That's the GP's point, it is hard but looking at it it seems easy. That repeats on just about everything, but we know about software development, so we know it is hard.
That is not really security though obscurity. There is nothing obscure on you aproach.
It is in fact secury though diversity that, while not being tecnicaly secure, have strong economical effects. And it is why Linux will have few problems with viroses (that are highly dependent of scale) even if all computers on the net run it.
"All that's needed is some discipline, because it also allows you to write exceptionally ugly code. Both Perl and C++ are the same way."
And guess why people are avoiding C++ nowadays, and Perl is still considered a hakers language. The only good thing about Java is that it is hard to write ugly code. Really, it shines in no other way, code is much biger than it could be, stantard library is full of (backward compatible) bugs and hacks that will be bugs on next versions, it is slow, it is hard to acess the plataform features... No single quality, but being hard to write ugly code.
And once you work on a system wrote by a dozen different developers, you'll understand why that is so important.
Well, a huge part of the world buys our TV shows... Any TV sucks a lot, but ours sucks so much less than most out there.
And I wouldn't be surprised if that process was on court since the movie got to YouTube (almost a year ago) and the first result just appeared yesterday.
First, TJSP is not a supreme court. Even less 'a state supreme court', there is no such thing.
I'd really like if YouTube takes this to Supreme Court (STJ), since it seems to be a constitutional violation (but it doesn't seem to worth a lot nowadays).
"Yeah, we have serious laws in Brazil about limits to what one can say. You cannot have hate speech, period. If you want to do hate speech go to more permissive countries (like the US, for instance). Nowadays, the internet exists to make this even more easier (though IIRC, France sued Yahoo because of hosted hatred pages...)."
Yep, there are limits. And those limits aren't right. The problem is not with hate speech (although the punishment is way bigger than should be), the problem is that only the press have freedom of expression (and what constitutes 'press' is subjective). Also, brazilian Constitution explicitly denies anonymous speech, what I think is good, but a lot o people disagree.
"Quite the contrary, those who came here live a fairly pacific life -- though, admittedly, we have one of the highest urban violence rates on the planet. But most can get respect, live their own lives in peace, keep away from war (if that's possible at all in our times of nuclear fears..)."
We don't go to wars, but the death rate of São Paulo due to crime is way highter than Palestine deaths because of their (endless) war. Admittedly, it is not completely fair to compare a city to a nation, but it is not completely unfair either. Also, we have respect from other "normal" people, but no respect from our governants, on any level (and you are living under a rock if you can't see that). Not to tell about the second biggest wealth diparity of the world.
Sometimes it is just infuriating to live here. The only nice thing is that is seems to be getting better quite fast.
Here at Brazil it is on the major press, but they call it the US$100 laptop, instead of OLPC. Maybe you didn't listen about it because it is not aimed to your area.
"Do you actually expect the Sierra Club to fund a study who's goal is skepticism?"
You know... Honest people's goal is to know if it is happening or not. Not to disprove it. So, no honest entity would fund a study where the results are known before it starts.
Also, it is a misleading piece of propaganda to call those people "skeptic". The skeptic ones are those who are searching for evidence to make their mind about the issue. Those people are searching for evidence to support their viewpoint, so they are BELIVERS.
"At this very moment, I am (pretending to be) entering data into this system. There are (on a guess) 100 fields that need to be filled. About 85 of them will always have the exact same data. Another 12 will be identical for every entry from the same order. Only 3 are unique--and one of those is the auto-increment primary key."
It probably IS the result of the users telling the programmer how to do things, and they did it that way on paper. No sane programmer would go out of his way to prompt (and test, validate, deal with wrong values, debug all that mess...) for data that he already has.
Or the programmer wasn't sane... It happens sometimes.
It is simply not fair to request from anybody to buid systems that improve the productivity of its users AND have a small learnning curve. Most people simply do things "the wrong way" (yep, even on their choosen area, competence is rare), and don't want to learn something new. Yet, they want computers to magicaly turn their processes into the optimal ones. It is even worse because lots of processes used to be "the right way" due to constraints that computers eliminated, and are now "the wrong way". Still, users don't want to learn something new.
Software designers are, thus, presented the choice of making a system that will please most people, or one that will please competent people. The first path leads to really bad software that makes a lot of money, the later one can lead to very nice software, but will almost surely be a commercial failure. Not that hard to chose, is it?
At least, with time competent people prevail. But it takes a lot of time, and when they do most of them are using dated processes (the ones that used to be "the right way"), and will refuse to learn new things again... FOSS (the software, alone) can survive that cycle, but most people that want to make a living of software can't.
Note: I'm not stating that software made for competent people is good, just that it can be good. Programmers competence are quite important here too.
"Sure, North Korea is not innocent in this respect, but the scale of development of the US police state dwarfs North Korea incredibly."
Not to say that the US is innocent (I'm one of the first here to attack it on threads like this), but you really need to take a better look at that. US situation is by no way worse than NK.
It probably means everything that can be compiled with DevCpp. That means everything that doesn't use some weard library or command line utilities. So no Amarok and K3b for us (playing music and burnning CDs on Windows will still suck)...
Maybe those will be ported too, but it takes extra effort and will surely take some time.
I also don't give a damn about the desktop anymore... I spent something like 2 hours of my time customizing it a few years ago, and use almost the same settings (I get tired of the wallpaper sometimes, and transparent task bar is new) untill today.
During that time, I've used those settings on 6 different computers (counting networks with shared home as 1 computer), and for a time, I started to evaluate different distros, so those settings passed trough dozens of different enviroments. Not a big investiment, and my desktop runs exactly the way I want it to run.
Now, if you think that a system with non portable settings is better... Go ahead.
Right before that clause there is a note saying that future licences will have the same spirit (read intention) than the curent one. That means, the licence protect the 4 freedoms, for you and everybody that you send a copy of the work (and that is quite clear at the licence).
All those problems are caused by people that want the benefits that GPL give them (code hard to steal, a communit that develops for you, and a few others) without wanting the obligations that come with them. But both come toguether, GPLv2 is FLAWED and, now that we know its flaws, it won't give you the good stuf anymore.
I'm looking into D (or Eifel, undecided until now) to start a project that I'm already postponning for 2 years... So, I can answer some questions.
"* native code speed
As opposed to C/C++."
No, like C/C++. The summary doesn't help, anyway, I doubt that claim, because it lacks pointer arithimetics. Don't get me wrong, normaly laking it is a nice feature, but it doesn't help making fast programs.
"Point granted, even though C and C++ arguably have optional garbage collection as well (if you link to the right library)."
That's not enough. In C/C++ you can't count on the garbage collector being there, and that makes all the diference.
"*More* powerful templates? The usual complaint is that C++ templates are too powerful (a Turing-equivalent compile time language)."
Their site claims a less powerfull template system, I bet the summary is wrong.
"Not exactly a recommendation that the core language apparently is so weak that these can't be put into libraries."
Being builting makes it so clearer than dealing with a library. Also, there are new operators defined exclusively for them. Anyway, they seem to be coded at the core library, not exactly builtin (the summary doesn't help again).
"I'm guessing he meant variants here, the preprocessor is often used for variants, rarely for versioning."
Yep, that is how they call variants at their site too.
"More preprecessor replacement here."
Yep, D deosn't have a preprocessor, what is a huge gain since the compiler knows about everything that is on your program.
"But totally different from C++?"
Similar, not equal. It not totally different from C/C++ either, just different. Who wrote that sumary?
D is an interesting language, that tries to get the best of lots of languages, but automatic memory management, design by contract and builtin test units are the most important features (also lack of macros if you come from C/C++). I don't know yet how those help on practice, but it seems to be a good language.
"Ugh, dared to? They're not the mafia, anyone and everyone can say whatever they want whenever they want."
I'm glad you are so sure about it... But you should go see what happens to people that dare think like FSF people. Oh, wait, you won't find them, only FSF people supported those decades of public embarassement.
"And unmasking the truth? It's rather obvious. DRM restricts what you can do with media."
Slashdot Mirror
That is the kind of clue that most people expect from them.
And there is no such thing as effective DRM.
That's the GP's point, it is hard but looking at it it seems easy. That repeats on just about everything, but we know about software development, so we know it is hard.
That is not really security though obscurity. There is nothing obscure on you aproach.
It is in fact secury though diversity that, while not being tecnicaly secure, have strong economical effects. And it is why Linux will have few problems with viroses (that are highly dependent of scale) even if all computers on the net run it.
It is compilable, and will create a bubblesort if you try it with prolog. But almost no real world programs can be specified that way.
Isn't that a feature?
We could also start to use languages that don't have side effects .
Then, the compiler can multi-thread our programs for us.
Only if it interacts with light. Neutrinos, for example, don't glow (and don't absorb light either).
And guess why people are avoiding C++ nowadays, and Perl is still considered a hakers language. The only good thing about Java is that it is hard to write ugly code. Really, it shines in no other way, code is much biger than it could be, stantard library is full of (backward compatible) bugs and hacks that will be bugs on next versions, it is slow, it is hard to acess the plataform features... No single quality, but being hard to write ugly code.
And once you work on a system wrote by a dozen different developers, you'll understand why that is so important.
Well, a huge part of the world buys our TV shows... Any TV sucks a lot, but ours sucks so much less than most out there.
And I wouldn't be surprised if that process was on court since the movie got to YouTube (almost a year ago) and the first result just appeared yesterday.
First, TJSP is not a supreme court. Even less 'a state supreme court', there is no such thing.
I'd really like if YouTube takes this to Supreme Court (STJ), since it seems to be a constitutional violation (but it doesn't seem to worth a lot nowadays).
Yep, there are limits. And those limits aren't right. The problem is not with hate speech (although the punishment is way bigger than should be), the problem is that only the press have freedom of expression (and what constitutes 'press' is subjective). Also, brazilian Constitution explicitly denies anonymous speech, what I think is good, but a lot o people disagree.
We don't go to wars, but the death rate of São Paulo due to crime is way highter than Palestine deaths because of their (endless) war. Admittedly, it is not completely fair to compare a city to a nation, but it is not completely unfair either. Also, we have respect from other "normal" people, but no respect from our governants, on any level (and you are living under a rock if you can't see that). Not to tell about the second biggest wealth diparity of the world.
Sometimes it is just infuriating to live here. The only nice thing is that is seems to be getting better quite fast.
cat > filename is also much easier to use...
And some use ozone. Chlorine is still the less corrosive of them.
Yet they didn't make it possible to open the door from inside.
Here at Brazil it is on the major press, but they call it the US$100 laptop, instead of OLPC. Maybe you didn't listen about it because it is not aimed to your area.
You know... Honest people's goal is to know if it is happening or not. Not to disprove it. So, no honest entity would fund a study where the results are known before it starts.
Also, it is a misleading piece of propaganda to call those people "skeptic". The skeptic ones are those who are searching for evidence to make their mind about the issue. Those people are searching for evidence to support their viewpoint, so they are BELIVERS.
It probably IS the result of the users telling the programmer how to do things, and they did it that way on paper. No sane programmer would go out of his way to prompt (and test, validate, deal with wrong values, debug all that mess...) for data that he already has.
Or the programmer wasn't sane... It happens sometimes.
It is simply not fair to request from anybody to buid systems that improve the productivity of its users AND have a small learnning curve. Most people simply do things "the wrong way" (yep, even on their choosen area, competence is rare), and don't want to learn something new. Yet, they want computers to magicaly turn their processes into the optimal ones. It is even worse because lots of processes used to be "the right way" due to constraints that computers eliminated, and are now "the wrong way". Still, users don't want to learn something new.
Software designers are, thus, presented the choice of making a system that will please most people, or one that will please competent people. The first path leads to really bad software that makes a lot of money, the later one can lead to very nice software, but will almost surely be a commercial failure. Not that hard to chose, is it?
At least, with time competent people prevail. But it takes a lot of time, and when they do most of them are using dated processes (the ones that used to be "the right way"), and will refuse to learn new things again... FOSS (the software, alone) can survive that cycle, but most people that want to make a living of software can't.
Note: I'm not stating that software made for competent people is good, just that it can be good. Programmers competence are quite important here too.
Not to say that the US is innocent (I'm one of the first here to attack it on threads like this), but you really need to take a better look at that. US situation is by no way worse than NK.
It probably means everything that can be compiled with DevCpp. That means everything that doesn't use some weard library or command line utilities. So no Amarok and K3b for us (playing music and burnning CDs on Windows will still suck)...
Maybe those will be ported too, but it takes extra effort and will surely take some time.
I also don't give a damn about the desktop anymore... I spent something like 2 hours of my time customizing it a few years ago, and use almost the same settings (I get tired of the wallpaper sometimes, and transparent task bar is new) untill today.
During that time, I've used those settings on 6 different computers (counting networks with shared home as 1 computer), and for a time, I started to evaluate different distros, so those settings passed trough dozens of different enviroments. Not a big investiment, and my desktop runs exactly the way I want it to run.
Now, if you think that a system with non portable settings is better... Go ahead.
Anyway, it is not common for Microsft to see the biger picure behind anticompetitive tatics.
Right before that clause there is a note saying that future licences will have the same spirit (read intention) than the curent one. That means, the licence protect the 4 freedoms, for you and everybody that you send a copy of the work (and that is quite clear at the licence).
All those problems are caused by people that want the benefits that GPL give them (code hard to steal, a communit that develops for you, and a few others) without wanting the obligations that come with them. But both come toguether, GPLv2 is FLAWED and, now that we know its flaws, it won't give you the good stuf anymore.
I'm looking into D (or Eifel, undecided until now) to start a project that I'm already postponning for 2 years... So, I can answer some questions.
No, like C/C++. The summary doesn't help, anyway, I doubt that claim, because it lacks pointer arithimetics. Don't get me wrong, normaly laking it is a nice feature, but it doesn't help making fast programs.
That's not enough. In C/C++ you can't count on the garbage collector being there, and that makes all the diference.
Their site claims a less powerfull template system, I bet the summary is wrong.
Being builting makes it so clearer than dealing with a library. Also, there are new operators defined exclusively for them. Anyway, they seem to be coded at the core library, not exactly builtin (the summary doesn't help again).
Yep, that is how they call variants at their site too.
Yep, D deosn't have a preprocessor, what is a huge gain since the compiler knows about everything that is on your program.
Similar, not equal. It not totally different from C/C++ either, just different. Who wrote that sumary?
D is an interesting language, that tries to get the best of lots of languages, but automatic memory management, design by contract and builtin test units are the most important features (also lack of macros if you come from C/C++). I don't know yet how those help on practice, but it seems to be a good language.
I'm glad you are so sure about it... But you should go see what happens to people that dare think like FSF people. Oh, wait, you won't find them, only FSF people supported those decades of public embarassement.
"And unmasking the truth? It's rather obvious. DRM restricts what you can do with media."
Yet most people do no understand it.