Another thing I'd kill for in C is a limited form of RAII, namely scope guards - the ability to say at any given point, "when the scope ends, run this before leaving it"
If you are willing to limit yourself to GCC-compatible compilers (GCC, clang, ICC, Path64, and - I think - XLC), then you should look up __attribute__((cleanup)). I use this for locks in C all the time. I just have a LOCK_FOR_SCOPE() macro, and the lock is automatically released when it goes out of scope. It's even exception safe if you compile with -fexceptions, so if some C++ or Objective-C throws an exception through your stack frame, it works nicely.
Okay. The JVM uses a generational GC. This actually uses a few generations, but I'll talk about a simpler version than Java uses, because it's easier to understand:
When you allocate objects, it uses a simple bump-the-pointer allocator in the short-lived generation. If an object stays around for a while, it is moved into a longer-lived generation. If not, it is deleted. I'm skipping over most of the details here, because they're not relevant. The important thing is that the generations are scanned approximately independently, and each maintains a remembered set of all of the objects in another generation that it references.
Some things, however, are not dynamically allocated. If you write Hello World in Java, you will have a string object that you wrote as "Hello world" in your source code. This object never needs to be deallocated. Neither does the class with your static main() method. The string is simple - it doesn't have any pointers - but the class is more complicated. It may have static fields (class variables, for Smalltalk programmers) that reference other objects. The GC must be able to follow these pointers, or it will prematurely deallocate objects. The class is therefore allocated in memory that is scanned by the GC, but not managed by the GC. This is the permanent object generation: the PermGen that the grandparent was talking about. This is fine for most programs, which generate classes by compiling Java code and have a smallish fixed number of them. It's a problem for self-modifying programs that generate new classes on the fly (something that Java has had APIs for since the start).
That would make a difference, if it weren't for two minor points:
In US Presidential elections, the winner has been the one that spent the most for quite a long time. I suspect that it's the same in most other US elections.
Once in power, there are ample opportunities for exploiting your position to make money.
So, a campaign contribution ends up being an indirect bribe, but it's still a bribe. You could probably improve matters a lot by ensuring that campaign contributions had to be anonymous, paid via an intermediary that would only report the total raised, not who paid it, so donations could not come with strings attached. You can donate money to support candidates that you agree with, not to make candidates agree with you.
Actually, I suspect most people can be trusted with power. It's only the ones that actively seek it that generally can't. If you picked 300 random people from the population to run the country for a couple of years, I would expect to see some minor abuses of power, but nothing like the kind of scale we get from career politicians.
You're forgetting app sales. The standard model for this kind of device is to charge 30% for the app sales. HP actually has quite a nice model for selling unapproved apps too. They do the same sort of vetting as Apple for the store, but if they reject your app (or you don't want to go through the approvals process) then they will still sell it. They'll put it in a part of the store that can't be found by searching or browsing and give you a URL. You can then publish the URL on your own site and WebOS device owners can just click on it and buy. HP handles all of the payment processing for you. This means that WebOS is a much more interesting platform for developers of software that are not likely to be approved by Apple.
If you sell the entire production run, that's a large installed base. If you sell them for $300 and each person buys an average of $60 of apps, you've broken even. The fact that you've sold them all makes it more likely that people will write apps, and the availability of lots of apps makes it more likely that people will spend $60. This is why Apple hyped the hell out of the first iPhones and iPads and why Microsoft licensed DOS (and, later, Windows) to anyone who wanted it for a relatively low price. Users mean third-party applications, which mean users who will want to buy the next version of the OS / device.
Or sell them for $300, make a small loss from each one, build a large installed base, and charge 30% for apps sold through your store. If people spend an average of $60 on apps, you've broken even. If they spend more, you've made a profit. Even if they spend less on the first generation, you encourage app development by having a large base of potential customers. And the cost of the components only has to drop by a few percent before you're making a profit anyway.
Oh, and if you think putting Android on it would make it better, I'm pretty sure you've not actually used a TouchPad.
I looked on eBay in the UK, and they seem to be going for £200-300 here, which works out to about that range. I'd happily pay £100 for one, but it doesn't look likely.
It's in my copy of The New Hackers Dictionary, which is the print copy of the Jargon File, published in 1991, claiming that it comes from vaxen (the plural of vax, which is marginally more sensible because vaxes sounds silly and there was no established plural of vax). You can find that definition online. It has nothing to do with some random comic, it's something that was briefly in vogue in the '80s and then became a sign of a poser trying to fit in with the UNIX community in the '90s, and finally of a random idiot in the '00s.
According to that site, it's alpha quality and doesn't integrate with the address book - you can't just find a person and say 'call via SIP', as per my requirements, you have to copy their number using its own dialler.
Apple effectively did end DRM for music. They initially said that they didn't want it, but the copyright owners insisted. Then Apple realised that they could use the DRM to lock people into the iPod / iTunes ecosystem and end up controlling most of the music distribution channel. The studios quickly realised that other vendors couldn't compete with iTunes if their music couldn't be played on the iPod, and they needed the competition to keep their slice of the revenue large and everyone else's small, so they started offering DRM-free licenses to Amazon and the like.
If you were following the licensing deals, the music industry was terrified of Apple's market dominance. They refused to license DRM-free music to Apple for as long as possible to allow competing stores to be set up (except EMI, who realised that being the only DRM-free label on iTunes gave them a competitive advantage).
If it hadn't been for Apple trying to lock people in to their channel, the studios would still be flailing around with a dozen different incompatible DRM implementations.
I'd take that over normal Windows support any day. Telephone support for a command line is a lot easier than a GUI. You just tell people to type something in - spelling it where necessary - and then read back what appears on the screen. Even better, you can just write the commands down, send them in an email, and say 'copy this into a terminal'. With a GUI, you need to tell people where to click, what to expect, where in each window to navigate, and so on. My mother had problems with her email a few months ago. Getting her to run ping and telnet commands in the terminal to establish that the connection was working was easy. Talking her through recreating the account in Thunderbird was much harder.
And if ISO 9660 file system images are so "read-only", then how does packet writing work on an actual CD?
Packet writing uses UDF, not ISO 9660. UDF was designed to allow incremental updates, ISO 9660 is read-only - if you want to append to an ISO 9660 filesystem then you need to create a multi-session disk which stores multiple ISO 9660 filesystems internally and looks through each one in order (newest to oldest) to find files.
I was using WinSCP in 2001. I think it was on version 2.3 then. Learning a new tool wasn't exactly a problem - it looked like Windows Exporer, so once you'd typed in your login details (once, then it saves them) you just needed to drag and drop in exactly the same way you would with WebDAV or FTP.
If my clients were using Windows, I'd probably favour WebDAV-over-HTTPS over SFTP, simply because Explorer has support for WebDAV, while they need to install a free program to use SCP / SFTP.
Should be pretty easy to automate too - pick a load of random dictionary words, +1 the 5 of the top 10 Google results from each one, plus your site. Each G+ spam account just needs to pick a different set of random words.
Let's see, I want to make a tablet, which OS shall I use?
iOS? Seems to be selling well, but the company that makes it won't license it to third parties, so that's out.
Windows 8 / Windows Phone 7? Adds a few dollars to the cost of each unit, but it comes backed by a company that will do a lot of the customisation for me and is pushing the developer tools at everyone with a Windows machine. Sounds possible.
Android? Costs nothing, seems to be doing pretty well in the market, backed by a company that's throwing money at it. Sounds possible.
WebOS? Been on half a dozen devices, neither of which did well in the market. Backed by a company that ditches entire product lines a few weeks after launch. Tiny established ecosystem, no guaranteed of long-term support, and on top of that, the manufacturer wants to charge a license fee for it. No thanks.
Most of the reviews of WebOS I read were positive. I considered getting a Pre, but the lack of a SIP client put me off. My current 'smart' phone is a Nokia N80 and I use four features on it:
The ability to store, access, and sync addresses.
The ability to make and receive calls to POTS phones over the mobile network.
The ability to make and receive calls to POTS phones using my SIP provider via WiFi.
The ability to send and receive text messages over the mobile network.
Oh, and occasionally I use the alarm feature. If I get a new phone, it must have a superset of these features. The Pre lacks the SIP capability (or, did last time I looked). If it had a SIP client[1], I'd have bought one last year.
I got to play with a TouchPad last week. The JTalk guys have a Smalltalk VM running inside V8 on WebOS, so it's a really nice machine for running Smalltalk code. They also showed off the rest of the system - it's really beautiful to work with. I don't really have a use for a tablet, but at £100 I'd have bought one anyway - they're really nice machines.
[1] And I don't mean some command-line thing that you can just about use, I mean something that integrates with the address book properly and lets you select whether to make a call over SIP or the mobile network.
The same reason that people were selling Xbox boxes on eBay. It's not technically fraud if you provide what's advertised, and a lot of people won't read the details too carefully if they see a low price.
Stocks without dividends are technical worthless pieces of paper with a company name printed on it
No they're not. They're ownership of some percentage of the company. If you buy a bar of gold, an acre of land, or a barrel of oil, they don't pay a dividend either, but you still own something which you believe has value and can later sell to someone else who believes that it has value. You buy them because you believe that they are a safer store of wealth than currency. Modern currencies intentionally inflate to encourage this perception and to make it more attractive to invest your money in companies that produce wealth than store it in money under your mattress.
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Another thing I'd kill for in C is a limited form of RAII, namely scope guards - the ability to say at any given point, "when the scope ends, run this before leaving it"
If you are willing to limit yourself to GCC-compatible compilers (GCC, clang, ICC, Path64, and - I think - XLC), then you should look up __attribute__((cleanup)). I use this for locks in C all the time. I just have a LOCK_FOR_SCOPE() macro, and the lock is automatically released when it goes out of scope. It's even exception safe if you compile with -fexceptions, so if some C++ or Objective-C throws an exception through your stack frame, it works nicely.
Correct me if I'm wrong
Okay. The JVM uses a generational GC. This actually uses a few generations, but I'll talk about a simpler version than Java uses, because it's easier to understand:
When you allocate objects, it uses a simple bump-the-pointer allocator in the short-lived generation. If an object stays around for a while, it is moved into a longer-lived generation. If not, it is deleted. I'm skipping over most of the details here, because they're not relevant. The important thing is that the generations are scanned approximately independently, and each maintains a remembered set of all of the objects in another generation that it references.
Some things, however, are not dynamically allocated. If you write Hello World in Java, you will have a string object that you wrote as "Hello world" in your source code. This object never needs to be deallocated. Neither does the class with your static main() method. The string is simple - it doesn't have any pointers - but the class is more complicated. It may have static fields (class variables, for Smalltalk programmers) that reference other objects. The GC must be able to follow these pointers, or it will prematurely deallocate objects. The class is therefore allocated in memory that is scanned by the GC, but not managed by the GC. This is the permanent object generation: the PermGen that the grandparent was talking about. This is fine for most programs, which generate classes by compiling Java code and have a smallish fixed number of them. It's a problem for self-modifying programs that generate new classes on the fly (something that Java has had APIs for since the start).
Unfortunately, some of us have to do this little thing called 'work', which involves collaborating with people around the world, including Russia.
Aww, look at the baby AI learning to speak, isn't it cute? Can you say 'Natalie Portman,' baby AI?
So, a campaign contribution ends up being an indirect bribe, but it's still a bribe. You could probably improve matters a lot by ensuring that campaign contributions had to be anonymous, paid via an intermediary that would only report the total raised, not who paid it, so donations could not come with strings attached. You can donate money to support candidates that you agree with, not to make candidates agree with you.
Actually, I suspect most people can be trusted with power. It's only the ones that actively seek it that generally can't. If you picked 300 random people from the population to run the country for a couple of years, I would expect to see some minor abuses of power, but nothing like the kind of scale we get from career politicians.
Was it a corporate or government-run school where you completely failed to learn any history?
You're forgetting app sales. The standard model for this kind of device is to charge 30% for the app sales. HP actually has quite a nice model for selling unapproved apps too. They do the same sort of vetting as Apple for the store, but if they reject your app (or you don't want to go through the approvals process) then they will still sell it. They'll put it in a part of the store that can't be found by searching or browsing and give you a URL. You can then publish the URL on your own site and WebOS device owners can just click on it and buy. HP handles all of the payment processing for you. This means that WebOS is a much more interesting platform for developers of software that are not likely to be approved by Apple.
If you sell the entire production run, that's a large installed base. If you sell them for $300 and each person buys an average of $60 of apps, you've broken even. The fact that you've sold them all makes it more likely that people will write apps, and the availability of lots of apps makes it more likely that people will spend $60. This is why Apple hyped the hell out of the first iPhones and iPads and why Microsoft licensed DOS (and, later, Windows) to anyone who wanted it for a relatively low price. Users mean third-party applications, which mean users who will want to buy the next version of the OS / device.
Or sell them for $300, make a small loss from each one, build a large installed base, and charge 30% for apps sold through your store. If people spend an average of $60 on apps, you've broken even. If they spend more, you've made a profit. Even if they spend less on the first generation, you encourage app development by having a large base of potential customers. And the cost of the components only has to drop by a few percent before you're making a profit anyway.
Oh, and if you think putting Android on it would make it better, I'm pretty sure you've not actually used a TouchPad.
I looked on eBay in the UK, and they seem to be going for £200-300 here, which works out to about that range. I'd happily pay £100 for one, but it doesn't look likely.
Because even the editors don't RTFA here.
You feed a snake two mice, you hook up to a computer two mouses.
Does anyone, in the world, apart from you and small children, actually say mouses?
It's in my copy of The New Hackers Dictionary, which is the print copy of the Jargon File, published in 1991, claiming that it comes from vaxen (the plural of vax, which is marginally more sensible because vaxes sounds silly and there was no established plural of vax). You can find that definition online. It has nothing to do with some random comic, it's something that was briefly in vogue in the '80s and then became a sign of a poser trying to fit in with the UNIX community in the '90s, and finally of a random idiot in the '00s.
According to that site, it's alpha quality and doesn't integrate with the address book - you can't just find a person and say 'call via SIP', as per my requirements, you have to copy their number using its own dialler.
Care to point out an actual error in the grandparent's post? His account tallies pretty well with what I remember...
Apple effectively did end DRM for music. They initially said that they didn't want it, but the copyright owners insisted. Then Apple realised that they could use the DRM to lock people into the iPod / iTunes ecosystem and end up controlling most of the music distribution channel. The studios quickly realised that other vendors couldn't compete with iTunes if their music couldn't be played on the iPod, and they needed the competition to keep their slice of the revenue large and everyone else's small, so they started offering DRM-free licenses to Amazon and the like.
If you were following the licensing deals, the music industry was terrified of Apple's market dominance. They refused to license DRM-free music to Apple for as long as possible to allow competing stores to be set up (except EMI, who realised that being the only DRM-free label on iTunes gave them a competitive advantage).
If it hadn't been for Apple trying to lock people in to their channel, the studios would still be flailing around with a dozen different incompatible DRM implementations.
I'd take that over normal Windows support any day. Telephone support for a command line is a lot easier than a GUI. You just tell people to type something in - spelling it where necessary - and then read back what appears on the screen. Even better, you can just write the commands down, send them in an email, and say 'copy this into a terminal'. With a GUI, you need to tell people where to click, what to expect, where in each window to navigate, and so on. My mother had problems with her email a few months ago. Getting her to run ping and telnet commands in the terminal to establish that the connection was working was easy. Talking her through recreating the account in Thunderbird was much harder.
And if ISO 9660 file system images are so "read-only", then how does packet writing work on an actual CD?
Packet writing uses UDF, not ISO 9660. UDF was designed to allow incremental updates, ISO 9660 is read-only - if you want to append to an ISO 9660 filesystem then you need to create a multi-session disk which stores multiple ISO 9660 filesystems internally and looks through each one in order (newest to oldest) to find files.
But I have my hands full fixing stuff that is actually broken
Was that stuff broken by the script kiddie who sniffed your FTP password?
I was using WinSCP in 2001. I think it was on version 2.3 then. Learning a new tool wasn't exactly a problem - it looked like Windows Exporer, so once you'd typed in your login details (once, then it saves them) you just needed to drag and drop in exactly the same way you would with WebDAV or FTP.
If my clients were using Windows, I'd probably favour WebDAV-over-HTTPS over SFTP, simply because Explorer has support for WebDAV, while they need to install a free program to use SCP / SFTP.
Should be pretty easy to automate too - pick a load of random dictionary words, +1 the 5 of the top 10 Google results from each one, plus your site. Each G+ spam account just needs to pick a different set of random words.
Let's see, I want to make a tablet, which OS shall I use?
iOS? Seems to be selling well, but the company that makes it won't license it to third parties, so that's out.
Windows 8 / Windows Phone 7? Adds a few dollars to the cost of each unit, but it comes backed by a company that will do a lot of the customisation for me and is pushing the developer tools at everyone with a Windows machine. Sounds possible.
Android? Costs nothing, seems to be doing pretty well in the market, backed by a company that's throwing money at it. Sounds possible.
WebOS? Been on half a dozen devices, neither of which did well in the market. Backed by a company that ditches entire product lines a few weeks after launch. Tiny established ecosystem, no guaranteed of long-term support, and on top of that, the manufacturer wants to charge a license fee for it. No thanks.
Oh, and occasionally I use the alarm feature. If I get a new phone, it must have a superset of these features. The Pre lacks the SIP capability (or, did last time I looked). If it had a SIP client[1], I'd have bought one last year.
I got to play with a TouchPad last week. The JTalk guys have a Smalltalk VM running inside V8 on WebOS, so it's a really nice machine for running Smalltalk code. They also showed off the rest of the system - it's really beautiful to work with. I don't really have a use for a tablet, but at £100 I'd have bought one anyway - they're really nice machines.
[1] And I don't mean some command-line thing that you can just about use, I mean something that integrates with the address book properly and lets you select whether to make a call over SIP or the mobile network.
The same reason that people were selling Xbox boxes on eBay. It's not technically fraud if you provide what's advertised, and a lot of people won't read the details too carefully if they see a low price.
Stocks without dividends are technical worthless pieces of paper with a company name printed on it
No they're not. They're ownership of some percentage of the company. If you buy a bar of gold, an acre of land, or a barrel of oil, they don't pay a dividend either, but you still own something which you believe has value and can later sell to someone else who believes that it has value. You buy them because you believe that they are a safer store of wealth than currency. Modern currencies intentionally inflate to encourage this perception and to make it more attractive to invest your money in companies that produce wealth than store it in money under your mattress.