Now.. to be fair, this is the Functional Programming Contest, and the tasks are designed to favor deep thought and subtle algorithms over raw speed.
That being said, OCaml is a great language, and I've been hacking in it for the last 5 days straight. It's gotten so that I hate programming in Java (too verbose, and inflexable) and Perl (Datastructures designed to inspire disgust.. I find myself writing $#{$categories} in my code and I want to cry)
How many people do you think actually do that through? Perhaps you belong to a particularly moral group of friends, and you really think to yourselves..
I could just download the whole album in less time than it would take me to to go to the record store and plunck down $15, but that would be wrong!
Be assured that most people don't think this way. This is why the RIAA is worried, and why they need to do something.
Then we'll find out whether they infringe on any patents. Remember this article:
clicky , clicky News.com from 2000
The Ogg developers staunchly defend the notion that they have created everything from scratch, or at least have built their system without using any of the Fraunhofer-owned technology. But their rivals say they aren't so sure.
"We doubt very much that they are not using Fraunhofer and Thomson intellectual property," Linde said. "We think it is likely they are infringing."
Whether this is true, analysts say Thomson and the German company are likely to file patent lawsuits the moment Vorbis appears to be a viable market candidate. By creating a perception of uncertainty around Vorbis' future, MP3's parents could prevent conservative digital music companies from adopting it.
"If you're going to go into a marketplace where people play hardball, that's what hardball looks like," Scheirer warned.
Mon dieu! Until this very moment I hadn't realized it was all a vast government conspiracy to prevent us from getting music without paying!
Here I was worried about wars and lies, oil and terrorism.
Hey, let's start an argument on static v dynamic
on
Preview of Java 1.5
·
· Score: 1
Hey, let's start an argument on statically typed vs dynamically typed langagues. That's never been done before.
You don't need a dynamically typed language to be expressive. Have you looked at ML code, or especially Haskell code?
When you have type inference, your code looks dynamically typed, but retains the protection of the type checker. (Of course you have to live within the type checker's rules, which may not be appropriate for all projects).
Well, for starters, why should the RIAA falsely accuse you of trafficking in copywrited materials when they have millions of actual copywrite violators to choose from. Besides being a waste of time, it would be a major setback for them to lose such a case, precedent wise.
If they did for some reason single you out, but had no credible evidence against you, I doubt the trial would last past an inital motion to dismiss.
If it did, you might very well interest the EFF in your case.
But my main point would have to be: It seems silly to worry about the RIAA going after you for trading non-copywrited content. They don't care. They're out there to protect the tracks that make them money. They're greedy, not inherintly evil.:)
I'm not a lawyer, but I've served on a jury and watched the U.S. system in action.
I'm certainly not going to say that having expensive lawyers behind them doesn't tilt the system heavily in their favor, but I will disagree with you if you're stating that they don't need evidence against you in order to win.
Remember, it's their job to prove that you are breaking the law.
They have to have proof that you are distributing their copywrited works.
And if you do, they will. If you share files with random people out there in internetland, be sure that some of those "people" will be automated RIAA bots doing regular expression matches on your song titles, then downloading the content to be perused later by their human controllers. Muhahahhah.
We all remember when lan filesharing meant Novell. Their protocols were fast; their server was solid. They used to brag about the number of assembly language instructions between the time when a file request hit the server and the time it was being sent out.
Part of this speed came from having a very simple, unprotected operating system. Any process on the server could bring down the entire server. Novell's code was very well debugged and very stable.
And then networking started to mean something other than just filesharing. People started developing client/server applications to run on servers.
The company I worked for developed NLMs (netware loadable modules) back in the day. It was a pain in the ass. Our code had to be flawless, because a single mistake would "abend" the server, taking down not only our services, but the lan filesharing, and everyone else's services too.
Mind you, we tested our code, we did everything we could to make it flawless, but that's a difficult standard to obtain in a complex piece of code.
Novell eventually tacked on some memory protection to the OS, allowing some NLMs to run at ring 1. But it seemed like too little too late.
Developers were realizing that it was a lot easier to develop and deploy server code on protected operating systems (Unix and Windows), and the speed bonus that Novell got by writing a down and dirty operating system was becoming less critical as machines got faster.
The same thing will happen with Palm OS vs Windows CE and Linux for the handhelds. The miserly memory handling and power consumption features of Palm OS will not be needed in future devices, and modern operating system features will win out.
You'll still be able to install linux on your PC. You just need to by a copy of that 007 game, modify your saved game file, flash your eprom, and you're go!
Oh, and where will the money to pay for the rebuilding come from? From the sale of Iraqi oil, according the the Bush administration.
We didn't bomb Iraq just to get rebuilding contracts, but clearly the administration is looking at it as an opportunity to funnel money to its friends.
You know, anyone who thinks we bombed Iraq just to get the rebuilding contracts isn't gonna be satisfied no matter WHO gets the contract.
Well, if we didn't take the rebuilding contracts then they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. On the other hand, as it currently stands, one of the first major contracts was awarded to a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., a company that was run by Vice President Dick Cheney, on a no-bid basis.
Exactly.. the problem is that a large part of our brains are programmed to recognize, differentiate, and judge other human beings. So if something looks ALMOST like a human being, chances are it will look grotesque.
First we mine it, then we're dumping nuclear waste on it, and eventually a freak nuclear explosion blows the moon completely out of orbit, stranding the poor crew of Moonbase Alpha.
(range to top...shoot above it -- targets on top get unpleasant surprise).
Or maybe the gunner gets an unpleasant suprise:
We heard OICW had a test failure in September 1999 at Aberdeen. Can you comment? 1) During the Proof of Principle testing, in a fixed test stand, a 20mm round detonated in the weapon chamber.
2) This caused two injuries: one person was treated as an outpatient and the second person required hospitalization for a broken arm.
What caused the test failure? The failure came after many successful single round firings followed by a shift to multiple round firings from a magazine. A government and industry Red Team determined the most probable cause was a system problem caused by three combined failures: a misaligned connector, software miscommunication between fire control and ammunition fuzing and mechanical failure in the safe and arming mechanism.
No, that's the kind of thinking that makes one skeptical, and skepticism is the knife that divides science from psuedo-science.
If someone has been hoping to find something their entire life, and claims to have found it, you should take their claims with a grain of salt.
If they can convince others with less of an emotional stake in the issue to repeat their experiments and those people come to the same conclusions, then you might have something worth posting on slashdot.
The quality won't be the same, but I'll be damned if I'm paying a penny for any of that anymore.
After all, who cares about the quality of information. Who cares if the information is researched and fact checked.
God forbid we actually pay people to do work for us.
In fact the freedom of information on the internet has inspired me to stop paying for things entirely. I'm hoping that I can find someone to supply my house with electricity based on their love for supplying people with power.
It's time for lunch. I'm going to go find someone who would love to make me a hamburger.
OCaml integrates with existing C code. There are many libraries released that are simply OCaml wrappers around existing C libraries.
OCaml is *not* faster than C. It would be hard to be faster than C, since it's basically glorified assembly language.
Depending on how well you code your C++, OCaml might or might not be faster than C++.
My point is that Ocaml is *much* easier to write correct, safe code in, and you don't have to sacrifice much speed or memory. Even if you are man enough to handle your pointers, you will appreciate being able to focus on the problem you are solving rather than having to juggle a lot of overhead.
Now how many Ocaml coders are there out there? Five thousand? Actually that number is probably generous.
I don't know the number, but I would guess that you're in the right ball park. So your argument is: Not enough people are using a language so I shouldn't use it. Well, then we're stuck with the crap that we have then, because we'll never be able to change.
The ocaml community is growing quickly. People that give it a try get addicted. I'm advocating the language because I really enjoy working with it, and I would like to see it have a chance out there in the real world. ocaml library growing every day
When coders run out of answers, they often resort to blanket claims of utopia delivered by a mysterious and obscure language.
It's just one direction that the original article was taking. One of his suggestions was "Ruby" which probably doesn't have a much larger programmer base in this country than ocaml does. High level languages don't have to be interpreted scripting languages.
It may be that there are other research languages out there that will be an even better choice for the next evolution of a general purpose language. OCaml certainly isn't the only choice.
The point is that programming languages are getting much cooler. With legacy code we're stuck with what we have, but when we're planning the future, let's keep an open mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Now.. to be fair, this is the Functional Programming Contest, and the tasks are designed to favor deep thought and subtle algorithms over raw speed.
That being said, OCaml is a great language, and I've been hacking in it for the last 5 days straight. It's gotten so that I hate programming in Java (too verbose, and inflexable) and Perl (Datastructures designed to inspire disgust.. I find myself writing $#{$categories} in my code and I want to cry)
Go OCAML. w00t!
How many people do you think actually do that through? Perhaps you belong to a particularly moral group of friends, and you really think to yourselves..
I could just download the whole album in less time than it would take me to to go to the record store and plunck down $15, but that would be wrong!
Be assured that most people don't think this way. This is why the RIAA is worried, and why they need to do something.
While your comment has a lot of merit, it is not really a response to the parent.
It is as silly to call this hacking as it would be to call a bank manager's embezzlement, "safecracking".
Try not to read too much into that paragraph.
Sure.. they'll sue whether they have a valid claim or not. You can't infer from this that they don't have a valid claim.
Then we'll find out whether they infringe on any patents. Remember this article:
clicky , clicky News.com from 2000
The Ogg developers staunchly defend the notion that they have created everything from scratch, or at least have built their system without using any of the Fraunhofer-owned technology. But their rivals say they aren't so sure.
"We doubt very much that they are not using Fraunhofer and Thomson intellectual property," Linde said. "We think it is likely they are infringing."
Whether this is true, analysts say Thomson and the German company are likely to file patent lawsuits the moment Vorbis appears to be a viable market candidate. By creating a perception of uncertainty around Vorbis' future, MP3's parents could prevent conservative digital music companies from adopting it.
"If you're going to go into a marketplace where people play hardball, that's what hardball looks like," Scheirer warned.
but the common man can not download a fuckin mp3?
Mon dieu! Until this very moment I hadn't realized it was all a vast government conspiracy to prevent us from getting music without paying!
Here I was worried about wars and lies, oil and terrorism.
Hey, let's start an argument on statically typed vs dynamically typed langagues. That's never been done before.
You don't need a dynamically typed language to be expressive. Have you looked at ML code, or especially Haskell code?
When you have type inference, your code looks dynamically typed, but retains the protection of the type checker. (Of course you have to live within the type checker's rules, which may not be appropriate for all projects).
20MB is unlikely, but I am unsuprised to find that:
class Hello
{
public static void main (String [] args)
{
System.out.println("Hello World!");
while (true) {}
}
}
sucks up 4,648 K, on my windows box with 1.4.1.
Well, for starters, why should the RIAA falsely accuse you of trafficking in copywrited materials when they have millions of actual copywrite violators to choose from. Besides being a waste of time, it would be a major setback for them to lose such a case, precedent wise.
:)
If they did for some reason single you out, but had no credible evidence against you, I doubt the trial would last past an inital motion to dismiss.
If it did, you might very well interest the EFF in your case.
But my main point would have to be: It seems silly to worry about the RIAA going after you for trading non-copywrited content. They don't care. They're out there to protect the tracks that make them money. They're greedy, not inherintly evil.
Wow, you're paranoid.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've served on a jury and watched the U.S. system in action.
I'm certainly not going to say that having expensive lawyers behind them doesn't tilt the system heavily in their favor, but I will disagree with you if you're stating that they don't need evidence against you in order to win.
Remember, it's their job to prove that you are breaking the law.
They have to have proof that you are distributing their copywrited works.
And if you do, they will. If you share files with random people out there in internetland, be sure that some of those "people" will be automated RIAA bots doing regular expression matches on your song titles, then downloading the content to be perused later by their human controllers. Muhahahhah.
I bet these kids ended up paying more than 99 cents a song.
We all remember when lan filesharing meant Novell. Their protocols were fast; their server was solid. They used to brag about the number of assembly language instructions between the time when a file request hit the server and the time it was being sent out.
Part of this speed came from having a very simple, unprotected operating system. Any process on the server could bring down the entire server. Novell's code was very well debugged and very stable.
And then networking started to mean something other than just filesharing. People started developing client/server applications to run on servers.
The company I worked for developed
NLMs (netware loadable modules) back in the day. It was a pain in the ass. Our code had to be flawless, because a single mistake would "abend" the server, taking down not only our services, but the lan filesharing, and everyone else's services too.
Mind you, we tested our code, we did everything we could to make it flawless, but that's a difficult standard to obtain in a complex piece of code.
Novell eventually tacked on some memory protection to the OS, allowing some NLMs to run at ring 1. But it seemed like too little too late.
Developers were realizing that it was a lot easier to develop and deploy server code on protected operating systems (Unix and Windows), and the speed bonus that Novell got by writing a down and dirty operating system was becoming less critical as machines got faster.
The same thing will happen with Palm OS vs Windows CE and Linux for the handhelds. The miserly memory handling and power consumption features of Palm OS will not be needed in future devices, and modern operating system features will win out.
You'll still be able to install linux on your PC. You just need to by a copy of that 007 game, modify your saved game file, flash your eprom, and you're go!
http://www.oldmanmurray.com/
:(
Don't bother going, it disappeared and turned into a "Coming soon" page until it eventually changed into a "Coming soonish" page.
Best game reviews ever. Sniff.
Oh, and where will the money to pay for the rebuilding come from? From the sale of Iraqi oil, according the the Bush administration.
We didn't bomb Iraq just to get rebuilding contracts, but clearly the administration is looking at it as an opportunity to funnel money to its friends.
You know, anyone who thinks we bombed Iraq just to get the rebuilding contracts isn't gonna be satisfied no matter WHO gets the contract.
Well, if we didn't take the rebuilding contracts then they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. On the other hand, as it currently stands, one of the first major contracts was awarded to a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., a company that was run by Vice President Dick Cheney, on a no-bid basis.
That looks pretty bad...
Exactly.. the problem is that a large part of our brains are programmed to recognize, differentiate, and judge other human beings. So if something looks ALMOST like a human being, chances are it will look grotesque.
Yea, I realized this with horror just after I hit the post button.
I knew I could count on some flamage.
This is clearly not true. Any method of gaining access that circumnavigates the established security procedures is a back door.
If they fire him tomorrow, they have no way of removing his access from the system, since they don't even know it's there.
First we mine it, then we're dumping nuclear waste on it, and eventually a freak nuclear explosion blows the moon completely out of orbit, stranding the poor crew of Moonbase Alpha.
Stop the madness now!
(range to top...shoot above it -- targets on top get unpleasant surprise).
Or maybe the gunner gets an unpleasant suprise:
We heard OICW had a test failure in September 1999 at Aberdeen. Can you comment?
1) During the Proof of Principle testing, in a fixed test stand, a 20mm round detonated in the weapon chamber.
2) This caused two injuries: one person was treated as an outpatient and the second person required hospitalization for a broken arm.
What caused the test failure?
The failure came after many successful single round firings followed by a shift to multiple round firings from a magazine. A government and industry Red Team determined the most probable cause was a system problem caused by three combined failures: a misaligned connector, software miscommunication between fire control and ammunition fuzing and mechanical failure in the safe and arming mechanism.
Something to be said for keeping it simple.
No, that's the kind of thinking that makes one skeptical, and skepticism is the knife that divides science from psuedo-science.
If someone has been hoping to find something their entire life, and claims to have found it, you should take their claims with a grain of salt.
If they can convince others with less of an emotional stake in the issue to repeat their experiments and those people come to the same conclusions, then you might have something worth posting on slashdot.
The quality won't be the same, but I'll be damned if I'm paying a penny for any of that anymore.
After all, who cares about the quality of information. Who cares if the information is researched and fact checked.
God forbid we actually pay people to do work for us.
In fact the freedom of information on the internet has inspired me to stop paying for things entirely. I'm hoping that I can find someone to supply my house with electricity based on their love for supplying people with power.
It's time for lunch. I'm going to go find someone who would love to make me a hamburger.
OCaml integrates with existing C code. There are many libraries released that are simply OCaml wrappers around existing C libraries.
OCaml is *not* faster than C. It would be hard to be faster than C, since it's basically glorified assembly language.
Depending on how well you code your C++, OCaml might or might not be faster than C++.
My point is that Ocaml is *much* easier to write correct, safe code in, and you don't have to sacrifice much speed or memory. Even if you are man enough to handle your pointers, you will appreciate being able to focus on the problem you are solving rather than having to juggle a lot of overhead.
Now how many Ocaml coders are there out there? Five thousand? Actually that number is probably generous.
I don't know the number, but I would guess that you're in the right ball park. So your argument is: Not enough people are using a language so I shouldn't use it. Well, then we're stuck with the crap that we have then, because we'll never be able to change.
The ocaml community is growing quickly. People that give it a try get addicted. I'm advocating the language because I really enjoy working with it, and I would like to see it have a chance out there in the real world.
ocaml library growing every day
When coders run out of answers, they often resort to blanket claims of utopia delivered by a mysterious and obscure language.
It's just one direction that the original article was taking. One of his suggestions was "Ruby" which probably doesn't have a much larger programmer base in this country than ocaml does. High level languages don't have to be interpreted scripting languages.
It may be that there are other research languages out there that will be an even better choice for the next evolution of a general purpose language. OCaml certainly isn't the only choice.
The point is that programming languages are getting much cooler. With legacy code we're stuck with what we have, but when we're planning the future, let's keep an open mind.