Reason to choose a specific language: Otherwise, they could deliberately choose a language that's more obfuscated -- say, machine language -- or a proprietary language. Even if they provide the compiler for said language, it would be about as much an exercise in confusion.
Reason I'd prefer Ruby to Python: This isn't a case where performance is important, significant indentation (as much as I like it) may be a problem when people inevitably print it out, and most importantly, Ruby's internal DSLs look damned good. I think this does need to be a DSL of some sort, and I'd rather it be an internal DSL than an external one -- but I'd rather it be a DSL than a Python library.
for the outside world you are the RUDE ASSHOLE if you behave like that
Maybe. One point I was trying to make is that sometime it is better for an open source project to be perceived as a bunch of rude assholes (but who actually get stuff done) than to waste tons of time and energy dealing with all the rude assholes who can't be bothered to Google it.
I am a programmer and I feel piss off till the verge of my fingers when the dumbest question hits my ear but I don't forget that being rude doesn't change something positively for anybody but for sure is changing me being perceived as a rude asshole.
Done right, it changes two things: First, I don't have to deal with that question anymore. Second, the person has either given up, or has been sufficiently embarrassed that the next time they have a question, they'll find the answer themselves before asking.
But again, I try to be gentle about it -- I try to say, "Look, here's what you wanted, but you could've found this yourself. It's generally considered rude to be lazy when asking questions."
By the way: Maybe I'm weird, but I'd much rather have a decently well-written (but insulting) comment than a comment which runs on and on with no commas periods or breaks that makes me feel out of breath just from reading it not even out loud just reading makes me want to take a deep breath when you finally put that period down.
Now, if it's a helpdesk, the situation is different. If I'm actually being paid to deal with users, I'll try to educate them, but it's my job to deal with those who refuse to learn. But the open source community is not a helpdesk, it's a collaborative effort. I'm willing to work with you to help you out, but I'm not willing to do your work for you.
If we thought that programming is holy art where only enlightened monks will read its secret codices between the walls of monastery and practice its rituals hidden by the stupid, not smart enough ordinary ones...
I never said that, and in particular, I'm not trying to be elitist. Anyone can learn to Google first, then ask, but they have to be told that.
Again, I'm not calling the person stupid, I'm calling their question stupid, and (hopefully) giving them some valuable advice for the next time they have such a question.
And there is this crucial little point -- remember how I said "maybe" it makes us a rude asshole? Even the outside world should be able to understand, when it's explained to them -- I'm not the one being rude. If you asked a question that wasted thirty seconds of my time (and everyone else's time on the list, adding up to possibly a few man-hours), and then several minutes of my time looking up the answer and typing a response, when you could've looked it up yourself in ten seconds, you are the one being rude.
I can still try to be helpful in my reply -- that is, I'll send you to letmegooglethatforyou, instead of justfuckinggoogleit, and I'll offer some other suggestions, and generally won't act offensive (aside from the lmgtfy link) -- but again, meet me halfway and I'll be much more willing to help.
There's nothing unsafe about pointer arithmetic, unless you do things in a lazy way and don't think things through.
Or unless you do think things through, and make a mistake.
And we all make mistakes.
The question is, when (not if) you make a mistake, will you get a nice stacktrace and an instant crash? Or will you get a segfault, or worse, a security vulnerability?
Pointer math is both more tedious and less safe than the alternatives. There are very few sane reasons to use it.
I think a major problem with modern CS education is that students are taught that pointer math is "unsafe", and end up afraid to even try it.
GOOD. That makes the world safer.
Now, I agree that they should try it, and learn how it works, and then never use it themselves -- much as they should do with data structures. After learning to write a hash table once, pretty much every language I'm ever going to use, forever, is going to have it built-in.
Maybe this is why so much software ends up getting written in java or c#, and my 3 GHz Core 2 doesn't feel any faster then the 2ghz Athlon I had 8 years ago...
Unlikely, partly because Java can often be faster than C, especially when people in C want to manually malloc/free everything. Turns out garbage collection, or at least memory pooling, is much faster than malloc/free -- and in fact, garbage collection can often be faster than anything else we've tried.
Leaving that aside for the moment, even if everyone went insane and used Ruby for everything, I doubt it would have nearly as much of a difference as the algorithms and data structures chosen. In other words, those who paid attention to their data structures and algorithms courses can write decently-fast code in any language -- if Ruby is a tenth the speed of Java, their Ruby script will run ten times slower. That's not good, but someone who didn't pay attention will manage to write Java code that runs n times slower than the smart person's Ruby script, where n is a very large number that gets larger as you try to do more things.
Pointer arithmetic is about the last place I would look if I wanted serious performance improvements.
Wrong code is wrong.... *any* bad code is undesirable (for a litany of reasons).
True, but also unavoidable.
Let me put it this way: You will dereference a null pointer at some point. Now, would you rather get a nice stacktrace and an instant failure, or a random segfault, or worse, a security hole?
Similarly, it's very likely you'll have something like a buffer overrun -- and the steps to avoid this are ridiculous -- so would you rather do all that extra tedium, much of it absurdly inefficient, and then if you get it wrong, you've got a security hole? Or would you rather do none of the tedium, and if you somehow get it wrong, you've got a DoS (a crash) at worst?
If a student cannot safely implement a hashtable in an unsafe language, then they pretty obviously don't have a firm grasp on either the concept of how hashtables are supposed to work, or a firm grasp on the language being used.
I still don't see what this has to do with it -- if a student can safely implement a hashtable in a safe language, why would we expect them to fail in an unsafe language?
All I see the unsafe language doing is making things unnecessarily difficult.
Really for something this simple, doing it safely in C is just a matter of staying in bounds, and not dereferencing null pointers.
That makes it even less relevant that it's in C and not some other language. Most languages will have that restriction. The difference is:
And if the student does mess something up (everyone messes stuff up sometime), then so what!
Well, if it's C, they'll get a segfault, with no useful information about why it's happening. Other languages will generally give a nice verbose backtrace -- useful when you're trying to learn what the hell is going on.
Well, it a very important thing to know, even if you never use it...
What, how to work in an unsafe language?
it is a very safe place to learn it.
If you say so. Also probably a safe place to lean assembly, but I wouldn't recommend that, either. Save both of those for, say, an OS design class.
It seems somewhat silly to have students implement things that a language natively supports. You're likely to get many "why do I have to reimplement this if python already supports it" type complaints.
That's a problem of motivation, something I'd expect any good class, period, to address. For example, our Data Structures course (in Java, yuck) had us implement an interpreter for a simple procedural language as a homework problem.
It's also not necessarily more of a problem in one language than another. Any decent language is going to offer many of these things as libraries. So, for example, when we were asked to implement a Linked List, we were not allowed to use java.util.LinkedList.
I did however read the comment I was replying to as "why should we need to learn things in Data Structures that python can already do". Perhaps I misread it.
You did.
Really though, a good class would be completely language agnostic. In my data structures class the professor demonstrated concepts with Pascal, but expected assignments to be completed using either C, C++, or python, at the student's discretion.
Apparently, some of the higher-level classes allow that. Data Structures is our second course, immediately after an "Intro to Java and OOP" course. The concepts are (hopefully) language-agnostic, but the assignments are relatively large and tightly restricted and spec'd. Even with this restriction, it can take awhile for them to be graded.
So I think it does make sense, especially this early on, to require a single language. I think Java is a terrible choice for that, but so it goes.
Now on the serious side, as a professional embedded linux developer, I have to say I am pretty happy that my "trying to fix X for a week" are over
Mine too! Let's compare:
my home pc is windows only
I guess that works -- now you can try cleaning viruses and spyware for the week instead!
I fixed the same problem by upgrading to a modern Ubuntu. I can still have everything "just work", I can still just watch a movie.
Yes, I realize that a modern, well-admin'd Windows can be reasonably secure, but you also have to realize that a modern, well-admin'd Linux can be reasonably friendly. I honestly haven't had X break randomly since Gentoo. Far more often, I have Windows decide my copy isn't genuine, or it just isn't going to resume from hibernate this time.
I don't know if you know this, but nobody puts monitors on Windows servers either.
Neither do I, but I don't have any Windows servers. I don't know what Windows servers have to do with this.
I don't see why, putty is a pretty popular remote terminal app,
Yes, and it is good for what it is. I just don't see the point unless he's running a Windows desktop -- Linux and OS X both have decent native ssh clients.
And he was bragging about how good he is with Linux and the CLI, which makes it odd that he'd need Windows, especially at work.
I agree, GUIs are wonderful for certain things. I just don't see why he'd prefer a Windows GUI.
I gave up Linux because I didn't need it for work, and the GUI is still utter shit compared to a version of Windows that is a decade old, never mind trying to compare it to a modern version of Windows or OSX.
Does Windows have sloppy focus? Does OS X? Have any of them, ever?
How about keyboard shortcuts for moving and resizing windows?
OS X has finally added Spaces, which is a pale imitation of virtual desktops on Linux. I think nVidia has something like that on Windows, but I have no idea how well it works.
Interestingly, multi-monitor support is worse on Windows. Easier to configure, but every time I want to run anything fullscreen (including a game), it insists on running on the "primary" monitor -- which is also where Windows insists on putting the task bar and start menu. I want those on my other monitor, which is smaller, but has more vertical space, so I can use my larger "primary" monitor for games. I haven't tried that since XP, though -- maybe it's changed.
How about you provide an actual example of what's wrong with the Linux GUI, especially when we're talking about sysadmin work.
...since you're apparently a capable Unix admin, ntfsclone.
But that doesn't apply here. That applies to viruses screwing up your Windows, but when hardware dies, particularly the motherboard, that image isn't going to help much.
I'd like to draw a hard distinction here between cases where someone is actually being an asshole (see some of the other responses), and cases where you're wasting someone's time because you couldn't figure out how to just fucking Google it.
I try to be a bit more helpful and offer to Google it for them, but seriously, there are a lot of questions by people who need to follow this flowchart before asking questions.
The attitude comes, I think, from the fact that this is an ongoing problem. There are enough real questions and real problems, and enough real work to be done, that it's infuriating to see dozens of people asking the exact same questions (which are right there in the FAQ)...
Eventually, you end up with a situation where, consciously or not, the community has learned that it's more productive to be antisocial and drive away a few good people (and hopefully get a few people who learn to ask better questions) so we can get things done, than to have to deal with the unwashed masses.
I'm trying not to be elitist here -- again, I present it moderately gently, and I do try to offer an actual response. However, keep in mind that this is not the help desk, but a community. Meet us halfway, and we're generally quite helpful and friendly, though there are obvious exceptions. But if you're not willing to do your homework, don't expect us to go out of our way, either -- in that case, you're the one being rude.
I haven't actually used a monitor on my unix box since I installed it. I just putty in and go from there..
While that sets you apart from many of us, it also reveals Windows on your desktop. Why?
I don't use monitors on my Unix servers...
The only time I even look at graphics
Yeah, I know it's hyperbole, but after your "putty" comment above, it's a fail.
I actually did work with a commandline only for a week or so while I was trying to fix my X. At least five or ten years ago, and I hope no one still needs to do that, but if you really want to say you "never look at graphics", try dealing with that with only Lynx for a browser.
I'm also 23, but I boot Windows when I want to play games -- and there, only the games I can't run on Linux.
My college changed the first 3 CS classes to Python instead of C++ because it's easier. Then when they get to Data Structures, they've gotta learn C++ for the first time, at the same time.
I've seen nothing in my current Data Structures course that couldn't be done in Python. Am I missing something?
They are willing to accept lower sales of the game and offer a less desirable product because they consider it preferable to having their games pirated.
Erm... why?
I mean, if they're driven by money, that seems like about the stupidest thing they could do. Yes, let's make the PC version both less enjoyable and less profitable!
They also don't want pirated PC copies of their game competing against their console sales.
Wouldn't that also be something they could measure? Compare sales of the console version of this game with other games that didn't have that DRM?
how would you like to walk around with a constant erection?
So now she finally understands what it's like to be a 13 year old boy?
That hypothetical 13-year-old should seek medical attention. If not, I'm guessing you don't actually mean constant, you mean continual.
What you and everyone else here seems to be missing is the difference between continual arousal (or just general horniness) and continuous arousal, which is a serious medical condition that doesn't need to be laughed at.
It's more or less like the difference between the kind of delusional that Glenn Beck is, and an actual serious mental disorder. I mean, your immediate response might be that Glenn Beck really is crazy, but if you've ever actually been around someone with paranoid delusions, who had to be physically restrained and forcibly drugged just to be brought under control, you wouldn't say that. Sure, Glenn Beck needs help, but there's a clear difference.
Apple is responsible for setting up the system this way. Either train the reviewers better, or stop exerting such anal-retentive control over your device.
And about as genuine. They'll change if they feel the bad press is bad enough, and they'll change back when it's over, and in general, they'll keep pushing the limits of what people will tolerate.
Please, educate yourself on the topic before you make yourself sound like an ass.
It's only humiliating if she think's being aroused humiliates her.
Being aroused, without your control, pretty much 24/7. Yes, I'd call that humiliating -- I'm assuming you're male, so how would you like to walk around with a constant erection?
And if it's all she can think about to the point of being debilitating, perhaps she should change jobs to something that involves sex or sextoys and get filthy rich.
I hope you're joking.
I'm a programmer. I like what I do. I would not like to have some sort of compulsive wanking problem where every time I started to write a line of code, I couldn't, because one hand would be moving from my keyboard to my pants.
What you're talking about is removing her choice to be anything other than a nymphomaniac, and she's supposed to be OK with that.
Bullshit.
Now, is it possible people can turn that around into an advantage? Sure, and if I had my hands amputated, I might be able to still live a long and healthy life -- but I'd still miss being able to type and otherwise function as a normal human being.
And by the way: Are you suggesting that the majority of sex workers (prostitution, pornography, etc) get filthy rich?
It's not a problem unless she wants it to be.
Unless you're willing to apply the same standard to amputees, shut the fuck up.
And by the way: This is distinct from nymphomania, which is a psychological condition. The main difference is that a nymphomaniac actually wants it. Think for a moment about the definition of rape, and you might start to get an idea of why this would be a problem.
Even more likely than that: Some teacher who "knew a lot about computers" set up the system in his/her spare time.
That seems far-fetched. There are FOSS tools like Moodle -- Blackboard, by contrast, is going to cost you. As their website doesn't specify a price, you can expect the price to be tailored to your individual institution, or in other words, likely several hundred dollars at least, probably in the thousands.
That's a guess, but it seems doubtful, or at least stupid, to allow "some teacher who knew a lot about computers" to have that much purchasing power.
Hopefully one day I’ll find a superstud who can satisfy me.
Ah now I understand... The old I-want-sex-all-the-time trick to get men.
Maybe. However, It is a real thing, and from what I understand is debilitating, humiliating, and doesn't necessarily lead to the woman becoming a nympho.
In fact, I'm kind of surprised -- even on Slashdot, I'd expect someone to have picked that up somewhere, rather than just assuming this is a good thing. That seems a bit on par with taking advantage of someone's mental disorder...
As PsychoSlashDot says, we need to keep bringing this up, talking about it, sharing it, etc. It does matter, it is morally questionable (even if perfectly legal), and it needs much, much more noise until Apple either stops doing it or starts losing significant marketshare.
I think your problem is that it's not news, certainly not for nerds. I'd agree with that.
I understand that Microsoft has a ton of backwards compatibility they need to maintain, but if a company the fraction of your size can do it, why can't you?
Inertia.
In fact, inertia is Microsoft's crown jewel. Notice how much heat they took for "breaking" so many apps with Vista. By contrast, Apple can release something like OS X and, despite Classic, you know you'd better get your shit in order if you want it to work two years from now.
68k emulation in PPC was decent. Classic mode worked for most applications and Rosetta was as seamless as it gets.
Ah, but can you actually run 68k apps, in Classic mode, in Rosetta, on an Intel machine? Last time I suggested this, people told me that Classic isn't supported on newer Macs.
Yes "FAT" Binaries are larger, but given how cheap HD space is, it's not too much of a concern of mine.
How about RAM? CPU cache? Bandwidth?
I don't mind spending these things if I'm getting something worthwhile out of it. Fat binaries might make sense on OS X, where apps typically aren't "installed" so much as "dragged to Applications". It makes little to no sense for the files installed from.mpkg which burrow themselves as deep into the system as any InstallShield installation on Windows.
About the only place it makes sense is a well-behaved commercial app, in which case, I can simply drag it from an old machine to a new one without caring about architecture.
Side note, and legitimate question, does Linux do fat binaries?
I believe someone wrote a patch, but no one cared.
There are a few reasons for this: First, the Linux workflow is different and IMO better. If I want the program 'foo' on my system, I go find it in the package manager and run it. This is especially seamless on the commandline -- I type 'foo', it says "foo isn't installed, type 'apt-get install foo' to install it.", I do that, then I type 'foo' again and it works.
In other words, the point isn't to download random binaries from the Internet. If you find an interesting-looking package on the Internet, fine, but you check your repositories first. Thus, you're ensured that the version you're getting is the latest version that works with your distro (and your version of that distro), that it will be patched with the rest of your system from the same place, that it's reasonably safe and vetted (and the real thing), and that it works for your architecture.
This is also why Linux never really needed an App Store -- package managers basically are App Stores already, just without payment.
The second reason is that Linux has, at a minimum, shell scripts, and usually many more scripting languages available. You can also generally count on tar and gzip at a minimum, probably bzip2 and lzma. So, when people do distribute proprietary apps for Linux, one common strategy is to compile a few different binaries for the architectures they want to support (usually just x86 and x86_64, but hlds used to have binaries optimized for many specific iterations of x86), include them all in a folder with the rest of your app (static resources and the like), and install a shell script that picks the appropriate binary (and libraries) at runtime.
If your worry is installers, there are programs which will take a folder like the above, tar it up, and wrap the tarball in a shell script. Effectively a self-extracting installer, like any other, only it doesn't need any binaries of itself, it just needs/bin/sh to exist and a decent tar to be in your path.
Now, it's a bit clumsy to use something like this, since you'd have to download it, mark it executable, and then run it. An alternative is to wrap that folder in a.deb (or a.rpm) and use that as an installer. You could also do what Google did and rely on the install scripts in Debian packages -- so when I install Go
The line-by-line rebuttals are a bit telling, in my opinion.
If you say so. What, then, about the response to your claim that no male character could ever be River Tam?
Take the paragraph about Mal, for example. I didn't write it as a bulleted list.
I don't really see how it's relevant. Stringing together a bunch of false sentences doesn't make a true paragraph.
On the Apsergers comparison, I distinctly weakened that with the word 'basically', and yet you omitted it from the quote,
Ah, sorry, my bad.
I don't think it saves your argument, though. Mal "basically" has Aspergers in the same way that because I sometimes daydream about a better life, I "basically" have delusions of grandeur -- and that's even if I grant that he doesn't understand what's going on, which doesn't seem to be the case.
Honestly, the only evidence I can think of that's at all relevant is that he doesn't notice Inara's feelings for him, which is not all that hard to imagine -- he is a bit biased in that regard, and she is doing her Companion-trained best to hide them.
I'm not all that worried whether or not you agree.
It's not so much whether I agree, but whether some of your positions are defensible at all.
His first few Buffy seasons were legendary, but the quality dropped off soon afterwards.
If you say so -- but keep in mind that Once More With Feeling was in season six. Out of seven.
Same thing for Angel... interesting concept that quickly became stale.
Destroying-the-world was also fairly late in the series. I will agree that it got stale, but I wouldn't say "quickly", and certainly not beyond recovery.
Firefly? Very overhyped.
I'd say it lives up to the hype, but would you actually call it bad?
Same for Dollhouse.
I don't know if this is typical, but I definitely got very mixed "hype" -- plenty of people saying dollhouse just isn't that good.
Contrast to Firefly -- very, very occasionally, I see someone say it's overhyped. There's a total of one person I can remember ever saying they didn't like it.
His artistic raison d'etre... the strong dominating female character... isn't going to work very well with the male-dominated Avengers,
Why not?
Scarlett Witch becomes the central character.
Oh, I see what you did there. Strong dominating female character.
No, what he does is strong female characters. Sometimes they're dominating (Buffy), sometimes it's male-dominated (Angel), sometimes it goes from one to the other (Firefly is male-dominated till the end of Serenity)...
I see no particular reason he couldn't do a decent job, unless you're hoping the Scarlett Witch is a damsel in distress.
Slashdot Mirror
Reason to choose a specific language: Otherwise, they could deliberately choose a language that's more obfuscated -- say, machine language -- or a proprietary language. Even if they provide the compiler for said language, it would be about as much an exercise in confusion.
Reason I'd prefer Ruby to Python: This isn't a case where performance is important, significant indentation (as much as I like it) may be a problem when people inevitably print it out, and most importantly, Ruby's internal DSLs look damned good. I think this does need to be a DSL of some sort, and I'd rather it be an internal DSL than an external one -- but I'd rather it be a DSL than a Python library.
for the outside world you are the RUDE ASSHOLE if you behave like that
Maybe. One point I was trying to make is that sometime it is better for an open source project to be perceived as a bunch of rude assholes (but who actually get stuff done) than to waste tons of time and energy dealing with all the rude assholes who can't be bothered to Google it.
I am a programmer and I feel piss off till the verge of my fingers when the dumbest question hits my ear but I don't forget that being rude doesn't change something positively for anybody but for sure is changing me being perceived as a rude asshole.
Done right, it changes two things: First, I don't have to deal with that question anymore. Second, the person has either given up, or has been sufficiently embarrassed that the next time they have a question, they'll find the answer themselves before asking.
But again, I try to be gentle about it -- I try to say, "Look, here's what you wanted, but you could've found this yourself. It's generally considered rude to be lazy when asking questions."
By the way: Maybe I'm weird, but I'd much rather have a decently well-written (but insulting) comment than a comment which runs on and on with no commas periods or breaks that makes me feel out of breath just from reading it not even out loud just reading makes me want to take a deep breath when you finally put that period down.
Now, if it's a helpdesk, the situation is different. If I'm actually being paid to deal with users, I'll try to educate them, but it's my job to deal with those who refuse to learn. But the open source community is not a helpdesk, it's a collaborative effort. I'm willing to work with you to help you out, but I'm not willing to do your work for you.
If we thought that programming is holy art where only enlightened monks will read its secret codices between the walls of monastery and practice its rituals hidden by the stupid, not smart enough ordinary ones...
I never said that, and in particular, I'm not trying to be elitist. Anyone can learn to Google first, then ask, but they have to be told that.
Again, I'm not calling the person stupid, I'm calling their question stupid, and (hopefully) giving them some valuable advice for the next time they have such a question.
And there is this crucial little point -- remember how I said "maybe" it makes us a rude asshole? Even the outside world should be able to understand, when it's explained to them -- I'm not the one being rude. If you asked a question that wasted thirty seconds of my time (and everyone else's time on the list, adding up to possibly a few man-hours), and then several minutes of my time looking up the answer and typing a response, when you could've looked it up yourself in ten seconds, you are the one being rude.
I can still try to be helpful in my reply -- that is, I'll send you to letmegooglethatforyou, instead of justfuckinggoogleit, and I'll offer some other suggestions, and generally won't act offensive (aside from the lmgtfy link) -- but again, meet me halfway and I'll be much more willing to help.
There's nothing unsafe about pointer arithmetic, unless you do things in a lazy way and don't think things through.
Or unless you do think things through, and make a mistake.
And we all make mistakes.
The question is, when (not if) you make a mistake, will you get a nice stacktrace and an instant crash? Or will you get a segfault, or worse, a security vulnerability?
Pointer math is both more tedious and less safe than the alternatives. There are very few sane reasons to use it.
I think a major problem with modern CS education is that students are taught that pointer math is "unsafe", and end up afraid to even try it.
GOOD. That makes the world safer.
Now, I agree that they should try it, and learn how it works, and then never use it themselves -- much as they should do with data structures. After learning to write a hash table once, pretty much every language I'm ever going to use, forever, is going to have it built-in.
Maybe this is why so much software ends up getting written in java or c#, and my 3 GHz Core 2 doesn't feel any faster then the 2ghz Athlon I had 8 years ago...
Unlikely, partly because Java can often be faster than C, especially when people in C want to manually malloc/free everything. Turns out garbage collection, or at least memory pooling, is much faster than malloc/free -- and in fact, garbage collection can often be faster than anything else we've tried.
Leaving that aside for the moment, even if everyone went insane and used Ruby for everything, I doubt it would have nearly as much of a difference as the algorithms and data structures chosen. In other words, those who paid attention to their data structures and algorithms courses can write decently-fast code in any language -- if Ruby is a tenth the speed of Java, their Ruby script will run ten times slower. That's not good, but someone who didn't pay attention will manage to write Java code that runs n times slower than the smart person's Ruby script, where n is a very large number that gets larger as you try to do more things.
Pointer arithmetic is about the last place I would look if I wanted serious performance improvements.
Wrong code is wrong.... *any* bad code is undesirable (for a litany of reasons).
True, but also unavoidable.
Let me put it this way: You will dereference a null pointer at some point. Now, would you rather get a nice stacktrace and an instant failure, or a random segfault, or worse, a security hole?
Similarly, it's very likely you'll have something like a buffer overrun -- and the steps to avoid this are ridiculous -- so would you rather do all that extra tedium, much of it absurdly inefficient, and then if you get it wrong, you've got a security hole? Or would you rather do none of the tedium, and if you somehow get it wrong, you've got a DoS (a crash) at worst?
If a student cannot safely implement a hashtable in an unsafe language, then they pretty obviously don't have a firm grasp on either the concept of how hashtables are supposed to work, or a firm grasp on the language being used.
I still don't see what this has to do with it -- if a student can safely implement a hashtable in a safe language, why would we expect them to fail in an unsafe language?
All I see the unsafe language doing is making things unnecessarily difficult.
Really for something this simple, doing it safely in C is just a matter of staying in bounds, and not dereferencing null pointers.
That makes it even less relevant that it's in C and not some other language. Most languages will have that restriction. The difference is:
And if the student does mess something up (everyone messes stuff up sometime), then so what!
Well, if it's C, they'll get a segfault, with no useful information about why it's happening. Other languages will generally give a nice verbose backtrace -- useful when you're trying to learn what the hell is going on.
Well, it a very important thing to know, even if you never use it...
What, how to work in an unsafe language?
it is a very safe place to learn it.
If you say so. Also probably a safe place to lean assembly, but I wouldn't recommend that, either. Save both of those for, say, an OS design class.
It seems somewhat silly to have students implement things that a language natively supports. You're likely to get many "why do I have to reimplement this if python already supports it" type complaints.
That's a problem of motivation, something I'd expect any good class, period, to address. For example, our Data Structures course (in Java, yuck) had us implement an interpreter for a simple procedural language as a homework problem.
It's also not necessarily more of a problem in one language than another. Any decent language is going to offer many of these things as libraries. So, for example, when we were asked to implement a Linked List, we were not allowed to use java.util.LinkedList.
I did however read the comment I was replying to as "why should we need to learn things in Data Structures that python can already do". Perhaps I misread it.
You did.
Really though, a good class would be completely language agnostic. In my data structures class the professor demonstrated concepts with Pascal, but expected assignments to be completed using either C, C++, or python, at the student's discretion.
Apparently, some of the higher-level classes allow that. Data Structures is our second course, immediately after an "Intro to Java and OOP" course. The concepts are (hopefully) language-agnostic, but the assignments are relatively large and tightly restricted and spec'd. Even with this restriction, it can take awhile for them to be graded.
So I think it does make sense, especially this early on, to require a single language. I think Java is a terrible choice for that, but so it goes.
Now on the serious side, as a professional embedded linux developer, I have to say I am pretty happy that my "trying to fix X for a week" are over
Mine too! Let's compare:
my home pc is windows only
I guess that works -- now you can try cleaning viruses and spyware for the week instead!
I fixed the same problem by upgrading to a modern Ubuntu. I can still have everything "just work", I can still just watch a movie.
Yes, I realize that a modern, well-admin'd Windows can be reasonably secure, but you also have to realize that a modern, well-admin'd Linux can be reasonably friendly. I honestly haven't had X break randomly since Gentoo. Far more often, I have Windows decide my copy isn't genuine, or it just isn't going to resume from hibernate this time.
I don't know if you know this, but nobody puts monitors on Windows servers either.
Neither do I, but I don't have any Windows servers. I don't know what Windows servers have to do with this.
I don't see why, putty is a pretty popular remote terminal app,
Yes, and it is good for what it is. I just don't see the point unless he's running a Windows desktop -- Linux and OS X both have decent native ssh clients.
And he was bragging about how good he is with Linux and the CLI, which makes it odd that he'd need Windows, especially at work.
I agree, GUIs are wonderful for certain things. I just don't see why he'd prefer a Windows GUI.
I gave up Linux because I didn't need it for work, and the GUI is still utter shit compared to a version of Windows that is a decade old, never mind trying to compare it to a modern version of Windows or OSX.
Does Windows have sloppy focus? Does OS X? Have any of them, ever?
How about keyboard shortcuts for moving and resizing windows?
OS X has finally added Spaces, which is a pale imitation of virtual desktops on Linux. I think nVidia has something like that on Windows, but I have no idea how well it works.
Interestingly, multi-monitor support is worse on Windows. Easier to configure, but every time I want to run anything fullscreen (including a game), it insists on running on the "primary" monitor -- which is also where Windows insists on putting the task bar and start menu. I want those on my other monitor, which is smaller, but has more vertical space, so I can use my larger "primary" monitor for games. I haven't tried that since XP, though -- maybe it's changed.
How about you provide an actual example of what's wrong with the Linux GUI, especially when we're talking about sysadmin work.
...since you're apparently a capable Unix admin, ntfsclone.
But that doesn't apply here. That applies to viruses screwing up your Windows, but when hardware dies, particularly the motherboard, that image isn't going to help much.
I'd like to draw a hard distinction here between cases where someone is actually being an asshole (see some of the other responses), and cases where you're wasting someone's time because you couldn't figure out how to just fucking Google it.
I try to be a bit more helpful and offer to Google it for them, but seriously, there are a lot of questions by people who need to follow this flowchart before asking questions.
The attitude comes, I think, from the fact that this is an ongoing problem. There are enough real questions and real problems, and enough real work to be done, that it's infuriating to see dozens of people asking the exact same questions (which are right there in the FAQ)...
Eventually, you end up with a situation where, consciously or not, the community has learned that it's more productive to be antisocial and drive away a few good people (and hopefully get a few people who learn to ask better questions) so we can get things done, than to have to deal with the unwashed masses.
I'm trying not to be elitist here -- again, I present it moderately gently, and I do try to offer an actual response. However, keep in mind that this is not the help desk, but a community. Meet us halfway, and we're generally quite helpful and friendly, though there are obvious exceptions. But if you're not willing to do your homework, don't expect us to go out of our way, either -- in that case, you're the one being rude.
I haven't actually used a monitor on my unix box since I installed it. I just putty in and go from there..
While that sets you apart from many of us, it also reveals Windows on your desktop. Why?
I don't use monitors on my Unix servers...
The only time I even look at graphics
Yeah, I know it's hyperbole, but after your "putty" comment above, it's a fail.
I actually did work with a commandline only for a week or so while I was trying to fix my X. At least five or ten years ago, and I hope no one still needs to do that, but if you really want to say you "never look at graphics", try dealing with that with only Lynx for a browser.
I'm also 23, but I boot Windows when I want to play games -- and there, only the games I can't run on Linux.
My college changed the first 3 CS classes to Python instead of C++ because it's easier. Then when they get to Data Structures, they've gotta learn C++ for the first time, at the same time.
I've seen nothing in my current Data Structures course that couldn't be done in Python. Am I missing something?
They are willing to accept lower sales of the game and offer a less desirable product because they consider it preferable to having their games pirated.
Erm... why?
I mean, if they're driven by money, that seems like about the stupidest thing they could do. Yes, let's make the PC version both less enjoyable and less profitable!
They also don't want pirated PC copies of their game competing against their console sales.
Wouldn't that also be something they could measure? Compare sales of the console version of this game with other games that didn't have that DRM?
how would you like to walk around with a constant erection?
So now she finally understands what it's like to be a 13 year old boy?
That hypothetical 13-year-old should seek medical attention. If not, I'm guessing you don't actually mean constant, you mean continual.
What you and everyone else here seems to be missing is the difference between continual arousal (or just general horniness) and continuous arousal, which is a serious medical condition that doesn't need to be laughed at.
It's more or less like the difference between the kind of delusional that Glenn Beck is, and an actual serious mental disorder. I mean, your immediate response might be that Glenn Beck really is crazy, but if you've ever actually been around someone with paranoid delusions, who had to be physically restrained and forcibly drugged just to be brought under control, you wouldn't say that. Sure, Glenn Beck needs help, but there's a clear difference.
Apple is responsible for setting up the system this way. Either train the reviewers better, or stop exerting such anal-retentive control over your device.
And about as genuine. They'll change if they feel the bad press is bad enough, and they'll change back when it's over, and in general, they'll keep pushing the limits of what people will tolerate.
Citation needed.
Oh please.
Please, educate yourself on the topic before you make yourself sound like an ass.
It's only humiliating if she think's being aroused humiliates her.
Being aroused, without your control, pretty much 24/7. Yes, I'd call that humiliating -- I'm assuming you're male, so how would you like to walk around with a constant erection?
And if it's all she can think about to the point of being debilitating, perhaps she should change jobs to something that involves sex or sextoys and get filthy rich.
I hope you're joking.
I'm a programmer. I like what I do. I would not like to have some sort of compulsive wanking problem where every time I started to write a line of code, I couldn't, because one hand would be moving from my keyboard to my pants.
What you're talking about is removing her choice to be anything other than a nymphomaniac, and she's supposed to be OK with that.
Bullshit.
Now, is it possible people can turn that around into an advantage? Sure, and if I had my hands amputated, I might be able to still live a long and healthy life -- but I'd still miss being able to type and otherwise function as a normal human being.
And by the way: Are you suggesting that the majority of sex workers (prostitution, pornography, etc) get filthy rich?
It's not a problem unless she wants it to be.
Unless you're willing to apply the same standard to amputees, shut the fuck up.
And by the way: This is distinct from nymphomania, which is a psychological condition. The main difference is that a nymphomaniac actually wants it. Think for a moment about the definition of rape, and you might start to get an idea of why this would be a problem.
In a perfectly sane world, no one would be using Blackboard to begin with.
Even more likely than that: Some teacher who "knew a lot about computers" set up the system in his/her spare time.
That seems far-fetched. There are FOSS tools like Moodle -- Blackboard, by contrast, is going to cost you. As their website doesn't specify a price, you can expect the price to be tailored to your individual institution, or in other words, likely several hundred dollars at least, probably in the thousands.
That's a guess, but it seems doubtful, or at least stupid, to allow "some teacher who knew a lot about computers" to have that much purchasing power.
Hopefully one day I’ll find a superstud who can satisfy me.
Ah now I understand... The old I-want-sex-all-the-time trick to get men.
Maybe. However, It is a real thing, and from what I understand is debilitating, humiliating, and doesn't necessarily lead to the woman becoming a nympho.
In fact, I'm kind of surprised -- even on Slashdot, I'd expect someone to have picked that up somewhere, rather than just assuming this is a good thing. That seems a bit on par with taking advantage of someone's mental disorder...
As PsychoSlashDot says, we need to keep bringing this up, talking about it, sharing it, etc. It does matter, it is morally questionable (even if perfectly legal), and it needs much, much more noise until Apple either stops doing it or starts losing significant marketshare.
I think your problem is that it's not news, certainly not for nerds. I'd agree with that.
I understand that Microsoft has a ton of backwards compatibility they need to maintain, but if a company the fraction of your size can do it, why can't you?
Inertia.
In fact, inertia is Microsoft's crown jewel. Notice how much heat they took for "breaking" so many apps with Vista. By contrast, Apple can release something like OS X and, despite Classic, you know you'd better get your shit in order if you want it to work two years from now.
68k emulation in PPC was decent. Classic mode worked for most applications and Rosetta was as seamless as it gets.
Ah, but can you actually run 68k apps, in Classic mode, in Rosetta, on an Intel machine? Last time I suggested this, people told me that Classic isn't supported on newer Macs.
Yes "FAT" Binaries are larger, but given how cheap HD space is, it's not too much of a concern of mine.
How about RAM? CPU cache? Bandwidth?
I don't mind spending these things if I'm getting something worthwhile out of it. Fat binaries might make sense on OS X, where apps typically aren't "installed" so much as "dragged to Applications". It makes little to no sense for the files installed from .mpkg which burrow themselves as deep into the system as any InstallShield installation on Windows.
About the only place it makes sense is a well-behaved commercial app, in which case, I can simply drag it from an old machine to a new one without caring about architecture.
Side note, and legitimate question, does Linux do fat binaries?
I believe someone wrote a patch, but no one cared.
There are a few reasons for this: First, the Linux workflow is different and IMO better. If I want the program 'foo' on my system, I go find it in the package manager and run it. This is especially seamless on the commandline -- I type 'foo', it says "foo isn't installed, type 'apt-get install foo' to install it.", I do that, then I type 'foo' again and it works.
In other words, the point isn't to download random binaries from the Internet. If you find an interesting-looking package on the Internet, fine, but you check your repositories first. Thus, you're ensured that the version you're getting is the latest version that works with your distro (and your version of that distro), that it will be patched with the rest of your system from the same place, that it's reasonably safe and vetted (and the real thing), and that it works for your architecture.
This is also why Linux never really needed an App Store -- package managers basically are App Stores already, just without payment.
The second reason is that Linux has, at a minimum, shell scripts, and usually many more scripting languages available. You can also generally count on tar and gzip at a minimum, probably bzip2 and lzma. So, when people do distribute proprietary apps for Linux, one common strategy is to compile a few different binaries for the architectures they want to support (usually just x86 and x86_64, but hlds used to have binaries optimized for many specific iterations of x86), include them all in a folder with the rest of your app (static resources and the like), and install a shell script that picks the appropriate binary (and libraries) at runtime.
If your worry is installers, there are programs which will take a folder like the above, tar it up, and wrap the tarball in a shell script. Effectively a self-extracting installer, like any other, only it doesn't need any binaries of itself, it just needs /bin/sh to exist and a decent tar to be in your path.
Now, it's a bit clumsy to use something like this, since you'd have to download it, mark it executable, and then run it. An alternative is to wrap that folder in a .deb (or a .rpm) and use that as an installer. You could also do what Google did and rely on the install scripts in Debian packages -- so when I install Go
The line-by-line rebuttals are a bit telling, in my opinion.
If you say so. What, then, about the response to your claim that no male character could ever be River Tam?
Take the paragraph about Mal, for example. I didn't write it as a bulleted list.
I don't really see how it's relevant. Stringing together a bunch of false sentences doesn't make a true paragraph.
On the Apsergers comparison, I distinctly weakened that with the word 'basically', and yet you omitted it from the quote,
Ah, sorry, my bad.
I don't think it saves your argument, though. Mal "basically" has Aspergers in the same way that because I sometimes daydream about a better life, I "basically" have delusions of grandeur -- and that's even if I grant that he doesn't understand what's going on, which doesn't seem to be the case.
Honestly, the only evidence I can think of that's at all relevant is that he doesn't notice Inara's feelings for him, which is not all that hard to imagine -- he is a bit biased in that regard, and she is doing her Companion-trained best to hide them.
I'm not all that worried whether or not you agree.
It's not so much whether I agree, but whether some of your positions are defensible at all.
His first few Buffy seasons were legendary, but the quality dropped off soon afterwards.
If you say so -- but keep in mind that Once More With Feeling was in season six. Out of seven.
Same thing for Angel... interesting concept that quickly became stale.
Destroying-the-world was also fairly late in the series. I will agree that it got stale, but I wouldn't say "quickly", and certainly not beyond recovery.
Firefly? Very overhyped.
I'd say it lives up to the hype, but would you actually call it bad?
Same for Dollhouse.
I don't know if this is typical, but I definitely got very mixed "hype" -- plenty of people saying dollhouse just isn't that good.
Contrast to Firefly -- very, very occasionally, I see someone say it's overhyped. There's a total of one person I can remember ever saying they didn't like it.
His artistic raison d'etre... the strong dominating female character... isn't going to work very well with the male-dominated Avengers,
Why not?
Scarlett Witch becomes the central character.
Oh, I see what you did there. Strong dominating female character.
No, what he does is strong female characters. Sometimes they're dominating (Buffy), sometimes it's male-dominated (Angel), sometimes it goes from one to the other (Firefly is male-dominated till the end of Serenity)...
I see no particular reason he couldn't do a decent job, unless you're hoping the Scarlett Witch is a damsel in distress.