Twitter's lawyers aren't there to protect you. Those lawyers aren't the defendants' lawyers, and they don't represent the defendants. Terms of Service don't protect users from anything. As far as I can see, they're irrelevant in this court case.
The people who uploaded the photo wronged the copyright holder. So did the defendants. I'm no lawyer, but I find it hard to argue with those facts.
It seems to me the defendants (news websites) must have known they risked being sued when they embedded those tweets.
I'm a journalist. I've freelanced, and I've had my copyright violated. If Vox wants to publish a photo it sees on the New York Times website, it needs to track down the photographer and get a license. That's everyday journalism. It's been that way for my entire lifetime. And I think on the balance, it makes journalism better.
Why should Vox's photo policy be different when it sees a photo on Twitter than when it sees a photo on the New York Times? I don't fault Vox for trying. I also don't fault the judge for saying, "it shouldn't."
The interesting part -- especially for non-journalists -- will be in determining damages. If my photo goes viral, can I honestly claim I'm worse off than if nobody tweeted it? I suspect the publicity of going viral outweighs the lost royalties in many cases. What will the final cash amount be: $1? $200 plus lawyers' fees? $10,000?
I think the plaintiff did the right thing in suing publishers. I hope Twitter users who unwittingly violate copyright don't get sued. And I anticipate finding out the amount in damages: I think that's the really interesting part.
A "vulnerability" implies that there is a problem that makes somebody vulnerable to something. Who is vulnerable to what in this case?
Here's what won't happen: you won't give your login credentials to a third party. That's because your browser won't read any cookies from the original site, and Genius prevents you from typing into web forms.
The author uses technical language without talking about what people do, how people interact, and what people care about. Instead, there's much ado about a variable called "clickjacker" -- eliding the fact that www.theverge.com installs a slew of clickjackers of its own. Is Genius evil because of a variable name?
Let's find out how Genius' CSP changes can affect human beings, THEN write 3,000 words about it.
On cloud services, storing all your files as "objects" is much cheaper than renting a filesystem to store them on. The gist of this article is, "if S3 allowed block-level access, it would be as cheap as S3 and as flexible as a filesystem."
The most powerful sentence in the article is "I can't work out the details." I can't imagine any cloud-services engineer reading this article and thinking, "ooh, I'd never thought of adding block-level access!" I think block-level access is the most-requested feature since S3 was born. The author hasn't described how this will work -- or how S3 works, even.
I could go into a dozen technical reasons why javascript is a terrible, horrible, outrageously bad language
So is Java. It's unfair to call JavaScript's problems "product killing"... unless you mean Java's are as well?
I juggle two day jobs, both for responsive, background-processing-heavy websites. One's in Node and one's in Scala (Java on steroids). To me, the Node way Makes More Sense.
Yes, Java can process in multiple threads at once; but then you need to worry about atomicity. Yes, Java it can delegate different jobs to different threads; but then you need to read up on ExecutorServices. Yes, Java is faster; but if you want async file reads, things get complicated pretty quickly. (If you're going to block your thread, you'd better adjust your thread pool....) Yes, Java is type-safe and compiled; but that hinders as often as it helps.
These are two different cultures. Java culture seems to whirl around huge infrastructures -- J2EE, JDBC, Swing, Ant, etc -- that have gargantuan learning curves and ten-year-old flaws. (One that bit me: Java 7's UTF-8 decoder accepts invalid UTF-8 to maintain compatibility with Java 5 -- that is, a ten-year-old version of the standard.)
In contrast, Node culture is about self-organizing chaos. You can deliver results really quickly, but you might need to rewrite your code in a few months to keep up with library changes. And your favourite dependency might not be there tomorrow.
Java and JavaScript (and any other language, really) can kill your product in different ways. Pick your poison.
MSF addresses severe problems (education shortfall, brain drain) that particularly impact the field of medicine. The problem is specific to medecine because it takes a decade of education to train a single doctor.
There is no equivalent problem in the field of technology, so there is no equivalent organization.
There are already people in developing countries who know how to use JavaScript and would love to apply their skills. And they'll (hopefully) be better at it than you, because they understand the local issues better than you ever will.
You can probably do more good, in a utilitarian sense, by getting a job in America and donating everything you can spare to a nonprofit in a developing country. That nonprofit can hire computer people with the money, building up that country's computer-person economy.
Volunteering overseas isn't a bad idea. But it isn't very humanitarian. Acknowledge that you're volunteering for your own reasons, and try not to make too much of an impact.
If I'm writing a paper, I use LaTeX. Yes, the macros are a pain, but I find it takes less time than writing a paper in, say, Word (page breaks, sections, image placement, etc. need only be written once in LaTeX, but in Word they need to be revisited at each draft); and LaTeX's output quality meets my standards (while Word's, say, doesn't).
If I'm writing documentation, I use Markdown. It's simple and it has links. The output quality is far lower, because I expect readers to prefer reading plain HTML anyway -- a PDF would be inconvenient for them, even if it would be prettier.
Generalizing those notions:
1. The best tool for the job is the one that lets you produce and edit content as quickly as possible, while meeting your requirements. In other words: if monospace, left-justified text files are satisfactory, you should probably be using plaintext. When starting a document, first pick a set of features, then choose the tool that has those features and gives you the fastest workflow.
2. Distributing in multiple formats shouldn't be a concern: you can convert pretty much any open format to any other. Your _master_ copy needs to encode all the features you use.
A CS degree may seem mundane, but the skills are in such demand you can do just about anything.
After graduating, I got sent overseas for six months to work for an AIDS-related organization in sub-Saharan Africa. The challenges were enormous and often unforeseeable; and while the job description suggested I would be doing nothing but programming, most of my job involved interacting with people.
For any white person volunteering overseas, the experience is extremely stressful and not at all glamourous--you won't save any lives, you won't earn bucketloads of cash, and congratulations will be few and far between. But overseas volunteers experience and learn things nobody else can possibly understand: your life would be changed forever.
Starting your search? In Canada, begin by looking for the CIDA internships page (the place to look); in the States, maybe investigate Peace Corps; in both, flip through CUSO-VSO and the myriad search websites Google will find for you. Organizations that pay you a stipend or salary are likely to provide both you and the recipient country with a much more useful placement (not to mention, they won't break the bank); unfortunately, though logically, those organizations are stricter about whom they interview and hire.
Watch the ground for snakes, and don't drink the water; why don't they teach this stuff in Computer Programming 101?
They purposely pointed LINUX to something that would not work. This goes well from bad coding into willful failure.
I just wonder if it is criminal?
It sounds more likely that they just copy/pasted the bulk of their BIOS code from another motherboard, then tested and tweaked until Windows XP and Vista stopped crashing.
(disclaimer: I do high-level software, not motherboards, so I could be way out in left field here...)
Maybe I'm missing the point, though - why do you see sines as being derived from (or the underlying concept for) sines instead of what I outlined above?
In normal trigonometry, sine is defined in terms of angle. In this new kind of trigonometry, you could say the spread is defined in terms of a sine. It's the same thing, only backwards.
The book doesn't really present any new mathematical findings; instead, it replaces our current foundations and presents trigonometry in what seems to be a more elegant form. (Of course, I'm only basing that on the first chapter....)
The professor seems to have found an interesting way to present trig - however, it should also be noted that he does actually rely on sines as an underlying concept.
That's missing the point entirely. The entire purpose of the book, from what I can gather, is to present rational trigonometry as the underlying concept behind sines. (Since the only other way to do it properly is with calculus and set theory.)
You know, I never understood why games developers don't just write for Linux (or indeed, any other OS), and then provide their games on a bootable disc.
I, for one, quit any game I'm playing the instant my email program (Evolution) tells me I've received an important email, or the instant somebody I care about sends me an instant message (Gaim). Half-Life 2 may be spectacular and all, but I place it at about the same priority as minesweeper -- that is, a diversion while my computer isn't being used for stuff I care about.
I can't help but think that everybody who says PHP scales simply has never gotten to know Java before. PHP was started as a hack and it's had new features tacked on ever since. Its extensions all have different function naming conventions and argument ordering (pop quiz: which parameter to is_array() is the needle, and which is the haystack? What about strstr()?). PHP4's objects copy themselves at the slightest provocation, leading to all sorts of problems. And while PHP's arrays are handy, they're nothing compared to Java's incredible Collections.
Obviously, the developers are aware of this, and along comes PHP5. But looking at The changes since PHP4, all you'll find are a whole bunch of changes which make PHP more like Java (oh, and PHP's "unique" overloading and object iteration features, which are truly bizarre).
I dunno about you, but the fact that PHP's developers are trying to make it more and more like Java leads me to suspect that Java has done something right.
I interpret your post to say that you worked on your 20k-line project alone; try working in a team in both PHP and Java and you'll understand why people say PHP doesn't scale.
Buy a video game, download a crack from the Internet, apply the crack, play the game until you reach a certain point, and finally watch the a scene; or
If you build an engine that allows you to write scripts that modify any page you view, there are obviously serious security flaws.
Yes, that's true. Then again, you could say the exact same thing of Firefox's extension system.
But if you receive your user script from a trusted source, it's more secure than installing a Firefox extension -- after all, there are only about 5 GM_ functions which actually escape a normal web page's security boundaries.
I'd far rather have an application that today is a little slower, but secure instead of fast but unsecure.
Zlib compression and decompression probably takes up a sizeable proportion of all CPU power in the world. Make it take twice as much processing power, and hell, you'd be impacting the environment because of the extra wattage used around the globe:P.
Seriously, though: its entire purpose is to be quick and transparent. If you double the amount of time it takes to compress everything, suddenly zlib becomes half as useful.
By using IE, you ensure that you will be safe from any bugs that arise from new technologies, such as PNG.
That's wrong, IE is just as vulnerable with regard to PNGs.
Also, zlib compression isn't only used in PNGs. It is used to transfer a good proportion of web pages, transparently. In fact, this very web page was transmitted to you using zlib, if you're using IE or Firefox or Opera or Safari or Lynx or....
People don't like carrying around multiple devices with them
Yes they do!
The thing Bill Gates just doesn't seem to get -- and the thing Apple seems to understand so clearly -- is that people don't care about computers, they care about tools. A mobile-phone-slash-music-player-slash-PDA is the technological equivalent of a hammer, a screwdriver and a saw rolled into one tool. That's not to say that such a combination won't work. Hell, Bill Gates's vision may be the most convenient thing for your average Joe. But your average Joe doesn't give a shit.
The nice thing about the iPod is that it plays music, and that's it. The simplicity is incredibly appealing. It's like a light switch: all it does is turn on the light. A key: all it does is open a door. A phone: all it does is lets you talk to people. (Show me a person who loves a complicated cell phone, and I'll show you ten who hate it.)
People love their iPods. I peer into my crystal ball, and I see that Bill Gates won't change that.
But someday in the next fifty years we will probably have a personal computer that mimics so closely a human being that people will assume naturally that it's as conscious of itself as we assume our fellow humans are conscious of themselves.
But will it be conscious? You see, fast computers don't solve the question at all: they only makes it all the more obvious and unanswerable.
pretty much every compiler around goes through the following steps: (a) make an abstract syntax tree from the source code, (b) optimize it, and (c) output machine code.
I'm not 100% sure about its internal processing, but I believe tcc either skips some of that or has it all so blended together that the steps aren't very distinct.
tcc does perform all those steps. It does them faster because the (a) part is far less abstract, and the (b) part does far less work (as a consequence).
You do bring up a good point, though: a compiler tuned to a specific language can be a hell of a lot faster at compiling than a more generic one. But it can't do much more in the way of optimizing its output.
Re:stupid dumb moronic question
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
Does all this extraneous language support make gcc bloated for single-language compilation?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: pretty much every compiler around goes through the following steps: (a) make an abstract syntax tree from the source code, (b) optimize it, and (c) output machine code. No matter what language you're using, these steps must be performed; a multi-language compiler simply provides many ways of doing (a). But since optimization happens after (a) anyway, it doesn't matter.
That's oversimplifying, since if a compiler were tuned to a single language it could probably use a slightly simpler abstract syntax tree format. But the benefits would be slight; it's far more useful to support tons of languages at little extra effort than to drop all alternate languages for a minor performance gain.
Not that I've tried it recently, but I think I did this a year or so ago (by accident) as non-root. I didn't lose any data whatsoever, since so many error messages began to get printed I hit Ctrl-C before it ever got to/home. So yeah, I heaved a huge sigh of relief.
The Internet is a content distribution system. It was designed from the very beginning so that users could request information and that information would be delivered. Quite obviously, the user is always free to not request information.
What gives advertisers the chutzpah to first further their profits by using the Internet, and then turn around and blame users when they don't request data they don't want? The Internet was not designed for advertisers. They are free to use it, but they must accept what it does and what it doesn't do.
An analogy would be going to a high-class restaurant and accusing the waiter of not serving Big Macs. Sure, Big Macs (compulsory advertisement) may be nice, but the restaurant (Internet) simply won't make them.
Soon as the qt windows free version starts shipping I think we will see alot of renewed development of gui stuff in python.
The GPL is a problem for many people.
On the other hand, why don't more people use PyGTK? Glade may be a pretty crappy program, but the GUIs you design with it can be great, because GTK has nice widgets. Especially compared to Swing -- coming from a GTK background, I find it next to impossible to design anything remotely similar to a user-friendly interface with Swing. In my (relatively brief) experience, PyGTK has been a dream: everything I ever wanted for RAD.
PyGTK is licensed under the LGPL -- a lot less of a turn-off to many people than the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Twitter's lawyers aren't there to protect you. Those lawyers aren't the defendants' lawyers, and they don't represent the defendants. Terms of Service don't protect users from anything. As far as I can see, they're irrelevant in this court case.
The people who uploaded the photo wronged the copyright holder. So did the defendants. I'm no lawyer, but I find it hard to argue with those facts.
It seems to me the defendants (news websites) must have known they risked being sued when they embedded those tweets.
I'm a journalist. I've freelanced, and I've had my copyright violated. If Vox wants to publish a photo it sees on the New York Times website, it needs to track down the photographer and get a license. That's everyday journalism. It's been that way for my entire lifetime. And I think on the balance, it makes journalism better.
Why should Vox's photo policy be different when it sees a photo on Twitter than when it sees a photo on the New York Times? I don't fault Vox for trying. I also don't fault the judge for saying, "it shouldn't."
The interesting part -- especially for non-journalists -- will be in determining damages. If my photo goes viral, can I honestly claim I'm worse off than if nobody tweeted it? I suspect the publicity of going viral outweighs the lost royalties in many cases. What will the final cash amount be: $1? $200 plus lawyers' fees? $10,000?
I think the plaintiff did the right thing in suing publishers. I hope Twitter users who unwittingly violate copyright don't get sued. And I anticipate finding out the amount in damages: I think that's the really interesting part.
A "vulnerability" implies that there is a problem that makes somebody vulnerable to something. Who is vulnerable to what in this case?
Here's what won't happen: you won't give your login credentials to a third party. That's because your browser won't read any cookies from the original site, and Genius prevents you from typing into web forms.
The author uses technical language without talking about what people do, how people interact, and what people care about. Instead, there's much ado about a variable called "clickjacker" -- eliding the fact that www.theverge.com installs a slew of clickjackers of its own. Is Genius evil because of a variable name?
Let's find out how Genius' CSP changes can affect human beings, THEN write 3,000 words about it.
On cloud services, storing all your files as "objects" is much cheaper than renting a filesystem to store them on. The gist of this article is, "if S3 allowed block-level access, it would be as cheap as S3 and as flexible as a filesystem."
The most powerful sentence in the article is "I can't work out the details." I can't imagine any cloud-services engineer reading this article and thinking, "ooh, I'd never thought of adding block-level access!" I think block-level access is the most-requested feature since S3 was born. The author hasn't described how this will work -- or how S3 works, even.
I could go into a dozen technical reasons why javascript is a terrible, horrible, outrageously bad language
So is Java. It's unfair to call JavaScript's problems "product killing" ... unless you mean Java's are as well?
I juggle two day jobs, both for responsive, background-processing-heavy websites. One's in Node and one's in Scala (Java on steroids). To me, the Node way Makes More Sense.
Yes, Java can process in multiple threads at once; but then you need to worry about atomicity. Yes, Java it can delegate different jobs to different threads; but then you need to read up on ExecutorServices. Yes, Java is faster; but if you want async file reads, things get complicated pretty quickly. (If you're going to block your thread, you'd better adjust your thread pool....) Yes, Java is type-safe and compiled; but that hinders as often as it helps.
These are two different cultures. Java culture seems to whirl around huge infrastructures -- J2EE, JDBC, Swing, Ant, etc -- that have gargantuan learning curves and ten-year-old flaws. (One that bit me: Java 7's UTF-8 decoder accepts invalid UTF-8 to maintain compatibility with Java 5 -- that is, a ten-year-old version of the standard.)
In contrast, Node culture is about self-organizing chaos. You can deliver results really quickly, but you might need to rewrite your code in a few months to keep up with library changes. And your favourite dependency might not be there tomorrow.
Java and JavaScript (and any other language, really) can kill your product in different ways. Pick your poison.
MSF addresses severe problems (education shortfall, brain drain) that particularly impact the field of medicine. The problem is specific to medecine because it takes a decade of education to train a single doctor.
There is no equivalent problem in the field of technology, so there is no equivalent organization.
There are already people in developing countries who know how to use JavaScript and would love to apply their skills. And they'll (hopefully) be better at it than you, because they understand the local issues better than you ever will.
You can probably do more good, in a utilitarian sense, by getting a job in America and donating everything you can spare to a nonprofit in a developing country. That nonprofit can hire computer people with the money, building up that country's computer-person economy.
Volunteering overseas isn't a bad idea. But it isn't very humanitarian. Acknowledge that you're volunteering for your own reasons, and try not to make too much of an impact.
If I'm writing a paper, I use LaTeX. Yes, the macros are a pain, but I find it takes less time than writing a paper in, say, Word (page breaks, sections, image placement, etc. need only be written once in LaTeX, but in Word they need to be revisited at each draft); and LaTeX's output quality meets my standards (while Word's, say, doesn't).
If I'm writing documentation, I use Markdown. It's simple and it has links. The output quality is far lower, because I expect readers to prefer reading plain HTML anyway -- a PDF would be inconvenient for them, even if it would be prettier.
Generalizing those notions:
1. The best tool for the job is the one that lets you produce and edit content as quickly as possible, while meeting your requirements. In other words: if monospace, left-justified text files are satisfactory, you should probably be using plaintext. When starting a document, first pick a set of features, then choose the tool that has those features and gives you the fastest workflow.
2. Distributing in multiple formats shouldn't be a concern: you can convert pretty much any open format to any other. Your _master_ copy needs to encode all the features you use.
A CS degree may seem mundane, but the skills are in such demand you can do just about anything.
After graduating, I got sent overseas for six months to work for an AIDS-related organization in sub-Saharan Africa. The challenges were enormous and often unforeseeable; and while the job description suggested I would be doing nothing but programming, most of my job involved interacting with people.
For any white person volunteering overseas, the experience is extremely stressful and not at all glamourous--you won't save any lives, you won't earn bucketloads of cash, and congratulations will be few and far between. But overseas volunteers experience and learn things nobody else can possibly understand: your life would be changed forever.
Starting your search? In Canada, begin by looking for the CIDA internships page (the place to look); in the States, maybe investigate Peace Corps; in both, flip through CUSO-VSO and the myriad search websites Google will find for you. Organizations that pay you a stipend or salary are likely to provide both you and the recipient country with a much more useful placement (not to mention, they won't break the bank); unfortunately, though logically, those organizations are stricter about whom they interview and hire.
Watch the ground for snakes, and don't drink the water; why don't they teach this stuff in Computer Programming 101?
They purposely pointed LINUX to something that would not work. This goes well from bad coding into willful failure. I just wonder if it is criminal?
It sounds more likely that they just copy/pasted the bulk of their BIOS code from another motherboard, then tested and tweaked until Windows XP and Vista stopped crashing.
(disclaimer: I do high-level software, not motherboards, so I could be way out in left field here...)
Hopefully someone can provide some sort of competition to this company.
Yes, somebody please do! It'd take about 2 hours for a PHP newbie to create a better system than WebCT.
Maybe I'm missing the point, though - why do you see sines as being derived from (or the underlying concept for) sines instead of what I outlined above?
In normal trigonometry, sine is defined in terms of angle. In this new kind of trigonometry, you could say the spread is defined in terms of a sine. It's the same thing, only backwards.
The book doesn't really present any new mathematical findings; instead, it replaces our current foundations and presents trigonometry in what seems to be a more elegant form. (Of course, I'm only basing that on the first chapter....)
The professor seems to have found an interesting way to present trig - however, it should also be noted that he does actually rely on sines as an underlying concept.
That's missing the point entirely. The entire purpose of the book, from what I can gather, is to present rational trigonometry as the underlying concept behind sines. (Since the only other way to do it properly is with calculus and set theory.)
You know, I never understood why games developers don't just write for Linux (or indeed, any other OS), and then provide their games on a bootable disc.
I, for one, quit any game I'm playing the instant my email program (Evolution) tells me I've received an important email, or the instant somebody I care about sends me an instant message (Gaim). Half-Life 2 may be spectacular and all, but I place it at about the same priority as minesweeper -- that is, a diversion while my computer isn't being used for stuff I care about.
I actually like PHP for large-scale web apps.
I can't help but think that everybody who says PHP scales simply has never gotten to know Java before. PHP was started as a hack and it's had new features tacked on ever since. Its extensions all have different function naming conventions and argument ordering (pop quiz: which parameter to is_array() is the needle, and which is the haystack? What about strstr()?). PHP4's objects copy themselves at the slightest provocation, leading to all sorts of problems. And while PHP's arrays are handy, they're nothing compared to Java's incredible Collections.
Obviously, the developers are aware of this, and along comes PHP5. But looking at The changes since PHP4, all you'll find are a whole bunch of changes which make PHP more like Java (oh, and PHP's "unique" overloading and object iteration features, which are truly bizarre).
I dunno about you, but the fact that PHP's developers are trying to make it more and more like Java leads me to suspect that Java has done something right.
I interpret your post to say that you worked on your 20k-line project alone; try working in a team in both PHP and Java and you'll understand why people say PHP doesn't scale.
Which is easier:
If you build an engine that allows you to write scripts that modify any page you view, there are obviously serious security flaws.
Yes, that's true. Then again, you could say the exact same thing of Firefox's extension system.
But if you receive your user script from a trusted source, it's more secure than installing a Firefox extension -- after all, there are only about 5 GM_ functions which actually escape a normal web page's security boundaries.
I'd far rather have an application that today is a little slower, but secure instead of fast but unsecure.
Zlib compression and decompression probably takes up a sizeable proportion of all CPU power in the world. Make it take twice as much processing power, and hell, you'd be impacting the environment because of the extra wattage used around the globe :P.
Seriously, though: its entire purpose is to be quick and transparent. If you double the amount of time it takes to compress everything, suddenly zlib becomes half as useful.
By using IE, you ensure that you will be safe from any bugs that arise from new technologies, such as PNG.
That's wrong, IE is just as vulnerable with regard to PNGs.
Also, zlib compression isn't only used in PNGs. It is used to transfer a good proportion of web pages, transparently. In fact, this very web page was transmitted to you using zlib, if you're using IE or Firefox or Opera or Safari or Lynx or....
People don't like carrying around multiple devices with them
Yes they do!
The thing Bill Gates just doesn't seem to get -- and the thing Apple seems to understand so clearly -- is that people don't care about computers, they care about tools. A mobile-phone-slash-music-player-slash-PDA is the technological equivalent of a hammer, a screwdriver and a saw rolled into one tool. That's not to say that such a combination won't work. Hell, Bill Gates's vision may be the most convenient thing for your average Joe. But your average Joe doesn't give a shit.
The nice thing about the iPod is that it plays music, and that's it. The simplicity is incredibly appealing. It's like a light switch: all it does is turn on the light. A key: all it does is open a door. A phone: all it does is lets you talk to people. (Show me a person who loves a complicated cell phone, and I'll show you ten who hate it.)
People love their iPods. I peer into my crystal ball, and I see that Bill Gates won't change that.
But someday in the next fifty years we will probably have a personal computer that mimics so closely a human being that people will assume naturally that it's as conscious of itself as we assume our fellow humans are conscious of themselves.
But will it be conscious? You see, fast computers don't solve the question at all: they only makes it all the more obvious and unanswerable.
pretty much every compiler around goes through the following steps: (a) make an abstract syntax tree from the source code, (b) optimize it, and (c) output machine code.
I'm not 100% sure about its internal processing, but I believe tcc either skips some of that or has it all so blended together that the steps aren't very distinct.
tcc does perform all those steps. It does them faster because the (a) part is far less abstract, and the (b) part does far less work (as a consequence).
You do bring up a good point, though: a compiler tuned to a specific language can be a hell of a lot faster at compiling than a more generic one. But it can't do much more in the way of optimizing its output.
Does all this extraneous language support make gcc bloated for single-language compilation?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: pretty much every compiler around goes through the following steps: (a) make an abstract syntax tree from the source code, (b) optimize it, and (c) output machine code. No matter what language you're using, these steps must be performed; a multi-language compiler simply provides many ways of doing (a). But since optimization happens after (a) anyway, it doesn't matter.
That's oversimplifying, since if a compiler were tuned to a single language it could probably use a slightly simpler abstract syntax tree format. But the benefits would be slight; it's far more useful to support tons of languages at little extra effort than to drop all alternate languages for a minor performance gain.
I dare you to try this. Dare.
Not that I've tried it recently, but I think I did this a year or so ago (by accident) as non-root. I didn't lose any data whatsoever, since so many error messages began to get printed I hit Ctrl-C before it ever got to /home. So yeah, I heaved a huge sigh of relief.
Or maybe that was just a weird dream.
The Internet is a content distribution system. It was designed from the very beginning so that users could request information and that information would be delivered. Quite obviously, the user is always free to not request information.
What gives advertisers the chutzpah to first further their profits by using the Internet, and then turn around and blame users when they don't request data they don't want? The Internet was not designed for advertisers. They are free to use it, but they must accept what it does and what it doesn't do.
An analogy would be going to a high-class restaurant and accusing the waiter of not serving Big Macs. Sure, Big Macs (compulsory advertisement) may be nice, but the restaurant (Internet) simply won't make them.
One thing I've never been able to grasp is why Python proponents always mention the fact that whitespace is significant as a good thing.
Yes, we all felt like this at one point. Try Python for one hour and you will love its treatment of whitespace for the rest of your life.
Soon as the qt windows free version starts shipping I think we will see alot of renewed development of gui stuff in python.
The GPL is a problem for many people.
On the other hand, why don't more people use PyGTK? Glade may be a pretty crappy program, but the GUIs you design with it can be great, because GTK has nice widgets. Especially compared to Swing -- coming from a GTK background, I find it next to impossible to design anything remotely similar to a user-friendly interface with Swing. In my (relatively brief) experience, PyGTK has been a dream: everything I ever wanted for RAD.
PyGTK is licensed under the LGPL -- a lot less of a turn-off to many people than the GPL.