When the choice is principles and employment, employment wins. I have child support to pay.
What a proud example you are for your children.
"Hey kids, when you have the choice between doing what's right and making a dollar, remember only the poor can afford a conscience! Pat Tillman chose to follow his principles, and look where he is now!"
And, let's face it... even though it's perfectly legal to file a Freedom of Information Act request, doing so for topics like this totally out of the blue is certainly suspicious activity.
The point of the Freedom of Information Act was to enable citizen oversight of government -- because such citizen oversight is the substance of democracy.
Investingating acts, such as FOIA requests, that are wholly legal and a part of the function of democracy -- just like the Justice Departnet subpoenaing the names of protesters -- tends to discourage citizens from questioning authority and from the exercise of legal rights: "Sure it's legal, but we'll hassle and possible arrest you" understandably makes people afraid.
What makes the University of Texas "investigation" so threatening is the quesions the investigators asked:
"Do you belong to any student activist organizations?"
"Have you ever thought of joining any student activist organizations, like UT Watch?"
If the FBI investigators are interested in stopping terrorism, why were their first questions about the requestor's membership in legal and non-terroristic student organizations?
Is anyone else reminded of "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?"
There are two possibilities that immediately leap to mind -- ok, three: 1) the FBI really thinks that student activist organizatins are terrosist fronts --has the "War of Terrot" really gone so badly wrong that large groups of American students have joined the "evildoers"?
2) That the FBI is investingating student activist groups -- not for real ilegal activity -- but to keep an eye on dissendents in teh infamous* tradition of COINTELPRO.
* "infamous" is FBI Director Mueller's description of COINTELPRO, not mine.
3) That the FBI insn't investingating student activist groups per se, but wishes to discourage membership in those groups by tarring them with the "terrorist" brush -- in other words, that the FBI is making a foray into influencing domestic politics, a precursor to totalitarianism.
So which is it? Have a large number of American colege students jouined the terrorists, or is the FBI back in the business of investigating legal dissent, or is the FBI trying to use its official power to influence domestic politics?
Whatever the answer, it seems the threat is not so much to the pipes underneath the University of Texas -- it seems the real threat is to American democracy itself.
As usual, the submitter and the editor didn't read the letter.
Parent poster is absolutely right. What's posted on Slashdot is egregiously misleading.
The Slashdot article states (emphasis mine):
tm writes "Comcast recently sent out letters to DMCA-infringing customers, informing them of their
illegal downloading transgressions. The notice clearly states that Comcast has been asked by the copyright owner, MGM, to notify the individual of their actions and demand that the downloaded file(s) be immediately removed. In addition, the individual must write a return letter, which consists of an explanation and an apology. It appears that if a valid explanation is given, such as 'I don't know how to secure my access point and my neighbors run wild on my connection,' then both Comcast and MGM will be happy. If the explanation is not satisfactory however, they may proceed with fines, termination of service, ect [sic]. It will be interesting to see how this plays out and if this will influence other ISPs to go after customers at Hollywood's request."
Please note I am not a Comcast customer and I have no relationship of any sort with Comcast.
Ok, point by point:
illegal downloading transgressions and demand that the downloaded file(s) be immediately removed.: reading this and trustingly reading the words as they were written, I understood this to mean that Comcast was logging customers downloads. This has privacy implications, and it allows the possibility of mis-identifying files as copyrighted based on ambiguous filenames. But the actual letter asks the user to "remove works from the [Comcast] Server"; it's about files on Comcast's machine, not files the user has downloaded.
the individual must write a return letter, which consists of an explanation and an apology: I found this particularly worrisome, as the idea of forced confession or forced contrition both recalls Maoist "reeducation" and Stalinist show-trails, and because such confessions can be used against their author in latter criminal or civil proceedings. But, once again, no, the letter only requests the (possibly) copyrighted work be removed from Comcast's server, and offers the Comcast customer the opportunity to write a letter to dispute the copyright status of disputed file(s).
If the explanation is not satisfactory however, they may proceed with fines, termination of service, ect: No mention at all is made of any fines, termination of service, or in act any consequences to the Comcast customer. Nor is any mention made, as the Slashdot article implies, that Comcast will -- extrajudicially -- be itself the judge of the acceptability of the letter.
influence other ISPs to go after customers at Hollywood's request: Comcast is doing nothing more than precisely what the DMCA legally requires it to do; no new precedent is being set, and it's the force of the law itself, not Comcast's actions, that will presumably influence other ISPs to follow the law. If there's a slippery slope (and I do think there is) it was started down by the legislators who passed the DMCA. not by Comcast which is simply and without elaboration doing what the DMCA requires it to do. Nothing new here.
Let me emphasize my last point: there is nothing new here. Comcast is doing what it must do under the DMCA, and it's doing what every other ISP has to do. Your complaint is with the DMCA, not Comcast.
My complaint is with the article submitter and, even more so, the Slashdot editor who submitted this: neither apparently took the time to read the linked Comcast letter (even though, to their credit, they did link it.
It's important that Slashdot and its readers rail against the all too common erosion of our rights, and I applaud Slashdot for doing so. But it only harms our cause when we waste time and hemorrhage credibility raging against straw men with no basis in reality. Let's salvage some credibility by Slashdot readers -- and editors -- admitting that, with this "article", we simply screwed up.
On the matter of Text, use FreeType for the GIMP. It produces beautiful scaled, rotated, and angled text output.
But, using GIMP 2 and the version of FreeType that comes with it, I can't produce multi-line texts.
With the GIMP "Text Tool", I can produce multi-line text -- but only if I manually insert newlines. With FreeType, I can't even insert newline manually. And I can't get the text to re-flow; I have to manually remove and replace newlines.
What I want to do is produce some block of text, and have that text wrap to the confines of some box I put around it. There's absolutely no way to do that using the GIMP.
For this I manually inserted newlines, then removed and replaced them as I fiddled with changing the font size. Tedious.
For this for the text on the placard, I used the "Text tool" and then the "Perspective tool" -- as FreeType would have required matching the rotation for each of the three lines.
Finally, for this, I recalled that I could do flowing, multi-line text boxes in WordPerfect back in 1986, so I fired up Microsoft Word. Word wouldn't really do what I wanted (no surprise there) but Open Office produced the Text Boxes quite handily, with multi-line wrapping and reflowing.
So did I use GIMP for one third last example? well, I took a screen shot of the Open Office screen and pasted that into GIMP to scale it and save it as a jpeg. Except, the GIMP couldn't or wouldn't paste my screen-shot, so I had to paste that into Microsoft Paint, save the Paint bmp, and open the bmp in GIMP.
Basically, multi-line text isn't supported in the GIMP -- and without decent text handling, GIMP's a nice toy but not a "real" application.
And the GIMP UI requires me to iconize all other windows, because I use an X-mouse style activate on mouse-over, but that's another complaint for another post.
how comfortable are people using an automated solution for refactoring with this particular language?"
Well, when you consider that a compiler is also "an automated solution for [code] refactoring", I guess anyone using C++ (or any other compiled language) is reasonably conformable.
Since there are no constructors or templates or multi-expression tests ( "if( a && b || c && d )") in any machine's assembly languages, we all trust our compilers to generate assembly language that corresponds to the high-level language constructs we've actually written -- and in the case of the control expression to that "if" statement, we trust the compiler to know and follow the operator precedence for the language being compiled -- and in C and C++, the required "short-circuit" evaluation too.
That said, a good bit of that trust -- for C++ and C -- reposes in rigorous language standards and (more or less, I don't want to argue about language (mis)features or hacks for backward compatibility) well thought-out language designs.
(That's one of the many benefits of a rigorous, documented language standard, by the way -- do you know if, in scripting language "S"( where "S" may be Perl, windows scripting host, visual basic, or what have you), short-circuit evaluation of logical operators takes place, or if there's a sequence point between each one? Not to bash any one language, but for Perl, deja-googling shows sequence points have been an unresolved issue since 1998.)
To the extent that a refactoring tool's design is based on standards and on thoughtful and an open -- not proprietary -- processes that bring in opposing and skeptical views, as do the design of C and C++, I'd be reasonably willing to, in Reagan's words, "trust but verify". But if the refactoring tool is the proprietary product of a closed shop, I'll be far less confident that the Marketing Department didn't;t have too much of a had in product "design".
But however the products comes to be, the proof remains in the use -- let's see how the automatic refactoring compares over several real-life projects before trying to judge.
The issue is this: they want access to GPL data structures. If they claim to be not GPL, they don't get it. If they copy it into their own code, they become a derivative work of Linux and are forced to become GPL. If they try to access the data structures in some round-about way, they're still linking, and so are forced to become GPL.
Since they're accessing "GPL data structures" solely for the purpose of interoperability between their driver and the kernel, wouldn't that be allowed under the DMCA interoperability clause, and thus, by Congressional intent, not be a violation of copyright (as Congress presumably by including the interoperability clause in the DMCA assumed it and intended it, either not to contravene or to override, any other statute, e.g., Title 17)?
If the driver isn't violating the linux kernel copyright, then no license is required, and so no strictures of that license, e.g. release of code under the GPL, are in force.
But IANAL, so if I'm missing something, enlighten me.
Actually, they already have the fix implemented, and it's currently in the process of being rolled out. The upgraded system makes use of a split primary key which comprised of a "selector" subkey and a "segment" subkey. The selector key is shifted left by four bits and then arithmetically added to the segment key. This clever scheme expands the index by a factor of 16; Google will soon be able to host over 64 billion pages!
Ah, youthful mod!
You've been (humorously) trolled. I suggest posting in this thread to remove your "+1 Informative", or getting a friend to mod it "Funny".
What the parent is describing is not what Google will do, but what DOS did: the above scheme is how MS-DOS managed memory, except that the "selector" and "offset" were both 16-bit numbers under DOS. (Although "segment" was the more usual term for "selector".) The segment number was shifted left four places -- or put more simply but less graphically, multiplied by 16 -- and then added to the offset number, to give the whole or "flat" address:
segment (in hex): 0001 offset ( in hex): 0002
segment is multipled by 16 (shifted left 4 bits or one hex digit of multipled by 16)
This allowed DOS to use 16-bit numbers to address 2^20 = 1 MB of memory, but since DOS reserved the upper 384 KB for the (remapped) BIOS and peripheral cards, programs were able to address at most 640 KB of memory; the parent's mention of "64 billion pages" is probably an allusion (increased several orders of magnitude) to this DOS limit.
Of course, this was a kludge, pure and simple, required because DOS machines were 16-bit. Among other things, it allowed the same memory locations (all but the very top and bottom memory addresses) to be addressable by several different addresses, and discovering pointer aliasing it required calculations that, by their very nature couldn't be done wholly in the machines (16-bit) registers.
Consider: segment 4, offset 0 is 4 * 16 + 0 = 64, and segment 3, offset 16 is 3 * 16 + 16 = 64, and segment 2, offset 32 is 2 * 16 + 32 = 64 and segment 1, offset 48 is 1 * 16 + 48 = 64 and segment 0, offset 64 is 0 * 16 + 64 = 64:
so all five segment:offset pairs are apparently different but actually point to the same memory location.
A team worked to optimize the path, and using an emulator created a new video which is 26:56, four and a half minutes faster.
I hate to be a spoilsport, but Ashcroft's eviscerating the 4th amendment in the United States and Blind Blunkett's forcing National ID cards on the United Kingdom and John Howard's government is pushing its own version of the "Patriot Act" in Australia, and these people have time to figure out how to play a perfect game of Zelda?
I guess they truly do live in a fantasy world.
Christ! Look up from your bread and circuses, people! The Tree of Liberty of being chopped down to kindle the fires that will forge your chains.
Your comments say it all really. If you have nothing to hide there isn't a problem is there.
Normally I'd respond to this with a long list of reasons that even people with nothing to hide -- now -- may have something to hide soon.
But I'm going to the March for Women's Lives today, because I want to show my support for keeping Bush and Ashcroft out of our bedrooms and our pants and our reproductive decisions -- even when we decide to have abortions.
Right now abortion is still legal in the US, although with increasingly tighter restrictions by the states. If Bush and Ashcroft and that crowd have their way, it won't be. If abortion is outlawed, would I want to be carrying around an ID card that told any cop looking at it that I had marched in 2004 for what was now illegal? Think that evidence of dissidence might get me an extra-long search or more stops at the airport?
So because I'm marching today, I don't really have time for my typical post explaining why national ID and national databanks are bad news even for those with "nothing to hide". So I'll leave you with some of many previous slashdot posts on the subject:
And yet, many of the Nazis who committed what were -- unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- unarguably war crimes, did not commit suicide, and some continue to collect pensions from the German government to this day.
I'm not trying to say that no American ever committed war crimes; My Lai was also unarguably a war crime (and may Calley burn in Hell!), and some of the U.S. military's actions in Iraq -- as in throwing prisoners in a river to drown -- surely are atrocities.
I'm just pointing out that suicide isn't necessarily what the guilty do. Indeed, I'd be inclined to suggest that the really guilty, people like Josef Mengele ("Angel of Death" responsible for human experimentation at Auschwitz, died vacationing at a Brazilian beach), Rudolf Höß (first commandant of Auschwitz, executed), and Erich_Priebke (perpetrator of the Ardeatine caves massacre, still alive), tend to be so -- for lack of a better word -- evil that they feel they're not guilty and therefore feel no need for suicide or other punishment. (Indeed, Priebke so strongly felt that the killing 350 Italian civilians was not his responsibility but the responsibility of those who ordered him to do it, that he openly admitted his actions from fifty years later to a television news crew's cameras -- and it was only this admission that led to his trial).
For the record, I believe that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no more illegal than any bombing of cities in the war -- and all major combatants bombed cities in World War II. Dead by conventional bomb, dead by V1 rocket, dead by fire-bombing, dead by atomic bomb -- they're all dead. I'm unaware of any difference in ways of being dead, with the possible exception that atomic bombs mean a quicker death.
Also, for the record, I believe any crime involved in dropping the atomic bombs pales beside the atrocities committed by the Japanese in Korea, China (in "the Rape of Nanking" (warning: link includes a disturbing picture of mass decapitation) the word "rape" is used pretty literally -- but includes ripping babies from their mothers' arms and bashing the babies' heads against walls, prior to raping the mother), the Philippines, and the Bataan Death March, not to mention the Japanese forced labor camps in which tens of thousands died.
To those who contend that we "could have" beaten Japan without recourse to atomic bombs, I ask them how many more America boys would have had to have died to achieve an unconditional Japanese surrender using only conventional weapons -- and if those arguing against using atomic bombs had any of their family members on the line.
I wasn't in the Pacific fighting Japan, but Paul Fussell (later professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania) was -- after fighting Hitler's legions in Europe -- and I'll defer to his opinion and that of the other boots on the ground: "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb"
But let me ask you: how many American boys would you have sacrificed in further conventional war against Japan, so that you, safe at home, could claim the moral high ground of an atomic-bomb-free but protracted conventional war ?
Maybe parent's don't want their children's dead bodies paraded on CNN to be USED by the opposition as a political device?
Maybe the parents do. Let's ask Sue Niederer, mother of slain soldier Seth Dvorin (emphasis orthogonal's):
But many relatives of soldiers who died in Iraq believe the White House is trying to cover up what is happening there. Sue Niederer said she was refused permission to see the return of her son Seth Dvorin's body as it was flown into the Dover base. Lieutenant Dvorin, 24, from the 101st Airborne Division, was killed in February while trying to disarm a roadside bomb, a task for which he was not trained.
Speaking from her home in New Jersey, Mrs Niederer said: "They killed my son and they did not permit me to be there to see the coffin. They said it was for health reasons, and... they did not want the public to see it and they did not want the newspapers there." She added: "They don't want any of this being shown because it's reality. A coffin strikes home. If you don't see the coffin you just say: 'Oh, there's another one who has died.' But when you show the coffin, you show families, you show people and emotions. This is what they are doing this is what they do not want you to see."
By the way, if you think news shows showing coffins is "using" the fallen soldiers, what do you think of Bush campaign ads showing the remains of a fallen firefighter being removed from Ground Zero? Surely you'll agree that an advertisement showing mangled remains is worse than a news program showing a casket with an ironed and neatly folded American flag over it? Right? Right?
1. The press has become so lopsided, so Democrat, that they are so eager to demean the current administration that they can't even bother to check the validity of the images of "Soldiers killed in Iraqi combat".
The press is using images obtained by The Memory Hole under a Freedom of Information Act request.
The request was for any photos of soldiers killed in Iraq. The Department of Defense, in response to the request gave a CD of photos The Memory Hole.
The Memory Hole made those photos available to the press.
Everyone in that chain thought the photos were of our Iraq dead because of an error by the Department of Defense. You're the only one foolish enough to blame "the press" for the government's error.
Even if some of the phots are of the Space Shuttle astronauts, those photos showing more than seven caskets certainly are not.
And even if all the photos were "invalid" that doesn't change the facts: over 700 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and the current administration has tried to suppress photos of caskets -- and Bush has failed to attend a ingle soldier's funeral -- because the administration doesn't want the American public to get a visceral feel for the costs of this unnecessary war.
I suppose you think that it's because of "press bias" that no photos of the putative "reason" for going to war, the soi-disant Weapons of Mass Destruction, have been published?
Yep. You and your kids don't have a right to keep a memento of their first Christmas pageant, because that might violate a corporation's exclusive right to an arrangement of a traditional Christmas song.
Your personal memories of your kids don't count; corporate profits do.
At that point, I think that many are getting screwed for a small plutocracy.
That's the thing though, if this is done young enough, the brain will adapt to the new setup. It's similar to the sight expirament done a while ago.
Young may not be an issue; in amputees, the motor and sensory areas in the brain that were connected to the amputated limb are, after amputation, "invaded" or "co-opted" by the adjoining sensory areas.
Unfortunately, this doesn't usually result is a the remaining limbs becoming super limbs -- but it can create sensations of a "phantom limb", where the amputee "feels" the missing limb.
This also happens based on use or disuse: someone, like a pianist or a surgeon, who makes a lot of use of his fingers, will likely have larger motor and sensory areas for the fingers, and , ceteris paribus, other areas will be diminished.
For an account of this accessible to lay persons, see V.S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain.
I always hit Drudge first thing when I log on in the morning. I don't necessarily trust everything he says or posts, but if something big happened, I know it will be there
Yeah, Drudge has the big stuff, ever it it's not true.
Like just this morning I went to Drudge and saw this posted:
Sad news... Stephen King, dead at 54
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
That being said, does the nature of the World Wide Web in fact give sites like Wonkette, Drudge, or even Slashdot a free pass on accuracy if it means the difference between getting the scoop or not?"
Speaking only of Slashdot, I'll just say... so far.
Although in the case of Slashdot, I think it's not so much about getting a scoop as posting a dupe
There are an awful lot of dashes at random places in this paragraph. Were you by chance running garbage collection?
Yeah. That's my style -- though only for Internet posts.
The double dashes are meant to be what printers call "em" dashes, dashes the width of the "m" character, and indicate a separate, parenthetical, explanatory or exemplary, or emphasized phrase.
In contrast the "en" dash -- which of course is the width of an "n" character -- is used to join words as, when a verb phrase is used as a noun -- "at clean-up time (noun phrase) we do all the clean up (no dash, "clean" is actually being used as a verb) including recursively calling the clean-up routines (noun phrase) for all contained objects that we need to clean up (infinitive form of verb)".
I like the "em" dash because it breaks up the train of thought, making the sentences "punchier" and giving it more of the sound of a impromptu -- "hey, just between you and I" (exemplary dash) -- conversation. It makes the post seem more "artless" and "real" and less contrived, less the product of work and more a dashed off and a breezy comment.
In general, the dashed phrase is the "pull-ed out" comment on the main idea, or an emphasis or re-stating of the main idea. As such, I prefer it to be interstitial, that is, stuck in the middle with a dash on either side: main idea -- elaboration -- continuation of main idea. More rare -- for me -- is the concluding dash, which generally is for an opposing or separate -- or in any not emphasising -- idea. And unlike the previous sentences, I generally prefer only one emphasizing dash -- at most -- per sentence.
By postponing the conclusion -- by making the reader have to wait for it during the interstitial em-dashed phrase (explanatory dash) -- I'm able to get in another thought. (And sometimes I can slip in that additional thought without having to support it with evidence -- (dash for separate but related thought -- note this is a rare "unbalanced" or non-interstitial dash) so I get it in for "free", because it's "just" an impromptu aside. I try not to abuse this too much, especially because Slashdot readers will quibble on even the smallest, tangential, peripheral points.)
At the same time that it allows me to write longer sentences, by breaking them up it allows me to not exceed the lesser attention span most people have for reading on screen. You'll also notice that -- contrary to most traditional advice for writing (dash for insertion of related but different -- and unsupported by evidence (parenthetical dash) -- idea) -- my paragraphs are usually only a few, and other only one, sentence long.
I do this because vertical white space -- paragraph breaks (dash for emphasis) -- make screen reading much less of a chore. Nothing is harder to read on a screen than someone's run-together mess (en dash in noun phrase) of sentence after sentence with no break. My eyes just glaze over and I ignore the whole thing.
By using regular paragraph breaks, you get the reader to read -- or at least scan the first several words of each paragraph to see if any open of them "hooks" his attention (dash for separate but related though, of the rarer "unbalanced" form). But in fact I'm breaking a standard "rule" of traditional writing. Many of my paragraphs are -- intentionally (dash for emphasis) -- "fragments".
I'm afraid it's time to start treasuring Pete while we can.
Yeah, I know. Recently I recall half listening to Folk Alley internet radio, which features a lot of Seeger's songs, and I though I heard the announcer comment hat "Pete was" something or another. I spent several sort-of-panicked, sort-or-resigned, sort-of-apprehensive minutes on Google news until I'd convinced myself Pete was still around to rabble rouse.
He's almost a movement by himself.
I saw that, even though he has that typical Leftist problem. I have a Seeger compilation (Pioneer of Folk) on which Seeger sings "Round and Round Hitler's Grave" and "Dear Mr. President" ("I hate Hitler...Now, Mr. President , we haven't always agreed in the past I know, but that ain't at all important now...We gotta lick Mr. Hitler...." and on the same compilation ""Washington Breakdown" ("Franklin D, listen to me, you ain't gonna send me 'cross the sea"" and "C for Conscription". (I think I mentioned thsi once before on Slashdot.)
Of course, Pete's opinion on the desirability of fighting Hitler "matured" after Hitler's "Operation Barbarossa" commenced on 22 June 1941, the Hitler-Stalin Pact went down the memory hole, and Stalin jerked Comintern's strings 180 degrees.
(On a personal note, I've always been about equally disgusted by the Stalinists and the Red-baiting McCarthyites (Joe, not Gene, of course). Stalin killed millions, but "Tail gunner" Joe was pissing on my constitution. The America Communists I've always seen as rather willing dupes who would have sold us into Uncle Joe's Gulags, but I've also admired them for all the shit they put up with for bucking trends in America, and for their support (whatever their motivation) for civil rights and workers' protections. And I love the music.
I lost my copy of Pete's Songs of Hope and Struggle but I found a copy of Paul Robeson singing the 1944 version of the Soviet anthem. The tune is awfully rousing, and the lyrics are so boot-licking toward Stalin ("And Stalin our Leader, with faith in the people, inspired us to build up the Land that we loved."), especially given that it's on a album named Songs for Free men.
I can't help, from my 21st century perspective, enjoying the irony in a macabre way, Robeson being vilified in this country for his idealism about a Soviet Russia, where at about the same time, as Solzhenitsyn tells us in Gulag Archipelago there was that local Communist Party rally where the applause for Stalin's name went on for thirty minutes because everyone was afraid to be the first to stop. Not to mention the anthem principally celebrates victory in the Great Patriotic War, a victory that almost didn't happen thanks to Stalin's purges of the Army and State in '37, a victory which happened only after Hitler and Stalin split Poland down the middle and Stalin destroyed the Polish elite at Katyn Forest and then at Nuremberg blamed Germany for the massacre.
I have some Soviet recording of the anthem too --- big "proletarian" choruses of "New Soviet Men" as frightening in their raw-boned way as Hitler's blond-haired, fanatic-eyed Aryan poster boys. Still, I can enjoy the Soviet recordings, despite Stalin's 60 million victims, in a way I can't enjoy my copy of the Horst Wessel Lied or my few copies of SS marching songs -- those I only listen to occasionally when reading histories of the Nazi era. Does my hypocrisy shows too?)
Sorry for rambling. Back to Pete.
So I don't quite agree with his politics, but I love the spirit they represent. Even though that spirit was brutally misused in Soviet Russia, here in the U.S. the left did help bring about great things, especially the Civil Rights movement. Even knowing he was, to some degree, a "useful idiot". Because he also roused people to organize the AFL-CIO, and to march in Selma and he wrote Last train to Nuremberg! ("Do I see Lieutenant Calley?... Do I see the voters, me
BOOM! And you reveal that you don't know what you're talking about. Circular references are irrelevant to any GC scheme more sophisticated than reference counting.
My point was that to avoid the problem of circular references, the garbage collector does have to be more sophisticated, and sophistication takes time and (memory) space -- time and space that a program may or may not be able to spare.
"for very many applications modern garbage collectors provide pause times that are completely compatible with human interaction. Pause times below 1/10th of a second are often the case,"
Pause times below 1/10th of a second? Hmm, how much below? TV-quality video is 24 frames per second, so a one-tenth second pause means dropping two or three frames. Acceptable? Perhaps, but not desirable.
"Does garbage collection cause my program's execution to pause? Not necessarily."
Yes, if you read my post carefully -- perhaps you missed a word or two when the garbage collector in your head did some clean-up -- I didn't say that pauses were inevitable. My complaint -- and not just mine, it's no revelation that garbage collection has may detractors -- is that the pauses are not predictable by writer of the program.
With non-garbage collected language, I know that memory allocation will either succeed ort fail, and I know (or a library writer knew) when allocation happens, because I'm explicitly coding it. So I know, at this particular point in my program, either allocation succeeded or failed.
But garbage collection can happen at any time, and cause a pause at any point in my program -- even when I'm needing to re-fill under-run buffers or read volatile memory or make time-critical choices. With garbage collection, I no longer have an algorithmic program, in which I can say what it's doing at any particular point in the code.
Then come back and make some informed comments, instead of spouting nonsense. Thank you.
That overly hostile arrogance suggests you're either a zealot or a fourteen year-old. That sort of blustering generally indicates someone who isn't that confident in himself or his argument, and so wishes to preempt questioning by being a posturing like a "tough guy"; it's particularly prevalent on the net -- though I'll grant that you didn't hide behind an Anonymous Coward post. Adults can disagree and discuss things without resorting to insults and attitude -- and I think you'll be able to do that too, with a little more experience.
Since that time other Ledbelly songs that have had great sucess
But perhaps the most telling Leadbelly song is about the time when Huddie Ledbetter, beter known as Leadbelly, came to Washington D.C. to record for Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song.
Huddie and Alan Lomax were denied accomodation at several hotels because the hotels wouldn't rent to an interracial group: Huddie was black and Lomax, co-founder with his father of the Library's Archive, and, was white.
So Huddie, with Lomax's help, wrote "Bourgeois Blues", which begins:
Gather round people, listen to me Don't try to make a home in Washington, D.C.
It's a bourgeois town, it's a bourgeois town, I've got the bourgeois blues, I'm going to spread the news around.
Huddie's gone now, and Alan Lomax died two tears ago, but the song, and their work, live on.
And even after desegregtion, Washington D.C.'s still a bourgeois town, it's a bourgeois town.
In a "large program" language, providing both C compatibility and garbage collection is a maintainability nightmare.
For those of us who don't like unpredictable...
pauses...
in our programs while the garbage collector does its work, will we be able to turn off garbage collection entirely or run the garbage collector only at specified times?
I'll answer my own question: even if this is possible, if D ever becomes a serious language, we will be using libraries written by other people, libraries that do rely on garbage collection.
So, no, we won't (realistically) be able to turn off the garbage collector, which means that we won't be able to write real-time programs, and it'll even be touchy writing programs, such as, oh, audio or video players, that require near real-time performance. (Not to mention the disappointment we all felt with the various java window-widget APIs (AWT, Swing) that looked great but couldn't run fast enough to respond to the mouse.)
Look folks, taking care of your own garbage wasn't possible in C for a library writer (even ones returning opaque pointers to structs that allocated their own memory) because you had to rely on the library user to call your cleanup function(s).
But the library user could clean-up. The problem was essentially that some programs didn't care enough to be careful -- pointers actually had to be tracked.
Now, it's fine if a library user wants to add on a garbage collector by re-writing malloc to track allocations. But libraries, which are intended to be used by lots of programmers, to write code, and by lots and lots of end users who run code should not use garbage collectors themselves -- because that forces the library user to use garbage collection too.
But in C++, library writers can write libraries that take care of their own garbage even when used by careless users, because the compiler will automatically call class destructors which can do clean-up. (Yes, except in the case of derived classes -- the writer of the derived class has to explicitly write a dtor to ensure the parent class dtor is called.)
And in C++, with the Standard Template Library, there's little need for non-library writers to do explicit allocation at all -- std::vector and std::string and std::auto_ptr, just by themselves, take care of most of the problems of memory leaks and buffer overruns.
If you're using C++ and you feel that you're a good enough programmer that there's real need for you to be calling
new
directly, them you're a good enough programmer to ensure that you've called
delete
for each new. And with std::auto_ptr, it's as easy as
std::auto_ptr<foo> pfoo( new foo );
pfoo->do_Stuff();
return; // auto_ptr calls delete on pfoo, right here, // without you doing anything, // and without garbage collection overhead
How much simpler does it need to be?
So why complicate things with garbage collector and tracking down circular references and unpredictable pauses? Garbage collection is a bad answer for non-trivial programs, and pretty much necessary for trivial programs.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - McDonald's Chairman/CEO Jim Cantalupo was found dead at his Orlando, Florida international McDonald's owner and operator convention this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his burgers, there's no denying his contributions to popular pudgy culture. Truly an American icon.
Slashdot Mirror
I have posted a copy of the censored paragraph on my weblog. Enjoy!
Mod down, disgusting dead baby jpeg.
When the choice is principles and employment, employment wins. I have child support to pay.
What a proud example you are for your children.
"Hey kids, when you have the choice between doing what's right and making a dollar, remember only the poor can afford a conscience! Pat Tillman chose to follow his principles, and look where he is now!"
The point of the Freedom of Information Act was to enable citizen oversight of government -- because such citizen oversight is the substance of democracy.
Investingating acts, such as FOIA requests, that are wholly legal and a part of the function of democracy -- just like the Justice Departnet subpoenaing the names of protesters -- tends to discourage citizens from questioning authority and from the exercise of legal rights: "Sure it's legal, but we'll hassle and possible arrest you" understandably makes people afraid.
And given that it is illegal to help set up a web site for a group or advocating opinions outlawed by the Jutice Department, even in the abscence of any other illegal activity, that fear is jutified.
What makes the University of Texas "investigation" so threatening is the quesions the investigators asked:
If the FBI investigators are interested in stopping terrorism, why were their first questions about the requestor's membership in legal and non-terroristic student organizations?
Is anyone else reminded of "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?"
There are two possibilities that immediately leap to mind -- ok, three: 1) the FBI really thinks that student activist organizatins are terrosist fronts --has the "War of Terrot" really gone so badly wrong that large groups of American students have joined the "evildoers"?
2) That the FBI is investingating student activist groups -- not for real ilegal activity -- but to keep an eye on dissendents in teh infamous* tradition of COINTELPRO.
* "infamous" is FBI Director Mueller's description of COINTELPRO, not mine.
3) That the FBI insn't investingating student activist groups per se, but wishes to discourage membership in those groups by tarring them with the "terrorist" brush -- in other words, that the FBI is making a foray into influencing domestic politics, a precursor to totalitarianism.
So which is it? Have a large number of American colege students jouined the terrorists, or is the FBI back in the business of investigating legal dissent, or is the FBI trying to use its official power to influence domestic politics?
Whatever the answer, it seems the threat is not so much to the pipes underneath the University of Texas -- it seems the real threat is to American democracy itself.
Parent poster is absolutely right. What's posted on Slashdot is egregiously misleading.
The Slashdot article states (emphasis mine):
Please note I am not a Comcast customer and I have no relationship of any sort with Comcast.
Ok, point by point:
Let me emphasize my last point: there is nothing new here. Comcast is doing what it must do under the DMCA, and it's doing what every other ISP has to do. Your complaint is with the DMCA, not Comcast.
My complaint is with the article submitter and, even more so, the Slashdot editor who submitted this: neither apparently took the time to read the linked Comcast letter (even though, to their credit, they did link it.
It's important that Slashdot and its readers rail against the all too common erosion of our rights, and I applaud Slashdot for doing so. But it only harms our cause when we waste time and hemorrhage credibility raging against straw men with no basis in reality. Let's salvage some credibility by Slashdot readers -- and editors -- admitting that, with this "article", we simply screwed up.
On the matter of Text, use FreeType for the GIMP. It produces beautiful scaled, rotated, and angled text output.
But, using GIMP 2 and the version of FreeType that comes with it, I can't produce multi-line texts.
With the GIMP "Text Tool", I can produce multi-line text -- but only if I manually insert newlines. With FreeType, I can't even insert newline manually. And I can't get the text to re-flow; I have to manually remove and replace newlines.
What I want to do is produce some block of text, and have that text wrap to the confines of some box I put around it. There's absolutely no way to do that using the GIMP.
For this I manually inserted newlines, then removed and replaced them as I fiddled with changing the font size. Tedious.
For this for the text on the placard, I used the "Text tool" and then the "Perspective tool" -- as FreeType would have required matching the rotation for each of the three lines.
Finally, for this, I recalled that I could do flowing, multi-line text boxes in WordPerfect back in 1986, so I fired up Microsoft Word. Word wouldn't really do what I wanted (no surprise there) but Open Office produced the Text Boxes quite handily, with multi-line wrapping and reflowing.
So did I use GIMP for one third last example? well, I took a screen shot of the Open Office screen and pasted that into GIMP to scale it and save it as a jpeg. Except, the GIMP couldn't or wouldn't paste my screen-shot, so I had to paste that into Microsoft Paint, save the Paint bmp, and open the bmp in GIMP.
Basically, multi-line text isn't supported in the GIMP -- and without decent text handling, GIMP's a nice toy but not a "real" application.
And the GIMP UI requires me to iconize all other windows, because I use an X-mouse style activate on mouse-over, but that's another complaint for another post.
how comfortable are people using an automated solution for refactoring with this particular language?"
Well, when you consider that a compiler is also "an automated solution for [code] refactoring", I guess anyone using C++ (or any other compiled language) is reasonably conformable.
Since there are no constructors or templates or multi-expression tests ( "if( a && b || c && d )") in any machine's assembly languages, we all trust our compilers to generate assembly language that corresponds to the high-level language constructs we've actually written -- and in the case of the control expression to that "if" statement, we trust the compiler to know and follow the operator precedence for the language being compiled -- and in C and C++, the required "short-circuit" evaluation too.
That said, a good bit of that trust -- for C++ and C -- reposes in rigorous language standards and (more or less, I don't want to argue about language (mis)features or hacks for backward compatibility) well thought-out language designs.
(That's one of the many benefits of a rigorous, documented language standard, by the way -- do you know if, in scripting language "S"( where "S" may be Perl, windows scripting host, visual basic, or what have you), short-circuit evaluation of logical operators takes place, or if there's a sequence point between each one? Not to bash any one language, but for Perl, deja-googling shows sequence points have been an unresolved issue since 1998.)
To the extent that a refactoring tool's design is based on standards and on thoughtful and an open -- not proprietary -- processes that bring in opposing and skeptical views, as do the design of C and C++, I'd be reasonably willing to, in Reagan's words, "trust but verify". But if the refactoring tool is the proprietary product of a closed shop, I'll be far less confident that the Marketing Department didn't;t have too much of a had in product "design".
But however the products comes to be, the proof remains in the use -- let's see how the automatic refactoring compares over several real-life projects before trying to judge.
The issue is this: they want access to GPL data structures. If they claim to be not GPL, they don't get it. If they copy it into their own code, they become a derivative work of Linux and are forced to become GPL. If they try to access the data structures in some round-about way, they're still linking, and so are forced to become GPL.
Since they're accessing "GPL data structures" solely for the purpose of interoperability between their driver and the kernel, wouldn't that be allowed under the DMCA interoperability clause, and thus, by Congressional intent, not be a violation of copyright (as Congress presumably by including the interoperability clause in the DMCA assumed it and intended it, either not to contravene or to override, any other statute, e.g., Title 17)?
If the driver isn't violating the linux kernel copyright, then no license is required, and so no strictures of that license, e.g. release of code under the GPL, are in force.
But IANAL, so if I'm missing something, enlighten me.
Ah, youthful mod!
You've been (humorously) trolled. I suggest posting in this thread to remove your "+1 Informative", or getting a friend to mod it "Funny".
What the parent is describing is not what Google will do, but what DOS did: the above scheme is how MS-DOS managed memory, except that the "selector" and "offset" were both 16-bit numbers under DOS. (Although "segment" was the more usual term for "selector".) The segment number was shifted left four places -- or put more simply but less graphically, multiplied by 16 -- and then added to the offset number, to give the whole or "flat" address:segment is multipled by 16 (shifted left 4 bits or one hex digit of multipled by 16)This allowed DOS to use 16-bit numbers to address 2^20 = 1 MB of memory, but since DOS reserved the upper 384 KB for the (remapped) BIOS and peripheral cards, programs were able to address at most 640 KB of memory; the parent's mention of "64 billion pages" is probably an allusion (increased several orders of magnitude) to this DOS limit.
Of course, this was a kludge, pure and simple, required because DOS machines were 16-bit. Among other things, it allowed the same memory locations (all but the very top and bottom memory addresses) to be addressable by several different addresses, and discovering pointer aliasing it required calculations that, by their very nature couldn't be done wholly in the machines (16-bit) registers.
Consider: segment 4, offset 0 is 4 * 16 + 0 = 64,
and segment 3, offset 16 is 3 * 16 + 16 = 64,
and segment 2, offset 32 is 2 * 16 + 32 = 64
and segment 1, offset 48 is 1 * 16 + 48 = 64
and segment 0, offset 64 is 0 * 16 + 64 = 64:
so all five segment:offset pairs are apparently different but actually point to the same memory location.
A team worked to optimize the path, and using an emulator created a new video which is 26:56, four and a half minutes faster.
I hate to be a spoilsport, but Ashcroft's eviscerating the 4th amendment in the United States and Blind Blunkett's forcing National ID cards on the United Kingdom and John Howard's government is pushing its own version of the "Patriot Act" in Australia, and these people have time to figure out how to play a perfect game of Zelda?
I guess they truly do live in a fantasy world.
Christ! Look up from your bread and circuses, people! The Tree of Liberty of being chopped down to kindle the fires that will forge your chains.
Your comments say it all really. If you have nothing to hide there isn't a problem is there.
Normally I'd respond to this with a long list of reasons that even people with nothing to hide -- now -- may have something to hide soon.
But I'm going to the March for Women's Lives today, because I want to show my support for keeping Bush and Ashcroft out of our bedrooms and our pants and our reproductive decisions -- even when we decide to have abortions.
Right now abortion is still legal in the US, although with increasingly tighter restrictions by the states. If Bush and Ashcroft and that crowd have their way, it won't be. If abortion is outlawed, would I want to be carrying around an ID card that told any cop looking at it that I had marched in 2004 for what was now illegal? Think that evidence of dissidence might get me an extra-long search or more stops at the airport?
So because I'm marching today, I don't really have time for my typical post explaining why national ID and national databanks are bad news even for those with "nothing to hide". So I'll leave you with some of many previous slashdot posts on the subject:
"The graveyards are full of people who 'had nothing to hide' until a change in government or an encounter with thugs meant they suddenly found themselves outsiders and victims, members of some group considered 'ok' to brutalize and oppress."
"One Bolshevik, one kulak, one 'Enemy of the People', one Jew, one Japanese-American, one Communist, one educated person, one literate person, one Arab."
"I suspect that, like you, Berthold Guthmann also felt no reason to fear the German government, or its records on him."
"You have nothing to hide! And you have no reason to fear your benevolent government! Because America is the land of the free and so IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE!"
"But I bet you can pick out anti-war, anti-Bush, and anti-Republican travelers for harassment, uh, I mean, protective detention."
All but one of the guys who dropped the nukes committed suicide.
And so did many victims of the Holocaust.
And yet, many of the Nazis who committed what were -- unlike Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- unarguably war crimes, did not commit suicide, and some continue to collect pensions from the German government to this day.
I'm not trying to say that no American ever committed war crimes; My Lai was also unarguably a war crime (and may Calley burn in Hell!), and some of the U.S. military's actions in Iraq -- as in throwing prisoners in a river to drown -- surely are atrocities.
I'm just pointing out that suicide isn't necessarily what the guilty do. Indeed, I'd be inclined to suggest that the really guilty, people like Josef Mengele ("Angel of Death" responsible for human experimentation at Auschwitz, died vacationing at a Brazilian beach), Rudolf Höß (first commandant of Auschwitz, executed), and Erich_Priebke (perpetrator of the Ardeatine caves massacre, still alive), tend to be so -- for lack of a better word -- evil that they feel they're not guilty and therefore feel no need for suicide or other punishment. (Indeed, Priebke so strongly felt that the killing 350 Italian civilians was not his responsibility but the responsibility of those who ordered him to do it, that he openly admitted his actions from fifty years later to a television news crew's cameras -- and it was only this admission that led to his trial).
For the record, I believe that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no more illegal than any bombing of cities in the war -- and all major combatants bombed cities in World War II. Dead by conventional bomb, dead by V1 rocket, dead by fire-bombing, dead by atomic bomb -- they're all dead. I'm unaware of any difference in ways of being dead, with the possible exception that atomic bombs mean a quicker death.
Also, for the record, I believe any crime involved in dropping the atomic bombs pales beside the atrocities committed by the Japanese in Korea, China (in "the Rape of Nanking" (warning: link includes a disturbing picture of mass decapitation) the word "rape" is used pretty literally -- but includes ripping babies from their mothers' arms and bashing the babies' heads against walls, prior to raping the mother), the Philippines, and the Bataan Death March, not to mention the Japanese forced labor camps in which tens of thousands died.
To those who contend that we "could have" beaten Japan without recourse to atomic bombs, I ask them how many more America boys would have had to have died to achieve an unconditional Japanese surrender using only conventional weapons -- and if those arguing against using atomic bombs had any of their family members on the line.
I wasn't in the Pacific fighting Japan, but Paul Fussell (later professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania) was -- after fighting Hitler's legions in Europe -- and I'll defer to his opinion and that of the other boots on the ground: "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb"
But let me ask you: how many American boys would you have sacrificed in further conventional war against Japan, so that you, safe at home, could claim the moral high ground of an atomic-bomb-free but protracted conventional war ?
Maybe the parents do. Let's ask Sue Niederer, mother of slain soldier Seth Dvorin (emphasis orthogonal's):
From "The image turning America against Bush" by Andrew Buncombe, for The Independent (UK)
By the way, if you think news shows showing coffins is "using" the fallen soldiers, what do you think of Bush campaign ads showing the remains of a fallen firefighter being removed from Ground Zero? Surely you'll agree that an advertisement showing mangled remains is worse than a news program showing a casket with an ironed and neatly folded American flag over it? Right? Right?
1. The press has become so lopsided, so Democrat, that they are so eager to demean the current administration that they can't even bother to check the validity of the images of "Soldiers killed in Iraqi combat".
The press is using images obtained by The Memory Hole under a Freedom of Information Act request.
The request was for any photos of soldiers killed in Iraq. The Department of Defense, in response to the request gave a CD of photos The Memory Hole.
The Memory Hole made those photos available to the press.
Everyone in that chain thought the photos were of our Iraq dead because of an error by the Department of Defense. You're the only one foolish enough to blame "the press" for the government's error.
Even if some of the phots are of the Space Shuttle astronauts, those photos showing more than seven caskets certainly are not.
And even if all the photos were "invalid" that doesn't change the facts: over 700 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and the current administration has tried to suppress photos of caskets -- and Bush has failed to attend a ingle soldier's funeral -- because the administration
doesn't want the American public to get a visceral feel for the costs of this unnecessary war.
I suppose you think that it's because of "press bias" that no photos of the putative "reason" for going to war, the soi-disant Weapons of Mass Destruction, have been published?
Since when did upholding the copyright law become "screwing over your children"?
I think about December of 2003, when numerous Australian schools, at the behest of the Australian version of the RIAA, advised parents not to video tape their children's Christmas musicals -- and in some cases having guards confiscate parents' cameras --, because the parents might film their children singing copyrighted songs, thus violating the rights of the copyright owners.
Yep. You and your kids don't have a right to keep a memento of their first Christmas pageant, because that might violate a corporation's exclusive right to an arrangement of a traditional Christmas song.
Your personal memories of your kids don't count; corporate profits do.
At that point, I think that many are getting screwed for a small plutocracy.
That's the thing though, if this is done young enough, the brain will adapt to the new setup. It's similar to the sight expirament done a while ago.
Young may not be an issue; in amputees, the motor and sensory areas in the brain that were connected to the amputated limb are, after amputation, "invaded" or "co-opted" by the adjoining sensory areas.
Unfortunately, this doesn't usually result is a the remaining limbs becoming super limbs -- but it can create sensations of a "phantom limb", where the amputee "feels" the missing limb.
This also happens based on use or disuse: someone, like a pianist or a surgeon, who makes a lot of use of his fingers, will likely have larger motor and sensory areas for the fingers, and , ceteris paribus, other areas will be diminished.
For an account of this accessible to lay persons, see V.S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain.
Yeah, Drudge has the big stuff, ever it it's not true.
Like just this morning I went to Drudge and saw this posted:
God, I was so upset until I went to Google news.
I could scoop ALL the major news sources just by making up crap stories featuring the right players
Hey, man, I just wanted to say that I loved your informative scoop about Rob Malda, John Ashcroft and Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Rope.
Who'dya have thunk that?
Speaking only of Slashdot, I'll just say... so far.
Although in the case of Slashdot, I think it's not so much about getting a scoop as posting a dupe
I kid, I kid! In truth I love you all!
There are an awful lot of dashes at random places in this paragraph. Were you by chance running garbage collection?
Yeah. That's my style -- though only for Internet posts.
The double dashes are meant to be what printers call "em" dashes, dashes the width of the "m" character, and indicate a separate, parenthetical, explanatory or exemplary, or emphasized phrase.
In contrast the "en" dash -- which of course is the width of an "n" character -- is used to join words as, when a verb phrase is used as a noun -- "at clean-up time (noun phrase) we do all the clean up (no dash, "clean" is actually being used as a verb) including recursively calling the clean-up routines (noun phrase) for all contained objects that we need to clean up (infinitive form of verb)".
I like the "em" dash because it breaks up the train of thought, making the sentences "punchier" and giving it more of the sound of a impromptu -- "hey, just between you and I" (exemplary dash) -- conversation. It makes the post seem more "artless" and "real" and less contrived, less the product of work and more a dashed off and a breezy comment.
In general, the dashed phrase is the "pull-ed out" comment on the main idea, or an emphasis or re-stating of the main idea. As such, I prefer it to be interstitial, that is, stuck in the middle with a dash on either side: main idea -- elaboration -- continuation of main idea. More rare -- for me -- is the concluding dash, which generally is for an opposing or separate -- or in any not emphasising -- idea. And unlike the previous sentences, I generally prefer only one emphasizing dash -- at most -- per sentence.
By postponing the conclusion -- by making the reader have to wait for it during the interstitial em-dashed phrase (explanatory dash) -- I'm able to get in another thought. (And sometimes I can slip in that additional thought without having to support it with evidence -- (dash for separate but related thought -- note this is a rare "unbalanced" or non-interstitial dash) so I get it in for "free", because it's "just" an impromptu aside. I try not to abuse this too much, especially because Slashdot readers will quibble on even the smallest, tangential, peripheral points.)
At the same time that it allows me to write longer sentences, by breaking them up it allows me to not exceed the lesser attention span most people have for reading on screen. You'll also notice that -- contrary to most traditional advice for writing (dash for insertion of related but different -- and unsupported by evidence (parenthetical dash) -- idea) -- my paragraphs are usually only a few, and other only one, sentence long.
I do this because vertical white space -- paragraph breaks (dash for emphasis) -- make screen reading much less of a chore. Nothing is harder to read on a screen than someone's run-together mess (en dash in noun phrase) of sentence after sentence with no break. My eyes just glaze over and I ignore the whole thing.
By using regular paragraph breaks, you get the reader to read -- or at least scan the first several words of each paragraph to see if any open of them "hooks" his attention (dash for separate but related though, of the rarer "unbalanced" form). But in fact I'm breaking a standard "rule" of traditional writing. Many of my paragraphs are -- intentionally (dash for emphasis) -- "fragments".
But your joke is a funnier explanation.
I'm afraid it's time to start treasuring Pete while we can.
Yeah, I know. Recently I recall half listening to Folk Alley internet radio, which features a lot of Seeger's songs, and I though I heard the announcer comment hat "Pete was" something or another. I spent several sort-of-panicked, sort-or-resigned, sort-of-apprehensive minutes on Google news until I'd convinced myself Pete was still around to rabble rouse.
He's almost a movement by himself.
I saw that, even though he has that typical Leftist problem. I have a Seeger compilation (Pioneer of Folk) on which Seeger sings "Round and Round Hitler's Grave" and
"Dear Mr. President" ("I hate Hitler...Now, Mr. President , we haven't always agreed in the past I know, but that ain't at all important now...We gotta lick Mr. Hitler...."
and on the same compilation ""Washington Breakdown" ("Franklin D, listen to me, you ain't gonna send me 'cross the sea"" and "C for Conscription". (I think I mentioned thsi once before on Slashdot.)
Of course, Pete's opinion on the desirability of fighting Hitler "matured" after Hitler's "Operation Barbarossa" commenced on 22 June 1941, the Hitler-Stalin Pact went down the memory hole, and Stalin jerked Comintern's strings 180 degrees.
(On a personal note, I've always been about equally disgusted by the Stalinists and the Red-baiting McCarthyites (Joe, not Gene, of course). Stalin killed millions, but "Tail gunner" Joe was pissing on my constitution. The America Communists I've always seen as rather willing dupes who would have sold us into Uncle Joe's Gulags, but I've also admired them for all the shit they put up with for bucking trends in America, and for their support (whatever their motivation) for civil rights and workers' protections. And I love the music.
I lost my copy of Pete's Songs of Hope and Struggle but I found a copy of Paul Robeson singing the 1944 version of the Soviet anthem. The tune is awfully rousing, and the lyrics are so boot-licking toward Stalin ("And Stalin our Leader, with faith in the people, inspired us to build up the Land that we loved."), especially given that it's on a album named Songs for Free men.
I can't help, from my 21st century perspective, enjoying the irony in a macabre way, Robeson being vilified in this country for his idealism about a Soviet Russia, where at about the same time, as Solzhenitsyn tells us in Gulag Archipelago there was that local Communist Party rally where the applause for Stalin's name went on for thirty minutes because everyone was afraid to be the first to stop. Not to mention the anthem principally celebrates victory in the Great Patriotic War, a victory that almost didn't happen thanks to Stalin's purges of the Army and State in '37, a victory which happened only after Hitler and Stalin split Poland down the middle and Stalin destroyed the Polish elite at Katyn Forest and then at Nuremberg blamed Germany for the massacre.
I have some Soviet recording of the anthem too --- big "proletarian" choruses of "New Soviet Men" as frightening in their raw-boned way as Hitler's blond-haired, fanatic-eyed Aryan poster boys. Still, I can enjoy the Soviet recordings, despite Stalin's 60 million victims, in a way I can't enjoy my copy of the Horst Wessel Lied or my few copies of SS marching songs -- those I only listen to occasionally when reading histories of the Nazi era. Does my hypocrisy shows too?)
Sorry for rambling. Back to Pete.
So I don't quite agree with his politics, but I love the spirit they represent. Even though that spirit was brutally misused in Soviet Russia, here in the U.S. the left did help bring about great things, especially the Civil Rights movement. Even knowing he was, to some degree, a "useful idiot". Because he also roused people to organize the AFL-CIO, and to march in Selma and he wrote Last train to Nuremberg! ("Do I see Lieutenant Calley?... Do I see the voters, me
This is wrong. If your compiler requires this, then your compiler is broken.
No, you're correct. It was me, not the compiler that was broken. Thanks for the correction.
BOOM! And you reveal that you don't know what you're talking about. Circular references are irrelevant to any GC scheme more sophisticated than reference counting.
My point was that to avoid the problem of circular references, the garbage collector does have to be more sophisticated, and sophistication takes time and (memory) space -- time and space that a program may or may not be able to spare.
"for very many applications modern garbage collectors provide pause times that are completely compatible with human interaction. Pause times below 1/10th of a second are often the case,"
Pause times below 1/10th of a second? Hmm, how much below? TV-quality video is 24 frames per second, so a one-tenth second pause means dropping two or three frames. Acceptable? Perhaps, but not desirable.
"Does garbage collection cause my program's execution to pause? Not necessarily."
Yes, if you read my post carefully -- perhaps you missed a word or two when the garbage collector in your head did some clean-up -- I didn't say that pauses were inevitable. My complaint -- and not just mine, it's no revelation that garbage collection has may detractors -- is that the pauses are not predictable by writer of the program.
With non-garbage collected language, I know that memory allocation will either succeed ort fail, and I know (or a library writer knew) when allocation happens, because I'm explicitly coding it. So I know, at this particular point in my program, either allocation succeeded or failed.
But garbage collection can happen at any time, and cause a pause at any point in my program -- even when I'm needing to re-fill under-run buffers or read volatile memory or make time-critical choices. With garbage collection, I no longer have an algorithmic program, in which I can say what it's doing at any particular point in the code.
Then come back and make some informed comments, instead of spouting nonsense. Thank you.
That overly hostile arrogance suggests you're either a zealot or a fourteen year-old. That sort of blustering generally indicates someone who isn't that confident in himself or his argument, and so wishes to preempt questioning by being a posturing like a "tough guy"; it's particularly prevalent on the net -- though I'll grant that you didn't hide behind an Anonymous Coward post. Adults can disagree and discuss things without resorting to insults and attitude -- and I think you'll be able to do that too, with a little more experience.
But perhaps the most telling Leadbelly song is about the time when Huddie Ledbetter, beter known as Leadbelly, came to Washington D.C. to record for Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song.
Huddie and Alan Lomax were denied accomodation at several hotels because the hotels wouldn't rent to an interracial group: Huddie was black and Lomax, co-founder with his father of the Library's Archive, and, was white.
So Huddie, with Lomax's help, wrote "Bourgeois Blues", which begins:
Huddie's gone now, and Alan Lomax died two tears ago, but the song, and their work, live on.
And even after desegregtion, Washington D.C.'s still a bourgeois town, it's a bourgeois town.
For those of us who don't like unpredictable...
pauses...
in our programs while the garbage collector does its work, will we be able to turn off garbage collection entirely or run the garbage collector only at specified times?
directly, them you're a good enough programmer to ensure that you've called for each new. And with std::auto_ptr, it's as easy as How much simpler does it need to be?I'll answer my own question: even if this is possible, if D ever becomes a serious language, we will be using libraries written by other people, libraries that do rely on garbage collection.
So, no, we won't (realistically) be able to turn off the garbage collector, which means that we won't be able to write real-time programs, and it'll even be touchy writing programs, such as, oh, audio or video players, that require near real-time performance. (Not to mention the disappointment we all felt with the various java window-widget APIs (AWT, Swing) that looked great but couldn't run fast enough to respond to the mouse.)
Look folks, taking care of your own garbage wasn't possible in C for a library writer (even ones returning opaque pointers to structs that allocated their own memory) because you had to rely on the library user to call your cleanup function(s).
But the library user could clean-up. The problem was essentially that some programs didn't care enough to be careful -- pointers actually had to be tracked.
Now, it's fine if a library user wants to add on a garbage collector by re-writing malloc to track allocations. But libraries, which are intended to be used by lots of programmers, to write code, and by lots and lots of end users who run code should not use garbage collectors themselves -- because that forces the library user to use garbage collection too.
But in C++, library writers can write libraries that take care of their own garbage even when used by careless users, because the compiler will automatically call class destructors which can do clean-up. (Yes, except in the case of derived classes -- the writer of the derived class has to explicitly write a dtor to ensure the parent class dtor is called.)
And in C++, with the Standard Template Library, there's little need for non-library writers to do explicit allocation at all -- std::vector and std::string and std::auto_ptr, just by themselves, take care of most of the problems of memory leaks and buffer overruns.
If you're using C++ and you feel that you're a good enough programmer that there's real need for you to be calling
So why complicate things with garbage collector and tracking down circular references and unpredictable pauses? Garbage collection is a bad answer for non-trivial programs, and pretty much necessary for trivial programs.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - McDonald's Chairman/CEO Jim Cantalupo was found dead at his Orlando, Florida international McDonald's owner and operator convention this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his burgers, there's no denying his contributions to popular pudgy culture. Truly an American icon.