The words C spaghetti code I've ever seen is simple compared to the horror of trying to figure out just what an object-oriented overgrown jungle is doing. Simply figuring out what code path is actually being followed can be nigh-impossible, thanks to interfaces and function overloading.
Part of the problem is that while OO languages can be powerful, they require serious study of design patterns and judicious application of object principles in order to achieve maximum value. When people approach OO in a procedural sort of way, with lots of switch statement smell, direct coupling, bad abstractions, etc then the result very often is worse than simply using a procedural approach. It takes some effort and skill to really grok OO and get the best out of it, but well written OO software and libraries can be quite powerful and a pleasure to work with.
Of course, C++ is in a class of its own here, with code splattered around the header and source files here and there.
IMHO, C++ (which was the first serious language that I learned) always suffered from the "bolted on" feel of the OO parts, especially when compared to later efforts like Java and.NET languages. Newer languages, such as Java and C#, have really shown how much more can be done when OO is planned into the language and properly accommodated from the start.
The 'C' defenders waste no time I see. If you were to ask 1000 average software developers currently employed in business software development what their language of choice is, I don't think that you would hear 'C' very often as an answer. I don't want to be messing around with malloc, pointer arithmetic, bit shifting, and other low level stuff when I write a business application. The boss doesn't care if assembler is Turing complete, he cares about making release on time and budget. If you chose 'C' as your application language then you will still be writing libraries long after most of your competitors have shipped. The 'C' language has its uses, to be sure, but honestly, business application development is no longer one of them in the substantial majority of cases.
or should we just call it the "Great Leap Forward"
Well, we aren't being forced to wear identical Mao jackets or being marched out into the countryside to grow basic foodstuffs with hand tools and ox carts while cheap loudspeakers shout slogans like, "Twenty years progress in a single day!". So it hasn't exactly reached the dire level of an American Cultural Revolution, at least not yet anyway.
Spoken like someone who has never owned a business, but this can be shown to be false even in abstraction. Consider the iterated prisoner's dilema game where the optimal strategy is actually tit for tat and NOT always being unfair. Business is like the iterated prisoner's dilema, if you constantly screw over every customer, supplier, and even competitors then you will be retaliated against until no longer in business. If what you said was true then the world would be completely run by the biggest assholes which, despite present appearances and common perceptions, isn't really the case. It's like Bob Marley sang, "You can fool some people sometimes, but you can't fool all the people all the time."
Would the overhead of allocating funds be greater than the reward? (always a question in government bullucracy)
Government spending is third parties (bureaucrats) spending other people's money (taxpayer's money) on still other people (beneficiaries) with little or no regard to profit or loss. This is the most wasteful and inefficient type of spending there is. The left likes to say that corporations don't do any better, but they ignore the main difference. If a corporation always loses money then it eventually folds (at least when governments don't bail them out, but that is a whole different gripe) and goes under. Governments can tax, spend, and print money and never go bankrupt (at least in theory, although Zimbabwe is testing the practical limits of hyperinflation as we speak and the results are NOT encouraging). It is fear of loss and motivation of gain which keeps corporations and individuals sharp and alert. Without those elements, we might all be as bad at spending as our children and our government.
How would we be sure the right people get the money, and not 'fakes'?
That is a tough one. I don't really have a good answer. However, I DO know that I DON'T like the idea of the government picking winners and losers. Perhaps they could ask Slashdot maybe and we could moderate the project bids?
How do we make sure projects continue to be free after they stop getting government funding?
Licensing (ala GPL) ensures that. Use of licenses from an approved list and mandatory distributions could be a prerequisite for receiving funding.
because allowing contracts of adhesion (like EULAs) signed by non-lawyers in casual circumstances to extract those kinds of concessions from the parties would result in the complete breakdown of society.
I suppose it depends upon what you mean by society. There was a time, before lawyers became widely available, when problems were settled at sword point which, despite obvious drawbacks, did tend to settle arguments quickly and permanently. Times may not have been modern back then, but even so not everyone lived like Grognak the Barbarian. We could all do with a bit less suing and a bit more sucking it up here in this country, that's for sure.
I have some limited exposure to the.NET framework, and it has perhaps a half-dozen APIs for threading, and the documentation is riddled with exposed interfaces that have the note "Do not use. Not safe. bullet in the brain pan squish" in it.
There are deprecated things here and there in the core libraries, just like in Java, but it is really only in the non-core, beta, and Microsoft only libraries that you see a lot of old interfaces or changes from version to version (as one might expect). In the core libraries, which are implemented by Mono and DotGNU for you open source promoters, the organization of APIs is actually quite good. In fact, in many ways Microsoft borrowed heavily from Java (even the class names are shared in most of the basic stuff) although.NET brought many improvements as well (again, not all original, but few things really are in programming these days). I don't know about you, but I think that Java and.NET (virtual machines, common language runtimes, managed and garbage collected memory, etc...) are the future of general purpose, non-specialized, programming and particularly so for common needs.
I can only imagine the hell a proper programmer endures in developing truly complex applications for.NET
Welcome to modern object-oriented serious software development. I have done it professionally for six(6) years now and while it can be difficult at times to hit the sweet spot (particularly on the first iteration) a lot of what is done in modern software development would just not be feasible for most business applications using more primitive languages such as C (note that I said NOT feasible, I didn't say impossible). The general purpose languages, like Java and.NET, complete with everything and the kitchen sink libraries are extremely powerful, but with power comes complexity so its a trade-off (like so many things in this business).
The important thing is to realize that platforms like Java and.NET are by their very nature abstractions and abstractions allow us to be less concerned with what OS the code actually runs on, which most of the time for most programs is a good thing. I am not going to try and defend Windows against Linux, but my point is that.NET shouldn't just be lumped in as "part of Windows" because it really is and can be so much more than that. In fact, if it wasn't for.NET I believe that Microsoft would already have lost out completely to Linux, open source, and Java.
That allows LLCs to go on wanton suing binges like this and never have to face the consequences of losing
The real world is full of consequences, some of them settled "out of court", for pissing off the wrong people. Those who use the legal system as a club to beat others into submission should be wary of unintended consequences, the world can be a dangerous place after all and particularly so when one plays for high stakes.
If even one company, Novell for example, can demonstrate prior art then the patent can be busted for everyone. Not sure if Novell can then turn around and patent the idea, but I suspect the answer is probably no because the idea has been out in the open for a while now and just because one is the first to invent and use something doesn't mean that one can go back and patent it years after the fact if they failed to do so from the start (IANAL, but I think that this is generally how it works).
There aren't a lot of aircraft that'll run well on less than avgas, and avgas is very expensive.
That is mainly due to poor availability of alternative aircraft engines with numerous advantages over piston engines for light aircraft use. For example, the Wankel rotary engine has a number of desirable aircraft features, including ability to accept and run on lower octaine fuel without loss of power, high power to weight ration, ability to continue running even when severely overheated, smaller frontal cross section, etc...from the wiki article:
"In addition to the enhanced reliability by virtue of the complete removal of this reciprocating stress on internal parts, the engine is constructed with an iron rotor within a housing made of aluminium, which has greater thermal expansion. This ensures that even a severely overheated Wankel engine cannot seize, as would likely occur in an overheated piston engine. This is a substantial safety benefit in aircraft use since no valves can burn out."
Not collectively, that is true. However, they can make a huge difference at the individual level, provided that one is savvy enough to configure and use a Bayesian filtering tool, such as SpamBayes. Most people don't have the same non-spam keywords or patterns in their regular e-mails so the spammers are not able to poison filters on a large scale when individuals use personal spam filtering. Spam will never go away in the global sense because the world will never run out of idiots so the best that we can do as individuals is to use the technology at our disposal to limit our personal exposure (I haven't seen a spam in my inbox for months, and it is now a very rare occurance for one to slip past my filters).
Since I am not a French citizen, nor have I lived in France I cannot say how good or bad the present private highway system in France is from personal experience, but the highways in France have been privatized for some time now and the fact that they are private does not seem to be a big issue in France. Perhaps they eat more locally grown produce there so the highway costs are not as much factored into food purchases? Whatever the case may be the French seem to be in no hurry to nationalize their highway system, so draw your own conclusions from that.
They probably should be tacked onto the power bill, but then everyone would piss and moan about how only wealthy people can afford to live like most middle class Americans do today. If everyone on the planet lived like Americans do today then it would take dozens of planets to provide all of the resources. There is going to be a day of reckoning, sooner or later (probably with some violence involved), when the accounts are balanced and we all pay our dues.
so most people just don't know it and don't factor it into their buying decisions
They don't factor it into their buying decisions because price controls make power in California too cheap, or cheaper than it should be, which leads to excessive demand which causes brownouts, power alerts, and bullshit public service announcements to turn up the thermostat and turn down the AC when the temperature starts climbing past 85 degrees. People are not altruistic, they are selfish and if you want people to conserve a scarce resource, whether that be water or electricity or whatever, then you have to charge people what it costs to provide. If people pay too little then they value it too little and they don't give a crap that their 100 inch plasma TV uses an extra 200 watts because hey, power is cheap and why should I conserve just so that my neighbor can turn up the AC and watch their TV anyway? What is in it for me?
Investing in anything that carries any risk whatsoever is a gamble.
If you want to take it to that extreme than every choice that you make in your life, even whether or not to get out of bed (or not) in the morning, involves risk. If you choose NOT to invest in anything then there is risk. There is risk either way. The rational response it to take steps to minimize the risk and maximize the return and investing is one way, perhaps the best way, to do that. My concern is that people who believe the "investing is gambling" mantra will NOT invest their money and then demand to be taken care of when they are old as if they are entitled to a share of my savings.
The Governator of Caleefoorneeah would rather that you did 500 sit ups instead of watching TV so this is his secret plan to discourage you from purchasing one.
Alright, you continue to do whatever you want with your money, invest it or not, and I will do likewise, but please don't cross the finish line of your productive working years at age 65 broke with no savings and say, "Ok government...now take care of me".
Just once, I've love to hear a die-hard libertarian explain how privatized roads would work. Just once.
They work quite well and in France of all places (hardly a Libertarian paradise). There are 1,00,960 km of roads in France and unlike many other countries, most of them are toll and operated by private companies such as Société des Autoroutes de Paris Normandie (SAPN). Now, before you respond, "Well, nobody drives in France" it is important to realize that France is among the most car dependent countries in Europe with 937 billion vehicle kilometers travelled in 2005 (85% by car). Despite this extensive private road network the public transport in France, as in many other developed EU states, is excellent (particularly by American standards) with high speed rail service, trams, and light railways providing extensive connections.
Now obviously it is not practical to privatize every last minor road and many forms of public transportation, street cars and buses for example, share the same local road networks as private vehicles. However, the example in France demonstrates that a quality network of highways and even regional roads can be maintained quite well by private enterprise. Indeed, that is more equitable. Why should people who never use the Highways pay for them? If they only take the bus and use trains or airplanes for longer trips then why should they pay for highways with their taxes?
The problem comes when people on both sides try to paint the issue of public vs private roads as an all or nothing proposition without acknowledging that a balance of the two is really what yields the best results.
While it is possible to approach investing in the same way that one approaches gambling the idea that Investing == Gambling is one of the most persistent and damaging ideas to enjoy wide currency among the non-investor classes of society. The definitions taken from the following article are instructive:
Investing is any activity in which money is put at risk for the purpose of making a profit, and which is characterized by some or most of the following (in approximately descending order of importance): sufficient research has been conducted; the odds are favorable; the behavior is risk-averse; a systematic approach is being taken; emotions such as greed and fear play no role; the activity is ongoing and done as part of a long-term plan; the activity is not motivated solely by entertainment or compulsion; ownership of something tangible is involved; a net positive economic effect results.
Gambling is any activity in which money is put at risk for the purpose of making a profit, and which is characterized by some or most of the following (in approximately descending order of importance): little or no research has been conducted; the odds are unfavorable; the behavior is risk-seeking; an unsystematic approach is being taken; emotions such as greed and fear play a role; the activity is a discrete event or series of discrete events not done as part of a long-term plan; the activity is significantly motivated by entertainment or compulsion; ownership of something tangible is not involved; no net economic effect results.
Slashdot Mirror
The words C spaghetti code I've ever seen is simple compared to the horror of trying to figure out just what an object-oriented overgrown jungle is doing. Simply figuring out what code path is actually being followed can be nigh-impossible, thanks to interfaces and function overloading.
Part of the problem is that while OO languages can be powerful, they require serious study of design patterns and judicious application of object principles in order to achieve maximum value. When people approach OO in a procedural sort of way, with lots of switch statement smell, direct coupling, bad abstractions, etc then the result very often is worse than simply using a procedural approach. It takes some effort and skill to really grok OO and get the best out of it, but well written OO software and libraries can be quite powerful and a pleasure to work with.
Of course, C++ is in a class of its own here, with code splattered around the header and source files here and there.
IMHO, C++ (which was the first serious language that I learned) always suffered from the "bolted on" feel of the OO parts, especially when compared to later efforts like Java and .NET languages. Newer languages, such as Java and C#, have really shown how much more can be done when OO is planned into the language and properly accommodated from the start.
The 'C' defenders waste no time I see. If you were to ask 1000 average software developers currently employed in business software development what their language of choice is, I don't think that you would hear 'C' very often as an answer. I don't want to be messing around with malloc, pointer arithmetic, bit shifting, and other low level stuff when I write a business application. The boss doesn't care if assembler is Turing complete, he cares about making release on time and budget. If you chose 'C' as your application language then you will still be writing libraries long after most of your competitors have shipped. The 'C' language has its uses, to be sure, but honestly, business application development is no longer one of them in the substantial majority of cases.
or should we just call it the "Great Leap Forward"
Well, we aren't being forced to wear identical Mao jackets or being marched out into the countryside to grow basic foodstuffs with hand tools and ox carts while cheap loudspeakers shout slogans like, "Twenty years progress in a single day!". So it hasn't exactly reached the dire level of an American Cultural Revolution, at least not yet anyway.
Being unfair is inherently to your advantage!
Spoken like someone who has never owned a business, but this can be shown to be false even in abstraction. Consider the iterated prisoner's dilema game where the optimal strategy is actually tit for tat and NOT always being unfair. Business is like the iterated prisoner's dilema, if you constantly screw over every customer, supplier, and even competitors then you will be retaliated against until no longer in business. If what you said was true then the world would be completely run by the biggest assholes which, despite present appearances and common perceptions, isn't really the case. It's like Bob Marley sang, "You can fool some people sometimes, but you can't fool all the people all the time."
Would the overhead of allocating funds be greater than the reward? (always a question in government bullucracy)
Government spending is third parties (bureaucrats) spending other people's money (taxpayer's money) on still other people (beneficiaries) with little or no regard to profit or loss. This is the most wasteful and inefficient type of spending there is. The left likes to say that corporations don't do any better, but they ignore the main difference. If a corporation always loses money then it eventually folds (at least when governments don't bail them out, but that is a whole different gripe) and goes under. Governments can tax, spend, and print money and never go bankrupt (at least in theory, although Zimbabwe is testing the practical limits of hyperinflation as we speak and the results are NOT encouraging). It is fear of loss and motivation of gain which keeps corporations and individuals sharp and alert. Without those elements, we might all be as bad at spending as our children and our government.
How would we be sure the right people get the money, and not 'fakes'?
That is a tough one. I don't really have a good answer. However, I DO know that I DON'T like the idea of the government picking winners and losers. Perhaps they could ask Slashdot maybe and we could moderate the project bids?
How do we make sure projects continue to be free after they stop getting government funding?
Licensing (ala GPL) ensures that. Use of licenses from an approved list and mandatory distributions could be a prerequisite for receiving funding.
because allowing contracts of adhesion (like EULAs) signed by non-lawyers in casual circumstances to extract those kinds of concessions from the parties would result in the complete breakdown of society.
I suppose it depends upon what you mean by society. There was a time, before lawyers became widely available, when problems were settled at sword point which, despite obvious drawbacks, did tend to settle arguments quickly and permanently. Times may not have been modern back then, but even so not everyone lived like Grognak the Barbarian. We could all do with a bit less suing and a bit more sucking it up here in this country, that's for sure.
I have some limited exposure to the .NET framework, and it has perhaps a half-dozen APIs for threading, and the documentation is riddled with exposed interfaces that have the note "Do not use. Not safe. bullet in the brain pan squish" in it.
There are deprecated things here and there in the core libraries, just like in Java, but it is really only in the non-core, beta, and Microsoft only libraries that you see a lot of old interfaces or changes from version to version (as one might expect). In the core libraries, which are implemented by Mono and DotGNU for you open source promoters, the organization of APIs is actually quite good. In fact, in many ways Microsoft borrowed heavily from Java (even the class names are shared in most of the basic stuff) although .NET brought many improvements as well (again, not all original, but few things really are in programming these days). I don't know about you, but I think that Java and .NET (virtual machines, common language runtimes, managed and garbage collected memory, etc...) are the future of general purpose, non-specialized, programming and particularly so for common needs.
I can only imagine the hell a proper programmer endures in developing truly complex applications for .NET
Welcome to modern object-oriented serious software development. I have done it professionally for six(6) years now and while it can be difficult at times to hit the sweet spot (particularly on the first iteration) a lot of what is done in modern software development would just not be feasible for most business applications using more primitive languages such as C (note that I said NOT feasible, I didn't say impossible). The general purpose languages, like Java and .NET, complete with everything and the kitchen sink libraries are extremely powerful, but with power comes complexity so its a trade-off (like so many things in this business).
The important thing is to realize that platforms like Java and .NET are by their very nature abstractions and abstractions allow us to be less concerned with what OS the code actually runs on, which most of the time for most programs is a good thing. I am not going to try and defend Windows against Linux, but my point is that .NET shouldn't just be lumped in as "part of Windows" because it really is and can be so much more than that. In fact, if it wasn't for .NET I believe that Microsoft would already have lost out completely to Linux, open source, and Java.
That's the trouble with browsing at +1...now I have to imagine what kind of comment that was a response to...
Most of the time it's better just to leave it at that...
That allows LLCs to go on wanton suing binges like this and never have to face the consequences of losing
The real world is full of consequences, some of them settled "out of court", for pissing off the wrong people. Those who use the legal system as a club to beat others into submission should be wary of unintended consequences, the world can be a dangerous place after all and particularly so when one plays for high stakes.
If even one company, Novell for example, can demonstrate prior art then the patent can be busted for everyone. Not sure if Novell can then turn around and patent the idea, but I suspect the answer is probably no because the idea has been out in the open for a while now and just because one is the first to invent and use something doesn't mean that one can go back and patent it years after the fact if they failed to do so from the start (IANAL, but I think that this is generally how it works).
There aren't a lot of aircraft that'll run well on less than avgas, and avgas is very expensive.
That is mainly due to poor availability of alternative aircraft engines with numerous advantages over piston engines for light aircraft use. For example, the Wankel rotary engine has a number of desirable aircraft features, including ability to accept and run on lower octaine fuel without loss of power, high power to weight ration, ability to continue running even when severely overheated, smaller frontal cross section, etc...from the wiki article:
"In addition to the enhanced reliability by virtue of the complete removal of this reciprocating stress on internal parts, the engine is constructed with an iron rotor within a housing made of aluminium, which has greater thermal expansion. This ensures that even a severely overheated Wankel engine cannot seize, as would likely occur in an overheated piston engine. This is a substantial safety benefit in aircraft use since no valves can burn out."
Filters will never solve the spam problem.
Not collectively, that is true. However, they can make a huge difference at the individual level, provided that one is savvy enough to configure and use a Bayesian filtering tool, such as SpamBayes. Most people don't have the same non-spam keywords or patterns in their regular e-mails so the spammers are not able to poison filters on a large scale when individuals use personal spam filtering. Spam will never go away in the global sense because the world will never run out of idiots so the best that we can do as individuals is to use the technology at our disposal to limit our personal exposure (I haven't seen a spam in my inbox for months, and it is now a very rare occurance for one to slip past my filters).
Is will it be able to run Windows Vista?
Driver 1 crushes the McGriddle into the carpeting and pours the McCoffee liberally over the central console before continuing on to work...
Why do people move out to the country if they don't want it to be like the country?
To get away from all of those annoying city folk who are noisy, rude, and leave their lights on all of the time...oh wait.
Since I am not a French citizen, nor have I lived in France I cannot say how good or bad the present private highway system in France is from personal experience, but the highways in France have been privatized for some time now and the fact that they are private does not seem to be a big issue in France. Perhaps they eat more locally grown produce there so the highway costs are not as much factored into food purchases? Whatever the case may be the French seem to be in no hurry to nationalize their highway system, so draw your own conclusions from that.
They probably should be tacked onto the power bill, but then everyone would piss and moan about how only wealthy people can afford to live like most middle class Americans do today. If everyone on the planet lived like Americans do today then it would take dozens of planets to provide all of the resources. There is going to be a day of reckoning, sooner or later (probably with some violence involved), when the accounts are balanced and we all pay our dues.
so most people just don't know it and don't factor it into their buying decisions
They don't factor it into their buying decisions because price controls make power in California too cheap, or cheaper than it should be, which leads to excessive demand which causes brownouts, power alerts, and bullshit public service announcements to turn up the thermostat and turn down the AC when the temperature starts climbing past 85 degrees. People are not altruistic, they are selfish and if you want people to conserve a scarce resource, whether that be water or electricity or whatever, then you have to charge people what it costs to provide. If people pay too little then they value it too little and they don't give a crap that their 100 inch plasma TV uses an extra 200 watts because hey, power is cheap and why should I conserve just so that my neighbor can turn up the AC and watch their TV anyway? What is in it for me?
Investing in anything that carries any risk whatsoever is a gamble.
If you want to take it to that extreme than every choice that you make in your life, even whether or not to get out of bed (or not) in the morning, involves risk. If you choose NOT to invest in anything then there is risk. There is risk either way. The rational response it to take steps to minimize the risk and maximize the return and investing is one way, perhaps the best way, to do that. My concern is that people who believe the "investing is gambling" mantra will NOT invest their money and then demand to be taken care of when they are old as if they are entitled to a share of my savings.
So as to compel one to buy one of their cars...
The Governator of Caleefoorneeah would rather that you did 500 sit ups instead of watching TV so this is his secret plan to discourage you from purchasing one.
except that have a governor that limits the brightness to 7.
You mean a Governator right?
Alright, you continue to do whatever you want with your money, invest it or not, and I will do likewise, but please don't cross the finish line of your productive working years at age 65 broke with no savings and say, "Ok government...now take care of me".
Just once, I've love to hear a die-hard libertarian explain how privatized roads would work. Just once.
They work quite well and in France of all places (hardly a Libertarian paradise). There are 1,00,960 km of roads in France and unlike many other countries, most of them are toll and operated by private companies such as Société des Autoroutes de Paris Normandie (SAPN). Now, before you respond, "Well, nobody drives in France" it is important to realize that France is among the most car dependent countries in Europe with 937 billion vehicle kilometers travelled in 2005 (85% by car). Despite this extensive private road network the public transport in France, as in many other developed EU states, is excellent (particularly by American standards) with high speed rail service, trams, and light railways providing extensive connections.
Now obviously it is not practical to privatize every last minor road and many forms of public transportation, street cars and buses for example, share the same local road networks as private vehicles. However, the example in France demonstrates that a quality network of highways and even regional roads can be maintained quite well by private enterprise. Indeed, that is more equitable. Why should people who never use the Highways pay for them? If they only take the bus and use trains or airplanes for longer trips then why should they pay for highways with their taxes?
The problem comes when people on both sides try to paint the issue of public vs private roads as an all or nothing proposition without acknowledging that a balance of the two is really what yields the best results.
While it is possible to approach investing in the same way that one approaches gambling the idea that Investing == Gambling is one of the most persistent and damaging ideas to enjoy wide currency among the non-investor classes of society. The definitions taken from the following article are instructive:
Investing is any activity in which money is put at risk for the purpose of making a profit, and which is characterized by some or most of the following (in approximately descending order of importance): sufficient research has been conducted; the odds are favorable; the behavior is risk-averse; a systematic approach is being taken; emotions such as greed and fear play no role; the activity is ongoing and done as part of a long-term plan; the activity is not motivated solely by entertainment or compulsion; ownership of something tangible is involved; a net positive economic effect results.
Gambling is any activity in which money is put at risk for the purpose of making a profit, and which is characterized by some or most of the following (in approximately descending order of importance): little or no research has been conducted; the odds are unfavorable; the behavior is risk-seeking; an unsystematic approach is being taken; emotions such as greed and fear play a role; the activity is a discrete event or series of discrete events not done as part of a long-term plan; the activity is significantly motivated by entertainment or compulsion; ownership of something tangible is not involved; no net economic effect results.