Yes, indeed, you did resort to name calling. But, don't worry, I don't take it too personally.
Sorry. C++ developer for over 10 years...
Well, I have you beat there by nearly another decade. In any case, perhaps now is the time for you to become very proficient at several other languages so that you actually have a basis for comparison.
I've grown up and have come to realize it's not the tool, but the person using the tool.
So, why don't you program in COBOL or Fortran 77? After all, COBOL programmers and Fortran 77 programmers were saying exactly the same thing you are: who needs all this new-fangled C and C++ nonsense when we can just write everything in COBOL or Fortran 77?
And when it comes to safety, your reasoning is roughly the same reasoning people use who don't wear safety belts or practice unsafe sex. And it's about as smart.
Yeah, man that was so stupid of Sun for getting angry at Microsoft for breaking their contract. How immature.
Yes, that was indeed immature, because it was a Pyrrhic victory; Sun could have achieved a much better outcome if they had played their cards right. But what was even more foolish was taunting Microsoft in 1996, when Java originally came out, with the claim that they would make Microsoft irrelevant.
So you think Flash works better in Linux than Java does? Am I missing something?
Yes, sadly, it does: Flash starts up fast, its animations are reasonably smooth, and it ships with just about every machine. Java, in contrast, takes forever to start up, doesn't exactly produce smooth animations, and needs to be separately downloaded and installed. It's actually quite a nuisance having to delete Flash from every machine and downloading and installing Java.
And what complaining from Sun are you talking about? Inform me.
Sun keeps complaining that the reason Java is having problems with graphics on X11 is X11's fault. But other cross platform toolkits (Qt, wxWindows, etc.) work much better on X11 than Java does, so clearly it is Sun that isn't doing a good job with their cross-platform toolkit.
Macromedia is trying to add just what is needed for client-side applications, but no more. For example, it does have database bindings. I don't think it is very heavy-duty, but, then, it doesn't have to be; it's more important that it downloads fast and can be included in every browser distribution.
Don't get me wrong: I think Flash is pretty awful. But they are handling the marketing and business side better than Sun.
There isn't any sandboxing with Java applications.
That's my point: Java applications don't need sandboxing, but the Java runtime still has complete support for it built in.
Java on the server allows people to write secure code
Yes, and so does just about any other language other than C or C++. While client-side sandboxing was something genuinely new in a shipping environment in 1996, there is nothing special or new about Java's security for server-side applications.
One way to provide this isolation would be to run each library as a separate process or in its own address space, like how in classic Unix the kernel
Well, more importantly, in classic UNIX systems, software packages were composed of dozens of small, short-lived processes. With that, you need neither garbage collection nor runtime safety. It's a shame that Linux has increasingly moved towards large, monolithic applications like those found in the Windows world. But if that's the kind of applications one builds, C/C++ is not the tool to do it.
Another way to get the same isolation at run time is to use a virtual machine
Well, there are a number of choices: (1) UNIX-style (lots of small processes), (2) virtual machines and JITs (Java), (3) sandboxing by pointer munging, and (4) safe languages with native code compilers (and digital signing of object files in untrusted environments).
I think (4) is actually probably the best choice for most desktop uses. It is odd that we ended up with (2), mostly because Sun promised one thing for Java (web-based applications) and then delivered something completely different (server platform).
You're right that 'vector' and other STL classes don't guarantee safety, but they are surely a big step up from raw C arrays or NUL-terminated strings. Many STL implementations do have 'safe' or 'debug' modes; it's a pity this mode is not the default.
Well, fortunately, C++ is sufficiently powerful that it is very easy to roll one's own array class or use any of a number of third party classes. Unlike STL, those end up giving users both fast and predictable performance and runtime safety.
Sun originally promised a platform for delivering client apps over the web. AWT may have been limited, but it was way better than anything Macromedia is producing.
But today, Flash ships with just about every browser and there is far more dynamic web content in Flash than in Java. Why? Because Macromedia didn't unnecessarily taunt Microsoft ("we are going to make Windows irrelevant"), because they worked hard to get Flash shipped with everything, and because they focused on authoring tools. And, strangely enough, Macromedia graphics works on Linux, while Sun keeps complaining and changing their implementation.
Sun, in contrast, did everything they could to get into Microsoft's cross-hairs, they didn't fix their bugs, they kept changing their strategies, and they never produced decent authoring tools. Now, Java is mostly a server-side technology. But that's not a particularly secure niche, since Java-style sandboxing is needed much less on the server than for downloadable applications, and because there are lots of alternatives on the server.
I don't think Macromedia will be successful at turning Flash into an application platform. But they sure are trying, and they are a lot more successful with worse technology than Sun with Java.
A statement like this reeks of ignorance. Blaming the language is typical of those novice programmers who fail to completely understanding the language.
And a statement like yours reeks of the kind of ignorance of macho programmers who think they have it all under control. When you grow up, you'll perhaps figure out that everybody makes mistakes. And when you grow up, you'll perhaps also figure out that, no matter how good you yourself may be, eventually, you'll have to work on multi-programmer projects and you have to deal with other people's code, who often are novices.
C++ is great language when speed and reliability on the server is required.
C++ is a great language, but not for most server applications.
I think he's absolutely right: trying to write secure systems in C or C++ is an uphill battle. With enormous amounts of work and testing, it can be done, but why would anybody want to?
On the other hand, Linux and Windows are in the same boat here: most of their critical components are written in the same languages: C and C++. Ditto for Solaris and Mac OS X. So, Windows doesn't have intrinsic an advantage there when it comes to languages and tools.
But Linux's development processes, community, and modularity give it a huge advantage over Windows when it comes to security. Just the ability to strip down a Linux system to barely a kernel and a handful of user processes, as well as the very fast bug fixing are enormous assets when it comes to security.
However, Microsoft has seen the light, which is why they are pushing C#/.NET: C# really does let them write code that is pretty much as efficient as C++ code, while still being completely safe, and yet giving them full access to the low-level features of the machine. So, if the Linux community doesn't watch out, Microsoft may (for the first time) end up having a technical lead.
Fortunately, the Mono project is working hard on creating a platform for both client and server development in C#. And, of course, we also are getting more servers and server components in Java, Python, PHP, and Perl.
The problem with C or C++ is that no matter how much library code you add to them, they don't provide fault isolation. That is, I can do everything right in my code, but some other module can still screw up my data structures through a stray pointer.
An additional problem with C (and to a lesser degree, C++) is that it doesn't protect you against mistakes or typos: it is very easy to introduce crashes and security problems accidentally.
Many languages other than C/C++ almost completely eliminate that worry. Java offers almost complete fault isolation: code simply cannot foul up structures to which it doesn't have access, and furthermore, you can control very carefully what code that you load is and is not allowed to do. And Modula-3 and C# give you the ability to mix safe and unsafe code predictably: by default, everything is safe. But if you ask for it, you can do unsafe stuff in clearly marked sections of the code. Furthermore, external libraries are guaranteed to be marked correctly as to whether they are safe or not.
Those are capabilities that simply are not available in C/C++/Objective-C, and they cannot be retrofitted or added after the fact as libraries.
similarly using 'vector' or other STL containers instead of C-style arrays.
That is wrong: STL makes very few safety guarantees. This is very unfortunate because the ANSI C++ committee had a big opportunity to make C++ a much safer language, but they missed it. If you want better support for safety in C++, you'll have to use or write your own data structure types (since STL is so poorly designed in many other ways, that's a good idea anyway).
At least in C++ there is a standard 'string' type, although some people insist on reinventing the wheel (Microsoft's MFC with CString, Qt with QString).
That's because (1) many of those libraries predate ANSI C++ by a long time, and (2) the ANSI C++ standard 'string' type also has some serious limitations.
C++ is a great language for scientific applications and things like embedded systems and operating system kernels. But it is not a good language for end-user application software, GUIs, or servers. And C, while it was a wonderful workhorse for 20 years, should really be retired.
Conditions are thought to have been pretty harsh on earth when life formed here as well, so why not? And, from the point of view of creatures living near thermal vents, dry land must look "pretty harsh" as well.
Besides, Venus may not have always been the way it is today.
I don't know about this particular game--maybe the decision makes sense, maybe it doesn't. But I think it is good that advertising is not considered "free speech" and that not everything goes when it comes to advertising. Of course, far more dangerous than advertisements for video games would seem to be advertisements for fast food. But perhaps they'll get around to restricting those, too.
Nobody knows, and it isn't really relevant to the discussion about climate change or climate change policies.
We have no idea what large amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will do to weather in Europe, the US, or anywhere else. We have no idea either what they will do to sea levels or plant life. But we do know that it is quite plausible that they will have big effects and that it is quite plausible that those effects won't be good. We also know that getting rid of excessive carbon dixoide from the atmosphere may take decades or centuries.
The conservative thing to do is to reduce our emissions to more historical levels which we know are safe, as opposed to engaging in a wild experiment on a global scale and see what happens.
We are talking about innacuracies "noncriminal" informaiton, [...] they exist for the convenience of cops,
As in "Mr. Smith, would like us to call in your wife and ask her about your three mistresses that our files show you have? Oh, of course, that's perfectly legal, we just think her answers might be relevant. Of course, if you just plea-bargain, we won't have to go through all that."
Or as in "Mr. Jones, our files show that you have met several times with known terrorists. No, you can't have those files. No, you can't talk to your lawyer. For reasons of national security, we are going to detain you for now."
As I was saying, in theory, where the justice system works logically and everything that matters is decided in proper legal proceedings, your argument is fine. In the real world, it doesn't work.
In fact, he despised the military (for example, massive defense cuts).
How does cutting the defense budget after the cold war is over translate into "despising the military"? The US spends more money on defense than the next half dozen or so nations combined. Don't you think it's time to reduce the size of the military?
He saw the military as a way to expand his social agenda (gays in the military,
Yeah, some "agenda" that is, requiring the largest government employer to behave in ways that is expected of most other employers. The real question is: why is the military some kind of hold-out for the right-wing religious social agenda?
Somalia, Bosnia,
I'm sorry, but can you explain to me what Clinton's hidden "agenda" was supposed to be there? I mean, it may or may not have been stupid to send troops there, but an "agenda"? Please enlighten us.
firing Tomahawks at Iraq to cover his own indiscretions).
I thought Clinton had sex with Monica in the Oval Office. You are saying they also traveled to Iraq together?
Modern modem protocols (e.g., V42bis) already perform pretty decent compression. You can find some test results here. Effective compression of web content was an explicit goal in the design of recent modem standards.
The software solution may seem to help with some computer setups, but that's because many computers are misconfigured: a 56k modem with compression needs to be hooked up to the computer at 230kbps or 460kbps because when the modem performs the decompression, it will need to send a high-speed data stream to the computer. The best solution for those high data rates is to just get a modern USB modem.
Kinda like being a card-carrying member of the NRA or of the Armed Forces during the previous administration, eh?
No, not like that at all. Republicans have managed to create the impression that the ACLU and "liberalism" are just barely shy of communism. Democrats haven't even tried to do the equivalent with the NRA, which would be placing it near the anarchist and fascist ends of the political spectrum; perhaps they should, though.
As for the armed forces, Clinton was even more enamored with using the military than Bush is; Clinton just wasn't so dramatic about it as Bush (nor as incompetent when it came to the ensuing international diplomatic fallout).
Just a note that having information doesn't reduce ones liberties.
That is roughly the same kind of reasoning that was behind communism and the Soviet Union; you see, it may make sense in theory, if everybody behaves selflessly and for the common good, but it doesn't work in practice.
Often, being a suspect and subject of an investigation is a huge punishment and hassle in itself. Furthermore, even if the information is correct and not about criminal conduct, you may still end up being subject to blackmail (e.g., by overzealous prosecutors who are convinced that you are guilty of something).
However to lose ones liberty they must have evidence and further sufficient evidence of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt.
Not anymore. Where have you been the last two years?
All that is good and well, but if you buy the book or video game, it is yours, and what you do with it only is governed by copyright law, not by contract law. And we decided a long time ago that when you pay for a book in a store, it is a purchase, not a license. Apparently, the law considers video game purchases equivalent.
So, yes, you can give up lots of rights via contracts, but you don't have a contract with the company that produced the video game. Therefore, it doesn't matter what conditions they try to impose in some piece of paper they include with the item.
The inglorious exception to this is PC software shrinkwrap licenses, which may or may not be valid.
Well, if being a "card carrying member of the ACLU" is being thrown around as an insult by people like Bush, that's not too surprising. And with the current administration, you have to worry about whether being a member of the ACLU is going to get you on some list somewhere.
However, some conservatives seem to be coming around; see here and here.
You can argue that keeping the MP3 files is just format shifting and doesn't represent a copyright violation; I would agree with you, although a court probably wouldn't.
But this would likely be considered "public performance" or "commercial use", which usually requires the payment of royalties to the copyright holders, no matter how you store the CDs. You could put them into a CD changer and pipe the audio through an analog speaker system and you'd still run into the same problem.
Until the twentieth century the main source of applied energy was animal movement,
Well, so the solution to our laptop power problems is easy: get a hamster, a wheel, and a little generator. That biological generator runs on lettuce, food pellets, or, in a pinch, airline food (not recommended for long term power generation because it may damage the generator), and it produces mostly carbon dioxide and some (hopefully) solid waste.
Just because a large fraction of Apple users are artists and designers doesn't mean that a large fraction of artists and designers are Apple users. And it also seems likely that Windows users upgrade more frequently, resulting in more revenue to Adobe.
Overall, I suspect Adobe is looking at their sales figures and making rational decisions based on that.
If the process releases ammonia that is dissolved in the sea water itself, like the article says, the process would be very different from that of a steam turbine.
However, on reflection, it seems much more likely that the reporter simply misunderstood something and that the "ammonia gas" is just the liquid used inside a traditional heat pump.
Well, this one doesn't seem to derive its energy from the temperature difference (that is used for water purification by evaporation), but rather from ammonia:
As the water is heated by the surrounding warm surface water, it releases ammonia gas, which then drives the system's power generator,
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Yes, indeed, you did resort to name calling. But, don't worry, I don't take it too personally.
Sorry. C++ developer for over 10 years...
Well, I have you beat there by nearly another decade. In any case, perhaps now is the time for you to become very proficient at several other languages so that you actually have a basis for comparison.
I've grown up and have come to realize it's not the tool, but the person using the tool.
So, why don't you program in COBOL or Fortran 77? After all, COBOL programmers and Fortran 77 programmers were saying exactly the same thing you are: who needs all this new-fangled C and C++ nonsense when we can just write everything in COBOL or Fortran 77?
And when it comes to safety, your reasoning is roughly the same reasoning people use who don't wear safety belts or practice unsafe sex. And it's about as smart.
Yes, that was indeed immature, because it was a Pyrrhic victory; Sun could have achieved a much better outcome if they had played their cards right. But what was even more foolish was taunting Microsoft in 1996, when Java originally came out, with the claim that they would make Microsoft irrelevant.
So you think Flash works better in Linux than Java does? Am I missing something?
Yes, sadly, it does: Flash starts up fast, its animations are reasonably smooth, and it ships with just about every machine. Java, in contrast, takes forever to start up, doesn't exactly produce smooth animations, and needs to be separately downloaded and installed. It's actually quite a nuisance having to delete Flash from every machine and downloading and installing Java.
And what complaining from Sun are you talking about? Inform me.
Sun keeps complaining that the reason Java is having problems with graphics on X11 is X11's fault. But other cross platform toolkits (Qt, wxWindows, etc.) work much better on X11 than Java does, so clearly it is Sun that isn't doing a good job with their cross-platform toolkit.
Don't get me wrong: I think Flash is pretty awful. But they are handling the marketing and business side better than Sun.
That's my point: Java applications don't need sandboxing, but the Java runtime still has complete support for it built in.
Java on the server allows people to write secure code
Yes, and so does just about any other language other than C or C++. While client-side sandboxing was something genuinely new in a shipping environment in 1996, there is nothing special or new about Java's security for server-side applications.
Well, more importantly, in classic UNIX systems, software packages were composed of dozens of small, short-lived processes. With that, you need neither garbage collection nor runtime safety. It's a shame that Linux has increasingly moved towards large, monolithic applications like those found in the Windows world. But if that's the kind of applications one builds, C/C++ is not the tool to do it.
Another way to get the same isolation at run time is to use a virtual machine
Well, there are a number of choices: (1) UNIX-style (lots of small processes), (2) virtual machines and JITs (Java), (3) sandboxing by pointer munging, and (4) safe languages with native code compilers (and digital signing of object files in untrusted environments).
I think (4) is actually probably the best choice for most desktop uses. It is odd that we ended up with (2), mostly because Sun promised one thing for Java (web-based applications) and then delivered something completely different (server platform).
You're right that 'vector' and other STL classes don't guarantee safety, but they are surely a big step up from raw C arrays or NUL-terminated strings. Many STL implementations do have 'safe' or 'debug' modes; it's a pity this mode is not the default.
Well, fortunately, C++ is sufficiently powerful that it is very easy to roll one's own array class or use any of a number of third party classes. Unlike STL, those end up giving users both fast and predictable performance and runtime safety.
But today, Flash ships with just about every browser and there is far more dynamic web content in Flash than in Java. Why? Because Macromedia didn't unnecessarily taunt Microsoft ("we are going to make Windows irrelevant"), because they worked hard to get Flash shipped with everything, and because they focused on authoring tools. And, strangely enough, Macromedia graphics works on Linux, while Sun keeps complaining and changing their implementation.
Sun, in contrast, did everything they could to get into Microsoft's cross-hairs, they didn't fix their bugs, they kept changing their strategies, and they never produced decent authoring tools. Now, Java is mostly a server-side technology. But that's not a particularly secure niche, since Java-style sandboxing is needed much less on the server than for downloadable applications, and because there are lots of alternatives on the server.
I don't think Macromedia will be successful at turning Flash into an application platform. But they sure are trying, and they are a lot more successful with worse technology than Sun with Java.
And a statement like yours reeks of the kind of ignorance of macho programmers who think they have it all under control. When you grow up, you'll perhaps figure out that everybody makes mistakes. And when you grow up, you'll perhaps also figure out that, no matter how good you yourself may be, eventually, you'll have to work on multi-programmer projects and you have to deal with other people's code, who often are novices.
C++ is great language when speed and reliability on the server is required.
C++ is a great language, but not for most server applications.
On the other hand, Linux and Windows are in the same boat here: most of their critical components are written in the same languages: C and C++. Ditto for Solaris and Mac OS X. So, Windows doesn't have intrinsic an advantage there when it comes to languages and tools.
But Linux's development processes, community, and modularity give it a huge advantage over Windows when it comes to security. Just the ability to strip down a Linux system to barely a kernel and a handful of user processes, as well as the very fast bug fixing are enormous assets when it comes to security.
However, Microsoft has seen the light, which is why they are pushing C#/.NET: C# really does let them write code that is pretty much as efficient as C++ code, while still being completely safe, and yet giving them full access to the low-level features of the machine. So, if the Linux community doesn't watch out, Microsoft may (for the first time) end up having a technical lead.
Fortunately, the Mono project is working hard on creating a platform for both client and server development in C#. And, of course, we also are getting more servers and server components in Java, Python, PHP, and Perl.
An additional problem with C (and to a lesser degree, C++) is that it doesn't protect you against mistakes or typos: it is very easy to introduce crashes and security problems accidentally.
Many languages other than C/C++ almost completely eliminate that worry. Java offers almost complete fault isolation: code simply cannot foul up structures to which it doesn't have access, and furthermore, you can control very carefully what code that you load is and is not allowed to do. And Modula-3 and C# give you the ability to mix safe and unsafe code predictably: by default, everything is safe. But if you ask for it, you can do unsafe stuff in clearly marked sections of the code. Furthermore, external libraries are guaranteed to be marked correctly as to whether they are safe or not.
Those are capabilities that simply are not available in C/C++/Objective-C, and they cannot be retrofitted or added after the fact as libraries.
similarly using 'vector' or other STL containers instead of C-style arrays.
That is wrong: STL makes very few safety guarantees. This is very unfortunate because the ANSI C++ committee had a big opportunity to make C++ a much safer language, but they missed it. If you want better support for safety in C++, you'll have to use or write your own data structure types (since STL is so poorly designed in many other ways, that's a good idea anyway).
At least in C++ there is a standard 'string' type, although some people insist on reinventing the wheel (Microsoft's MFC with CString, Qt with QString).
That's because (1) many of those libraries predate ANSI C++ by a long time, and (2) the ANSI C++ standard 'string' type also has some serious limitations.
C++ is a great language for scientific applications and things like embedded systems and operating system kernels. But it is not a good language for end-user application software, GUIs, or servers. And C, while it was a wonderful workhorse for 20 years, should really be retired.
Besides, Venus may not have always been the way it is today.
I don't know about this particular game--maybe the decision makes sense, maybe it doesn't. But I think it is good that advertising is not considered "free speech" and that not everything goes when it comes to advertising. Of course, far more dangerous than advertisements for video games would seem to be advertisements for fast food. But perhaps they'll get around to restricting those, too.
We have no idea what large amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will do to weather in Europe, the US, or anywhere else. We have no idea either what they will do to sea levels or plant life. But we do know that it is quite plausible that they will have big effects and that it is quite plausible that those effects won't be good. We also know that getting rid of excessive carbon dixoide from the atmosphere may take decades or centuries.
The conservative thing to do is to reduce our emissions to more historical levels which we know are safe, as opposed to engaging in a wild experiment on a global scale and see what happens.
As in "Mr. Smith, would like us to call in your wife and ask her about your three mistresses that our files show you have? Oh, of course, that's perfectly legal, we just think her answers might be relevant. Of course, if you just plea-bargain, we won't have to go through all that."
Or as in "Mr. Jones, our files show that you have met several times with known terrorists. No, you can't have those files. No, you can't talk to your lawyer. For reasons of national security, we are going to detain you for now."
As I was saying, in theory, where the justice system works logically and everything that matters is decided in proper legal proceedings, your argument is fine. In the real world, it doesn't work.
How does cutting the defense budget after the cold war is over translate into "despising the military"? The US spends more money on defense than the next half dozen or so nations combined. Don't you think it's time to reduce the size of the military?
He saw the military as a way to expand his social agenda (gays in the military,
Yeah, some "agenda" that is, requiring the largest government employer to behave in ways that is expected of most other employers. The real question is: why is the military some kind of hold-out for the right-wing religious social agenda?
Somalia, Bosnia,
I'm sorry, but can you explain to me what Clinton's hidden "agenda" was supposed to be there? I mean, it may or may not have been stupid to send troops there, but an "agenda"? Please enlighten us.
firing Tomahawks at Iraq to cover his own indiscretions).
I thought Clinton had sex with Monica in the Oval Office. You are saying they also traveled to Iraq together?
The software solution may seem to help with some computer setups, but that's because many computers are misconfigured: a 56k modem with compression needs to be hooked up to the computer at 230kbps or 460kbps because when the modem performs the decompression, it will need to send a high-speed data stream to the computer. The best solution for those high data rates is to just get a modern USB modem.
No, not like that at all. Republicans have managed to create the impression that the ACLU and "liberalism" are just barely shy of communism. Democrats haven't even tried to do the equivalent with the NRA, which would be placing it near the anarchist and fascist ends of the political spectrum; perhaps they should, though.
As for the armed forces, Clinton was even more enamored with using the military than Bush is; Clinton just wasn't so dramatic about it as Bush (nor as incompetent when it came to the ensuing international diplomatic fallout).
That is roughly the same kind of reasoning that was behind communism and the Soviet Union; you see, it may make sense in theory, if everybody behaves selflessly and for the common good, but it doesn't work in practice.
Often, being a suspect and subject of an investigation is a huge punishment and hassle in itself. Furthermore, even if the information is correct and not about criminal conduct, you may still end up being subject to blackmail (e.g., by overzealous prosecutors who are convinced that you are guilty of something).
However to lose ones liberty they must have evidence and further sufficient evidence of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt.
Not anymore. Where have you been the last two years?
(2) Sponsor, or contribute to, the development of open source games.
So, yes, you can give up lots of rights via contracts, but you don't have a contract with the company that produced the video game. Therefore, it doesn't matter what conditions they try to impose in some piece of paper they include with the item.
The inglorious exception to this is PC software shrinkwrap licenses, which may or may not be valid.
However, some conservatives seem to be coming around; see here and here.
But this would likely be considered "public performance" or "commercial use", which usually requires the payment of royalties to the copyright holders, no matter how you store the CDs. You could put them into a CD changer and pipe the audio through an analog speaker system and you'd still run into the same problem.
Well, so the solution to our laptop power problems is easy: get a hamster, a wheel, and a little generator. That biological generator runs on lettuce, food pellets, or, in a pinch, airline food (not recommended for long term power generation because it may damage the generator), and it produces mostly carbon dioxide and some (hopefully) solid waste.
Overall, I suspect Adobe is looking at their sales figures and making rational decisions based on that.
However, on reflection, it seems much more likely that the reporter simply misunderstood something and that the "ammonia gas" is just the liquid used inside a traditional heat pump.