The Earth is capitalised, so world isn't a particularly good example. There are others, such as god, where capitalisation is used to differentiate between a god and the specific God. Similarly, there are many internets (any network of networks is an internet), but only one Internet.
I had an ASUS Android tablet. It got security updates for about 18 months and then was left with known, remotely exploitable, security updates. I won't buy anything else from them that doesn't either have third-party OS support or a legally enforceable guarantee that they'll provide updates for the expected lifetime of the device.
The election would be a lot more interesting if Sanders decided to run as an independent. Both Trump and Clinton are at or under about 30% popularity in various opinion polls. I doubt that he'd win, but having either Trump or Clinton win with under 30% of the popular vote would give Congress a lot of ammunition for keeping them in check.
GPL, you link to the API and distribute, you are required to provide source.
But why are you required to provide the source? Remember, the GPL is a copyright license and so can only grant rights that copyright took away, not take away rights. If fair use permits me to use the API, then my code is not a derived work of the GPL'd code and so I can distribute it with whatever license I want. I need to obey the permissions of the GPL if I want to distribute the GPL'd library, but there's nothing stopping me from distributing the code under a different license and requiring end users to install the GPL'd library for themselves. The GPL is explicitly not a usage license, so doing so would not cause the end user to infringe the GPL.
The real stupidity from Oracle is that they didn't realise how dangerous it would be to win the lawsuit. If they had come up with a verdict that APIs were covered by copyright and implementations were not fair use, then life would have been very difficult for them. Remember the SCO lawsuit? Now imagine what a similar lawsuit would cover if all of the APIs in POSIX (and the C/C++ specifications) were copyrighted by the first person to propose and implement them. Solaris would be dead in the water, as would most other UNIX clones.
I also don't use Facebook, but an increasing number of companies use it as their primary online presence (not surprising, as its primary purpose is a marketing platform, with a social network along the side). I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes the sole contact mechanism for various companies over the next couple of years, which will make remaining off the system harder.
there isn't anything wrong with COBOL at a fundamental level
There are many things wrong with COBOL, but there's one thing that's very right with it: support. You can take COBOL code written in the '60s and run it unmodified on modern hardware with toolchains provided by multiple vendors. Even FORTRAN doesn't have that - it's very hard to get support for anything older than FORTRAN '77 from a modern Fortran toolchain (and even F77 support is only there because of a certain codebase that can't be modified without needing re-validation, which can't happen as long as the test-ban treaty is in effect). Add to that, many the kinds of people who buy COBOL toolchains really care about high availability so if uptime is something that really matters to you then there are a lot of options.
Exactly. Which is easier to maintain, run on modern hardware, and buy a supported toolchain for: COBOL code written in 1965 for OS/360, or Visual Basic code written in 1993 for Windows 3.1?
Did you read the numbers? Their sales dropped by 20% from 2008-2009. There was a slight up-tick in 2010, so blaming the CEO who took over in 2010 is nonsense. Nokia had a decent kernel and a crappy userland for their smartphone range in 2005. Their solution was to replace the kernel with Linux and to have a dozen teams compete internally on a new userland, each with far more interest in sabotaging the others than on producing something to compete externally. In hindsight, adopting Windows Phone was a bad idea (though largely because Microsoft failed to get buy-in from third party app developers), but Nokia didn't have anything internal to compete with iOS and Android and their attempts to develop something were tearing the company apart internally. They basically had the choice of Android or Windows Phone. The margins in the Android handset market are tiny - even in 2010, few companies other than Google and Samsung were making money - and there was little competition in the Windows Phone market.
If the US legal system is not completely divorced from its inheritance of English Common Law, then I suspect that this isn't actually true. Written and verbal contracts are not so dissimilar in common law, the requirement is that a 'meeting of minds' has taken place. The written contract exists to provide evidence of this. Verbal agreements are problematic because there is a lack of evidence, however a witnessed verbal agreement can carry the same weight as a written one if the witnesses are willing to testify on behalf of one of the parties. Written contracts exist to avoid the need for this and the reliance on potentially faulty memories of the involved parties.
And then it interprets that bytecode using a really crappy interpreter, unlike Java which has had millions of dollars invested in optimising the JIT compiler.
They make a phone that runs an interface that looks like shit
Odd observation. My partner has a Windows phone and the UI is the only thing about it that I actually like. It's clean and easy to use (I use Android on my phone and iOS on my tablet, so I have a solid basis for comparison here) and so far the only mobile UI that hasn't managed to piss me off. On the other hand, the fact that she needs to test her alarm before going to sleep because sometimes the phone needs a reboot to allow alarms to make a noise and that there's practically nothing in the App Store that you'd want are real problems for adoption.
Only in the USA. In most of Europe, kale has been a staple crop for around a thousand years. It became more popular in the UK in the second world war, when it was one of the easiest vegetables to cultivate at home and food imports were very expensive. It's one of the cheapest leaf vegetables to buy here.
The prices change a lot over time. You can use camelcamelcamel to track the historic prices of items. I suspect that this is actually becoming a problem for Amazon: I held off buying something recently for two weeks waiting for Amazon to lower their price back to where it was when I first looked. They didn't, but one of their competitors did in this time so I bought it from them instead.
Complete rubbish; object based & functional, not OO.
Functional languages are ones that have a strong notion of a pure function (i.e. something that is side-effect free and has immutable state). JavaScript doesn't come close to representing this.
A very good definition for the term: rubbish language.
Name one mainstream language that doesn't have odd corner cases.
by definition not an integer.
Sorry, I meant the only type that you can use for representing integer data. You effectively have a 53-bit integer that silently becomes a floating point value on overflow. This is the type that you must use for all integer data, including things like loop induction variables.
5% per day isn't that big a deal, as the most common use for these things is storing power between peak generation and peak consumption times. For solar power, these are only a few hours apart.
You don't need much energy to keep them cool, you need a lot of energy to cool them down. Once they're cool, maintaining the temperature is mostly accomplished by insulation. Take a look at the plans for superconducting power lines: the cost of cooling can be less than the savings from reduced transmission loss.
Google's machine learning capabilities come from their (very recent) purchase of Deep Mind, which really didn't have very much of anywhere near the value that Google paid (good implementations of a few old and well-known algorithms and a few really good demos).
If you wait 15 years to move in the tech world, you're in for some pain
The problem with this argument is that most of the companies that built systems with VB6 aren't in the tech world. They're in a host of other fields and used VB with some database (possible Access, hopefully SQL Server) for a load of custom workflow automation. They don't want to replace it after 5 years, because writing software is not part of their business and is just a cost centre. They'll replace computers when they become too slow for new software or physically break. They expect their computer systems to have the same reliability as their physical systems. VB was probably entirely the wrong tool for the job for many of these companies given those requirements, but it's too late now.
As for Windows 3.1, you might have missed it but one of the big reasons that 64-bit Windows took so long to reach mainstream was that it couldn't run Win16 programs. That killed it for a huge number of companies that had programs written for Windows 3.1 (or even 3.0) that they depended on and which still worked fine in 32-bit XP.
I have actually seen well-written VB6 code. Once. But it worked as an existence proof. It's actually quite a bit easier to write good VB6 code than it was in earlier versions of the language. Most of the VB hate comes from the fact that it was so easy to use that it attracted a load of really bad programmers. These days, most of those folks have moved on to Python.
JavaScript has some nice features. It's a pure OO language, it has a simple prototype-based model with differential inheritance, but it also has a lot of ugly corner cases:
'Semicolon insertion' - the semicolon is optional anywhere that the parser can determine that one should be needed. This means that some things are either code blocks or object literals depending on how you line wrap your code.
The only integer type is an IEEE double-precision floating point number. You can't represent a 64-bit integer without using a bignum library. Compare this with something like Smalltalk (an ancestor of JavaScript, with Self as the direct parent), where integers are either SmallInt or BigInt objects and are transparently promoted when they are no longer small enough to be hidden inside a pointer.
Javascript has operators that work on objects, but no operator overloading. object + string, string + number, number + array are all well-defined in JavaScript. They won't throw type exceptions, but they will produce really unexpected results.
The semantics of 'new' and 'this' binding are really weird. Any JavaScript function (which is actually a closure) can be either called directly or as an argument to the new operator. In the first case, the hidden 'this' parameter is the closure object. In the latter case, the 'this' argument is a new object whose prototype is set to a field in the function object. There are a few other subtleties.
JavaScript is a pure imperative language. The execution model is that code is run as soon as it is read, which makes quick startup difficult. V8 cheats and just does brace matching when it encounters a function and lazily parses the function when it's first called, but other languages that have a more explicit declarative structure get this for free and have cleaner entry points (there's no equivalent of 'main()' in JavaScript).
That said, it's not significantly worse or better than most other mainstream programming languages.
Prelude to Axanar is the short film that they released as a preview of the feature-length film that they are working on, with the current working title Axanar.
Slashdot Mirror
The Earth is capitalised, so world isn't a particularly good example. There are others, such as god, where capitalisation is used to differentiate between a god and the specific God. Similarly, there are many internets (any network of networks is an internet), but only one Internet.
I had an ASUS Android tablet. It got security updates for about 18 months and then was left with known, remotely exploitable, security updates. I won't buy anything else from them that doesn't either have third-party OS support or a legally enforceable guarantee that they'll provide updates for the expected lifetime of the device.
The election would be a lot more interesting if Sanders decided to run as an independent. Both Trump and Clinton are at or under about 30% popularity in various opinion polls. I doubt that he'd win, but having either Trump or Clinton win with under 30% of the popular vote would give Congress a lot of ammunition for keeping them in check.
GPL, you link to the API and distribute, you are required to provide source.
But why are you required to provide the source? Remember, the GPL is a copyright license and so can only grant rights that copyright took away, not take away rights. If fair use permits me to use the API, then my code is not a derived work of the GPL'd code and so I can distribute it with whatever license I want. I need to obey the permissions of the GPL if I want to distribute the GPL'd library, but there's nothing stopping me from distributing the code under a different license and requiring end users to install the GPL'd library for themselves. The GPL is explicitly not a usage license, so doing so would not cause the end user to infringe the GPL.
The real stupidity from Oracle is that they didn't realise how dangerous it would be to win the lawsuit. If they had come up with a verdict that APIs were covered by copyright and implementations were not fair use, then life would have been very difficult for them. Remember the SCO lawsuit? Now imagine what a similar lawsuit would cover if all of the APIs in POSIX (and the C/C++ specifications) were copyrighted by the first person to propose and implement them. Solaris would be dead in the water, as would most other UNIX clones.
I also don't use Facebook, but an increasing number of companies use it as their primary online presence (not surprising, as its primary purpose is a marketing platform, with a social network along the side). I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes the sole contact mechanism for various companies over the next couple of years, which will make remaining off the system harder.
there isn't anything wrong with COBOL at a fundamental level
There are many things wrong with COBOL, but there's one thing that's very right with it: support. You can take COBOL code written in the '60s and run it unmodified on modern hardware with toolchains provided by multiple vendors. Even FORTRAN doesn't have that - it's very hard to get support for anything older than FORTRAN '77 from a modern Fortran toolchain (and even F77 support is only there because of a certain codebase that can't be modified without needing re-validation, which can't happen as long as the test-ban treaty is in effect). Add to that, many the kinds of people who buy COBOL toolchains really care about high availability so if uptime is something that really matters to you then there are a lot of options.
Exactly. Which is easier to maintain, run on modern hardware, and buy a supported toolchain for: COBOL code written in 1965 for OS/360, or Visual Basic code written in 1993 for Windows 3.1?
Did you read the numbers? Their sales dropped by 20% from 2008-2009. There was a slight up-tick in 2010, so blaming the CEO who took over in 2010 is nonsense. Nokia had a decent kernel and a crappy userland for their smartphone range in 2005. Their solution was to replace the kernel with Linux and to have a dozen teams compete internally on a new userland, each with far more interest in sabotaging the others than on producing something to compete externally. In hindsight, adopting Windows Phone was a bad idea (though largely because Microsoft failed to get buy-in from third party app developers), but Nokia didn't have anything internal to compete with iOS and Android and their attempts to develop something were tearing the company apart internally. They basically had the choice of Android or Windows Phone. The margins in the Android handset market are tiny - even in 2010, few companies other than Google and Samsung were making money - and there was little competition in the Windows Phone market.
If the US legal system is not completely divorced from its inheritance of English Common Law, then I suspect that this isn't actually true. Written and verbal contracts are not so dissimilar in common law, the requirement is that a 'meeting of minds' has taken place. The written contract exists to provide evidence of this. Verbal agreements are problematic because there is a lack of evidence, however a witnessed verbal agreement can carry the same weight as a written one if the witnesses are willing to testify on behalf of one of the parties. Written contracts exist to avoid the need for this and the reliance on potentially faulty memories of the involved parties.
it compiles to bytecode like Java
And then it interprets that bytecode using a really crappy interpreter, unlike Java which has had millions of dollars invested in optimising the JIT compiler.
Fortran and COBOL are tools of the patriarchy
You heard it here first folks, Admiral Grace Hopper: representative of the patriarchy.
They make a phone that runs an interface that looks like shit
Odd observation. My partner has a Windows phone and the UI is the only thing about it that I actually like. It's clean and easy to use (I use Android on my phone and iOS on my tablet, so I have a solid basis for comparison here) and so far the only mobile UI that hasn't managed to piss me off. On the other hand, the fact that she needs to test her alarm before going to sleep because sometimes the phone needs a reboot to allow alarms to make a noise and that there's practically nothing in the App Store that you'd want are real problems for adoption.
Only in the USA. In most of Europe, kale has been a staple crop for around a thousand years. It became more popular in the UK in the second world war, when it was one of the easiest vegetables to cultivate at home and food imports were very expensive. It's one of the cheapest leaf vegetables to buy here.
The prices change a lot over time. You can use camelcamelcamel to track the historic prices of items. I suspect that this is actually becoming a problem for Amazon: I held off buying something recently for two weeks waiting for Amazon to lower their price back to where it was when I first looked. They didn't, but one of their competitors did in this time so I bought it from them instead.
Complete rubbish; object based & functional, not OO.
Functional languages are ones that have a strong notion of a pure function (i.e. something that is side-effect free and has immutable state). JavaScript doesn't come close to representing this.
A very good definition for the term: rubbish language.
Name one mainstream language that doesn't have odd corner cases.
by definition not an integer.
Sorry, I meant the only type that you can use for representing integer data. You effectively have a 53-bit integer that silently becomes a floating point value on overflow. This is the type that you must use for all integer data, including things like loop induction variables.
5% per day isn't that big a deal, as the most common use for these things is storing power between peak generation and peak consumption times. For solar power, these are only a few hours apart.
You don't need much energy to keep them cool, you need a lot of energy to cool them down. Once they're cool, maintaining the temperature is mostly accomplished by insulation. Take a look at the plans for superconducting power lines: the cost of cooling can be less than the savings from reduced transmission loss.
Google's machine learning capabilities come from their (very recent) purchase of Deep Mind, which really didn't have very much of anywhere near the value that Google paid (good implementations of a few old and well-known algorithms and a few really good demos).
If you wait 15 years to move in the tech world, you're in for some pain
The problem with this argument is that most of the companies that built systems with VB6 aren't in the tech world. They're in a host of other fields and used VB with some database (possible Access, hopefully SQL Server) for a load of custom workflow automation. They don't want to replace it after 5 years, because writing software is not part of their business and is just a cost centre. They'll replace computers when they become too slow for new software or physically break. They expect their computer systems to have the same reliability as their physical systems. VB was probably entirely the wrong tool for the job for many of these companies given those requirements, but it's too late now.
As for Windows 3.1, you might have missed it but one of the big reasons that 64-bit Windows took so long to reach mainstream was that it couldn't run Win16 programs. That killed it for a huge number of companies that had programs written for Windows 3.1 (or even 3.0) that they depended on and which still worked fine in 32-bit XP.
I have actually seen well-written VB6 code. Once. But it worked as an existence proof. It's actually quite a bit easier to write good VB6 code than it was in earlier versions of the language. Most of the VB hate comes from the fact that it was so easy to use that it attracted a load of really bad programmers. These days, most of those folks have moved on to Python.
That said, it's not significantly worse or better than most other mainstream programming languages.
I have three words for you: Ada on rails.
Prelude to Axanar is the short film that they released as a preview of the feature-length film that they are working on, with the current working title Axanar.
They're owned by Facebook, why would you even be considering doing business with them in the first place?