Oviously you've never manned a helpdesk. Many people don't even understand the basics of the web like URLs or site boundaries - let alone subtle distinctions like link authorship (distinctions which Microsoft may choose to blur in future).
VMWare is an emulator - kind of. I'm running it now, and it emulates most of the hardware (you only have to look at the Control Panel - "Display: VMWare"), but not the processor itself.
If it split dead center the portion below the center would right away fall at the rate of gravity and the part away from the earth would zoom away at a similar speed (though not accelerating of course).
The "rate of gravity" as you call it, is an accelaration not a speed. So what do you mean by "zoom away at a similar speed"??
Makes you wonder what's going on in MS Recruiting.
That's an interesting point. One man, even one as, ahem, talented as BillG himself, couldn't possibly shape the personalities of thousands of employees... could he??
This is all very well and good, but a far more immediately useful kind of interaction to be looking at would be interaction between medicines. This could save lives straight away. According to a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, more than 100,000 deaths per year are caused by adverse drug reactions - making it the fourth biggest killer in the US, after heart disease, cancer and stroke. See http://dmoz.org/Society/Issues/Health_and_Safety/I atrogenesis/
for more info.
By contrast, deaths due to traditional herbal remedies are so rare they're hard to find. I'm not dismissing modern medicine entirely - far from it - I'm just pointing out some disturbing facts.
So why are gene interactions so hot, yet medicine interactions so neglected in research? And why, for that matter do so few people know that they could substantially reduce their risk of heart disease and cancer by going vegetarian or vegan? Surely the governments of the world should be funding research and education on these two topics on a massive scale - it could save thousands upon thousands of lives - and even from a callous economic point of view, the savings in terms of medicaid and lost economic productivity due to ill-health would be huge! In fact, official guidelines still endorse a meat-based diet despite the well-known health risks, and there is NO serious attempt to co-ordinate drug safety information between regulatory bodies internationally. That's right, none - regulatory bodies in the UK often ignore bans in the US, and vice-versa. What's more, the support for even collating data on side effects of medicines at a government level is poor - particularly in the UK.
The reason is the same in both cases, and it's very simple. Profit. Profit for the drugs companies, to be precise. Pharamaceutical corps profit from ill-health, and they don't exactly relish the idea of their drugs getting banned or contraindicated for safety reasons, either. Campaign funds, and the revolving door between the FDA and the drugs/biotech industries helps keep the government in line. For more info see http://www.drrath.com/
Because, as Larry Wall said, "Persons of leisurely moral growth often confuse giving with taking."
Larry Wall was just making a not-particularly-intelligent flame. It was just a joke. I can't see how anyone could take that literally.
When was the last time you read someone saying "Aren't I magnanimous? Aren't I generous? I downloaded 100 mp3s yesterday!" or "What an evil bastard Steven King is - giving away free chapters of his latest book!" Surely, no-one literally confuses giving with taking.
Now, the ones who say "I'm [illegally] copying music to protest against the RIAA", may be confusing their own motivations (or they may not - after all, if a sufficiently large proportion of the population breaks a law, the law is made to look ridiculous, so it is in that sense a worthwhile thing to do) - but regardless, that would be a different sort of confusion.
The evidence that Java is proprietary is that Sun tried to push it as a formal standard but yanked it back every time a standards body tried to do the things that would make it a standard.
What evidence would that be? Did you sit on all the standards bodies involved? Or do you work at Sun? Either way, you must have some inside information most of us don't have access to. Withdrawing from the standards process could have been done for any number of reasons, and correlation doesn't imply causation.
Hence, "he" does not mean "that male," it means "that male or person of unknown gender."
That is a frequent misconception. Even if it was true in the past - which is debatable - it's no longer true today, because people take it to mean "that male". Even journalists now use "they" instead of "he" (although there are ways to rephrase some sentences to avoid having to face the problem in the first place). Newsflash: language evolves.
if you don't like the terms of the job you're in, quit
How about if you don't like the laws of your country, stop whining, move to another country. If no country meets your needs, start your own country on some uninhabited island!
If you don't like being defrauded, it's all your stupid fault. If you don't like it when someone breaks into your house, it's your stupid fault for not having enough security equipment. What - you don't own a gun? How do you expect to blow suspected criminals away if you don't have a gun??
If you don't like it when people break a contract, it's your stupid fault for trusting that they would keep to it anyway. If you don't like what someone says on Slashdot - including this comment - stop whining, don't read Slashdot. No one is forcing you to read it!
But, let's go further. Why don't we say to women who have been raped, if you don't like being raped you shouldn't have worn that short skirt? - Oh no, wait, some people do actually say that! After all, it's just evolutionary biology - any fool can see that Darwinism proves conclusively that the rapist is just acting out natural instincts and is therefore forgivable, whereas the woman who has been raped is, er, just wearing a short skirt to attract men, which is a natural thing to do... No wait... I think I got mixed up there somewhere. Anyway, the Taliban have the right idea - no provocative clothing.
Let's take it further. If you don't like being abused by your father, why don't you run away from home. If you don't like your babies being born with horrible deformities due to depleted uranium in the area, well, you shouldn't have been stupid enough to live there, should you?
If you are poor you are obviously too stupid to advance. Everyone in America can be as rich as Bill Gates through hard work, therefore the poor are just lazy and it's all their own fault. Simple logic. Any protestor who denies this is obviously a window-smashing Neanderthal. And if you don't like racism you obviously shouldn't have been born black - why don't you just get cosmetic surgery like Michael Jackson has, and quit whining!
This is the whole idea of "libertarianism" - blame the victim. The victim is always at fault, if the victim ever complains they are a "whiner"! (Except if the victim is rich, then they are a noble entrepeneur, "creating wealth". Even complaining about having to pay workers 20 cents more, or reducing CO2 emmissions by a tiny fraction, isn't "whining", it's... well, it's not "whining", anyway. I can't quite figure out that discrepancy. I think it must be some kind of unwritten rule of "libertarianism".)
So why won't the lot of you just quit whining!?
Including you so-called "libertarians" - you're the worst, selfish, spoilt brat whiners of them all!! Why don't you just move to another country if you hate the so-called "socialist" practices of the federal government so much and quit whining!
Hey, did you ever notice - "quit whining" might be taken as an extremely offensive flame. Well fancy that! I always thought it was a rational, objective assessment. Hey, you - I know your lover has just died because of an accident on the job, and you would like the government to prosecute those people directly responsible for manslaughter - but come on, get over it! Won't you just QUIT WHINING!
all you do when you pass regulations
What, like safety regulations which prevent deaths at work?
and whine to the government about your labor relations is make businesses more expensive to run, ergo less money to attract more employees, ergo fewer people paid less.
And I suppose the fact that less people will die on the job - if the laws are enforced, which they frequently aren't - means nothing to you? Remember, if unemployment is high in a given sector, so-called "low-skilled" workers are easy and cheap to replace if they happen to accidentally die. That's why safety standards are so low in sweatshops in many countries.
And, er... minimum wage laws? They're not going to make people be paid less! (excluding illegal wage levels and legal loopholes). I really don't think you can argue that.
It takes a view of software and literature as something that is meant to be *used*. Wrong.
Obviously it is meant to be used (or read, in the case of literature). Things which are not meant to be used are described as ornamental, decorative, etc. But anyway, whichever way you look at this, this is irrelevant to the point RMS is trying to make.
The usefulness of their software releases interests them insofar as it is useful in lining their pockets.
Obviously. Anyone with half a clue about business knows that - including RMS.
I'll make a wild stab as to the objection you're trying to make to "The Right To Read" - it's hard to see what your relevant point is, but I'll guess. Maybe you're saying that fair use is not in business interests.
Not necessarily so. What is in a business' interestes depends upon how their customers behave.
You don't even have to understand the concept of altruism to get this (I know some "libertarian" sheeple have a problem getting their heads round that concept). This is not essentially about altruism. RMS point is that is not in consumers' interests to have their fair use rights taken away, and that if they make enough fuss about it (via e.g. political action, market choices etc.), they might be able to preserve or enlarge their legal rights to share. NOTE: I'm talking about legal rights here, not some incoherent bollocks about "natural rights".
Is that too hard for you to understand? Do you now understand that you completely missed the point?
Also look at the RONDO project, which is more academic and aspect-oriented but takes up the same idea. Er, how about a link, let's see - you can find papers on it on researchindex.com - search for RONDO. Also aspect-oriented programming in general.
Yes, here is a simple example (in Java, which doesn't have friends) of where the lack of friends breaks modularity:
You need to implement a bidirectional relationship (assume you don't have an OODBMS or whatever that can automate this for you). Let's say that whenever you add a new Book to a Borrower's list of Borrowed Items, the Book object needs to be notified that it has been borrowed so that it can quickly return who currently has it (this is really for efficiency reasons only, but that may be very useful in e.g. a distributed environment).
You can't say
private void notifyIveBeenBorrowed() {...}
because that won't be callable from your Book class. But if Book is in another package, you have to make it public - but it should only be callable from Borrower. Even if it isn't in another package, you have to expose the method to all the other classes in your package. You could put the two classes in a package all by themselves, but that's a bit silly - and then what happens if you need another bidirectional relationship involving Book and some other class?
In the limit, a completely programmatic access control mechanism would probably be useful (please vote for the feature request I've filed in the sun java bug database for this!), but still, in my experience public and private seem to be suitable enough in the majority of cases.
Your single-sentence Slashdot comment gave me more clue about what Jiazzi is about than the whole of your website, which I found only slightly more informative than a Microsoft press release!
I would suggest that it would not only make it easier to appreciate the usefulness of Jiazzi, but would actually make it easier to understand it as a whole, if you considered what a detractor or confused newbie might say and then tried to respond to - or even pre-empt - those kind of comments. Here are some basic questions which you could answer (I am actually researching non-brittle component integration, so this is not just idle banter!):
Jiazzi is a component system that enables the construction of separately compiled and externally linked components in Java.
What does externally linked mean? External to what?
Jiazzi is not a Java language extension, instead it is an evolution of the complete Java environment that adds mechanisms for describing and linking components.
Er... why is it not an extension? Do you not introduce any new syntax? If it's not an extension, what is it? A preprocessor, a postprocessor, a style guide or set of patterns, or what?
Jiazzi allows the use of the OOP paradigm across component boundaries with components that import and export Java classes.
Why can't you use "the OOP paradigm across component boundaries" already? Just wrap components in objects for example. Of course then you may have crosscutting problems, but this is where AOP might come in.
The combination of these features in Jiazzi enables a revolutionary
solution to the extensibility problem with an open class pattern.
What is an open class pattern? What is it about the solution that makes it revolutionary?
A unit is analogous to a shared or dynamically-linked library.
I find this analogy almost content-free. A jar file is similar to a dll, but so what?
Groups of classes known as ports are connected together during linking. Using ports reduces the quantity of explicit connections between units, which makes the component system scale and easier to use.
Isn't this merely a simple extension of package-private classes?
"ls | grep | foo | more" was such a leap forward from manually naming and manipulating temporary files.
Maybe, but that's hardly revolutionary - the idea of composition of functions - f(g(h(x))) instead of t=h(x), u=g(t) etc. - precedes computers by a long way.
Interface specifications are our great contribution to the advancement of knowledge. They let us take a complex system, and simplify its behavior and definition by organizing it in terms of independent components.
Yes, they are a great contribution, but they are fundamentally shallow for many kinds of complex systems. This is because some problems have requirements (such as logging, synchronization, repeated metadata) which inherently cut accross more traditional decomposition units like classes and functions. This is why I believe aspect-oriented programming could well be the next big revolution in programming. (Disclaimer: I'm biased, I research this stuff at university). Any new language which doesn't take account of that risks being sidelined by those that do.
I believe he's referring to the court deliberately dragging its feet and then leaving literally a few hours for the recount to complete. This was a deliberate, calculated attempt to cheat by the Republican members of the Supreme Court. According to some reports, Gore would actually have won. The analogy with a sports game is invalid because there during time out the game clock is paused.
Slashdot Mirror
The "rate of gravity" as you call it, is an accelaration not a speed. So what do you mean by "zoom away at a similar speed"??
That's an interesting point. One man, even one as, ahem, talented as BillG himself, couldn't possibly shape the personalities of thousands of employees... could he??
By contrast, deaths due to traditional herbal remedies are so rare they're hard to find. I'm not dismissing modern medicine entirely - far from it - I'm just pointing out some disturbing facts.
So why are gene interactions so hot, yet medicine interactions so neglected in research? And why, for that matter do so few people know that they could substantially reduce their risk of heart disease and cancer by going vegetarian or vegan? Surely the governments of the world should be funding research and education on these two topics on a massive scale - it could save thousands upon thousands of lives - and even from a callous economic point of view, the savings in terms of medicaid and lost economic productivity due to ill-health would be huge! In fact, official guidelines still endorse a meat-based diet despite the well-known health risks, and there is NO serious attempt to co-ordinate drug safety information between regulatory bodies internationally. That's right, none - regulatory bodies in the UK often ignore bans in the US, and vice-versa. What's more, the support for even collating data on side effects of medicines at a government level is poor - particularly in the UK.
The reason is the same in both cases, and it's very simple. Profit. Profit for the drugs companies, to be precise. Pharamaceutical corps profit from ill-health, and they don't exactly relish the idea of their drugs getting banned or contraindicated for safety reasons, either. Campaign funds, and the revolving door between the FDA and the drugs/biotech industries helps keep the government in line. For more info see http://www.drrath.com/
Larry Wall was just making a not-particularly-intelligent flame. It was just a joke. I can't see how anyone could take that literally.
When was the last time you read someone saying "Aren't I magnanimous? Aren't I generous? I downloaded 100 mp3s yesterday!" or "What an evil bastard Steven King is - giving away free chapters of his latest book!" Surely, no-one literally confuses giving with taking.
Now, the ones who say "I'm [illegally] copying music to protest against the RIAA", may be confusing their own motivations (or they may not - after all, if a sufficiently large proportion of the population breaks a law, the law is made to look ridiculous, so it is in that sense a worthwhile thing to do) - but regardless, that would be a different sort of confusion.
What evidence would that be? Did you sit on all the standards bodies involved? Or do you work at Sun? Either way, you must have some inside information most of us don't have access to. Withdrawing from the standards process could have been done for any number of reasons, and correlation doesn't imply causation.
That is a frequent misconception. Even if it was true in the past - which is debatable - it's no longer true today, because people take it to mean "that male". Even journalists now use "they" instead of "he" (although there are ways to rephrase some sentences to avoid having to face the problem in the first place). Newsflash: language evolves.
See: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ian/Manifestoes/heVsThey.s html
How about if you don't like the laws of your country, stop whining, move to another country. If no country meets your needs, start your own country on some uninhabited island!
If you don't like being defrauded, it's all your stupid fault. If you don't like it when someone breaks into your house, it's your stupid fault for not having enough security equipment. What - you don't own a gun? How do you expect to blow suspected criminals away if you don't have a gun??
If you don't like it when people break a contract, it's your stupid fault for trusting that they would keep to it anyway. If you don't like what someone says on Slashdot - including this comment - stop whining, don't read Slashdot. No one is forcing you to read it!
But, let's go further. Why don't we say to women who have been raped, if you don't like being raped you shouldn't have worn that short skirt? - Oh no, wait, some people do actually say that! After all, it's just evolutionary biology - any fool can see that Darwinism proves conclusively that the rapist is just acting out natural instincts and is therefore forgivable, whereas the woman who has been raped is, er, just wearing a short skirt to attract men, which is a natural thing to do... No wait... I think I got mixed up there somewhere. Anyway, the Taliban have the right idea - no provocative clothing.
Let's take it further. If you don't like being abused by your father, why don't you run away from home. If you don't like your babies being born with horrible deformities due to depleted uranium in the area, well, you shouldn't have been stupid enough to live there, should you?
If you are poor you are obviously too stupid to advance. Everyone in America can be as rich as Bill Gates through hard work, therefore the poor are just lazy and it's all their own fault. Simple logic. Any protestor who denies this is obviously a window-smashing Neanderthal. And if you don't like racism you obviously shouldn't have been born black - why don't you just get cosmetic surgery like Michael Jackson has, and quit whining!
This is the whole idea of "libertarianism" - blame the victim. The victim is always at fault, if the victim ever complains they are a "whiner"! (Except if the victim is rich, then they are a noble entrepeneur, "creating wealth". Even complaining about having to pay workers 20 cents more, or reducing CO2 emmissions by a tiny fraction, isn't "whining", it's... well, it's not "whining", anyway. I can't quite figure out that discrepancy. I think it must be some kind of unwritten rule of "libertarianism".)
So why won't the lot of you just quit whining!?
Including you so-called "libertarians" - you're the worst, selfish, spoilt brat whiners of them all!! Why don't you just move to another country if you hate the so-called "socialist" practices of the federal government so much and quit whining!
Hey, did you ever notice - "quit whining" might be taken as an extremely offensive flame. Well fancy that! I always thought it was a rational, objective assessment. Hey, you - I know your lover has just died because of an accident on the job, and you would like the government to prosecute those people directly responsible for manslaughter - but come on, get over it! Won't you just QUIT WHINING!
all you do when you pass regulations
What, like safety regulations which prevent deaths at work?
and whine to the government about your labor relations is make businesses more expensive to run, ergo less money to attract more employees, ergo fewer people paid less.
And I suppose the fact that less people will die on the job - if the laws are enforced, which they frequently aren't - means nothing to you? Remember, if unemployment is high in a given sector, so-called "low-skilled" workers are easy and cheap to replace if they happen to accidentally die. That's why safety standards are so low in sweatshops in many countries.
And, er... minimum wage laws? They're not going to make people be paid less! (excluding illegal wage levels and legal loopholes). I really don't think you can argue that.
Obviously it is meant to be used (or read, in the case of literature). Things which are not meant to be used are described as ornamental, decorative, etc. But anyway, whichever way you look at this, this is irrelevant to the point RMS is trying to make.
The usefulness of their software releases interests them insofar as it is useful in lining their pockets.
Obviously. Anyone with half a clue about business knows that - including RMS.
I'll make a wild stab as to the objection you're trying to make to "The Right To Read" - it's hard to see what your relevant point is, but I'll guess. Maybe you're saying that fair use is not in business interests.
Not necessarily so. What is in a business' interestes depends upon how their customers behave.
You don't even have to understand the concept of altruism to get this (I know some "libertarian" sheeple have a problem getting their heads round that concept). This is not essentially about altruism. RMS point is that is not in consumers' interests to have their fair use rights taken away, and that if they make enough fuss about it (via e.g. political action, market choices etc.), they might be able to preserve or enlarge their legal rights to share. NOTE: I'm talking about legal rights here, not some incoherent bollocks about "natural rights".
Is that too hard for you to understand? Do you now understand that you completely missed the point?
You need to implement a bidirectional relationship (assume you don't have an OODBMS or whatever that can automate this for you). Let's say that whenever you add a new Book to a Borrower's list of Borrowed Items, the Book object needs to be notified that it has been borrowed so that it can quickly return who currently has it (this is really for efficiency reasons only, but that may be very useful in e.g. a distributed environment).
You can't say
private void notifyIveBeenBorrowed() {...}
because that won't be callable from your Book class. But if Book is in another package, you have to make it public - but it should only be callable from Borrower. Even if it isn't in another package, you have to expose the method to all the other classes in your package. You could put the two classes in a package all by themselves, but that's a bit silly - and then what happens if you need another bidirectional relationship involving Book and some other class?
In the limit, a completely programmatic access control mechanism would probably be useful (please vote for the feature request I've filed in the sun java bug database for this!), but still, in my experience public and private seem to be suitable enough in the majority of cases.
I would suggest that it would not only make it easier to appreciate the usefulness of Jiazzi, but would actually make it easier to understand it as a whole, if you considered what a detractor or confused newbie might say and then tried to respond to - or even pre-empt - those kind of comments. Here are some basic questions which you could answer (I am actually researching non-brittle component integration, so this is not just idle banter!):
Jiazzi is a component system that enables the construction of separately compiled and externally linked components in Java.
What does externally linked mean? External to what?
Jiazzi is not a Java language extension, instead it is an evolution of the complete Java environment that adds mechanisms for describing and linking components.
Er... why is it not an extension? Do you not introduce any new syntax? If it's not an extension, what is it? A preprocessor, a postprocessor, a style guide or set of patterns, or what?
Jiazzi allows the use of the OOP paradigm across component boundaries with components that import and export Java classes.
Why can't you use "the OOP paradigm across component boundaries" already? Just wrap components in objects for example. Of course then you may have crosscutting problems, but this is where AOP might come in.
The combination of these features in Jiazzi enables a revolutionary solution to the extensibility problem with an open class pattern.
What is an open class pattern? What is it about the solution that makes it revolutionary?
A unit is analogous to a shared or dynamically-linked library.
I find this analogy almost content-free. A jar file is similar to a dll, but so what?
Groups of classes known as ports are connected together during linking. Using ports reduces the quantity of explicit connections between units, which makes the component system scale and easier to use.
Isn't this merely a simple extension of package-private classes?
Maybe, but that's hardly revolutionary - the idea of composition of functions - f(g(h(x))) instead of t=h(x), u=g(t) etc. - precedes computers by a long way.
Interface specifications are our great contribution to the advancement of knowledge. They let us take a complex system, and simplify its behavior and definition by organizing it in terms of independent components.
Yes, they are a great contribution, but they are fundamentally shallow for many kinds of complex systems. This is because some problems have requirements (such as logging, synchronization, repeated metadata) which inherently cut accross more traditional decomposition units like classes and functions. This is why I believe aspect-oriented programming could well be the next big revolution in programming. (Disclaimer: I'm biased, I research this stuff at university). Any new language which doesn't take account of that risks being sidelined by those that do.