Most of these are going to have pretty much exactly the same syntax as svn, which is pretty much exactly the same syntax as cvs, at least for simple things.
Of course, you want IDE integration, so your mileage may vary quite a bit. I would suggest that most of the learning curve is the same as the commandline svn tool, though, and you do want to know that, in case you need it. I used Tortoise for quite awhile, when I was on Windows, but every now and then, I'd have to grab the commandline svn client for something stupid, like being able to rename multiple files on the local machine and have it show up as one commit (the next one, to be precise).
Also, because of the ease of setup, I find myself using something like bzr much more often for one-man projects, realizing that if someone else has to jump in at some point, it's as simple as emailing changesets. (Think of a changeset as a set of patches which can be merged as a chunk of revision history.) And knowing the commandline tools means I'm not tethered to any given IDE or editor.
Automatically giving up ideas or beliefs without good reason
I have never heard an argument or seen evidence for a given religion which makes me think it's anything more than a massive delusion, at best.
This does not mean I'm unwilling to listen. I love discussing religion and philosophy. Just don't expect to convince me with something as pathetic as "The Pope said so, and he's always right!"
Wow, that is a long read. And it only seems to confirm what I said. Since you're too lazy, let me try to sum it up with a few quotes:
Indeed, infallibility also belongs to the body of bishops as a whole, when, in doctrinal unity with the pope, they solemnly teach a doctrine as true.
So, if I understand this, it means that if the Pope and the bishops agree on something, then it is true -- but that the Pope can't make such a decree by himself. And the analogy is still valid; it's not just one person who's encouraging stem cell research, it's a community.
Infallibility belongs in a special way to the pope as head of the bishops (Matt. 16:1719; John 21:1517). As Vatican II remarked, it is a charism the pope "enjoys in virtue of his office, when, as the supreme shepherd and teacher of all the faithful, who confirms his brethren in their faith (Luke 22:32), he proclaims by a definitive act some doctrine of faith or morals. Therefore his definitions, of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church, are justly held irreformable, for they are pronounced with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, an assistance promised to him in blessed Peter."
Phew! I'm curious how this doesn't support the original "misconception", however. The Pope can apparently declare some doctrine, and it's held irreformable.
An infallible pronouncementwhether made by the pope alone or by an ecumenical councilusually is made only when some doctrine has been called into question.
And so on.
Would you care to point out where I was wrong, here? There's some vague mention that infallibility doesn't mean "without sin", and there's certainly a clarification that it doesn't mean everything the Pope says or does is infallible. It still implies that he can make an infallible decree, however. And that, again, seems very much like the act of a god, not of a man. (Unless, of course, they aren't actually infallible -- heresy!)
But all of this is offtopic -- the Coward I was responding to did seem to imply that infallibility and more.
NAT is here to stay and it's not an ugly hack. A company like, say, IBM does not want to have to go to ICANN every time it hooks another laptop to its internal network.
That's why you get IP addresses in blocks. When I went to college, every computer had a relatively fixed IP address.
Nor does the rest of the Internet need to know about IBM's internal network topology.
I'm really not sure I see the correlation, there. What, exactly, does IBM need to hide?
And see above, anyway. At this college, I registered both network cards of my laptop -- ethernet and wireless. This means that no matter where I was on campus, plugged in or not, it had the same IP address.
NAT is actually a useful piece of technology
For which better alternatives exist. Besides, usefulness and ugliness are not mutually exclusive.
There's nothing more to say to you until you get that one, crucial point: Firewalls do not have to be NATs, and NATs don't have to firewall. And you need a firewall whether or not you have a NAT.
Once you do, understand that NAT is a brutally ugly hack. It's much easier and more powerful to simply be able to open a firewall port than to have to forward ports.
And you do need a firewall on your computer -- that, or just turn services off. If you don't do one of the two, wireless will bite you someday.
If you want a sense of how a microkernel might be developed, go play with Erlang. Literally thousands of "processes", but because the memory is entirely managed, there's not really a performance tradeoff versus a threaded app. (Or at least, versus a threaded app in a similar, bytecode architecture.)
But that also shows you the essential problem with microkernel designs. From what I can tell, most microkernels have been written in C, which wasn't really designed to work as a message-passing system. Also, they are written with the assumption that memory protection is something which has to be done as memory segmentation...
If you still think that, by the way, read up on Microsoft's Singularity.
And your SCSI-vs-IDE analogy doesn't fit at all. If you really think overhead is going to become irrelevant, why not write everything in Ruby?
The reason the performance of a given kernel is relevant is, it affects the entire system. Just pulling numbers out of my ass, if an IDE CD burner used 200 clock cycles per second, it'd kill a CPU at 200 mhz, use 10% of a CPU at 2 ghz, and be fairly insignificant on a dual-2.5ghz or an eight-core monster. (Ironically, once you get to dual-core, part of the reason it's insignificant is the same as before -- even if it uses 100% of one CPU, you still have another whole CPU available. Similarly, the SCSI version was attractive because it'd leave you most of a CPU by offloading to some specialized processor on the CD drive.)
Point is, not all overhead is like that. Sure, some is -- if Beryl is slow on my machine, I can probably just upgrade my video card and it'll be fast. But a lot of OS overhead is going to be slow at any speed.
It might not matter (for now) how slow disk access is -- on this laptop, quite a few FS operations will go to the kernel first, then (via FUSE) to a userspace NTFS implementation, then back to the kernel where it's encrypted before it hits the disk, and most of the time, it's still faster than the disk can physically read and write.
But it almost certainly does matter how slow your video driver is. For gamers, that means the difference between a smooth 60fps at a high resolution to having to turn all the settings down and getting maybe 40fps.
Something that is easy to replace is less valuable than something that is hard to replace.
Something that is easy to replace is less risky than something that is hard to replace. And if you're risky, they might just get rid of you and replace you with a bunch of lower-paid, less-risky people.
Improving the process = making it more efficient = making it require less manpower = layoffs.
Depends what kind of company it is. Try this: Making it require less manpower = doing more with the manpower you have = more money coming into the company = you getting paid more.
Of course, it could also mean what you say. I'm glad I don't work at that kind of company. Where I work, I love nothing more than to engineer myself out of a job, and move on to another project.
Case in point: Currently working on some system administration, which is actually an interesting problem as we move to Amazon EC2. At some point, enough of this will be automated and out of my hands. But rather than freeing me up to be laid off, it frees me up to work on development -- to join the team which is actually developing programs to run on that EC2 cluster. If the web backend process gets too efficient, to where they don't need me working on it, maybe I'll work on an iPhone interface.
And I have stock options, which means that if I drag my feet and slow down the process, I'm only hurting myself.
Good point. But whatever answer you come up with -- or the Patent Office comes up with -- should not be based on the size of the backlog of pending patents.
At least right now, if we are to believe Google, PageRank is actually neutral. It's entirely based on actual content and/or popularity.
Allowing any additional service here for money seems like it'd be a step towards destroying that democratic ideal. Should someone who can afford to spend thousands on SEO, and an occasional $500 to Google, be given any advantage in normal (non-ad) search results over a community run, nonprofit (.org) website? I don't think we want to go there.
There was a machine -- Diebold, unfortunately -- which would scan the ballot when it was dropped in, and keep some sort of internal tally. It wouldn't say who I voted for, but it would say that I voted.
With Rails, you have thousands of hobbyist and wannabes going "Why the hell didn't I think of that?!?!", and the rest of us looking at our existing frameworks going "Check...check...check...OH WAIT I don't have this...oh wait, I didn't WANT it because last time we tried we lost a 5 million$ in wasted time....
Maybe that happened with AJAX, too. But like Rails, it's possible (though not necessarily easy) to leave out the parts you like.
Example: Call it "AJAX", use that style of programming, but use JSON instead of XML.
Of course, the other difference is that AJAX is a bit more nebulous of a concept. Rails is a concrete framework, and a nebulous cloud of ideas that people port to other languages, and either to the existing frameworks, or they create a new one.
It works for me on Windows and I can always play Darwinia and defcon were ever I am in the world, which is very good.
Except when you're not on Windows.
I can download the non-Steam version of Darwinia and Uplink, for Linux or Windows, put all three ports on a USB stick (Windows, Linux, OS X -- unless OSX is distributed by someone else?), and play it anywhere in the world.
The difference is, I can also play it without having to be online, or create a Steam account, or really do anything other than download the binary. I might have to type in a code. Maybe.
I've always favoured net installs over physical media, though I wonder what will happen in 10 years from now, will I still be able to play Darwinia through steam?
Maybe. Probably not. I know I'll be able to, so long as I have a backup copy somewhere.
Now, here's the larger problem: You bought it on Steam. I bought it directly from Introversion. You can't get the direct-from-Introversion version, and I can't get the Steam version, without buying it again.
I mean, more power to them, but to me, "independent" is the sales they make via their own website -- the relatively un-DRM'd versions with Linux and OS X support. I actually did go there to buy my copy of Uplink, and later of Darwinia.
Are they trying to say that this option will always be available? Or are they using some other definition of "independent", meaning "innovative but cheap graphics"?
That's the funny part -- Microsoft did offer them dirt-cheap Windows and training programs, damned near everything but the strip club. Linux still came out cheaper.
Which means they can afford to go to a strip club anyway.
There exist chainsaws which have the following warning label:
Do not attempt to stop chain with your hands or genitals.
So yes, I absolutely do think chainsaws should have fewer warning labels, as anyone who actually seriously considers stopping a chainsaw blade with their genitals should never, ever be allowed to reproduce. Let them be selected out!
I don't see this as any different than Perl having built-in regular expressions or $_, or any shell using stdin/stdout as a value-passing mechanism.
In Perl's case, you're somewhat right about regular expressions, but it's kind of hard to abuse them. Pretty much anything that deals with text could use regular expressions. For a better example, look at Perl formats, which were actually removed from the core language, but left as modules.
Heck, we could do away entirely with printf() and just use fprintf(stdout,...) for the C standard library.
Two things with that:
First, that's not special syntax, it's a function call.
Second, again, it's a library. The standard library, but a library nonetheless. I don't have to include stdio.h.
As to a language based around OpenGL/graphics primitives... the Alias|Wavefront OBJ file format is a declarative form of just that. It wouldn't suprise me to see someone use an embedded Lua interpreter to create a procedural "file format" for graphics primitives.
Certainly, and there is a form of C meant for actually running on the video hardware -- as in, you write shaders with it.
But a shader is just a shader, it's not going to become anything more than that. A somewhat-dynamic webpage could very quickly become a web app, and at that point, I'd much rather have a solid general-purpose language in it.
You're right. But with PHP (where textual content is easy due to the special-case syntax), I get a turing-complete templating system out-of-the-box.
Erm... I still don't really see the advantage. After all, if out-of-the-box-ness is important, may as well use rails. A few simple commands, and you have everything in place, including a templating engine.
I don't necessarily think a templating engine should be Turing-complete, but that's moot anyway -- as I said, these other languages do have embedded versions of themselves now.
Now that I think about it more... the only real reasons why I still use PHP is because deployment is dirt simple and because I already know most the quirks and stumbling blocks that every programmer will eventually hit with it.
See, that one, I really can't blame you for. But were you to do it over, would you rather know the quirks of PHP, or of something else?
Slashdot Mirror
Most of these are going to have pretty much exactly the same syntax as svn, which is pretty much exactly the same syntax as cvs, at least for simple things.
Of course, you want IDE integration, so your mileage may vary quite a bit. I would suggest that most of the learning curve is the same as the commandline svn tool, though, and you do want to know that, in case you need it. I used Tortoise for quite awhile, when I was on Windows, but every now and then, I'd have to grab the commandline svn client for something stupid, like being able to rename multiple files on the local machine and have it show up as one commit (the next one, to be precise).
Also, because of the ease of setup, I find myself using something like bzr much more often for one-man projects, realizing that if someone else has to jump in at some point, it's as simple as emailing changesets. (Think of a changeset as a set of patches which can be merged as a chunk of revision history.) And knowing the commandline tools means I'm not tethered to any given IDE or editor.
To me, open-mindedness means these things:
It does not mean this:
I have never heard an argument or seen evidence for a given religion which makes me think it's anything more than a massive delusion, at best.
This does not mean I'm unwilling to listen. I love discussing religion and philosophy. Just don't expect to convince me with something as pathetic as "The Pope said so, and he's always right!"
Wow, that is a long read. And it only seems to confirm what I said. Since you're too lazy, let me try to sum it up with a few quotes:
So, if I understand this, it means that if the Pope and the bishops agree on something, then it is true -- but that the Pope can't make such a decree by himself. And the analogy is still valid; it's not just one person who's encouraging stem cell research, it's a community.
Phew! I'm curious how this doesn't support the original "misconception", however. The Pope can apparently declare some doctrine, and it's held irreformable.
And so on.
Would you care to point out where I was wrong, here? There's some vague mention that infallibility doesn't mean "without sin", and there's certainly a clarification that it doesn't mean everything the Pope says or does is infallible. It still implies that he can make an infallible decree, however. And that, again, seems very much like the act of a god, not of a man. (Unless, of course, they aren't actually infallible -- heresy!)
But all of this is offtopic -- the Coward I was responding to did seem to imply that infallibility and more.
That's why you get IP addresses in blocks. When I went to college, every computer had a relatively fixed IP address.
I'm really not sure I see the correlation, there. What, exactly, does IBM need to hide?
And see above, anyway. At this college, I registered both network cards of my laptop -- ethernet and wireless. This means that no matter where I was on campus, plugged in or not, it had the same IP address.
For which better alternatives exist. Besides, usefulness and ugliness are not mutually exclusive.
So what's the advantage of a LAN? NAT?
Erm... If you're just using a NAT as a firewall, why not use, I don't know, an actual firewall? Router/firewall doesn't have to imply NAT.
There's nothing more to say to you until you get that one, crucial point: Firewalls do not have to be NATs, and NATs don't have to firewall. And you need a firewall whether or not you have a NAT.
Once you do, understand that NAT is a brutally ugly hack. It's much easier and more powerful to simply be able to open a firewall port than to have to forward ports.
And you do need a firewall on your computer -- that, or just turn services off. If you don't do one of the two, wireless will bite you someday.
It's definitely strange and bizarre, but I don't see anything actually broken in Konqueror. Haven't tried in anything else, though.
Should have said 200,000,000 clock cycles per second. I guess I'm not used to thinking of CPUs measured in the kilohertz or lower.
I wonder how you reconcile this:
With this:
Whether you meant it or not, that's great satire, very Colbert-esque. May you be modded +5 Funny.
If you want a sense of how a microkernel might be developed, go play with Erlang. Literally thousands of "processes", but because the memory is entirely managed, there's not really a performance tradeoff versus a threaded app. (Or at least, versus a threaded app in a similar, bytecode architecture.)
But that also shows you the essential problem with microkernel designs. From what I can tell, most microkernels have been written in C, which wasn't really designed to work as a message-passing system. Also, they are written with the assumption that memory protection is something which has to be done as memory segmentation...
If you still think that, by the way, read up on Microsoft's Singularity.
And your SCSI-vs-IDE analogy doesn't fit at all. If you really think overhead is going to become irrelevant, why not write everything in Ruby?
The reason the performance of a given kernel is relevant is, it affects the entire system. Just pulling numbers out of my ass, if an IDE CD burner used 200 clock cycles per second, it'd kill a CPU at 200 mhz, use 10% of a CPU at 2 ghz, and be fairly insignificant on a dual-2.5ghz or an eight-core monster. (Ironically, once you get to dual-core, part of the reason it's insignificant is the same as before -- even if it uses 100% of one CPU, you still have another whole CPU available. Similarly, the SCSI version was attractive because it'd leave you most of a CPU by offloading to some specialized processor on the CD drive.)
Point is, not all overhead is like that. Sure, some is -- if Beryl is slow on my machine, I can probably just upgrade my video card and it'll be fast. But a lot of OS overhead is going to be slow at any speed.
It might not matter (for now) how slow disk access is -- on this laptop, quite a few FS operations will go to the kernel first, then (via FUSE) to a userspace NTFS implementation, then back to the kernel where it's encrypted before it hits the disk, and most of the time, it's still faster than the disk can physically read and write.
But it almost certainly does matter how slow your video driver is. For gamers, that means the difference between a smooth 60fps at a high resolution to having to turn all the settings down and getting maybe 40fps.
Didn't the old PC Mag editor-in-chief leave because of Vista?
That explains a lot...
Not exactly the same, but it is a problem when other people are taking them seriously. Which means we kind of have to.
Something that is easy to replace is less risky than something that is hard to replace. And if you're risky, they might just get rid of you and replace you with a bunch of lower-paid, less-risky people.
Depends what kind of company it is. Try this: Making it require less manpower = doing more with the manpower you have = more money coming into the company = you getting paid more.
Of course, it could also mean what you say. I'm glad I don't work at that kind of company. Where I work, I love nothing more than to engineer myself out of a job, and move on to another project.
Case in point: Currently working on some system administration, which is actually an interesting problem as we move to Amazon EC2. At some point, enough of this will be automated and out of my hands. But rather than freeing me up to be laid off, it frees me up to work on development -- to join the team which is actually developing programs to run on that EC2 cluster. If the web backend process gets too efficient, to where they don't need me working on it, maybe I'll work on an iPhone interface.
And I have stock options, which means that if I drag my feet and slow down the process, I'm only hurting myself.
Good point. But whatever answer you come up with -- or the Patent Office comes up with -- should not be based on the size of the backlog of pending patents.
At least right now, if we are to believe Google, PageRank is actually neutral. It's entirely based on actual content and/or popularity.
Allowing any additional service here for money seems like it'd be a step towards destroying that democratic ideal. Should someone who can afford to spend thousands on SEO, and an occasional $500 to Google, be given any advantage in normal (non-ad) search results over a community run, nonprofit (.org) website? I don't think we want to go there.
For once, that tag seems appropriate.
There was a machine -- Diebold, unfortunately -- which would scan the ballot when it was dropped in, and keep some sort of internal tally. It wouldn't say who I voted for, but it would say that I voted.
In what way is that not sufficient?
If it is simply a website with user management, and no actual DRM, then, well...
Think about every non-DRM'd song you've ever bought...
Yep. Case in point. People who have bought that song have access to it. People who haven't, don't. Access control -- but it's un-DRM'd.
However, complicated DRM schemes do not require Vista.
Maybe that happened with AJAX, too. But like Rails, it's possible (though not necessarily easy) to leave out the parts you like.
Example: Call it "AJAX", use that style of programming, but use JSON instead of XML.
Of course, the other difference is that AJAX is a bit more nebulous of a concept. Rails is a concrete framework, and a nebulous cloud of ideas that people port to other languages, and either to the existing frameworks, or they create a new one.
Except when you're not on Windows.
I can download the non-Steam version of Darwinia and Uplink, for Linux or Windows, put all three ports on a USB stick (Windows, Linux, OS X -- unless OSX is distributed by someone else?), and play it anywhere in the world.
The difference is, I can also play it without having to be online, or create a Steam account, or really do anything other than download the binary. I might have to type in a code. Maybe.
Maybe. Probably not. I know I'll be able to, so long as I have a backup copy somewhere.
Now, here's the larger problem: You bought it on Steam. I bought it directly from Introversion. You can't get the direct-from-Introversion version, and I can't get the Steam version, without buying it again.
Can anyone distribute a Steam game?
In other words: Is Valve functioning solely as an avenue of distribution, like eBay, or are they functioning as a publisher, like EA?
So independent they went with Steam?
I mean, more power to them, but to me, "independent" is the sales they make via their own website -- the relatively un-DRM'd versions with Linux and OS X support. I actually did go there to buy my copy of Uplink, and later of Darwinia.
Are they trying to say that this option will always be available? Or are they using some other definition of "independent", meaning "innovative but cheap graphics"?
That's the funny part -- Microsoft did offer them dirt-cheap Windows and training programs, damned near everything but the strip club. Linux still came out cheaper.
Which means they can afford to go to a strip club anyway.
There exist chainsaws which have the following warning label:
So yes, I absolutely do think chainsaws should have fewer warning labels, as anyone who actually seriously considers stopping a chainsaw blade with their genitals should never, ever be allowed to reproduce. Let them be selected out!
In Perl's case, you're somewhat right about regular expressions, but it's kind of hard to abuse them. Pretty much anything that deals with text could use regular expressions. For a better example, look at Perl formats, which were actually removed from the core language, but left as modules.
Two things with that:
First, that's not special syntax, it's a function call.
Second, again, it's a library. The standard library, but a library nonetheless. I don't have to include stdio.h.
Certainly, and there is a form of C meant for actually running on the video hardware -- as in, you write shaders with it.
But a shader is just a shader, it's not going to become anything more than that. A somewhat-dynamic webpage could very quickly become a web app, and at that point, I'd much rather have a solid general-purpose language in it.
Erm... I still don't really see the advantage. After all, if out-of-the-box-ness is important, may as well use rails. A few simple commands, and you have everything in place, including a templating engine.
I don't necessarily think a templating engine should be Turing-complete, but that's moot anyway -- as I said, these other languages do have embedded versions of themselves now.
See, that one, I really can't blame you for. But were you to do it over, would you rather know the quirks of PHP, or of something else?
Ah, well. Nobody's gotten it right yet, anyway.