Erm, didn't Steam allow exactly that? If you pre-ordered HL2, it downloaded all the content over the month before the release date, and then at midnight, barring their servers falling over, you could play straight away.
I gather it's largely the slang and culture references. Things like muff, minge, pub (which I didn't realise would cause confusion), and others. There is a list on the BBC website somewhere I think. Some of the culture references are just totally lost, like us watching some Simpson's episodes. I doubt anyone not from these shores could appreciate the brilliance of David Brent saying he loved Ian Botham, references to the Corrs, Des'ree, the poem Slough ("dropping bombs is no way to solve town planning problems"), or in the final episodes the appearance of Howard from the Halifax adverts, and his manager's reference to having had the same problem with Bruno Brookes. All these slightly out-of-date and very British references cause problems I gather.
Dia is quite good for simple diagrams I find, although with a few annoying bugs related to font rendering. Anyone else got any other suggestions on this?
And, in computer science at least, most publications first appear in peer-reviewed conferences in which attendance at the conference (generally very expensive) is a condition of publication. Which basically amounts to paying to have your work published.
I have always viewed that mandatory conference attendance is because otherwise the conference wouldn't work; if no-one turns up to present then there is no conference, so they have to make sure they will have enough presenters. So if you submit a paper, you must present.
I think it's fair to say that the main purpose of submitting a paper is to be able to present it at the conference, not just to have the paper included in the proceedings. Especially considering the useful feedback you can get at conferences.
The other interesting thing about boost, in relation to other comments, is that they are very selective about which projects they include, as this new Java repository intends to be. It's because of this that boost is so popular I think; the libraries are all carefully designed and well-implemented. I use a lot of them in my code. I would welcome a Java equivalent (especially one that uses the power of generics as much as boost does for templates).
That's true, though there are two easy ways to get your code GPLed:
1. Extend an existing GPL project. Since it remains under the GPL the university will have no real reason not to just release it back onto the Internet.
2. Ask. After completing my university project I asked if it could be released LGPL to the world. A forms and a signature later, it was. Universities claim IPR on projects as a precaution but for most projects they won't stand a chance of making any money, at which point they'd generally be happy to open source it with their name on it, to show off work done at the uni.
As a final point, I found that the clause stated that any work produced by me for my course that was a computer program or a design for one belonged to the uni, but all else was mine. This may sound irrelevant for a CS course but it meant that I could publish an essay I did for my course on-line for anyone who was interested. YMMV of course.
As far as threading is concerned, one of the few languages I've dealt with that makes mutexes, semaphores, etc. easy to deal with is Java. Most other languages bury the stuff too deep into the proprietary APIs to make them useful. Consider multithreading in win32 [microsoft.com]. We need better programming languages before we can ever start reaping the benefits of good multithreading hardware.
Pure bullshit.
Why? I think the grandparent was quite right. Lack of good support for concurrency in languages is a major reason why people shy away from it; concurrency in C and other such languages is both non-portable, and a frightening prospect.
Java does make a valiant attempt, but still falls flat because it was too afraid to go all out and properly support concurrency, but made a better attempt than C. Although I suspect a lot of concurrency problems in Java are inherited from the underlying OSes (e.g. not being able to use threading well with GUIs). It is a problem that Computer Science has built up over the past 50 years, and one that will not be solved overnight.
Unless you are a member of a union, have a bonafide employment contract, or live and work in Montana, your boss can fire you for any reason at any time -- that's "at will" emplyment for you.
At the risk of asking a stupid question, is it not normal to have an employment contract? I've seen this "unless you have a contract" thing a few times in this discussion, and was surprised. I'm pretty sure that there is a law here in the UK that states you must have an employment contract within 13 weeks of beginning work, and if you don't have a contract I think you'd generally consider your job to be a bit on the dodgy side... is this not the case in the US?
Empirical evidence has shown, time and time again, that low level languages like C and Forth produce more efficient, faster, and easier to maintain code than today's so called high level languages... Unless you see a speed increase of Olog(n) then you are simply wasting resources by using a high level language.
My only explanation for your post is that where you said high level you meant low level, and vice versa. Could you reference the evidence that C and Forth are easier to maintain than higher-level languages (faster and more efficient they might be, but that is very rarely a performance criteria in modern software)? C is, in my experience, more likely to have bugs and security defects, and be far less maintainable, as well as more likelt to be unsafe. I agree that bad code is bad code in any language, but since C seems to tolerate it more than other languages, surely that shows it is a problem with C as well as the developer?
There is a reason that the trend has been for higher and higher level languages, and C is a lone aberration that bucks the trend. We don't program in assembly much any more for the same reason that one day we won't program in C much any more. For a kernel, C is obviously the right language, but for most other applications it is an odd choice than can usually only be justified because it is the language that the developer is comfortable with.
$2? Considering that the price of cinema tickets over here is ~5 GBP which comes out to around $10, $1 an episode seems like a good price to me, especially considering I'd buy the series box set at a price which is (very) roughly $3-4 an episode.
I'd like to see a model where I could pay say $2 an episode, then at the end of a 20-episode series, I could get my $40 discounted off the price of the DVD box set. That would certainly tempt me - I'd get to see the shows when they came out without waiting for the DVD (assuming they got the hang of good cross-continental distribution), but would also end up with the DVDs eventually too.
I feel I should comment on some of your points... the reason that tax cuts are not reviled is not so much the warm fuzzy feeling, as the feeling that this money should make public services better. There is an understanding that you get what you pay for, and if the NHS (for example) is underfunded, then to make it better we need to fund it more. Because we can understand where the money is going, we feel (perhaps naively) that the tax rise is acceptable.
Of course this generalisation applies more to the left than to the right, but then the left are in power at the moment... The Tories still try to win votes with tax cuts, but interestingly these days they focus on choice. As you note, tax cuts are not as popular as they once were. I would suggest this is because people realise that taking money away from public services is hardly going to improve them, but that's just my feeling.
The public dental health issue is tricky, but for all other health areas the NHS is considering a lumbering dinosaur, but one that will still suffice for most people. Dental health is difficult because all the dentists are going private, and thus it is hard to actually find an NHS dentist. The quality of NHS dentists is considered by just about everyone to be equivalent to the quality of private, it's just the supply of them that is a problem.
The tax on PCs appears (I haven't RTFA) to be a possible replacement for the TV licence. If this is the case, it would not be a new tax - just moving an old one onto new technology.
DEP will not prevent all buffer overflow attacks. It is intended to protect from the attack where the return address of the stack is overwritten to make the program jump into the stack. However, the program could still jump into a useful portion of existing code, or simply crash, or keep running but overflow a flag variable on the stack that will cause odd behaviour. It can also prevent things like JIT/HotSpot compilation. I'm not saying it's not useful at all, but it is one of many measures that all help a little.
However no software patches or programs will actually be dispensed through the site. The alerts will tell people how to go about getting hold of patches from security firms.
That is not to say phishing-like attacks could not be used with false anti-virus domains etc though I guess...
Time to reason with the angry AC...
How can you miss the virtual keyword in Java since every 'function' is virtual?
What the C# virtual keyword facilitates is declaring functions to be non-virtual. As in C++, this can provide performance benefits, as well as preventing people later overriding any method that is inappropriate to override where a coder forgot to write final.
That C# even has functions and function pointers (delegates) is a sick joke. The naming scheme is inherited from visual basic and lame since it doesn't tell you anything meaningful... in Java Nouns are capalized and verbs are camel-case whereas in C# Classes, Methods, and Properties are capitalized and only variables are not (ie, it's retarded).
What is the problem with having function pointers in C#? And can't you do similar to using them by using reflection in Java anyway? As for having functions, one of the things that bugs me about Java is that if you have a function that is not directly related to any one class, you still have to bundle it to a class anyway. Java's own bundled classes like System often seem to be a substitute for namespaced functions to me anyway.
Basically the C# language is built for the masses of lame C / VB / C++ coders that have no sense of style. Seriously, nobody with any self respect could even write in C++ if they knew the difference. The only thing holding Java back is the license; you can't even emerge in on gentoo without manually downloading a file for heaven's sake!
Are you saying that no-one would code in C++ if they understood C#, or that nobody would use C++ if they understood Java? It is interesting to note that Java has recently introduced generics, which function very similarly to templates in C++. Java sometimes feels like it is merely a C++ to JVM-bytecode compiler, with an extra large body of standard library.
The politics section has become an echo chamber of malcontent liberalism--the epitome of what's wrong with the Democratic party. With them, there's no room for legitimate disagreement. They're right and George Bush and everyone who voted for him are wrong and evil (or, at the very least, stupid).
My theory on this would be that a lot of slashdot readers are not from America, and it seems to me that a great deal of people from outside America really can't understand why any Americans voted for Bush (myself included). It would be like us voting in Kilroy-Silk (bit of a UK-only reference there, but the best example that came to mind). The rest of the world would be sitting there scratching their heads, wondering why the hell we had done it. And with good reason, I might add.
Ooooh I think I have a name for it... Think about it like this. Each bit is either equal OR it isn't. And since it would be your patent, it would be EXCLUSIVE to you.... I've got it - IsNotEqualInABitwiseManner;-)
I think this is an interesting and important point. As Linux and Mac OS X gain market share and popularity, especially among developers, more and more applications are being developed cross-platform - a lot, but not all, originating from the Unix side of things. Once all the applications that you use are portable, or similar enough programs are available on each OS, your choice of OS becomes a much easier choice because you can choose on the OS's merits rather than what applications are available for it.
So for example, my web browser is Firefox and my mail client is Thunderbird. I can handle text editors on both Windows and Linux, which means the only things remaining that bind me to Windows are games and IM clients. If I didn't use them, I could choose between OSes based on say stability, features (e.g. available filesystems), and so on.
* Cost-benefit analysis defining a finite number of workplace injuries or deaths as acceptable * Pension fund fraud * Tax abatements and subsidies for unnecessary projects
Jeese... again, just not funny material here. Also, not something that most cube-dwellers will run into except in the newspaper.
Actually, I think the cost-benefit analysis one has been covered in previous strips - either Dogbert or the PHB were selling a dodgy product they knew could cause fatalities but didn't care.
Quite apart from the views expressed, that transcript is near-impossible to read because neither of them even gets to finish their sentences! Are all American programs like this, or just Fox?
It would be my suggestion that the reason for some of the effect you describe is because humans use intelligence to solve these problems, but computers usually solve them by finding a brute-force way. For example, chess-playing in humans involves careful consideration of strategies and gambits etc, but machines solve the problem by considering all possible responses to each move and making a calculation of the best move (afaik). Once people see the methodology, they are not inclined to term it intelligent. Just a thought...
Slashdot Mirror
Erm, didn't Steam allow exactly that? If you pre-ordered HL2, it downloaded all the content over the month before the release date, and then at midnight, barring their servers falling over, you could play straight away.
I gather it's largely the slang and culture references. Things like muff, minge, pub (which I didn't realise would cause confusion), and others. There is a list on the BBC website somewhere I think. Some of the culture references are just totally lost, like us watching some Simpson's episodes. I doubt anyone not from these shores could appreciate the brilliance of David Brent saying he loved Ian Botham, references to the Corrs, Des'ree, the poem Slough ("dropping bombs is no way to solve town planning problems"), or in the final episodes the appearance of Howard from the Halifax adverts, and his manager's reference to having had the same problem with Bruno Brookes. All these slightly out-of-date and very British references cause problems I gather.
Dia is quite good for simple diagrams I find, although with a few annoying bugs related to font rendering. Anyone else got any other suggestions on this?
I have always viewed that mandatory conference attendance is because otherwise the conference wouldn't work; if no-one turns up to present then there is no conference, so they have to make sure they will have enough presenters. So if you submit a paper, you must present.
I think it's fair to say that the main purpose of submitting a paper is to be able to present it at the conference, not just to have the paper included in the proceedings. Especially considering the useful feedback you can get at conferences.
The other interesting thing about boost, in relation to other comments, is that they are very selective about which projects they include, as this new Java repository intends to be. It's because of this that boost is so popular I think; the libraries are all carefully designed and well-implemented. I use a lot of them in my code. I would welcome a Java equivalent (especially one that uses the power of generics as much as boost does for templates).
1. Extend an existing GPL project. Since it remains under the GPL the university will have no real reason not to just release it back onto the Internet.
2. Ask. After completing my university project I asked if it could be released LGPL to the world. A forms and a signature later, it was. Universities claim IPR on projects as a precaution but for most projects they won't stand a chance of making any money, at which point they'd generally be happy to open source it with their name on it, to show off work done at the uni.
As a final point, I found that the clause stated that any work produced by me for my course that was a computer program or a design for one belonged to the uni, but all else was mine. This may sound irrelevant for a CS course but it meant that I could publish an essay I did for my course on-line for anyone who was interested. YMMV of course.
In the UK, where he does most of his work and is therefore concerned with, he is recognised by the general public.
Pure bullshit.
Why? I think the grandparent was quite right. Lack of good support for concurrency in languages is a major reason why people shy away from it; concurrency in C and other such languages is both non-portable, and a frightening prospect.
Java does make a valiant attempt, but still falls flat because it was too afraid to go all out and properly support concurrency, but made a better attempt than C. Although I suspect a lot of concurrency problems in Java are inherited from the underlying OSes (e.g. not being able to use threading well with GUIs). It is a problem that Computer Science has built up over the past 50 years, and one that will not be solved overnight.
By someone, with an obsessive, compulsive, love of, commas, perhaps? ;-)
At the risk of asking a stupid question, is it not normal to have an employment contract? I've seen this "unless you have a contract" thing a few times in this discussion, and was surprised. I'm pretty sure that there is a law here in the UK that states you must have an employment contract within 13 weeks of beginning work, and if you don't have a contract I think you'd generally consider your job to be a bit on the dodgy side... is this not the case in the US?
My only explanation for your post is that where you said high level you meant low level, and vice versa. Could you reference the evidence that C and Forth are easier to maintain than higher-level languages (faster and more efficient they might be, but that is very rarely a performance criteria in modern software)? C is, in my experience, more likely to have bugs and security defects, and be far less maintainable, as well as more likelt to be unsafe. I agree that bad code is bad code in any language, but since C seems to tolerate it more than other languages, surely that shows it is a problem with C as well as the developer?
There is a reason that the trend has been for higher and higher level languages, and C is a lone aberration that bucks the trend. We don't program in assembly much any more for the same reason that one day we won't program in C much any more. For a kernel, C is obviously the right language, but for most other applications it is an odd choice than can usually only be justified because it is the language that the developer is comfortable with.
I'd like to see a model where I could pay say $2 an episode, then at the end of a 20-episode series, I could get my $40 discounted off the price of the DVD box set. That would certainly tempt me - I'd get to see the shows when they came out without waiting for the DVD (assuming they got the hang of good cross-continental distribution), but would also end up with the DVDs eventually too.
Of course this generalisation applies more to the left than to the right, but then the left are in power at the moment... The Tories still try to win votes with tax cuts, but interestingly these days they focus on choice. As you note, tax cuts are not as popular as they once were. I would suggest this is because people realise that taking money away from public services is hardly going to improve them, but that's just my feeling.
The public dental health issue is tricky, but for all other health areas the NHS is considering a lumbering dinosaur, but one that will still suffice for most people. Dental health is difficult because all the dentists are going private, and thus it is hard to actually find an NHS dentist. The quality of NHS dentists is considered by just about everyone to be equivalent to the quality of private, it's just the supply of them that is a problem.
The tax on PCs appears (I haven't RTFA) to be a possible replacement for the TV licence. If this is the case, it would not be a new tax - just moving an old one onto new technology.
DEP will not prevent all buffer overflow attacks. It is intended to protect from the attack where the return address of the stack is overwritten to make the program jump into the stack. However, the program could still jump into a useful portion of existing code, or simply crash, or keep running but overflow a flag variable on the stack that will cause odd behaviour. It can also prevent things like JIT/HotSpot compilation. I'm not saying it's not useful at all, but it is one of many measures that all help a little.
However no software patches or programs will actually be dispensed through the site. The alerts will tell people how to go about getting hold of patches from security firms.
That is not to say phishing-like attacks could not be used with false anti-virus domains etc though I guess...
What the C# virtual keyword facilitates is declaring functions to be non-virtual. As in C++, this can provide performance benefits, as well as preventing people later overriding any method that is inappropriate to override where a coder forgot to write final.
That C# even has functions and function pointers (delegates) is a sick joke. The naming scheme is inherited from visual basic and lame since it doesn't tell you anything meaningful... in Java Nouns are capalized and verbs are camel-case whereas in C# Classes, Methods, and Properties are capitalized and only variables are not (ie, it's retarded).
What is the problem with having function pointers in C#? And can't you do similar to using them by using reflection in Java anyway? As for having functions, one of the things that bugs me about Java is that if you have a function that is not directly related to any one class, you still have to bundle it to a class anyway. Java's own bundled classes like System often seem to be a substitute for namespaced functions to me anyway.
Basically the C# language is built for the masses of lame C / VB / C++ coders that have no sense of style. Seriously, nobody with any self respect could even write in C++ if they knew the difference. The only thing holding Java back is the license; you can't even emerge in on gentoo without manually downloading a file for heaven's sake!
Are you saying that no-one would code in C++ if they understood C#, or that nobody would use C++ if they understood Java? It is interesting to note that Java has recently introduced generics, which function very similarly to templates in C++. Java sometimes feels like it is merely a C++ to JVM-bytecode compiler, with an extra large body of standard library.
Heh... my whole car is worth a bit under 2 mac minis... :-)
My theory on this would be that a lot of slashdot readers are not from America, and it seems to me that a great deal of people from outside America really can't understand why any Americans voted for Bush (myself included). It would be like us voting in Kilroy-Silk (bit of a UK-only reference there, but the best example that came to mind). The rest of the world would be sitting there scratching their heads, wondering why the hell we had done it. And with good reason, I might add.
Errr, ahem. Misread the original post and only followed the example rather than actually thinking about it. Ignore my comment, I'll be quiet now....
Ooooh I think I have a name for it... Think about it like this. Each bit is either equal OR it isn't. And since it would be your patent, it would be EXCLUSIVE to you.... I've got it - IsNotEqualInABitwiseManner ;-)
So for example, my web browser is Firefox and my mail client is Thunderbird. I can handle text editors on both Windows and Linux, which means the only things remaining that bind me to Windows are games and IM clients. If I didn't use them, I could choose between OSes based on say stability, features (e.g. available filesystems), and so on.
Doesn't Steam do this as well, using its friends list?
Jeese... again, just not funny material here. Also, not something that most cube-dwellers will run into except in the newspaper. Actually, I think the cost-benefit analysis one has been covered in previous strips - either Dogbert or the PHB were selling a dodgy product they knew could cause fatalities but didn't care.
Quite apart from the views expressed, that transcript is near-impossible to read because neither of them even gets to finish their sentences! Are all American programs like this, or just Fox?
It would be my suggestion that the reason for some of the effect you describe is because humans use intelligence to solve these problems, but computers usually solve them by finding a brute-force way. For example, chess-playing in humans involves careful consideration of strategies and gambits etc, but machines solve the problem by considering all possible responses to each move and making a calculation of the best move (afaik). Once people see the methodology, they are not inclined to term it intelligent. Just a thought...