Re:Check out Rob Pike's thoughts on code commentin
on
How to Write Comments
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· Score: 1
waddstr is a procedure, not a function (conceptually - yes, I know that C doesn't make a distinction). In a more verbose language it would be named something like addStringToWindow. It's not about Hungarian style funcion & procedure names, it's a literate style of naming. If you have a function that checks if a window is raised and returns a boolean, don't call it raise, or wraised - call it isWindowRaised() or (OO) window.isRaised() or window.raised(). Using verbose names for both your variables and your functions can do amazing things for the readability of your code, even in the absence of comments.
Comments are still extremely valuable for explaining why you do something, especially if it's because theres a non-obvious corner case, or there is an obvious change or optimization you can't make for non-obvious reasons.
No. It's true. Amtrak sucks. And Amtrak is as private as the USPS. It is a government owned corporation.
Amtrak does suck, and it's not government owned, and it doesn't suck simply because of the government. As I said, the best railroads in the world are government owned and operated. It sucks because of a variety of specific decisions and issues, some of which were made by the government, but it's entirely possible - even likely - that a private company would have made the same decisions. It was/is the federal governments failure to commit to passenger rail that is a primary cause of Amtraks suckiness, not the existence of government interference.
No, it's true. If you add up all the cost increases on services, materials, and medicines, a doctors office spends more dealing with the feds than on rent, electricity, or any other overhead expense.
The major expense a (medical) doctor pays is malpractice insurance.
Regulations over the past 20 years have skyrocketed. Under the Clinton administration, the federal registry (the big book of regulations) doubled! Under Reagan & both Bushes, it went up almost as much.
The size of the federal register, sure, but I was talking specifically about insurance regulation, which hasn't changed much in 20 years. Regulation in general has increased a lot more. On the other hand, while there are a great many more regulations, you can't even draw a correlation, much less a causation, between the amount of regulation in general and economic performance in general.
The insurance and medical companies (mostly the drug companies) like that though. It decreases competition and increases their profits at the cost of the consumers' choice. Big companies cozy up to government, because they see it as a tool to use to make money.
Can't possibly agree more, although they're also the first ones to trot out the "free market" any time regulation that might empower consumers shows up. A lot (certainly not all, but a lot) of government agencies and regulations came into existence because the private sector abused the trust of the public, enough for them to take notice and for politicians to feel pressured to do something about it. You can certainly make a reasonable case about how that regulation and those regulatory bodies are inefficent and heap costs on companies and consumers, or maybe even that they don't serve thier purpose anymore, but they mostly did *not* spring up out of thin air (the FCC being something of an exception here), they were created in response to specific incidents or general conditions. You can make a quite reasonable argument that market regulations are in and of themselves an expression of the free market.
How much have trains changed since amtrak (part of the government) started running them in 1971?
This is false. The problem with our rail (theres actually a ton of problems, but the specific one with Amtrak) is that the (private) companies that own almost all (well over 90%) of the actual rail in the US are freight companies. Amtrak is the only commuter rail service (and it is also a private company), but it owns essentially zero rail and can't provide high speed service even if it wanted to. It's worth pointing out that all of the good rail lines in the world are government funded and usually government run. The state of rail in the US is fucked, for a lot of reasons, but it's not fucked just because the government intervened.
How much have airplanes improved under private carriers in that time, even with the burden of FAA compliance and government run airports?
Hardly at all. A large portion of the planes still flying are the same planes that flew in 1971, and even the newer ones are still old designs. The air traffic control system has hardly been updated at all. By the way, the government doesn't run airports, although it does regulate them - they're generally funded by the ever-famous public-private partnership (where a private company gets the land & right of way for free via emminent domain), and run by private companies.
Medicare (as all social spending in the US) has an overhead of over 50% when you include the money that goes to pay bureaucrats in the HHS department, pork projects, and the huge amount of fraud.
Making up your numbers doesn't impress anyone.
The biggest chunk of overhead for private providers is compliance with the federal government's millions of pages of regulations.
This is untrue.
The price of medical care in the USA has gone up proportionally with the increase in federal regulation: the more the government tells the medical industry what to do, the more it costs you.
Healthcare benefits have gone steadily down, and prices have gone steadily up over the last 20 years or so, and federal regulation of the insurance industry has hardly changed at all in that time. There have been some major regulatory changes in the health care industry, which have indirectly raised prices and probably your insurance costs as a result, but it's worth noting that these regulations came into existence due to systemic and widespread abuses and failures on the part of that same industry.
In fact, you sound like you're arguing everythign except realistic points (which, of course, the book does too - I don't want to sound like I'm defending it because it's crap).
In fact, everything you write here sounds exactly like the standard fears & rants of a Microsoft sharecropper who fears (greatly) the de-valuation of your company. It's certainly true that Microsoft has engendered a large subculture, but I don't think you could prove that that market would be smaller or less vibrant if there was greater competition in the OS market. It's entirely possible that your specific section would be - you make your money by compensating for flaws in Microsofts product - but the market of third party/customized solutions would probably be at least as large and as profitable. By the way, as long as we're talking about hidden costs, the costs of companies such as yours provides are an excellent demonstration of them.
If Linux fanboys want to convince, they need to make a product that works as well as the competition.
In my experience (I'm 31 and have been watching freeware since 1984 when I started my first BBS), that hasn't happened often.
Of course, there are millions of people who disagree with you. What "works as well" is often subjective. A big part of the issue is convincing people (who, thanks to the MS monopoly, have generally only experienced Windows) is that "different" is not "worse". This is a hard sell and is one reason alternate operating systems have such an uproad hill to acceptance in the general market.
Word documents have become the de facto standard for document exchange and are what has locked many people into staying with Microsoft Word. Really? My users (nearly 90% in our last questionnaire) love the Word interface and look-and-feel.
Self-selected surveys are *great* for backing up your already felt convictions, aren't they? How many of your users are even aware of alternatives to Word? Of the ones who have, how many would even consider switching if they were told they couldn't keep compatability with Word documents, even if there were (potentially massive) cost savings? There's a saying about the value of your share of the IT market being the cost of all your customers to switch away from your product - Microsoft relies very heavily on that to keep customers from switching.
This book is ridiculous, and is pointing the blame at a non-monopoly instead of at competitors who don't know how to compete.
And here is where the real fanboy stuff shows through. Microsoft is *absolutely* a monopoly. There is no question about it whatsoever. You can argue a lot about how they got there, and you can pin blame on IBM and Novell and everyone else, and you can claim that MS deserves its status and it's un-American to limit them, but claiming with a straight face that they aren't a monopoly is just retarded.
Who said anything about performance issues? And what the hell does the compiler have to do with anything? If I wanted to write assembly code I'd do that. The *only* reason to use a higher level language at all is to make it easier for humans to follow. Therefore, making it difficult for humans alone is totally sufficent reason for not doing it. Especially since there is no condition using goto that cannot be written using other constructs.
The whole cowboy culture of programers (just look down in this thread to see people bragging about the least readable assignments they ever turned in) is detrimental to the state of the art in programming. So is the obsession with performance (mostly by people who couldn't tell you the hotspots in the code they're supposedly "optimizing", of course). And thats why stuff like an assignment to turn in code using the least LOC possible is harmful and irresponsible. There is no circumstance, ever, where you will need to use this skill. It provides no special insight into algorithms, and only minimal knowledge of language features. You aren't a better programmer because you avoid your enter key. I know it's not really reasonable to expect college students to act like real grownups, but theres no reason to encourage it in classes.
I don't believe you that the authors needed to use a goto (crappy programming doesn't neccesarily mean that your pet solution is the answer). It's more likely that what they really wanted was an exception.
The use of goto in this manner in the Linux kernel is used as a poor-mans exception, which C does't have, and use of goto in this manner is more common in C. It's a crummy way of doing your error handling, since it has all of the flaws of exceptions and hardly any of the benefits, as well as introducing a few flaws of its own, but when you're working in C you don't really have any other choice. The use of goto like this is one of the reasons people regularly suggest using C++ for the linux kernel.
The professor is right - don't use goto. On the other hand, he's also a dogmatic asshole (assuming that the OP is fairly presenting his case, which I suppose is questionable) for giving an assingment like "write this in the fewest LOC possible". In fact, such an exercise in and of itself is detrimental to the teaching of good programming practice. So minus points for giving it, and extra minus points for giving the OP grief when he used goto to achieve that goal.
One of the Massachusets requirements is that the default file format must be, or must be alterable to, the OpenDoc format. I was all ready to give MS the benefit of the doubt, too, reading the Office developer blogs and hearing them talk about how MS has turned a new leaf and is really dedicated to interoperability and open standards. And in fairness, maybe the Office guys believe that.
It is not that one needs to dispense with empathy when they become a conservative, but that one changes the method or procedure for dealing with the poor and needy.
It is innate in the definition of a free market economy that poor/unsuccessful actors are not successfull. In a *truly* free economy, this means that they die of starvation, exposure, or other avoidable causes. Hand waving that "surely someone will take care of this" is avoiding the issue - taking care of this problem is one of the things we invented governments for.
Capitalists have arguments that purport to show that not only are the unintended consequences of government intervention in the economy worse than the intended consequence, but at a more fundamental level of who is the true owner of private property and who has the rights of disposing of it, that the state has no right to steal from one person in order to give to another... even if the consequences of that are straightforwardly positive.
This is a philosophical issue and can't be proven unless you already accept its assumptions. The socialist viewpoint (with very strong historical backing, although it's not in much favor today) is that it's impossible for a private individual to hold "private" property at all - and that doing so is essentially the same as stealing from the commons. You can see hints of this thinking in the arguments for property taxes.
I'd like to clarify that I'm not arguing for socialism, which I think is also a pipe dream (although it's a more comforting pipe dream than free-market capitalism), but against "pure" capitalism. Neither is realistically sustainable, any more than anarchy is.
I think, from what I've read, that Rothbard's definition of a monopoly seems to be right. He defines it as an exclusive grant of trading priveleges, and as such, is fundamentally incompatible with a true free market.
Rothbard is playing semantic games and defining his conclusion as his argument. A truly free market won't have monopolies only because the definition of a free market precludes them - once it's got monopolies it isn't free anymore. That is also totally ignoring the very real and predictable fact of historical monopolies - leveraging, say, a monopoly on water rights into extreme social and economic power has been done a million times in a million places. And if you accept the existence of private property, you accept the existence of monopolies - all private property is is an implicit or explicit grant of monopoly rights over a resource. A truly free market is not a sustainable condition - it requires outside intervention to avoid collapse. For example, a big problem today with the operation of our (not very free, but more free than others) market is the problem of information - the whole economic theory behind competition relies on informed actors. But when the information actors need is just another good to be bartered, you quickly realize that that control of the information about the market is an enormously powerful tool in manipulating that market - far more powerful than competition.
A monopoly holder doesn't have to withhold goods in order to drive up prices - by definition a monopoly is the only (or only practical) source for a good. My father in laws family made a lot of money when his (several greats) grandfather participated in a land grab in Montana - he took unfarmable land overlooking a valley that happened to be suitable for damming the only river in the valley. By leveraging that water monopoly, he was able to eventually gain monopoly control over the cattle market in that area. If he hadn't been an alcoholic, his family might well still control that part of Montana. Note that historically, this has happened lots of times. A common response is that the farmers in the valley might band together and take over control of the river. Then they'll share the water between them in common. Know what that leads to? Community control of resources - it's the beginnings of socialism.
Free markets *aren't* solid at a fundamental level, and more than socialism is. They certainly aren't ethical - one of the reasons socialism is so popular is because it directly addresses the concern people have for one another. To be a true free market capitalist, you have to dispense with empathy which many people find uncomfortable.
Further, the "free market" is a myth - no such thing has ever existed, nor will it, because it's unstable and devolves into monopoly systems, which end up with controlled markets. Which is why nobody actually wants them.
It's *still* not legal under the LGPL - it becomes legal under something else which is not the LGPL. And you win the prize for "least usefull non-answer to a concern".
Rule of thumb is this: If you use an LGPL library, it must be possible for the end-user of your application to replace the LGPL library with something else. Theres a few different ways to do this - dynamically link, statically link but ship source, statically link but ship object files & linker scripts.
Re:Why am I getting spam from Linspire?
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PHP 5.1.0 Released
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· Score: 1
FYI (if you didn't know already), nVu is funded and developed by Linspire, so it's unsuprising that they signed you up for the email list. I bet the privacy policy even says so. So while I know that it's annoying, it's not that nVu sold your email address to Linspire, or (neccesarily) that Linspire buys email addresses - nVu *is* Linspire.
Most abandonware really is - in many cases, it's not longer possible even to determine who the copyright holder actually is.
HOWEVER:
Abandonware, however reasonable and ethical it may seem, is not a legal concept, and copyright law doesn't care if you can't find the original author. There really isn't any wiggle room here at all. Now, that is at least partially a failing of our copyright system - requiring registration, for example, helps prevent this sort of thing - but as it currently stands, abandonware sites are clearly and unequivocably outside the law, and DMCA takedown notices sent to them are legit. Unless the person sending the notice doesn't actually own the copyright, which has happened.
Re:I think I buy into this "ajax" thing
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Ajax in Action
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Netscape didn't believe that,
And they were wrong, too, and so was Microsoft. They were worried that Java appletts, of all things, were going to kill the desktop OS. Wake me up when that starts happening - and it had a much better chance than AJAX does.
Google doesn't seem to believe that it's a terrible platform either.
Thats why Google Earth is an AJAX application, right? Except it's not. And Googles applications, while good and certainly groundbreaking in terms of web applications are nothing compared to the state of client applications, even years ago. The UI features Maps and GMail lack are too many list here - and they are extremely suited for deployment on the web. Spreadsheets, and even word processing, not so much.
Re:I think I buy into this "ajax" thing
on
Ajax in Action
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· Score: 2, Insightful
where you think of the browser hosting your application rather than content
And this is where you go wrong, and why AJAX sucks, and will continue to suck - web browers are (fundamentally) shitty application platforms, for very important reasons that will not go away. The future of web applications, the future where they don't totally suck and aren't jury rigged one-of inconsistent half-assed things, is in specialized thin clients.
Re:Can AJAX finally bring us "push technology"
on
Ajax in Action
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· Score: 2, Informative
No. AJAX, for all it's hype and buzz and crapola, does not fundamentally change the client/server nature of HTTP and the web. AJAX applications that load data do it by polling, exactly the same as meta refresh tags and timer-based javascript refreshes have been for 10 years.
So, it's even less of a "one is better or more powerful than the other" thing. SQL is just different from all-purpose languages.
SQL is unequivocaly less powerful than a Turing-complete language, pretty much by definition. SQL can only describe sets, the same way that you might describe a set (actually a tuple, but whatever) in Python as (1,2,3,4). There's no reason a set-based language can't be Turing complete, as thats exactly what PL/SQL and the various other prodecural variants are, but SQL per se is absolutely not as powerful as any "general purpose", Turing complete language.
In an all-purpose, Turing complete programming language, support for sets is limited or non-existent.
Eh? Maybe you meant set operations, as in set theory? sets and bags, as data structures, are well supported (Turing equivilence and all that).
If you want to integrate the two, you usually have to use a cursor in an all-purpose programming language, and go through all the tuples of the set one by one.
In order to *do* anything with a set, you must go through the tuples of the set in some way (not neccesarily one by one). That is why programming languages interact with them like that. The fact that SQL cannot do that is one reason it is not a programming language - it can only describe sets, not act upon them.
It may be accurate to say that while it is theoretically possible to design a database such that all data can be represented, and no nulls are present or required, the availability of NULL has real practical value (but Oracle making empty string be the same is still stupid).
It's a seperate product from Oracle (the company), not an integral part of Oracle (the database). I've used only very shallowly and other products even less so I can't speak to how well it compares with other stuff out there, but it's certainly more convenient than needing to interoperate with outside applications.
And it was probably the most contrived, ridiculous CSI episode I've ever seen, and thats saying a bit. The guy who "makes the game" - CEO of the company and apparently also the game designer - won't tell them the games storyline, because "it's proprietary"? There's no gamefaqs.com in whatever planet CSI is set on? And the "twist" that the game designer is actually the secret "Wizard" that all the "players" turn their "points" into? Please. And the justification is that it somehow drives sales of his game? Right.
I know a guy who has a T-1 run to his home. He had to get a business license but as soon as he had that Verizon was happy to take his money. It's a hell of a lot more than you're paying for your satellite, though...
Slashdot Mirror
Comments are still extremely valuable for explaining why you do something, especially if it's because theres a non-obvious corner case, or there is an obvious change or optimization you can't make for non-obvious reasons.
Amtrak does suck, and it's not government owned, and it doesn't suck simply because of the government. As I said, the best railroads in the world are government owned and operated. It sucks because of a variety of specific decisions and issues, some of which were made by the government, but it's entirely possible - even likely - that a private company would have made the same decisions. It was/is the federal governments failure to commit to passenger rail that is a primary cause of Amtraks suckiness, not the existence of government interference.
No, it's true. If you add up all the cost increases on services, materials, and medicines, a doctors office spends more dealing with the feds than on rent, electricity, or any other overhead expense.
The major expense a (medical) doctor pays is malpractice insurance.
Regulations over the past 20 years have skyrocketed. Under the Clinton administration, the federal registry (the big book of regulations) doubled! Under Reagan & both Bushes, it went up almost as much.
The size of the federal register, sure, but I was talking specifically about insurance regulation, which hasn't changed much in 20 years. Regulation in general has increased a lot more. On the other hand, while there are a great many more regulations, you can't even draw a correlation, much less a causation, between the amount of regulation in general and economic performance in general.
The insurance and medical companies (mostly the drug companies) like that though. It decreases competition and increases their profits at the cost of the consumers' choice. Big companies cozy up to government, because they see it as a tool to use to make money.
Can't possibly agree more, although they're also the first ones to trot out the "free market" any time regulation that might empower consumers shows up. A lot (certainly not all, but a lot) of government agencies and regulations came into existence because the private sector abused the trust of the public, enough for them to take notice and for politicians to feel pressured to do something about it. You can certainly make a reasonable case about how that regulation and those regulatory bodies are inefficent and heap costs on companies and consumers, or maybe even that they don't serve thier purpose anymore, but they mostly did *not* spring up out of thin air (the FCC being something of an exception here), they were created in response to specific incidents or general conditions. You can make a quite reasonable argument that market regulations are in and of themselves an expression of the free market.
This is false. The problem with our rail (theres actually a ton of problems, but the specific one with Amtrak) is that the (private) companies that own almost all (well over 90%) of the actual rail in the US are freight companies. Amtrak is the only commuter rail service (and it is also a private company), but it owns essentially zero rail and can't provide high speed service even if it wanted to. It's worth pointing out that all of the good rail lines in the world are government funded and usually government run. The state of rail in the US is fucked, for a lot of reasons, but it's not fucked just because the government intervened.
How much have airplanes improved under private carriers in that time, even with the burden of FAA compliance and government run airports?
Hardly at all. A large portion of the planes still flying are the same planes that flew in 1971, and even the newer ones are still old designs. The air traffic control system has hardly been updated at all. By the way, the government doesn't run airports, although it does regulate them - they're generally funded by the ever-famous public-private partnership (where a private company gets the land & right of way for free via emminent domain), and run by private companies.
Medicare (as all social spending in the US) has an overhead of over 50% when you include the money that goes to pay bureaucrats in the HHS department, pork projects, and the huge amount of fraud.
Making up your numbers doesn't impress anyone.
The biggest chunk of overhead for private providers is compliance with the federal government's millions of pages of regulations.
This is untrue.
The price of medical care in the USA has gone up proportionally with the increase in federal regulation: the more the government tells the medical industry what to do, the more it costs you.
Healthcare benefits have gone steadily down, and prices have gone steadily up over the last 20 years or so, and federal regulation of the insurance industry has hardly changed at all in that time. There have been some major regulatory changes in the health care industry, which have indirectly raised prices and probably your insurance costs as a result, but it's worth noting that these regulations came into existence due to systemic and widespread abuses and failures on the part of that same industry.
Well, you *sound* like one...
In fact, you sound like you're arguing everythign except realistic points (which, of course, the book does too - I don't want to sound like I'm defending it because it's crap).
In fact, everything you write here sounds exactly like the standard fears & rants of a Microsoft sharecropper who fears (greatly) the de-valuation of your company. It's certainly true that Microsoft has engendered a large subculture, but I don't think you could prove that that market would be smaller or less vibrant if there was greater competition in the OS market. It's entirely possible that your specific section would be - you make your money by compensating for flaws in Microsofts product - but the market of third party/customized solutions would probably be at least as large and as profitable. By the way, as long as we're talking about hidden costs, the costs of companies such as yours provides are an excellent demonstration of them.
If Linux fanboys want to convince, they need to make a product that works as well as the competition.
In my experience (I'm 31 and have been watching freeware since 1984 when I started my first BBS), that hasn't happened often.
Of course, there are millions of people who disagree with you. What "works as well" is often subjective. A big part of the issue is convincing people (who, thanks to the MS monopoly, have generally only experienced Windows) is that "different" is not "worse". This is a hard sell and is one reason alternate operating systems have such an uproad hill to acceptance in the general market.
Word documents have become the de facto standard for document exchange and are what has locked many people into staying with Microsoft Word. Really? My users (nearly 90% in our last questionnaire) love the Word interface and look-and-feel.
Self-selected surveys are *great* for backing up your already felt convictions, aren't they? How many of your users are even aware of alternatives to Word? Of the ones who have, how many would even consider switching if they were told they couldn't keep compatability with Word documents, even if there were (potentially massive) cost savings? There's a saying about the value of your share of the IT market being the cost of all your customers to switch away from your product - Microsoft relies very heavily on that to keep customers from switching.
This book is ridiculous, and is pointing the blame at a non-monopoly instead of at competitors who don't know how to compete.
And here is where the real fanboy stuff shows through. Microsoft is *absolutely* a monopoly. There is no question about it whatsoever. You can argue a lot about how they got there, and you can pin blame on IBM and Novell and everyone else, and you can claim that MS deserves its status and it's un-American to limit them, but claiming with a straight face that they aren't a monopoly is just retarded.
The whole cowboy culture of programers (just look down in this thread to see people bragging about the least readable assignments they ever turned in) is detrimental to the state of the art in programming. So is the obsession with performance (mostly by people who couldn't tell you the hotspots in the code they're supposedly "optimizing", of course). And thats why stuff like an assignment to turn in code using the least LOC possible is harmful and irresponsible. There is no circumstance, ever, where you will need to use this skill. It provides no special insight into algorithms, and only minimal knowledge of language features. You aren't a better programmer because you avoid your enter key. I know it's not really reasonable to expect college students to act like real grownups, but theres no reason to encourage it in classes.
I don't believe you that the authors needed to use a goto (crappy programming doesn't neccesarily mean that your pet solution is the answer). It's more likely that what they really wanted was an exception.
The use of goto in this manner in the Linux kernel is used as a poor-mans exception, which C does't have, and use of goto in this manner is more common in C. It's a crummy way of doing your error handling, since it has all of the flaws of exceptions and hardly any of the benefits, as well as introducing a few flaws of its own, but when you're working in C you don't really have any other choice. The use of goto like this is one of the reasons people regularly suggest using C++ for the linux kernel.
The professor is right - don't use goto. On the other hand, he's also a dogmatic asshole (assuming that the OP is fairly presenting his case, which I suppose is questionable) for giving an assingment like "write this in the fewest LOC possible". In fact, such an exercise in and of itself is detrimental to the teaching of good programming practice. So minus points for giving it, and extra minus points for giving the OP grief when he used goto to achieve that goal.
One of the Massachusets requirements is that the default file format must be, or must be alterable to, the OpenDoc format. I was all ready to give MS the benefit of the doubt, too, reading the Office developer blogs and hearing them talk about how MS has turned a new leaf and is really dedicated to interoperability and open standards. And in fairness, maybe the Office guys believe that.
It is innate in the definition of a free market economy that poor/unsuccessful actors are not successfull. In a *truly* free economy, this means that they die of starvation, exposure, or other avoidable causes. Hand waving that "surely someone will take care of this" is avoiding the issue - taking care of this problem is one of the things we invented governments for.
Capitalists have arguments that purport to show that not only are the unintended consequences of government intervention in the economy worse than the intended consequence, but at a more fundamental level of who is the true owner of private property and who has the rights of disposing of it, that the state has no right to steal from one person in order to give to another... even if the consequences of that are straightforwardly positive.
This is a philosophical issue and can't be proven unless you already accept its assumptions. The socialist viewpoint (with very strong historical backing, although it's not in much favor today) is that it's impossible for a private individual to hold "private" property at all - and that doing so is essentially the same as stealing from the commons. You can see hints of this thinking in the arguments for property taxes.
I'd like to clarify that I'm not arguing for socialism, which I think is also a pipe dream (although it's a more comforting pipe dream than free-market capitalism), but against "pure" capitalism. Neither is realistically sustainable, any more than anarchy is.
I think, from what I've read, that Rothbard's definition of a monopoly seems to be right. He defines it as an exclusive grant of trading priveleges, and as such, is fundamentally incompatible with a true free market.
Rothbard is playing semantic games and defining his conclusion as his argument. A truly free market won't have monopolies only because the definition of a free market precludes them - once it's got monopolies it isn't free anymore. That is also totally ignoring the very real and predictable fact of historical monopolies - leveraging, say, a monopoly on water rights into extreme social and economic power has been done a million times in a million places. And if you accept the existence of private property, you accept the existence of monopolies - all private property is is an implicit or explicit grant of monopoly rights over a resource. A truly free market is not a sustainable condition - it requires outside intervention to avoid collapse. For example, a big problem today with the operation of our (not very free, but more free than others) market is the problem of information - the whole economic theory behind competition relies on informed actors. But when the information actors need is just another good to be bartered, you quickly realize that that control of the information about the market is an enormously powerful tool in manipulating that market - far more powerful than competition.
A monopoly holder doesn't have to withhold goods in order to drive up prices - by definition a monopoly is the only (or only practical) source for a good. My father in laws family made a lot of money when his (several greats) grandfather participated in a land grab in Montana - he took unfarmable land overlooking a valley that happened to be suitable for damming the only river in the valley. By leveraging that water monopoly, he was able to eventually gain monopoly control over the cattle market in that area. If he hadn't been an alcoholic, his family might well still control that part of Montana. Note that historically, this has happened lots of times. A common response is that the farmers in the valley might band together and take over control of the river. Then they'll share the water between them in common. Know what that leads to? Community control of resources - it's the beginnings of socialism.
I think it's worth n
Further, the "free market" is a myth - no such thing has ever existed, nor will it, because it's unstable and devolves into monopoly systems, which end up with controlled markets. Which is why nobody actually wants them.
It's *still* not legal under the LGPL - it becomes legal under something else which is not the LGPL. And you win the prize for "least usefull non-answer to a concern".
Rule of thumb is this: If you use an LGPL library, it must be possible for the end-user of your application to replace the LGPL library with something else. Theres a few different ways to do this - dynamically link, statically link but ship source, statically link but ship object files & linker scripts.
FYI (if you didn't know already), nVu is funded and developed by Linspire, so it's unsuprising that they signed you up for the email list. I bet the privacy policy even says so. So while I know that it's annoying, it's not that nVu sold your email address to Linspire, or (neccesarily) that Linspire buys email addresses - nVu *is* Linspire.
HOWEVER:
Abandonware, however reasonable and ethical it may seem, is not a legal concept, and copyright law doesn't care if you can't find the original author. There really isn't any wiggle room here at all. Now, that is at least partially a failing of our copyright system - requiring registration, for example, helps prevent this sort of thing - but as it currently stands, abandonware sites are clearly and unequivocably outside the law, and DMCA takedown notices sent to them are legit. Unless the person sending the notice doesn't actually own the copyright, which has happened.
And they were wrong, too, and so was Microsoft. They were worried that Java appletts, of all things, were going to kill the desktop OS. Wake me up when that starts happening - and it had a much better chance than AJAX does.
Google doesn't seem to believe that it's a terrible platform either.
Thats why Google Earth is an AJAX application, right? Except it's not. And Googles applications, while good and certainly groundbreaking in terms of web applications are nothing compared to the state of client applications, even years ago. The UI features Maps and GMail lack are too many list here - and they are extremely suited for deployment on the web. Spreadsheets, and even word processing, not so much.
And this is where you go wrong, and why AJAX sucks, and will continue to suck - web browers are (fundamentally) shitty application platforms, for very important reasons that will not go away. The future of web applications, the future where they don't totally suck and aren't jury rigged one-of inconsistent half-assed things, is in specialized thin clients.
No. AJAX, for all it's hype and buzz and crapola, does not fundamentally change the client/server nature of HTTP and the web. AJAX applications that load data do it by polling, exactly the same as meta refresh tags and timer-based javascript refreshes have been for 10 years.
SQL is unequivocaly less powerful than a Turing-complete language, pretty much by definition. SQL can only describe sets, the same way that you might describe a set (actually a tuple, but whatever) in Python as (1,2,3,4). There's no reason a set-based language can't be Turing complete, as thats exactly what PL/SQL and the various other prodecural variants are, but SQL per se is absolutely not as powerful as any "general purpose", Turing complete language.
Eh? Maybe you meant set operations, as in set theory? sets and bags, as data structures, are well supported (Turing equivilence and all that).
If you want to integrate the two, you usually have to use a cursor in an all-purpose programming language, and go through all the tuples of the set one by one.
In order to *do* anything with a set, you must go through the tuples of the set in some way (not neccesarily one by one). That is why programming languages interact with them like that. The fact that SQL cannot do that is one reason it is not a programming language - it can only describe sets, not act upon them.
It may be accurate to say that while it is theoretically possible to design a database such that all data can be represented, and no nulls are present or required, the availability of NULL has real practical value (but Oracle making empty string be the same is still stupid).
It's a seperate product from Oracle (the company), not an integral part of Oracle (the database). I've used only very shallowly and other products even less so I can't speak to how well it compares with other stuff out there, but it's certainly more convenient than needing to interoperate with outside applications.
Not to my knowledge. The MySQL client libraries are GPL.
And it was probably the most contrived, ridiculous CSI episode I've ever seen, and thats saying a bit. The guy who "makes the game" - CEO of the company and apparently also the game designer - won't tell them the games storyline, because "it's proprietary"? There's no gamefaqs.com in whatever planet CSI is set on? And the "twist" that the game designer is actually the secret "Wizard" that all the "players" turn their "points" into? Please. And the justification is that it somehow drives sales of his game? Right.
I know a guy who has a T-1 run to his home. He had to get a business license but as soon as he had that Verizon was happy to take his money. It's a hell of a lot more than you're paying for your satellite, though...