Alright, but surely the facts presented by Blizzard, namely their theory of copyright infringement, are going to be disputed by MDY Industries? What happens if I make up a "fact" and then ask for summary judgment based upon that "fact"? If there are no factual issues in dispute then don't both parties have to sign an written agreement stating as much and why would you want to allow your opponent the chance to win summary judgment when you could simply dispute the facts anyway and force the issue to go to trial?
However, I'd feel that my equipment is safe from the theft I've been hearing about at some datacenters. How about armed intruders? I doubt that the guards get paid enough to get shot over your data and they probably have master keys which access the entire facility so they will probably do whatever the guys with the guns tell them to do.
It seems to be a common legal tactic these days for lawyers to automatically file for summary judgment on their legal claims and theories, no matter how shaky their foundation in logic or fact, in an attempt to win a quick decision which might have far reaching and very negative consequences and side effects. It is an extremely short sited thing for an officer of the court (and lawyers are technically officers of the court) to do in light of the damage it might cause to the practice of law in general. There ought to be , if there are not already, some sort of sanctions for abusing legal procedures in these ways and they need to be enforced for the ultimate benefit of all parties with an interest in the laws going forward (including possibly the short sited plaintiff and his attorney...one never knows when something that was initially useful might come back to bite one in the posterior when it is least expected).
The proper defense against these types of tactics is for the students to become certified as class of wrongfully prosecuted and legally harassed college students. Then it doesn't matter that the students are individually weak or that they won't individually see a lot of money in damages, because the potential losses for the RIAA and their members if they should lose could be very terrible indeed. Class actions are the nuclear weapons of the legal profession and they force even the largest corporations and conglomerates to take notice.
metaprogramming is available via attributes and reflection in.NET and generics are fully supported with inheritence. As for policy based design you can achieve essentially the same result with interfaces and the strategy pattern. It is also possible to constrain the types of generic parameters to particular interfaces or base classes with generic constraints.
(i.e. have a class with its base class being specified by one of its generic parameters).
You mean like this:
public class foo[T] : bar[T] where T : bar[T] { }// substitute angle brackets for square brackets in actual.cs file.
That is legal in.NET, it is an example of generics with constraints.
many kinds of things that is acquired and released, and many of these things can not be allowed to hang around until the gc gets around to finalizing the instance
Unless you are programming something like real time systems this is rarely a big deal. I have never had a problem with garbage collection. Now, granted some programming techniques lean more heavily on the garbage collector than others, but with prudent use of the new for object creation and using (to ensure that dispose and by reference close on streams gets called as soon as you are done with the resource) it has not really been an issue for me. A well written.NET program can be very fast and have very efficient memory usage.
It is my experience that the practical usefulness of features like manual memory management and multiple inheritence are frequntly over-stated by those favoring C and C++. It is cherry picking unless your work frequently involves those optimizations and they are critical (which is not the case in most programming tasks).
As far as standard library completeness goes I'm not of the opinion that a standard library should be to choke full of features myself. The more important thing to me is what the libraries that are readily available for the language will let me do Then you should really like platforms like.NET and Java which have standard libraries that let you do just about anything and are readily available as part of the platform. On the one hand you prefer smaller libraries but on the other hand you care about how many features are provided by those libraries. It seems to me that those are opposite goals.
and the libraries that are readily available for python are quite broad. I will admit that I have heard some good things about Python, but I have hear even more good things (and know from first hand experience) about.NET.
Except that C had very minimal standard library support and certainly nothing like what we see now in.NET and Java. With repsect,.NET and Java are really just about as far from the minimalist approach of C as one can get..NET and Java and virtual machine languages are all about abstraction while in C there really was no abstraction, it was and is designed to run as close to the hardware as possible.
As for distributing your own version of the standard.NET libraries that really doesn't make much sense. The class library is so well defined and so complete, just as it is in Java, that the class library is really an integral part of the platform.
Looking at.NET as the 'new C' is, at least IMHO, the wrong view. Both.NET and Java are descended from the C branch of languages, but they really are moving well beyond that initial inheritence into areas which Dennis Ritchie and Bell Labs never could have anticipated or probably even imagined (there was no practical context in which to have a serious discussion about object oriented programming back in the early 1970s because many of the concepts that are in.NET and Java today hadn't been invented yet or were only tossed around as theories by academic computer scientists).
multiple inheritance for you Sigh, here we go again with the multiple inheritence argument. Multiple inheritence was almost *always* abused in the C++ days whenever it showed up to innapropriately compose unrelated classes for the sake of convenience and the utter violation of abstraction. The few legitimate uses of multiple inheritence, which are rare enough that I cannot think of them off the top of my head, can almost certainly achieved by alternative object oriented means in both Java and.NET in ways which do not carry the same potential for abuse or ambiguity.
Want to make use of policy based design? Tough generics aren't even in the same ball park as C++ templates. Name a feature of C++ templates (other than multiple inheritence) that cannot be done in.NET with generics. I really tried to think of one, but I couldn't come up with a meaningful example.
Want to make use of deterministic RIAA Is that your own terminology?
but I can't remember if they finally put in deterministic destructors that will get automatically get called when an instance goes out of scope in the latest version.
There is not a direct comparison because destructors in garbage collected languages, such as.NET languages and Java, do not serve the same purpose as they do in manual memory management languages such as C and C++. In.NET the destructor, if one is implemented, is compiled into the Finalize method which is called by the garbage collector and not manually by the programmer. It is pointless to argue that.NET and Java do not include a feature of manually managed memory languages which is not needed because garbage collection serves the same purpose by different means.
Here it comes, the car analogy: Both a manual transmission and an automatic transmission both shift gears so does it really make sense to argue about the details of *how* that happens as long as the gears get shifted? In most cases the answer is no.
nitpick.NET all you want, but name another platform besides Java which includes half as many features or has a standard library which is half as complete.
I will grant you that ASP.NET has been a sore point, but they are finally starting to see the light with the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions and the Model View Controller option for ASP.NET development. Scott Gu has an entire blog article series (complete with example project) covering the ASP.NET MVC Framework and it really is going in the right direction. I know that the MVC idea is not original and it certainly wasn't invented at Microsoft, but immitation is the sincerst form of flattery as they say and Microsoft is finally seeing the light on this one.
For as much as I like programming in C#, I just can't see myself using it very often, as it is just not very well suited to the kinds of work that I do most, particularly web development, where I use mostly JavaScript and whatever server side language happens to be convenient The risk there is that you are reinventing the wheel with JavaScript DOM code and other plumbing that have been done thousands of times before by countless other developers and, lets face it, probably done better. I wouldn't trust myself to write the best general purpose JavaScript libraries either and I wouldn't try, especially when I know that someone else has already done that. A really great programming environment frees one from having to be concerned with plumbing issues, that while interesting on some level, are not generally directly relevant to the problems at hand (i.e. business logic and what the site should actually be doing).
and low level server architecture, which I mostly do in C and occasionally C++
Reminds me of the CGI days which were really quite primitive compared with web applications that can be built today with the much better tools. Perhaps you are one of the ellusive jedi masters of C and C++, but I think it is fair to say that C or C++ are really innapropriate choices for the majority of web developers these days.
As for the absolute performance of ASP.NET vs other possible approaches I am not surprised that ASP.NET doesn't win the speed race, but really, how many of us run sites like Yahoo where that last ounce of performance and speed is really worth the price in terms of low level complexity and micro optimization required to achieve it? ASP.NET is an appropriate and reasonable choice for the vast majority of web application projects that most developers will be asked to build.
I've never used.net, but I'm surprised that you would lump Cocoa, Carbon, and Java all together.
I am not lumping them together (as in equivalence) but rather pointing out that if you are looking to create or use a fully generic and general purpose programming environment then you are going to create or end up using something that looks very much like.NET or Java because those languages represent the natural and logical progression of a development environment that, while not specially suited to any particular task, is designed to do just about anything that a typical programmer might want to do.
Carbon is a collection of libraries written in C for creating apps on the mac. It's often used when there is either no equivalent Objective-C library present, or Objective-C is not wanted.
There have always been C libraries of various degrees of completeness for just about every platform which has ever supported C, but Java and subsequently.NET have really taken the concept of integrated full feature generic class library to new heights of completeness in terms of what is in the 'standard' library. I know of no other programming environments which support such large and varied default class libraries as.NET and Java.
While I'm currently using Java at work, I'm not a huge fan of it. I've never considered it particularly innovative, and would take C++ over it for most projects.
I don't know what you do at work, but I would not consider using C++ for anything except drivers and other lightweight embedded systems at this point and even there C would probably be a better choice. As far as general purpose application development and software engineering are concerned.NET and Java represent the future direction and really the most natural evolution, dovetailing perfectly with virtualization and the elimination of hardware specifics in favor of pure abstractions. It is virtualization and abstraction which allows the construction of such large, powerful, and yes complex software in ways that are manageable, scalable, and expandable. It is ironic really that with.NET Microsoft has probably hastened the demise of their monopoly platform by making the platform irrelevant.
The places where Java is really supposed to shine (i.e. cross-platformability) it does only mediocrely. Both AWT and Swing are awful to use, and don't provide for good interfaces.
I prefer.NET of course, but I mention Java because.NET owes a debt to Java for blazing the trail and Java is continuing to develop along a parallel track so it bears mentioning along with.NET.
Even though it's an older language, I would say Objective-C is innovative and lends itself very well to windowing systems (especially for features like double-dispatching). Like Java and.net it also has introspection (technically so does C++, but you kinda have to roll your own).
There is more to the world than windowing systems. Assuming that it is possible (and I believe that it is) wouldn't you rather have a language and platform that is powerful enough to do anything that you might ever want to instead of a platform which may be good for certain specialized tasks but falls short or doesn't follow as well when you take it into completely new areas and directions? The whole point is that you shouldn't have to roll your own, it has been done already ten thousand times and done well by other developers. Use their work and don't re-invent the wheel. The vast class libraries of.NET and Java are well grounded in this principle.
Apple has also added some nice features to Objective-C, like properties which you can synthesize. This has the added bonus that the setters and getters are automatically generated for you. The only other language that I know (I
The whole comparison of.NET to the Win32 API by the author is almost completely bunk. He tried to lump something which he does not understand (.NET) into the same boat as Win16/32 arguments that were maybe relevant 10 years ago when people were still doing a lot of new development with Win32 and not.NET. The.NET Framework is at least as good as Java (and better than Java IMHO) and there is no way that cocoa, carbon, or objective C is more innovative or advanced than Java or.NET. The author has head stuck way up his ass if he thinks that the.NET API stinks. The whole article is very misleading and seriously strains credibility.
The argument that.NET is limited by the attempt to be simplistic is asinine I agree. It sounds to me like this guy used.NET for a year or so around 2002 when it was brand new and then left and hasn't looked again for the last six (6) years. He is the first person that I have heard accuse.NET of being "too simplistic". The.NET class library (and Java class library as well) is the definition of everything and the kitchen sink. These are extremly powerful languages and libraries that are if anything too complex.
Before I even get into the technical components of his argument, if he's trying to say that Java is better in this area, then he needs to get his eyes checked. Again, I totally agree. The.NET Framework class libraries and the C# language are the definition of "The Right Way" to organize and structure code. They are technically sophisticated, architecturally beautiful, and make use of all of the best ideas at the culmination of nearly three (3) decades of object oriented programming theory and software engineering. If he is going to criticize.NET for its "lack of capability" then he is basically saying that Java is crap too, because.NET borrowed heavily from Java which in turn borrowed heavily from C++, smalltalk, and all the way back through C to Algol 60.
portable across environments, but that's not what.NET development is being used for It is supported and in the future it will become more and more common. The great innovation on the part of.NET was the common runtime type description language and metadata in addition to the common language assembly. This is what allows different programming languages to fully share types across libraries compiled from different source languages (including cross langague debugging). This was the feature that Java was missing and this is a major reason why.NET is so popular, it has the potential to end the "my programming language is better than yours" debate because the common types and assembly make the argument irrelevant. Use C# or use VB.NET or use Eiffel or whatever other language you want.
I can say with experience that.NET is very powerful and can be very pleasant to work with. I have been using.NET for six (6) years now and I can honestly say that it has fulfilled all of my expectations with very few dissapointments and it is improving substantially with each subsequent version. I know that I sound like a hopeless fanboy, but.NET really is a pleasure to work with, especially given the breadth and depth of the libraries and languages with a tool for every job and every job done with the right tool.
I honestly think that.NET is a crowning achievement of theirs. Although it probably doesn't hold much water with the Slashdot crowd, I think that it is fair to say that.NET is the best thing ever to come out of Microsoft, even though it wasn't a completely original idea (but how many completely original ideas have there been in computer science anyway? Everyone benefits from the work of predecessors and ones who have come before us).
In July 2007 the The New York Times published an article using data from CNW Marketing Research finding that 57% of Prius buyers said their main reason for buying was that "it makes a statement about me.", while just 36% cited fuel economy as a prime motivator,. Shortly afterwards Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson coined the term "Prius politics" to describe a situation where the driver's desire to "show off" is a stronger motivator than the desire to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
The buyers for the Tesla roadster are primarily interested in the cool factor or making a political statement and not an economical vehicle or even just a practical sports car.
The store sells the "brand" and that can be just as important or even more important than the actual product in today's market. Why else would they open the store in Beverly Hills if not to promote the brand and in a stylish and flashy way? The store is a highly visible expression of style over function in a world capital of decadence, luxury, and conspicuous consumption.
If there is one thing that reporters really don't like it is having their ability to speak and report freely curtailed. You can bet your bottom dollar that if China follows through with this policy then they will be called out on it by western journalists during the games and reminded of their previous assurances. The 2008 Beijing Olympics are shaping up to be the most politically charged games in a generation, even the Moscow games of 1980 and the subsequent Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles games in 1984 did not draw as much world wide attention and controversy as the upcoming Beijing games have. The Chinese are proving to the world once again that they have a tin ear for international public relations with their handling of the torch relay and the Tibet issue.
For example, the United States would not have risked invading Iraq if they though New York would be nuked in response, regardless of any nuclear superiority.
A nuclear arsenal is really only useful if it is safe from a first strike and can serve as an effective second strike deterrent. In practice this means large strategic nuclear missile submarine (SSN) fleets with MIRV warhead ICBMs on constant rotation such that some percentage of them are always on patrol at sea somewhere. The ability to covertly deliver a single warhead is not a deterrent, it is a useless provocation. If the small country is attacked first then the large country will already be on alert and there will be virtually zero chance to successfully smuggle in the covert warhead for a retaliatory attack. So, unless the small country is going to invest in the aforementioned fleet of nuclear armed subs, which they cannot afford to do anyway, a small nuclear arsenal is a waste of resources for the small country and offers no substantial deterrent value.
As for Iran and the IAEA, there have been persistent complaints from the IAEA inspectors of delays, irregularities, and other funny business which suggest that Iran is trying to subvert the inspections. There are also facilities which Iran has not and will not allow the inspectors to enter. I would call that being secretive.
For example, why is Britain, a country with so much coal, thinking about building new nuclear power stations? The coal mines in Britain are very deep compared to mines in other places around the world, the United States for example, and therefore mostly not economical. Once the British government cut subsidies to domestic coal production in the late 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, most of the inefficient and uneconomical mines closed and Britain produces a great deal less domestic coal today. In contrast, the Iranian oil reserves are of the light crude easily pumped variety (although not as fine as some other crudes from around the world) and there is a fair amount of natural gas mixed in too, so the need for nuclear power there is much less clear than it is in Britain.
Not only did the US support such terrorist groups but the US has also committed terrorist acts itself. I am not going to argue in support of or apologize for poor foreign policy choices by various past and present US administrations since everyone knows that there have been mistakes. However, there is an important difference: the United States does not maintain an official standing public policy of armed support to foreign non-state groups as part of an ongoing Revolutionary ideology or the promotion of state sponsored religion and religious theocracy...Iran does both.
They probably could work them into the film as extras in the background of some scene, it might be good for a bit of comic relief for those who can spot the reference.
If there is anything that is going to drive countries to develop nuclear weapons, it is the fear of invasion or even a limited nuclear strike by powerful countries like the US. To which their best response is to talk. It would be insane for any nation, especially a smaller one, to attack either the United States, China, Russia, or any of the other G-8 nations with nuclear weapons. The retaliatory response makes such an action unthinkable under any circumstances. It would be better for Iran to talk, if their motives are truley peaceful as they claim. They should make the case clearly and let the court of world opinion decide instead of being secretive and coy with their international relations. If the economic case is rational and logical and the Iranians were willing to be reasonable then the world and the IAEA and the United States would listen. They would be given a fair hearing, if they renounced terrorism as official state policy and proceeded as outlined above.
I fail to see why MS would want to compete with Google so much Google is earning economic rent through their strong franchise business in search and online advertising. There is no way that they are not going to attract competitors. Microsoft is in the technology business too, so it is difficult to explain to your shareholders why you are not trying to capture a piece of that lucrative market for yourself, especially when you seem well placed to compete for a share of the spoils. Microsoft is trying to earn the best possible return for their shareholders and that means competing for a share of the market in which Google is earning strong profits going forward.
It wasn't just the Yahoo executives who weren't interested in the deal. There was no way that Microsoft could win a proxy fight for Yahoo at anything approaching a reasonable price. The founders and various other individuals (including the board) owned about 34% or so of the outstanding shares and there was at least 25% more owned by individual investors (who rarely bother to vote in proxy fights which means that the board would get to vote those shares too). So the board and the individuals opposing Microsoft controlled at least 60% or so of the outstanding shares, making any hostile takeover direct shareholder tender offer a non-starter (unless Microsoft offered an insane price which they obviously weren't going to do). Microsoft did the only thing that they could do, they made the prudent decision and walked away.
The NPT was a noble effort, and a necessary one for the sake of appearances, but even when the treaty was signed nobody seriously believed that the nuclear genie could be stuffed back into the bottle again. The efforts spent policing the nuclear forces of the world would be better spent in addressing the differences that lead to the desire to use these weapons in the first place.
Was that the transcript of the entire discussion? It seems a bit odd to me that the organizers would go to the trouble of assembling the panel and an audience including some foreign lawyers only to have what appeared to be a brief twenty (20) minute discussion and then take no questions at the end. Perhaps Professor Hansen didn't like how the discussion was unfolding and cut it short so that he wouldn't lose the debate. Isn't it a bit unusual and irregular for the moderator to take a position up front anyway? What ever happened to the impartial and unbiased moderator concept?
The primary problem with an exoskeleton, at least as it pertains to front line combat use, is and, as far as I know, remains the massive heat signature generated by the internal combustion engine that is required to pressurize the hydraulic components (a battery powered compressor would probably be impractical and not any less heat generating). Anyone wearing this exoskeleton would show up like the sun on infrared making them vulnerable to the types of heat seeking missiles or automated guns that would normally target vehicles and other substantial heat sources. If you are going to have the heat problem then why not just use a vehicle which can mount the heavy weapon on the chassis, carry some exhaust cooling shrouds, and provide more armor than the exoskeleton? The exoskeleton doesn't make much sense, at least in my opinion, for front line operations or at least not it its present form. It doesn't offer enough advantages over a vehicle to make it worthwhile to accept the same or similar set of drawbacks (i.e. generating large quantities of waste heat).
Taxes go towards all services you receive from your State, and when you don't pay them, they have to be made up another way. There are entirely too many and too generous services in NY and other high tax and spend liberal states. They should throw all of the bums out of their rent-controlled apartments, slash the wellfare rolls, and cut all of the bureaucratic waste before they reach once more into my pocket to make good the effects of their reckless and foolish spending. It is not greedy to keep the money that you have worked hard to earn, but there is something evil in this liberal notion that you have the right to help yourself to the property and money of someone else because you want free beer every Tuesday and you don't want to pay what it costs out of your own pocket. The Constitution defines negative rights (i.e. the right to an opportunity to succeed) NOT positive rights (i.e. the right to receive beer on Tuesdays at your neighbor's expense) so if you want beer then go out and earn the money to buy it, but don't keep sticking your hand in your neighbor's pocket through higher taxes to pay for it and claim that it is your right.
Eventually I solved the problem by taking a year off of anything work related to travel and clear my brain. That is a big part of the problem here in America. We have the least number of vacation days, on average 0-5, per year of any industrialized nation in the world. No matter how much you love your job if you work constantly with no significant breaks then you are going to burn out. This is one area where I think the Europeans have it right.
Slashdot Mirror
Alright, but surely the facts presented by Blizzard, namely their theory of copyright infringement, are going to be disputed by MDY Industries? What happens if I make up a "fact" and then ask for summary judgment based upon that "fact"? If there are no factual issues in dispute then don't both parties have to sign an written agreement stating as much and why would you want to allow your opponent the chance to win summary judgment when you could simply dispute the facts anyway and force the issue to go to trial?
It seems to be a common legal tactic these days for lawyers to automatically file for summary judgment on their legal claims and theories, no matter how shaky their foundation in logic or fact, in an attempt to win a quick decision which might have far reaching and very negative consequences and side effects. It is an extremely short sited thing for an officer of the court (and lawyers are technically officers of the court) to do in light of the damage it might cause to the practice of law in general. There ought to be , if there are not already, some sort of sanctions for abusing legal procedures in these ways and they need to be enforced for the ultimate benefit of all parties with an interest in the laws going forward (including possibly the short sited plaintiff and his attorney...one never knows when something that was initially useful might come back to bite one in the posterior when it is least expected).
The proper defense against these types of tactics is for the students to become certified as class of wrongfully prosecuted and legally harassed college students. Then it doesn't matter that the students are individually weak or that they won't individually see a lot of money in damages, because the potential losses for the RIAA and their members if they should lose could be very terrible indeed. Class actions are the nuclear weapons of the legal profession and they force even the largest corporations and conglomerates to take notice.
You mean like this:
public class foo[T] : bar[T] where T : bar[T] { } // substitute angle brackets for square brackets in actual .cs file.
That is legal in .NET, it is an example of generics with constraints.
many kinds of things that is acquired and released, and many of these things can not be allowed to hang around until the gc gets around to finalizing the instanceUnless you are programming something like real time systems this is rarely a big deal. I have never had a problem with garbage collection. Now, granted some programming techniques lean more heavily on the garbage collector than others, but with prudent use of the new for object creation and using (to ensure that dispose and by reference close on streams gets called as soon as you are done with the resource) it has not really been an issue for me. A well written .NET program can be very fast and have very efficient memory usage.
It is my experience that the practical usefulness of features like manual memory management and multiple inheritence are frequntly over-stated by those favoring C and C++. It is cherry picking unless your work frequently involves those optimizations and they are critical (which is not the case in most programming tasks).
As far as standard library completeness goes I'm not of the opinion that a standard library should be to choke full of features myself. The more important thing to me is what the libraries that are readily available for the language will let me do Then you should really like platforms like
.NET is trying to be the new C.Except that C had very minimal standard library support and certainly nothing like what we see now in .NET and Java. With repsect, .NET and Java are really just about as far from the minimalist approach of C as one can get. .NET and Java and virtual machine languages are all about abstraction while in C there really was no abstraction, it was and is designed to run as close to the hardware as possible.
As for distributing your own version of the standard .NET libraries that really doesn't make much sense. The class library is so well defined and so complete, just as it is in Java, that the class library is really an integral part of the platform.
Looking at .NET as the 'new C' is, at least IMHO, the wrong view. Both .NET and Java are descended from the C branch of languages, but they really are moving well beyond that initial inheritence into areas which Dennis Ritchie and Bell Labs never could have anticipated or probably even imagined (there was no practical context in which to have a serious discussion about object oriented programming back in the early 1970s because many of the concepts that are in .NET and Java today hadn't been invented yet or were only tossed around as theories by academic computer scientists).
There is not a direct comparison because destructors in garbage collected languages, such as .NET languages and Java, do not serve the same purpose as they do in manual memory management languages such as C and C++. In .NET the destructor, if one is implemented, is compiled into the Finalize method which is called by the garbage collector and not manually by the programmer. It is pointless to argue that .NET and Java do not include a feature of manually managed memory languages which is not needed because garbage collection serves the same purpose by different means.
Here it comes, the car analogy: Both a manual transmission and an automatic transmission both shift gears so does it really make sense to argue about the details of *how* that happens as long as the gears get shifted? In most cases the answer is no.
nitpick .NET all you want, but name another platform besides Java which includes half as many features or has a standard library which is half as complete.
Reminds me of the CGI days which were really quite primitive compared with web applications that can be built today with the much better tools. Perhaps you are one of the ellusive jedi masters of C and C++, but I think it is fair to say that C or C++ are really innapropriate choices for the majority of web developers these days.
As for the absolute performance of ASP.NET vs other possible approaches I am not surprised that ASP.NET doesn't win the speed race, but really, how many of us run sites like Yahoo where that last ounce of performance and speed is really worth the price in terms of low level complexity and micro optimization required to achieve it? ASP.NET is an appropriate and reasonable choice for the vast majority of web application projects that most developers will be asked to build.
I've never used .net, but I'm surprised that you would lump Cocoa, Carbon, and Java all together.
I am not lumping them together (as in equivalence) but rather pointing out that if you are looking to create or use a fully generic and general purpose programming environment then you are going to create or end up using something that looks very much like .NET or Java because those languages represent the natural and logical progression of a development environment that, while not specially suited to any particular task, is designed to do just about anything that a typical programmer might want to do.
Carbon is a collection of libraries written in C for creating apps on the mac. It's often used when there is either no equivalent Objective-C library present, or Objective-C is not wanted.
There have always been C libraries of various degrees of completeness for just about every platform which has ever supported C, but Java and subsequently .NET have really taken the concept of integrated full feature generic class library to new heights of completeness in terms of what is in the 'standard' library. I know of no other programming environments which support such large and varied default class libraries as .NET and Java.
While I'm currently using Java at work, I'm not a huge fan of it. I've never considered it particularly innovative, and would take C++ over it for most projects.
I don't know what you do at work, but I would not consider using C++ for anything except drivers and other lightweight embedded systems at this point and even there C would probably be a better choice. As far as general purpose application development and software engineering are concerned .NET and Java represent the future direction and really the most natural evolution, dovetailing perfectly with virtualization and the elimination of hardware specifics in favor of pure abstractions. It is virtualization and abstraction which allows the construction of such large, powerful, and yes complex software in ways that are manageable, scalable, and expandable. It is ironic really that with .NET Microsoft has probably hastened the demise of their monopoly platform by making the platform irrelevant.
The places where Java is really supposed to shine (i.e. cross-platformability) it does only mediocrely. Both AWT and Swing are awful to use, and don't provide for good interfaces.
I prefer .NET of course, but I mention Java because .NET owes a debt to Java for blazing the trail and Java is continuing to develop along a parallel track so it bears mentioning along with .NET.
Even though it's an older language, I would say Objective-C is innovative and lends itself very well to windowing systems (especially for features like double-dispatching). Like Java and .net it also has introspection (technically so does C++, but you kinda have to roll your own).
There is more to the world than windowing systems. Assuming that it is possible (and I believe that it is) wouldn't you rather have a language and platform that is powerful enough to do anything that you might ever want to instead of a platform which may be good for certain specialized tasks but falls short or doesn't follow as well when you take it into completely new areas and directions? The whole point is that you shouldn't have to roll your own, it has been done already ten thousand times and done well by other developers. Use their work and don't re-invent the wheel. The vast class libraries of .NET and Java are well grounded in this principle.
Apple has also added some nice features to Objective-C, like properties which you can synthesize. This has the added bonus that the setters and getters are automatically generated for you. The only other language that I know (I
The whole comparison of .NET to the Win32 API by the author is almost completely bunk. He tried to lump something which he does not understand (.NET) into the same boat as Win16/32 arguments that were maybe relevant 10 years ago when people were still doing a lot of new development with Win32 and not .NET. The .NET Framework is at least as good as Java (and better than Java IMHO) and there is no way that cocoa, carbon, or objective C is more innovative or advanced than Java or .NET. The author has head stuck way up his ass if he thinks that the .NET API stinks. The whole article is very misleading and seriously strains credibility.
The short answer is Prius Politics. From the wiki article on Toyota Prius:
In July 2007 the The New York Times published an article using data from CNW Marketing Research finding that 57% of Prius buyers said their main reason for buying was that "it makes a statement about me.", while just 36% cited fuel economy as a prime motivator,. Shortly afterwards Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson coined the term "Prius politics" to describe a situation where the driver's desire to "show off" is a stronger motivator than the desire to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
The buyers for the Tesla roadster are primarily interested in the cool factor or making a political statement and not an economical vehicle or even just a practical sports car.The store sells the "brand" and that can be just as important or even more important than the actual product in today's market. Why else would they open the store in Beverly Hills if not to promote the brand and in a stylish and flashy way? The store is a highly visible expression of style over function in a world capital of decadence, luxury, and conspicuous consumption.
If there is one thing that reporters really don't like it is having their ability to speak and report freely curtailed. You can bet your bottom dollar that if China follows through with this policy then they will be called out on it by western journalists during the games and reminded of their previous assurances. The 2008 Beijing Olympics are shaping up to be the most politically charged games in a generation, even the Moscow games of 1980 and the subsequent Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles games in 1984 did not draw as much world wide attention and controversy as the upcoming Beijing games have. The Chinese are proving to the world once again that they have a tin ear for international public relations with their handling of the torch relay and the Tibet issue.
A nuclear arsenal is really only useful if it is safe from a first strike and can serve as an effective second strike deterrent. In practice this means large strategic nuclear missile submarine (SSN) fleets with MIRV warhead ICBMs on constant rotation such that some percentage of them are always on patrol at sea somewhere. The ability to covertly deliver a single warhead is not a deterrent, it is a useless provocation. If the small country is attacked first then the large country will already be on alert and there will be virtually zero chance to successfully smuggle in the covert warhead for a retaliatory attack. So, unless the small country is going to invest in the aforementioned fleet of nuclear armed subs, which they cannot afford to do anyway, a small nuclear arsenal is a waste of resources for the small country and offers no substantial deterrent value.
As for Iran and the IAEA, there have been persistent complaints from the IAEA inspectors of delays, irregularities, and other funny business which suggest that Iran is trying to subvert the inspections. There are also facilities which Iran has not and will not allow the inspectors to enter. I would call that being secretive.
For example, why is Britain, a country with so much coal, thinking about building new nuclear power stations? The coal mines in Britain are very deep compared to mines in other places around the world, the United States for example, and therefore mostly not economical. Once the British government cut subsidies to domestic coal production in the late 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, most of the inefficient and uneconomical mines closed and Britain produces a great deal less domestic coal today. In contrast, the Iranian oil reserves are of the light crude easily pumped variety (although not as fine as some other crudes from around the world) and there is a fair amount of natural gas mixed in too, so the need for nuclear power there is much less clear than it is in Britain. Not only did the US support such terrorist groups but the US has also committed terrorist acts itself. I am not going to argue in support of or apologize for poor foreign policy choices by various past and present US administrations since everyone knows that there have been mistakes. However, there is an important difference: the United States does not maintain an official standing public policy of armed support to foreign non-state groups as part of an ongoing Revolutionary ideology or the promotion of state sponsored religion and religious theocracy...Iran does both.Of course, you would need your Marty McFly life-preserver 80s puffy jacket and spandex tight Levi's jeans to complete the look.
They probably could work them into the film as extras in the background of some scene, it might be good for a bit of comic relief for those who can spot the reference.
It wasn't just the Yahoo executives who weren't interested in the deal. There was no way that Microsoft could win a proxy fight for Yahoo at anything approaching a reasonable price. The founders and various other individuals (including the board) owned about 34% or so of the outstanding shares and there was at least 25% more owned by individual investors (who rarely bother to vote in proxy fights which means that the board would get to vote those shares too). So the board and the individuals opposing Microsoft controlled at least 60% or so of the outstanding shares, making any hostile takeover direct shareholder tender offer a non-starter (unless Microsoft offered an insane price which they obviously weren't going to do). Microsoft did the only thing that they could do, they made the prudent decision and walked away.
The NPT was a noble effort, and a necessary one for the sake of appearances, but even when the treaty was signed nobody seriously believed that the nuclear genie could be stuffed back into the bottle again. The efforts spent policing the nuclear forces of the world would be better spent in addressing the differences that lead to the desire to use these weapons in the first place.
Was that the transcript of the entire discussion? It seems a bit odd to me that the organizers would go to the trouble of assembling the panel and an audience including some foreign lawyers only to have what appeared to be a brief twenty (20) minute discussion and then take no questions at the end. Perhaps Professor Hansen didn't like how the discussion was unfolding and cut it short so that he wouldn't lose the debate. Isn't it a bit unusual and irregular for the moderator to take a position up front anyway? What ever happened to the impartial and unbiased moderator concept?
The primary problem with an exoskeleton, at least as it pertains to front line combat use, is and, as far as I know, remains the massive heat signature generated by the internal combustion engine that is required to pressurize the hydraulic components (a battery powered compressor would probably be impractical and not any less heat generating). Anyone wearing this exoskeleton would show up like the sun on infrared making them vulnerable to the types of heat seeking missiles or automated guns that would normally target vehicles and other substantial heat sources. If you are going to have the heat problem then why not just use a vehicle which can mount the heavy weapon on the chassis, carry some exhaust cooling shrouds, and provide more armor than the exoskeleton? The exoskeleton doesn't make much sense, at least in my opinion, for front line operations or at least not it its present form. It doesn't offer enough advantages over a vehicle to make it worthwhile to accept the same or similar set of drawbacks (i.e. generating large quantities of waste heat).