, after which I could believe something as fundamental at this would reach the House of Lords.
And of course, whether the European Patent Office should actually have awarded that patent in the first place is subject to debate. The European Parliament has repeatedly denied attempts to legitimise software patents, so while the EPO has awarded this (and a few others) that might be interpreted that way, there's doubt about whether they would stand up even at European level.
The thing is, the absurd abuses of the system by local councils and the like are currently fairly high profile, and anyone who tries it again is likely to see the world from the perspective of a head rolling down a hill shortly afterwards.
Oh, and a lot of the data being held by ISPs and such is far from voluntary, because the framework for doing a lot of this dirty work was set up under RIPA several years ago.