Going to the moon could have been seen as a waste of resources, but it brought back rocks that has helped us understand our own planets past.
Going over the Atlantic in the 1400s was probably a waste of resources, I mean, people were still clinging over the idea that the Earth was flat at that time, but yet, somehow someone went over in order to find another way to India (sort of suggesting that at least some people thought the Earth was round), but in anycase, what they found was a new continent, but yeah, it was a waste of resources anyway. I mean, people where pretty sure that the ships would fall of the edge of the planet then.
People experimenting with flying in the 1800s and early 1900s where probably wasting resources as well, I mean, what's the point. You could go (almost) anywhere on the planet by ship, horse and foot.
Sending up the first satellites was a waste of resources, I mean, we have no use for meteorological reports or detailed maps or navigation systems. I mean, we where doing fine before this, and who would have known that those applications would be developed using satellites.
In-fact, our early ancestors leaving Africa probably wasted a lot of resources transporting themselves to Europe and Asia, what is the point of going somewhere at all? They should have stayed in Africa and made sure that the problems at home where solved before they decided to leave.
This is the reason that some universities (like Chalmers in Gothenburg) are using Haskell and assembly (in parallell (well, the assembly has to be encoded in bits by hand, but anyway)) as first languages.
Although while some might have hacked in assembly before uni, it is very unlikely that they would have written any Haskell, so they are basically telling the CSE students that start... "you don't know nothing yet". I kind of liked the idea, when I started there I was seriously suffering from the perfect programmer syndrome and it did give me some perspective on things.
So, it is perfectly possible to teach people exposed to BASIC (though I was exposed to C/C++, assembly and Pascal when I started), you just have to shock them enough.
FTFA: "IBM said that computational scaling overcomes these limitations by using mathematical techniques to modify the shape of the masks and the characteristics of the illuminating source used to image the circuits for each layer of an integrated circuit."
That gives you an idea. They are not being more secretive than normal.
When I take over the world, I will instate the capital punishment for the misuse of units.
Usage of non SI or IEEE units will be punishable with either: 1) Prison, 10 years for every magnitude of error made in minor offences (i.e. use of m instead of M or vice versa, or mb instead of MiB), followed by death. 2) Quick Death on the spot for other offences (use of arcane units, this especially include the bar as it is very easy to know what it is in kPa).
I have a MPL licensed project on Google Code. I am just wondering when they banned it, and how this ban was communicated with the users?
There is nothing in the google code blog (which I regularly check for updates through RSS) as I can see it, and I have not received any information at all as manager of an MPL project.
What consequences would the ban have on already existing projects?
This was already decided by the federal authorities (the EU) in the council of ministers a couple years ago. They where kind enough to ignore the European parliament's opinion as much as possible; as the council threatened to have it treated as a judicial cooperation matter (i.e. third pillar and only for the council).
Could people start realising this, that certain issues are decided on federal level here in Europe, and maybe fight it there. Whenever the federal law is implemented, it is to late to change it, with exception of some of the details (such as who is allowed to access the data).
The thing is about storing traffic data, such as the time stamps and from and to address of the e-mails being sent. This data will be available even in the case you encrypt your e-mails.
Most other states have implementing this, allowing the police, and only the police to request extracts of the traffic data registers when investigating crimes. The british version of this seem to go further in the access rights to the data, allowing not only the police to access the data but also for any other authority not involved in criminal investigations and without court orders.
It would be interesting to see if this would be in breach of the European data protection laws.
I am living in the UK, but since I am not a citizen, I am not allowed to vote (taxed without representation); from what I'd reckon, there is a pervasive conservative culture here (certainly not in my circles), where people are still protesting to the decimalisation of the Pound and the introduction of the metric system for goods.
The point being, the internet is this new and scary thing that only "hackers" use, so they might as well try to control it as much as possible. No real brit would try to use it anyway.
The point is that it is either a Union of states and in that case the logical place to aprove it is in the local parliaments. If it is a Union of people, we can discuss about referendums, I dont mind having one, but it must in that case be a common one for all of Europe.
As said, individual referendums is a joke on democracy, do you think it is fair that 1.6M irish voters (out of 3M eligible) of which 860k voted no, have the opportunity to block the further developments of the Union which have a POPULATION OF 500M. This means that a mere 0.172 percent of the European population have voted against, and this is blocking the progress of the Union.
Having individual referendums in each state would not be fair either, what if the majority of the European voters supported the treaty but in Ireland there was an overweight of no-votes, how would you interprete that outcome?
No, the only referendum that would suit this kind of question would be a joint one, but perhaps with parliamentary approvals as a compliment.
The joke on democracy is also that the Irish voters in the name of democracy voted against the treaty which would ensure more areas in which the European Parliament have co-decision rights in it, i.e. they voted to keep the curent organisation where the unelected council have legislative rights in certain areas.
Congratulations, on behalf of the other 499.4M citizens of Europe I give my deepest thanks to the Irish no-voters, thank you for deciding this for the rest of us.
Technically you are right, but when inserting a SIM from an other operator in another state/country, I include that switching SIM is not just about the physical act of switching SIM but also includes the fact that the other SIM will work in the phone, i.e. unlocked. Now, I know that you can unlock it through hacks, and also get an unlocked one in France or Belgium, but looking on the hacks, they seem to have been unreliable and updating the phone software with patches from Apple is really out of the question in that case.
At the moment, getting an unlocked phone in France is possible, but it is quite a lot more expensive.
What they should do is to introduce a subsidised telephone, where you get a contract (with premature termination penalties), and that is unlocked. I would be happy to add maybe a EUR 100 extra for that phone compared to the network locked versions.
Yes, there is no front facing video-camera. One of the key points of 3G is that there is native video conferencing support in the networks.
Further, can you ge an unlocked version (even if subsidised with a contract would be great), I refuse to pay anything for a phone if I cannot switch SIM card in it. I live in the UK, have my parents in Sweden and my girlfriends family is in Belgium and I am going to the Netherlands a lot for work.
So, tell me, even though the EU have done a lot of work in capping the roaming fees, they are still way to high, and especially for data transfers, why would I get an iPhone. I would really want one, but without front facing camera and reasonable options to ge an unlocked phone (I dont mind signing a contract in my country of residence), why the heck would I get one.
Frankly, I will not get the iPhone until those items are fixed on the todo list.
Should we use other names for the weekdays and the months as well. I mean, if we should not refer to one god in the year, why should we honour Odin (Wednesday), Thor (Thursday) or the roman gods in the names of the months. I suppose we can keep the name of July and August since they name roman emperors, but we should quickly stop calling March in the name of the roman god of war.
I do like the CE / BCE because they actually have a meaning in English, but really, claiming that it should be used because of the religious baggage in AD/BC is just a lot of crap if you don't try to push for new weekdays and months.
"Ada has an equivilant with packed types. You can set the 'Size attribute on custom types with bit precision, and you can pack multiple custom types into a record just like bitfields. We use this to read in packed data from hardware all the time."
Yes, this is true, and it is one of the areas where Ada is very nice, i.e. for doing packet decoding (though in my opinion, erlang is nicer in this aspect).
The bad thing is that the syntax for declaring your packed records in Ada is a bit redundant.
Well, there are bit fields in C. There is no bit type, since there is no machine that actually supports working with single bit datablocks.
Yes, there are issues with C. Yes, Ada may have nice features, but the language is extremely difficult to learn and leads to excessively verbose code (this is not a good thing, since it makes it more difficult to grasp what an expression that would have been 1 line of clean C is suddenly 3 or 4 lines of Ada).
Note, I write Ada professionally, and it is a decent language for some tasks, but systems programming is not one of them.
The article mention Misra-C for enhanced safety, but that is just a myth. Misra-C exists in order to support crappy compilers for embedded chipsets.
Misra makes the following statement illegal for example: "if (x == 5)", instead it has to be written as "if (5 == x)" in order to prevent bugs from missing one of the =. Note, that any reasonable C compiler (and it would be better to have a certification of the compilers that are used instead of forcing in unintuitive code) will give you a warning about assigning something as "if (x = 5)".
But in order to fall back to the post, firstly as noted, there are bit fields in C, and you can use them to represent sequences of bits in 90% of the cases where you need to.
C has bitwise operators that actually works (compared to Ada), which makes it a lot more suitable for bitmanipulation than Ada.
C also treat arrays and pointers as the same, and pointers are not checked, and you can cast data and pointers to whatever you want, this is why it is suitable for low level memory manipulation.
The thing is not really that C could not be better on low level programming, it could definitely be improved. But the plain thing is, there is nothing better for the task out there.
I can see that D might have a future though, but it is not there yet.
Well, with democratic, if you mean not directly elected, then you are right.
The commission is appointed my the state governments of the EU and scrutinised by the European parliament (and since the last time it is clear that they can kick out single members that they don't like).
Now, compare this with how the state cabinets are elected in a parliamentarian system (as is the case in all of EU), the parliament is elected and they appoint a government. The exact contents of this government is typically arranged by who will be the prime-minister.
My point is that there is not anything more undemocratic with the commission than with the national cabinets.
The commission do not have legislative power, they did try to push through software patents, yes, but the attempt was stopped by the elected european parliament.
There is however democratic issues with the EU, but these are mostly laid out at the council. They are an unelected body (well indirectly elected) that have legislative power. The council severe issues with its legitimacy. They were for example attempting to approve the software patents directive in the wrong forum (agricultural and fishery council IIRC).
The council is made out of the state governments and cannot be discharged if they behave badly, as this would mean discharging all the state governments. It would be more prudent to have a senate appointed by the states (or elections in the states), that could be kicked out in its whole, but this is another discussion.
The commission did lay down proposals for patents, but it was their right to make proposals for new laws. The parliament discharged the patent directive with something like 600 votes against 50.
This was exactly the reason that I did not get a 360 last week. I looked at the existing consoles, and the 360 came with to many options for me to bother about (and why the heck would I pay 100 pounds extra for the Elite edition when the only thing I cared about in it was the HDMI port), the PS3 was too bloody expensive. So, I ended up getting a Wii (with the added bonus of that my girlfriend actually likes the Wii-games so we can play together).
A lot of languages can be optimised more than C due to C's pointer semantics. Especially troublesome is that two pointers may alias the same objects (this is especially noticeable if one compares C with Fortran).
It is however possible in C99 to use the restrict keyword to tell the compiler that aliasing is forbidden, this put C on par with Fortran in speed on big mathematical problems. This is also an issue when comparing C with Ada, but easily addressed with restricted pointers.
By the way, I assume you are the same McCabe that shows up in the code complexity measurements that we produce.
Interesting article indeed. But this is not really any news, handwritten assembly is not efficient on complex CPU architectures such as modern CPUs or DSPs (with a few exceptions naturally). It started already with the first RISC machines in the early 80s.
Yes, you can do things with child packages. But in order to squeeze out the last percent of coverage, sometimes, you need access to the internals of the package.
The problem with Ada is that you cannot do that, unless you move all the package state into the spec (well, the private parts in the spec). This said, the problem is that the encapsulation rules of the Ada language makes unit-testing with 100% coverage very difficult and time consuming.
As said, there is a lot of things that you CAN do in the language, but they are not necessarily simple and easy to do. The encapsulation rules in Java are much more suitable for writing good unit-tests.
I do think that as part of the application layer of the embedded software, Ada is decent. But for the system layer, the language is more a nuisance.
One of the key issues is that the language actively encourages verbosity over clarity, meaning that something that you could write as one line of C (and very easy to read C by the way), can sometimes span several lines in Ada, which mean that you spend more time reading and trying to understand the expression because it is so long, this is especially noticeable when expressing complex bit wise expressions.
Slashdot Mirror
Going to the moon could have been seen as a waste of resources, but it brought back rocks that has helped us understand our own planets past.
Going over the Atlantic in the 1400s was probably a waste of resources, I mean, people were still clinging over the idea that the Earth was flat at that time, but yet, somehow someone went over in order to find another way to India (sort of suggesting that at least some people thought the Earth was round), but in anycase, what they found was a new continent, but yeah, it was a waste of resources anyway. I mean, people where pretty sure that the ships would fall of the edge of the planet then.
People experimenting with flying in the 1800s and early 1900s where probably wasting resources as well, I mean, what's the point. You could go (almost) anywhere on the planet by ship, horse and foot.
Sending up the first satellites was a waste of resources, I mean, we have no use for meteorological reports or detailed maps or navigation systems. I mean, we where doing fine before this, and who would have known that those applications would be developed using satellites.
In-fact, our early ancestors leaving Africa probably wasted a lot of resources transporting themselves to Europe and Asia, what is the point of going somewhere at all? They should have stayed in Africa and made sure that the problems at home where solved before they decided to leave.
This is the reason that some universities (like Chalmers in Gothenburg) are using Haskell and assembly (in parallell (well, the assembly has to be encoded in bits by hand, but anyway)) as first languages.
Although while some might have hacked in assembly before uni, it is very unlikely that they would have written any Haskell, so they are basically telling the CSE students that start... "you don't know nothing yet". I kind of liked the idea, when I started there I was seriously suffering from the perfect programmer syndrome and it did give me some perspective on things.
So, it is perfectly possible to teach people exposed to BASIC (though I was exposed to C/C++, assembly and Pascal when I started), you just have to shock them enough.
FTFA: "IBM said that computational scaling overcomes these limitations by using mathematical techniques to modify the shape of the masks and the characteristics of the illuminating source used to image the circuits for each layer of an integrated circuit."
That gives you an idea. They are not being more secretive than normal.
When I take over the world, I will instate the capital punishment for the misuse of units.
Usage of non SI or IEEE units will be punishable with either:
1) Prison, 10 years for every magnitude of error made in minor offences (i.e. use of m instead of M or vice versa, or mb instead of MiB), followed by death.
2) Quick Death on the spot for other offences (use of arcane units, this especially include the bar as it is very easy to know what it is in kPa).
I have a MPL licensed project on Google Code. I am just wondering when they banned it, and how this ban was communicated with the users?
There is nothing in the google code blog (which I regularly check for updates through RSS) as I can see it, and I have not received any information at all as manager of an MPL project.
What consequences would the ban have on already existing projects?
Thank you, I just spent 2h watching that when I should have been doing something useful... :)
This was already decided by the federal authorities (the EU) in the council of ministers a couple years ago. They where kind enough to ignore the European parliament's opinion as much as possible; as the council threatened to have it treated as a judicial cooperation matter (i.e. third pillar and only for the council).
Could people start realising this, that certain issues are decided on federal level here in Europe, and maybe fight it there. Whenever the federal law is implemented, it is to late to change it, with exception of some of the details (such as who is allowed to access the data).
The thing is about storing traffic data, such as the time stamps and from and to address of the e-mails being sent. This data will be available even in the case you encrypt your e-mails.
Most other states have implementing this, allowing the police, and only the police to request extracts of the traffic data registers when investigating crimes. The british version of this seem to go further in the access rights to the data, allowing not only the police to access the data but also for any other authority not involved in criminal investigations and without court orders.
It would be interesting to see if this would be in breach of the European data protection laws.
I am living in the UK, but since I am not a citizen, I am not allowed to vote (taxed without representation); from what I'd reckon, there is a pervasive conservative culture here (certainly not in my circles), where people are still protesting to the decimalisation of the Pound and the introduction of the metric system for goods.
The point being, the internet is this new and scary thing that only "hackers" use, so they might as well try to control it as much as possible. No real brit would try to use it anyway.
The more you tighten your grip, Virgin, the more customers will slip through your fingers
Yes, but we all know how much credibility ISO has. :)
The point is that it is either a Union of states and in that case the logical place to aprove it is in the local parliaments. If it is a Union of people, we can discuss about referendums, I dont mind having one, but it must in that case be a common one for all of Europe.
As said, individual referendums is a joke on democracy, do you think it is fair that 1.6M irish voters (out of 3M eligible) of which 860k voted no, have the opportunity to block the further developments of the Union which have a POPULATION OF 500M. This means that a mere 0.172 percent of the European population have voted against, and this is blocking the progress of the Union.
Having individual referendums in each state would not be fair either, what if the majority of the European voters supported the treaty but in Ireland there was an overweight of no-votes, how would you interprete that outcome?
No, the only referendum that would suit this kind of question would be a joint one, but perhaps with parliamentary approvals as a compliment.
The joke on democracy is also that the Irish voters in the name of democracy voted against the treaty which would ensure more areas in which the European Parliament have co-decision rights in it, i.e. they voted to keep the curent organisation where the unelected council have legislative rights in certain areas.
Congratulations, on behalf of the other 499.4M citizens of Europe I give my deepest thanks to the Irish no-voters, thank you for deciding this for the rest of us.
Technically you are right, but when inserting a SIM from an other operator in another state/country, I include that switching SIM is not just about the physical act of switching SIM but also includes the fact that the other SIM will work in the phone, i.e. unlocked. Now, I know that you can unlock it through hacks, and also get an unlocked one in France or Belgium, but looking on the hacks, they seem to have been unreliable and updating the phone software with patches from Apple is really out of the question in that case.
At the moment, getting an unlocked phone in France is possible, but it is quite a lot more expensive.
What they should do is to introduce a subsidised telephone, where you get a contract (with premature termination penalties), and that is unlocked. I would be happy to add maybe a EUR 100 extra for that phone compared to the network locked versions.
It also does not support ODF files as far as I can see. That is also a major problem, especially on slashdot.
Yes, there is no front facing video-camera. One of the key points of 3G is that there is native video conferencing support in the networks.
Further, can you ge an unlocked version (even if subsidised with a contract would be great), I refuse to pay anything for a phone if I cannot switch SIM card in it. I live in the UK, have my parents in Sweden and my girlfriends family is in Belgium and I am going to the Netherlands a lot for work.
So, tell me, even though the EU have done a lot of work in capping the roaming fees, they are still way to high, and especially for data transfers, why would I get an iPhone. I would really want one, but without front facing camera and reasonable options to ge an unlocked phone (I dont mind signing a contract in my country of residence), why the heck would I get one.
Frankly, I will not get the iPhone until those items are fixed on the todo list.
Two things...
1. You do apparently not get that much snow where you live (0 C).
2. You never cook where you have to boil water (100 C).
Should we use other names for the weekdays and the months as well. I mean, if we should not refer to one god in the year, why should we honour Odin (Wednesday), Thor (Thursday) or the roman gods in the names of the months. I suppose we can keep the name of July and August since they name roman emperors, but we should quickly stop calling March in the name of the roman god of war.
I do like the CE / BCE because they actually have a meaning in English, but really, claiming that it should be used because of the religious baggage in AD/BC is just a lot of crap if you don't try to push for new weekdays and months.
I must say it, with a sample size of two, the statistical evidence is surely convincing...
"Ada has an equivilant with packed types. You can set the 'Size attribute on custom types with bit precision, and you can pack multiple custom types into a record just like bitfields. We use this to read in packed data from hardware all the time."
Yes, this is true, and it is one of the areas where Ada is very nice, i.e. for doing packet decoding (though in my opinion, erlang is nicer in this aspect).
The bad thing is that the syntax for declaring your packed records in Ada is a bit redundant.
Well, there are bit fields in C. There is no bit type, since there is no machine that actually supports working with single bit datablocks.
Yes, there are issues with C. Yes, Ada may have nice features, but the language is extremely difficult to learn and leads to excessively verbose code (this is not a good thing, since it makes it more difficult to grasp what an expression that would have been 1 line of clean C is suddenly 3 or 4 lines of Ada).
Note, I write Ada professionally, and it is a decent language for some tasks, but systems programming is not one of them.
The article mention Misra-C for enhanced safety, but that is just a myth. Misra-C exists in order to support crappy compilers for embedded chipsets.
Misra makes the following statement illegal for example:
"if (x == 5)", instead it has to be written as "if (5 == x)" in order to prevent bugs from missing one of the =. Note, that any reasonable C compiler (and it would be better to have a certification of the compilers that are used instead of forcing in unintuitive code) will give you a warning about assigning something as "if (x = 5)".
But in order to fall back to the post, firstly as noted, there are bit fields in C, and you can use them to represent sequences of bits in 90% of the cases where you need to.
C has bitwise operators that actually works (compared to Ada), which makes it a lot more suitable for bitmanipulation than Ada.
C also treat arrays and pointers as the same, and pointers are not checked, and you can cast data and pointers to whatever you want, this is why it is suitable for low level memory manipulation.
The thing is not really that C could not be better on low level programming, it could definitely be improved. But the plain thing is, there is nothing better for the task out there.
I can see that D might have a future though, but it is not there yet.
Well, with democratic, if you mean not directly elected, then you are right.
The commission is appointed my the state governments of the EU and scrutinised by the European parliament (and since the last time it is clear that they can kick out single members that they don't like).
Now, compare this with how the state cabinets are elected in a parliamentarian system (as is the case in all of EU), the parliament is elected and they appoint a government. The exact contents of this government is typically arranged by who will be the prime-minister.
My point is that there is not anything more undemocratic with the commission than with the national cabinets.
The commission do not have legislative power, they did try to push through software patents, yes, but the attempt was stopped by the elected european parliament.
There is however democratic issues with the EU, but these are mostly laid out at the council. They are an unelected body (well indirectly elected) that have legislative power. The council severe issues with its legitimacy. They were for example attempting to approve the software patents directive in the wrong forum (agricultural and fishery council IIRC).
The council is made out of the state governments and cannot be discharged if they behave badly, as this would mean discharging all the state governments. It would be more prudent to have a senate appointed by the states (or elections in the states), that could be kicked out in its whole, but this is another discussion.
The commission did lay down proposals for patents, but it was their right to make proposals for new laws. The parliament discharged the patent directive with something like 600 votes against 50.
This was exactly the reason that I did not get a 360 last week. I looked at the existing consoles, and the 360 came with to many options for me to bother about (and why the heck would I pay 100 pounds extra for the Elite edition when the only thing I cared about in it was the HDMI port), the PS3 was too bloody expensive. So, I ended up getting a Wii (with the added bonus of that my girlfriend actually likes the Wii-games so we can play together).
537 mb is a very small amount of data. I am sure that you mean MB, but please, do not write milli bit when you mean something else.
A lot of languages can be optimised more than C due to C's pointer semantics. Especially troublesome is that two pointers may alias the same objects (this is especially noticeable if one compares C with Fortran).
It is however possible in C99 to use the restrict keyword to tell the compiler that aliasing is forbidden, this put C on par with Fortran in speed on big mathematical problems. This is also an issue when comparing C with Ada, but easily addressed with restricted pointers.
By the way, I assume you are the same McCabe that shows up in the code complexity measurements that we produce.
Interesting article indeed. But this is not really any news, handwritten assembly is not efficient on complex CPU architectures such as modern CPUs or DSPs (with a few exceptions naturally). It started already with the first RISC machines in the early 80s.
Yes, you can do things with child packages. But in order to squeeze out the last percent of coverage, sometimes, you need access to the internals of the package.
The problem with Ada is that you cannot do that, unless you move all the package state into the spec (well, the private parts in the spec). This said, the problem is that the encapsulation rules of the Ada language makes unit-testing with 100% coverage very difficult and time consuming.
As said, there is a lot of things that you CAN do in the language, but they are not necessarily simple and easy to do. The encapsulation rules in Java are much more suitable for writing good unit-tests.
I do think that as part of the application layer of the embedded software, Ada is decent. But for the system layer, the language is more a nuisance.
One of the key issues is that the language actively encourages verbosity over clarity, meaning that something that you could write as one line of C (and very easy to read C by the way), can sometimes span several lines in Ada, which mean that you spend more time reading and trying to understand the expression because it is so long, this is especially noticeable when expressing complex bit wise expressions.