> Right now the idea is that the UI elements won't eat all that much memory, so why waste time with allocation/deallocation?
The applications I make (defense applications) are required to run for weeks uninterrupted, whereas the user opens and closes windows like there is no tomorrow. Increasing the memory footprint because some widgets are not deleted is not the appropriate solution for me.
> You can of course use pointers anyway, and delete them whenever, but at the moment it'll be your responsibility to ensure they were no longer in use or bad things will happen.
Why do you bother at all with memory management, since shared and weak ptrs are part of C++0x? you use all the nice features of c++0x like lambdas. Why not smart pointers?
Smart pointers are extremely necessary if one wants to write a decent model/view library, into which the view goes away automatically when the model goes away too.
> I use my own string class because std::string is garbage.
You can always use STL to provide a library with missing functionality in an std::basic_string subclass. There is no need for a totally new string class.
> I have my own function class because std::function sucks at binding to member function pointers.
No, it does not. This is very simple:
bind(&Class::Member, object)
> My version of optional
And it is totally incompatible with the rest of the world.
> is so you don't need boost to use it
C++0x contains the boost functions and boost bind, so no need for boost.
Sorry. For all the effort you put into this library, for me it is a big NO if it does not use standard components, even if they are not the best there can be. There are many reasons why using absolutely standard components is very critical.
You nailed it with callbacks that allow using lambdas, but you failed at memory management (Phoenix expects to delete everything on exit) and on containers (why do you define your own?).
If a nuclear reactor is underground (let's say, 100 m below surface), then in case of radiation leak, a simple covering of the reactor with dirt will solve the problem.
Parallelism is very easy, provided that you don't do it yourself.
Use a pure functional programming language like Haskell that can be automatically parallelized.
Or use a programming language that uses the Active Object Pattern (or the Actor model).
Or do as I do: use C++ to implement message passing, then have one thread per object. Objects don't have public members, they simply communicate by exchanging messages.
In all the above cases, the trick is to avoid state. In Haskell, state is avoided by design; in the Actor Model/Active Object pattern, state is avoided due to isolation: effectively, each thread is like a separate process.
"Human are capable of recognizing when an algorithm will halt (or not); computers are not; therefore thought cannot be reduced to computation"
It is not true. Humans can recognize halting in some algorithms; not in all algorithms.
Saying that humans can recognize when an algorithm will halt equals humans recognizing that prime numbers are finite (or infinite), which is a problem not yet solved. This problem is also used to demonstrate the halting problem.
Openness is not enough. What is required is accountability.
For example, the Greek government decided to publish its records in opengov.gr.
In that site, there is a lot of information published, including phone bills from public services. But there is no reference to what phone numbers public servants call, making the freedom essentially useless: we, the citizens, don't know if the public servants spent money phoning other public servants or sex hot lines, for example.
Make a working prototype, and patent it. This has nothing to do with copyright at all. Also no patents on ideas, methods, or other non physical goods.
But patenting only the result of the work, instead of the work itself, will not make you any money. Others will copy your idea and make other products similar to yours.
But the stream of 1s and 0s does not it's self have value. It can be recreated at any time for marginal cost(you could argue that if I did download it from a server of the artist, that I should be responsible for the bill for the bandwidth used to do that. That would be fair, so here is the $0.002 that I owe for the 2MB song. I would be unable to otherwise aquire the "thing" how did I do any harm? In fact i may end up helping if i like it and share it with many friends, and some of them have the means/will to buy it, but would not have otherwise known about it. There are a great many music artists making a decent living while giving all their songs for free on the internet in high quality.
You don't understand what value means. Have you ever wondered why a physical product has a certain price? it's not only because the materials cost a certain amount of money. It's not only because of the paychecks of those involved in creating it. Value it's about what one things he/she deserves to profit for his/her effort. We value physical products on the basis of what we want to buy. A product's value is a completely fictitious concept, and therefore it does not apply only to physical products.
Now I would not say that there is not a place for copyright, patents, trademarks, "freedom of expression", and whatnot, but there needs to be some balance there. 140 years (unless assigned to a company that lives for 400) is a bit extreme, why should you make money all your life, and for the entire lives of your children just because you thought something.
Well, in a free world, the only person that can set the prices of his/her works is the author of that works. If someone wants, then he can even have a forever copyright on his/her creation. It's their creation, they can do whatever they want with them.
You do know why no restaurants sing "happy birthday" don't you? right because it is under copyright and they would need to pay up to sing it.
So? sing another song. Don't sing anything. Big deal.
The term "add alarm" is programmer's speak: an alarm object is added to a collection of alarms. No wonder people unfamiliar with programming cannot interpret the term correctly.
Your post is totally hyporcritic. You put freedom of expression and copyright in the same context, which is totally wrong: copyright has nothing to do with the freedom of expression; you are free to express yourself as much as you want, perhaps more free than any other time in history. Enjoying the works of others without their consent is not freedom of expression, it is a violation of the rights of other people to make their works available in the way they see fit.
The only reason you wrote the above is that somehow you feel alarmed that you cannot copy software, movies and songs as freely as you used to.You don't give a rat's ass about freedom of expression, because if you trully did, then you (and people like you) would protest for a lot of other cases of freedom of expression being violated.
Enjoying the works of others without obeying their terms of usage is illegal. Just like we slashdotters complain so much about free software being used illegally in commercial settings, and we cry foul each time the GPL is violated, so can the song writers, movie producers and software developers complain when their terms of usage are violated. You cannot complain that a company violated the GPL, while at the same time you download the latest movies from torrent. In both cases, some people produced something with specific terms of usage that must be respected.
As for copying those 1s and 0s, an item does not have to have a physical form to be considered a product. Suppose that you have an idea for a new way to produce energy that you worked really hard all your life on. Wouldn't you like to be able to enjoy the fruits of your labor? would't it be unfair to you, after all the difficulties you went through, if someone came along and simply copied your paper, claiming "freedom of expression"? then you would not be able to enjoy thee fruits of your labor! therefore, illegally enjoying digital goods is no different than stealing? in both cases, someone is derived from something. When you steal something, the owner is deprived of the item, when you pirate something, the owner is deprived of the value of the pirated item.
Shame on you for what you wrote. I know this post will be condemned to oblivion, because it goes against the line of thinking of the majority, but someoen had to post a rebuttal.
Perhaps if an operating system was designed in such a way that it didn't need administrative privileges to run it, then social engineering issues wouldn't be a problem.
For example, if a user session was completely virtualized (including all the administrator's resources), then a user could only harm his files and not the operating system.
And then if a user session could have children sessions, programs running in those children sessions could not harm the parent sessions in any meaningful way.
Each time a security problem is discussed, I post the following comments:
a) the programming languages used to construct affected programs (C and C++ in most cases) are inadequate for the purpose of making secure apps.
b) operating systems could be designed in a better way, even coping with social engineering issues.
c) CPUs could be designed in a better way as well, coping with software modularization issues related to security.
Yet, each time, I meet the following responses:
a) it doesn't matter if the programming language at hand has problems, as long as the programmers are good. Well, the programming language does matter (long discussion, not suitable for this).
b) there is no way operating systems could be designed in a better way (they could, that's another long discussion).
c) CPUs are already optimally designed (they are not).
All people are subject to the mob thinking problem. Even the knowledgeable/informed ones as the slashdot members.
I don't see how the fair tax is going to work. I am referring to the provision that says that goods purchased for business use will not be taxed. This is not enforceable in any meaningful way: business owners will put all their personal purchases on their businesses, effectively having a free pass to avoid taxation.
Osama is already a martyr for some muslims. They do not need a corpse photo to protest.
Releasing the photos will convince us that he really died now, and not in the past, provided that the photos will be real.
You know why yheh do not release the photos? because million of eyes will look to them for errors, and they are not convinced of their ability to fool million of people.
If Al Qaeda is driven by CIA, MI6 and Mossad, then its no wonder Al Qaeda announced OBL's death. Why would they need to announce it anyway?
OBL's family wasn't anywhere near OBL, otherwise they would either be dead or in position to describe what happened, neither of these two cases being true.
The locals know nothing more about OBL than we do. If they did know more, OBL would have been betrayed along time ago.
Please show us a video of OBL that is after 2001. I bet you cannot find one. The 2007 video is clearly a fake, since he appears younger.
Osama is dead from 2001. US waited a long time to present his death to us, when the time was right.
And after reading the above, I conclude that the Windows security model is...sh1t.
First of all, it's extremely complex. It takes a long web page just to describe some aspects of it.
Secondly, it's extremely disjoint: each little piece of Windows, having been developed in isolation, was its own ways, which results in not being able to enforce a single security system all over the system.
The real problem with this is that US citizens give too much importance to the POTUS. In most cases, he does what his consultants tell him to do, and they can serve a wide variety of interests.
The BC issue is very useful to the PTB, actually. While people focus on the BC, they lose sight of the real issues. For example, there is little fuss made about the REAL ID entered through the back door (i.e. via the driving license).
Except to have access to the same number of functions/actions with the toolbars, I need many more toolbars and lots more real-estate. Tabbed interfaces take care of that - you have the same real-estate shared among logical groups.
But you don't have access to the same functions/actions with the toolbars! you only have access to ONE tab at a time. You have to select another tab in order to have access to other functions/actions.
Furthermore, the size of the ribbon is so big that it easily has room for toolbars for the most used functions/actions.
And of course I can create my own custom tabs, with functionality that I predominantly use so I do not need to switch between different tabs at all.
You can do that with toolbars as well. I have always customized Word, for example, and put most of the functions I use in two toolbars.
Great! How can I upgrade the screen on my laptop?
Buy a new one.
Yes, because +F1 is so hard to do... Try it, it toggles the visible status of the ribbon.
But in its minimized state, the ribbon is as useless as a menu: when I click on the document, the ribbon is closed.
Wow. Even in those two pictures you posted, the difference is quite visible: the Excel 2000's menu is so much better, because it takes so much less space and it is much less cluttered.
Slashdot Mirror
> Right now the idea is that the UI elements won't eat all that much memory, so why waste time with allocation/deallocation?
The applications I make (defense applications) are required to run for weeks uninterrupted, whereas the user opens and closes windows like there is no tomorrow. Increasing the memory footprint because some widgets are not deleted is not the appropriate solution for me.
> You can of course use pointers anyway, and delete them whenever, but at the moment it'll be your responsibility to ensure they were no longer in use or bad things will happen.
Why do you bother at all with memory management, since shared and weak ptrs are part of C++0x? you use all the nice features of c++0x like lambdas. Why not smart pointers?
Smart pointers are extremely necessary if one wants to write a decent model/view library, into which the view goes away automatically when the model goes away too.
> I use my own string class because std::string is garbage.
You can always use STL to provide a library with missing functionality in an std::basic_string subclass. There is no need for a totally new string class.
> I have my own function class because std::function sucks at binding to member function pointers.
No, it does not. This is very simple:
bind(&Class::Member, object)
> My version of optional
And it is totally incompatible with the rest of the world.
> is so you don't need boost to use it
C++0x contains the boost functions and boost bind, so no need for boost.
Sorry. For all the effort you put into this library, for me it is a big NO if it does not use standard components, even if they are not the best there can be. There are many reasons why using absolutely standard components is very critical.
You nailed it with callbacks that allow using lambdas, but you failed at memory management (Phoenix expects to delete everything on exit) and on containers (why do you define your own?).
If a nuclear reactor is underground (let's say, 100 m below surface), then in case of radiation leak, a simple covering of the reactor with dirt will solve the problem.
Is this realistic?
Not really, at least in languages where messages are indistinguishable from normal function calls.
Parallelism is very easy, provided that you don't do it yourself.
Use a pure functional programming language like Haskell that can be automatically parallelized.
Or use a programming language that uses the Active Object Pattern (or the Actor model).
Or do as I do: use C++ to implement message passing, then have one thread per object. Objects don't have public members, they simply communicate by exchanging messages.
In all the above cases, the trick is to avoid state. In Haskell, state is avoided by design; in the Actor Model/Active Object pattern, state is avoided due to isolation: effectively, each thread is like a separate process.
"Human are capable of recognizing when an algorithm will halt (or not); computers are not; therefore thought cannot be reduced to computation"
It is not true. Humans can recognize halting in some algorithms; not in all algorithms.
Saying that humans can recognize when an algorithm will halt equals humans recognizing that prime numbers are finite (or infinite), which is a problem not yet solved. This problem is also used to demonstrate the halting problem.
Openness is not enough. What is required is accountability.
For example, the Greek government decided to publish its records in opengov.gr.
In that site, there is a lot of information published, including phone bills from public services. But there is no reference to what phone numbers public servants call, making the freedom essentially useless: we, the citizens, don't know if the public servants spent money phoning other public servants or sex hot lines, for example.
Openness is not useful without Accountability.
Consciousness is description of the state where the brain thinks about itself in first person.
This process is the result of the brain building a model about itself.
The brain works by building models of reality (or what the brain perceives of being reality).
One of the models built by the brain is the about brain itself. This allows for consciousness.
Make a working prototype, and patent it. This has nothing to do with copyright at all. Also no patents on ideas, methods, or other non physical goods.
But patenting only the result of the work, instead of the work itself, will not make you any money. Others will copy your idea and make other products similar to yours.
But the stream of 1s and 0s does not it's self have value. It can be recreated at any time for marginal cost(you could argue that if I did download it from a server of the artist, that I should be responsible for the bill for the bandwidth used to do that. That would be fair, so here is the $0.002 that I owe for the 2MB song. I would be unable to otherwise aquire the "thing" how did I do any harm? In fact i may end up helping if i like it and share it with many friends, and some of them have the means/will to buy it, but would not have otherwise known about it. There are a great many music artists making a decent living while giving all their songs for free on the internet in high quality.
You don't understand what value means. Have you ever wondered why a physical product has a certain price? it's not only because the materials cost a certain amount of money. It's not only because of the paychecks of those involved in creating it. Value it's about what one things he/she deserves to profit for his/her effort. We value physical products on the basis of what we want to buy. A product's value is a completely fictitious concept, and therefore it does not apply only to physical products.
Now I would not say that there is not a place for copyright, patents, trademarks, "freedom of expression", and whatnot, but there needs to be some balance there. 140 years (unless assigned to a company that lives for 400) is a bit extreme, why should you make money all your life, and for the entire lives of your children just because you thought something.
Well, in a free world, the only person that can set the prices of his/her works is the author of that works. If someone wants, then he can even have a forever copyright on his/her creation. It's their creation, they can do whatever they want with them.
You do know why no restaurants sing "happy birthday" don't you? right because it is under copyright and they would need to pay up to sing it.
So? sing another song. Don't sing anything. Big deal.
The term "add alarm" is programmer's speak: an alarm object is added to a collection of alarms. No wonder people unfamiliar with programming cannot interpret the term correctly.
Your post is totally hyporcritic. You put freedom of expression and copyright in the same context, which is totally wrong: copyright has nothing to do with the freedom of expression; you are free to express yourself as much as you want, perhaps more free than any other time in history. Enjoying the works of others without their consent is not freedom of expression, it is a violation of the rights of other people to make their works available in the way they see fit.
The only reason you wrote the above is that somehow you feel alarmed that you cannot copy software, movies and songs as freely as you used to.You don't give a rat's ass about freedom of expression, because if you trully did, then you (and people like you) would protest for a lot of other cases of freedom of expression being violated.
Enjoying the works of others without obeying their terms of usage is illegal. Just like we slashdotters complain so much about free software being used illegally in commercial settings, and we cry foul each time the GPL is violated, so can the song writers, movie producers and software developers complain when their terms of usage are violated. You cannot complain that a company violated the GPL, while at the same time you download the latest movies from torrent. In both cases, some people produced something with specific terms of usage that must be respected.
As for copying those 1s and 0s, an item does not have to have a physical form to be considered a product. Suppose that you have an idea for a new way to produce energy that you worked really hard all your life on. Wouldn't you like to be able to enjoy the fruits of your labor? would't it be unfair to you, after all the difficulties you went through, if someone came along and simply copied your paper, claiming "freedom of expression"? then you would not be able to enjoy thee fruits of your labor! therefore, illegally enjoying digital goods is no different than stealing? in both cases, someone is derived from something. When you steal something, the owner is deprived of the item, when you pirate something, the owner is deprived of the value of the pirated item.
Shame on you for what you wrote. I know this post will be condemned to oblivion, because it goes against the line of thinking of the majority, but someoen had to post a rebuttal.
Perhaps if an operating system was designed in such a way that it didn't need administrative privileges to run it, then social engineering issues wouldn't be a problem.
For example, if a user session was completely virtualized (including all the administrator's resources), then a user could only harm his files and not the operating system.
And then if a user session could have children sessions, programs running in those children sessions could not harm the parent sessions in any meaningful way.
Each time a security problem is discussed, I post the following comments:
a) the programming languages used to construct affected programs (C and C++ in most cases) are inadequate for the purpose of making secure apps.
b) operating systems could be designed in a better way, even coping with social engineering issues.
c) CPUs could be designed in a better way as well, coping with software modularization issues related to security.
Yet, each time, I meet the following responses:
a) it doesn't matter if the programming language at hand has problems, as long as the programmers are good. Well, the programming language does matter (long discussion, not suitable for this).
b) there is no way operating systems could be designed in a better way (they could, that's another long discussion).
c) CPUs are already optimally designed (they are not).
All people are subject to the mob thinking problem. Even the knowledgeable/informed ones as the slashdot members.
Tax all profits proportionally to their size, up to a certain percent (75%, for example).
When I say 'all profits', I mean all profits, no exceptions.
I don't see how the fair tax is going to work. I am referring to the provision that says that goods purchased for business use will not be taxed. This is not enforceable in any meaningful way: business owners will put all their personal purchases on their businesses, effectively having a free pass to avoid taxation.
Osama is already a martyr for some muslims. They do not need a corpse photo to protest.
Releasing the photos will convince us that he really died now, and not in the past, provided that the photos will be real.
You know why yheh do not release the photos? because million of eyes will look to them for errors, and they are not convinced of their ability to fool million of people.
If Al Qaeda is driven by CIA, MI6 and Mossad, then its no wonder Al Qaeda announced OBL's death. Why would they need to announce it anyway?
OBL's family wasn't anywhere near OBL, otherwise they would either be dead or in position to describe what happened, neither of these two cases being true.
The locals know nothing more about OBL than we do. If they did know more, OBL would have been betrayed along time ago.
Please show us a video of OBL that is after 2001. I bet you cannot find one. The 2007 video is clearly a fake, since he appears younger.
Osama is dead from 2001. US waited a long time to present his death to us, when the time was right.
And after reading the above, I conclude that the Windows security model is ...sh1t.
First of all, it's extremely complex. It takes a long web page just to describe some aspects of it.
Secondly, it's extremely disjoint: each little piece of Windows, having been developed in isolation, was its own ways, which results in not being able to enforce a single security system all over the system.
The real problem with this is that US citizens give too much importance to the POTUS. In most cases, he does what his consultants tell him to do, and they can serve a wide variety of interests.
The BC issue is very useful to the PTB, actually. While people focus on the BC, they lose sight of the real issues. For example, there is little fuss made about the REAL ID entered through the back door (i.e. via the driving license).
There is no video after 2002 showing him in a clear way.
My assumption is that OBL was long dead before now, and it is just now that he isn't needed any more as a scapegoat.
Let's not forget that he shaked hands with the CIA back in the eighties.
Math cannot and should not be patented. However, a computer program is an application of math on a mechanical device, and so it can be patented.
The above is not my view, is what the patent system is based upon.
Personally, I would like to see that practical applications of abstract concepts are not patentable at all.
Indeed. Many C++ Windows devs have managed to avoid MFC by using Qt. Without Qt, cross-platform Windows apps are nearly impossible.
Except to have access to the same number of functions/actions with the toolbars, I need many more toolbars and lots more real-estate. Tabbed interfaces take care of that - you have the same real-estate shared among logical groups.
But you don't have access to the same functions/actions with the toolbars! you only have access to ONE tab at a time. You have to select another tab in order to have access to other functions/actions.
Furthermore, the size of the ribbon is so big that it easily has room for toolbars for the most used functions/actions.
And of course I can create my own custom tabs, with functionality that I predominantly use so I do not need to switch between different tabs at all.
You can do that with toolbars as well. I have always customized Word, for example, and put most of the functions I use in two toolbars.
Great! How can I upgrade the screen on my laptop?
Buy a new one.
Yes, because +F1 is so hard to do... Try it, it toggles the visible status of the ribbon.
But in its minimized state, the ribbon is as useless as a menu: when I click on the document, the ribbon is closed.
True, but there hasn't really been a better interface than the "Win 3.1" one so far.
Wow. Even in those two pictures you posted, the difference is quite visible: the Excel 2000's menu is so much better, because it takes so much less space and it is much less cluttered.