Being a long-time C++ software engineer (10+ years), the biggest thing that irritates me about C++ is backwards compatibility with C. I would love to have to explicitly cast everything, including between signed and unsigned scalars: in such a case, it is perfectly clear to the programmer when he is performing a type-mismatched comparison or assignment, something that has bitten me often in the past.
In sum: C++'s biggest problem is its C legacy. Tear it away, add real type-safety, and you have a language much more powerful and safer than Java.
I can't say I much enjoy many of the popular programs (The Apprentice, American Idol, Friends, etc.), but I do relish certain programs like MythBusters, The Simpsons (well, reruns of older episodes, at least), Family Guy, Frasier, Futurama, and The Sopranos. (And, of course, Yankees games.) It's not about being proud of watching TV: I am neither proud nor ashamed of it. I simply like certain programs, and am not going to stop watching them because some sanctimonious, teetotaling, neo-prohibitionist, self-denial-is-good crowd has decided that TV Is Bad(TM) along with lots of other things.
You know what? I like beer. I like farting. I like trucks, and (gasp!) SUV's. I like Slashdot (which, incidentally, seems much less intellectual than your average 2003 episode of The Simpsons). And I fucking like TV. If you don't like it, don't watch it: I don't judge you as stupid simply because you don't like TV. But don't tell me I'm somehow missing out on life or an inferior bag of mostly water because I spend an average of 2 hours a day watching TV. I know what I like better than you do, and watching TV is a welcome respite from work, home renovations, and ice hockey.
This sounds like another correlation vs. causality fallacy: is it not at least as likely that those who are willing to turn off their TV sets for a week are likely to be those who have already gotten sick of TV? Why the addiction implication?
It's the same reason Fox News and the Israelis call Palestinian bombers "homicide bombers" instead of the more accepted term "suicide bomber".
This has always irritated me about Fox News. I find Fox's conservative bias a refreshing alternative to CNN's liberal bias, but this one thing really irks me. The precise property of suicide bombers that makes them so unique is the fact that they kill themselves in addition to their targets. Fundamentally, all bombers are homicide bombers: the "homicide" modifier is redundant, and insufficient to describe these people.
It clearly falls under the purview of global government.
Yikes! Thank goodness the UN isn't actually a global government with sovereign power over anyone. The UN is basically a soap box for third-world dictators to scapegoat developed countries for the problems their own corrupt governments are actually responsible for. The UN really needs to be reformed (e.g., France out of the security council, Germany, Japan, and India in would be a better approximation of great powers; and of course countries without consensual governments should have no vote in the general assembly or be eligible to chair any committees), but I don't see this happening anytime soon.
However, even with reforms, the UN should have no power over the structure of the internet: the internet today is essentially just a large NAP of private networks, and has none of its own structure. Even the use of ICANN's private DNS servers by the vast majority of users on the internet is just convention, and any country or organization can run their own root servers and lobby others to use them. Any attempts to centrally control these systems will ultimately result in the system's primary users (those who will no doubt be screwed by the UN's dictator-centric model) routing around the regulations.
Bottom line: thank goodness the internet is peer-to-peer. The users truly have the power, and don't have to take it up the ass from a central authority.
Give me a break. As much as I can't stand Microsoft's business tactics, Bill Gates has given several hundred thousand dollars per day to charity, amortized over his entire lifetime. What have you done?
The reason I ask is that there are actual libertarians here (myself included) who see nothing wrong with a contract violation case going to court. I think you are stuck in the classic trap of seeing all slashdot readers as socialist slashbots: I assure you, there are quite distinct subgroups here.
Go get cable if you don't like the service Dish is giving you. Seriously. Explain to me exactly why you think Dish owes you squat.
Considering how people flail and pound on buttons
on
Hand-Powered Hardware?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
when playing Gameboys and other such devices, isn't it possible just to harness all the extra energy expended beyond that which is required to tell the device, "Yes, move up, and then left, and then..."? Don't mod this up to funny: I'm serious. Think of all the energy that is wasted by just heating the plastic, when it could go into powering the device in the first place.
Unless you need to print color, you can do better by going to eBay and buying a used laser printer that (a) will work with Linux without any fuss since it understands PCL and that (b) doesn't require expensive ink cartridge refills, as you can simply buy toner in bulk and refill the toner cartridge yourself every 5,000 sheets for very little money.
I myself got an fabu-tastic HP Laserjet 4L for $35 + shipping, and it has given me zero problems from day one. Great little printer, and no ink refills to pay for.
I don't know about the truth of that story, but there's a related story that IS true.
My friend Phil (MIT class of '96) was waiting for a "walk" signal at the crosswalk at lobby 7 one time. When the signal finally changed to "walk," he proceeded to walk out into the street, only to have a car screech to a halt next to him. He started pointing furiously at the "walk" light, but noticed that the driver was pointing furiously at the traffic light. Unbelievably, he saw it was green!
Apparently, the traffic light system was serving up both a walk AND a green at the same time!
If this wasn't an isolated event, your story may not be an urban legend after all...
Arms control works only when the most powerful parties are rational: back when the US and USSR were the only major nuclear powers, this was a true statement, as much as it pains me to say the USSR was "rational.":)
This is not true anymore: there are too many nuclear powers now, not all of whom want to sacrifice the benefits of being a major nuclear power on the altar of "arms control." Please tell me what you think is in it for them?
Good god, read between the lines, or at least look at my homepage. I don't think the world needs saving: I just want people to realize that they may make different choices in that regard if they understood how much it was costing them.
Just remember that everything carries a cost, including radical environmentalism. If you support making policy solely on the basis of someone's fears, then you'd better not whine when those policies cost you money, as they did in this case. Remember that saving the earth doesn't happen for free, and when you raise costs for those "greedy corporations," they just pass their cost right onto you, the consumer.
If the consumer really weren't benefitting, then they'd seek out alternatives: they do exist, as I'm sure you know. I've been using one for 9-1/2 years: Linux and associated alternative applications.
Despite the fact that I dislike Microsoft's tactics, it's hard to dispute that their dominance of the market has encouraged adoption of computing by the masses by making computers more useful through easy interoperation: people want to know that what they buy can operate well with others' equipment, so any barrier to this is a barrier to adoption of computing in general. Most of the geeks here (myself included) couldn't care less about how easy or hard it is to get Office data into a Linux spreadsheet, but we are a tiny, tiny minority of all people using computers.
Of course, standards would get us to Nirvana just as market dominance by MS is and allow the tiny minority of us who use something other than Windows to make full use of our computing power under our chosen environments; but there's hardly an economic or public benefit argument to be made for having the guv'mint do our dirty work and go after MS just because they don't make the lives of (generously) 5% of computer users easier.
The only convincing argument IMO for getting the government involved is to ensure that We the Taxpayers aren't getting screwed out of our money by MS: from this perspective, the government doesn't need to pursue litigation, but only needs to state that they will purchase only software that stores and transmits data in royalty-free formats so alternative vendors can be used effectively in price negotiations. At this point, MS would be required to patent-unencumber their file formats in order to get their software into federal offices, and thus into the offices of federal contractors, and from there into subcontractors, etc. I don't see this option being pursued. Why? It seems like it would get MS to play ball a lot more quickly than decades-long litigation.
Exactly when did Netscape ever work well on Linux?
All I remember is consistent crashing from Netscape Gold through the finally-put-down Netscape 4.x. It was the biggest piece of shit browser ever written precisely because its codebase was old (forked from NCSA Mosaic in 1994, which itself was much older) and non-extensible, yet more and more shit was thrust into it. It had to be rewritten, and all the Gecko-based browsers have been much more feature-complete and reliable for the past 2-3 years than Netscape ever was.
I use Galeon, and the thing basically never crashes. Back in 1999, I considered myself lucky if a particular version of Netscape 4.x only crashed once every half-hour.
GSM better? Hardly. CDMA is by far the superior standard from a technical standpoint, and yet it is starting to lose to imported GSM due to the incompetence of the providers here who adopted it. (Verizon seems to do a good job of it, but they're expensive and don't have a good phone selection. And *Sprint*... ugh, gawd are they terrible.)
Yes, I'm sure I will get plenty of replies stating that Vorbis support doesn't matter. Well, sucks for Apple: they're not getting my $400 because they don't support Ogg Vorbis, the format in which my 1,200 CD's/14,000 tracks are all encoded in. But these are the choices one must make, and they've made the calculation that they can do without Vorbis users' money. Time will tell whether this is a good calculation or not.
LOL... So, I'm actually libertarian, the primary differences between conservatives and libertarians being (a) libs have more faith in the free market and (b) libs want government to have no power over personal behavior that doesn't harm anyone else (e.g., marriage in general, not just gay marriage). FWIW, not all libertarians are pacifists, although the Libertarian Party would have you believe that.
But, I agree: you and I are still anomalies on slashdot. The number of leftist statist commie pinko whack-jobs on this site is incredible. Did everyone involved in the 60's peace movements go into IT?
So, please, mod this down too: I've got karma to burn.
I'd rather the US government devote itself to really rightful goals, like:
* Letting me keep more of the money I earn * Reducing spending on unnecessary stuff like space exploration, health care, poverty * Increasing funding to the military and courts to the proper levels * Getting out of the UN, since it obviously is not in our best interests to be a member
$1.5 billion to potentially benefit the entire country is better than $16 billion wasted on one city. It's too bad it didn't work out (pre-set flight lanes essentially required by the fuzziness of VOR make the whole system less efficient than it could be), but at least it was federal money wasted on a national system, not federal money wasted on a local system.
Slashdot Mirror
Being a long-time C++ software engineer (10+ years), the biggest thing that irritates me about C++ is backwards compatibility with C. I would love to have to explicitly cast everything, including between signed and unsigned scalars: in such a case, it is perfectly clear to the programmer when he is performing a type-mismatched comparison or assignment, something that has bitten me often in the past.
In sum: C++'s biggest problem is its C legacy. Tear it away, add real type-safety, and you have a language much more powerful and safer than Java.
I can't say I much enjoy many of the popular programs (The Apprentice, American Idol, Friends, etc.), but I do relish certain programs like MythBusters, The Simpsons (well, reruns of older episodes, at least), Family Guy, Frasier, Futurama, and The Sopranos. (And, of course, Yankees games.) It's not about being proud of watching TV: I am neither proud nor ashamed of it. I simply like certain programs, and am not going to stop watching them because some sanctimonious, teetotaling, neo-prohibitionist, self-denial-is-good crowd has decided that TV Is Bad(TM) along with lots of other things.
You know what? I like beer. I like farting. I like trucks, and (gasp!) SUV's. I like Slashdot (which, incidentally, seems much less intellectual than your average 2003 episode of The Simpsons). And I fucking like TV. If you don't like it, don't watch it: I don't judge you as stupid simply because you don't like TV. But don't tell me I'm somehow missing out on life or an inferior bag of mostly water because I spend an average of 2 hours a day watching TV. I know what I like better than you do, and watching TV is a welcome respite from work, home renovations, and ice hockey.
This sounds like another correlation vs. causality fallacy: is it not at least as likely that those who are willing to turn off their TV sets for a week are likely to be those who have already gotten sick of TV? Why the addiction implication?
It's the same reason Fox News and the Israelis call Palestinian bombers "homicide bombers" instead of the more accepted term "suicide bomber".
This has always irritated me about Fox News. I find Fox's conservative bias a refreshing alternative to CNN's liberal bias, but this one thing really irks me. The precise property of suicide bombers that makes them so unique is the fact that they kill themselves in addition to their targets. Fundamentally, all bombers are homicide bombers: the "homicide" modifier is redundant, and insufficient to describe these people.
> That is the same as GTK,
False. GTK is licensed under LGPL, which is far less restrictive. Do some research before you spout this drivel.
It clearly falls under the purview of global government.
Yikes! Thank goodness the UN isn't actually a global government with sovereign power over anyone. The UN is basically a soap box for third-world dictators to scapegoat developed countries for the problems their own corrupt governments are actually responsible for. The UN really needs to be reformed (e.g., France out of the security council, Germany, Japan, and India in would be a better approximation of great powers; and of course countries without consensual governments should have no vote in the general assembly or be eligible to chair any committees), but I don't see this happening anytime soon.
However, even with reforms, the UN should have no power over the structure of the internet: the internet today is essentially just a large NAP of private networks, and has none of its own structure. Even the use of ICANN's private DNS servers by the vast majority of users on the internet is just convention, and any country or organization can run their own root servers and lobby others to use them. Any attempts to centrally control these systems will ultimately result in the system's primary users (those who will no doubt be screwed by the UN's dictator-centric model) routing around the regulations.
Bottom line: thank goodness the internet is peer-to-peer. The users truly have the power, and don't have to take it up the ass from a central authority.
Cheers,
Kyle
...of the Elephant's Foot below reactor number four.
Give me a break. As much as I can't stand Microsoft's business tactics, Bill Gates has given several hundred thousand dollars per day to charity, amortized over his entire lifetime. What have you done?
The reason I ask is that there are actual libertarians here (myself included) who see nothing wrong with a contract violation case going to court. I think you are stuck in the classic trap of seeing all slashdot readers as socialist slashbots: I assure you, there are quite distinct subgroups here.
What makes you think the people complaining are libertarians?
Go get cable if you don't like the service Dish is giving you. Seriously. Explain to me exactly why you think Dish owes you squat.
when playing Gameboys and other such devices, isn't it possible just to harness all the extra energy expended beyond that which is required to tell the device, "Yes, move up, and then left, and then..."? Don't mod this up to funny: I'm serious. Think of all the energy that is wasted by just heating the plastic, when it could go into powering the device in the first place.
Unless you need to print color, you can do better by going to eBay and buying a used laser printer that (a) will work with Linux without any fuss since it understands PCL and that (b) doesn't require expensive ink cartridge refills, as you can simply buy toner in bulk and refill the toner cartridge yourself every 5,000 sheets for very little money.
I myself got an fabu-tastic HP Laserjet 4L for $35 + shipping, and it has given me zero problems from day one. Great little printer, and no ink refills to pay for.
I don't know about the truth of that story, but there's a related story that IS true.
My friend Phil (MIT class of '96) was waiting for a "walk" signal at the crosswalk at lobby 7 one time. When the signal finally changed to "walk," he proceeded to walk out into the street, only to have a car screech to a halt next to him. He started pointing furiously at the "walk" light, but noticed that the driver was pointing furiously at the traffic light. Unbelievably, he saw it was green!
Apparently, the traffic light system was serving up both a walk AND a green at the same time!
If this wasn't an isolated event, your story may not be an urban legend after all...
Arms control is dead, welcome new instability.
:)
Arms control works only when the most powerful parties are rational: back when the US and USSR were the only major nuclear powers, this was a true statement, as much as it pains me to say the USSR was "rational."
This is not true anymore: there are too many nuclear powers now, not all of whom want to sacrifice the benefits of being a major nuclear power on the altar of "arms control." Please tell me what you think is in it for them?
Good god, read between the lines, or at least look at my homepage. I don't think the world needs saving: I just want people to realize that they may make different choices in that regard if they understood how much it was costing them.
Just remember that everything carries a cost, including radical environmentalism. If you support making policy solely on the basis of someone's fears, then you'd better not whine when those policies cost you money, as they did in this case. Remember that saving the earth doesn't happen for free, and when you raise costs for those "greedy corporations," they just pass their cost right onto you, the consumer.
Sorry, but that is hardly insightful.
If the consumer really weren't benefitting, then they'd seek out alternatives: they do exist, as I'm sure you know. I've been using one for 9-1/2 years: Linux and associated alternative applications.
Despite the fact that I dislike Microsoft's tactics, it's hard to dispute that their dominance of the market has encouraged adoption of computing by the masses by making computers more useful through easy interoperation: people want to know that what they buy can operate well with others' equipment, so any barrier to this is a barrier to adoption of computing in general. Most of the geeks here (myself included) couldn't care less about how easy or hard it is to get Office data into a Linux spreadsheet, but we are a tiny, tiny minority of all people using computers.
Of course, standards would get us to Nirvana just as market dominance by MS is and allow the tiny minority of us who use something other than Windows to make full use of our computing power under our chosen environments; but there's hardly an economic or public benefit argument to be made for having the guv'mint do our dirty work and go after MS just because they don't make the lives of (generously) 5% of computer users easier.
The only convincing argument IMO for getting the government involved is to ensure that We the Taxpayers aren't getting screwed out of our money by MS: from this perspective, the government doesn't need to pursue litigation, but only needs to state that they will purchase only software that stores and transmits data in royalty-free formats so alternative vendors can be used effectively in price negotiations. At this point, MS would be required to patent-unencumber their file formats in order to get their software into federal offices, and thus into the offices of federal contractors, and from there into subcontractors, etc. I don't see this option being pursued. Why? It seems like it would get MS to play ball a lot more quickly than decades-long litigation.
until the government can properly regulate it
Who says the government has the power to regulate things like this, much less that it is "proper" for them to do so?
Exactly when did Netscape ever work well on Linux?
All I remember is consistent crashing from Netscape Gold through the finally-put-down Netscape 4.x. It was the biggest piece of shit browser ever written precisely because its codebase was old (forked from NCSA Mosaic in 1994, which itself was much older) and non-extensible, yet more and more shit was thrust into it. It had to be rewritten, and all the Gecko-based browsers have been much more feature-complete and reliable for the past 2-3 years than Netscape ever was.
I use Galeon, and the thing basically never crashes. Back in 1999, I considered myself lucky if a particular version of Netscape 4.x only crashed once every half-hour.
GSM better? Hardly. CDMA is by far the superior standard from a technical standpoint, and yet it is starting to lose to imported GSM due to the incompetence of the providers here who adopted it. (Verizon seems to do a good job of it, but they're expensive and don't have a good phone selection. And *Sprint*... ugh, gawd are they terrible.)
Yes, I'm sure I will get plenty of replies stating that Vorbis support doesn't matter. Well, sucks for Apple: they're not getting my $400 because they don't support Ogg Vorbis, the format in which my 1,200 CD's/14,000 tracks are all encoded in. But these are the choices one must make, and they've made the calculation that they can do without Vorbis users' money. Time will tell whether this is a good calculation or not.
LOL... So, I'm actually libertarian, the primary differences between conservatives and libertarians being (a) libs have more faith in the free market and (b) libs want government to have no power over personal behavior that doesn't harm anyone else (e.g., marriage in general, not just gay marriage). FWIW, not all libertarians are pacifists, although the Libertarian Party would have you believe that.
But, I agree: you and I are still anomalies on slashdot. The number of leftist statist commie pinko whack-jobs on this site is incredible. Did everyone involved in the 60's peace movements go into IT?
So, please, mod this down too: I've got karma to burn.
I'd rather the US government devote itself to really rightful goals, like:
* Letting me keep more of the money I earn
* Reducing spending on unnecessary stuff like space exploration, health care, poverty
* Increasing funding to the military and courts to the proper levels
* Getting out of the UN, since it obviously is not in our best interests to be a member
$1.5 billion to potentially benefit the entire country is better than $16 billion wasted on one city. It's too bad it didn't work out (pre-set flight lanes essentially required by the fuzziness of VOR make the whole system less efficient than it could be), but at least it was federal money wasted on a national system, not federal money wasted on a local system.