It's a start. Lot of "owners" think they have such far reaching power over works of art, think they get to dictate what others may and may not do.
I've heard many a museum claim that copyright gives them the authority to forbid photos. It's one thing to forbid flash photography on the grounds that flashes put out UV radiation which can damage art. But they try to forbid photos, not just flashes. Claim that it would violate copyright, even though the work of art in question is long out of copyright, and they never held ownership of any copyright over the work anyway. The Alamo also claims it's "disrespectful" to the dead. A building near downtown Dallas, the Infomart, has signs that say you can't take photos of the building, and they include in that photos of the exterior from public locations such as nearby sidewalks. They claim it's for security reasons. Some museums reveal their real fears, crying that they will not have any more visitors, not be able to sell postcards. Was funny to hear this one old lady complain about the Internet ruining their business.
One place I know of that did have a change of heart is the memorial to the Oklahoma City bombing. They still have signs up that forbid photos inside, but if you ask them, they will tell you that you can take pictures.
They're in the business of assessing possible problems with people.
Too bad they get it wrong much of the time. These guys are pig-headed, simplistic thinkers. They are more interested in covering their asses than getting the facts right. They figure it's better to make connections that aren't there, no matter how stupid, than to miss something. If that catches a few innocents in the net, they accept it as unfortunate but a necessary price of security. What I found especially striking was that one of the groups is Communist. I thought we won the Cold War? What these guys do is total House Un-American Activities Committee. These guys could also be prejudiced against smart, creative people such as college professors and actors, secretly enjoying it when they get to use their petty authority and judgments to trip them up.
But that's not a founding principle of the US. Innocent until proven guilty is. British military justice, which operated the opposite way, guilty until proven innocent, had too many cases of good people's careers and lives being wrecked over unfounded accusations. The founding fathers recognized that accusations are legion, and under a guilty until proven innocent system, they might not be able to find any acceptable people. No one would be able to qualify. Unfair systems promote corruption. The people running it can more easily abuse a system for personal gain when it is already unfair and abusive.
The entire premise of the article is bull. Are companies ever going to get off this fixation on specific programming languages? There used to be such a thing as training. Companies once did that.
Now it sounds like everyone has accepted that you should train on your own time. Worse, you have to do speculative training. Learn the specifics of some platform, and you might get a job doing it.
Last coding job I had used Perl 5. We recreated an app for a database. The original app had been discontinued in favor of a 4GL language.
Then the client decided they wanted that app coded in the 4GL language, and hired me to do it. Wow, what a lot of 80s thinking and cruft I saw. Managed to produce what they wanted, but they had to compromised a little. The input methods were typical of the era. Tried to do it all so the programmer didn't have to bother with tedious details. But if you wanted to change some of those details, you couldn't, not without a lot of extra work.
Ever used a Reverse Polish calculator? Or postfix or prefix notation? It does work. Yeah, I seriously would prefer prefix notation to superfluous parentheses.
Maybe you feel it's unclear? There's an answer to that too. Whitespace, as in Proper Indentation.
thingA
. thingB
. . thingC 4 7
. thingD thingE
Before you ask, no, the whitespace is not required, This isn't Python. It is merely there to aid coders, same as any other indentation in C source code.
Very idealistic. We could do with more transparency. Mroe than that, we could do with more equality of transparency. The rich get to hide their mistakes behind the corporate veil. Those of us who aren't executives of corporations have more limited options.
However, until the law is perfect, justice is truly fair, and our peers are totally enlightened about freedom of thought, speech, and so forth, all of which may be never, privacy is important. Is there anyone who hasn't had things to hide from our own parents? Especially our parents? Like that you got a warning for speeding while you were out on the town last night? Think of all the potentially embarrassing things there are to buy, such as porn magazines, sex toys, alcoholic drinks, hemorrhoid medicine, denture adhesive, and certain genres of music. I would love to have the hypocrisies and tyrannies uncovered and shamed out of existence by acknowledgement that lots of people have the same problems and desires. I mean things like that your parents engaged in sex to bring you into the world, but they forbid that you learn any details about sex (The stork brought you? You appeared under a cabbage leaf?), and certainly forbid that you try it! Just having a waist size connected to your name could be more than embarrassing, supposing it suggests that you are overweight, and you suffer discrimination from people who have never even seen you?
There are also political issues. Do you want it known whether you voted Republican or Democrat, or some 3rd party? Some examples of political issues are the War on Piracy and the War on Drugs. Years ago, there was the hysteria over Communism, with the House Un-American Activities Committee and the infamous Joe McCarthy ruining the careers of many in Hollywood. That has all been discredited now and we are at last easing up on drugs. Piracy however is still raging. And it can still happen again, with climate scientists such as Michael Mann among some of the more recent victims. They did their utmost to fish through his private emails for evidence that he was incompetent or a liar, and when they couldn't find good enough dirt, they exaggerated what they could. There are powerful interests that would very much like to use more transparency to force their extreme views on copyright on the rest of us. Would you like to be sued for copying a recording to another device? Arrested and your equipment seized, for timeshifting? With total transparency, they could do that. But fortunately for us all, the universe does not work that way. They cannot win, but they can hurt plenty of people before they are at last shut down. I think someday, copying will be legal, and seen as good for everyone, even artists. Until then, we all just have to be a little cautious, and keep it quiet whenever we do anything they could construe as piracy.
The "if (a = b)" syntax is among the first things newcomers to C are warned about. It's not a big problem.
Null terminated strings are a bigger problem. What do you do if you want to embed nulls in a string? Not use the entire string.h library for starters, have to write your own routines. It really is better to store the length in a simple integer, as long as it's not stupidly small like in Turbo Pascal where they set aside one measly byte, thus making the maximum length a paltry 255 characters. There are simply too many use cases where length information is needed. Having the length makes a strlen function trivial and run in constant time, instead of a time dependent upon the data. We now have the String class in the Standard Template Library which addresses these problems.
Bigger yet are the limitations of the function call syntax. This is not just C, but most programming languages that originated in those times. Most functions have a fixed number of parameters. If it's known how many parameters there are, it is not necessary to enclose the list. Basic math is done without that, eg. c = a +b instead of something gross like equal(&c,add(a,b)), Why can't functions be done the same way? Because they decided to allow variable numbers of parameters, with the printf function being the most prominent example of such a function. This was done in a very awkward manner. Consequently, most programmers avoid it. But we still have to include the parentheses even for functions with a fixed number of parameters. C enshrined parentheses as basically a sigil to distinguish function names from variable names. What does C gain from this? The ability to curry? No. Recursive functions? No, don't need variable length parameter lists for that, it does recursion anyway. The good in C's function syntax is that the programmer doesn't have to use a key word like "call" to call a function, and C has no unnecessary distinction between a function and a "procedure" as in Pascal. Can sort of do some functional style programming by passing pointers to functions. But they didn't get functions good enough. Operator overloading is an ugly hack that tries to address these inherent deficiencies. It doesn't succeed, can't go far enough. Same with polymorphism and name mangling. And C++'s addition of prefacing a parameter with an ampersand is nice, but merely a syntactic shortcut. The latest C/C++ standards also nibble at this problem with things like the introduction of "auto". But it still has the fundamental problem of excessive parentheses, like in LISP. C is all about brevity and economy, in both syntax and compiled code, but in this, they didn't do as well as they could have.
Then there's parallel programming. C wasn't designed for it, and can't do it clearly and cleanly. To be fair, there isn't a general purpose language that really nails parallel programming. Does it make sense to have to clear an array by using a loop, as in "for (i=0; i<MAX; i++) a[i] =0;"? Not if you're trying to use the massive parallelism of current commodity graphics cards. To this day, parallel programming remains a sort of black art, to be attempted only by the most skilled and intrepid programmers. Similar to the reputation that assembler still has in some programming circles, or that network programming used to have (sockets, ooh, scary!) Just include the magic library and call the magic functions, let them handle the complexities.
And that brings me to the next point, the libraries. The language designers didn't put enough consideration into libraries, or they would have realized how huge the entire set of libraries could get and made some provisions for that. Instead, years later namespaces were added. The next problem with the libraries is related to the problems with function calls. The library interface is too language specific. Those header files are a mess that makes it much harder for another language to use the related functions. A common solution is to resort to "wrappers", like m
This study looks seriously flawed. They just throw up their hands at doing a direct comparison of architectures when they try to use extremely complicated systems and sort of do their best to beat down and control all the factors that introduces. One of the basic principles of a scientific study is that independent variables are controlled. It's very hard to say how much the instruction set architecture matters when you can't tell what pipelining, out of order execution, branch prediction, speculative execution, caching, shadowing (of registers), and so on are doing to speed things up. An external factor that could influence the outcome is temperature. Maybe one computer was in a hotter corner of the test lab than the other, and had to spend extra power just overcoming the higher resistance that higher temperatures cause.
It might have been better to approach this from an angle of simulation. Simulate a more idealized computer system, one without so many factors to control.
Be happy. The universe is not structured that way. Copying happens all the time in nature. Billions and billions of bacteria create copies of themselves every day. Events that generate light or sound radiate faithful copies of energy in many directions and also can generate echoes. One person can address a crowd of thousands, and radio stations can broadcast one signal to millions, because nature does work that way.
The insanity is the direction we tried to take ideas. We've tried to treat ideas like they're gold. Try to hoard them, try to demarcate and issue certificates of ownership. Tried to apply the logic of material ownership to the immaterial. Many people have fallen for the oversimplification, and have bought the lines that "property is property" and "stealing is stealing". But those pesky ideas just won't stay safely locked up. Someone else might get the same idea without ever breaking into the vault. The people who are regularly appalled and unhappy that vaults don't protect ideas are fools. That DRM exists and has been forced into so many products agasint the wishes of people who know better, is a testament to the large numbers of people who have failed to grasp this aspect of nature. The universe is a better place because ideas can't be locked up. It's the fools who have tried mightily to make patents and copyrights work who are struggling against reality. They're fighting an unwinnable battle. They will eventually lose, but until that day comes, they continue to cause a lot of waste, grief, and damage.
Funny. I live in Texas. Cities use red light cameras. From Plano, I've received a, well, not exactly a ticket, but a notice that the car violated a city ordinance for running a red light, and the owner must pay a $75 fine.
No, that may not work. One way a city and their red light camera operating partner has devised to get around those pesky legal requirements that you get to confront your accuser and that they have to prove you were driving is to change the offense from a moving violation to a mere violation of a city ordinance. Doesn't matter who was driving, the owner gets punished regardless. It's similar to being penalized for not mowing your lawn. Your insurance rates do not go up, you don't get a strike on your driving record.
Making the crime into a violation of a city ordinance makes it harder for them to collect, as it's not as serious. An easy way to deal with an accusation is to refuse to pay. But they've also worked out ways to get you if you try that. Even though it's not a moving violation, somehow, you can't renew your driver's license until you've paid the fine. They can also call on a debt collection agency who will happliy trash your credit rating.
Don't be so dismissive of Chernobyl and Fukushima as freak, one time events.
The causes you mention are proximate causes. The root cause was human stupidity, recklessness, greed, and folly. That's what sank the Titanic. That's what has caused hundreds of oil spills, including Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez. It's what killed thousands of people in Bhopal. Upon inquiry, over and over we find that the operators had plenty of warnings and plenty of measures they could have taken to avoid problems. They just chose not to heed the warnings. The Titanic didn't have to charge ahead at full speed at night. Didn't have to cut straight through a field of icebergs.
In Fukushima's case, that recklessness manifested as several stupid decisions that saved a little money but made disaster certain if a tsunami struck. They did not build a high enough wall. The engineers knew how high it needed to be and told management, but management overruled or ignored them. Then, they didn't maintain the emergency generators. They skimped on several other measures. The people making these decisions had no business taking such gambles on behalf of the whole world. They were incompetent to understand the true risks they were taking. They had no reason to suppose that a tsunami would never hit, but they behaved as if it wouldn't happen. We would never have allowed such recklessness if we'd known. And that's another thing those fools did-- cover it up. They knew others would not approve of the risks they were taking. They knew. But instead of heeding those very legitimate fears, they denied that they were taking huge risks. They behave like ostriches, sticking their heads in the sand so they couldn't see doom approaching. Then they have the nerve to say that they are blameless and no one could have foreseen that a tsunami could be that big. The only way anyone could think that is by ignoring or dismissing most of knowledge ever recorded and studies ever done on tsunamis. They built for 3.1m and increased to 5.7m, and there had already been 8 tsunamis higher than that in the past century. The 2004 tsunami that hit Sumatra was 24m, and at a few points 30m thanks to funneling effects. They might have even tried a bit of propaganda, bribe someone to cook up bad studies showing that tsunamis are never bigger than some relatively small size.
It will happen again. We do have honest asssessment and reporting in many areas, such as passenger airplanes. Nuclear power could be operated safely. The problem is, will nuclear power be operated safely? Fukushima shows us that it won't. People can't be trusted that far. The continued efforts of TEPCO to downplay the disaster and spin it as not really their fault and also not really so horrific after all shows that they haven't learned their lesson and they still don't take safety seriously enough. Covering their asses seems to be more important than coming clean on matters that imperil the lives of thousands. One example of the spin that nuclear proponents put on the issue is number of deaths. I have pointed out repeatedly that you can't use that alone as a measure of how disastrous an accident was. By that measure, a bad bus crash (Prestonsburg, Kentucky, 27 deaths) could rank as a bigger disaster than a major hurricane (Andrew, 26 direct fatalities).
Would you put those TEPCO bozos in charge of a nuclear plant? I wouldn't.
Both. Copyright is monopolistic. Why is it that only one publisher at a time can have the "right" to make copies of works still in copyright? There's no good reason for such restrictions. As an example, anyone can print Sherlock Holmes stories. No need to ask anyone for permission. You might think that means no one can profit from printing them, and so no one does, but that is not the case.
As for better models, one word: patronage. Patronage worked for centuries. It worked for Mozart. You might suppose that means only the wealthy would patronize the arts. In Mozart's day, that was largely the case. But today we can do patronage much, much better. Thanks to vastly superior communication, the public can directly participate in the financing of art and science. That was simply not possible centuries ago. Currently we have Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Humble Bundle.
Patronage can be the mainstay, but it's not all. There's also the advertising and endorsement models. Broadcast radio and TV uses advertising.
Having to get permission to share information is indeed tyranny. Tyranny over our very thoughts. Civilization arose and advanced because we invented and improved ways of sharing knowledge. We created writing systems so we could more easily share knowledge. Sharing is the natural state. It is only relatively recently that a coalition of various small interests have conspired to change the thinking on sharing so that now it's vilified as "piracy". The Gutenberg press was a huge advancement that some, sadly predictably, attempted to suppress. One of the forces attempting to control the press was the Church. They wanted to make sure there were no inaccurate Bibles circulating amongst the people no matter how high their rank, and felt this "need" gave them the right to dictate what printers could print. They helped pioneer the whole idea of copyright, for that purpose. Today, it is unthinkable that anyone could censor the Bible. The Pope himself has no authority to tell printers that they can't print whatever version of the Bible they want.
And today, suppression is happening again with our most recent breakthrough, the Internet. It will eventually end, it's only a question of when. The sooner the better.
Most answers to these questions are concentrating on the snooping. System admins should not snoop, unless specifically told to do so by someone in authority.
But few are talking about office politics. Do not stick your head in the sand! Listening to the grapevine is not snooping. Learn what's going on the same way everyone else can, by keeping up with how the company's presentation did at the trade show and that sort of thing, not by abusing system administrator privileges to read private email and the like. You have an interest in knowing if the company is about to go bankrupt, be sold, or layoff a whole division. You also want to know if you have enemies and if so, who they are and why they hate and fear you so you can guard yourself. It may be that someone somehow views you as a threat to their job, and they'd like to get you before you get them. Doesn't matter that you aren't a threat, what matters is that they see you that way. You may be able to show them otherwise, and they'll stop trying to plant knives in your back. Or maybe not. There are a lot of sick bastards out there who want power so they can enjoy making others sweat, make their lives hell. You don't want to be surprised by your job being eliminated, and if that's likely, you want to know that with as much advance notice as possible.
You're right, I had not heard of node.js. Checking, I see that node.js was released in 2009. An eternity for regular users, but for casual users, really not all that long ago. There is plenty of old documentation out there that should be retired because it's older than node.js and Javascript 1.8.5.
In 2011, the Javascript 1.8.5 release added some sorely needed missing functionality that I used to complain about: Object.keys, and similar functions. The book I had was too old to cover these new features.
Although Javascript can be used on the server side, it's not so easy. What do you need to run a Javascript program? A browser. You don't want to have to run a browser on the server. GCC doesn't have a front end for Javascript. You could use Rhino to translate from Javascript to Java, and run that on the server side. Closure compiles Javascript to Javascript. Helpful to make Javascript run faster, not helpful to make it run. There may be some proprietary, commercial tools for compiling or running Javascript.
So, what do I not know about? What tools are there for running Javascript outside a browser? Or, is there some tiny browser like Lynx or Links that can do it?
And I have an issue with how needlessly complicated programming is. IDE's? They're a trivial addition to the problem. The problem is the entire ecosystem. For example, why is a tool like Make a language of its own? Why are revision control systems yet another level of complexity about the same as a programming language? Can you be a competent programmer without knowing about those things?
Then there's the nightmare of library code. There is no standardized way to call libraries, and maybe that's impossible, but we could have done better. We have this horrific mess of libraries tied to individual languages, with C/C++ libraries being perhaps the most prevalent. But C doesn't provide enough to make portable libraries. Need that.h file. A programmer may need to know about the informal conventions that were established to deal with name collisions. Some of this has been addressed, with additions such as namespaces. Other languages have wrappers to connect to C libraries, or they have their own libraries, or both.
The web is very messy. Web pages have become jumbled mixes of data and code. There's PHP or Python or Perl on the server side, Javascript on the client side. Why couldn't the same language work in both places? There's Java, sort of. But Java doesn't work on the client side unless the user installs a massive plugin that constantly nags users to keep it updated. Actually, just about any language can be easily used on the server side. One of the exceptions is... Javascript! Then, should browsers run executable code? No Execute has been worked into CPUs, while the web has been flying in the opposite direction.
There is politics involved too. Some Microsoft ""documentation" is actually marketing drivel. And you're always wondering what they're hiding now. Not even they know how big their own API is. Over 60,000 functions, so I've heard.
I am an ACM member, but I'm not happy with it. My biggest complaint about the ACM is their failure to understand why copyright is bad and needs massive reform or abolishment. Instead, they jump in bed, ideologically, with copyright extremists! $100 membership isn't good enough for access to the digital library, have to pay another $100 for that? What a total money grab, locking up knowledge and for what? To coerce membership fees from researchers? Aren't they supposed to be a non-profit organization? The digital library should be public! Freely available to all, including non-members. Some years, CACM has had a "special" issue in the summer devoted to intellectual property issues. Some of those CACM articles are downright shameful in their unquestioned support of the current system, preferring to dive into how to use copyright when they haven't discussed why. It's like the whole fake "teach the controversy" debate between Evolution and Creationism. Any science magazine that dared treat Creationism as if it was valid science would quickly lose all respect and become a laughingstock. But the ACM still soberly talks as if copyright can somehow still work. It's like listening to some cranks say that they can fix the problems with the Theory of Intelligent Design, just have to do more exploration and research.
It's embarrassing. On technological matters, the ACM ought to be one of the most progressive organizations in existence. Instead, they were slow to get on the Internet. Their early websites were garbage nearly devoid of content, seemingly made live only because it was even more embarrassing not to have a website at all! They were late to the party for online renewal of membership. Yes, ACM has done online renewal for years, but they weren't the first to do that, far from it. Now they're going to be late to the death of copyright.
Sharing is more than easy and natural, it's good. Sharing is so important to civilzations that early ones developed writing systems to facilitate it, and later ones have been improving it ever since. Reading and writing used to be only for the nobility, for the practical reason that educating everyone was more expense than was thought worthwhile, though this was also correctly seen as an excuse not to educate the masses. Words were terribly subversive, best if the people can't read them. The pen is not mightier than the sword if no one can read. Democracies changed that, deciding that 100% literacy was a desirable and nearly obtainable goal.
Now here we are today, and what are our supposedly democratic governments doing? Siding with those who think they have a right to lock away knowledge, those who think the worthy desire to compensate artists justifies all kinds of monstrosities and public expense, and that fair compensation can only be done through Holy Copyright.
Er, pegged to the right, I mean. That fridge may have been the least efificient model available in 1995.
I hypermile too. But here again, you'll do better with a better car, rather than sweating to make a bad car do a little better. If we took energy savings seriously, we'd smooth the undersides of our cars for starters. No more of this having the car's guts exposed to the world.
I can't quite match you, but I have our house just under 300kwh in the months with the most pleasant temperatures. There are 3 of us, and it sounds like only 1 of you. You live in a place with a friendlier climate, while I am stuck in north Texas. Last year, we used about 5200kwh. Was hovering around 10000kwh in the 1990s. Improvements in lighting, displays, and A/Cs have made more difference than being an activist about turning things off all the time. However, the biggest saver is being willing to live with greater temperature differences, setting the thermostat to 83 in the summer and 70 in the winter.
I'm looking forward to about a 10% improvement now that we have finally ditched our old fridge. It was made in 1995, and the efficiency of refrigerators was greatly improved starting in 1996. It wasn't even efficient for a 1995 model, being pegged all the way to the left on the energy usage label.
Mass is a big point. Mercury is very dense and quite a bit more massive than Ganymede and Titan and all the other moons in our solar system. Mercury is 3.3x10^23 kg, while the most massive moon, Ganymede, is only 1.48x10^23, less than half of Mercury's mass.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a start. Lot of "owners" think they have such far reaching power over works of art, think they get to dictate what others may and may not do.
I've heard many a museum claim that copyright gives them the authority to forbid photos. It's one thing to forbid flash photography on the grounds that flashes put out UV radiation which can damage art. But they try to forbid photos, not just flashes. Claim that it would violate copyright, even though the work of art in question is long out of copyright, and they never held ownership of any copyright over the work anyway. The Alamo also claims it's "disrespectful" to the dead. A building near downtown Dallas, the Infomart, has signs that say you can't take photos of the building, and they include in that photos of the exterior from public locations such as nearby sidewalks. They claim it's for security reasons. Some museums reveal their real fears, crying that they will not have any more visitors, not be able to sell postcards. Was funny to hear this one old lady complain about the Internet ruining their business.
One place I know of that did have a change of heart is the memorial to the Oklahoma City bombing. They still have signs up that forbid photos inside, but if you ask them, they will tell you that you can take pictures.
They're in the business of assessing possible problems with people.
Too bad they get it wrong much of the time. These guys are pig-headed, simplistic thinkers. They are more interested in covering their asses than getting the facts right. They figure it's better to make connections that aren't there, no matter how stupid, than to miss something. If that catches a few innocents in the net, they accept it as unfortunate but a necessary price of security. What I found especially striking was that one of the groups is Communist. I thought we won the Cold War? What these guys do is total House Un-American Activities Committee. These guys could also be prejudiced against smart, creative people such as college professors and actors, secretly enjoying it when they get to use their petty authority and judgments to trip them up.
But that's not a founding principle of the US. Innocent until proven guilty is. British military justice, which operated the opposite way, guilty until proven innocent, had too many cases of good people's careers and lives being wrecked over unfounded accusations. The founding fathers recognized that accusations are legion, and under a guilty until proven innocent system, they might not be able to find any acceptable people. No one would be able to qualify. Unfair systems promote corruption. The people running it can more easily abuse a system for personal gain when it is already unfair and abusive.
The entire premise of the article is bull. Are companies ever going to get off this fixation on specific programming languages? There used to be such a thing as training. Companies once did that.
Now it sounds like everyone has accepted that you should train on your own time. Worse, you have to do speculative training. Learn the specifics of some platform, and you might get a job doing it.
Last coding job I had used Perl 5. We recreated an app for a database. The original app had been discontinued in favor of a 4GL language.
Then the client decided they wanted that app coded in the 4GL language, and hired me to do it. Wow, what a lot of 80s thinking and cruft I saw. Managed to produce what they wanted, but they had to compromised a little. The input methods were typical of the era. Tried to do it all so the programmer didn't have to bother with tedious details. But if you wanted to change some of those details, you couldn't, not without a lot of extra work.
Ever used a Reverse Polish calculator? Or postfix or prefix notation? It does work. Yeah, I seriously would prefer prefix notation to superfluous parentheses.
Maybe you feel it's unclear? There's an answer to that too. Whitespace, as in Proper Indentation.
thingA
. thingB
. . thingC 4 7
. thingD thingE
Before you ask, no, the whitespace is not required, This isn't Python. It is merely there to aid coders, same as any other indentation in C source code.
Very idealistic. We could do with more transparency. Mroe than that, we could do with more equality of transparency. The rich get to hide their mistakes behind the corporate veil. Those of us who aren't executives of corporations have more limited options.
However, until the law is perfect, justice is truly fair, and our peers are totally enlightened about freedom of thought, speech, and so forth, all of which may be never, privacy is important. Is there anyone who hasn't had things to hide from our own parents? Especially our parents? Like that you got a warning for speeding while you were out on the town last night? Think of all the potentially embarrassing things there are to buy, such as porn magazines, sex toys, alcoholic drinks, hemorrhoid medicine, denture adhesive, and certain genres of music. I would love to have the hypocrisies and tyrannies uncovered and shamed out of existence by acknowledgement that lots of people have the same problems and desires. I mean things like that your parents engaged in sex to bring you into the world, but they forbid that you learn any details about sex (The stork brought you? You appeared under a cabbage leaf?), and certainly forbid that you try it! Just having a waist size connected to your name could be more than embarrassing, supposing it suggests that you are overweight, and you suffer discrimination from people who have never even seen you?
There are also political issues. Do you want it known whether you voted Republican or Democrat, or some 3rd party? Some examples of political issues are the War on Piracy and the War on Drugs. Years ago, there was the hysteria over Communism, with the House Un-American Activities Committee and the infamous Joe McCarthy ruining the careers of many in Hollywood. That has all been discredited now and we are at last easing up on drugs. Piracy however is still raging. And it can still happen again, with climate scientists such as Michael Mann among some of the more recent victims. They did their utmost to fish through his private emails for evidence that he was incompetent or a liar, and when they couldn't find good enough dirt, they exaggerated what they could. There are powerful interests that would very much like to use more transparency to force their extreme views on copyright on the rest of us. Would you like to be sued for copying a recording to another device? Arrested and your equipment seized, for timeshifting? With total transparency, they could do that. But fortunately for us all, the universe does not work that way. They cannot win, but they can hurt plenty of people before they are at last shut down. I think someday, copying will be legal, and seen as good for everyone, even artists. Until then, we all just have to be a little cautious, and keep it quiet whenever we do anything they could construe as piracy.
The "if (a = b)" syntax is among the first things newcomers to C are warned about. It's not a big problem.
Null terminated strings are a bigger problem. What do you do if you want to embed nulls in a string? Not use the entire string.h library for starters, have to write your own routines. It really is better to store the length in a simple integer, as long as it's not stupidly small like in Turbo Pascal where they set aside one measly byte, thus making the maximum length a paltry 255 characters. There are simply too many use cases where length information is needed. Having the length makes a strlen function trivial and run in constant time, instead of a time dependent upon the data. We now have the String class in the Standard Template Library which addresses these problems.
Bigger yet are the limitations of the function call syntax. This is not just C, but most programming languages that originated in those times. Most functions have a fixed number of parameters. If it's known how many parameters there are, it is not necessary to enclose the list. Basic math is done without that, eg. c = a +b instead of something gross like equal(&c,add(a,b)), Why can't functions be done the same way? Because they decided to allow variable numbers of parameters, with the printf function being the most prominent example of such a function. This was done in a very awkward manner. Consequently, most programmers avoid it. But we still have to include the parentheses even for functions with a fixed number of parameters. C enshrined parentheses as basically a sigil to distinguish function names from variable names. What does C gain from this? The ability to curry? No. Recursive functions? No, don't need variable length parameter lists for that, it does recursion anyway. The good in C's function syntax is that the programmer doesn't have to use a key word like "call" to call a function, and C has no unnecessary distinction between a function and a "procedure" as in Pascal. Can sort of do some functional style programming by passing pointers to functions. But they didn't get functions good enough. Operator overloading is an ugly hack that tries to address these inherent deficiencies. It doesn't succeed, can't go far enough. Same with polymorphism and name mangling. And C++'s addition of prefacing a parameter with an ampersand is nice, but merely a syntactic shortcut. The latest C/C++ standards also nibble at this problem with things like the introduction of "auto". But it still has the fundamental problem of excessive parentheses, like in LISP. C is all about brevity and economy, in both syntax and compiled code, but in this, they didn't do as well as they could have.
Then there's parallel programming. C wasn't designed for it, and can't do it clearly and cleanly. To be fair, there isn't a general purpose language that really nails parallel programming. Does it make sense to have to clear an array by using a loop, as in "for (i=0; i<MAX; i++) a[i] =0;"? Not if you're trying to use the massive parallelism of current commodity graphics cards. To this day, parallel programming remains a sort of black art, to be attempted only by the most skilled and intrepid programmers. Similar to the reputation that assembler still has in some programming circles, or that network programming used to have (sockets, ooh, scary!) Just include the magic library and call the magic functions, let them handle the complexities.
And that brings me to the next point, the libraries. The language designers didn't put enough consideration into libraries, or they would have realized how huge the entire set of libraries could get and made some provisions for that. Instead, years later namespaces were added. The next problem with the libraries is related to the problems with function calls. The library interface is too language specific. Those header files are a mess that makes it much harder for another language to use the related functions. A common solution is to resort to "wrappers", like m
This study looks seriously flawed. They just throw up their hands at doing a direct comparison of architectures when they try to use extremely complicated systems and sort of do their best to beat down and control all the factors that introduces. One of the basic principles of a scientific study is that independent variables are controlled. It's very hard to say how much the instruction set architecture matters when you can't tell what pipelining, out of order execution, branch prediction, speculative execution, caching, shadowing (of registers), and so on are doing to speed things up. An external factor that could influence the outcome is temperature. Maybe one computer was in a hotter corner of the test lab than the other, and had to spend extra power just overcoming the higher resistance that higher temperatures cause.
It might have been better to approach this from an angle of simulation. Simulate a more idealized computer system, one without so many factors to control.
I have TWC and happened to be awake and doing a little Internet surfing around 4AM CST. My connection went down. Now I know what happened.
Be happy. The universe is not structured that way. Copying happens all the time in nature. Billions and billions of bacteria create copies of themselves every day. Events that generate light or sound radiate faithful copies of energy in many directions and also can generate echoes. One person can address a crowd of thousands, and radio stations can broadcast one signal to millions, because nature does work that way.
The insanity is the direction we tried to take ideas. We've tried to treat ideas like they're gold. Try to hoard them, try to demarcate and issue certificates of ownership. Tried to apply the logic of material ownership to the immaterial. Many people have fallen for the oversimplification, and have bought the lines that "property is property" and "stealing is stealing". But those pesky ideas just won't stay safely locked up. Someone else might get the same idea without ever breaking into the vault. The people who are regularly appalled and unhappy that vaults don't protect ideas are fools. That DRM exists and has been forced into so many products agasint the wishes of people who know better, is a testament to the large numbers of people who have failed to grasp this aspect of nature. The universe is a better place because ideas can't be locked up. It's the fools who have tried mightily to make patents and copyrights work who are struggling against reality. They're fighting an unwinnable battle. They will eventually lose, but until that day comes, they continue to cause a lot of waste, grief, and damage.
Funny. I live in Texas. Cities use red light cameras. From Plano, I've received a, well, not exactly a ticket, but a notice that the car violated a city ordinance for running a red light, and the owner must pay a $75 fine.
No, that may not work. One way a city and their red light camera operating partner has devised to get around those pesky legal requirements that you get to confront your accuser and that they have to prove you were driving is to change the offense from a moving violation to a mere violation of a city ordinance. Doesn't matter who was driving, the owner gets punished regardless. It's similar to being penalized for not mowing your lawn. Your insurance rates do not go up, you don't get a strike on your driving record.
Making the crime into a violation of a city ordinance makes it harder for them to collect, as it's not as serious. An easy way to deal with an accusation is to refuse to pay. But they've also worked out ways to get you if you try that. Even though it's not a moving violation, somehow, you can't renew your driver's license until you've paid the fine. They can also call on a debt collection agency who will happliy trash your credit rating.
Don't be so dismissive of Chernobyl and Fukushima as freak, one time events.
The causes you mention are proximate causes. The root cause was human stupidity, recklessness, greed, and folly. That's what sank the Titanic. That's what has caused hundreds of oil spills, including Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez. It's what killed thousands of people in Bhopal. Upon inquiry, over and over we find that the operators had plenty of warnings and plenty of measures they could have taken to avoid problems. They just chose not to heed the warnings. The Titanic didn't have to charge ahead at full speed at night. Didn't have to cut straight through a field of icebergs.
In Fukushima's case, that recklessness manifested as several stupid decisions that saved a little money but made disaster certain if a tsunami struck. They did not build a high enough wall. The engineers knew how high it needed to be and told management, but management overruled or ignored them. Then, they didn't maintain the emergency generators. They skimped on several other measures. The people making these decisions had no business taking such gambles on behalf of the whole world. They were incompetent to understand the true risks they were taking. They had no reason to suppose that a tsunami would never hit, but they behaved as if it wouldn't happen. We would never have allowed such recklessness if we'd known. And that's another thing those fools did-- cover it up. They knew others would not approve of the risks they were taking. They knew. But instead of heeding those very legitimate fears, they denied that they were taking huge risks. They behave like ostriches, sticking their heads in the sand so they couldn't see doom approaching. Then they have the nerve to say that they are blameless and no one could have foreseen that a tsunami could be that big. The only way anyone could think that is by ignoring or dismissing most of knowledge ever recorded and studies ever done on tsunamis. They built for 3.1m and increased to 5.7m, and there had already been 8 tsunamis higher than that in the past century. The 2004 tsunami that hit Sumatra was 24m, and at a few points 30m thanks to funneling effects. They might have even tried a bit of propaganda, bribe someone to cook up bad studies showing that tsunamis are never bigger than some relatively small size.
It will happen again. We do have honest asssessment and reporting in many areas, such as passenger airplanes. Nuclear power could be operated safely. The problem is, will nuclear power be operated safely? Fukushima shows us that it won't. People can't be trusted that far. The continued efforts of TEPCO to downplay the disaster and spin it as not really their fault and also not really so horrific after all shows that they haven't learned their lesson and they still don't take safety seriously enough. Covering their asses seems to be more important than coming clean on matters that imperil the lives of thousands. One example of the spin that nuclear proponents put on the issue is number of deaths. I have pointed out repeatedly that you can't use that alone as a measure of how disastrous an accident was. By that measure, a bad bus crash (Prestonsburg, Kentucky, 27 deaths) could rank as a bigger disaster than a major hurricane (Andrew, 26 direct fatalities).
Would you put those TEPCO bozos in charge of a nuclear plant? I wouldn't.
Both. Copyright is monopolistic. Why is it that only one publisher at a time can have the "right" to make copies of works still in copyright? There's no good reason for such restrictions. As an example, anyone can print Sherlock Holmes stories. No need to ask anyone for permission. You might think that means no one can profit from printing them, and so no one does, but that is not the case.
As for better models, one word: patronage. Patronage worked for centuries. It worked for Mozart. You might suppose that means only the wealthy would patronize the arts. In Mozart's day, that was largely the case. But today we can do patronage much, much better. Thanks to vastly superior communication, the public can directly participate in the financing of art and science. That was simply not possible centuries ago. Currently we have Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Humble Bundle.
Patronage can be the mainstay, but it's not all. There's also the advertising and endorsement models. Broadcast radio and TV uses advertising.
Having to get permission to share information is indeed tyranny. Tyranny over our very thoughts. Civilization arose and advanced because we invented and improved ways of sharing knowledge. We created writing systems so we could more easily share knowledge. Sharing is the natural state. It is only relatively recently that a coalition of various small interests have conspired to change the thinking on sharing so that now it's vilified as "piracy". The Gutenberg press was a huge advancement that some, sadly predictably, attempted to suppress. One of the forces attempting to control the press was the Church. They wanted to make sure there were no inaccurate Bibles circulating amongst the people no matter how high their rank, and felt this "need" gave them the right to dictate what printers could print. They helped pioneer the whole idea of copyright, for that purpose. Today, it is unthinkable that anyone could censor the Bible. The Pope himself has no authority to tell printers that they can't print whatever version of the Bible they want.
And today, suppression is happening again with our most recent breakthrough, the Internet. It will eventually end, it's only a question of when. The sooner the better.
Isn't "Documentation" a 4-Letter Word?
docx ?
Most answers to these questions are concentrating on the snooping. System admins should not snoop, unless specifically told to do so by someone in authority.
But few are talking about office politics. Do not stick your head in the sand! Listening to the grapevine is not snooping. Learn what's going on the same way everyone else can, by keeping up with how the company's presentation did at the trade show and that sort of thing, not by abusing system administrator privileges to read private email and the like. You have an interest in knowing if the company is about to go bankrupt, be sold, or layoff a whole division. You also want to know if you have enemies and if so, who they are and why they hate and fear you so you can guard yourself. It may be that someone somehow views you as a threat to their job, and they'd like to get you before you get them. Doesn't matter that you aren't a threat, what matters is that they see you that way. You may be able to show them otherwise, and they'll stop trying to plant knives in your back. Or maybe not. There are a lot of sick bastards out there who want power so they can enjoy making others sweat, make their lives hell. You don't want to be surprised by your job being eliminated, and if that's likely, you want to know that with as much advance notice as possible.
You're right, I had not heard of node.js. Checking, I see that node.js was released in 2009. An eternity for regular users, but for casual users, really not all that long ago. There is plenty of old documentation out there that should be retired because it's older than node.js and Javascript 1.8.5.
In 2011, the Javascript 1.8.5 release added some sorely needed missing functionality that I used to complain about: Object.keys, and similar functions. The book I had was too old to cover these new features.
Although Javascript can be used on the server side, it's not so easy. What do you need to run a Javascript program? A browser. You don't want to have to run a browser on the server. GCC doesn't have a front end for Javascript. You could use Rhino to translate from Javascript to Java, and run that on the server side. Closure compiles Javascript to Javascript. Helpful to make Javascript run faster, not helpful to make it run. There may be some proprietary, commercial tools for compiling or running Javascript.
So, what do I not know about? What tools are there for running Javascript outside a browser? Or, is there some tiny browser like Lynx or Links that can do it?
And I have an issue with how needlessly complicated programming is. IDE's? They're a trivial addition to the problem. The problem is the entire ecosystem. For example, why is a tool like Make a language of its own? Why are revision control systems yet another level of complexity about the same as a programming language? Can you be a competent programmer without knowing about those things?
Then there's the nightmare of library code. There is no standardized way to call libraries, and maybe that's impossible, but we could have done better. We have this horrific mess of libraries tied to individual languages, with C/C++ libraries being perhaps the most prevalent. But C doesn't provide enough to make portable libraries. Need that .h file. A programmer may need to know about the informal conventions that were established to deal with name collisions. Some of this has been addressed, with additions such as namespaces. Other languages have wrappers to connect to C libraries, or they have their own libraries, or both.
The web is very messy. Web pages have become jumbled mixes of data and code. There's PHP or Python or Perl on the server side, Javascript on the client side. Why couldn't the same language work in both places? There's Java, sort of. But Java doesn't work on the client side unless the user installs a massive plugin that constantly nags users to keep it updated. Actually, just about any language can be easily used on the server side. One of the exceptions is... Javascript! Then, should browsers run executable code? No Execute has been worked into CPUs, while the web has been flying in the opposite direction.
There is politics involved too. Some Microsoft ""documentation" is actually marketing drivel. And you're always wondering what they're hiding now. Not even they know how big their own API is. Over 60,000 functions, so I've heard.
I am an ACM member, but I'm not happy with it. My biggest complaint about the ACM is their failure to understand why copyright is bad and needs massive reform or abolishment. Instead, they jump in bed, ideologically, with copyright extremists! $100 membership isn't good enough for access to the digital library, have to pay another $100 for that? What a total money grab, locking up knowledge and for what? To coerce membership fees from researchers? Aren't they supposed to be a non-profit organization? The digital library should be public! Freely available to all, including non-members. Some years, CACM has had a "special" issue in the summer devoted to intellectual property issues. Some of those CACM articles are downright shameful in their unquestioned support of the current system, preferring to dive into how to use copyright when they haven't discussed why. It's like the whole fake "teach the controversy" debate between Evolution and Creationism. Any science magazine that dared treat Creationism as if it was valid science would quickly lose all respect and become a laughingstock. But the ACM still soberly talks as if copyright can somehow still work. It's like listening to some cranks say that they can fix the problems with the Theory of Intelligent Design, just have to do more exploration and research.
It's embarrassing. On technological matters, the ACM ought to be one of the most progressive organizations in existence. Instead, they were slow to get on the Internet. Their early websites were garbage nearly devoid of content, seemingly made live only because it was even more embarrassing not to have a website at all! They were late to the party for online renewal of membership. Yes, ACM has done online renewal for years, but they weren't the first to do that, far from it. Now they're going to be late to the death of copyright.
Sharing is more than easy and natural, it's good. Sharing is so important to civilzations that early ones developed writing systems to facilitate it, and later ones have been improving it ever since. Reading and writing used to be only for the nobility, for the practical reason that educating everyone was more expense than was thought worthwhile, though this was also correctly seen as an excuse not to educate the masses. Words were terribly subversive, best if the people can't read them. The pen is not mightier than the sword if no one can read. Democracies changed that, deciding that 100% literacy was a desirable and nearly obtainable goal.
Now here we are today, and what are our supposedly democratic governments doing? Siding with those who think they have a right to lock away knowledge, those who think the worthy desire to compensate artists justifies all kinds of monstrosities and public expense, and that fair compensation can only be done through Holy Copyright.
Sharing should be encouraged. By everyone.
Er, pegged to the right, I mean. That fridge may have been the least efificient model available in 1995.
I hypermile too. But here again, you'll do better with a better car, rather than sweating to make a bad car do a little better. If we took energy savings seriously, we'd smooth the undersides of our cars for starters. No more of this having the car's guts exposed to the world.
I can't quite match you, but I have our house just under 300kwh in the months with the most pleasant temperatures. There are 3 of us, and it sounds like only 1 of you. You live in a place with a friendlier climate, while I am stuck in north Texas. Last year, we used about 5200kwh. Was hovering around 10000kwh in the 1990s. Improvements in lighting, displays, and A/Cs have made more difference than being an activist about turning things off all the time. However, the biggest saver is being willing to live with greater temperature differences, setting the thermostat to 83 in the summer and 70 in the winter.
I'm looking forward to about a 10% improvement now that we have finally ditched our old fridge. It was made in 1995, and the efficiency of refrigerators was greatly improved starting in 1996. It wasn't even efficient for a 1995 model, being pegged all the way to the left on the energy usage label.
To be fair, no car, not a little econobox nor a big SUV, is going to do well in a collision with a tractor trailer.
Mass is a big point. Mercury is very dense and quite a bit more massive than Ganymede and Titan and all the other moons in our solar system. Mercury is 3.3x10^23 kg, while the most massive moon, Ganymede, is only 1.48x10^23, less than half of Mercury's mass.