I thought the founding fathers of C++ were Bjarne Stroustrup.
Stroustrup is the original creator of C++, but several of the other big names were involved pretty much from the start, and a lot of them have worked together over the years. Stan Lippman is one such person.
Someone remarked the other day, possibly on this very board, along the lines of "the C++ standardisation committee is now full of template-loving metaprogramming fans" who are more concerned with fixing their pet superlibraries than they are with fixing the more glaring flaws in C++ as a modern programming language. I'm sure anyone who follows developments around the language, particularly the serious Usenet groups, will see at least an element of truth in that claim.
This is almost worse, though. We now have at least two of the biggest names in C++ -- Stan Lippman and Herb Sutter -- following the Microsoft banner. At first, I figured that would be good for the language, driving up standards compliance in one of the most popular implementations, Visual C++. Now I begin to suspect that it's just another Embrace And Extend(TM) manoeuvre.
The first round of "Managed C++" needed horrible syntax kludges, because C++ is simply too flexible a language to become another.Net language clone like C# or VB.Net. At least it was fairly standard-compliant before, though. Now, if you thought VC++ 6's for loop scoping bug was annoying (and having fixed numerous bits of code broken in that way that failed on other compilers, I promise you it can be very annoying) that's going to be nothing: at Microsoft, they care about standards compliance, but not so much that they won't add random extra keywords to the language! I fail to see how this will be any better than back when Borland used to add properties and such, and then anybody wanting to move away from their component libraries was screwed.
C++ sucks if you want to use.Net anyway; if that's the sort of programming environment you want, why not just use C# and be done with it? For all Microsoft's banter about interoperability, no-one who's got 100,000 lines of MFC code and a workforce trained to maintain it is really going to change to.Net overnight. Technologies like that are for new projects, started from scratch and able to match the architecture from the ground up, not for random porting exercises of existing code.
Ultimately, managed C++ is just another lock-in technique, but it's sad that it's apparently being supported so enthusiastically by people who used to know better.
...it's only wrong in it fails to encourage creativity in the societally agreed upon way, as opposed to say, being wrong the way stealing your car is wrong.
But the fact that you own your car is only a societal convention as well. Many cultures over history have not supported the concept of private ownership, and if you think about it, the natural default is "possession is 10/10ths of the law".
DVD is a relatively new technology. I only bought my first player 18 months ago. Since then, I've bought about 10 films and a similar number of "complete series" box sets of my favourite shows. I have no problem with this, because I'm paying 2-3x what it would cost me to rent the film from my local Blockbuster, or considerably less than that for the box sets, and I'm only getting the content I want, without advertising thrown in every ten minutes, etc.
I've never ripped any similar content from the 'net, because I don't agree with it ethically; I know that one of those shows nearly went bust and almost didn't make the final series because of those cash worries. That may not be an issue for Britney or the latest Arnie film, and those are easy targets for people trying to justify ripping content on-line, but most artists/worksdon't get the luxury of mass distribution that those guys have, and do suffer a noticeable adverse effect if they're widely ripped.
Your post brings up several of the most important points about copyright in modern society, so I'd like to respond to what I believe are some of the common fallacies.
I think that profiting from another's work IS theft, but just making a copy for yourself to use or give to your friends on an individual basis is not theft since it does not result in a profit for the person making copies. Making a copy is NOT the same as stealing a physical object, since the owner still has the original.
This is true, of course, but you may have devalued the original, and thus you may have prevented the work's creator from making a profit, even though you have not done so yourself. Consider this: if everyone were allowed to make half a dozen copies of a new CD for themselves and their family/friends, any individual doing so would be relatively harmless to the distributor. However, the whole nation doing so would result in everyone getting a free copy of the CD within hours of its release via the snowball effect, with the creator making nothing but the profit from selling the first CD.
If society were to allow this within its laws, then the charge for that first CD would have to go way up to reflect the difference to the content provider. That would make producing new content unrealistic for most current providers, and thus the supply of new content would dry up. Thus it is in society's interests to restrict copying in this way, and bingo! You just invented copyright, and explained why fair use does not extend to "just giving it to a couple of friends" or "just downloading a personal copy with Morpheus/Kazaa/whatever".
The argument that the creator of the work loses money because of such personal copying is unproven.
And rather conveniently, it can never be proven, since you can never have a 100% equivalent control group for the same material, and study the effects of the two scenarios in parallel. You could identify a correlation between the increase in on-line ripping of a type of product and a drop in the sales figures for that type, or some sort of trend over time, but you can never prove causation from correlation.
I suspect that the MPAA is worried more than they need to be about this whole issue of downloading films, since it is not all that economically attractive to those who could afford to buy a DVD. Those downloaders that cannot afford a DVD represent no loss to the film makers.
But since when did we have a right to have something for free because we could not afford to pay for it? Our economics work because in exchange for our labours, we receive credit that can be spent on goods and services of value to us. We must choose how to spend that credit wisely, because it is finite. If you rip stuff that you "wouldn't have bought anyway", then obviously it has value to you, but by not paying for it at the asking price, you are breaking your side of the bargain: others who do pay at the asking price are subsidising you, and you have extra credit to spend on other things that those who respected the system do not, which is more than you are entitled to. In any other context, feeding off society in this way would be regarded by most people as unethical, and I fail to see any difference in the case of copyright infringement.
Interesting combination... As you say, it sounds pretty close to today's Java.
C/C++/Java like syntax with curly braces, semicolons and etc (I like the rigid nature of it, I feel it's more unambiguous than more open syntaxes);
This is one of those issues that I think polarizes people's opinions, and although semantics matter more than just about anything in a language, I certainly disagree with those who say syntax doesn't matter. Personally, although I work with languages like C++ and Perl all day, I do find the curly braces, semicolons and (in particular) parentheses for function calls overweight at times.
I'm quite a fan of functional programming. I wouldn't want to use a purely functional language for most real projects, but I miss serious tools for manipulating functions in languages like C++. When you're dealing with that level of flexibility, I find the parentheses can build up uncomfortably in a language like C++: it becomes almost LISP-like, and while the latter has a certain elegance in its design, I think people who dislike all the )))))s have a good point.
I guess I prefer a relatively clean and punctuation-free syntax by default, but where you can easily add () pairs to disambiguate. I'm undecided about Python's characteristic use of whitespace to block code, perhaps because the rigid nature doesn't fit with my hypothetical style where both functions and types are built fairly freely, but in a naturally block-structured language (such as Python is) I think it also has that certain practical and elegant quality.
Java style OOP, where everything is a class;
I guess we just disagree on that one. In my world, not everything is an object; something like Java's approach is great for certain features with types, and does impose a useful structure that's good for maintainability by Joe Average, but it severely limits what good guys can do -- I want both powerful types and powerful functions, not something one-sided.
I totally agree with your other points: I think any serious contender for my "New Language of the Year" award is going to need a very tight, very flexible standard library, backed by something like CPAN so all those features that 10% of the users want have a home, and community effort can be focussed on producing a small number of top quality libraries rather than a wide range of mediocre ones (which is what, IMHO, Java's standard library has become).
No worries. I did find that particular comment somewhat offensive -- perhaps unfairly so, as I've encountered a few too many US-based bigots around here recently -- but as at least one mod realised, my reply was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I actually did get, and pretty much agree with, your main point.
FWIW, those of us involved with IT in Europe very much do care about what happens with copyright and patents, particularly the software patents currently under consideration in our European legislature. I work in a city full of small technology companies, and the interests of such companies (the majority of the industry, of course) frequently coincide with the interests of individuals IME. The work economy around me, and the local economy in general where I happen to live, and everyone everywhere who's going to benefit from the technologies being developed here, all depend on getting things like that right.
Also, under the bsd license commercial proprietary software can integrate the open-source work, so why would anyone slave away at developing linux, only to have their work immediately integrated into commercial applications, the original developers not to see a dime.
Oh, the irony. Software shouldn't have controlling interests, remember? It should be free! So sayeth the great RMS.
If you don't like this sort of feedback, don't use misleading terms like "free software" in connection with the GPL.
I suppose the only good news is that detailed physics are probably here to stay now, and should get better as the industry keeps fueling their evolution.
I guess it depends on what level of physics you're talking about. Total Annihilation was, AFAIK, the first RTS game to use somewhat realistic physics in its game world. As a result, placing your artillery on higher ground really did extend the range, and hiding behind a hill really did protect you from line-of-sight missiles.
However, given that the TA-based conversion mentioned on this board the other day adds in things like craters in the map after big explosions, obviously the original wasn't 100% on the physics and some people still want a more deformable game world. I guess more realistic physics is still a big driver then...
but at the same time, most currently popular languages are equipped fairly equally (hence their popularity).
To some extent, that's clearly true. However, I think the two qualifiers you've added in that sentence give away the nature of today's programming world.
Firstly, languages which are "currently popular" are frequently faddish in this business. A few years ago, it was all about "object orientation". Now it's all about "scripting".
Of course there are a lot of similarities between, say, Perl, Python and Ruby, but then there's the qualified "fairly equally": if you look at the programming landscape as a whole, focussing on popular languages rather than minority or academic interests, you can still see very significant differences even between the popular languages. C++ lacks the convenience of Java at times, but makes up for it in raw power at other times. It's easy to say Perl and Python are almost the same if all you look at is trivial text processing work, but for more complex tasks?
But it really is very faddish. I'm still waiting for someone to produce a language with strong support for both functions and UDTs, where most of the coding can be declarative, but the structure is familiar to the 9x% of programmers who live in an imperative world, and structured programming with side effects isn't prohibitively awkward where it would be useful. It's not hard to imagine such a thing if you're familiar with both imperative and functional programming, and several of the so-called scripting languages tend in this direction, but no-one's really bitten the bullet yet. In the meantime, as you say, we're stuck with a lot of languages that are different, but really not that different.
When I read the intro, I was expecting something like a Java version of C++'s Boost libraries -- things the standard library missed or didn't do well, peer-reviewed to keep the quality up, etc.
When I read the linked page, I found more like a Java version of C++ -- it looks as though a lot of those libraries are there to overcome the very strengths/weaknesses (depending on your application) that most differentiate the two languages. If you want to use C++, why not just use C++?
I respectfully suggest that if you want average end users to report bugs, expecting them to find a page full of explanatory text, with no immediately obvious place to enter the bug information, hidden in the OOo web site, where two links later and just as you think you're going to put the data in you have to "log in", is not the way forward.
Most users won't report a bug when the process is that complicated; they have better things to do with their time, like tell everyone how OOo is crappy and full of bugs.
Sure, but then there were two studies in this case, the other one obvious pro-OSS. I doubt the people who compiled that studied the possibilities of Windows-based systems in great detail or prototyped with those, either...
Depends on how long a period of time you run the cost/benefit analysis over. It quite likely wouldn't be cheaper over the short to medium term.
Indeed. Now, the major saving in cost between MS and OSS is the purchase cost: you don't have to sign up for X, Y and Z support packages, and more than you do with OSS. Moreover, MS Office has far stronger capabilities in this area than any of the OSS rivals; I'm a fan of OpenOffice, but I'm also a realist. So, I don't really see how even in the long-term using OSS will be the cheaper option in TCO terms, starting from now.
There's an old rule of thumb that to dislodge an established player in a market, you have to have 10x the offering. It needs to be 1/10 the cost (that's TCO, not price), 10x as good (in terms of features people actually want and/or usability they actually benefit from), or an equivalent combination. Anything less isn't worth the agro of switching, retraining, etc. And right now, as much as I admire and support those who develop OSS alternatives to Microsoft's monoliths, the simple fact is that they're not there yet, and the conclusions in this study -- however dubiously funded -- seem to be pretty reasonable. In maybe 2-3 years, let's have this discussion again; I imagine it will be a lot more interesting, if the leading figures in the OSS world can get over the aspects of an OSS development process that currently suck.
(The other aspects here, like a deal made by a government body apparently being locked away so it can't be seen by those electing that body, are considerably less agreeable, but that's not the point of this discussion.)
How many large organisations do you really know that have been hit hard because of a bug in Microsoft software?
By hit hard I assume you are discounting the IT costs of the e-mail worms that plague Outlook, even though some articles have claimed multi-million dollar expenses.
Not real worms that infect systems that could not have been patched, no. However, I do discount things like:
e-mail viruses propagated by idiots who can't follow a simple instruction not to open attachments they weren't expecting
worms that infected systems where patches to prevent them had been available for more than 24 hours
simply because these are at most indirectly Microsoft's fault, Microsoft have taken reasonable steps to mitigate such damage, and most importantly, these sorts of problems would manifest themselves just as surely if OSS were in use.
Just like everyone remember Microsoft about 2-3 years back saying they are now (then) becoming serious about security and it'll show very soon. Those 2-3 years have passed and what have changed?
They're releasing Windows XP SP2. Perhaps you've heard of it?
That's a fascinating article. I think I just watched somebody advocating OSS alternatives to Microsoft because in the Windows XP version, you actually have to run a couple of command lines, view a couple of text files, and understand what a port is, all in order to configure a firewall! <shock> <horror> Can anybody see the staggering irony of this pithy attack? Particularly when -- as the article notes, but not exactly prominently -- the user is following a point-by-point list of instructions to do it, and only has to do it if the normal, one step, GUI-based approach doesn't work anyway. (I would remind the less attentive reader that the alternative under consideration is a Linux-based system, where as we all know, no configuration work ever requires you to step outside a highly tuned and immaculately user-friendly GUI environment.)
In fact, if you read over the original Reg article, the (not so) independent study may have been funded by MS, but the points it makes are pretty obvious. If they have 120 custom MS Office-based applications running already, with all the attendant development costs already paid and all the staff already trained, can any OSS zealot really tell us with a straight face that it will be cheaper to switch to OpenOffice? The other points quoted in the Reg article are similarly self-evident and entirely credible; the security one is probably most tenuous, but does anyone really believe OSS is a silver bullet here? <ahem> shell: <ahem> How many large organisations do you really know that have been hit hard because of a bug in Microsoft software?
I know some of Microsoft's FUD is pretty laughable, but guys, with the anti-Microsoft FUD in this thread you've truly exemplified how OSS can surpass Microsoft's efforts...
Oh, Jar Jar, youssun only de comic extra. You wassun putten dere to makun de kiddies laughin'. But youssun pissen' off de big bad dark side, and now youssun hava take id like a... longun-eary pokey-eye ting.
Does anyone have any advice on finding a good hardware firewall to go with a broadband connection, please? I recently got hooked up to ADSL, via a 4-port router ADSL modem, and since then my formerly invisible system (thanks to ZoneAlarm) has numerous ports closed but visible, and for some reason I completely fail to understand, FTP onto the router open, even to the outside world.
I'm somewhat disconcerted by this, because having had a system that wasn't fully patched but was clean before (56k modems and Windows Update just don't mix, no matter how much Microsoft might pretend otherwise, so I only had the really critical ones), the first thing I did was grab all the other updates, and even then I got prompted a few minutes later to download a fix for MyDoom.Something, which implied I was probably infected.
I want my invisible system back again! Any advice/recommendations much appreciated. I'm in the UK, in case anyone has a specific piece of kit and/or vendor in mind.
It's certainly better than previous versions of Windows, possibly excepting 2000, but I think you're going a bit far there. XP with a couple of routine apps installed may be stable forever. From direct personal experience, XP pretty much needs a clean reinstall after 2 years' worth of:
Microsoft's own updates, patches, patches-on-patches, cumulative patches and so on
updates to personal firewall and other anti-nasties software
updates of video drivers and DirectX fighting over games
changes of ISP, complete with uninstalling all their automatically-installed crap and a switch from modem to broadband
IE/OE/Mozilla/Fire*/Thunderbird versions fighting over Internet stuff
updates of OpenOffice/Acrobat Reader/etc. fighting over text documents
trials and finished-produce graphics packages (many of the trials since uninstalled since nobody seems to make a decent one any more) fighting over images
Microsoft's own explorer constantly messing around with "My Documents"
and so on.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that Windows relies on obscure configuration via the registry, shared DLLs, and vendors providing software of reasonable quality with a 100% bulletproof uninstallation procedure, particularly where things like device drivers and security tools are concerned. As long as you have those limitations, any system where
software is ever installed and then uninstalled
installed software is patched or upgraded to a new version
a combination of software from different vendors that probably hasn't been tested together is installed
is going to need a periodic clean-out. This problem is not unique to Windows; you get similar problems on a Mac, on Linux, or on any other platform meeting the above description for that matter. It is worse on Windows, simply because even a technically competent user will have trouble cleaning out the registry and sorting out any shared files properly after updates/uninstalls, particularly if they weren't completely successful.
English is also a TIMTOWTDI language, yet nobody disputes that it's a good thing when it comes to English
On the other hand, scientists write in maths, and computer programmers write in languages with formal specifications. It sucks in maths when people use non-standard notations, or there simply isn't a standard notation, for the concepts you're working with. It makes it hard for others to follow your logic, and for you to follow theirs. The same is true of programming languages. Sometimes providing one good way to do something is better than a plethora of mediocre ones.
When complexity issues drown C++/Java, look to Lisp.
Really? I've worked on some pretty large projects in my time, and found the design and abstraction tools in the first languages you mention to be very helpful. What sorts of complexity issues did you have in mind, and how big is "really large"?
Here let's say you make a new abstract class Total Number that used 4 or more subclassses which would each convert to the others when needed [Emphasis added]
Slashdot Mirror
Stroustrup is the original creator of C++, but several of the other big names were involved pretty much from the start, and a lot of them have worked together over the years. Stan Lippman is one such person.
Someone remarked the other day, possibly on this very board, along the lines of "the C++ standardisation committee is now full of template-loving metaprogramming fans" who are more concerned with fixing their pet superlibraries than they are with fixing the more glaring flaws in C++ as a modern programming language. I'm sure anyone who follows developments around the language, particularly the serious Usenet groups, will see at least an element of truth in that claim.
This is almost worse, though. We now have at least two of the biggest names in C++ -- Stan Lippman and Herb Sutter -- following the Microsoft banner. At first, I figured that would be good for the language, driving up standards compliance in one of the most popular implementations, Visual C++. Now I begin to suspect that it's just another Embrace And Extend(TM) manoeuvre.
The first round of "Managed C++" needed horrible syntax kludges, because C++ is simply too flexible a language to become another .Net language clone like C# or VB.Net. At least it was fairly standard-compliant before, though. Now, if you thought VC++ 6's for loop scoping bug was annoying (and having fixed numerous bits of code broken in that way that failed on other compilers, I promise you it can be very annoying) that's going to be nothing: at Microsoft, they care about standards compliance, but not so much that they won't add random extra keywords to the language! I fail to see how this will be any better than back when Borland used to add properties and such, and then anybody wanting to move away from their component libraries was screwed.
C++ sucks if you want to use .Net anyway; if that's the sort of programming environment you want, why not just use C# and be done with it? For all Microsoft's banter about interoperability, no-one who's got 100,000 lines of MFC code and a workforce trained to maintain it is really going to change to .Net overnight. Technologies like that are for new projects, started from scratch and able to match the architecture from the ground up, not for random porting exercises of existing code.
Ultimately, managed C++ is just another lock-in technique, but it's sad that it's apparently being supported so enthusiastically by people who used to know better.
But the fact that you own your car is only a societal convention as well. Many cultures over history have not supported the concept of private ownership, and if you think about it, the natural default is "possession is 10/10ths of the law".
See title. :-)
DVD is a relatively new technology. I only bought my first player 18 months ago. Since then, I've bought about 10 films and a similar number of "complete series" box sets of my favourite shows. I have no problem with this, because I'm paying 2-3x what it would cost me to rent the film from my local Blockbuster, or considerably less than that for the box sets, and I'm only getting the content I want, without advertising thrown in every ten minutes, etc.
I've never ripped any similar content from the 'net, because I don't agree with it ethically; I know that one of those shows nearly went bust and almost didn't make the final series because of those cash worries. That may not be an issue for Britney or the latest Arnie film, and those are easy targets for people trying to justify ripping content on-line, but most artists/worksdon't get the luxury of mass distribution that those guys have, and do suffer a noticeable adverse effect if they're widely ripped.
Your post brings up several of the most important points about copyright in modern society, so I'd like to respond to what I believe are some of the common fallacies.
This is true, of course, but you may have devalued the original, and thus you may have prevented the work's creator from making a profit, even though you have not done so yourself. Consider this: if everyone were allowed to make half a dozen copies of a new CD for themselves and their family/friends, any individual doing so would be relatively harmless to the distributor. However, the whole nation doing so would result in everyone getting a free copy of the CD within hours of its release via the snowball effect, with the creator making nothing but the profit from selling the first CD.
If society were to allow this within its laws, then the charge for that first CD would have to go way up to reflect the difference to the content provider. That would make producing new content unrealistic for most current providers, and thus the supply of new content would dry up. Thus it is in society's interests to restrict copying in this way, and bingo! You just invented copyright, and explained why fair use does not extend to "just giving it to a couple of friends" or "just downloading a personal copy with Morpheus/Kazaa/whatever".
And rather conveniently, it can never be proven, since you can never have a 100% equivalent control group for the same material, and study the effects of the two scenarios in parallel. You could identify a correlation between the increase in on-line ripping of a type of product and a drop in the sales figures for that type, or some sort of trend over time, but you can never prove causation from correlation.
But since when did we have a right to have something for free because we could not afford to pay for it? Our economics work because in exchange for our labours, we receive credit that can be spent on goods and services of value to us. We must choose how to spend that credit wisely, because it is finite. If you rip stuff that you "wouldn't have bought anyway", then obviously it has value to you, but by not paying for it at the asking price, you are breaking your side of the bargain: others who do pay at the asking price are subsidising you, and you have extra credit to spend on other things that those who respected the system do not, which is more than you are entitled to. In any other context, feeding off society in this way would be regarded by most people as unethical, and I fail to see any difference in the case of copyright infringement.
Interesting combination... As you say, it sounds pretty close to today's Java.
This is one of those issues that I think polarizes people's opinions, and although semantics matter more than just about anything in a language, I certainly disagree with those who say syntax doesn't matter. Personally, although I work with languages like C++ and Perl all day, I do find the curly braces, semicolons and (in particular) parentheses for function calls overweight at times.
I'm quite a fan of functional programming. I wouldn't want to use a purely functional language for most real projects, but I miss serious tools for manipulating functions in languages like C++. When you're dealing with that level of flexibility, I find the parentheses can build up uncomfortably in a language like C++: it becomes almost LISP-like, and while the latter has a certain elegance in its design, I think people who dislike all the )))))s have a good point.
I guess I prefer a relatively clean and punctuation-free syntax by default, but where you can easily add () pairs to disambiguate. I'm undecided about Python's characteristic use of whitespace to block code, perhaps because the rigid nature doesn't fit with my hypothetical style where both functions and types are built fairly freely, but in a naturally block-structured language (such as Python is) I think it also has that certain practical and elegant quality.
I guess we just disagree on that one. In my world, not everything is an object; something like Java's approach is great for certain features with types, and does impose a useful structure that's good for maintainability by Joe Average, but it severely limits what good guys can do -- I want both powerful types and powerful functions, not something one-sided.
I totally agree with your other points: I think any serious contender for my "New Language of the Year" award is going to need a very tight, very flexible standard library, backed by something like CPAN so all those features that 10% of the users want have a home, and community effort can be focussed on producing a small number of top quality libraries rather than a wide range of mediocre ones (which is what, IMHO, Java's standard library has become).
No worries. I did find that particular comment somewhat offensive -- perhaps unfairly so, as I've encountered a few too many US-based bigots around here recently -- but as at least one mod realised, my reply was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I actually did get, and pretty much agree with, your main point.
FWIW, those of us involved with IT in Europe very much do care about what happens with copyright and patents, particularly the software patents currently under consideration in our European legislature. I work in a city full of small technology companies, and the interests of such companies (the majority of the industry, of course) frequently coincide with the interests of individuals IME. The work economy around me, and the local economy in general where I happen to live, and everyone everywhere who's going to benefit from the technologies being developed here, all depend on getting things like that right.
You arrogant, selfish little nerd.
Love,
Everyone in the rest of the world who supports or contributes to OSS.
Oh, the irony. Software shouldn't have controlling interests, remember? It should be free! So sayeth the great RMS.
If you don't like this sort of feedback, don't use misleading terms like "free software" in connection with the GPL.
I guess it depends on what level of physics you're talking about. Total Annihilation was, AFAIK, the first RTS game to use somewhat realistic physics in its game world. As a result, placing your artillery on higher ground really did extend the range, and hiding behind a hill really did protect you from line-of-sight missiles.
However, given that the TA-based conversion mentioned on this board the other day adds in things like craters in the map after big explosions, obviously the original wasn't 100% on the physics and some people still want a more deformable game world. I guess more realistic physics is still a big driver then...
Why, thank you. :-)
To some extent, that's clearly true. However, I think the two qualifiers you've added in that sentence give away the nature of today's programming world.
Firstly, languages which are "currently popular" are frequently faddish in this business. A few years ago, it was all about "object orientation". Now it's all about "scripting".
Of course there are a lot of similarities between, say, Perl, Python and Ruby, but then there's the qualified "fairly equally": if you look at the programming landscape as a whole, focussing on popular languages rather than minority or academic interests, you can still see very significant differences even between the popular languages. C++ lacks the convenience of Java at times, but makes up for it in raw power at other times. It's easy to say Perl and Python are almost the same if all you look at is trivial text processing work, but for more complex tasks?
But it really is very faddish. I'm still waiting for someone to produce a language with strong support for both functions and UDTs, where most of the coding can be declarative, but the structure is familiar to the 9x% of programmers who live in an imperative world, and structured programming with side effects isn't prohibitively awkward where it would be useful. It's not hard to imagine such a thing if you're familiar with both imperative and functional programming, and several of the so-called scripting languages tend in this direction, but no-one's really bitten the bullet yet. In the meantime, as you say, we're stuck with a lot of languages that are different, but really not that different.
When I read the intro, I was expecting something like a Java version of C++'s Boost libraries -- things the standard library missed or didn't do well, peer-reviewed to keep the quality up, etc.
When I read the linked page, I found more like a Java version of C++ -- it looks as though a lot of those libraries are there to overcome the very strengths/weaknesses (depending on your application) that most differentiate the two languages. If you want to use C++, why not just use C++?
I respectfully suggest that if you want average end users to report bugs, expecting them to find a page full of explanatory text, with no immediately obvious place to enter the bug information, hidden in the OOo web site, where two links later and just as you think you're going to put the data in you have to "log in", is not the way forward.
Most users won't report a bug when the process is that complicated; they have better things to do with their time, like tell everyone how OOo is crappy and full of bugs.
Sure, but then there were two studies in this case, the other one obvious pro-OSS. I doubt the people who compiled that studied the possibilities of Windows-based systems in great detail or prototyped with those, either...
Indeed. Now, the major saving in cost between MS and OSS is the purchase cost: you don't have to sign up for X, Y and Z support packages, and more than you do with OSS. Moreover, MS Office has far stronger capabilities in this area than any of the OSS rivals; I'm a fan of OpenOffice, but I'm also a realist. So, I don't really see how even in the long-term using OSS will be the cheaper option in TCO terms, starting from now.
There's an old rule of thumb that to dislodge an established player in a market, you have to have 10x the offering. It needs to be 1/10 the cost (that's TCO, not price), 10x as good (in terms of features people actually want and/or usability they actually benefit from), or an equivalent combination. Anything less isn't worth the agro of switching, retraining, etc. And right now, as much as I admire and support those who develop OSS alternatives to Microsoft's monoliths, the simple fact is that they're not there yet, and the conclusions in this study -- however dubiously funded -- seem to be pretty reasonable. In maybe 2-3 years, let's have this discussion again; I imagine it will be a lot more interesting, if the leading figures in the OSS world can get over the aspects of an OSS development process that currently suck.
(The other aspects here, like a deal made by a government body apparently being locked away so it can't be seen by those electing that body, are considerably less agreeable, but that's not the point of this discussion.)
Not real worms that infect systems that could not have been patched, no. However, I do discount things like:
- e-mail viruses propagated by idiots who can't follow a simple instruction not to open attachments they weren't expecting
- worms that infected systems where patches to prevent them had been available for more than 24 hours
simply because these are at most indirectly Microsoft's fault, Microsoft have taken reasonable steps to mitigate such damage, and most importantly, these sorts of problems would manifest themselves just as surely if OSS were in use.They're releasing Windows XP SP2. Perhaps you've heard of it?
That's a fascinating article. I think I just watched somebody advocating OSS alternatives to Microsoft because in the Windows XP version, you actually have to run a couple of command lines, view a couple of text files, and understand what a port is, all in order to configure a firewall! <shock> <horror> Can anybody see the staggering irony of this pithy attack? Particularly when -- as the article notes, but not exactly prominently -- the user is following a point-by-point list of instructions to do it, and only has to do it if the normal, one step, GUI-based approach doesn't work anyway. (I would remind the less attentive reader that the alternative under consideration is a Linux-based system, where as we all know, no configuration work ever requires you to step outside a highly tuned and immaculately user-friendly GUI environment.)
In fact, if you read over the original Reg article, the (not so) independent study may have been funded by MS, but the points it makes are pretty obvious. If they have 120 custom MS Office-based applications running already, with all the attendant development costs already paid and all the staff already trained, can any OSS zealot really tell us with a straight face that it will be cheaper to switch to OpenOffice? The other points quoted in the Reg article are similarly self-evident and entirely credible; the security one is probably most tenuous, but does anyone really believe OSS is a silver bullet here? <ahem> shell: <ahem> How many large organisations do you really know that have been hit hard because of a bug in Microsoft software?
I know some of Microsoft's FUD is pretty laughable, but guys, with the anti-Microsoft FUD in this thread you've truly exemplified how OSS can surpass Microsoft's efforts...
Oh, Jar Jar, youssun only de comic extra. You wassun putten dere to makun de kiddies laughin'. But youssun pissen' off de big bad dark side, and now youssun hava take id like a... longun-eary pokey-eye ting.
No, something much more powerful: one modern graphics card! ;-)
Does anyone have any advice on finding a good hardware firewall to go with a broadband connection, please? I recently got hooked up to ADSL, via a 4-port router ADSL modem, and since then my formerly invisible system (thanks to ZoneAlarm) has numerous ports closed but visible, and for some reason I completely fail to understand, FTP onto the router open, even to the outside world.
I'm somewhat disconcerted by this, because having had a system that wasn't fully patched but was clean before (56k modems and Windows Update just don't mix, no matter how much Microsoft might pretend otherwise, so I only had the really critical ones), the first thing I did was grab all the other updates, and even then I got prompted a few minutes later to download a fix for MyDoom.Something, which implied I was probably infected.
I want my invisible system back again! Any advice/recommendations much appreciated. I'm in the UK, in case anyone has a specific piece of kit and/or vendor in mind.
It's certainly better than previous versions of Windows, possibly excepting 2000, but I think you're going a bit far there. XP with a couple of routine apps installed may be stable forever. From direct personal experience, XP pretty much needs a clean reinstall after 2 years' worth of:
- Microsoft's own updates, patches, patches-on-patches, cumulative patches and so on
- updates to personal firewall and other anti-nasties software
- updates of video drivers and DirectX fighting over games
- changes of ISP, complete with uninstalling all their automatically-installed crap and a switch from modem to broadband
- IE/OE/Mozilla/Fire*/Thunderbird versions fighting over Internet stuff
- updates of OpenOffice/Acrobat Reader/etc. fighting over text documents
- trials and finished-produce graphics packages (many of the trials since uninstalled since nobody seems to make a decent one any more) fighting over images
- Microsoft's own explorer constantly messing around with "My Documents"
and so on.It is an unfortunate fact of life that Windows relies on obscure configuration via the registry, shared DLLs, and vendors providing software of reasonable quality with a 100% bulletproof uninstallation procedure, particularly where things like device drivers and security tools are concerned. As long as you have those limitations, any system where
- software is ever installed and then uninstalled
- installed software is patched or upgraded to a new version
- a combination of software from different vendors that probably hasn't been tested together is installed
is going to need a periodic clean-out. This problem is not unique to Windows; you get similar problems on a Mac, on Linux, or on any other platform meeting the above description for that matter. It is worse on Windows, simply because even a technically competent user will have trouble cleaning out the registry and sorting out any shared files properly after updates/uninstalls, particularly if they weren't completely successful.On the other hand, scientists write in maths, and computer programmers write in languages with formal specifications. It sucks in maths when people use non-standard notations, or there simply isn't a standard notation, for the concepts you're working with. It makes it hard for others to follow your logic, and for you to follow theirs. The same is true of programming languages. Sometimes providing one good way to do something is better than a plethora of mediocre ones.
Really? I've worked on some pretty large projects in my time, and found the design and abstraction tools in the first languages you mention to be very helpful. What sorts of complexity issues did you have in mind, and how big is "really large"?
That was your first mistake. :-)