It's like this. "We've detected you're not using a standards-compliant browser. While some features of this website will be available, we suggest you upgrade to one of the following browsers:.
But, as this week's Slashdot saying goes, there's the rub: people don't want to be told they're wrong, and web sites that patronise their audience get their window closed. Any commercial organisation's web site is likely to be focused primarily on one thing, and one thing only: sales. Achieving those sales is incompatible with trying to "educate" their users, and very unlikely to achieve a better return in terms of boosting sales from the five vistors a week who use non-IE browsers. Ergo, as much as we all hate it, their management has entirely the right mentality.
If you were going to do that, I'd suggest going back to the old-fashioned "Designed for..." logos at the bottom of the page, since at least a few people might remember them. Then again, those people are probably using non-IE browsers already anyway, and everyone else will probably go "What's Mozilla?" Sad as it is, you're never going to win this one by out-PRing Microsoft.
Oh, really: two whole carriers?! Tell me, are any of these 40-50 advanced multi-role planes stealth planes? Does Britian even have such planes on the drawing board? As great as British jets are, they are dwarfed in numbers, speed, flying height, and undetectability, and so on, by the full range of U.S. air power.
ROFLMAO. And you called me clueless?
OK, news flash: the article you linked to is one big, inaccurate wafflefest. Try looking up any page about the Eurofighter on the web and it'll tell you not only that stealth has been designed in from a very early stage, and not only that its long-range and dogfighting abilities are more than a par for any current production aircraft, they'll also tell you that it's a project that's been running for years and is in fairly advanced trials at this point. That doesn't sound much like a decade or two lag to me. And that's an aircraft developed by several of the larger European military powers, and will be used by all of them when it enters full production.
The presumption in your linked article about US submarine capability to sink anyone else's surface ships effortlessly is similarly screwed, and the point was the technology not the volume, so your point about having "only" two carriers is pretty meaningless, as is this conversation at this point. But you really shouldn't believe everything you read in the papers, particularly when they're as ill-informed at the article you linked to.
There was an article recently in the NYTimes describing these things.
You're basing your claim on an article in the NYT...?
But the reality is that we have weapon systems and in quantities that nobody else has or will have in the near future.
Well inside a decade from now, the UK will be running a carrier with an air wing of 40-50 planes, much of it comprised of the most advanced multi-role plane in the world. Three years later, we're due to have a second new carrier.
By that time, several of the major players in Europe will also be using that plane routinely, and the French will probably be running it off the aforementioned Charles de Gaulle platform as well.
How you can see that and claim the US is decades ahead of everyone else because you have so-called supercarriers, I don't understand.
As for your confrontational tone, you might like to remember that we're on the same side, using those same satellite resources, and with our forces linked into the same electronic C&C systems. But hey, if you think it's fun to fantasize about what would happen if things ever did get ugly between us, don't worry about the satellites; by the time we've switched off your early warning hardware in the UK, you'll be more worried about a ballistic missile hit from a rogue state anyway.
Care to explain how that statement shows conciet and ignorance?
You claimed that US military tech is 10-20 years beyond everyone else.
You mentioned US aircraft carriers. Do you know how old some of them are? Sure, the US Navy is looking to introduce new ships, but the French now have the Charles de Gaulle, and the UK is also working on a state-of-the-art carrier programme (look up "CVF") that should yield vastly more powerful ships than we currently have well within a decade. (And at least ours aren't running Windows! <ahem> Yorktown incident <ahem> Bill Gates buying major stake in the guys working on the RR carrier project <ahem>)
Looking at the aircraft themselves, the tech they're playing with for the Eurofighter seems to be at least the same level as the experimental aircraft in the US. The Apache Longbow isn't the only serious helicopter in town, either (and IIUC, the Comanche project is pretty much dead).
In terms of heavy armour, the Challenger 2 is very much in the same league as the M1A2 Abrams in capabilities. In fact, some of the systems in the Challenger 2 are pretty directly borrowed from the M1A1, just as the M1A2's are.
And of course, in modern warfare you don't tend to get mass engagements on the scale of last century's world wars. The basic kit used by the infantry on the ground is comparable whether you're looking at US troops or European ones, for example (screw-ups in the logistics and fatal kit shortages notwithstanding). For vehicular protection in urban warfare, who's developing the technology we're discussing in this thread? Is it the US?
Bottom line, the US spends a lot more money on firepower than anyone else, and has a lot more of it, but I stand by my statement that claiming the US is decades ahead of everyone else technologically is just arrogance.
You seem to think wars are caused by a disagreements between nations. [...] Wars are typically started over competition for natural resources, or because one country would like to control the other.
Don't you think those might be... well... sources of disagreement?
I don't feel like playing amateur psychologist today, but I suspect there are more people around with your mindset than you might realise at that age. I met quite a few at university, and discovered that they are very good at some things, and very bad at others. Many things, including their job satisfaction and their value to an employer, depend on how well they play to their strengths.
For example, it seems they can achieve a relatively large amount in a given period of time if they are interested in what they are doing, making them very good at brief but difficult tasks where they can focus. On the other hand, they seem to be quite easily distracted by things they find more interesting, which can be a strain if you're trying to keep up a regular 9-5 job in any technology industry: in the real world, there's a lot of grunt work that needs to be done too.
IME, people with this sort of mindset tend to be natural "starters" rather than "finishers", and go for the big picture rather than the details -- they're better at producing innovative ideas than dotting the i's and crossing the t's. I've concluded that they are the natural candidates for "leading edge" research posts: let them wander with their heads in the clouds, and let those with more pragmatic, solid mindsets turn the useful ideas into reality.
Aw, crap. I wasn't going to go amateur psychologist. But hey, there you go, maybe it'll provide some ideas for you to play with.
So, what you're saying is: war sucks. Well, duh. Unfortunately it's about as stoppable as the tide.
It takes a pretty major difference of opinion to start a war; they don't happen by accident. You could avoid them altogether by resolving those differences before resorting to the trigger fingers, if only the politicians had the guts to do it.
Unless you mean all armoured assault vehicles share targeting information and fire many small projectiles instead of one big one?
Actually, that's pretty much where the next generation of military technology is going. The era of the "electronic battlefield" is here, and the tactical advantage conferred by weapons like the Apache Longbow appears to be pretty staggering. I'm not in the military and don't have any amazing revelations to offer, but I'd be amazed if they aren't diverting huge quantities of R&D resources to hooking up ground units as well.
Our military tech is at least a decade or two ahead of everyone else on the planet
The conceit and ignorance shown by that comment aside, that still won't help your tank crew when someone on the roof of an Iraqi building fires a reasonably recent RPG straight down on top of their tank. This does have the potential to take out an Abrams, as some unfortunate incidents in Iraq have shown all too clearly. If you're going to use tanks in urban warfare, best adjust their defensive capabilities to suit.
FWIW, TFA indicates that the outer armour layer is bulletproof (presumably meaning small arms, LMGs, etc. in this context) and earthed, and the electrical wizardry is in an inner layer, which is live if (and only if) the tank commander decides to switch it on because he's worried about this type of attack. It also indicated that in live fire trials, a vehicle had taken multiple RPG hits at close range and survived, so they've obviously resolved the "multiple hits" problem somehow.
As for armouring light vehicles routinely, the US forces have already been cranking out thousands of up-armoured HMMWVs in Iraq in response to the changing tactics of their adversaries over the past year or so. Presumably they'll be investigating whether there are benefits to incorporating this technology as part of that programme, but given that the electrical armour is designed to protect MBTs from hits by a particular kind of anti-tank weapon, but HMMWVs have windows, I'm not sure I see the application. It seems more likely to be useful on Bradleys and the like, but don't the army hate those anyway?
If you polarize the hull plating, you need to have a way to reverse the polarity in case they fire a reverse-phase ion cannon.
Well, that's easy! You just interlock your fingers with your hands over your head, move your hands up and down rapidly, and then open your arms while making an odd noise. That really should have been explained to you before you got on board; don't tell me you missed the pre-flight briefing...?
It sucks that a lot of programmers think learning assembly is just something they should do some day to gain better insight.
Personally I think the curriculum for coding should begin with asm, and the student should work his way up to the higher level languages.
The curriculum should certainly include assembler, but only because learning assembly is a way to gain better insight. I've written my fair share of ASM code over the years, but today it's good for supporting higher level languages, and pretty much nothing else.
Consider the effort to get optimisations right by hand on modern architectures when compilers are written to do it systematically, the lack of anything beyond the most primitive functionality compared to HLLs or archives like CPAN, and the complete lack of portability in an era where shifting your code on diverse platforms is becoming ever more important. All of these things are good enough reasons to opt for a higher level alternative in their own right, and all are near universal truths in today's development environments.
That's not to say ASM isn't useful for the right things. It's just that those things are such a vanishingly small part of the software development world that I think ASM's value is now far greater as an aid to understanding higher level languages than it is as a development tool in its own right. If you need to write ASM code, sure, take a specialist course, but don't waste time with the details in a general programming or CS course; there are far more important concepts to teach in a limited amount of time.
But if Perl is written in C, wouldn't that mean that Perl can never be "faster" than C?
Superficially, that seems an obvious truth, but it doesn't necessarily hold in practice for several reasons:
By definition, high-level languages have more expressive features than a glorified assembly language. Those features allow the programmer to express certain concepts directly, in a form whose semantics that the compiler can understand. That in turn may allow the HLL compiler to optimise the output code it produces in a way that the LLL compiler couldn't. Consider the number of optimisations that no current C compiler can perform because of the risk of variable aliasing, which simply can't happen in some high-level functional languages because effectively there are no variables, only immutable values.
Moreover, in practice, pretty much nobody goes to the effort to implement an optimised high-level language feature in a C program unless they're writing a compiler for that HLL anyway.
Finally, there is the issue of run-time optimisation, which is to an extent just a variation on the themes above. So-called just-in-time compilers can potentially look at the run-time behaviour of a program, and dynamically adjust the executable code to better handle what is really happening, with the real data being provided. How else do you think an overweight beast like Java now gets performance at least comparable to the C and C++ world? Since no compiler can ever know what real data will be provided, the only way to achieve this effect in a LLL like C is to write your own virtual machine, and effectively create your own new language with a JIT compiler. Not a lot of projects do that, because it's insanely complicated.
In other words, with today's compiler technology, and more importantly today's run-time environments, C is no longer automatically the king of performance, and it is both theoretically and practically possible for much higher level languages to outperform even hand-optimised compiled C code.
Of course, the price you pay is the initial overhead for the JIT compilation process, usually when a program first loads. However, this is one area where rapidly increasing hardware speeds really tells, because that directly reduces the overhead of that bootstrapping process, so the field of more level the faster hardware gets.
I expect traditional, compile-only technologies to fade into the background over time; in the programming language "performance vs. safety+power" spectrum, they aim at a target nobody will need to hit any more. There will always be a need for LLLs, if only to write the underlying platforms to support HLLs, but for regular application development, their days are numbered.
IANAL, but I do follow this issue. The last professional opinion I heard on this subject, as it applies in the UK, is that the disclaimer is meaningless if it's just attached at the bottom of the mail. However, if a notice is placed at the top of the mail, then the terms may have some legal weight, as by continuing to read the message you're assumed to agree with the notice (or so the hypothetical but as yet untested legal argument goes). Perhaps this explains the annoying and rather offensive mails I've received from a couple of friends recently, roughly of the form:
*** This communication may contain privileged information and by reading further you are entering into an agreement with Ripoff Screwem and Jones as described at the end of this message. ***
Lunch at 12?
[20+ lines of legalese similar to that in the article go here.]
Of course, if it's a work e-mail account it's sent from, that's what you get for using it to send personal mail. OTOH, if I were a client or potential client of such a firm, I'd be rather offended to read that sort of rubbish, too. I wonder if it really covers them at all, and even if it does, whether it does more PR harm than legal protection good...
We shouldn't allow Microsoft to take over the net. When doctoring your none-geeks friends machine, simply remove all MS-conspiracy related trash you can find:)
My mum and dad would like to know why on-line banking doesn't work any more, please. Apparently their bank's web site has turned into some sort of marriage counselling service and warned them that they were "incompatible clients" or something.
In short, preach
No, please don't. The word "preach" almost implies fanaticism, and you are clearly a fanatic, in the same way RMS is clearly a fanatic. I have nothing against you or your right to believe passionately in your cause, but please understand that ultimately you are doing more harm than good, because you are burying your head in the sand. Fanatics rarely convert people long term, and they alienate far more people than they bring in.
If you want to help, then don't preach, but educate. Install Firefox or whatever alongside IE, and explain that they can use either program to surf the web, but that Firefox is safer. Make sure they know how to find IE if they come across a site that's "broken" so it doesn't work with Mozilla. But be objective, and don't stop them doing what they want to do. Evangelism is the #1 way to make smart but uninformed people think you're talking crap, and those are exactly the people you need to convert first.
We see similar things all the time on some programming newsgroups, particularly those aimed at beginners. Anyone posting an obvious homework assignment is usually answered with one of:
an extended essay on why nobody in the profession is going to do it for them (because they might then get a degree they didn't deserve, and get a real job working with the person who wrote the answer)
an off-hand comment about consultancy rates starting at $250/hr
(from the evil people) a perfectly technically correct answer using very clever coding techniques, which no beginning student would even have heard of, never mind have the first clue how to implement (e.g., on a C++ group, writing the program to compute a Fibonacci number using template metaprogramming to work it out at compile time and effectively reduce the main() function to a single print statement).
I always kinda admired the people who took the third approach, though I never really had time to do something like that myself. It's a shame we never got to see their faces when their lecturers/supervisors caught up with them after they handed them in...
(Yes, we're all evil bastards. Your sympathy for the homework assignment posters wears out after the first few hundred, though.)
Before all the English Majors start whining, I should mention that I have an English BA, which I picked up accidentally while working on my CS BS, so I know what the hell I'm talking about.
That's nothing. While studying for my maths degree, I picked up three PhDs, two MBAs and a Diploma in Human Resources Management, and all without leaving my e-mail client.
The only solution I can see to this problem is the summary execution of the bosses and clients.
That's why he's the boss, and not you.
You're talking about a web site. That's marketing, sales, publicity. That in turn means pizazz, shine, flash, user experience. The back end is utterly irrelevant, except in so far as it helps the above. The boss understands that, because he's a businessman. A lot of people in this discussion apparently don't, because they're developers. Lucky there's enough room in the world for both, isn't it?
Come on, Italian politicians, you passed a law to put tens of thousands of your own young people in prison for activities that few civilized people consider to be a crime.
I love it when people make overblown claims like that, without anything to back them up.
Pretty much everyone knows copyright infringement is illegal. People who do it do so because they think they can get away with it and are prepared to run the risk of not doing so, not because they don't believe they're breaking the law.
First off, kiddo, there are perfectly clean lines in life.
You've never watched a court case that left a jury with a difficult decision to make, have you?
To extend the grandparent's example slightly, consider the following case; bear with me, this will be relevant. Suppose a woman is in court, accused of murdering her husband. There is clear evidence that she delivered a knife wound to his chest, from which he died. He had a history of abusing his wife and their address was known to local police as a common location for domestic violence. She claims she was acting in self-defence. But, the prosecution points out that there had been no reports of domestic violence from that address for over 18 months, and the husband was found on the floor in the bathroom having just taken a shower; hardly a likely time for someone to be attacking his wife, they claim. You and eleven of your peers hold the fate of this woman in your hands: is she a long-suffering victim now finally freed from an abusive husband who had learned to hide his wicked behaviour, someone who deserves to spend the rest of her life behind bars for exacting revenge on a victim who had put an abusive past behind him, or somewhere in between?
I use a specific, and obviously difficult, example of self-defence here because in the analogy of the grandparent post, self-defence would be similar to fair use rights: they're something of an exception to the normal rule, it's hard to decide whether or not they apply in many cases, but making a mistake can have very serious consequences. Clearly these situations differ greatly in how much they really matter, but I think the analogy is quite a good one to illustrate the problems of deciding who's right in the real world.
Although, this is a completely domain specific topic, I'll go out on a limb and say in most cases open source software is at least up to par with closed source alternatives.
You're quite right that it's domain specific, but in this context, I think we're pretty clearly talking about the mainstream apps used by a large number of businesses: office suites are the obvious one, and things like browsers and e-mail clients, graphics and DTP packages, and accounting tools are probably common enough to merit inclusion.
In these cases, I'm afraid I strongly disagree with the claim quoted above. You can make a strong case for switching to Linux and Apache in the server markets. You could make a reasonable case that one or two other specific applications (I mentioned Gnumeric before) are now roughly on a par with the established commercial players, although in reality it takes much, much more than being on a par to justify someone switching. Most of the open source rivals simply aren't in the game yet, though; OpenOffice is perhaps the best example of an OSS application with great potential but needing another couple of years of strong development to start seriously challenging the incumbent market leader.
The GIMP bashing was a case of, "I learned photoshop and now I don't want to learn another new interface" crybaby syndrome.
There was an element of that, but there was a lot of genuine and objective criticism also. I made the effort to try it myself, but gave up after repeated crashes while trying to save my work or applying a straightforward filter. (The most telling thing was that most of the replies I got said that was my fault for using Windows and the Windows version of the GIMP isn't L337 enough, or something.) Even when it did work, I found it very difficult to get fairly basic effects out of it, when I could easily achieve them using any number of commercial alternatives (Paint Shop Pro, PhotoImpact, Photoshop, etc.) The non-standard interface, at least to Windows users, is also a major disadvantage. There is a reason nearly everyone uses the same conventions: it makes the user's life easier, unless there is a very compelling reason not to. The fact that the developers happen to like a different menu appearance is not such a reason.
I'll mostly gloss over your comments on Mozilla, noting that I too find fewer pages that don't work these days as web developers seem to be a bit more aware of W3C standards. However, I stand by my claim that the dev team's stubborn insistence on "open standards" rather than interoperability with the guy with 90+% market share demonstrates incredible naivete if their goal really is widespread penetration, and is a great example of why your average business is sticking with the current commercial products.
But people always fail to take into account the fact that sooner rather than later, you're going to have to purchase an upgrade or continue your support license.
Why is this any more true for commercial products than OSS? In fact, isn't it more true for OSS? How many times have you seen someone told they can get the bug fix if they just get the latest source from the project CVS repository and rebuild it themselves? How many full (not alpha or beta) releases of Mozilla have their been in the past couple of years, compared to any commercial browser? (I'll mention in passing that there have been numerous backward-compatibility nightmares in those releases, including a Moz 1.6 upgrade that completely toasted my 1.5 mail database, so upgrade woes are hardly unique to commercial apps either.)
Is it really worth it to keep paying that $300, every year or so, even when you already understand the configuration process, already have a base configuration, and just need to tweak that base in order to continue using the upgrade.
Slashdot Mirror
I would, but my eyesight isn't good enough to read the text. :-/
But, as this week's Slashdot saying goes, there's the rub: people don't want to be told they're wrong, and web sites that patronise their audience get their window closed. Any commercial organisation's web site is likely to be focused primarily on one thing, and one thing only: sales. Achieving those sales is incompatible with trying to "educate" their users, and very unlikely to achieve a better return in terms of boosting sales from the five vistors a week who use non-IE browsers. Ergo, as much as we all hate it, their management has entirely the right mentality.
If you were going to do that, I'd suggest going back to the old-fashioned "Designed for..." logos at the bottom of the page, since at least a few people might remember them. Then again, those people are probably using non-IE browsers already anyway, and everyone else will probably go "What's Mozilla?" Sad as it is, you're never going to win this one by out-PRing Microsoft.
ROFLMAO. And you called me clueless?
OK, news flash: the article you linked to is one big, inaccurate wafflefest. Try looking up any page about the Eurofighter on the web and it'll tell you not only that stealth has been designed in from a very early stage, and not only that its long-range and dogfighting abilities are more than a par for any current production aircraft, they'll also tell you that it's a project that's been running for years and is in fairly advanced trials at this point. That doesn't sound much like a decade or two lag to me. And that's an aircraft developed by several of the larger European military powers, and will be used by all of them when it enters full production.
The presumption in your linked article about US submarine capability to sink anyone else's surface ships effortlessly is similarly screwed, and the point was the technology not the volume, so your point about having "only" two carriers is pretty meaningless, as is this conversation at this point. But you really shouldn't believe everything you read in the papers, particularly when they're as ill-informed at the article you linked to.
You're basing your claim on an article in the NYT...?
Well inside a decade from now, the UK will be running a carrier with an air wing of 40-50 planes, much of it comprised of the most advanced multi-role plane in the world. Three years later, we're due to have a second new carrier.
By that time, several of the major players in Europe will also be using that plane routinely, and the French will probably be running it off the aforementioned Charles de Gaulle platform as well.
How you can see that and claim the US is decades ahead of everyone else because you have so-called supercarriers, I don't understand.
As for your confrontational tone, you might like to remember that we're on the same side, using those same satellite resources, and with our forces linked into the same electronic C&C systems. But hey, if you think it's fun to fantasize about what would happen if things ever did get ugly between us, don't worry about the satellites; by the time we've switched off your early warning hardware in the UK, you'll be more worried about a ballistic missile hit from a rogue state anyway.
You claimed that US military tech is 10-20 years beyond everyone else.
You mentioned US aircraft carriers. Do you know how old some of them are? Sure, the US Navy is looking to introduce new ships, but the French now have the Charles de Gaulle, and the UK is also working on a state-of-the-art carrier programme (look up "CVF") that should yield vastly more powerful ships than we currently have well within a decade. (And at least ours aren't running Windows! <ahem> Yorktown incident <ahem> Bill Gates buying major stake in the guys working on the RR carrier project <ahem>)
Looking at the aircraft themselves, the tech they're playing with for the Eurofighter seems to be at least the same level as the experimental aircraft in the US. The Apache Longbow isn't the only serious helicopter in town, either (and IIUC, the Comanche project is pretty much dead).
In terms of heavy armour, the Challenger 2 is very much in the same league as the M1A2 Abrams in capabilities. In fact, some of the systems in the Challenger 2 are pretty directly borrowed from the M1A1, just as the M1A2's are.
And of course, in modern warfare you don't tend to get mass engagements on the scale of last century's world wars. The basic kit used by the infantry on the ground is comparable whether you're looking at US troops or European ones, for example (screw-ups in the logistics and fatal kit shortages notwithstanding). For vehicular protection in urban warfare, who's developing the technology we're discussing in this thread? Is it the US?
Bottom line, the US spends a lot more money on firepower than anyone else, and has a lot more of it, but I stand by my statement that claiming the US is decades ahead of everyone else technologically is just arrogance.
Which, incidentally, is itself a made up word. :-)
(Or have I just fallen for a cunning and deliberate pun? :-/)
Don't you think those might be... well... sources of disagreement?
I don't feel like playing amateur psychologist today, but I suspect there are more people around with your mindset than you might realise at that age. I met quite a few at university, and discovered that they are very good at some things, and very bad at others. Many things, including their job satisfaction and their value to an employer, depend on how well they play to their strengths.
For example, it seems they can achieve a relatively large amount in a given period of time if they are interested in what they are doing, making them very good at brief but difficult tasks where they can focus. On the other hand, they seem to be quite easily distracted by things they find more interesting, which can be a strain if you're trying to keep up a regular 9-5 job in any technology industry: in the real world, there's a lot of grunt work that needs to be done too.
IME, people with this sort of mindset tend to be natural "starters" rather than "finishers", and go for the big picture rather than the details -- they're better at producing innovative ideas than dotting the i's and crossing the t's. I've concluded that they are the natural candidates for "leading edge" research posts: let them wander with their heads in the clouds, and let those with more pragmatic, solid mindsets turn the useful ideas into reality.
Aw, crap. I wasn't going to go amateur psychologist. But hey, there you go, maybe it'll provide some ideas for you to play with.
It takes a pretty major difference of opinion to start a war; they don't happen by accident. You could avoid them altogether by resolving those differences before resorting to the trigger fingers, if only the politicians had the guts to do it.
Actually, that's pretty much where the next generation of military technology is going. The era of the "electronic battlefield" is here, and the tactical advantage conferred by weapons like the Apache Longbow appears to be pretty staggering. I'm not in the military and don't have any amazing revelations to offer, but I'd be amazed if they aren't diverting huge quantities of R&D resources to hooking up ground units as well.
The conceit and ignorance shown by that comment aside, that still won't help your tank crew when someone on the roof of an Iraqi building fires a reasonably recent RPG straight down on top of their tank. This does have the potential to take out an Abrams, as some unfortunate incidents in Iraq have shown all too clearly. If you're going to use tanks in urban warfare, best adjust their defensive capabilities to suit.
FWIW, TFA indicates that the outer armour layer is bulletproof (presumably meaning small arms, LMGs, etc. in this context) and earthed, and the electrical wizardry is in an inner layer, which is live if (and only if) the tank commander decides to switch it on because he's worried about this type of attack. It also indicated that in live fire trials, a vehicle had taken multiple RPG hits at close range and survived, so they've obviously resolved the "multiple hits" problem somehow.
As for armouring light vehicles routinely, the US forces have already been cranking out thousands of up-armoured HMMWVs in Iraq in response to the changing tactics of their adversaries over the past year or so. Presumably they'll be investigating whether there are benefits to incorporating this technology as part of that programme, but given that the electrical armour is designed to protect MBTs from hits by a particular kind of anti-tank weapon, but HMMWVs have windows, I'm not sure I see the application. It seems more likely to be useful on Bradleys and the like, but don't the army hate those anyway?
Yeah, those silly tanks and their damn fancy-pants defence systems...
We should just Chobham all up and start again, I say. :-p
Well, that's easy! You just interlock your fingers with your hands over your head, move your hands up and down rapidly, and then open your arms while making an odd noise. That really should have been explained to you before you got on board; don't tell me you missed the pre-flight briefing...?
The curriculum should certainly include assembler, but only because learning assembly is a way to gain better insight. I've written my fair share of ASM code over the years, but today it's good for supporting higher level languages, and pretty much nothing else.
Consider the effort to get optimisations right by hand on modern architectures when compilers are written to do it systematically, the lack of anything beyond the most primitive functionality compared to HLLs or archives like CPAN, and the complete lack of portability in an era where shifting your code on diverse platforms is becoming ever more important. All of these things are good enough reasons to opt for a higher level alternative in their own right, and all are near universal truths in today's development environments.
That's not to say ASM isn't useful for the right things. It's just that those things are such a vanishingly small part of the software development world that I think ASM's value is now far greater as an aid to understanding higher level languages than it is as a development tool in its own right. If you need to write ASM code, sure, take a specialist course, but don't waste time with the details in a general programming or CS course; there are far more important concepts to teach in a limited amount of time.
Superficially, that seems an obvious truth, but it doesn't necessarily hold in practice for several reasons:
In other words, with today's compiler technology, and more importantly today's run-time environments, C is no longer automatically the king of performance, and it is both theoretically and practically possible for much higher level languages to outperform even hand-optimised compiled C code.
Of course, the price you pay is the initial overhead for the JIT compilation process, usually when a program first loads. However, this is one area where rapidly increasing hardware speeds really tells, because that directly reduces the overhead of that bootstrapping process, so the field of more level the faster hardware gets.
I expect traditional, compile-only technologies to fade into the background over time; in the programming language "performance vs. safety+power" spectrum, they aim at a target nobody will need to hit any more. There will always be a need for LLLs, if only to write the underlying platforms to support HLLs, but for regular application development, their days are numbered.
IANAL, but I do follow this issue. The last professional opinion I heard on this subject, as it applies in the UK, is that the disclaimer is meaningless if it's just attached at the bottom of the mail. However, if a notice is placed at the top of the mail, then the terms may have some legal weight, as by continuing to read the message you're assumed to agree with the notice (or so the hypothetical but as yet untested legal argument goes). Perhaps this explains the annoying and rather offensive mails I've received from a couple of friends recently, roughly of the form:
Of course, if it's a work e-mail account it's sent from, that's what you get for using it to send personal mail. OTOH, if I were a client or potential client of such a firm, I'd be rather offended to read that sort of rubbish, too. I wonder if it really covers them at all, and even if it does, whether it does more PR harm than legal protection good...
My mum and dad would like to know why on-line banking doesn't work any more, please. Apparently their bank's web site has turned into some sort of marriage counselling service and warned them that they were "incompatible clients" or something.
No, please don't. The word "preach" almost implies fanaticism, and you are clearly a fanatic, in the same way RMS is clearly a fanatic. I have nothing against you or your right to believe passionately in your cause, but please understand that ultimately you are doing more harm than good, because you are burying your head in the sand. Fanatics rarely convert people long term, and they alienate far more people than they bring in.
If you want to help, then don't preach, but educate. Install Firefox or whatever alongside IE, and explain that they can use either program to surf the web, but that Firefox is safer. Make sure they know how to find IE if they come across a site that's "broken" so it doesn't work with Mozilla. But be objective, and don't stop them doing what they want to do. Evangelism is the #1 way to make smart but uninformed people think you're talking crap, and those are exactly the people you need to convert first.
We see similar things all the time on some programming newsgroups, particularly those aimed at beginners. Anyone posting an obvious homework assignment is usually answered with one of:
I always kinda admired the people who took the third approach, though I never really had time to do something like that myself. It's a shame we never got to see their faces when their lecturers/supervisors caught up with them after they handed them in...
(Yes, we're all evil bastards. Your sympathy for the homework assignment posters wears out after the first few hundred, though.)
Nah, you're imagining things. Even the world's smallest violin is laughing at this guy.
That's nothing. While studying for my maths degree, I picked up three PhDs, two MBAs and a Diploma in Human Resources Management, and all without leaving my e-mail client.
That's why he's the boss, and not you.
You're talking about a web site. That's marketing, sales, publicity. That in turn means pizazz, shine, flash, user experience. The back end is utterly irrelevant, except in so far as it helps the above. The boss understands that, because he's a businessman. A lot of people in this discussion apparently don't, because they're developers. Lucky there's enough room in the world for both, isn't it?
I love it when people make overblown claims like that, without anything to back them up.
Pretty much everyone knows copyright infringement is illegal. People who do it do so because they think they can get away with it and are prepared to run the risk of not doing so, not because they don't believe they're breaking the law.
You've never watched a court case that left a jury with a difficult decision to make, have you?
To extend the grandparent's example slightly, consider the following case; bear with me, this will be relevant. Suppose a woman is in court, accused of murdering her husband. There is clear evidence that she delivered a knife wound to his chest, from which he died. He had a history of abusing his wife and their address was known to local police as a common location for domestic violence. She claims she was acting in self-defence. But, the prosecution points out that there had been no reports of domestic violence from that address for over 18 months, and the husband was found on the floor in the bathroom having just taken a shower; hardly a likely time for someone to be attacking his wife, they claim. You and eleven of your peers hold the fate of this woman in your hands: is she a long-suffering victim now finally freed from an abusive husband who had learned to hide his wicked behaviour, someone who deserves to spend the rest of her life behind bars for exacting revenge on a victim who had put an abusive past behind him, or somewhere in between?
I use a specific, and obviously difficult, example of self-defence here because in the analogy of the grandparent post, self-defence would be similar to fair use rights: they're something of an exception to the normal rule, it's hard to decide whether or not they apply in many cases, but making a mistake can have very serious consequences. Clearly these situations differ greatly in how much they really matter, but I think the analogy is quite a good one to illustrate the problems of deciding who's right in the real world.
You're quite right that it's domain specific, but in this context, I think we're pretty clearly talking about the mainstream apps used by a large number of businesses: office suites are the obvious one, and things like browsers and e-mail clients, graphics and DTP packages, and accounting tools are probably common enough to merit inclusion.
In these cases, I'm afraid I strongly disagree with the claim quoted above. You can make a strong case for switching to Linux and Apache in the server markets. You could make a reasonable case that one or two other specific applications (I mentioned Gnumeric before) are now roughly on a par with the established commercial players, although in reality it takes much, much more than being on a par to justify someone switching. Most of the open source rivals simply aren't in the game yet, though; OpenOffice is perhaps the best example of an OSS application with great potential but needing another couple of years of strong development to start seriously challenging the incumbent market leader.
There was an element of that, but there was a lot of genuine and objective criticism also. I made the effort to try it myself, but gave up after repeated crashes while trying to save my work or applying a straightforward filter. (The most telling thing was that most of the replies I got said that was my fault for using Windows and the Windows version of the GIMP isn't L337 enough, or something.) Even when it did work, I found it very difficult to get fairly basic effects out of it, when I could easily achieve them using any number of commercial alternatives (Paint Shop Pro, PhotoImpact, Photoshop, etc.) The non-standard interface, at least to Windows users, is also a major disadvantage. There is a reason nearly everyone uses the same conventions: it makes the user's life easier, unless there is a very compelling reason not to. The fact that the developers happen to like a different menu appearance is not such a reason.
I'll mostly gloss over your comments on Mozilla, noting that I too find fewer pages that don't work these days as web developers seem to be a bit more aware of W3C standards. However, I stand by my claim that the dev team's stubborn insistence on "open standards" rather than interoperability with the guy with 90+% market share demonstrates incredible naivete if their goal really is widespread penetration, and is a great example of why your average business is sticking with the current commercial products.
Why is this any more true for commercial products than OSS? In fact, isn't it more true for OSS? How many times have you seen someone told they can get the bug fix if they just get the latest source from the project CVS repository and rebuild it themselves? How many full (not alpha or beta) releases of Mozilla have their been in the past couple of years, compared to any commercial browser? (I'll mention in passing that there have been numerous backward-compatibility nightmares in those releases, including a Moz 1.6 upgrade that completely toasted my 1.5 mail database, so upgrade woes are hardly unique to commercial apps either.)
I am typing this on a fully patched Win