"Ah, well, that explains it: all of those companies have large constituencies like you that simply don't get it, and marketing, inertia and industry conservatism keeps you in business, not your technical prowess."
Don't get what? that some higher level languages simplify memory handling but also don't solve everything and have other drawbacks? Or am I supposed to somehow "get" that C is (in your deeply flawed opinion) obsolete? Perhaps you'd like to detail why that's your opinion, or if not what exactly I'm supposed to "get"?
Also, I'm amused that first you say that these big companies "get" it, and then you say that they don't get it and inertia/company name is the only reason they keep selling. Make up your mind. If you mean to imply that myself and/or my group are standing firm against corporate modernisation strategy then you're mistaken.
You may also be interested to know we were bought in relatively recently due to aforesaid wild profitability, we didn't have the name then and were already selling into an enterprise market and beating the two major incumbents.
I suggest you back off at this point, you're out of your depth.
That he felt the one big thing he missed was miniaturisation. Multivac is not the internet, it's one enormous computer. Asimov genunely thought we'd have less and less computers that got bigger and bigger. He didn't realise that whilst they do get more powerful, they also get smaller and so they get everywhere.
Makes you wonder what sort of futures he would have imagined had he got that right.
OTOH, at least he wasn't claiming his fiction was anything but fictin and though experiments, grounded somewhere in realirty, and not "This is what will happen! Listen to me, I'm important and clever!"
Because everyone I know and have ever heard from, that doesn't resort to denialist idiocy when confronted with pollution and climate change, thinks we should be using our immense knowledge of science and technology to solve the problems we have.
Never have seen anyone saying "OMG, technology is evil, we must go back to the dark ages". It seems to be the imaginary hippy strawman that people with a financial interest use to stop people thinking about alternative power sources and more efficient tech.
Don't make me laugh, they've been pushing that for decades now. It's not going to happen as long as humans can control their own metadata.
Maybe I should read some more recent papers on the idea, bt last I knew of it it was a pipedream and would only work in a world where everyone was honest.
I work for one of those you mentioned. I'm not really at liberty to to say which. We're not under any pressure to switch from C, nobody's even suggested it. Even for new components. Could be because we're industry leaders in our sphere and wildly profitable.
Yes, we suffer from the occasional leak, which we plug fast, but not many and usually when one customer has done something unusual.
If you think Java is an automatic get-out-of-leak-free card, you're mistaken.
I work for a company you _have_ heard of on server products that have to run constantly on everything from desktop pcs to big iron. We'd know if we had leaks because we test, and we'd know because our very large telecom and ISP customers would scream at us.
We don't deal with the same kind of data as the fox guys do, but we do have memory under control thankyou. Not everyone on slashdot only programs in their bedroom after college.
"I've never had any positive results from dowsing either, but I'm not arrogant enough to think that my experiences can speak for everybody."
What do you want from me? The studies all show it as having no grounding in truth, whether done by dispassionate third parties or by people with claims. Then you say try it yourself, I say I have and now I'm arrogant. Fuck off.
"Such forces (behind things like dowsing) often rely on the conscious state of the perceiver."
Then they're nonsense.
"If you're interested, then Astrology is often much more useful in determining whether something is 'going on' or not, in that the subject isn't the one in charge of creating the results."
Now I know you're a troll. Astrology? Please.
Next you'll be supporting Psychics and Wiccan Charges.
Well anyway, have a good life, these days you can get by believing in crap because so many others who don't take what the shamen say as true have built up a framework for real knowledge.
By the way - I'm typo prone most of the time, it comes of the brain moving faster than the hands. Not that I'm saying my brain's all that fast. If people do get worked up it's because you continue to repeat your assertions and accusations whilst refusing to address the fundamental point - it's not reproducable or measurable and consistently fails in proper testing, despite anecdotes to the contrary. If you question the whole basis of knowledge gathering through evidence collection then I suggest perhaps you should read Carl Sagan's "Candle in the Dark".
That's why the Lord invented ifdefs and #defines:)
One can have source-portable code that compiles differently on different platforms.
Sure, it's not true portability, I'll grant you that.
On heap fragmentation, well that is solved in my current project by using our own memory management system on an mmap'd file, and by keeping the data we play with in small chunks. I think a web browser is probably unique in both the range of data sizes and frequency of load, so it's tricky I'm sure.
IMHO, this is an operating system problem, not a language issue. May I ask how you'd solve it a higher level language?
Is it that the target VM can hide the actual memory addresses from the running program such that it can shuffle things around when it detects fragmentation?
We have boobs just under the front page of our top selling daily newspaper, though not in our advertising and not usually on tv before 9pm. We've also kinda got some of the good ol' fashioned US desensitisation to violence going on.
Hardcore porn may or may not be illegal, nobody's really sure. Probably not.
We're a nation of slightly prudish people who don't really want it rubbed in their faces, so to speak, but enjoy a bit of titillation and a giggle in private.
Not a hell of a lot worse than other games, but it gave you the same sort of tension and jumpiness asa really good horror movie. Well the first one did, not sure about the second, haven't played it yet myself.
AO? Well, if GTA deserved an M rating (dubious, IMHO), then yes, Manhunt's a step up from there. it was farking great though. MH2 has a lot of detractors, maybe it's not so good.
In the UK the ratings are law. Doesn't seem so bad to me most of the time. Until they pull a stunt like refusing to rate something. We still have censorship in this country it seems. Fuckt them, really, for making the decision for us adults.
I bet, I just bet, that at some point in the meeting when it was decided that old chesnut came up -
Oh I don't disagree with you really, I just disagreed with the point about demographics.
OTOH, I do think there wasa qualitative difference between GTA and Manhunt. If I had teenage kids over about 13 I'd be happy (not saying everyone would be) for them to play something like GTA. I'd probably give it another couple of years before Manhunt...
I don't kno0w, I'm not that familiar with the rest of the US ratingsystem so it would be difficult for me to say AO is needed when there might already be a perfectly good rating spectrum beneath it .
I think it probably highlights another issue though - the squeeze from the bottom. It's like a weird litle game of "chicken" at the moment, seeing who can get closest to the line without going over and being banned, because shops won't sell "AO" and a lot of consumers probably won't buy under an "M".
Whatever the average age of gamers is (and there seems to be some dispute), it's no longer just the realm of children. The tech is shiny and expensive and th 18-30 segment are the folks with a lot of disposable income and a love of shiny toys.
And the government will give itself a nice fat getout clause so that it's immune when it loses everyone's data, but any company or individual outside the government is in trouble.
Right, so because you can't present a shred of evidence for what you're talking about, and neither can anyone else - just let me get this straight - I'm biased and closed minded?
Classic wooly thinking nonsense.
I don't _have_ to have tried something out if I see honest research that discredit's it. Just like I don't _have_ to have eaten a particular type of cake to be retty sure it tastes good, given the ingredients.
The ingredients of Dowsing are a cup of myth, a cup of self delusion and a pinch of charlatanry for flavour. I know that's a recipe for snakeoil.
And yes, I've held dowsing rods, they wiggle all over the place for little to no reason, amplifying tiny movements in the users's hands. This has been born out by the scientific research into the area.
Npow, get off your "I'm open minded and try things before dismissing them" high horse, it's bullshit, as is everything else the "spiritual" types are so fervent about but can't reproduce undr observation or present evidence for.
Go on, show me a counterexample. I know you can't.
Why should Sony and Nintendo stop it being released on their consoles?
There are people making the games, there are people that want to play the games, why not just let the rating system rate them and let people choose to play them or not?
Then there wouldn't be so much pressure to get a game in under the M rating, the ESRB wouldn't be under so much pressure not to give out AO ratings (which are an effective ban at present), and parents would have a fairer idea of what is suitable for little Jimmy and what really is not.
Sony and Nintendo are the problem in this scenario.
"Worse, because C/C++ is so cumbersome, a lot of people seem to write things in Javascript that should probably really be written in a compiled (yet safe) language."
Please explain, I'm losing you here.
And no, it's not the language to blame. It's not that horrendously difficult to keep control of memory in C programs, lots of us do it every day.
I will agree that garbage collection is a weird way of doing things and it would be better if the obeyed, oh, the FIRST rule of C programming - keep track of our damn memory usage!
C is a beautifully powerful and elegant language, and very portable. No need to move away.
You guys get SCREWED by your corporations. Even when they get found guilty of monopolistic behaviour not much happens.
We in the EU don't like that so much. We don't worship money as much as the US does, nor do we believe in the invisible hand of the market as much as you guys do. The fatal flaw in the theory being that the participants are supposed to be well informed and able to make comparative choices, which we all know is the opposite of what marketing does.
Well anyway. There's good and bad in both approaches, but this is more than sour grapes from Vodafone. This is "We're playing by the rules here, we don't think these guys are, check them out". And, IMHO, Apple are skating close to the edge with all the locks and tie-ins.
Not that it really matters, apparently UK sales were a flop the other week. Could be something to do with the extortionate up front cost AND expensive contract. We're used to one or the other, but not both...
Colour me corrected. OTOH the UK government standards agency has just made a load of food manufacturers take some of the health claims off their packaging because the science isn't backing them up.
Meh, knowing marketers they were probably trying to claim it could give you the power of levitation.
Well, as a materialist, I don't believe in taking anecdotes off the web as evidence.
If people get agitated (and I know I do) it's because they
a) can't believe the level of deliberate self delusion they're hearing b) don't want to tell the speaker they are a fscking idiot, but on another level really really really do want to
"above all else is the need to believe that the classical scientific model remains pristine and unaffected by any of this other 'nonsense'"
When you can prove any of it, the slightest little thing, then we'll stop considering it nonsense. If you discard the empirical model of knowledge gathering (as most of these things do) then you discard the very thing that makes it knowledge - evidence. Claiming to know something by other means is simply delusion or idiocy.
Yes, amazing and unexpected things can happen. When they do we collect evidence and investigate them. If we remove that requirement we may as well go back to the days of ghosts and leprechauns.
Slashdot Mirror
"Ah, well, that explains it: all of those companies have large constituencies like you that simply don't get it, and marketing, inertia and industry conservatism keeps you in business, not your technical prowess."
Don't get what? that some higher level languages simplify memory handling but also don't solve everything and have other drawbacks? Or am I supposed to somehow "get" that C is (in your deeply flawed opinion) obsolete? Perhaps you'd like to detail why that's your opinion, or if not what exactly I'm supposed to "get"?
Also, I'm amused that first you say that these big companies "get" it, and then you say that they don't get it and inertia/company name is the only reason they keep selling. Make up your mind. If you mean to imply that myself and/or my group are standing firm against corporate modernisation strategy then you're mistaken.
You may also be interested to know we were bought in relatively recently due to aforesaid wild profitability, we didn't have the name then and were already selling into an enterprise market and beating the two major incumbents.
I suggest you back off at this point, you're out of your depth.
That he felt the one big thing he missed was miniaturisation. Multivac is not the internet, it's one enormous computer. Asimov genunely thought we'd have less and less computers that got bigger and bigger. He didn't realise that whilst they do get more powerful, they also get smaller and so they get everywhere.
Makes you wonder what sort of futures he would have imagined had he got that right.
OTOH, at least he wasn't claiming his fiction was anything but fictin and though experiments, grounded somewhere in realirty, and not "This is what will happen! Listen to me, I'm important and clever!"
Really, I'm interested.
Because everyone I know and have ever heard from, that doesn't resort to denialist idiocy when confronted with pollution and climate change, thinks we should be using our immense knowledge of science and technology to solve the problems we have.
Never have seen anyone saying "OMG, technology is evil, we must go back to the dark ages". It seems to be the imaginary hippy strawman that people with a financial interest use to stop people thinking about alternative power sources and more efficient tech.
Don't make me laugh, they've been pushing that for decades now. It's not going to happen as long as humans can control their own metadata.
Maybe I should read some more recent papers on the idea, bt last I knew of it it was a pipedream and would only work in a world where everyone was honest.
I'd like to live there, it's a shame we don't.
I work for one of those you mentioned. I'm not really at liberty to to say which. We're not under any pressure to switch from C, nobody's even suggested it. Even for new components. Could be because we're industry leaders in our sphere and wildly profitable.
Yes, we suffer from the occasional leak, which we plug fast, but not many and usually when one customer has done something unusual.
If you think Java is an automatic get-out-of-leak-free card, you're mistaken.
I work for a company you _have_ heard of on server products that have to run constantly on everything from desktop pcs to big iron. We'd know if we had leaks because we test, and we'd know because our very large telecom and ISP customers would scream at us.
We don't deal with the same kind of data as the fox guys do, but we do have memory under control thankyou. Not everyone on slashdot only programs in their bedroom after college.
"I've never had any positive results from dowsing either, but I'm not arrogant enough to think that my experiences can speak for everybody."
What do you want from me?
The studies all show it as having no grounding in truth, whether done by dispassionate third parties or by people with claims. Then you say try it yourself, I say I have and now I'm arrogant. Fuck off.
"Such forces (behind things like dowsing) often rely on the conscious state of the perceiver."
Then they're nonsense.
"If you're interested, then Astrology is often much more useful in determining whether something is 'going on' or not, in that the subject isn't the one in charge of creating the results."
Now I know you're a troll. Astrology? Please.
Next you'll be supporting Psychics and Wiccan Charges.
Well anyway, have a good life, these days you can get by believing in crap because so many others who don't take what the shamen say as true have built up a framework for real knowledge.
By the way - I'm typo prone most of the time, it comes of the brain moving faster than the hands. Not that I'm saying my brain's all that fast.
If people do get worked up it's because you continue to repeat your assertions and accusations whilst refusing to address the fundamental point - it's not reproducable or measurable and consistently fails in proper testing, despite anecdotes to the contrary. If you question the whole basis of knowledge gathering through evidence collection then I suggest perhaps you should read Carl Sagan's "Candle in the Dark".
Sure, yes, I'm just thinking that right _now_ it wouldn't be the big stores, that onloine ones would be the place to get these games.
Until they started to sell and Wally World realised they were missing out on revenue.
It's all about trying to break the stigma of AO, piece by piece.
Not that rockstar or any other game house is going to want to be the pioneer in this.
That's why the Lord invented ifdefs and #defines :)
One can have source-portable code that compiles differently on different platforms.
Sure, it's not true portability, I'll grant you that.
On heap fragmentation, well that is solved in my current project by using our own memory management system on an mmap'd file, and by keeping the data we play with in small chunks. I think a web browser is probably unique in both the range of data sizes and frequency of load, so it's tricky I'm sure.
IMHO, this is an operating system problem, not a language issue. May I ask how you'd solve it a higher level language?
Is it that the target VM can hide the actual memory addresses from the running program such that it can shuffle things around when it detects fragmentation?
We have boobs just under the front page of our top selling daily newspaper, though not in our advertising and not usually on tv before 9pm. We've also kinda got some of the good ol' fashioned US desensitisation to violence going on.
Hardcore porn may or may not be illegal, nobody's really sure. Probably not.
We're a nation of slightly prudish people who don't really want it rubbed in their faces, so to speak, but enjoy a bit of titillation and a giggle in private.
Not a hell of a lot worse than other games, but it gave you the same sort of tension and jumpiness asa really good horror movie. Well the first one did, not sure about the second, haven't played it yet myself.
AO? Well, if GTA deserved an M rating (dubious, IMHO), then yes, Manhunt's a step up from there. it was farking great though. MH2 has a lot of detractors, maybe it's not so good.
In the UK the ratings are law. Doesn't seem so bad to me most of the time. Until they pull a stunt like refusing to rate something. We still have censorship in this country it seems. Fuckt them, really, for making the decision for us adults.
I bet, I just bet, that at some point in the meeting when it was decided that old chesnut came up -
"But children will get their hands on it"
Bugger the children.
Oh I don't disagree with you really, I just disagreed with the point about demographics.
OTOH, I do think there wasa qualitative difference between GTA and Manhunt. If I had teenage kids over about 13 I'd be happy (not saying everyone would be) for them to play something like GTA. I'd probably give it another couple of years before Manhunt...
I don't kno0w, I'm not that familiar with the rest of the US ratingsystem so it would be difficult for me to say AO is needed when there might already be a perfectly good rating spectrum beneath it .
I think it probably highlights another issue though - the squeeze from the bottom. It's like a weird litle game of "chicken" at the moment, seeing who can get closest to the line without going over and being banned, because shops won't sell "AO" and a lot of consumers probably won't buy under an "M".
Whatever the average age of gamers is (and there seems to be some dispute), it's no longer just the realm of children. The tech is shiny and expensive and th 18-30 segment are the folks with a lot of disposable income and a love of shiny toys.
And the government will give itself a nice fat getout clause so that it's immune when it loses everyone's data, but any company or individual outside the government is in trouble.
Just watch and wait.
Where we banned the game entirely. Brilliant.
I'd take console manufacturer censorship over government censorship any day.
True...
But some retailers (especially online) would still carry it. It's the console manufacturers that knock it stone dead.
Was that a reply to me?
I didn't say "prohibited", It's the games companies doing it, not the government.
Right, so because you can't present a shred of evidence for what you're talking about, and neither can anyone else - just let me get this straight - I'm biased and closed minded?
Classic wooly thinking nonsense.
I don't _have_ to have tried something out if I see honest research that discredit's it. Just like I don't _have_ to have eaten a particular type of cake to be retty sure it tastes good, given the ingredients.
The ingredients of Dowsing are a cup of myth, a cup of self delusion and a pinch of charlatanry for flavour. I know that's a recipe for snakeoil.
And yes, I've held dowsing rods, they wiggle all over the place for little to no reason, amplifying tiny movements in the users's hands. This has been born out by the scientific research into the area.
Npow, get off your "I'm open minded and try things before dismissing them" high horse, it's bullshit, as is everything else the "spiritual" types are so fervent about but can't reproduce undr observation or present evidence for.
Go on, show me a counterexample. I know you can't.
Why should Sony and Nintendo stop it being released on their consoles?
There are people making the games, there are people that want to play the games, why not just let the rating system rate them and let people choose to play them or not?
Then there wouldn't be so much pressure to get a game in under the M rating, the ESRB wouldn't be under so much pressure not to give out AO ratings (which are an effective ban at present), and parents would have a fairer idea of what is suitable for little Jimmy and what really is not.
Sony and Nintendo are the problem in this scenario.
Err.... Name a (non-microsoft) product with open source that's not also redistributable.
I'm having trouble thinking of any.
"Worse, because C/C++ is so cumbersome, a lot of people seem to write things in Javascript that should probably really be written in a compiled (yet safe) language."
Please explain, I'm losing you here.
And no, it's not the language to blame. It's not that horrendously difficult to keep control of memory in C programs, lots of us do it every day.
I will agree that garbage collection is a weird way of doing things and it would be better if the obeyed, oh, the FIRST rule of C programming - keep track of our damn memory usage!
C is a beautifully powerful and elegant language, and very portable. No need to move away.
You guys get SCREWED by your corporations. Even when they get found guilty of monopolistic behaviour not much happens.
We in the EU don't like that so much. We don't worship money as much as the US does, nor do we believe in the invisible hand of the market as much as you guys do. The fatal flaw in the theory being that the participants are supposed to be well informed and able to make comparative choices, which we all know is the opposite of what marketing does.
Well anyway. There's good and bad in both approaches, but this is more than sour grapes from Vodafone. This is "We're playing by the rules here, we don't think these guys are, check them out". And, IMHO, Apple are skating close to the edge with all the locks and tie-ins.
Not that it really matters, apparently UK sales were a flop the other week. Could be something to do with the extortionate up front cost AND expensive contract. We're used to one or the other, but not both...
Colour me corrected. OTOH the UK government standards agency has just made a load of food manufacturers take some of the health claims off their packaging because the science isn't backing them up.
Meh, knowing marketers they were probably trying to claim it could give you the power of levitation.
Well, as a materialist, I don't believe in taking anecdotes off the web as evidence.
If people get agitated (and I know I do) it's because they
a) can't believe the level of deliberate self delusion they're hearing
b) don't want to tell the speaker they are a fscking idiot, but on another level really really really do want to
"above all else is the need to believe that the classical scientific model remains pristine and unaffected by any of this other 'nonsense'"
When you can prove any of it, the slightest little thing, then we'll stop considering it nonsense. If you discard the empirical model of knowledge gathering (as most of these things do) then you discard the very thing that makes it knowledge - evidence. Claiming to know something by other means is simply delusion or idiocy.
Yes, amazing and unexpected things can happen. When they do we collect evidence and investigate them. If we remove that requirement we may as well go back to the days of ghosts and leprechauns.
Well it depends on the condition, IMHO, a lot of minor things clear up by themselves.
Homeopathic remedies have been thoroughly debunked and are basically just water anyway...
If there is an effect, believe me, it's bugger all to do with the homeopathic remedy.