So far, I do NOT see Intel's reputation
being damaged in any form. On the contrary,
the programmers, yes, who are also CUSTOMERS,
seems to enjoy it.
This is an example of the right joke on the
right audience, which is why I said these
things could damage reputation.
If I see expletives in source code, however,
I cannot help but conclude that the company
in question does not practice effective code
review. Code review, as you must know, is
one of the most cost effective ways to catch
bugs, and they're not doing it.
Jokes are even worse. Most jokes are at
least a little offensive to somebody, so there
is really a time and place for these. Putting
it in source code means that the joke may be
read a long time in the future by somebody
from a very different culture.
Remember that it's really hard to be actually
funny. Successful comedians get paid a lot
of money, and for some reason your day job
is still programming.
I bought my 486 laptop in 1995 under a tight
budget, and traded a color screen in favor of
4 MB more of RAM. With 8 MB of RAM, X barely
works. There were no real word processors to
test, but believe me, there wasn't much left
of either CPU power or memory. I can compile
the kernel under the text console, but not
when X and Afterstep are running (it just
about dies trying).
The same box dual booted Windows 95, where I
can run Word just fine.
Is it just me, or do the words "professional"
and/or "mature," when they occur next to
"programmer," actually mean "conservative," or
"humorless," or "full of him/herself?"
Humor can co-exist with professionalism.
However, source code is not where you put it.
If you ever release that code to a customer,
it could damage your company's reputation.
Too many such comments could interfere with
efforts to search the source code. Humor
also often language- and culture-dependent,
so your company's foreign employees may even
misunderstand subtle jokes as actual useful
comments about the code. And then it's no
longer funny.
Not to say that many such coding standards
are little more than power trips. However,
a professional will always keep in mind the
fact that the source code doesn't belong to
him or her. If you don't like the rules set
by your employer, find another job.
by promoting a product that is nowhere near
ready for primetime. OpenOffice for Mac OS
is at alpha level, suitable really only for
developers and very brave and dedicated
testers. Putting in a box raises expectations
to unreasonable levels, and saying "move over
Microsoft" is just downright crazy.
With lies like "amazing product that will soon
give Microsoft a run for its money", free
software doesn't even need enemies. Please
do not promote free software to the general
public until it is ready.
Any coders out there know that sometimes
intense modification or starting over is just
what has to be done to make your program what
you want.
Yes, in many cases a rewrite is better than
reuse. However, you do not discover
major faults in
your code that require a rewrite (much less "a
few times") in the middle of development. To
do so indicates that your team does not
understand the code base it was to reuse, or did
not understand the requirements. Either form
of incompetence rightfully results in failure,
especially in a cutthroat market like games.
Also, "started over a few times" does not
say "taking time to do it right" to me. It
says they don't know how to do it right, and
are just fumbling in the dark.
Note that I am not familiar with their actual
development practices, so I am assuming your
description is accurate, and basing my comments
on that.
technology moves too quickly and your
game looks old fast.
So find another niche to play in. Actually
invent a new game, and it will look
new.
But what if when two years have passed, you
need another year to finish the title?
This sounds cruel, because the market is
cruel, but your product then deserves to die.
Schedule estimates off by 50% are rarely
survivable.
Please don't think I'm attacking you or your
project, or that I'm saying I can somehow do
better. I'm just saying that when trapped in
a rat race with otherwise identical competitors,
you must either do the job better than anybody
else or create a new job entirely.
That is BS. I have a 733 MHz G4 desktop, and
it's a lot more than sufficient for DV editing.
Even my old 350mhz G4 did editing decently. The
problem must be your iMovie. Try Final Cut Pro
3.
I don't use iMovie. Apple disables some G4 realtime effects in
FCP if you only have a 733 MHz G4. FCP also
drops frames once in a while during playback.
It works almost all of the time and the overall
experience is pleasant, but I wouldn't describe
it as "a lot more than sufficient".
You can get a notebook with a 1.8Ghz AMD or 2.0Ghz Pentium for half that price.
Compared to the Dell Inspiron 8200 (1.7 GHz P4, $1,499), the PowerBook has 512 MB RAM (Dell
has 128 MB), 1 MB cache (512 KB), 60 GB disk
(30 GB), DVD-R drive (DVD), GB ethernet (100
Mbps), a 5-hour battery life (2-3 hours),
weighing in at 5.4 lbs (7.9 lbs), measuring
1.0 inches thick (1.75 in).
So no, I don't think the two are comparable.
Upgrading the RAM, hard drive, and video
card (ATI Mobility Radeon 9000) to match up
better resulted in a $2,277 package, with
the PowerBook still holding significant
advantages in size, battery life, and a DVD-R
drive for a 25% price premium.
If you really want to buy an Powerbook, I
suggest getting an iBook instead and spend the
other $1500 on a PC with a nice 17" LCD
display.
Please do not make unqualified suggestions
like these, because it implies that anybody
who buys the PowerBook is just stupid. I
fully expect, for example, that someone who
needs to run Final Cut Pro on the road would
appreciate or need the extra power. I can
barely edit at full DV quality on a 733 MHz
desktop G4, so a top-end iBook (800 MHz G3)
could be painful to use.
Besides, one may not need, want, or even have
room for the $1,500 PC with a nice LCD display.
HP seems to have a penchant for hidden testing functions.
Not just HP. If you do a bit of searching around
the web, many cell phones have half-hidden debug
features that are knowingly left in. In my
experience, they are left in not because they
are useful (written by developer for developer),
but because you don't want to disturb the tested
binary minutes away from deadlines, even just
to remove debug code.
Unlike game cheats, these don't tend to unleash
anything useful to the end user. They're
also certainly not easter eggs.
You mention a "knowledge" of God. I understand that there are strongly held beliefs in God, but what knowledge is there?
This is straying far off topic, so I'm just
going respond briefly.
Whether a God exists or not is a valid human
question. It is also a question that Science
cannot answer. In fact, religions almost seem
to retreat whereever science advances. It
is possible that God indeed doesn't exist,
but science cannot prove that anything doesn't
exist.
What I'm trying to say is, I find the present
methods of studying God unsatisfactory.
Religions as we know them today have obvious
problems, but science doesn't fill the hole.
What I am leaving room for - and asking
tolerance for - is a revolutionary way of
studying.
The scientific method has not changed since it was invented by William Harvey in the 16th century. It has stood the test of time.
First of all, that's one-tenth of recorded
human history. More importantly, religion
withstood the "test of time" far longer. So?
I do not believe that the method is flawed
in some way and is, in fact, rock-solid.
Firstly, it's exactly what a catholic
might have thought about his religion a few
hundred years ago, so your certainty is
somewhat scary.
Secondly, the experimentation step has a
serious and obvious flaw: there are things
we cannot experiment on (think exploding
stars), and there are events we cannot
observe because of their duration and all
the factors we cannot eliminate (think
cancer studies).
Do you really believe that there cannot
possibly ever be a better way to study the
world around us?
The embedded market is ruled by geeks who
make informed decisions based on specs and
their products needs.
One company chose a CPU because that's what
they used on the last project, and they wanted
to ensure that reused as much of the code as
possible. Sounds technical, except the "reuse"
aspect was overhyped to make the product seem
feasible, even though the CPU was severely
underpowered for one of its requirements.
Another company was going to switch CPUs
because they were entering into a strategic
partnership with the CPU maker, and wanted to
ensure a consistent supply of flash chips.
Applications with national prestige (or
military use) often are required to use
domestic products, even if there are superior
foreign alternatives.
Not as prone to marketing armies, yes, but
purely based on specs and needs, not always.
You are confusing the scientific method and scientific conclusions. I do not believe that the scientific method will be changed in the foreseeable future.
How did you think we arrived at the scientific
method to start with? The process of obtaining
the truth is iterative, and the point is that
at one point in time people felt perfectly "right"
- as right as you feel today - to throw away
scientific findings because they contradict
"higher" principles.
As I point out in my earlier post, science as
we know it today has obvious failings. The
most obvious one is its complete inapplicability
to the concept and knowledge of God. There
are other examples. For example, we are
terrible at tracing cause. Medical science has
identified hundreds of carcinogens, but it is
very difficult to conclude that something
causes cancer.
We might be learning about our universe in a
very different way five hundred years from
now. I don't think it is possible to say
what that method even looks like, the same way
a priest in the Middle Ages could not imagine
science today. The scientific method is not
only not the pinnacle of learning, it might
actually be near the end of its usefulness.
[Net Income is the] amount of a company's total sales (revenue) remaining after subtracting all of its costs, in a given period of time [...]. This very important figure [...] is the best measure of the current operating state of a company.
This is grossly simplified. A company with poor
sales (and therefore negative net income) can
hold a valuable patent, a developing bestseller
product, or even just a good domain name to be
worth more its net income suggests. Similarly,
a company with great net income may be facing
an anti-trust investigation (think IBM), or
some other potential disturbance (think
brewing internal conflicts in Apple).
Worse, net income has not proven to be
difficult to falsify: some companies have
added future earnings to bloat revenue, and
others have hidden away expenses in
subsidiaries.
The wise observer will not attribute too much
importance to a single metric of performance.
I think it can be easily demonstrated to be
false based on a few incontrovertable assumptions
about the nature of Rights, but it's not an
outright lie.
That anybody has a right to anything is a matter
of belief.
Historically, people have right to
own land if they get there first, win a war, or
perhaps purchase it. However, in a communist
society, there simply is no such individual
right to own land.
Civil rights for black people in the US is a
very recent thing, just like women's rights,
including reproductive rights concerning
abortion or even contraception. In most
countries, euthanasia is not a right, but it
may be in the future. Drinking alcohol was
not a right during certain periods, but even
now marijuana is legal in certain places.
Coming back to the point, if you eat a dog,
the police in one country might arrest you,
while police in another might ask you if it
was tasty. You can't eat beef in some
places. In general, endangered species enjoy
the right to be free from hunting. Many
managed species (fish, for example) can only
be hunted in limited ways. Different animals
have different rights to life that we grant
them.
So I'm not sure what you mean by
"incontrovertible assumptions about the
nature of Rights".
I am saying that anyone who believes that scientific studies should be "revised" to fit a political agenda is wrong. And I am saying that anyone who would defend those actions is wrong.
I don't need to be tolerant of deceipt.
You are assuming that the scientific approach
is "right". In the past, scientific discoveries
are often bent or suppressed for religious or
political reasons. We now consider that "wrong".
However, you should also accept that some time
in the future, your current views may be just
as "wrong" as the Inquisition. Science as we
know it today may turn into a gross approximation
of a greater truth, the way Newtonian mechanics
approximates Einsteinian "truth". I make this
analogy deliberately - Einstein may turn out
to be slightly or substantially wrong.
Science is a tool by which we discover truth,
and it may not be the only or even best tool
to discover truth. (For example, Science will
likely never prove or disprove God.) To be
"intolerant" is to risk not seeing, and is in
fact contradictory to the skepticism required
of scientists.
This is not to say I don't think that science
is the best tool we have today.
Even in the United States the only people that actually pay for applications like Photoshop are those folks that use it professionally.
You are terribly mistaken. Photoshop Elements
2.0 is the number one selling software package
at Amazon. Fact is, Adobe is keenly aware of
this market segment, and its price - $40 after
rebates - is low enough that people don't feel
it is worth their time to dig around for a free
alternative.
Free is not everything. Netscape was free,
but Microsoft proved that having to download
it was already too much trouble for most
users. Note also that Netscape was far more
popular than Gimp is today, and even had
many websites using Netscape-only features!
Adobe isn't going to port to Linux, because they know that if their customers start experimenting with Linux they are very likely to start experimenting with other Free Software
Huh? As you mentioned, Gimp runs on Windows,
yet Photoshop Elements is still a bestseller.
If having Gimp for Windows isn't enough of an
incentive to try it, why would Photoshop for
Linux make them reinstall their OS?
the result isn't evidence; it's just a computer-assisted guess.
Nonsense. I've seen with my own eyes how a
fuzzy security camera or satellite photograph
clearly show faces or license plate numbers
using sophisticated software in several major
Hollywood movies.
A cell tower is the point where "wire" ends and
"wireless" begins. As such, one end of it is
tied to the cellular network, which in turn is
tied to the land line network.
With a blimp, the end going into the cellular
network must also be wireless. What you've
then introduced is a wireless repeater, which
consumes twice the bandwidth compared to a
land-based tower.
The angles at which land-based towers transmit
allows its beams to penetrate windows for
indoor coverage. A blimp that flies higher
would not be able to penetrate several floors
(or even just ordinary roofing) to provide the
same coverage, especially right underneath
itself.
If the blimp cannot be kept stationary enough
for doppler sync purposes, then you'll need
significantly more complex software to deal
with the fact that both the blimp and the
handset are moving.
Not impossible, but there are significant
obstacles.
Ah, but the point is that a Linux based PC was sold. It's another number on the userbase. The userbase size is very important to companies thinking about writing a Linux app or game - are there enough people to buy it and turn a profit?
It's another false statistic in the user base.
A person who buys a "Linux PC" but runs Windows
on it isn't going to buy Linux games or apps,
so the potential profit can never be realized
from them.
Even those who do continue to use Linux belong
to a category unlikely to spend a lot on games.
After all, they bought a cheap PC.
Actually this is rubbish, you don't have
to explicitly cast in C++. The compiler will
guess the right cast type, the same as it
does in C.
I'll let Bjarne Stroustrup (creator of C++) answer.
If you're going to complain about casting int to char * without warning, as you do in the second example, you should also complain about converting void * to char * without warning..
I'll let Steve Summit (author of the comp.lang.c FAQ) answer.
Healthy skepticism is a good trait on Slashdot, but it's best to stay polite ("rubbish") unless you know what you're talking about.
would actually be substandard C. Since C
assumes that an unprototyped function returns
int, forgetting to include stdio.h would
generate an error, which is silenced by the
explicit cast.
Furthermore, the most recent iteration of
ANSI C, known as C99, contains many features
not supported in C++.
Taiwan was 'created' after the communist revolution in China (Mainland). The losers went to Taiwan and called it China, they even held the 'china' seat at the UN. It wasn't till in the 60s (??) that the People's Republic of China got that seat and Taiwan doesn't have it anymore.
Utterly wrong. The Republic of China was
created in 1912, following the overthrow of
the Qing ("ching") Dynasty. This was the
"China" that allied with the US in WWII
and got a permanent seat in the Security
Council of the UN.
In 1949, the RoC lost the civil war against
the communists on mainland China, and
retreated to Taiwan. The communists
established the People's Republic of China,
which was not recognized by the US until
the late 70s. The PROC later took over
the UN seat.
To date, there is no country (recognized
or not) named "Taiwan". The RoC remains
in power on Taiwan, with a couple of dozen
diplomatic relationships.
If the Chinese want to, they can take
it easily. 3 US carriers won't help a bit
against a Chinese offensive with 500,000
men.
That's wrong, too. China must first
establish air superiority if their limited
naval ability to ferry troops is to survive
the trip. Taiwan has hundreds of Mirage
and F-16 fighters to counter. As for the
overwhelming numerical superiority, you
need to consider that Taiwan is a small
island, and sending too many troops really
will just cause congestion.
Unaided, Taiwan will most likely eventually
lose, but it's not at all likely to be
easy for China. This is really Taiwan's
only and worst military nightmare, so a lot
of preparations have gone into this potential
war.
Originally and before 1999 (I'm not sure
when policy changed) the US did recognize
the independence of Taiwan. It was only
around the time that China regained control
of Hong Kong that the US switched (I'm
probably incorrect about the timeline)
from Tawain to China (including evicting
Tawain from a seat in the UN).
Your timeline is off by about 20 years.
The US also never recognized the independence
of "Taiwan". Rather, the US recognized
the government of the Republic of China -
which from 1949 to the present effectively
controls only Taiwan and a couple of small
islands. In the late 70s, the US wanted
to establish diplomatic relations with the
People's Republic of China, at which time
the RoC left the UN.
If the defence aliance still does exist
with Taiwan its a throwback to when the US
officially supported their position.
No, it's a US law called the Taiwan Relations
Act, which requires the US government to
provide Taiwan with defensive weapons against
aggression from China. It was enacted after
diplomatic relations were severed. It
specifically does not require the US to
send troops, although of course the US may
choose to.
If I remember correctly, almost immediately after China reclaimed Hong Kong they picked up the fight by putting ships in the waters between the two countries and lobbing missiles over their heads
The missile tests were aimed at intimidating
Taiwanese voters just before a presidential
election. That was several years before Hong
Kong was returned to China.
The US was acting like the father in the
front "Don't make me turn this car around,
or both of you'll get a spanking"
Uh, one of the "kids" in the backseat has
nuclear weapons. I think your analogy
grossly overestimates the US role here.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an example of the right joke on the right audience, which is why I said these things could damage reputation.
If I see expletives in source code, however, I cannot help but conclude that the company in question does not practice effective code review. Code review, as you must know, is one of the most cost effective ways to catch bugs, and they're not doing it.
Jokes are even worse. Most jokes are at least a little offensive to somebody, so there is really a time and place for these. Putting it in source code means that the joke may be read a long time in the future by somebody from a very different culture.
Remember that it's really hard to be actually funny. Successful comedians get paid a lot of money, and for some reason your day job is still programming.
I bought my 486 laptop in 1995 under a tight budget, and traded a color screen in favor of 4 MB more of RAM. With 8 MB of RAM, X barely works. There were no real word processors to test, but believe me, there wasn't much left of either CPU power or memory. I can compile the kernel under the text console, but not when X and Afterstep are running (it just about dies trying).
The same box dual booted Windows 95, where I can run Word just fine.
Humor can co-exist with professionalism. However, source code is not where you put it. If you ever release that code to a customer, it could damage your company's reputation. Too many such comments could interfere with efforts to search the source code. Humor also often language- and culture-dependent, so your company's foreign employees may even misunderstand subtle jokes as actual useful comments about the code. And then it's no longer funny.
Not to say that many such coding standards are little more than power trips. However, a professional will always keep in mind the fact that the source code doesn't belong to him or her. If you don't like the rules set by your employer, find another job.
With lies like "amazing product that will soon give Microsoft a run for its money", free software doesn't even need enemies. Please do not promote free software to the general public until it is ready.
Yes, in many cases a rewrite is better than reuse. However, you do not discover major faults in your code that require a rewrite (much less "a few times") in the middle of development. To do so indicates that your team does not understand the code base it was to reuse, or did not understand the requirements. Either form of incompetence rightfully results in failure, especially in a cutthroat market like games.
Also, "started over a few times" does not say "taking time to do it right" to me. It says they don't know how to do it right, and are just fumbling in the dark.
Note that I am not familiar with their actual development practices, so I am assuming your description is accurate, and basing my comments on that.
So find another niche to play in. Actually invent a new game, and it will look new.
But what if when two years have passed, you need another year to finish the title?
This sounds cruel, because the market is cruel, but your product then deserves to die. Schedule estimates off by 50% are rarely survivable.
Please don't think I'm attacking you or your project, or that I'm saying I can somehow do better. I'm just saying that when trapped in a rat race with otherwise identical competitors, you must either do the job better than anybody else or create a new job entirely.
I don't use iMovie. Apple disables some G4 realtime effects in FCP if you only have a 733 MHz G4. FCP also drops frames once in a while during playback. It works almost all of the time and the overall experience is pleasant, but I wouldn't describe it as "a lot more than sufficient".
Compared to the Dell Inspiron 8200 (1.7 GHz P4, $1,499), the PowerBook has 512 MB RAM (Dell has 128 MB), 1 MB cache (512 KB), 60 GB disk (30 GB), DVD-R drive (DVD), GB ethernet (100 Mbps), a 5-hour battery life (2-3 hours), weighing in at 5.4 lbs (7.9 lbs), measuring 1.0 inches thick (1.75 in).
So no, I don't think the two are comparable. Upgrading the RAM, hard drive, and video card (ATI Mobility Radeon 9000) to match up better resulted in a $2,277 package, with the PowerBook still holding significant advantages in size, battery life, and a DVD-R drive for a 25% price premium.
Please do not make unqualified suggestions like these, because it implies that anybody who buys the PowerBook is just stupid. I fully expect, for example, that someone who needs to run Final Cut Pro on the road would appreciate or need the extra power. I can barely edit at full DV quality on a 733 MHz desktop G4, so a top-end iBook (800 MHz G3) could be painful to use.
Besides, one may not need, want, or even have room for the $1,500 PC with a nice LCD display.
Not just HP. If you do a bit of searching around the web, many cell phones have half-hidden debug features that are knowingly left in. In my experience, they are left in not because they are useful (written by developer for developer), but because you don't want to disturb the tested binary minutes away from deadlines, even just to remove debug code.
Unlike game cheats, these don't tend to unleash anything useful to the end user. They're also certainly not easter eggs.
This is straying far off topic, so I'm just going respond briefly.
Whether a God exists or not is a valid human question. It is also a question that Science cannot answer. In fact, religions almost seem to retreat whereever science advances. It is possible that God indeed doesn't exist, but science cannot prove that anything doesn't exist.
What I'm trying to say is, I find the present methods of studying God unsatisfactory. Religions as we know them today have obvious problems, but science doesn't fill the hole. What I am leaving room for - and asking tolerance for - is a revolutionary way of studying.
The scientific method has not changed since it was invented by William Harvey in the 16th century. It has stood the test of time.
First of all, that's one-tenth of recorded human history. More importantly, religion withstood the "test of time" far longer. So?
I do not believe that the method is flawed in some way and is, in fact, rock-solid.
Firstly, it's exactly what a catholic might have thought about his religion a few hundred years ago, so your certainty is somewhat scary.
Secondly, the experimentation step has a serious and obvious flaw: there are things we cannot experiment on (think exploding stars), and there are events we cannot observe because of their duration and all the factors we cannot eliminate (think cancer studies).
Do you really believe that there cannot possibly ever be a better way to study the world around us?
One company chose a CPU because that's what they used on the last project, and they wanted to ensure that reused as much of the code as possible. Sounds technical, except the "reuse" aspect was overhyped to make the product seem feasible, even though the CPU was severely underpowered for one of its requirements.
Another company was going to switch CPUs because they were entering into a strategic partnership with the CPU maker, and wanted to ensure a consistent supply of flash chips.
Applications with national prestige (or military use) often are required to use domestic products, even if there are superior foreign alternatives.
Not as prone to marketing armies, yes, but purely based on specs and needs, not always.
How did you think we arrived at the scientific method to start with? The process of obtaining the truth is iterative, and the point is that at one point in time people felt perfectly "right" - as right as you feel today - to throw away scientific findings because they contradict "higher" principles.
As I point out in my earlier post, science as we know it today has obvious failings. The most obvious one is its complete inapplicability to the concept and knowledge of God. There are other examples. For example, we are terrible at tracing cause. Medical science has identified hundreds of carcinogens, but it is very difficult to conclude that something causes cancer.
We might be learning about our universe in a very different way five hundred years from now. I don't think it is possible to say what that method even looks like, the same way a priest in the Middle Ages could not imagine science today. The scientific method is not only not the pinnacle of learning, it might actually be near the end of its usefulness.
suppressing that information is outrageous.
I agree. It is possibly even criminal.
This is grossly simplified. A company with poor sales (and therefore negative net income) can hold a valuable patent, a developing bestseller product, or even just a good domain name to be worth more its net income suggests. Similarly, a company with great net income may be facing an anti-trust investigation (think IBM), or some other potential disturbance (think brewing internal conflicts in Apple).
Worse, net income has not proven to be difficult to falsify: some companies have added future earnings to bloat revenue, and others have hidden away expenses in subsidiaries.
The wise observer will not attribute too much importance to a single metric of performance.
That anybody has a right to anything is a matter of belief.
Historically, people have right to own land if they get there first, win a war, or perhaps purchase it. However, in a communist society, there simply is no such individual right to own land.
Civil rights for black people in the US is a very recent thing, just like women's rights, including reproductive rights concerning abortion or even contraception. In most countries, euthanasia is not a right, but it may be in the future. Drinking alcohol was not a right during certain periods, but even now marijuana is legal in certain places.
Coming back to the point, if you eat a dog, the police in one country might arrest you, while police in another might ask you if it was tasty. You can't eat beef in some places. In general, endangered species enjoy the right to be free from hunting. Many managed species (fish, for example) can only be hunted in limited ways. Different animals have different rights to life that we grant them.
So I'm not sure what you mean by "incontrovertible assumptions about the nature of Rights".
"Outright lie"?
This is a political belief. It can be right or wrong, but not true or false.
I don't need to be tolerant of deceipt.
You are assuming that the scientific approach is "right". In the past, scientific discoveries are often bent or suppressed for religious or political reasons. We now consider that "wrong".
However, you should also accept that some time in the future, your current views may be just as "wrong" as the Inquisition. Science as we know it today may turn into a gross approximation of a greater truth, the way Newtonian mechanics approximates Einsteinian "truth". I make this analogy deliberately - Einstein may turn out to be slightly or substantially wrong.
Science is a tool by which we discover truth, and it may not be the only or even best tool to discover truth. (For example, Science will likely never prove or disprove God.) To be "intolerant" is to risk not seeing, and is in fact contradictory to the skepticism required of scientists.
This is not to say I don't think that science is the best tool we have today.
You are terribly mistaken. Photoshop Elements 2.0 is the number one selling software package at Amazon. Fact is, Adobe is keenly aware of this market segment, and its price - $40 after rebates - is low enough that people don't feel it is worth their time to dig around for a free alternative.
Free is not everything. Netscape was free, but Microsoft proved that having to download it was already too much trouble for most users. Note also that Netscape was far more popular than Gimp is today, and even had many websites using Netscape-only features!
Adobe isn't going to port to Linux, because they know that if their customers start experimenting with Linux they are very likely to start experimenting with other Free Software
Huh? As you mentioned, Gimp runs on Windows, yet Photoshop Elements is still a bestseller. If having Gimp for Windows isn't enough of an incentive to try it, why would Photoshop for Linux make them reinstall their OS?
Nonsense. I've seen with my own eyes how a fuzzy security camera or satellite photograph clearly show faces or license plate numbers using sophisticated software in several major Hollywood movies.
With a blimp, the end going into the cellular network must also be wireless. What you've then introduced is a wireless repeater, which consumes twice the bandwidth compared to a land-based tower.
The angles at which land-based towers transmit allows its beams to penetrate windows for indoor coverage. A blimp that flies higher would not be able to penetrate several floors (or even just ordinary roofing) to provide the same coverage, especially right underneath itself.
If the blimp cannot be kept stationary enough for doppler sync purposes, then you'll need significantly more complex software to deal with the fact that both the blimp and the handset are moving.
Not impossible, but there are significant obstacles.
It's another false statistic in the user base. A person who buys a "Linux PC" but runs Windows on it isn't going to buy Linux games or apps, so the potential profit can never be realized from them.
Even those who do continue to use Linux belong to a category unlikely to spend a lot on games. After all, they bought a cheap PC.
I'll let Bjarne Stroustrup (creator of C++) answer.
If you're going to complain about casting int to char * without warning, as you do in the second example, you should also complain about converting void * to char * without warning..
I'll let Steve Summit (author of the comp.lang.c FAQ) answer.
Healthy skepticism is a good trait on Slashdot, but it's best to stay polite ("rubbish") unless you know what you're talking about.
The most commonly-encountered difference is probably:
which is perfectly valid (and good) C. It is invalid C++ because the void * return type of malloc() must be explicitly cast to (char *). However:would actually be substandard C. Since C assumes that an unprototyped function returns int, forgetting to include stdio.h would generate an error, which is silenced by the explicit cast.Furthermore, the most recent iteration of ANSI C, known as C99, contains many features not supported in C++.
Utterly wrong. The Republic of China was created in 1912, following the overthrow of the Qing ("ching") Dynasty. This was the "China" that allied with the US in WWII and got a permanent seat in the Security Council of the UN.
In 1949, the RoC lost the civil war against the communists on mainland China, and retreated to Taiwan. The communists established the People's Republic of China, which was not recognized by the US until the late 70s. The PROC later took over the UN seat.
To date, there is no country (recognized or not) named "Taiwan". The RoC remains in power on Taiwan, with a couple of dozen diplomatic relationships.
If the Chinese want to, they can take it easily. 3 US carriers won't help a bit against a Chinese offensive with 500,000 men.
That's wrong, too. China must first establish air superiority if their limited naval ability to ferry troops is to survive the trip. Taiwan has hundreds of Mirage and F-16 fighters to counter. As for the overwhelming numerical superiority, you need to consider that Taiwan is a small island, and sending too many troops really will just cause congestion.
Unaided, Taiwan will most likely eventually lose, but it's not at all likely to be easy for China. This is really Taiwan's only and worst military nightmare, so a lot of preparations have gone into this potential war.
Your timeline is off by about 20 years. The US also never recognized the independence of "Taiwan". Rather, the US recognized the government of the Republic of China - which from 1949 to the present effectively controls only Taiwan and a couple of small islands. In the late 70s, the US wanted to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, at which time the RoC left the UN.
If the defence aliance still does exist with Taiwan its a throwback to when the US officially supported their position.
No, it's a US law called the Taiwan Relations Act, which requires the US government to provide Taiwan with defensive weapons against aggression from China. It was enacted after diplomatic relations were severed. It specifically does not require the US to send troops, although of course the US may choose to.
If I remember correctly, almost immediately after China reclaimed Hong Kong they picked up the fight by putting ships in the waters between the two countries and lobbing missiles over their heads
The missile tests were aimed at intimidating Taiwanese voters just before a presidential election. That was several years before Hong Kong was returned to China.
The US was acting like the father in the front "Don't make me turn this car around, or both of you'll get a spanking"
Uh, one of the "kids" in the backseat has nuclear weapons. I think your analogy grossly overestimates the US role here.