Out of interest, did you actually read any of those articles you cited? The first, for example, is using Java to develop a distributed computation network. Sure, if you take 100 computers, of course you can do more with even a moderately efficient programming language than you can do on a single machine, even if your language were several times faster on that machine. I don't see how that supports your argument; on the contrary, it's the classic "hardware is cheap" approach necessarily employed by those using inefficient programming tools.
How about finding some real, production applications (not recent, unfinished developments or academic experiments) that use Java for the same sort of job that things like C++ or FORTRAN are used for at present, without falling back on the word "distributed"? Funnily enough, a quick Google looking for that turned up nada for me.
Your example is often cited, but it's rare in real code. Usually, you'd either copy from one container to another by direct assignment, or populate one from another by using something like a back_inserter. So yes, the weakness is there, but it's not as significant as the existing alternative.
And of course, nothing says iterators can't be access-checked in a safe library implementation.
but I think the evidence really is to the contrary. Hundreds of millions (if not more) lines of code have now been written in languages that use garbage collection. Some of these languages are high-performance and some are used for real-time work, and they all work fine.
I think we probably have quite different experiences here. Certainly your world, where a query-driven application like Tomcat is "high performance", is very different to mine, where things like 3D modelling, photorealistic rendering, and large scale simulations are bread and butter. Does anyone write CAD programs or supercomputer-based weather modellers using Java? Not that I know of, and I do and have worked in these fields for several years. That's not to say that no-one ever does, of course, but it's not the norm.
None of this means that I see manual memory management as a good thing. On the contrary, for the vast majority of the time, it's just another implementation detail, and best dealt with automatically. I'm just saying that there are plenty of other nasty categories of programmer that a garbage collector won't help you with.
[The scary part is] that Australia is not doing something special, they are simply catching up to most of the rest of the world as far as fair use goes.
On the contrary, the scary part is that this is something special, and in many western jurisdictions today the above isn't deemed fair use (or whatever that jurisdiction's law calls the concept). In the UK, for example, AIUI it is technically legal to record a broadcast television programme for time-shifting purposes, but illegal to keep the recording long-term, which seems to be one of the things being legalised in Australia. Let's hope the UK's newly-ordered review of intellectual property law for the digital age reaches similar conclusions; I will certainly be writing to them to encourage it!
I agree that treating everyday users as criminals is bad, but worse is treating 'copyright industries' as something special, something to be protected.
That depends. Who or what is a "copyright industry"?
If you mean the people who generate new works that are protected by copyright, then they are special, and of great value to society. I read the context for the statement you're objecting to differently to you: I interpreted it as saying that where making a copy doesn't harm the copyright holder, there's no need for making that copy to be illegal. If making a copy does harm the copyright holder, then perhaps it should be illegal, since preventing such harm is what copyright law offers the rightsholder in exchange for sharing their work with society.
If, on the other hand and as I suspect, you mean the major publishers, record labels and so on, who essentially force artists to give up their own copyright as a condition for entry into the traditional marketplace, then screw 'em, I say. But my views on the nature of copyright and the fact that the underlying right should be non-transferrable in law have been expressed here before, so I won't go into them again unless asked.
I'd agree with that, if every member of the public were capable of forming a rational decision based on a fully informed view on every issue. Unfortunately, that's simply not practical. There are too many fields with laws applying for everyone to know everything about them. Also, a significant proportion of the population simply isn't smart enough to act in their own interests when it comes to more complex laws (this isn't a criticism of those people, it's simply a fact).
I believe that this is why the most successful societies have evolved systems of government where representatives of the people are elected, and those representatives can dedicate themselves full-time to getting informed so they can make those decisions in the best interests of those they represent. This sort of system doesn't always work, but I suspect in the long run it's a lot better for everyone than a literal "one person, one vote" scheme.
You are relying on C++'s implied "return 0", but not all
platforms use 0 to indicate success.
Perhaps, but returning 0 from main() is guaranteed to return a suitable success indicator to the host environment. From ISO/IEC 14882:1998, 18.3/8:
Finally, control is returned to the host environment. If status is zero or EXIT_SUCCESS, an implementation-defined form of the status successful termination is returned.
I actually cut the second paragraph from my previous comment before posting, but since you bring the subject up: yes, I do challenge the claims in those articles.
Let's ignore issues of running on a JVM, and assume that once Hotspot or the like has done its stuff we're dealing with fully compiled code. Even then, Java has natural inhibitions regarding performance compared to a lower-level language like C or C++. These range from its lack of "value types" to a highly portable but necessarily non-optimal floating point model.
Some of these inhibitions can be overcome with sufficiently smart optimisation techniques. The escape analysis stuff that's starting to filter through (but AFAIK isn't in widespread use among mainstream implementations yet) should help a lot with some things, for example.
However, some of the weaknesses, particularly the floating point model, are inherent. If you want truly portable behaviour, you have to use the portable floating point model, which means you can't take advantage of a lot of hardware-based optimisation available to other languages. If you switch to using those optimisations, as I understand you can in the more recent versions of Java, then you pick up the performance but you give up any pretence of getting the same results on all platforms. (I write highly portable floating point code for a living; trust me, you can't have both complete portability and optimal performance, ever.)
In summary, then, to satisfy the claims about Java performance made in those articles, you need tomorrow's Java optimisation technology today and to give up one of the main advantages to programming in Java. I'll concede that the kind of projects mentioned in the articles might be a in position where those two requirements aren't a problem, but most Java developers sure aren't -- at least, not yet.
I suspect it's far more likely that the management teams believe, rightly or wrongly, that their staff will be more productive using Java than, say, C++ or ADA. I doubt that the concerns are purely for the quality of the final product, even in the miiltary field; remember that the US Navy had one of its ships dead in the water after a bug caused the Windows NT code it was running to crash, leaving the ship stranded. Engineers have warned repeatedly against the use of Windows as a foundation for combat systems on US and UK Navy vessels, but they're more likely to be fired for their trouble than to get any sort of rational reaction from senior management.
Modern unmanaged C++ is NOT fine; STL permits many kinds of bugs that are analogous to buffer overflows.
Huh? Granted there are some silly design decisions in the C++ standard library, like making the unchecked indexing use operator[] and the safer, checked version use at() on a std::vector. Still, it's much harder to get things like overruns using the STL, where much code is iterator-based, and harder still to do it in a way that won't be obvious to any remotely competent code reviewer (who will ask why you're not using the safer indexing if your loop does count instead). What sort of thing did you have in mind?
Finally, without full garbage collection, you cannot have full runtime safety.
Garbage collection is an answer to one category of programmer error, and it's far from the most serious. As I often mention in these discussions, I haven't caused a memory leak writing in C++ in years, and I've got automated tools running on the projects concerned just in case to prove it. It's actually quite hard to get a memory leak in C++ if you use basic good programming practices.
On the other hand, in a language with GC you still have problems with messing up thread safety to cause race conditions, messing up thread synchronisation to cause deadlocks, greedy acquisition/lazy release of resources crippling the performance of your process (or, more commonly, other processes running on the same machine but not under the same run-time framework), SQL injection, using naive encryption and/or insecure transport protocols. These are all common flaws seen in real programs, and can be just as damaging as any buffer overflow, if not more so.
And I make this case without, until now, mentioning the IME very real problem that a lot of cheaposoft programmers who grow up relying on GC don't have the same appreciation of low level mechanics as those who don't, which causes them to write unnecessarily naff code with problems of its own.
At the end of the day, GC is a useful tool for many programming jobs, but it's only a tool, not a silver bullet. It's no substitute for a good programmer who knows what he's doing.
It's fascinating that there are two replies to the GPP, post mentioning using Java in a real-time context, as if that somehow implies that its performance is equivalent to something like C or C++. "Hard real-time" and "fast" are completely different qualities, and having one does not imply the other either way around.
What's reasonable doubt got to do with anything here? Proof "beyond reasonable doubt" is the standard for conviction in a criminal case in some jurisdictions. This is not a criminal case, and the evidence is not being used to convict someone of a crime.
What's necessary here is for a court to accept an argument that there are reasonable grounds to continue an investigation, when that investigation might reasonably result in identifying a target for a legitimate court case. That test is closer in nature to "showing probable cause" than to "beyond reasonable doubt".
Your argument is a bit like telling a police officer at the scene of a recent shooting that he can't even talk to someone found at the scene with a gun-shaped bulge under their jacket, because there's no immediate proof that the guy really is carrying a gun, and even if he is, there's no immediate proof that he was the person who did the shooting. You're looking at entirely the wrong point in the timescale, and applying entirely the wrong standards.
Perhaps you could visit the GMail home page and tell us where on that page you found an indication that it was under test?
If I asked my many non-techie friends who have GMail accounts what the significance of the word "beta" under the main logo was, how many of them do you think would know? If the answer isn't "all of them" then Google's marketing has misled someone, or at best they haven't corrected a false impression given by someone else. That is not the mark of a public test programme.
Just to correct you, there isn't any proof, from what I read, that any illegal activity has taken place.
And just to correct the AC, I never said there was. We're not talking about bringing a case for copyright infringement, we're talking about whether there is sufficient grounds to justify further investigation.
Just because someone makes available a file called 'Eminem - When I'm Gone.mp3' doesn't mean it's copyrighted material, indeed, it might not even be an audio file.
Sure, it might not. But there's a good chance that it is, and a reasonable person might expect it to be so. IMHO, it's clearly a reasonable basis for a court to allow further investigation.
If you don't want to be investigated as if you're infringing copyright, don't put up a big neon sign outside your door saying "Copy latest Eminem tracks illegally here!":-)
Right, let's be clear. I think a lot of behaviour by the RIAA and its ilk is disgusting.
Now that I've got that little disclaimer out of the way, let me ask: is this use of ex parte tactics really so unreasonable? From the RIAA's point of view, the law has been broken. They just can't find out who did it to take legal action against them directly, because the ISPs and such (quite rightly) won't disclose confidential information to the RIAA on demand.
So, the RIAA do what any sound legal system should require them to do if they want to proceed: they must go to a court, and make a case that there is a reasonable need for them to have that information, and ask the court to give them the authority to get it. The court can consider their argument -- which, if they've got information that someone was swapping songs, almost certainly illegally, is a fairly solid one -- and grant the permission if it finds it appropriate.
At that point, no individual has yet been brought to court to face any claim, so no individual has been harmed. The RIAA just has a name, and it's up to them to demonstrate, in a separate court action with the defendant given due process, that the named person committed some illegal act and should be required to pay compensation or whatever.
Now, personally I think the US "everyone pays their own fees" system sucks, because it's wide open to abuse by large and well-funded organisations in this sort of context, but that's a separate problem. With US law as it is right now, what would be a more reasonable way for one party that has genuine evidence that they may have been damaged by some other, unknown party to seek fair compensation than by asking the courts to agree with them based on their evidence to date, and to enable them to find the person likely to be responsible so that they can be properly taken to court?
Writing "beta" on something doesn't make it a beta test version. The term "beta test" has a pretty specific meaning in software development, though sadly few people remember what it is and why it's important these days.
If you release a piece of software to the general public and charge for it (as in Microsoft) then it's not a beta, it's a product. If you advertise a web service widely and get loads of people to use it routinely (as in Google) then it's not a beta, it's a live service.
The use of "beta" on everything, even things you're treating as a real product in all other respects, is just the latest meaningless buzzword, and a pathetic attempt to avoid taking responsibility for the quality of your product or service. It will sting Microsoft and Google alike soon enough, as neither customer opinion nor (if applicable) commercial partners or courts ruling on disagreements will give it much weight.
Unfortunately, that page doesn't seem to work just now. All I can see is a shaded background, some small print at the bottom, and a banner that reads "Alienware recommends Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional." Are you really sure about that recommendation?;-)
Do you think general business awareness is a skill in itself? I agree with you that understanding your role as an IT guy (whether sysadmin or development) is vital to being as useful as you can be, but I suspect it's important enough to be considered a whole category in its own right rather than just another skill on the checklist next to configuring SAMBA or programming Perl. I also think it can be taught/learned in the same way as good management.
Do you really think the supply of good quality IT workers is going up? IME, it's the opposite: most of the guys coming in now are all hot on this certificate or that buzzword, but even those from an allegedly academic background often don't understand basic principles as much as everyone used to when the market was smaller and newer.
So, what are some theories as to why Dell has lately been less of a friend to Microsoft, and what does this mean for the future?
I think Dell has a smart management team. They realise that they are a market leader in hardware, and the balance of power is shifting.
Microsoft can't afford to upset Dell. It would be unfortunate for MS if the income stream from Dell dried up, and disastrous if Dell boxes started going out with non-MS software routinely given priority.
Dell, on the other hand, increasingly has viable alternatives to offer and probably an increasing number of customers asking about them, particularly on the Windows vs. $OTHER_OS front. And of course, they can more effectively compete against other workstation and particularly server vendors if they aren't paying the Microsoft tax, and they have more legal shielding than ever against reprisals by MS.
Today, Microsoft is getting a very bad name in some areas, particularly among the techies who probably buy 99% of the Dell servers and a heavy majority of the workstations and support contracts. At a time like that, if you'll forgive the horrible cliches, it pays to know which side your bread's buttered, and not to have all your eggs in one basket.
Well, funnily enough I saw a programme on TV about the UK's new alternative GPS satellite network this evening, since they're just launching the first trial box into orbit.
It was quite scary that, while discussing the better resolution than the existing GPS network, the first example use quoted by a spokesman was that it was accurate enough to be used for automatic road tolls.
If you think the UK doesn't care about these things, though, I suspect you're wrong. Word hasn't quite hit the mainstream about the new nationwide spy camera network that will track everywhere you drive on main roads and hold the information for 5 years yet, but when it does (along with the fact that it's all been done by the police without any parliamentary oversight, based on a technicality in their rules) then I predict there will be hell to pay, and it could even be the catalyst for a nationwide protest against the ever increasing government surveillance we're being put under. The whole ID card/register thing has gone very quiet since the terrorists actually attacked us and the government admitted that the ID card scheme wouldn't have helped, so now the civil liberties gang need a new target. As luck would have it, one has turned up right on time!
And for the record, three GATSO speed cameras have been taken out (violently) within a mile or two of my house in recent months, and nationally even senior police figures have now admitted that the emphasis on those monstrosities was misguided and taken as a whole, the current road safety policies not really bringing the improvements that were claimed earlier.
good news brother... you can still enbale the old menu structure...
Really? Everything I've seen says that by the final release, Microsoft do not (or at least did not at the time) intend to leave the old menu structure around, forcing everyone to shift. Maybe the idiocy of that plan has sunk in.
OK, so assuming 95% of the user base can and will immediately revert to the old-style menus, what other reason is there to upgrade from Office 2003?
Writing as the guy who evaluates new versions of development tools at work...
Visual Studio 2005 is really good.
No, it's not. It would be pretty good if it worked, but it has some unforgivable bugs.
For a start, there's clearly something wrong with the UI code that make it literally unusable on the majority of our PCs at work. (They have varied specs, and some of them very powerful boxes by any standards, so don't even bother telling me we just need another 512MB of RAM or something. Thanks.) It'll go into a trance for minutes at a time one some machines, hogging almost 100% CPU and GB of memory. We haven't been able to isolate the problem, because other machines run it fine, but it seems to be connected to the background updating of Intellisense (on which many of the useful improvements in VS2005 rely, of course) and the processing power or memory size of the machine in question does not seem to matter. On at least one powerful machine, it was OK to start with but performance has degraded to unusability over time, too.
Even worse, there are also some major bugs in the code generation. It appears, based on tests conducted among our dev teams and some colleagues at other organisations, that they introduced some serious performance regressions between beta 2 and the final release. In a fairly large study, co-ordinated between several dev teams with independent code bases, we've measured a 30-50% drop in the performnce of heavily mathematical code since VS2003, for example, and there definitely wasn't anything close to that problem in beta 2.
How they managed not to notice that, we don't know, but the simple fact is that at present, the parts of VS2005 we're using (mainly VC++ for native code, for performance reasons) are not an improvement on 2003. Several of my colleagues have reverted all the way to VC++ 6 as an IDE, with a workhorse machine building the final code using the 2003 compiler; they never used the earlier.Net versions for day-to-day development because useful features like browse info were removed. The whole team is now backing out of the 2005 upgrade because the UI bugs make it a liability for us and the performance bugs mean our customers -- to whom speed typically matters a lot -- probably won't buy anything we compile with it anyway. Needless to say, since we were the first guys to try it, most of our other dev teams have no immediate plans to attempt an upgrade at this point!
If Microsoft released a service pack that fixed these show-stopping bugs early in 2006, we'd certainly consider upgrading at that stage, because there is a lot to like about VS2005 as well. But the simple fact is that right now, there are some bugs so serious that nothing else matters.
Kudos to the economists who recommended giving away the Express versions for free, though; that's a smart move.
Office 12 really is a new product. It's not an update like the other versions have been. The ribbon menu system is WAY better then the current drop down menus.
Leaving aside the fact that it's not out yet so we don't know what the ribbons will do in the end product, personally I found them annoying as hell anyway. I've been using MS Office on Windows since version -17 or something, and I know how to get things done. What I want is fixes for the awkward bits that make my life more difficult, or improvements and new features (there's plenty a WP program could do to help a lot of people's everyday work that Word still, bizarrely, can't do). What I absolutely don't want is another UI overhaul, particularly one that's going to mean I have to work out where everything's gone so I can fend off the hoards of enquiries from colleagues who know I like to play with this stuff and will probably find things before they do.
Um... Yes. Perish the thought that the laws of a nation should be there for the benefit of its citizens, and should supports businesses only in as much as they ultimately benefit the citizens too. It would definitely be better to have a US-style arrangement, where people can work arbitrarily long hours without overtime, get about 1/2 as much annual leave as the legal minimum in Europe (with most employers giving more), and have no job security because they can be fired on a whim.
We have plenty of problems with our laws being daft over here, both at a national and a continental level, but overall our employment laws are pretty fair to both sides, I think.
Of course you're allowed to walk down the sidewalk, but if you are arrested for committing an offence and can't prove your identity in some reasonable way at the time, how do you propose that the authorities ensure that you are duly brought to court for that offence if they have to release you without knowing who you are?
I think there's a big ethical and legal difference between not carrying ID being grounds for arrest when you've committed an offence and there is reasonable grounds to confirm your identity, and not carrying ID being an offence in itself. The "show us your papers" complaint normally applies to the latter concern; I don't personally have any problem with the former.
Slashdot Mirror
Out of interest, did you actually read any of those articles you cited? The first, for example, is using Java to develop a distributed computation network. Sure, if you take 100 computers, of course you can do more with even a moderately efficient programming language than you can do on a single machine, even if your language were several times faster on that machine. I don't see how that supports your argument; on the contrary, it's the classic "hardware is cheap" approach necessarily employed by those using inefficient programming tools.
How about finding some real, production applications (not recent, unfinished developments or academic experiments) that use Java for the same sort of job that things like C++ or FORTRAN are used for at present, without falling back on the word "distributed"? Funnily enough, a quick Google looking for that turned up nada for me.
Your example is often cited, but it's rare in real code. Usually, you'd either copy from one container to another by direct assignment, or populate one from another by using something like a back_inserter. So yes, the weakness is there, but it's not as significant as the existing alternative.
And of course, nothing says iterators can't be access-checked in a safe library implementation.
Thank you.
I think we probably have quite different experiences here. Certainly your world, where a query-driven application like Tomcat is "high performance", is very different to mine, where things like 3D modelling, photorealistic rendering, and large scale simulations are bread and butter. Does anyone write CAD programs or supercomputer-based weather modellers using Java? Not that I know of, and I do and have worked in these fields for several years. That's not to say that no-one ever does, of course, but it's not the norm.
None of this means that I see manual memory management as a good thing. On the contrary, for the vast majority of the time, it's just another implementation detail, and best dealt with automatically. I'm just saying that there are plenty of other nasty categories of programmer that a garbage collector won't help you with.
On the contrary, the scary part is that this is something special, and in many western jurisdictions today the above isn't deemed fair use (or whatever that jurisdiction's law calls the concept). In the UK, for example, AIUI it is technically legal to record a broadcast television programme for time-shifting purposes, but illegal to keep the recording long-term, which seems to be one of the things being legalised in Australia. Let's hope the UK's newly-ordered review of intellectual property law for the digital age reaches similar conclusions; I will certainly be writing to them to encourage it!
That depends. Who or what is a "copyright industry"?
If you mean the people who generate new works that are protected by copyright, then they are special, and of great value to society. I read the context for the statement you're objecting to differently to you: I interpreted it as saying that where making a copy doesn't harm the copyright holder, there's no need for making that copy to be illegal. If making a copy does harm the copyright holder, then perhaps it should be illegal, since preventing such harm is what copyright law offers the rightsholder in exchange for sharing their work with society.
If, on the other hand and as I suspect, you mean the major publishers, record labels and so on, who essentially force artists to give up their own copyright as a condition for entry into the traditional marketplace, then screw 'em, I say. But my views on the nature of copyright and the fact that the underlying right should be non-transferrable in law have been expressed here before, so I won't go into them again unless asked.
I'd agree with that, if every member of the public were capable of forming a rational decision based on a fully informed view on every issue. Unfortunately, that's simply not practical. There are too many fields with laws applying for everyone to know everything about them. Also, a significant proportion of the population simply isn't smart enough to act in their own interests when it comes to more complex laws (this isn't a criticism of those people, it's simply a fact).
I believe that this is why the most successful societies have evolved systems of government where representatives of the people are elected, and those representatives can dedicate themselves full-time to getting informed so they can make those decisions in the best interests of those they represent. This sort of system doesn't always work, but I suspect in the long run it's a lot better for everyone than a literal "one person, one vote" scheme.
Blockquoth the AC:
Perhaps, but returning 0 from main() is guaranteed to return a suitable success indicator to the host environment. From ISO/IEC 14882:1998, 18.3/8:
I actually cut the second paragraph from my previous comment before posting, but since you bring the subject up: yes, I do challenge the claims in those articles.
Let's ignore issues of running on a JVM, and assume that once Hotspot or the like has done its stuff we're dealing with fully compiled code. Even then, Java has natural inhibitions regarding performance compared to a lower-level language like C or C++. These range from its lack of "value types" to a highly portable but necessarily non-optimal floating point model.
Some of these inhibitions can be overcome with sufficiently smart optimisation techniques. The escape analysis stuff that's starting to filter through (but AFAIK isn't in widespread use among mainstream implementations yet) should help a lot with some things, for example.
However, some of the weaknesses, particularly the floating point model, are inherent. If you want truly portable behaviour, you have to use the portable floating point model, which means you can't take advantage of a lot of hardware-based optimisation available to other languages. If you switch to using those optimisations, as I understand you can in the more recent versions of Java, then you pick up the performance but you give up any pretence of getting the same results on all platforms. (I write highly portable floating point code for a living; trust me, you can't have both complete portability and optimal performance, ever.)
In summary, then, to satisfy the claims about Java performance made in those articles, you need tomorrow's Java optimisation technology today and to give up one of the main advantages to programming in Java. I'll concede that the kind of projects mentioned in the articles might be a in position where those two requirements aren't a problem, but most Java developers sure aren't -- at least, not yet.
I suspect it's far more likely that the management teams believe, rightly or wrongly, that their staff will be more productive using Java than, say, C++ or ADA. I doubt that the concerns are purely for the quality of the final product, even in the miiltary field; remember that the US Navy had one of its ships dead in the water after a bug caused the Windows NT code it was running to crash, leaving the ship stranded. Engineers have warned repeatedly against the use of Windows as a foundation for combat systems on US and UK Navy vessels, but they're more likely to be fired for their trouble than to get any sort of rational reaction from senior management.
Any questions? :-)
<Menacing overlord voice> Finish him! </Menacing overlord voice>
Huh? Granted there are some silly design decisions in the C++ standard library, like making the unchecked indexing use operator[] and the safer, checked version use at() on a std::vector. Still, it's much harder to get things like overruns using the STL, where much code is iterator-based, and harder still to do it in a way that won't be obvious to any remotely competent code reviewer (who will ask why you're not using the safer indexing if your loop does count instead). What sort of thing did you have in mind?
Garbage collection is an answer to one category of programmer error, and it's far from the most serious. As I often mention in these discussions, I haven't caused a memory leak writing in C++ in years, and I've got automated tools running on the projects concerned just in case to prove it. It's actually quite hard to get a memory leak in C++ if you use basic good programming practices.
On the other hand, in a language with GC you still have problems with messing up thread safety to cause race conditions, messing up thread synchronisation to cause deadlocks, greedy acquisition/lazy release of resources crippling the performance of your process (or, more commonly, other processes running on the same machine but not under the same run-time framework), SQL injection, using naive encryption and/or insecure transport protocols. These are all common flaws seen in real programs, and can be just as damaging as any buffer overflow, if not more so.
And I make this case without, until now, mentioning the IME very real problem that a lot of cheaposoft programmers who grow up relying on GC don't have the same appreciation of low level mechanics as those who don't, which causes them to write unnecessarily naff code with problems of its own.
At the end of the day, GC is a useful tool for many programming jobs, but it's only a tool, not a silver bullet. It's no substitute for a good programmer who knows what he's doing.
It's fascinating that there are two replies to the GPP, post mentioning using Java in a real-time context, as if that somehow implies that its performance is equivalent to something like C or C++. "Hard real-time" and "fast" are completely different qualities, and having one does not imply the other either way around.
What's reasonable doubt got to do with anything here? Proof "beyond reasonable doubt" is the standard for conviction in a criminal case in some jurisdictions. This is not a criminal case, and the evidence is not being used to convict someone of a crime.
What's necessary here is for a court to accept an argument that there are reasonable grounds to continue an investigation, when that investigation might reasonably result in identifying a target for a legitimate court case. That test is closer in nature to "showing probable cause" than to "beyond reasonable doubt".
Your argument is a bit like telling a police officer at the scene of a recent shooting that he can't even talk to someone found at the scene with a gun-shaped bulge under their jacket, because there's no immediate proof that the guy really is carrying a gun, and even if he is, there's no immediate proof that he was the person who did the shooting. You're looking at entirely the wrong point in the timescale, and applying entirely the wrong standards.
Perhaps you could visit the GMail home page and tell us where on that page you found an indication that it was under test?
If I asked my many non-techie friends who have GMail accounts what the significance of the word "beta" under the main logo was, how many of them do you think would know? If the answer isn't "all of them" then Google's marketing has misled someone, or at best they haven't corrected a false impression given by someone else. That is not the mark of a public test programme.
And just to correct the AC, I never said there was. We're not talking about bringing a case for copyright infringement, we're talking about whether there is sufficient grounds to justify further investigation.
Sure, it might not. But there's a good chance that it is, and a reasonable person might expect it to be so. IMHO, it's clearly a reasonable basis for a court to allow further investigation.
If you don't want to be investigated as if you're infringing copyright, don't put up a big neon sign outside your door saying "Copy latest Eminem tracks illegally here!" :-)
Right, let's be clear. I think a lot of behaviour by the RIAA and its ilk is disgusting.
Now that I've got that little disclaimer out of the way, let me ask: is this use of ex parte tactics really so unreasonable? From the RIAA's point of view, the law has been broken. They just can't find out who did it to take legal action against them directly, because the ISPs and such (quite rightly) won't disclose confidential information to the RIAA on demand.
So, the RIAA do what any sound legal system should require them to do if they want to proceed: they must go to a court, and make a case that there is a reasonable need for them to have that information, and ask the court to give them the authority to get it. The court can consider their argument -- which, if they've got information that someone was swapping songs, almost certainly illegally, is a fairly solid one -- and grant the permission if it finds it appropriate.
At that point, no individual has yet been brought to court to face any claim, so no individual has been harmed. The RIAA just has a name, and it's up to them to demonstrate, in a separate court action with the defendant given due process, that the named person committed some illegal act and should be required to pay compensation or whatever.
Now, personally I think the US "everyone pays their own fees" system sucks, because it's wide open to abuse by large and well-funded organisations in this sort of context, but that's a separate problem. With US law as it is right now, what would be a more reasonable way for one party that has genuine evidence that they may have been damaged by some other, unknown party to seek fair compensation than by asking the courts to agree with them based on their evidence to date, and to enable them to find the person likely to be responsible so that they can be properly taken to court?
Writing "beta" on something doesn't make it a beta test version. The term "beta test" has a pretty specific meaning in software development, though sadly few people remember what it is and why it's important these days.
If you release a piece of software to the general public and charge for it (as in Microsoft) then it's not a beta, it's a product. If you advertise a web service widely and get loads of people to use it routinely (as in Google) then it's not a beta, it's a live service.
The use of "beta" on everything, even things you're treating as a real product in all other respects, is just the latest meaningless buzzword, and a pathetic attempt to avoid taking responsibility for the quality of your product or service. It will sting Microsoft and Google alike soon enough, as neither customer opinion nor (if applicable) commercial partners or courts ruling on disagreements will give it much weight.
Unfortunately, that page doesn't seem to work just now. All I can see is a shaded background, some small print at the bottom, and a banner that reads "Alienware recommends Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional." Are you really sure about that recommendation? ;-)
Interesting comment. I have two follow-ups:
I think Dell has a smart management team. They realise that they are a market leader in hardware, and the balance of power is shifting.
Microsoft can't afford to upset Dell. It would be unfortunate for MS if the income stream from Dell dried up, and disastrous if Dell boxes started going out with non-MS software routinely given priority.
Dell, on the other hand, increasingly has viable alternatives to offer and probably an increasing number of customers asking about them, particularly on the Windows vs. $OTHER_OS front. And of course, they can more effectively compete against other workstation and particularly server vendors if they aren't paying the Microsoft tax, and they have more legal shielding than ever against reprisals by MS.
Today, Microsoft is getting a very bad name in some areas, particularly among the techies who probably buy 99% of the Dell servers and a heavy majority of the workstations and support contracts. At a time like that, if you'll forgive the horrible cliches, it pays to know which side your bread's buttered, and not to have all your eggs in one basket.
Well, funnily enough I saw a programme on TV about the UK's new alternative GPS satellite network this evening, since they're just launching the first trial box into orbit.
It was quite scary that, while discussing the better resolution than the existing GPS network, the first example use quoted by a spokesman was that it was accurate enough to be used for automatic road tolls.
If you think the UK doesn't care about these things, though, I suspect you're wrong. Word hasn't quite hit the mainstream about the new nationwide spy camera network that will track everywhere you drive on main roads and hold the information for 5 years yet, but when it does (along with the fact that it's all been done by the police without any parliamentary oversight, based on a technicality in their rules) then I predict there will be hell to pay, and it could even be the catalyst for a nationwide protest against the ever increasing government surveillance we're being put under. The whole ID card/register thing has gone very quiet since the terrorists actually attacked us and the government admitted that the ID card scheme wouldn't have helped, so now the civil liberties gang need a new target. As luck would have it, one has turned up right on time!
And for the record, three GATSO speed cameras have been taken out (violently) within a mile or two of my house in recent months, and nationally even senior police figures have now admitted that the emphasis on those monstrosities was misguided and taken as a whole, the current road safety policies not really bringing the improvements that were claimed earlier.
Really? Everything I've seen says that by the final release, Microsoft do not (or at least did not at the time) intend to leave the old menu structure around, forcing everyone to shift. Maybe the idiocy of that plan has sunk in.
OK, so assuming 95% of the user base can and will immediately revert to the old-style menus, what other reason is there to upgrade from Office 2003?
Writing as the guy who evaluates new versions of development tools at work...
No, it's not. It would be pretty good if it worked, but it has some unforgivable bugs.
For a start, there's clearly something wrong with the UI code that make it literally unusable on the majority of our PCs at work. (They have varied specs, and some of them very powerful boxes by any standards, so don't even bother telling me we just need another 512MB of RAM or something. Thanks.) It'll go into a trance for minutes at a time one some machines, hogging almost 100% CPU and GB of memory. We haven't been able to isolate the problem, because other machines run it fine, but it seems to be connected to the background updating of Intellisense (on which many of the useful improvements in VS2005 rely, of course) and the processing power or memory size of the machine in question does not seem to matter. On at least one powerful machine, it was OK to start with but performance has degraded to unusability over time, too.
Even worse, there are also some major bugs in the code generation. It appears, based on tests conducted among our dev teams and some colleagues at other organisations, that they introduced some serious performance regressions between beta 2 and the final release. In a fairly large study, co-ordinated between several dev teams with independent code bases, we've measured a 30-50% drop in the performnce of heavily mathematical code since VS2003, for example, and there definitely wasn't anything close to that problem in beta 2.
How they managed not to notice that, we don't know, but the simple fact is that at present, the parts of VS2005 we're using (mainly VC++ for native code, for performance reasons) are not an improvement on 2003. Several of my colleagues have reverted all the way to VC++ 6 as an IDE, with a workhorse machine building the final code using the 2003 compiler; they never used the earlier .Net versions for day-to-day development because useful features like browse info were removed. The whole team is now backing out of the 2005 upgrade because the UI bugs make it a liability for us and the performance bugs mean our customers -- to whom speed typically matters a lot -- probably won't buy anything we compile with it anyway. Needless to say, since we were the first guys to try it, most of our other dev teams have no immediate plans to attempt an upgrade at this point!
If Microsoft released a service pack that fixed these show-stopping bugs early in 2006, we'd certainly consider upgrading at that stage, because there is a lot to like about VS2005 as well. But the simple fact is that right now, there are some bugs so serious that nothing else matters.
Kudos to the economists who recommended giving away the Express versions for free, though; that's a smart move.
Leaving aside the fact that it's not out yet so we don't know what the ribbons will do in the end product, personally I found them annoying as hell anyway. I've been using MS Office on Windows since version -17 or something, and I know how to get things done. What I want is fixes for the awkward bits that make my life more difficult, or improvements and new features (there's plenty a WP program could do to help a lot of people's everyday work that Word still, bizarrely, can't do). What I absolutely don't want is another UI overhaul, particularly one that's going to mean I have to work out where everything's gone so I can fend off the hoards of enquiries from colleagues who know I like to play with this stuff and will probably find things before they do.
Um... Yes. Perish the thought that the laws of a nation should be there for the benefit of its citizens, and should supports businesses only in as much as they ultimately benefit the citizens too. It would definitely be better to have a US-style arrangement, where people can work arbitrarily long hours without overtime, get about 1/2 as much annual leave as the legal minimum in Europe (with most employers giving more), and have no job security because they can be fired on a whim.
We have plenty of problems with our laws being daft over here, both at a national and a continental level, but overall our employment laws are pretty fair to both sides, I think.
Of course you're allowed to walk down the sidewalk, but if you are arrested for committing an offence and can't prove your identity in some reasonable way at the time, how do you propose that the authorities ensure that you are duly brought to court for that offence if they have to release you without knowing who you are?
I think there's a big ethical and legal difference between not carrying ID being grounds for arrest when you've committed an offence and there is reasonable grounds to confirm your identity, and not carrying ID being an offence in itself. The "show us your papers" complaint normally applies to the latter concern; I don't personally have any problem with the former.