Bah, clean compiles are for wimps. If it builds in debug configuration on one platform, that's enough to ship the release build on fifteen others, darnit.
They're having trouble with the moon. Seems that a little-known government agency known as "NASA" went there before Microsoft even existed, thus claiming the moon before Microsoft ever did.
In other news...
Microsoft have recently announced funding for a new research project into the history of space travel. This will build up to culminate in a series of "one-off" TV shows hosted by former X-Files cast members, which will prove conclusively that man has never been to the moon.
A court case against NASA is expected to follow shortly, alleging that other "one-off" TV shows hosted by the same former X-Files cast members and describing man's visit to the moon were faked, and that Microsoft's reputation as the number one supplier of moon-based products has been irreparably damaged.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled Microsoft bashing.
So the Iraqi citizens are responsible for Saddam? 100% of them voted him in.
I have two points to make here.
Firstly, they didn't have a choice, but the US citizenry did.
Secondly, if you don't like the argument about citizens being responsible for their own government, perhaps you should stop large numbers of overly militant US citizens from using it as an excuse to justify the inevitable civilian casualties in your merry little war. I have heard exactly this argument -- "They have a choice, they could overthrow him if they wanted, so screw 'em if they don't" -- from several war advocates from the US recently.
I was pretty irate when I first heard they were going to do that (plus the max 12 hours in 24, max 2 hours at a time, etc. for dial-up). I very nearly moved ISPs that day, since I believe in voting with my wallet instead of bitching about stuff but doing nothing useful.
Interestingly enough, in spite of expecting to be quite a high demand user (my PC is usually on-line at home when I'm in, checking for mail, etc.) I haven't yet had a warning message about being within (I think it's) 35 hours of hitting my time cap. That being the case, I'm wondering who actually is getting upset about this except for those who spend all day playing P2P host. And frankly, doing that occasionally is one thing, but having it on all the time is a whole different level of use, and deserves to be charged accordingly.
By far the most annoying thing about BT Internet and a few others is that they cut you off after 2 hours of dial-up, even if you're in the middle of downloading a 20MB service pack, or playing an on-line game, or whatever. That just sucks, and their previously stated arguments for doing it (cutting down on the top percentile who leave things on-line all the time and use vastly more than their fair share of bandwidth) are now clearly bull if they lock you out after 150 hours in a month anyway.
BTW, when I say "US", I refer, of course, to the administration, not the citizens.
See now, this is a big part of the problem with political discussions. The US administration did not just happen. It was elected (yeah, yeah, or not) by the US population. You can talk about buying votes all you like, but at the end of the day, money doesn't vote, citizens do. If they don't like the way they're being represented, they shouldn't have elected this goverment.
We don't want the Royal Marines raiding the VA Software headquarters looking for alleged terrorists Abdul Hemos and the commander of the cell, Hashish Taco.
Sorry, we're too busy building up to a war on Iraq to go after actual terrorists threats.
I think you faild to recognize the parent post as one from a Programming Languages Weenie.
Nah. The parent post was written by a standard, mark I "Java-biased C++-bashing weenie", a particularly tedious subtype of Programming Language Weenie whose sole purpose in life seems to be to post not-quite-accurate comments about C++ and Java with the sole aim of slagging off C++, whether or not said comments are actually relevant to the conversation at hand.
But thanks for the tip.:-)
By the way, I too am something of a programming language weenie, and quite familiar with the literature on formal type systems and such. However, I question the merit of even raising such issues in relation to languages such as C++ and Java. Neither language has a particularly pure type system, and it makes much more sense to compare and contrast corresponding features of those two (such as C++ templates and Java generics) than it does to have a dig at the fact that other languages have a theoretically sounder basis.
I use a personal firewall and privacy software to get away with this, and I naturally minimize or close Mozilla if a boss comes near my bench. Don't we all?
Thankfully, no. I have finally found a company that views its people as valuable assets and treats them accordingly. Both my interviewers when I was first applying got the reference to being karma-capped on slashdot, and I read it quite happily at my desk (my team leader/boss sitting at the one right behind me in an open plan office).
I don't take the piss by surfing on company time, and they're quite happy for me to read/. at lunch, or even <shock> surf during business hours to find useful information!
Salary = No hours, no overtime. Just get the work done.
Yep, corporate slavery seems to be the accepted norm in some parts of the world.
Too bad. Some of us have a 37.5 hour week written into our contracts (this is pretty normal in the UK) and expect to work something approximating that amount of time (less normal, but I've never had a problem doing so). Strangely, we seem to get at least as much done as the people who work 60+ hour weeks, perhaps because for all of our 37.5 hours we're actually doing useful work, and not undoing the ****-ups we made in hours 8-12 of yesterday.
Of course, it takes a smart company to realise that extra hours does not equal extra profit, and a very smart one to actually force its employees to take breaks, holidays, etc. Few companies are that smart. (But those that are tend to be both nice places to work and very successful.)
So is there some kind of strange, dark, Mason-like secret society which causes people exposed to a sufficient amount of Lisp to think that Lisp is the One True Way, and other languages are correct only to the extent that they are completely identical to Lisp?
Yes! Damn you Perl types and your "There's More Than One Way To Do It" heresy!!!!
One day, the great god S-expression will catch up with you and you'll get your comeuppance, mark my words...
I would like to know, however, why the professors at my school bash C and C++. [...] Anyone else care to respond on if this is an academia thing to hate C and C++ or just my school?
It does seem to be a popular academic past-time. I suspect it's similar to the slashbot groupthink effect. Most of these people have the luxury of working in a theoretical world, where the sorts of practical issues that make C, C++ and their ilk so useful are not relevant. They then reinforce each other's beliefs and preconceptions when they discuss things, without outside influence to put the opposite point of view.
A couple of the researchers at the computer lab where I did my diploma were like this. (The lab has several well-known names from the ML world there, BTW, and functional programming is very much their thing.) I also saw a few lectures given by others in the department that touched on C and C++, and they were pretty similar to what you see in bad books and uninformed comments around here: based on the languages of 10-20 years ago, and with no effort made to even investigate how things might have changed since then.
It's the old problem: academia produces some potentially very useful theory, but never does anything practical with it, while industry labours along using pragmatic techniques that are decades behind the times, because it's too scared to move away from known safe ground and investigate the applications of academic theory for itself...
I for one can see the weaknesses of the languages, yet I can also find weaknesses in many other languages including the languages of functional and declarative paradigms.
Exactly. The question is simply whether the weaknesses are actually important to how you're using the language. The answer is very different for an academic researcher and a full-time professional software developer.
Templates were C++'s way of simulating generic types. The difference is that templates are essentially macros in fancy clothing, and generate a different flavor of the class for every combination of type parameters, while generics are a much cleaner, more abstract construct, better grounded in the theory of types, which use polymorphism to achieve their genericity.
That's one definition of generics, but hardly the only one in use in the programming world. "Polymorphism" is one of those fantastic words that has had so many meanings attached to it that it no longer means anything useful without further qualification. Templates in C++ can do a little more than boring old macros these days, too.
In any case, this will be a fantastic feature, and they're done a much better job with it than C++ did with templates.
If you're going to troll, could you please at least provide some sort of supporting evidence? On paper, the Java implementation is similar to C++ templates but with the usual Java trade-off that some of the power is sacrificed to improve the simplicity. However, in this case, that leaves Java generics without several useful features, and consequently without the ability to do most of the useful tricks that leading edge C++ can do. How do you see Java's generics as better than C++ templates, other than being simpler, and using OO-style polymorphism (which isn't really a generics issue, it's a C++ type system vs. Java type system issue)?
I think we're on different wavelengths here. I'm talking about whether they can enforce an EULA condition, such that I'm forced to grant access so they can audit me. This is way before any judgement of penalties for alleged copyright infringement.
And there aren't that many levels of court in the UK system, are there? Can't remember exactly how the civil system works -- and in my own country, too:-( -- but you're pretty much on the top rung of the ladder on your third or fourth visit either way I think. For an issue with fundamental implications for every software user and business in the country, that doesn't seem so inconceivable.
My understanding (and I could well be wrong on this...) is that C++-style strings are included as part of the Standard C++ Library, not as part of the Standard Template Library. The standard library contains the STL but not the other way around.
More or less. If you want the actual story, do a search for Stepanov, but basically the STL as a concept was invented completely independently of C++, it happened that C++ was the first decent language they found to implement those concepts, and given the match and some advocacy by a few C++ notables, much of the standard C++ library is based on the ideas of the STL.
How, exactly, did "standard" C++ look back about 3.5 years ago?!
Pretty much identical to how it looks now, since the standard was published in '98 and the version that became standard was around in '97.
What did you expect? Hell, many modern C++ features weren't even implemented by most available compilers in 1999.
I would hope (not expect, alas) that authors professing to teach C++ would make some vague attempt to do so in a correct and useful way, which this book apparently does not.
And yes, most decent C++ compilers did have reasonable support for the standard bits 'n' pieces by '99. VC++ 6, for example, though featuring a slightly crippled implementation of the standard library, provides perfectly serviceable implementations of string, vector, <iostream>, etc.
Speaking as someone who has helped out on beginners' C++ forums for years, I hate books like this. They typically teach C++ as it was 15 years ago, which is bad enough, and they make out that it's still that way, which is even worse. You only have to look at the average slashbot's response to any thread about C++ (how it doesn't feature garbage collection, is littered with buffer overrun vulnerabilities and memory leaks, etc.) to realise how little most people who think they know actually know. Now, guess why that might be...
They show up at your door with a warrant and several federal marshals.
We're talking about the UK (and the real world). Get off your delusional, US-centric high horse already.
It is very unlikely they could actually obtain the sort of access rights you're talking about, as they are not a law enforcement body. It is even less likely that they could do whatever they wanted to audit my company even if they were somehow able to gain access rights. They can take me to court for copyright infringement if they like, but when they lose (since I don't have any illegally copied software) it's very likely the court will award me costs. (Too bad we don't have punitive damages over here...) And make me pay for the audit? That isn't even written into the EULA, never mind any law I've ever seen.
Your post is nothing but paranoid FUD. Please go away now.
Even if they lose and you "win" by having them cover your legal expenses (not likely).... their "threat model" probably won't be impacted at all.
First of all, why do you say it is unlikely they would have to cover my legal expenses? That seems pretty routine in cases where a prosecution turns out to be malicious but without basis.
Secondly, their threat model might not be destroyed by Joe Businessman winning his case, but if a sufficiently high court finds that EULAs have no legal weight, the BSA and its supporters are pretty shafted. News would get out real quick, and everyone will be throwing the letters away, not just the smart ones. Not good for the BSA, that...
Yes, but are you willing risk a test case that brings a $250,000 and 5 years in prison, or whatever the exact copyright infringement penalty is, for every alleged illegal copy. (I doubt it too).
Why the hell not? I have no illegal software on my machines, and nothing they do, not even producing some disgruntled ex-employee, can prove otherwise.
And quit with the scare-mongering penalties and read the law already.
I take it that you didn't read all those EULAs barfed out at you during the installs.
Sure I did. Of course, whether they have any legal basis or not, and if so whether it confers rights on the BSA rather than the software vendor(s), are different questions. The BSA can find out in court, if they really want to know whether I've got any illegal software installed (I haven't) and they're prepared to risk a test case that could destroy their whole threat model (I doubt it).
...actually installed illegally pirated software, though. Show me a case where a group with genuinely bought software but a couple of misplaced certificates was successfully sued?
Microsoft is part of the BSA and in their agreement they can damm well do this.
Really? Show me the test case. EULAs are, to date, a pretty untested legal minefield anyway. Certain terms are widely expected to be found illegal under the relevant jurisdictions, however, and at the last count this was one of them. But you never know until that test case...
So how exactly do they propose to check up on me anyway? On what legal basis can they force me to let them into my business to perform an "audit" to their satisfaction? Who the hell do these people think they are anyway?
This is just the usual scare-mongering. It's about time someone stood up to people like this and made them produce some evidence and go to court. Better yet, let them go after a legit company, and sue them for some form of defamation afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah, clean compiles are for wimps. If it builds in debug configuration on one platform, that's enough to ship the release build on fifteen others, darnit.
In other news...
Microsoft have recently announced funding for a new research project into the history of space travel. This will build up to culminate in a series of "one-off" TV shows hosted by former X-Files cast members, which will prove conclusively that man has never been to the moon.
A court case against NASA is expected to follow shortly, alleging that other "one-off" TV shows hosted by the same former X-Files cast members and describing man's visit to the moon were faked, and that Microsoft's reputation as the number one supplier of moon-based products has been irreparably damaged.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled Microsoft bashing.
I have two points to make here.
Firstly, they didn't have a choice, but the US citizenry did.
Secondly, if you don't like the argument about citizens being responsible for their own government, perhaps you should stop large numbers of overly militant US citizens from using it as an excuse to justify the inevitable civilian casualties in your merry little war. I have heard exactly this argument -- "They have a choice, they could overthrow him if they wanted, so screw 'em if they don't" -- from several war advocates from the US recently.
I was pretty irate when I first heard they were going to do that (plus the max 12 hours in 24, max 2 hours at a time, etc. for dial-up). I very nearly moved ISPs that day, since I believe in voting with my wallet instead of bitching about stuff but doing nothing useful.
Interestingly enough, in spite of expecting to be quite a high demand user (my PC is usually on-line at home when I'm in, checking for mail, etc.) I haven't yet had a warning message about being within (I think it's) 35 hours of hitting my time cap. That being the case, I'm wondering who actually is getting upset about this except for those who spend all day playing P2P host. And frankly, doing that occasionally is one thing, but having it on all the time is a whole different level of use, and deserves to be charged accordingly.
By far the most annoying thing about BT Internet and a few others is that they cut you off after 2 hours of dial-up, even if you're in the middle of downloading a 20MB service pack, or playing an on-line game, or whatever. That just sucks, and their previously stated arguments for doing it (cutting down on the top percentile who leave things on-line all the time and use vastly more than their fair share of bandwidth) are now clearly bull if they lock you out after 150 hours in a month anyway.
See now, this is a big part of the problem with political discussions. The US administration did not just happen. It was elected (yeah, yeah, or not) by the US population. You can talk about buying votes all you like, but at the end of the day, money doesn't vote, citizens do. If they don't like the way they're being represented, they shouldn't have elected this goverment.
"Goal wazz", more or less. It's a traditional British word borrowed by another European nation a couple of years ago, apparently.
Sorry, we're too busy building up to a war on Iraq to go after actual terrorists threats.
Nah. The parent post was written by a standard, mark I "Java-biased C++-bashing weenie", a particularly tedious subtype of Programming Language Weenie whose sole purpose in life seems to be to post not-quite-accurate comments about C++ and Java with the sole aim of slagging off C++, whether or not said comments are actually relevant to the conversation at hand.
But thanks for the tip. :-)
By the way, I too am something of a programming language weenie, and quite familiar with the literature on formal type systems and such. However, I question the merit of even raising such issues in relation to languages such as C++ and Java. Neither language has a particularly pure type system, and it makes much more sense to compare and contrast corresponding features of those two (such as C++ templates and Java generics) than it does to have a dig at the fact that other languages have a theoretically sounder basis.
Thankfully, no. I have finally found a company that views its people as valuable assets and treats them accordingly. Both my interviewers when I was first applying got the reference to being karma-capped on slashdot, and I read it quite happily at my desk (my team leader/boss sitting at the one right behind me in an open plan office).
I don't take the piss by surfing on company time, and they're quite happy for me to read /. at lunch, or even <shock> surf during business hours to find useful information!
Yep, corporate slavery seems to be the accepted norm in some parts of the world.
Too bad. Some of us have a 37.5 hour week written into our contracts (this is pretty normal in the UK) and expect to work something approximating that amount of time (less normal, but I've never had a problem doing so). Strangely, we seem to get at least as much done as the people who work 60+ hour weeks, perhaps because for all of our 37.5 hours we're actually doing useful work, and not undoing the ****-ups we made in hours 8-12 of yesterday.
Of course, it takes a smart company to realise that extra hours does not equal extra profit, and a very smart one to actually force its employees to take breaks, holidays, etc. Few companies are that smart. (But those that are tend to be both nice places to work and very successful.)
Yes! Damn you Perl types and your "There's More Than One Way To Do It" heresy!!!!
One day, the great god S-expression will catch up with you and you'll get your comeuppance, mark my words...
It does seem to be a popular academic past-time. I suspect it's similar to the slashbot groupthink effect. Most of these people have the luxury of working in a theoretical world, where the sorts of practical issues that make C, C++ and their ilk so useful are not relevant. They then reinforce each other's beliefs and preconceptions when they discuss things, without outside influence to put the opposite point of view.
A couple of the researchers at the computer lab where I did my diploma were like this. (The lab has several well-known names from the ML world there, BTW, and functional programming is very much their thing.) I also saw a few lectures given by others in the department that touched on C and C++, and they were pretty similar to what you see in bad books and uninformed comments around here: based on the languages of 10-20 years ago, and with no effort made to even investigate how things might have changed since then.
It's the old problem: academia produces some potentially very useful theory, but never does anything practical with it, while industry labours along using pragmatic techniques that are decades behind the times, because it's too scared to move away from known safe ground and investigate the applications of academic theory for itself...
Exactly. The question is simply whether the weaknesses are actually important to how you're using the language. The answer is very different for an academic researcher and a full-time professional software developer.
That's one definition of generics, but hardly the only one in use in the programming world. "Polymorphism" is one of those fantastic words that has had so many meanings attached to it that it no longer means anything useful without further qualification. Templates in C++ can do a little more than boring old macros these days, too.
If you're going to troll, could you please at least provide some sort of supporting evidence? On paper, the Java implementation is similar to C++ templates but with the usual Java trade-off that some of the power is sacrificed to improve the simplicity. However, in this case, that leaves Java generics without several useful features, and consequently without the ability to do most of the useful tricks that leading edge C++ can do. How do you see Java's generics as better than C++ templates, other than being simpler, and using OO-style polymorphism (which isn't really a generics issue, it's a C++ type system vs. Java type system issue)?
I think we're on different wavelengths here. I'm talking about whether they can enforce an EULA condition, such that I'm forced to grant access so they can audit me. This is way before any judgement of penalties for alleged copyright infringement.
And there aren't that many levels of court in the UK system, are there? Can't remember exactly how the civil system works -- and in my own country, too :-( -- but you're pretty much on the top rung of the ladder on your third or fourth visit either way I think. For an issue with fundamental implications for every software user and business in the country, that doesn't seem so inconceivable.
More or less. If you want the actual story, do a search for Stepanov, but basically the STL as a concept was invented completely independently of C++, it happened that C++ was the first decent language they found to implement those concepts, and given the match and some advocacy by a few C++ notables, much of the standard C++ library is based on the ideas of the STL.
And yet, ironically enough, it's one of the few where this is not far from the truth. :-)
Pretty much identical to how it looks now, since the standard was published in '98 and the version that became standard was around in '97.
I would hope (not expect, alas) that authors professing to teach C++ would make some vague attempt to do so in a correct and useful way, which this book apparently does not.
And yes, most decent C++ compilers did have reasonable support for the standard bits 'n' pieces by '99. VC++ 6, for example, though featuring a slightly crippled implementation of the standard library, provides perfectly serviceable implementations of string, vector, <iostream>, etc.
Speaking as someone who has helped out on beginners' C++ forums for years, I hate books like this. They typically teach C++ as it was 15 years ago, which is bad enough, and they make out that it's still that way, which is even worse. You only have to look at the average slashbot's response to any thread about C++ (how it doesn't feature garbage collection, is littered with buffer overrun vulnerabilities and memory leaks, etc.) to realise how little most people who think they know actually know. Now, guess why that might be...
We're talking about the UK (and the real world). Get off your delusional, US-centric high horse already.
It is very unlikely they could actually obtain the sort of access rights you're talking about, as they are not a law enforcement body. It is even less likely that they could do whatever they wanted to audit my company even if they were somehow able to gain access rights. They can take me to court for copyright infringement if they like, but when they lose (since I don't have any illegally copied software) it's very likely the court will award me costs. (Too bad we don't have punitive damages over here...) And make me pay for the audit? That isn't even written into the EULA, never mind any law I've ever seen.
Your post is nothing but paranoid FUD. Please go away now.
First of all, why do you say it is unlikely they would have to cover my legal expenses? That seems pretty routine in cases where a prosecution turns out to be malicious but without basis.
Secondly, their threat model might not be destroyed by Joe Businessman winning his case, but if a sufficiently high court finds that EULAs have no legal weight, the BSA and its supporters are pretty shafted. News would get out real quick, and everyone will be throwing the letters away, not just the smart ones. Not good for the BSA, that...
Why the hell not? I have no illegal software on my machines, and nothing they do, not even producing some disgruntled ex-employee, can prove otherwise.
And quit with the scare-mongering penalties and read the law already.
Sure I did. Of course, whether they have any legal basis or not, and if so whether it confers rights on the BSA rather than the software vendor(s), are different questions. The BSA can find out in court, if they really want to know whether I've got any illegal software installed (I haven't) and they're prepared to risk a test case that could destroy their whole threat model (I doubt it).
That's nice. What are they going to do then?
...actually installed illegally pirated software, though. Show me a case where a group with genuinely bought software but a couple of misplaced certificates was successfully sued?
Really? Show me the test case. EULAs are, to date, a pretty untested legal minefield anyway. Certain terms are widely expected to be found illegal under the relevant jurisdictions, however, and at the last count this was one of them. But you never know until that test case...
...This is the BSA, in the UK, right?
So how exactly do they propose to check up on me anyway? On what legal basis can they force me to let them into my business to perform an "audit" to their satisfaction? Who the hell do these people think they are anyway?
This is just the usual scare-mongering. It's about time someone stood up to people like this and made them produce some evidence and go to court. Better yet, let them go after a legit company, and sue them for some form of defamation afterwards.