Dude, at least get your facts straight. As someone pointed out below embryonic stem cells don't come from abortions. They come from in-vitro fertilization and are currently discarded and die anyway. AND abortions only happen when the baby is viable if it has severe defects and no chance of enjoyable life or mother's health is in danger. Only during the first trimester is the decision is entirely up to the mother.
I am pro-choice, but I wouldn't allow aborting a baby at 8 months except in horrible and rare circumstances. Does anyone here really think different? If mother is likely to be killed by either birth or C-section, or if the baby is going to live in pain and drown in it's own saliva by the age of 3, well that's a different story.
Standard bodies move so slowly that they are useless for developing the first solution to any problem or adding a major new feature. C and Javascript were long in use before ANSI or ECMA looked at them.
What the standards are good for are ironing out small wrinkles like concatenating arguments in macros after millions on users have already chosen the technology and settled any major differences. The solutions are often kludgy, unsatisfactory and simply take the lowest common denominator rather than the most elegant existing solution. Yet this work is absolutely essential - after innovations have been made and tested.
So, let there be ANSI.DOC2007 and Microsoft can make any changes they want after that - so long as they are required to fully document/unpatent their current format and support all current features when saving to.DOC2007 to the best approximation allowed by the standard. Also they will have to adopt.DOC2010 some time after its out.
I assume computer users working for Mass government like some features in Microsoft software. The question is weather they should try to negotiate some agreement that serves interest of its citizens, or should just assume MS is evil and give up. I think they should approach this question much more seriously than most slashdot users - they are dealing with 100 of millions of taxpayers money and IT overhead is pure waste.
May this be a lesson for any large company - if you hold back your division from doing what the customer wants, someone else will come and take your business and you probably will never get it back. Where would Apple be now if they didn't port iTunes to Windows?
I think Microsoft is about to get some education. Most people can tolerate Windows on desktop, but servers are no-no for big companies in terms of performance, scalability (SMP/64 bit/massive multitasking), security or remote administration.
The writing is on the wall - just look at Apache vs IIS market share. When talking to generic backends, Microsoft client software often has no special advantages and competition is starting to sneak up on them. Still think anyone will pay for Windows for a browser-only terminal?
The only way for them to salvage a big chunk of their market share is to port exchange, IIS, SQL Server and the rest of "BackOffice" to Linux and do whatever corporate customers say they need to use it - get behind Samba, make IIS an Apache plugin, make their own Linux distribution. But I suspect it's far more likely we'll one day see Steve Balmer coming to IBM keynotes and confessing his mistakes.
Re:IRC analysis fatally flawed
on
Is IRC All Bad?
·
· Score: 1
Sure - if I buy DRMed music and record companies conspire to make it unusable in future, I hope someone goes down for stealing copyrighted materials that were rightly in my possession.
On the other hand, IRC dudes are only guilty of copyright infringement, which is far less serious than theft. Ever heard anyone busted for making a single copy of an $200 program? Try to steal the same amount from a store, and you are likely to go to jail.
if you fight back it will only get worse for you even if you eventually win by getting the bully in trouble.
From my experience the opposite is true - if you fight back at all, you are less likely to be bothered in future even if you lose. Even your feeble blows caused some amount of pain and if you show you are willing in principal to seriously hurt him, well you might just get lucky next time.
In the other words, collect donations, then countersue and suck them dry. Next time, spammers will not dare to sue you or anyone else.
In that case, I'd buy a PC many times more powerful at the price of a G5.
Ok, go ahead, give me a link to someone who sells a PC at least twice more powerful than dual 2.5Ghz G5 - for $3K or less. Or a PC that can transcode a DVD to MPEG4 at the same speed, provided that an optimized program taking advantage of Altivec or MMX is used on both platforms.
There was one UNIX Version 7 system which used tandem 68000's which had one processor lag one intruction behind the first so that it could be used to restart the processing in the case of a memory fault.
This should be nominated as one of the top hacks ever, right next to interleaving programs stored on a drum to match the rotation speed. Could I have a link?
What I don't understand is why didn't they just pad memory access instructions with NOPs so that they would be all the same size and OS could manually adjust the PC? Or was memory so expensive that even dual CPUs with custom synchronization hardware made more sense?
Great, an alternative to one language not suitable for learning programming is to either use another unsuitable language or don't code at all. If you teach BASIC, you can just say "computer follows your instruction exactly line by line, until you explicitely ask it to go to a different step". How about:
Computer looks up System class in java.lang package, finds an "out" static member, then selects a correct println method according to overloading rules...
How does your version handle nested inheritance any better? Say, I have A->B->C->D->E and I want to call method foo and I don't remember which class defined it. Clearly impossible. Now, say I figured out it was defined in B. How do I invoke it? e->super.super.super.foo()? e->d.c.b.foo()? ((B *)d)->foo()? The last version is the shortest, but doesn't do any compile-time checking that d is a "substruct" of B, rather than say an int.
As for memory, say you have an array of million pointers to objects with virtual functions - entirely possible for complicated graphics rendering. Are you really saying it doesn't matter if vtables add 4M overhead or 40M overhead?
There is already a language that is compatible with C, handles OOP without unnecessary overhead, and generates code identical to C when OOP is not used. What makes you think that you can do better than many competing compiler vendors, without even writing a compiler? How can a Lisp user complain that C++ has too much overhead?
Not to mention cleaning core dumps if you ever touch a lego the wrong way. *Smile* Yes, I am afraid I wouldn't be a programmer if either of these languages were my first experience. If "good "+"day" doesn't append two strings, there is just something unhealthy about it.
Well, I hope bad experience doesn't keep you from having fun. Grab qbasic and draw some fractals. Quite good images for maybe 10 lines of code. Or write a game where you kill your professor by throwing heavy C++ books.
Oh no. First, you need to put a pointer to a struct of function pointers shared between all instances to have the same space efficiency as C++. That structure should also have a pointer to function table of base class so that you can call functions overridden by yourself without knowing their private names. I assume that each of your structs will have a "super" field of super-struct type in the beginning. To call one of these functions, you would need to do something like:
If draw wants to access fields defined in TopBase, DrawBase and Derived, it will need to cast its first arguments to each of these structs in turn.
You can implement interfaces by having one "virtual" function that takes a pointer to an interface object and returns a struct with functions of this object for each interface method.
After a while, you will write macros to encapsulate all these things and will become quite productive. And then one day, you will want to inherit from a struct written by another programmer, who came up with his own virtual functions, inheritance, interfaces and macros.
Maybe the solution is to write a special version of C compiler with built in support for virtual functions in structs, so that people can use a clean, concise syntax for calling them and structs written by different people interoperate naturally. Oh wait...
I don't see why you gave up the benefits of C++ for such a small improvement. One day you might want to display video on the sides of your cubes. With C++, you just pass a VideoCube to renderer.spin(Cube&cube) and it will call approporiate virtual functions to get bitmaps of each of the sides. With C code, you are likely accessing internals of struct Cube directly and can not change it's implementation without re-writting a lot of code.
Besides, if you really need efficiency, you can write low-level routines in C and still compile them using a C++ compiler. Make Renderer a friend of Cube if you really want to hardcode its internals. Of course, some C++ features like non-virtual method calls have no extra overhead, and some - like inline functions and refrences instead of pointers - can potentially generate faster code.
OOP can be overdone, but a small degree is useful in any program longer than 2 pages. By contrast, I don't see how coding directly in XML would ever be helpful. If that's an internal representation used by my editor or compiler - well, whatever works for them.
Should I put off kids? Should I have them and then look for a job? Should I land a job with maternity leave and hope that I still get tenure if I use maternity leave within the first few years I am working there?
I think you would prefer society to accommodate your innate differences and let you raise children without suffering disadvantage in your carrier compared to people who are likely to be more productive simply because they have more time to work. Fair enough. But this kind of things shouldn't be one way. What do you think are some of the innate differences of men? What are you willing to give up in your carrier and personal life to accommodate them?
I had a girl recently go on a long rant of how she was a "free spirit" and won't let any man control her or run her life... and a week later talks about how she's thankful that her dad provides the food, the house, the money for school, etc... the MAN provides it all.
Maybe her father doesn't try to control her or make her take care of all his needs?
The 1950s family structure wasn't bad, hell it was damned near perfect. I don't know why people hate on the 50's so much, it was a better time and place.
I don't see what stops you from having a 50's family structure. Just find someone who thinks alike. Oh, you want to force someone else to live in a way that will make you happy? Uh.. we kind of got away from that and it's worth some inconvenience.
I don't think your USB virtual privacy machine 1. comes with 20GB of storage, 2. Runs apps as fast as dual PPC, 3. prevents malware on the host from just formatting its hard drive, 4. can be pulled out for instant suspend or 5. comes with a commercially supported server for VPN, backup and centralized administration.
This is actually perfect for universities. Work from home or any lab, don't worry about hacked or infected public PCs (passwords can be entered with on-screen keyboard), for(;;) fork(); will not kill some central public server.
The only curious thing is the choice of non-Intel CPU. I wonder what kind applications they run on this thing - Mozilla and OpenOffice? I know what I would run when I have to use other people's computers.
You read too much Intel marketing literature - old stuff released before Pentium M at that. "2.8Ghz" and "1.2Ghz" is not a valid measurement of CPU performance, much less of how productive you will be at a particular task. A mini Mac might be 30% slower than your cheap PC for CPU bound tasks that don't rely on vector processing, floating point, graphics rendering though GPU or smooth preemptive multitasking - not 60% slower as the clock speeds imply. But once you actually start creating a presentation, organizing your photos, making a video or composing a tune, it will leave a spyware-laden PC with clunky OS and apps in the dust.
It is not MS that tells Dell to bundle MS with their system. It is not MS that tells Dell not to bundle "security features" (antivirus and others).
I guess you didn't follow the antitrust trial. MS forced OEMs into contracts where they pay for a copy of Windows for every PC, even if the ship it without an OS. They also prohibit replacing IE with another browser.
Judging by the fact that I still can not order a PC and ask vendor to wipe out the hard drive before shipping and give me a refund for bundled Windows/Office, things still haven't changed much.
Actually, it also has something to do with the fact that Macs don't run web pages and e-mail as programs, among a few other security precautions.
If more people switch, we'll eventually see adware in programs you manually download and run, just not self-installing variery. And for non-administrator users, it will not be able to modify shared applications or system libraries. People will be able to get rid of it with "rm -rf ~/Library".
To be fair, WinXP SP2 with Firefox, Thunderbird and iTunes instead of MS apps comes close to that level of security. The remaining concerns are world-writable DLLs and COM controls scattered all of the disk, the fact that user's registry hive can not be removed without breaking many installed programs, and inconvinience of running as a non-admin.
please note that harassing the receptionist at these places is unlikely to cause any change in their investment policies
Of course it's pointless to be rude or demand that she personally withdraw company's investments. But you can certainly politely explain that you are a victim of their client's illegal activities and ask to contact one of the partners who has influence in decision making.
You will not get through, but the company's management will eventually know that people keep calling and complaining about Claria. The last thing an investment company wants is a client entangled in a class action lawsuit or government investigation.
Then again, you might be surprised. Michael Moore convinced Kmart to stop selling bullets just by talking to them - granted he brought columbine victims along. Maybe some companies don't wish to invest in scum and will turn away once the reality is fully explained to them.
It's nice to know it's just bad luck, not procrastination. But as for checking ID numbers, a modern desktop computer can do this instantly. I doubt new students enroll faster than 1/minute, but in the worst case you could store an 120MB bitmap and just toggle a single bit to assign an ID number.
Non-random approach is dangerous because you can guess ID numbers of your classmates and from then on it's much easier to access their information or worse change their class enrollment.
I bet they have been "in the process or replacing the system" since last century. They just didn't do any serious work on that until they got busted. Same as US Airways over christmas and countless companies with Y2K bug until 1999. Everyone with decision making power should take a serious pay cut and students should get tuition discounts to offset the cost of dealing with identity theft.
If they really took the problem seriously, an upgrade wouldn't take long at all. Just mechanically replace SSNs in the database with unique, randomly generated 9 digit numbers and set up a web page that maps SHA(SSN) to the new ID.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, at least get your facts straight. As someone pointed out below embryonic stem cells don't come from abortions. They come from in-vitro fertilization and are currently discarded and die anyway. AND abortions only happen when the baby is viable if it has severe defects and no chance of enjoyable life or mother's health is in danger. Only during the first trimester is the decision is entirely up to the mother.
I am pro-choice, but I wouldn't allow aborting a baby at 8 months except in horrible and rare circumstances. Does anyone here really think different? If mother is likely to be killed by either birth or C-section, or if the baby is going to live in pain and drown in it's own saliva by the age of 3, well that's a different story.
Come on, that's one case where it's not going to help. They'll just come back to when you still living.
Standard bodies move so slowly that they are useless for developing the first solution to any problem or adding a major new feature. C and Javascript were long in use before ANSI or ECMA looked at them.
.DOC2007 and Microsoft can make any changes they want after that - so long as they are required to fully document/unpatent their current format and support all current features when saving to .DOC2007 to the best approximation allowed by the standard. Also they will have to adopt .DOC2010 some time after its out.
What the standards are good for are ironing out small wrinkles like concatenating arguments in macros after millions on users have already chosen the technology and settled any major differences. The solutions are often kludgy, unsatisfactory and simply take the lowest common denominator rather than the most elegant existing solution. Yet this work is absolutely essential - after innovations have been made and tested.
So, let there be ANSI
I assume computer users working for Mass government like some features in Microsoft software. The question is weather they should try to negotiate some agreement that serves interest of its citizens, or should just assume MS is evil and give up. I think they should approach this question much more seriously than most slashdot users - they are dealing with 100 of millions of taxpayers money and IT overhead is pure waste.
May this be a lesson for any large company - if you hold back your division from doing what the customer wants, someone else will come and take your business and you probably will never get it back. Where would Apple be now if they didn't port iTunes to Windows?
I think Microsoft is about to get some education. Most people can tolerate Windows on desktop, but servers are no-no for big companies in terms of performance, scalability (SMP/64 bit/massive multitasking), security or remote administration.
The writing is on the wall - just look at Apache vs IIS market share. When talking to generic backends, Microsoft client software often has no special advantages and competition is starting to sneak up on them. Still think anyone will pay for Windows for a browser-only terminal?
The only way for them to salvage a big chunk of their market share is to port exchange, IIS, SQL Server and the rest of "BackOffice" to Linux and do whatever corporate customers say they need to use it - get behind Samba, make IIS an Apache plugin, make their own Linux distribution. But I suspect it's far more likely we'll one day see Steve Balmer coming to IBM keynotes and confessing his mistakes.
Sure - if I buy DRMed music and record companies conspire to make it unusable in future, I hope someone goes down for stealing copyrighted materials that were rightly in my possession.
On the other hand, IRC dudes are only guilty of copyright infringement, which is far less serious than theft. Ever heard anyone busted for making a single copy of an $200 program? Try to steal the same amount from a store, and you are likely to go to jail.
if you fight back it will only get worse for you even if you eventually win by getting the bully in trouble.
From my experience the opposite is true - if you fight back at all, you are less likely to be bothered in future even if you lose. Even your feeble blows caused some amount of pain and if you show you are willing in principal to seriously hurt him, well you might just get lucky next time.
In the other words, collect donations, then countersue and suck them dry. Next time, spammers will not dare to sue you or anyone else.
In that case, I'd buy a PC many times more powerful at the price of a G5.
Ok, go ahead, give me a link to someone who sells a PC at least twice more powerful than dual 2.5Ghz G5 - for $3K or less. Or a PC that can transcode a DVD to MPEG4 at the same speed, provided that an optimized program taking advantage of Altivec or MMX is used on both platforms.
There was one UNIX Version 7 system which used tandem 68000's which had one processor lag one intruction behind the first so that it could be used to restart the processing in the case of a memory fault.
This should be nominated as one of the top hacks ever, right next to interleaving programs stored on a drum to match the rotation speed. Could I have a link?
What I don't understand is why didn't they just pad memory access instructions with NOPs so that they would be all the same size and OS could manually adjust the PC? Or was memory so expensive that even dual CPUs with custom synchronization hardware made more sense?
Great, an alternative to one language not suitable for learning programming is to either use another unsuitable language or don't code at all. If you teach BASIC, you can just say "computer follows your instruction exactly line by line, until you explicitely ask it to go to a different step". How about:
Computer looks up System class in java.lang package, finds an "out" static member, then selects a correct println method according to overloading rules...
that would be delicious
Don't eat OQO with Debian
How does your version handle nested inheritance any better? Say, I have A->B->C->D->E and I want to call method foo and I don't remember which class defined it. Clearly impossible. Now, say I figured out it was defined in B. How do I invoke it? e->super.super.super.foo()? e->d.c.b.foo()? ((B *)d)->foo()? The last version is the shortest, but doesn't do any compile-time checking that d is a "substruct" of B, rather than say an int.
As for memory, say you have an array of million pointers to objects with virtual functions - entirely possible for complicated graphics rendering. Are you really saying it doesn't matter if vtables add 4M overhead or 40M overhead?
There is already a language that is compatible with C, handles OOP without unnecessary overhead, and generates code identical to C when OOP is not used. What makes you think that you can do better than many competing compiler vendors, without even writing a compiler? How can a Lisp user complain that C++ has too much overhead?
Not to mention cleaning core dumps if you ever touch a lego the wrong way. *Smile* Yes, I am afraid I wouldn't be a programmer if either of these languages were my first experience. If "good "+"day" doesn't append two strings, there is just something unhealthy about it.
Well, I hope bad experience doesn't keep you from having fun. Grab qbasic and draw some fractals. Quite good images for maybe 10 lines of code. Or write a game where you kill your professor by throwing heavy C++ books.
Oh no. First, you need to put a pointer to a struct of function pointers shared between all instances to have the same space efficiency as C++. That structure should also have a pointer to function table of base class so that you can call functions overridden by yourself without knowing their private names. I assume that each of your structs will have a "super" field of super-struct type in the beginning. To call one of these functions, you would need to do something like:
Derived *d;
((TopBase *)d->functions->draw((DrawBase *)d)(graphicsCtx);
If draw wants to access fields defined in TopBase, DrawBase and Derived, it will need to cast its first arguments to each of these structs in turn.
You can implement interfaces by having one "virtual" function that takes a pointer to an interface object and returns a struct with functions of this object for each interface method.
After a while, you will write macros to encapsulate all these things and will become quite productive. And then one day, you will want to inherit from a struct written by another programmer, who came up with his own virtual functions, inheritance, interfaces and macros.
Maybe the solution is to write a special version of C compiler with built in support for virtual functions in structs, so that people can use a clean, concise syntax for calling them and structs written by different people interoperate naturally. Oh wait...
I don't see why you gave up the benefits of C++ for such a small improvement. One day you might want to display video on the sides of your cubes. With C++, you just pass a VideoCube to renderer.spin(Cube&cube) and it will call approporiate virtual functions to get bitmaps of each of the sides. With C code, you are likely accessing internals of struct Cube directly and can not change it's implementation without re-writting a lot of code.
Besides, if you really need efficiency, you can write low-level routines in C and still compile them using a C++ compiler. Make Renderer a friend of Cube if you really want to hardcode its internals. Of course, some C++ features like non-virtual method calls have no extra overhead, and some - like inline functions and refrences instead of pointers - can potentially generate faster code.
OOP can be overdone, but a small degree is useful in any program longer than 2 pages. By contrast, I don't see how coding directly in XML would ever be helpful. If that's an internal representation used by my editor or compiler - well, whatever works for them.
Should I put off kids? Should I have them and then look for a job? Should I land a job with maternity leave and hope that I still get tenure if I use maternity leave within the first few years I am working there?
I think you would prefer society to accommodate your innate differences and let you raise children without suffering disadvantage in your carrier compared to people who are likely to be more productive simply because they have more time to work. Fair enough. But this kind of things shouldn't be one way. What do you think are some of the innate differences of men? What are you willing to give up in your carrier and personal life to accommodate them?
I had a girl recently go on a long rant of how she was a "free spirit" and won't let any man control her or run her life... and a week later talks about how she's thankful that her dad provides the food, the house, the money for school, etc... the MAN provides it all.
Maybe her father doesn't try to control her or make her take care of all his needs?
The 1950s family structure wasn't bad, hell it was damned near perfect. I don't know why people hate on the 50's so much, it was a better time and place.
I don't see what stops you from having a 50's family structure. Just find someone who thinks alike. Oh, you want to force someone else to live in a way that will make you happy? Uh.. we kind of got away from that and it's worth some inconvenience.
There have been bank robbers who present a valid ID during the crime, but such cases are rare.
I don't think your USB virtual privacy machine 1. comes with 20GB of storage, 2. Runs apps as fast as dual PPC, 3. prevents malware on the host from just formatting its hard drive, 4. can be pulled out for instant suspend or 5. comes with a commercially supported server for VPN, backup and centralized administration.
This is actually perfect for universities. Work from home or any lab, don't worry about hacked or infected public PCs (passwords can be entered with on-screen keyboard), for(;;) fork(); will not kill some central public server.
The only curious thing is the choice of non-Intel CPU. I wonder what kind applications they run on this thing - Mozilla and OpenOffice? I know what I would run when I have to use other people's computers.
You read too much Intel marketing literature - old stuff released before Pentium M at that. "2.8Ghz" and "1.2Ghz" is not a valid measurement of CPU performance, much less of how productive you will be at a particular task. A mini Mac might be 30% slower than your cheap PC for CPU bound tasks that don't rely on vector processing, floating point, graphics rendering though GPU or smooth preemptive multitasking - not 60% slower as the clock speeds imply. But once you actually start creating a presentation, organizing your photos, making a video or composing a tune, it will leave a spyware-laden PC with clunky OS and apps in the dust.
It is not MS that tells Dell to bundle MS with their system. It is not MS that tells Dell not to bundle "security features" (antivirus and others).
I guess you didn't follow the antitrust trial. MS forced OEMs into contracts where they pay for a copy of Windows for every PC, even if the ship it without an OS. They also prohibit replacing IE with another browser.
Judging by the fact that I still can not order a PC and ask vendor to wipe out the hard drive before shipping and give me a refund for bundled Windows/Office, things still haven't changed much.
Actually, it also has something to do with the fact that Macs don't run web pages and e-mail as programs, among a few other security precautions.
If more people switch, we'll eventually see adware in programs you manually download and run, just not self-installing variery. And for non-administrator users, it will not be able to modify shared applications or system libraries. People will be able to get rid of it with "rm -rf ~/Library".
To be fair, WinXP SP2 with Firefox, Thunderbird and iTunes instead of MS apps comes close to that level of security. The remaining concerns are world-writable DLLs and COM controls scattered all of the disk, the fact that user's registry hive can not be removed without breaking many installed programs, and inconvinience of running as a non-admin.
please note that harassing the receptionist at these places is unlikely to cause any change in their investment policies
Of course it's pointless to be rude or demand that she personally withdraw company's investments. But you can certainly politely explain that you are a victim of their client's illegal activities and ask to contact one of the partners who has influence in decision making.
You will not get through, but the company's management will eventually know that people keep calling and complaining about Claria. The last thing an investment company wants is a client entangled in a class action lawsuit or government investigation.
Then again, you might be surprised. Michael Moore convinced Kmart to stop selling bullets just by talking to them - granted he brought columbine victims along. Maybe some companies don't wish to invest in scum and will turn away once the reality is fully explained to them.
It's nice to know it's just bad luck, not procrastination. But as for checking ID numbers, a modern desktop computer can do this instantly. I doubt new students enroll faster than 1/minute, but in the worst case you could store an 120MB bitmap and just toggle a single bit to assign an ID number.
Non-random approach is dangerous because you can guess ID numbers of your classmates and from then on it's much easier to access their information or worse change their class enrollment.
I bet they have been "in the process or replacing the system" since last century. They just didn't do any serious work on that until they got busted. Same as US Airways over christmas and countless companies with Y2K bug until 1999. Everyone with decision making power should take a serious pay cut and students should get tuition discounts to offset the cost of dealing with identity theft.
If they really took the problem seriously, an upgrade wouldn't take long at all. Just mechanically replace SSNs in the database with unique, randomly generated 9 digit numbers and set up a web page that maps SHA(SSN) to the new ID.
as a result of development of this technology. Or did they just mount a stock one from Radio Shark on the airplane windshield?