My concern is if they do get that thing off the ground -- are they going to be able to control it?
Having trained on a Piper Warrior, taking a glider lesson was a scary experience -- I never did get the hang of rudder/aileron coordination, something you don't need to worry about in the Warrior on account of asymmetrical aileron deflection. Probably the worst preparation for operating the Flyer is experience in light planes because I imagine the Flyer control feel is unlike any other aircraft anyone has trained on.
Do they have simulators of the Flyer so the reenactors can operate the Flyer safely?
Is it fair to say that Ada was a "software engineering" language before Java came on the scene. You know what I mean: the features of the language are supposed to prevent common bugs from happening and foster readability and maintainability. While there are "software engineering" aspects to C++, is it fair to say that C++ targets the same "large project" market but takes a very different approach?
The "published metrics" I have seen suggest that Ada and C++ are neck-and-neck with each other -- development speed, bug rates, and such. Ada may have a slight edge, but it is nothing to write home about. This supports the notion that tool-based security is a weak one.
The old notion of car safety was to put the burden on the driver while the Ralph Nader approach was to build safer cars. As it turns out, the biggest safety factor remains the "nut behind the wheel" -- go to the IIHS Web site and look at the relative safety of the different car makes, and the pattern follows driver demographics more than anything else (a Toyota Corolla is a lot safer than a Geo Prizm -- they both come off the same assembly line in California).
Along the same lines, the biggest factor in software bugs is "the loose screw behind the keyboard" rather than issues of language design.
I think Eric Idle's best work is the rockumentary about The Ruttles titled "All You Need is Cash." The Ruttles started as a Harry Shearer/Eric Idle sketch on SNL when Eric Idle was guest host (Idle promised to bring the Beatles, and the Ruttles were the poor last-minute stand-ins).
The concept grew into a 90-minute special shown on TV only once called "All You Need is Cash" featuring cameos of George Harrison and Bianca Jagger as the wife of one of the Ruttles.
The Ruttles offers so much more possibility for new comic ideas and Holy Grail. The the Ruttles you can create new material about their breakup, the spotty record of their post-Ruttles solo careers, the nostalgia for the Ruttles and the resulting Broadway knockoffs (Ruttlemania?). With Holy Grail, you are recycling old material.
This discussion is taking a hardware-geek turn in talking flops and mips and bits and watts. People are forgetting that Intel (at least the traditional 8087-style FPU, don't know about SSE) is considered the Gold Standard for IEEE 754 while the Alpha floating point is alleged to cut corners, and you need to factor this all in for comparing power and performance and flops per kwHr.
"Professor Floating Point" argues (trolls?) that Java sucks for floating point, but you need to wade through his entertaining read to see what he says about precision and processors and flags and traps. This dude (you have to scroll down to the section on IEEE 754) takes the opposite view: the two dudes are Dole and Clinton on that stupid "60 Minutes" thing, but between the two of them you kind of get the picture.
The picture is that a lot of why Intel is slow is they are doing an arguably higher-quality floating point, and dude number 2 reinforces the view that Alphas and SPARCs and other RISCs do what dude number 1 says is cheap floating point because they don't want to be slowed down.
Check the two references out and you decide whether everything Intel does is really needed, but it is important to know that an Alpha is not just a better, cheaper, faster chip -- it does its floating point differently, and some people (or perhaps just Kahan, dude number 1) care a great deal about this.
Think of the 8087 as a vehicle with "off-road" capability -- yes, it is slower and guzzles more gas, but if you gotta go off road, you gotta have it.
The original discussion was whether anyone used/benefited from a C++ implementation of GC. A poster responded with a link to Stroustrup pointing out that C++ is so expressive that you don't need GC -- you can embed the memory management in stack-frame objects which take care of it for you.
I pointed out that Stroustrup's example shows the expressive power of C++, but there is a big "huh?" factor of reading the code on account that many of us mere mortals are not rehearsed in the use of templates and STL, and there was something to be said for Java and GC, not just for safety but for simplicity of expression and code reading by maintenance programmers.
Yours is one of three comments to my remarks, answering questions I had raised, disagreeing with some points, agreeing with others, but otherwise engaging in a reasoned discussion of the merits of C++ and its advanced features (templates and STL). But I get moderated down and flagged "troll" -- oh well.
C++ is very expressive indeed, and the example shows that C++ is good at something for which many would consider a scripting language to be required. But like some scripting languages, this C++ code fragment descends into a mix of Egyption hieroglyphics and Hittite cuneiform rather quickly.
So please tell me what
typedef vector::const_iterator Iter;
(or rather vector::const_iterator) is supposed to mean. I suppose vector is a templated class, but how does::const_iterator come up with a type name -- I thought:: either references a static field or a class member function?
And what is the deal with the sort(,) as a free-standing function? Following OO principles, shouldn't the vector object v know how to sort itself with a call to v.sort()? And what the heck is this const_iterator type anyway that you can do ++ and * on it -- looks an awful lot like a pointer -- oops, I forgot, you can overload ++ and * to make "safe" operations on what are really objects look like "dangerous" pointer operations which the C/C++ community is in custom of using.
In principle, all the stuff done in Java and perhaps in scripting languages could all be done elegantly and expressively in C++ if us mere mortals ever figure out how to use the darned thing. But there is a kind of uniformity to Java (all object variables being GC'd heap references, collection and iterator types working with generic Object's that we cast to what the object is and rely on runtime type checking, don't worry-be happy allocation of these objects where we grab towels from the rack and leave them on the bathroom floor for the hotel maid to pick up) that simply feels more comfortable.
C++ is the music of Bach: elegant, mathematical, intricate, and expressive, but most musicians performing in front of audiences don't understand it and it is played as a dull jumble and mishmash and audiences gaze at Bach stuck at the beginning of a recital as a chore to get through. Java is the music of Mozart: simplified, standardized, predictable, and economical, but musicians of this era understand it and play it with gusto, and audiences love it because it sound so happy and makes them feel uplifted.
Well, they already have a Java Swing IDE: JBuilder. I guess it is easier to use what they have rather than start over. And I imagine that Swing to SWT (Eclipse) is not a trivial port.
Funny you should mention Eclipse as this product seems to be a commercial counterpart to the free-download Eclipse.
1. BuilderX (from the demo) indeed supports whatever C++ compiler you want. I guess that is the beauty of C++ -- try finding Pascal's to do that on all the different systems.
2. It appears that their GUI thingy is wxWindows with a Visual Basicy form designer on top. I imagine they are roundtripping design-time properties as code as in VS.NET and I believe also JBuilder instead of saving designer properties in.DFM files such as the case with Delphi.
They also call their GUI thingy a "preview" which suggests they are lukewarm in their committment or releasing early. Delphi 7 included "preview Delphi#" and there was all this talk about Galileo, a full-blown VS.NET competitor that would include Delphi# as a language choice among many, only they have come out with C# Builder and it is unknown how Delphi fits in the picture.
Oh, and I suppose the IDE is a Java Swing app. If you are happy with JBuilder, you should be OK with this. Making the IDE Java Swing is so they can port it to all those platforms. Kylix is an entirely different animal because it is Windows and Linux only, and it uses WINE/WINElib to do the IDE (ewww! -- I don't have anything against WINE, but is it really stable enough?).
So, what more do you gals and guys still want (apart from a lower price)? The thing supports all your favorite C++ compilers, it compiles and runs (console apps) on remote machines, it plugs into CVS or other version-control team-software thingy, it has the Together Soft UML roundtripper (although UML and Rational Rose and all those software engineering deals seem to be bigger in the Java world), and it appears to do a Visual Basicy thing with wxWindows. If there was such a thing 10 years ago, (c 1993), I wonder if Java would have even happened.
Stephen J Gould argues that mammalian species generally only last about 10 million years -- we are a young species (perhaps a couple hundred thousand years old). After that the evolve or get replaced with something that evolved from another species.
I think the idea is that long before the 500 million years we have until the Sun warms up too much (I think we have another 5 billion of main-sequence time left, but there is the Sun creeping up and left along the Main Sequence that is the problem), we or our evolved progeny will have travelled to another planet, perhaps even out of the solar system.
Isn't that the plot to that lamo movie Mission to Mars? But didn't Philip Dick have a lot to contribute to Hollywood -- didn't he have a connection to Blade Runner?
This idea that Earth is "seeded" from afar is a neat science fiction concept, but there are a lot of ham-fisted realizations such as the insufferable Battlestar Galactica among others.
Is JBuilder the most Visual-Basicy Java IDE out there?
I think the JBuilder slows can be partly attributed to Java Swing.
I am old (learned Pascal in a course taught by Brinch Hansen back in the 70's) and am comfortable with Pascal. For a Visual-Basicy experience with a compiled language, Delphi rocks. Do others have experience with C++ Builder?
I "discovered" that VS.NET saves design-time properties in code while the Borland setup saves it in files (as in persistent objects that save themselves to streams). It took me a long time to figure this out because VS.NET hides the code that expresses design properties unless you click the outline expansion box: it took lots of Googling to find this out as MSDN is really frustrating in explaining such stuff.
I guess I like expansion of design properties into code in that I like to code to fully explain what a program is doing rather than relying on some "magic" tied away in a hidden data file somewhere (I was influenced in this prejudice by Brinch Hansen's opinions on side-effects in programming systems).
On the other hand, the code method presents "round-trip" problems, especially if someone ignores the warning comments and changes some of the code. If you drop an untested widget on to a form, you can bugger up the code when trying to remove a widget that crashes the designer by trying to edit code. I also think the design properties in a data file approach makes it easier to hook into the saving and retrieving of properties to implement custom property data types -- with the code approach you have to tinker with code parser objects (Document Object Model parser objects) which is beyond my skills at this point.
Patents could be used to tie mono/.Gnu up in knots. The idea is that if you develop for.NET/Windows you should be darned well tied to Windows instead of traipsing off into Linux or whatever.
OK, Windows is Microsoft's flagship OS, and they want to defend their turf. So, lets say developers and their customers pay MS the required tithe. If you play this software game too far, is there any room for little-guy developers of even Windows itself?
When MS started out with DOS and then with Windows, I think they went to great lengths to get "mindshare" of developers: MSDN, Visual Basic for applications programmers, VC++ for heavy-metal programmers, and so on. And then you had all the "third parties." Where would the PC have been without Lotus 123? Where would programming languages on the PC be without Borland? It is said that MS treatment of developers is what sunk OS/2. IBM was charging an arm-and-a-leg for OS/2 development tools at a time when MS was handing tools out at conferences to get developers to forgo OS/2 and develop for Win32.
But a good part of MS was that they fostered 3rd party developers, but when you got big enough they either bought you out or squashed you.
So having good developer relations was important to the growth of Windows and Microsoft, and the fact that there were a lot of people besides Microsoft writing apps for Windows was part of what was so great about Windows, especially since early iterations of Microsoft compilers, spread sheets, and other apps were pretty lame.
But now the development tools all cost an arm and a leg, and with software patents as a club, what size developer will Microsoft tolerate. If you are selling a recipe program written in VB to a handful of friends, you will be off the radar, but at what market size does MS these days decide they want all of that market.
More importantly, if independent software developers are all put out of business through the enforcement of IP, how is MS going to develop new markets through their usual strategy of buying out or squashing out the pioneers. MS has in the past been pretty clumsy in all their attempts at new markets and has depended on acquisition (can you say Anders Hejlsberg? I knew you could!).
Besides choking off small developers, at what point is MS going to shoot themselves in the foot?
Consumer Reports ran some oil in NYC taxi cabs (considered hard duty -- lots of idling, stop and go) and figured you could go 6000 miles -- below 6000 miles there was no significant improvement to engine wear while if you pushed it past 6000, they started to see wear on camshafts and valve lifters and such.
When my mom saw the trunk on the Grand Marquis my dad leased as a Ford executive-rank employee, her take was that a Mafia hitman could stuff a couple of dead rivals back there.
No my mom was not "connected." It was after years of downsized cars, trunks got to be so small that a person got to wonder how a Mafia hitman got to do what Mafia guys were known to do. She figures that if you were a Mafia guy, you definitely wanted to get a Grand Marquis.
Oh, and the comment about the bodies of murdered prostitutes is sexist and sick. The socially proper way to describe the Crown Vic trunk is that you could get two dead Mafia guys in there with no problem.
Seeing a picture of a rocket I had drawn as a child, my mom had asked me "are you going into space in that rocket." "Oh no, I am just the designer of the rocket, my younger brother is going to fly it."
With that childhood memory, I always wonder about the Rutans and about sibling rivalry and all that.
Forget about the noise issues. I am interested if super or hypersonic travel makes any sense from an energy standpoint.
The B-70 prototype was supposed to benefit from "compression lift" and get high lift-to-drag ratios to give it intercontinental range. The B-70 had all (six) engines clustered in a single pod underneath a delta wing, and the outer segments of the delta wing drooped down. The whole thing was supposed to get lift from the resulting shock wave bubble under the aircraft, generated by the engine pod and herded together by the down-drooped wing tips.
The word is that it didn't get the same low drag as the wind tunnel models, and the SST design that followed it didn't seem to go for clustered engines and drooped wing tips to get compression lift. On the other hand, in the high-altitude hypersonic regime you are proposing, various types of "wave riders" have been proposed.
Another concept along the lines you are suggesting came out of Lawrence-Livermore Labs (I guess they are looking for stuff to do with the end of the Cold War) where they went back to Eugen Sanger's idea of atmospheric "skip" -- you would boost something into space with a rocket and then let it skip across the upper atmosphere like a stone sent skimming across a pond. The claim for that was improved energy efficiency (over subsonic travel?), although I wonder if the reentry heating problem is worse when you have these multiple partial reentries, and I wonder how popular these skip trajectories would be with passengers apart from those passengers who want a roller coaster type ride (Vomit Comet anyone?).
Hey, I forgot all about that, that last year I would step outside, point at the sky, and go "planet-planet-planet-planet" and my wife and everyone in her family thought I was totally weird or something.
Don't we already have food pills -- something like an Egg McMuffin is pretty compact and calorie dense. Or perhaps some of these "energy bar" snack/meal substitutes. A meal will never fit in the size of a Tylenol capsule, but I think it can fit in the palm of your hand.
When do we have to start worrying that ActiveX components have become obsolete (to develop)? Part of what.NET is about is that Windows Forms components are much easier to develop and much more object-oriented (allows inheritance while ActiveX/COM is compositional).
But if one has already developed a set of ActiveX controls and is comfortable with a set of tools for writing them, they are far and away the most cross-language thing around -- at least in the Windows world. Not only do they work with VB 6 and with the Borland languages (and with Eclipse SWT, although with some restrictions), they work in Visual Studio.NET as seemlessly as they do in VB 6.
What I mean is that for developing software components for resale, it seems that ActiveX offers the biggest market because it is usable from VB 6 as well as VB.NET, and it is better to have the ActiveX in unmanaged code because you don't have to worry about customers installing the CLR.
Right now, porting perfectly good ActiveX components to.NET seems like a waste of time. Microsoft already had an ActiveX/COM compatibility layer in J++ (the RCW/CCW thingy), and there would have been peasants with pitchforks at the gate of.NET broke compatibility with the mass of legacy ActiveX/COM components, but the support for ActiveX/COM in.NET is too good -- it is the WINE of Windows (only.NET ActiveX/COM compability actually works while I hear WINE is a work in progress).
When Windows 95 came out, there was a big push that apps be ported to it rather than just run in 16-bit legacy mode. With.NET, there is no such push. You know the taunt, where are the shrink-wrap Java apps? Yeah, where are the shrink-wrap.NET apps? Does Windows XP even come with the CLR/.NET runtime or do you have to download and install it?
What incentive is there to write something other than an internally-used app to.NET? One incentive would be if they came out with a Mac.NET and maybe even used it so the same code base to Office could run on PC and Mac. Don't see that happening.
Am I missing something? Is.NET really meant as a server-side thingy? Is.NET really not meant for the desktop since MS has not made a big push to put.NET on a lot of desktops?
Back in the olden days of DOS and raw VGA graphics programming, the graphics device was simply an area of memory where you set bits. The Windows API along with the Java Swing (Sun) and Java SWT (IBM/Eclipse) seem to have busted this simple thing into three things, the properties and boundaries of which never get properly explained. As far as I can tell they all have an equivalent to 1) a graphics object that allows high-level drawing operations (no setting bits, or if you can it is one bit at a time and very inefficient), 2) a bitmap object that hides the implementation detail of how pixels are stored, but allows fast drawing of a block of pixels to a graphics object, and 3) a raster object that allows setting individual pixels like in the old days, but cannot be directly blasted to the screen like a bitmap object but requires some kind of bitmap object as an intermediary on the way to the screen.
Why we can't do graphics as rasters and have to go through this song and dance I don't know; graphics has to be split into these three object types for a combination of device-independence and historical-bloody mindedness. On the other hand, this three-object system could be abstracted, but someone please show me the portable GUI library that has a "raster widget" which allows me to paint a picture by setting bits -- efficiently. In GUIdom, the graphics object (object 1) and its high-level ops (drawing lines, rectangles, and characters) is king, and the bitmap (object 2) is introduced as a way of blitting icons, logos, and photographics pictures sucked in from standard image file formats without having to know how the bits are stored. A raster (object 3) is somehow considered an advanced feature -- a developer is not supposed to worry one's pretty little head about graphics operations as low-level as rasters -- and if your application needs to work at the level of rasters (I compute and display "voice-print" speech spectrograms), you have some real issues with portable GUI frameworks.
Windows actually has a powerful facility for working with rasters (bless their dark little hearts) -- the CreateDIBSection() API call that allows you to create an object that has both bitmap (object 2) and a raster (object 3) interfaces -- you can twiddle the image bits through the raster interface and then turn around and use the bitmap interface to blast this image to the screen through a graphics object (object 1). I think the reason that Windows has CreateDIBSection() and its sister call StretchDIBits() is that game programmers (especially 2-d games, I understand 3-d games have gone to using high-level graphics primitives as an intermediary to the screen) blast bits, and those API calls were what Microsoft had to offer to woo developers of VGA games over to Windows -- they preceded the full-blown DirectX API. Object framework support for this is rare, but guess what, Delphi (3 and later) has a Scanline property (object 3 interface) to bitmap objects (object 2 interface) that abstracts the CreateDIBSection() call.
Also guess what: Kylix, the Qt-library version of Delphi has the Scanline property, but it is brain damaged. Apparently Qt allows for objects that are both bitmap (object 2) and raster (object 3) at the same time, but you cannot update just a piece of the raster without incurring the compute-time hit of reconverting the entire raster to repaint the bitmap every time you do that. So, if you want to be selectively updating a raster you have to go through the rigemarole of creating a subsized raster, doing its bitmap refresh, and then blitting to a bigger bitmap. I thought these GUI frameworks were supposed to abstract and make life simple instead of create the need to come up with all these work arounds.
What I want to know is if WINE has an effective mapping of CreateDIBSection() into whatever Unix calls, and if so, why can't Qt have the same capability so we could port to Linux and dispense with this WINE thingy?
Instead of replicating the Windows API, can I get the functionality of the W
See, the big cost in CPUs is engineering development, not chip manufacture. These foreign governments with socialized computing are going to negotiate low-cost purchases from the American CPU companies, who in turn will have to charge high prices in the U.S., especially to individuals without CPU coverage in their IT insurance.
Of course Americans will try to sneak over to Taiwan or use the Internet to buy cheap CPUs using purchase orders signed by unethical sysadmins. At that time, the director of the FDA (Federal Dataprocessing Administration), will issue warnings that these foreign CPUs (really repackaged American CPUs) are "insecure" on account of inadequate "testing", and then we will know that the FDA has become a shill for the American CPU companies.
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Having trained on a Piper Warrior, taking a glider lesson was a scary experience -- I never did get the hang of rudder/aileron coordination, something you don't need to worry about in the Warrior on account of asymmetrical aileron deflection. Probably the worst preparation for operating the Flyer is experience in light planes because I imagine the Flyer control feel is unlike any other aircraft anyone has trained on.
Do they have simulators of the Flyer so the reenactors can operate the Flyer safely?
The "published metrics" I have seen suggest that Ada and C++ are neck-and-neck with each other -- development speed, bug rates, and such. Ada may have a slight edge, but it is nothing to write home about. This supports the notion that tool-based security is a weak one.
The old notion of car safety was to put the burden on the driver while the Ralph Nader approach was to build safer cars. As it turns out, the biggest safety factor remains the "nut behind the wheel" -- go to the IIHS Web site and look at the relative safety of the different car makes, and the pattern follows driver demographics more than anything else (a Toyota Corolla is a lot safer than a Geo Prizm -- they both come off the same assembly line in California).
Along the same lines, the biggest factor in software bugs is "the loose screw behind the keyboard" rather than issues of language design.
Yeah, but what about the long-term effects on vision.
The concept grew into a 90-minute special shown on TV only once called "All You Need is Cash" featuring cameos of George Harrison and Bianca Jagger as the wife of one of the Ruttles.
The Ruttles offers so much more possibility for new comic ideas and Holy Grail. The the Ruttles you can create new material about their breakup, the spotty record of their post-Ruttles solo careers, the nostalgia for the Ruttles and the resulting Broadway knockoffs (Ruttlemania?). With Holy Grail, you are recycling old material.
"Professor Floating Point" argues (trolls?) that Java sucks for floating point, but you need to wade through his entertaining read to see what he says about precision and processors and flags and traps. This dude (you have to scroll down to the section on IEEE 754) takes the opposite view: the two dudes are Dole and Clinton on that stupid "60 Minutes" thing, but between the two of them you kind of get the picture.
The picture is that a lot of why Intel is slow is they are doing an arguably higher-quality floating point, and dude number 2 reinforces the view that Alphas and SPARCs and other RISCs do what dude number 1 says is cheap floating point because they don't want to be slowed down.
Check the two references out and you decide whether everything Intel does is really needed, but it is important to know that an Alpha is not just a better, cheaper, faster chip -- it does its floating point differently, and some people (or perhaps just Kahan, dude number 1) care a great deal about this.
Think of the 8087 as a vehicle with "off-road" capability -- yes, it is slower and guzzles more gas, but if you gotta go off road, you gotta have it.
I pointed out that Stroustrup's example shows the expressive power of C++, but there is a big "huh?" factor of reading the code on account that many of us mere mortals are not rehearsed in the use of templates and STL, and there was something to be said for Java and GC, not just for safety but for simplicity of expression and code reading by maintenance programmers.
Yours is one of three comments to my remarks, answering questions I had raised, disagreeing with some points, agreeing with others, but otherwise engaging in a reasoned discussion of the merits of C++ and its advanced features (templates and STL). But I get moderated down and flagged "troll" -- oh well.
So please tell me what
typedef vector::const_iterator Iter;
(or rather vector::const_iterator) is supposed to mean. I suppose vector is a templated class, but how does ::const_iterator come up with a type name -- I thought :: either references a static field or a class member function?
And what is the deal with the sort(,) as a free-standing function? Following OO principles, shouldn't the vector object v know how to sort itself with a call to v.sort()? And what the heck is this const_iterator type anyway that you can do ++ and * on it -- looks an awful lot like a pointer -- oops, I forgot, you can overload ++ and * to make "safe" operations on what are really objects look like "dangerous" pointer operations which the C/C++ community is in custom of using.
In principle, all the stuff done in Java and perhaps in scripting languages could all be done elegantly and expressively in C++ if us mere mortals ever figure out how to use the darned thing. But there is a kind of uniformity to Java (all object variables being GC'd heap references, collection and iterator types working with generic Object's that we cast to what the object is and rely on runtime type checking, don't worry-be happy allocation of these objects where we grab towels from the rack and leave them on the bathroom floor for the hotel maid to pick up) that simply feels more comfortable.
C++ is the music of Bach: elegant, mathematical, intricate, and expressive, but most musicians performing in front of audiences don't understand it and it is played as a dull jumble and mishmash and audiences gaze at Bach stuck at the beginning of a recital as a chore to get through. Java is the music of Mozart: simplified, standardized, predictable, and economical, but musicians of this era understand it and play it with gusto, and audiences love it because it sound so happy and makes them feel uplifted.
Funny you should mention Eclipse as this product seems to be a commercial counterpart to the free-download Eclipse.
2. It appears that their GUI thingy is wxWindows with a Visual Basicy form designer on top. I imagine they are roundtripping design-time properties as code as in VS.NET and I believe also JBuilder instead of saving designer properties in .DFM files such as the case with Delphi.
They also call their GUI thingy a "preview" which suggests they are lukewarm in their committment or releasing early. Delphi 7 included "preview Delphi#" and there was all this talk about Galileo, a full-blown VS.NET competitor that would include Delphi# as a language choice among many, only they have come out with C# Builder and it is unknown how Delphi fits in the picture.
Oh, and I suppose the IDE is a Java Swing app. If you are happy with JBuilder, you should be OK with this. Making the IDE Java Swing is so they can port it to all those platforms. Kylix is an entirely different animal because it is Windows and Linux only, and it uses WINE/WINElib to do the IDE (ewww! -- I don't have anything against WINE, but is it really stable enough?).
So, what more do you gals and guys still want (apart from a lower price)? The thing supports all your favorite C++ compilers, it compiles and runs (console apps) on remote machines, it plugs into CVS or other version-control team-software thingy, it has the Together Soft UML roundtripper (although UML and Rational Rose and all those software engineering deals seem to be bigger in the Java world), and it appears to do a Visual Basicy thing with wxWindows. If there was such a thing 10 years ago, (c 1993), I wonder if Java would have even happened.
I think the idea is that long before the 500 million years we have until the Sun warms up too much (I think we have another 5 billion of main-sequence time left, but there is the Sun creeping up and left along the Main Sequence that is the problem), we or our evolved progeny will have travelled to another planet, perhaps even out of the solar system.
This idea that Earth is "seeded" from afar is a neat science fiction concept, but there are a lot of ham-fisted realizations such as the insufferable Battlestar Galactica among others.
I think the JBuilder slows can be partly attributed to Java Swing.
I am old (learned Pascal in a course taught by Brinch Hansen back in the 70's) and am comfortable with Pascal. For a Visual-Basicy experience with a compiled language, Delphi rocks. Do others have experience with C++ Builder?
I "discovered" that VS.NET saves design-time properties in code while the Borland setup saves it in files (as in persistent objects that save themselves to streams). It took me a long time to figure this out because VS.NET hides the code that expresses design properties unless you click the outline expansion box: it took lots of Googling to find this out as MSDN is really frustrating in explaining such stuff.
I guess I like expansion of design properties into code in that I like to code to fully explain what a program is doing rather than relying on some "magic" tied away in a hidden data file somewhere (I was influenced in this prejudice by Brinch Hansen's opinions on side-effects in programming systems).
On the other hand, the code method presents "round-trip" problems, especially if someone ignores the warning comments and changes some of the code. If you drop an untested widget on to a form, you can bugger up the code when trying to remove a widget that crashes the designer by trying to edit code. I also think the design properties in a data file approach makes it easier to hook into the saving and retrieving of properties to implement custom property data types -- with the code approach you have to tinker with code parser objects (Document Object Model parser objects) which is beyond my skills at this point.
OK, Windows is Microsoft's flagship OS, and they want to defend their turf. So, lets say developers and their customers pay MS the required tithe. If you play this software game too far, is there any room for little-guy developers of even Windows itself?
When MS started out with DOS and then with Windows, I think they went to great lengths to get "mindshare" of developers: MSDN, Visual Basic for applications programmers, VC++ for heavy-metal programmers, and so on. And then you had all the "third parties." Where would the PC have been without Lotus 123? Where would programming languages on the PC be without Borland? It is said that MS treatment of developers is what sunk OS/2. IBM was charging an arm-and-a-leg for OS/2 development tools at a time when MS was handing tools out at conferences to get developers to forgo OS/2 and develop for Win32.
But a good part of MS was that they fostered 3rd party developers, but when you got big enough they either bought you out or squashed you.
So having good developer relations was important to the growth of Windows and Microsoft, and the fact that there were a lot of people besides Microsoft writing apps for Windows was part of what was so great about Windows, especially since early iterations of Microsoft compilers, spread sheets, and other apps were pretty lame.
But now the development tools all cost an arm and a leg, and with software patents as a club, what size developer will Microsoft tolerate. If you are selling a recipe program written in VB to a handful of friends, you will be off the radar, but at what market size does MS these days decide they want all of that market.
More importantly, if independent software developers are all put out of business through the enforcement of IP, how is MS going to develop new markets through their usual strategy of buying out or squashing out the pioneers. MS has in the past been pretty clumsy in all their attempts at new markets and has depended on acquisition (can you say Anders Hejlsberg? I knew you could!).
Besides choking off small developers, at what point is MS going to shoot themselves in the foot?
Consumer Reports ran some oil in NYC taxi cabs (considered hard duty -- lots of idling, stop and go) and figured you could go 6000 miles -- below 6000 miles there was no significant improvement to engine wear while if you pushed it past 6000, they started to see wear on camshafts and valve lifters and such.
No my mom was not "connected." It was after years of downsized cars, trunks got to be so small that a person got to wonder how a Mafia hitman got to do what Mafia guys were known to do. She figures that if you were a Mafia guy, you definitely wanted to get a Grand Marquis.
Oh, and the comment about the bodies of murdered prostitutes is sexist and sick. The socially proper way to describe the Crown Vic trunk is that you could get two dead Mafia guys in there with no problem.
With that childhood memory, I always wonder about the Rutans and about sibling rivalry and all that.
The B-70 prototype was supposed to benefit from "compression lift" and get high lift-to-drag ratios to give it intercontinental range. The B-70 had all (six) engines clustered in a single pod underneath a delta wing, and the outer segments of the delta wing drooped down. The whole thing was supposed to get lift from the resulting shock wave bubble under the aircraft, generated by the engine pod and herded together by the down-drooped wing tips.
The word is that it didn't get the same low drag as the wind tunnel models, and the SST design that followed it didn't seem to go for clustered engines and drooped wing tips to get compression lift. On the other hand, in the high-altitude hypersonic regime you are proposing, various types of "wave riders" have been proposed.
Another concept along the lines you are suggesting came out of Lawrence-Livermore Labs (I guess they are looking for stuff to do with the end of the Cold War) where they went back to Eugen Sanger's idea of atmospheric "skip" -- you would boost something into space with a rocket and then let it skip across the upper atmosphere like a stone sent skimming across a pond. The claim for that was improved energy efficiency (over subsonic travel?), although I wonder if the reentry heating problem is worse when you have these multiple partial reentries, and I wonder how popular these skip trajectories would be with passengers apart from those passengers who want a roller coaster type ride (Vomit Comet anyone?).
Hey, I forgot all about that, that last year I would step outside, point at the sky, and go "planet-planet-planet-planet" and my wife and everyone in her family thought I was totally weird or something.
Don't we already have food pills -- something like an Egg McMuffin is pretty compact and calorie dense. Or perhaps some of these "energy bar" snack/meal substitutes. A meal will never fit in the size of a Tylenol capsule, but I think it can fit in the palm of your hand.
But if one has already developed a set of ActiveX controls and is comfortable with a set of tools for writing them, they are far and away the most cross-language thing around -- at least in the Windows world. Not only do they work with VB 6 and with the Borland languages (and with Eclipse SWT, although with some restrictions), they work in Visual Studio .NET as seemlessly as they do in VB 6.
What I mean is that for developing software components for resale, it seems that ActiveX offers the biggest market because it is usable from VB 6 as well as VB .NET, and it is better to have the ActiveX in unmanaged code because you don't have to worry about customers installing the CLR.
Right now, porting perfectly good ActiveX components to .NET seems like a waste of time. Microsoft already had an ActiveX/COM compatibility layer in J++ (the RCW/CCW thingy), and there would have been peasants with pitchforks at the gate of .NET broke compatibility with the mass of legacy ActiveX/COM components, but the support for ActiveX/COM in .NET is too good -- it is the WINE of Windows (only .NET ActiveX/COM compability actually works while I hear WINE is a work in progress).
What incentive is there to write something other than an internally-used app to .NET? One incentive would be if they came out with a Mac .NET and maybe even used it so the same code base to Office could run on PC and Mac. Don't see that happening.
Am I missing something? Is .NET really meant as a server-side thingy? Is .NET really not meant for the desktop since MS has not made a big push to put .NET on a lot of desktops?
Why we can't do graphics as rasters and have to go through this song and dance I don't know; graphics has to be split into these three object types for a combination of device-independence and historical-bloody mindedness. On the other hand, this three-object system could be abstracted, but someone please show me the portable GUI library that has a "raster widget" which allows me to paint a picture by setting bits -- efficiently. In GUIdom, the graphics object (object 1) and its high-level ops (drawing lines, rectangles, and characters) is king, and the bitmap (object 2) is introduced as a way of blitting icons, logos, and photographics pictures sucked in from standard image file formats without having to know how the bits are stored. A raster (object 3) is somehow considered an advanced feature -- a developer is not supposed to worry one's pretty little head about graphics operations as low-level as rasters -- and if your application needs to work at the level of rasters (I compute and display "voice-print" speech spectrograms), you have some real issues with portable GUI frameworks.
Windows actually has a powerful facility for working with rasters (bless their dark little hearts) -- the CreateDIBSection() API call that allows you to create an object that has both bitmap (object 2) and a raster (object 3) interfaces -- you can twiddle the image bits through the raster interface and then turn around and use the bitmap interface to blast this image to the screen through a graphics object (object 1). I think the reason that Windows has CreateDIBSection() and its sister call StretchDIBits() is that game programmers (especially 2-d games, I understand 3-d games have gone to using high-level graphics primitives as an intermediary to the screen) blast bits, and those API calls were what Microsoft had to offer to woo developers of VGA games over to Windows -- they preceded the full-blown DirectX API. Object framework support for this is rare, but guess what, Delphi (3 and later) has a Scanline property (object 3 interface) to bitmap objects (object 2 interface) that abstracts the CreateDIBSection() call.
Also guess what: Kylix, the Qt-library version of Delphi has the Scanline property, but it is brain damaged. Apparently Qt allows for objects that are both bitmap (object 2) and raster (object 3) at the same time, but you cannot update just a piece of the raster without incurring the compute-time hit of reconverting the entire raster to repaint the bitmap every time you do that. So, if you want to be selectively updating a raster you have to go through the rigemarole of creating a subsized raster, doing its bitmap refresh, and then blitting to a bigger bitmap. I thought these GUI frameworks were supposed to abstract and make life simple instead of create the need to come up with all these work arounds.
What I want to know is if WINE has an effective mapping of CreateDIBSection() into whatever Unix calls, and if so, why can't Qt have the same capability so we could port to Linux and dispense with this WINE thingy?
Instead of replicating the Windows API, can I get the functionality of the W
Of course Americans will try to sneak over to Taiwan or use the Internet to buy cheap CPUs using purchase orders signed by unethical sysadmins. At that time, the director of the FDA (Federal Dataprocessing Administration), will issue warnings that these foreign CPUs (really repackaged American CPUs) are "insecure" on account of inadequate "testing", and then we will know that the FDA has become a shill for the American CPU companies.
Hah! The Warsaw Pact countries were behind this fluoride thing afterall.
Yeah, but as soon as you turn your back, Landru will declare "Festival" and then your kids will trash the place . . .