Furthermore, even if patents were better prior art than--well, prior art--even Microsoft doesn't have enough money to patent all the trivial crap in the world.
They don't need all of it, only enough to sue irritations like this into oblivion (or to force a hostile takeover with the threat of doing so).
Not that soon: Bill probably doesn't have a note this small in his pocket, though Steve might have to forego breaking any W^Hwindows this week to cover the costs...
Erm... Yes. But that would kinda defeat the point of using a non-breaking space, wouldn't it?
A more sensible approach to preventing the page-widening trolls from having their fun would simply be to insert a (breaking) space if there is a continuous string of n characters without one, as IIRC Slashdot already does if you type things like long URLs in a post.
I'm not familiar with all of the tools you mentioned there, but with something I am a little familiar with — InDesign — the overall power and convenience is now well ahead of LateX IME. As you say, there are some gaps. There are also some things it's much better at. But unless I really need TeX-style equations, I'd rather use a tool like InDesign for most things these days.
According to my personal and subjective experience, serif fonts are more readable because it add more information, especially to disambiguate those groups of letters: {m,n,u} and {p,q,b,d,h,g}. I guess many of you will find it strange because letters don't look confusing, maybe some will think I have a kind of dyslexia (I really don't). In fact the issue arises at high speed reading, when the brain guess a group of words rather than actually reading it.
Sure, but it seems to me that the interesting question is whether it's the subtle changes in letter forms created by using serifs that disambiguate otherwise similar-looking letters, or whether it's something else like context. If you read a word like "turning" in a serifed font, is it the serifs that prevent you reading it as "tuming", or is it the fact that you have learned that "tuming" isn't a word in English and "turning" is?
Of course, the fact that going to www.imaterrorist.com in your web browser gets rejected at the ISP level is not the same thing as preventing you from accessing the content on that site.
I think we need a new Slashdot tag: wethinkweowntheinternet. We could just automatically moderate the first post in any such discussion pointing out the futility of censorship at a national level to (+5, Insightful), all the others repeating the same thought to (-1, Redundant), and the remaining 97% of comments (+5, Funny)...
I'm afraid I've long since given up on the LaTeX3 effort. There doesn't seem to be any driving force, and progress has been tending to zero for many years.
I think the problem is that while the TeX family of tools provided high quality typesetting that was basically a cut above the rest when they were written, that was several decades ago. Today we have Opentype font technology starting to enter mainstream applications, and at least the high-end DTP programs take advantage of that and are starting to offer serious typography in terms of things like H&J. Things like automatic ligatures and using the right dash are nice to have, but hardly earth-shattering, and everyone else has them now, too. That rules out typography as a major advantage for TeX.
The second big advantage it has always had is typesetting mathematics. Again, it seems a matter of time before the big boys can play that game too. As always, the limitation here is mostly that there are (and probably always will be) few high-quality fonts available that are suitable for setting mathematics.
The third advantage of TeX, particularly the LaTeX family, and perhaps the most relevant today, is the support for long documents. Things like cross-references and bibliographies actually work and provide enough functionality to get useful results, albeit only if you jump through the right hoops to set them up. The same cannot be said of any word processor I have used, and many DTP packages are lacking in this area, but this seems to be improving (at least in DTP land).
The fourth and final traditional advantage of TeX is extensibility. However, in a world that has scripting languages and that understands modularity and plug-in architectures, the idea of writing document classes and extension packages using the obscure and awkward TeX primitives looks its age. The LaTeX community in particular has done a remarkable job of maintaining spaghetti packages and adding compatibility features to get this package to work with that one, but it's still spaghetti. Compare and contrast with a more modern application designed with that kind of simple core and easy extensibility in mind, such as Firefox.
And of course, TeX and its derivatives have always had some major disadvantages. It is a curious irony that TeX had the best paragraph justification algorithm in town — something that even now is only being equalled in a few high-end DTP programs — yet one of the worst approaches to setting pages ever conceived. Even today's low-end DTP software blows away the most advanced page-setting algorithms in any TeX derivative. (There are, after all, some advantages to having computers that measure RAM in GB not KB.)
I think it is about time we consigned TeX to a place of honour in the history books. Now if only someone would write a decent DTP package that could cope with long documents and setting mathematics to a high standard...
Talking about serif and sans-serif: serif fonts are much more readable on paper (it helps brain to disambiguate many letters), but due to the pixel size on screen the serif fonts are often worse than sans-serif.
The problem with this debate, IMHO, is that an awful lot of "accepted wisdom" simply isn't backed up by evidence. In some cases, even explanations that have long since been debunked are still quoted in "scientific" papers. The one about serifs helping the eye to track along a line of text is a favourite, which bizarrely persists despite eye-tracking studies long ago demonstrating that humans do not read a continuous line of text straight through from left to right anyway.
I don't recall seeing any research specifically considering the disambiguation properties of serifs, but whatever we do do when we read, it definitely isn't looking at each letter separately. This must make suspect any argument about the readability of extended bodies of text that is based on disambiguation of character shapes. (Obviously in other contexts, for example when viewing source code in an editor, different conclusions might apply.)
The argument that pixellation and serifs don't mix is another old chestnut. In readability studies, Times New Roman and Georgia hold their own against the likes of Arial and Verdana, with the font size also being a big influence on how effectively text is read and how well it is perceived subjectively. Throw in issues like anti-aliasing, and whatever conclusions we can draw, it's certainly not clear on the evidence to date that sans fonts are more readable just because they have no serifs.
Hey, I wonder whether we can set up a typographic version of Snopes.:-)
As you say, the only rationale for Vista has been that M$ needed a new version to maintain cash flow from its operating system division. They still get the cash from XP so they aren't hurt too badly from a pure cash flow point of view.
The irony there is that the second statement undermines the first. It is entirely possible that (profit from Vista sale - amortised development cost for that copy of Vista) is less than (profit from XP sale).
Microsoft's influence over Dell extends exactly as far as it makes Dell money. Since the post-antitrust spanking they received around the world, that boils down to how many copies of Windows they can supply that Dell will sell on, with a profit for both companies.
Just as major vendors couldn't move entirely to XP after Win2K was released, but perhaps even more so this time, if the people want XP rather than Vista, that's what Dell is going to give them.
It's good to see my earlier predictions are well on their way to coming true. Maybe I should get a middle name starting with X and start writing a blog.;-)
Actually, the optimal line length for extended reading has more to do with the angle through which yours eyes must rotate to get back to the start of each line from the end of the one preceding it. It happens that for typical typefaces, text sizes and reading distances, this works out at around 4–5", or 1.5 alphabets, or whatever your preferred practical rule of thumb is.
The irony, of course, is that the latest versions of Windows support Opentype pretty comprehensively, the latest fonts from MS support some Opentype features, pretty much all of the serious, commercial, professional-grade fonts you can buy these days come as Opentype (at least from sources like Adobe), Opentype features are far more powerful than anything in the TeX/METAFONT world, yet Microsoft were too busy revamping their UI again to add support for these features in Word 2007. So much for BillG's claims about readability on the screen being important.
If you're referring to METAFONT-style fonts, then there is some supplementary information you can encode in the font file to indicate kerning between specific pairs, and also some moderately flexible ligature support. It's nowhere near as powerful as what you can do with Opentype, but suffices for reasonable quality when setting Roman alphabet languages. It can also be adapted, if you try hard enough, to support more complicated scripts like Devanagari. The nastiest limitations for that sort of work usually involved the number 256, IIRC.
The TeX engine itself does some spacing work as well, but more in the areas of punctuation and whitespace for justification than inter-letter spacing. (This is why you have to be careful when using a . character as something other than a full stop, if you want typographically correct results.) If you want something interesting built on top of TeX, look up Han The Thanh's thesis on microtypography and have a play with PDF(La)TeX.
I thought someone might finally have come up with some serious research showing how to objectively improve readability, but it's just a summary of kerning.
Why is this area so bare of real scientific results? There have been a few studies into on-screen readability, typically measuring things like reading speed, accuracy of recollection afterwards, and subjective approval of the document by the reader. However, there are so many variables that people don't seem to control that it's hard to see any general patterns. For example, changing the font from 10pt to 12pt on screen may well not just scale the size by 120%, but also make the dominant strokes two pixels wide rather than one. There is little consistency among conclusions about optimal font size for reading across fonts or whether serif or sans-serif fonts are more readable, perhaps because there are so many variables.
Oh well, I guess we'll just have to wait a bit longer for comprehensive research.
Having used 1.5 for a long period of time its also one of the more stable programs I'v use every day, havnt so far seen a crash or something that dosnt work as intended.
Do you know whether they've fixed the mess that is "compacting folders" for TB2?
I got very bored of having to manually hack index files because something an end-user should never have to know about wasn't happening and TB 1.5 broke in various ways. I then discovered that you can make it auto-prompt to remind you to compact folders at least, but it does that far too often, including on start-up, which then gets silly messages as your filter rules run.
Other things on my wish list include:
Automatically place my replies to messages in the same folder as the message I'm replying to.
For bonus points, provide an option in the filter rules that automatically places incoming messages in the same folder as any message I already have that they're replying to (as indicated by message headers).
Speaking of filter rules, it's been very annoying that you can't share rules between different incoming mail accounts in previous versions. Has this been added?
And on a related note, is there a view option in the news reader that shows only threads where one of my accounts has posted, so I can follow up on those threads first?
Also in news, it would be nice if the pseudo-killfile options worked properly, so adding a rule to ignore any threads started by spammer@annoying.com would clean up the 50 or so I've already downloaded headers for.
And of course, many of us at work want calendaring compatible with Outlook/Exchange, but unfortunately I see from other posts that there isn't a matching release of any suitable add-in.
Can anyone who's been trying it confirm whether any of the above have been added? If so, I'll probably upgrade. If not, I'll wait a while in case of silly bugs. Thanks!
People speak as if running some Windows program isn't a casual activity.
For a lot of people, running a Windows program... wait, what's Windows?
Seriously, a lot of the world knows little or nothing about computers. As long as they can read e-mail, surf the web and play their games, they don't care what else is on there.
Sony's actions are simple market economics, and as much as we hate it, I would guess that they've done their research and concluded that the income lost from vocal anti-DRM geeks and less vocal just-shop-somewhere-else people they annoy incidentally is significantly less than the income lost from casual infringers who will be dissuaded from copying the discs with DRM.
Sony's PR department really don't seem to understand that they have a monumental image problem.
Many Slashdot posters really don't seem to understand that most consumers don't care about DRM and company image. They just want to watch Casino Royale or whatever, and as long as it works, they'll be happy.
Sony, however, do understand this, which is why they keep trying this sort of crap without much fear of the consequences. Until DRM becomes a high-profile issue with the general public (which basically means until the majority have been directly and adversely affected by it) Sony's PR department probably don't much care.
Of course, when DRM does become socially unacceptable, which may finally start to happen as a result of the major changes in the on-line music market over the past few days, Sony's history of abuse may well become a PR headache for them. But it's rare for any corporate PR group to think that far ahead, because often consumers just forget or don't care enough by the time the issue comes up.
It's not a case of "forgive and forget" - far too many people are too damned lazy to keep themselves well informed which is precisely what the DRM-supporting corporations are banking on to get DRM in quietly through the back door.
And what else should I be keeping myself informed about? The latest proposed abuses of drivers to extort more money, and the latest stupid "pro-cycling" legislation that makes cycling more dangerous? The relative morality of the food sourcing policies of the four major supermarket brands with stores near my home? The levels of customer service of my ISP and telephone company? The details of the different extortionate charges levied by all the banks with branches in my city?
There are two big problems with your argument. Firstly, no consumer has the time and experience to know about everything. Secondly, even if they did, since it's common for most or all of the big name businesses to cut the same corners in the name of increasing profits while keeping competitive prices, while the smaller or more ethical businesses can't compete on price and are essentially a niche market for dedicated "ethical consumers".
This is why a completely free market is often not a good idea, and government should intervene with regulation/legislation where markets fail to act appropriately without such incentives. No-one else has the time and resources to monitor diverse consumer markets and keep the big boys in line.
Presumably the point is that it's a disincentive to casual copying. Of course pretty much any current DRM scheme can be broken fairly easily by geeks with the right kit... but most people who buy those DVDs aren't geeks with the right kit.
CD standards are defined and policed by one organisation.
DVD standards are the product of a large collaboration between double-figures of large businesses originally, one of them being Sony themselves. There are now hundreds involved, and AFAICS there is no single group with the authority to take enforcement action is someone is abusing the "DVD" description.
The second definition of fold doesn't seem so bad.
Ah, but this is one of the big problems with syntax-bloated languages, of which Java is one of the worst. A basic definition of fold requires only two lines: one for the recursion rule, and one for the end case. When you start thinking that using "only 7 lines" to write fold is good, you know you've been used to bloat for too long!
I'm sorry, but if you cannot figure out how to get into MSDN to look up a Win32 API, you simply have no business writing software.
What a stupid thing to write. It's not my employer's fault if Microsoft's MSDN web sites are now so slow to respond at peak times that web browsers time out before displaying the page, and neither is it their fault that whenever you search for something even with C++ filtering on, you get far more hits on.Net-related topics than on real C++ or traditional Windows APIs. Sure, searching for an API when you already know what it's called and you're only looking in local help files works, but anything more general in the search or based on Microsoft's web servers is hosed big time, and that has nothing to do with how good anyone is at writing software (well, except Microsoft, perhaps).
why does virtually every text about Java add some C++ bashing?
It doesn't, but since a significant part of Java's target audience is people who don't understand/appreciate C++, it's not surprising that some of the commentary demonstrates an ignorance of the underlying models in the two languages and their relative strengths and weaknesses.
It means that you can create List and pass it to a legacy method which takes only unparameterized List.
Whether that is a useful compatibility mechanism or a fundamental weakness in the type system that defeats the entire point of generics is left as an exercise to the reader.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't need all of it, only enough to sue irritations like this into oblivion (or to force a hostile takeover with the threat of doing so).
Not that soon: Bill probably doesn't have a note this small in his pocket, though Steve might have to forego breaking any W^Hwindows this week to cover the costs...
Erm... Yes. But that would kinda defeat the point of using a non-breaking space, wouldn't it?
A more sensible approach to preventing the page-widening trolls from having their fun would simply be to insert a (breaking) space if there is a continuous string of n characters without one, as IIRC Slashdot already does if you type things like long URLs in a post.
I'm not familiar with all of the tools you mentioned there, but with something I am a little familiar with — InDesign — the overall power and convenience is now well ahead of LateX IME. As you say, there are some gaps. There are also some things it's much better at. But unless I really need TeX-style equations, I'd rather use a tool like InDesign for most things these days.
Sure, but it seems to me that the interesting question is whether it's the subtle changes in letter forms created by using serifs that disambiguate otherwise similar-looking letters, or whether it's something else like context. If you read a word like "turning" in a serifed font, is it the serifs that prevent you reading it as "tuming", or is it the fact that you have learned that "tuming" isn't a word in English and "turning" is?
Of course, the fact that going to www.imaterrorist.com in your web browser gets rejected at the ISP level is not the same thing as preventing you from accessing the content on that site.
I think we need a new Slashdot tag: wethinkweowntheinternet. We could just automatically moderate the first post in any such discussion pointing out the futility of censorship at a national level to (+5, Insightful), all the others repeating the same thought to (-1, Redundant), and the remaining 97% of comments (+5, Funny)...
I'm afraid I've long since given up on the LaTeX3 effort. There doesn't seem to be any driving force, and progress has been tending to zero for many years.
I think the problem is that while the TeX family of tools provided high quality typesetting that was basically a cut above the rest when they were written, that was several decades ago. Today we have Opentype font technology starting to enter mainstream applications, and at least the high-end DTP programs take advantage of that and are starting to offer serious typography in terms of things like H&J. Things like automatic ligatures and using the right dash are nice to have, but hardly earth-shattering, and everyone else has them now, too. That rules out typography as a major advantage for TeX.
The second big advantage it has always had is typesetting mathematics. Again, it seems a matter of time before the big boys can play that game too. As always, the limitation here is mostly that there are (and probably always will be) few high-quality fonts available that are suitable for setting mathematics.
The third advantage of TeX, particularly the LaTeX family, and perhaps the most relevant today, is the support for long documents. Things like cross-references and bibliographies actually work and provide enough functionality to get useful results, albeit only if you jump through the right hoops to set them up. The same cannot be said of any word processor I have used, and many DTP packages are lacking in this area, but this seems to be improving (at least in DTP land).
The fourth and final traditional advantage of TeX is extensibility. However, in a world that has scripting languages and that understands modularity and plug-in architectures, the idea of writing document classes and extension packages using the obscure and awkward TeX primitives looks its age. The LaTeX community in particular has done a remarkable job of maintaining spaghetti packages and adding compatibility features to get this package to work with that one, but it's still spaghetti. Compare and contrast with a more modern application designed with that kind of simple core and easy extensibility in mind, such as Firefox.
And of course, TeX and its derivatives have always had some major disadvantages. It is a curious irony that TeX had the best paragraph justification algorithm in town — something that even now is only being equalled in a few high-end DTP programs — yet one of the worst approaches to setting pages ever conceived. Even today's low-end DTP software blows away the most advanced page-setting algorithms in any TeX derivative. (There are, after all, some advantages to having computers that measure RAM in GB not KB.)
I think it is about time we consigned TeX to a place of honour in the history books. Now if only someone would write a decent DTP package that could cope with long documents and setting mathematics to a high standard...
The problem with this debate, IMHO, is that an awful lot of "accepted wisdom" simply isn't backed up by evidence. In some cases, even explanations that have long since been debunked are still quoted in "scientific" papers. The one about serifs helping the eye to track along a line of text is a favourite, which bizarrely persists despite eye-tracking studies long ago demonstrating that humans do not read a continuous line of text straight through from left to right anyway.
I don't recall seeing any research specifically considering the disambiguation properties of serifs, but whatever we do do when we read, it definitely isn't looking at each letter separately. This must make suspect any argument about the readability of extended bodies of text that is based on disambiguation of character shapes. (Obviously in other contexts, for example when viewing source code in an editor, different conclusions might apply.)
The argument that pixellation and serifs don't mix is another old chestnut. In readability studies, Times New Roman and Georgia hold their own against the likes of Arial and Verdana, with the font size also being a big influence on how effectively text is read and how well it is perceived subjectively. Throw in issues like anti-aliasing, and whatever conclusions we can draw, it's certainly not clear on the evidence to date that sans fonts are more readable just because they have no serifs.
Hey, I wonder whether we can set up a typographic version of Snopes. :-)
The irony there is that the second statement undermines the first. It is entirely possible that (profit from Vista sale - amortised development cost for that copy of Vista) is less than (profit from XP sale).
Microsoft's influence over Dell extends exactly as far as it makes Dell money. Since the post-antitrust spanking they received around the world, that boils down to how many copies of Windows they can supply that Dell will sell on, with a profit for both companies.
Just as major vendors couldn't move entirely to XP after Win2K was released, but perhaps even more so this time, if the people want XP rather than Vista, that's what Dell is going to give them.
It's good to see my earlier predictions are well on their way to coming true. Maybe I should get a middle name starting with X and start writing a blog. ;-)
Actually, the optimal line length for extended reading has more to do with the angle through which yours eyes must rotate to get back to the start of each line from the end of the one preceding it. It happens that for typical typefaces, text sizes and reading distances, this works out at around 4–5", or 1.5 alphabets, or whatever your preferred practical rule of thumb is.
The irony, of course, is that the latest versions of Windows support Opentype pretty comprehensively, the latest fonts from MS support some Opentype features, pretty much all of the serious, commercial, professional-grade fonts you can buy these days come as Opentype (at least from sources like Adobe), Opentype features are far more powerful than anything in the TeX/METAFONT world, yet Microsoft were too busy revamping their UI again to add support for these features in Word 2007. So much for BillG's claims about readability on the screen being important.
If you're referring to METAFONT-style fonts, then there is some supplementary information you can encode in the font file to indicate kerning between specific pairs, and also some moderately flexible ligature support. It's nowhere near as powerful as what you can do with Opentype, but suffices for reasonable quality when setting Roman alphabet languages. It can also be adapted, if you try hard enough, to support more complicated scripts like Devanagari. The nastiest limitations for that sort of work usually involved the number 256, IIRC.
The TeX engine itself does some spacing work as well, but more in the areas of punctuation and whitespace for justification than inter-letter spacing. (This is why you have to be careful when using a . character as something other than a full stop, if you want typographically correct results.) If you want something interesting built on top of TeX, look up Han The Thanh's thesis on microtypography and have a play with PDF(La)TeX.
I thought someone might finally have come up with some serious research showing how to objectively improve readability, but it's just a summary of kerning.
Why is this area so bare of real scientific results? There have been a few studies into on-screen readability, typically measuring things like reading speed, accuracy of recollection afterwards, and subjective approval of the document by the reader. However, there are so many variables that people don't seem to control that it's hard to see any general patterns. For example, changing the font from 10pt to 12pt on screen may well not just scale the size by 120%, but also make the dominant strokes two pixels wide rather than one. There is little consistency among conclusions about optimal font size for reading across fonts or whether serif or sans-serif fonts are more readable, perhaps because there are so many variables.
Oh well, I guess we'll just have to wait a bit longer for comprehensive research.
Do you know whether they've fixed the mess that is "compacting folders" for TB2?
I got very bored of having to manually hack index files because something an end-user should never have to know about wasn't happening and TB 1.5 broke in various ways. I then discovered that you can make it auto-prompt to remind you to compact folders at least, but it does that far too often, including on start-up, which then gets silly messages as your filter rules run.
Other things on my wish list include:
Can anyone who's been trying it confirm whether any of the above have been added? If so, I'll probably upgrade. If not, I'll wait a while in case of silly bugs. Thanks!
For a lot of people, running a Windows program... wait, what's Windows?
Seriously, a lot of the world knows little or nothing about computers. As long as they can read e-mail, surf the web and play their games, they don't care what else is on there.
Sony's actions are simple market economics, and as much as we hate it, I would guess that they've done their research and concluded that the income lost from vocal anti-DRM geeks and less vocal just-shop-somewhere-else people they annoy incidentally is significantly less than the income lost from casual infringers who will be dissuaded from copying the discs with DRM.
Many Slashdot posters really don't seem to understand that most consumers don't care about DRM and company image. They just want to watch Casino Royale or whatever, and as long as it works, they'll be happy.
Sony, however, do understand this, which is why they keep trying this sort of crap without much fear of the consequences. Until DRM becomes a high-profile issue with the general public (which basically means until the majority have been directly and adversely affected by it) Sony's PR department probably don't much care.
Of course, when DRM does become socially unacceptable, which may finally start to happen as a result of the major changes in the on-line music market over the past few days, Sony's history of abuse may well become a PR headache for them. But it's rare for any corporate PR group to think that far ahead, because often consumers just forget or don't care enough by the time the issue comes up.
And what else should I be keeping myself informed about? The latest proposed abuses of drivers to extort more money, and the latest stupid "pro-cycling" legislation that makes cycling more dangerous? The relative morality of the food sourcing policies of the four major supermarket brands with stores near my home? The levels of customer service of my ISP and telephone company? The details of the different extortionate charges levied by all the banks with branches in my city?
There are two big problems with your argument. Firstly, no consumer has the time and experience to know about everything. Secondly, even if they did, since it's common for most or all of the big name businesses to cut the same corners in the name of increasing profits while keeping competitive prices, while the smaller or more ethical businesses can't compete on price and are essentially a niche market for dedicated "ethical consumers".
This is why a completely free market is often not a good idea, and government should intervene with regulation/legislation where markets fail to act appropriately without such incentives. No-one else has the time and resources to monitor diverse consumer markets and keep the big boys in line.
Presumably the point is that it's a disincentive to casual copying. Of course pretty much any current DRM scheme can be broken fairly easily by geeks with the right kit... but most people who buy those DVDs aren't geeks with the right kit.
CD standards are defined and policed by one organisation.
DVD standards are the product of a large collaboration between double-figures of large businesses originally, one of them being Sony themselves. There are now hundreds involved, and AFAICS there is no single group with the authority to take enforcement action is someone is abusing the "DVD" description.
Ah, but this is one of the big problems with syntax-bloated languages, of which Java is one of the worst. A basic definition of fold requires only two lines: one for the recursion rule, and one for the end case. When you start thinking that using "only 7 lines" to write fold is good, you know you've been used to bloat for too long!
What a stupid thing to write. It's not my employer's fault if Microsoft's MSDN web sites are now so slow to respond at peak times that web browsers time out before displaying the page, and neither is it their fault that whenever you search for something even with C++ filtering on, you get far more hits on .Net-related topics than on real C++ or traditional Windows APIs. Sure, searching for an API when you already know what it's called and you're only looking in local help files works, but anything more general in the search or based on Microsoft's web servers is hosed big time, and that has nothing to do with how good anyone is at writing software (well, except Microsoft, perhaps).
It doesn't, but since a significant part of Java's target audience is people who don't understand/appreciate C++, it's not surprising that some of the commentary demonstrates an ignorance of the underlying models in the two languages and their relative strengths and weaknesses.
Heh... Now you just have to get operator overloading and type inference, and you'll be able to write
like those of us with real programming languages.Whether that is a useful compatibility mechanism or a fundamental weakness in the type system that defeats the entire point of generics is left as an exercise to the reader.