The key word here is "economically viable". Think for a moment, what would happen if oil supplies started running low because of a lack of profitable reserves? Demand for oil is pretty inelastic (not dependant on price), so the price would almost assuredly go up, just as when supplies are cut short for other reasons, like an OPEC quota. As the price of oil goes up, reserves that cost more to extract will now be profitable. We'll still have oil, but it will just be more expensive.
Remember that if the price of oil goes up, there are various points at which other energy sources become competitive. So it is possible for oil to be priced "out of the market" except for specialized uses.
Hmmm...given that only "managed*" code will run in the CLR, I don't think that non-Java like languages will ever run in.NET.
The CLR can be used for both managed and unmanaged code. http://www.yasd.com/tutorials/c_sharp/chap17_1.htm . And anyhow, other languages could be "managed." There is already a prototype of Python running on the CLR and there is no reason to believe that it could not be finished one day to be equivalent to Jython. And C++ runs on the CLR: already.
+ The C# Abstract or "Virtual Machine" (CLR) is not designed for C#, rather for language neutrality (to an extent). Java and the JVM, however, are closely tied.
It will be years before we know whether non-Java-like languages actually run better on the.NET runtime than on the C# one. Don't believe Microsoft's PR.
That is flat out silly. Java provides object wrappers for it's primitive types.
That doesn't negate his point. After all it would take a monkey fifteen minutes to create those wrapper classes. But you can't add two float wrappers to each other or do a "++" on an integer wrapper can you? So eventually you need to deal with wrapping and unwrapping. That's just plain silly and the only excuse for it is performance. If.NET gets similar performance without the primitive type hack then Java has no excuse.
If you want to talk about non-OOP features, C# is full of them. Like structs for example. Who came up with that idea?
There is nothing wrong with a language having features that are not OOP. OOP is not a religion. The problem with non-object primitive types is that you need to deal with wrapping and unwrapping them. Anyhow, there is nothing non-OOP about structs either. OOP *allows* encapsulation, it does not *demand* it all of the time.
As far as Indexers go (and pretty much all the differences between Java and C#), they are just syntactic sugar that really just makes code confusing to read compared to Java.
That's weak. Any extra syntax taht C# adds, no matter how simple or readable is "confusing." Look, I think C# and Java are tweedledee and tweeldedum. I hate them both. I have no reason to defend one over the other. But you are so blatantly partisan that you refuse to look at the few, tiny things that C# got right with fresh eyes. That sort of thinking will hurt Java in the long run because it will blind Java's developers and users to good ideas from elsewhere. You should use the things that C# got right to pressure Java's developers to fix their mistakes.
In particular, Java could use a strong dose of syntactic sugar. C# is a little better, but just a little. For starters, I'd suggest you look at Python handles iterators, indexers, generators, and dictionary and list initializers. There is nothing I hate more than switching from Python to Java and realizing that I could write half as much code and it could be clearer. Even ignoring the static type checking system, Java seems to go out of its way be verbose. That iterator class crap is just unbelievably ugly.
This coming from someone who tries to pretend he was inspired by smalltalk (since its more OO pure) even though its plainly obvious to anyone who knows jack shit about languages that the Java object model is a strict subset of C++'s. I mean, in smalltalk, things like reflection and introspection fall out of the way the object model works. In Java, its a bag on the side, because Bjarne didn't design it into the C++ object model, which Gosling stole wholesale.
The Java object model is a lot closer to the Simula object model which is much older and simpler than C++'s. I mean garbage collection is a pretty big part of the object model and Java has it and C++ doesn't. C++ has templates and Java doesn't.
What if you only have an email address for someone you need to contact?
Web: Read a book
What if there is no book on the topic, only a web page?
Any data that is transferred could just as easily go by modem.
Oh yeah, a hundred telecommuters are going to hit each companies two or three remaining modems. Now maybe thousands of telecommuters out of work for a week is not quite an economic shock comparable to September 11 but it sure wouldn't be good for the economy.
Documentum has long been the leader in large scale "document management" and they are still around. They are probably overkill for small or medium sized businesses though.
Don't forget, the "unwritten rules" of the Internet as a non-commercial venue included the Web(!) at first; there were always "dot-com" addresses, but outright advertising was seriously frowned upon. However, had this fundamentalist purity somehow miraculously stayed intact, most of us would probably be out of a job today. I know I would.
It is not right to treat PULL information sources like web sites as analogous to PUSH information sources. The commercialization was never the problem for any but a tiny fraction of people. If you had done a "Canter and Siegel" about the Israeli/Palestinian question you would have been flamed also. The only reason that commercialism made it worse is because it was clear that if there was profit in it there would be no end to it.
Okay, you've probably beaten the lowest priced Dell (I'm too lazy to check), but Circuit City has machines for as low as $474.95 for an eMachines or $569.00 for a Compaq. The Compaq has roughly the same specs as the Mac (minus monitor). My habit is to buy the cheapest computer available and use it for a year and a half and then buy another cheap one. I don't change my monitor that often so I don't want to buy one with each computer. The computer at Circuit City is a Compaq Presario 5000.
As I admitted before, Macs are probably competitive in the mid-range. But if you want a CHEAP COMPUTER you would have to buy a used Mac to get to PC-like prices.
Now lets look at it: First off, price. The bottom line iMac is actually very cheap and when you compare it to a packaged PC deal with 3 year warranty, you'll actually find the prices are roughly the same and the Mac has more features.
According to sfgate, the cheapest of the new iMacs $1,399.00. I've seen it elsewhere at $1294.00. Dell's cheapest Pentium 4 is $1,086.17 and $906.17 if you already have a monitor as many of us do. And that's to say nothing of eMachines! Macs may be competitive at the mid-range but if you want a cheap box, Apple is not where I would turn.
Never is a long time. You must have some special insight into the future to argue with such authority against Moore's law. Don't you think there was a day when they said that Quake could never be written in C?
2. SPAM click rates will continue to fall, and bandwidth costs will soar, so eventually the point will be reached that most SPAM will no longer be viable economically- this may be some time away, but I think it is certainly a possibility.
Bandwidth costs are not storing. There is a ton of left over bandwidth from the.COM bubble which is going unused. SPAM is relatively lightweight. We need either technical or political solutions. We can't wait for spam to get too expensive because of bandwidth.
Yes, expert witnesses will be available in high stakes cases. But in most of high stakes cases people will learn to be careful and do negotiations through lawyers anyhow. The problem is going to be in the small claims cases where the judge is in a hurry, the parties don't have lawyers, etc. Those cases often seem to come down to he said/she said already and if "he" or "she" happens to be a computer person they could make their side of the story much more believable quite cheaply with a forged email.
One thing that worries me about this decision is that I'm not sure whether your average judge knows how easy it is to forge emails. I could come to court with a bunch of ASCII that I claim you sent me. If the judge isn't techno-savvy he'll think that's "proof" that you sent it.
The other thing that bothers me is mentioned in the article. People think about email as an informal medium like conversation. They'll be afraid to use it if they think that it's legally the same as writing a formal contract. Or they'll have to put a stupid.sig: "this email does not represent a legally binding contract."
...you would think that at least ONE of the first set of interviews could be with a girl or a woman... it's not as if there aren't any "free software hackers" who are ladies. hmm.--katie
There really aren't that many famous female free software hackers. I can think of a famous female free software MANAGER and a WRITER but few software developers. That's really amazing and deserves further investigation. Female software developers are a small minority to start with but somehow open source/free software seems to weed them out even more. I could hypothesize why this is (probably a variety of reasons) but I think it deserves indepth study. It would be great to poll male and female CS graduates on a variety of ambitions and emotions and then track which ones become open source hackers.
It would also be useful to track their career paths. If most women are pushed into relationship-oriented jobs (management, marketing, phone support) then they may not have the opportunity to even play with open source software enough to want to contribute to it.
I'm no found of the CPCC but this Lawrence Wade guy needs to get a life. He's surfing the web and just looking around for copyright violations? Is an IP lawyer or something?
Holy crap! Excuse me for being a doubting thomas, but can you point to some evidence about the $0.21 tax on CD-R (Data - not audio). If your right about that, I think I might seek out a lawyer and try to sue the RIAA. I'm not kidding at all.
We're talking about Canada so I don't know if the RIAA is even involved. There is something in Canada called the CPCC and it exists to collect this money and disburse it. Yes, CD-Rs get taxed at $0.21, which is cheaper than the $0.77 for CD-R Audios.
See http://www.cpcc.ca/English/FAQ/faq.html.
It kind of makes you wonder about Canadian sanity.
Please understand that this is a proposal from the people who would collect this money. It does not represnt the position of the Canadian government or the Canadian people. It is a starting point for the negotiations:
Pursuant to subsection 83(6) of the Copyright Act, the Copyight Board hereby publishes the statement filed by the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) on February 11, 2002, with respect to the levies it proposes to collect, effective January 1,2003, for the sale, in Canada, of blank audio recording media.
This is essentially a wishlist from the organization that represents the copyright owners. Think of it as an initial bargaining position. They will back off if there is massive pushback from consumers and manufacturers. The manufacturers should be particularly upset. Think of how pissed off you would be if you made an MP3 player that was taxed but a similar product was not taxed because it advertised itself as a "personal organizer WITH MP3 CAPABILITY." Think about if you are a microdrive manufacturer and your product has to compete with slightly bigger drives that are not considered "microdrives."
I don't see how this thing could go through without major changes. Surely the manufacturers will scream bloody murder.
It says nothing about memory sold separate from the device.
Actually, a different part of the article addresses memory sold separate from the device. That's the part that really pisses me off. If I buy a microdrive for my camera I'm paying a pirating tax on it??
Yes, you can write to your Member of Parliament but the PDF also says how you can directly comment to the board. You need to read it to understand how to have the most impact. There are certain arguments that they feel they cannot accept because of the overriding law.
I think the weakest point would be the idea that a removable flash memory storage device is an "audio recording device." These things are used as much in digital cameras and PDAs as in MP3 players. Once they start expanding the definition in this way they will eventually get to plain old hard drives eventually.
$21 for each gigabyte of memory in each non-removable hard drive incorporated into each MP3 player or into each similar device with an internal hard drive that is intended for use primarily to record and play music.
It says nothing about memory sold separate from the device. Therefore it will quickly become apparent that it makes sense to sell the hard drive separately. The same goes for the provision on memory. If it doesn't come with the device it seems like it isn't taxed.
Someone please moderate the parent up!
I could repeat what it says and karma-whore but I'd rather help the poster get his intelligent argument promoted!
Slashdot Mirror
The key word here is "economically viable". Think for a moment, what would happen if oil supplies started running low because of a lack of profitable reserves? Demand for oil is pretty inelastic (not dependant on price), so the price would almost assuredly go up, just as when supplies are cut short for other reasons, like an OPEC quota. As the price of oil goes up, reserves that cost more to extract will now be profitable. We'll still have oil, but it will just be more expensive.
Remember that if the price of oil goes up, there are various points at which other energy sources become competitive. So it is possible for oil to be priced "out of the market" except for specialized uses.
Hmmm...given that only "managed*" code will run in the CLR, I don't think that non-Java like languages will ever run in .NET.
The CLR can be used for both managed and unmanaged code. http://www.yasd.com/tutorials/c_sharp/chap17_1.htm . And anyhow, other languages could be "managed." There is already a prototype of Python running on the CLR and there is no reason to believe that it could not be finished one day to be equivalent to Jython. And C++ runs on the CLR: already.
+ The C# Abstract or "Virtual Machine" (CLR) is not designed for C#, rather for language neutrality (to an extent). Java and the JVM, however, are closely tied.
It will be years before we know whether non-Java-like languages actually run better on the .NET runtime than on the C# one. Don't believe Microsoft's PR.
That is flat out silly. Java provides object wrappers for it's primitive types.
That doesn't negate his point. After all it would take a monkey fifteen minutes to create those wrapper classes. But you can't add two float wrappers to each other or do a "++" on an integer wrapper can you? So eventually you need to deal with wrapping and unwrapping. That's just plain silly and the only excuse for it is performance. If .NET gets similar performance without the primitive type hack then Java has no excuse.
If you want to talk about non-OOP features, C# is full of them. Like structs for example. Who came up with that idea?
There is nothing wrong with a language having features that are not OOP. OOP is not a religion. The problem with non-object primitive types is that you need to deal with wrapping and unwrapping them. Anyhow, there is nothing non-OOP about structs either. OOP *allows* encapsulation, it does not *demand* it all of the time.
As far as Indexers go (and pretty much all the differences between Java and C#), they are just syntactic sugar that really just makes code confusing to read compared to Java.
That's weak. Any extra syntax taht C# adds, no matter how simple or readable is "confusing." Look, I think C# and Java are tweedledee and tweeldedum. I hate them both. I have no reason to defend one over the other. But you are so blatantly partisan that you refuse to look at the few, tiny things that C# got right with fresh eyes. That sort of thinking will hurt Java in the long run because it will blind Java's developers and users to good ideas from elsewhere. You should use the things that C# got right to pressure Java's developers to fix their mistakes.
In particular, Java could use a strong dose of syntactic sugar. C# is a little better, but just a little. For starters, I'd suggest you look at Python handles iterators, indexers, generators, and dictionary and list initializers. There is nothing I hate more than switching from Python to Java and realizing that I could write half as much code and it could be clearer. Even ignoring the static type checking system, Java seems to go out of its way be verbose. That iterator class crap is just unbelievably ugly.
This coming from someone who tries to pretend he was inspired by smalltalk (since its more OO pure) even though its plainly obvious to anyone who knows jack shit about languages that the Java object model is a strict subset of C++'s. I mean, in smalltalk, things like reflection and introspection fall out of the way the object model works. In Java, its a bag on the side, because Bjarne didn't design it into the C++ object model, which Gosling stole wholesale.
The Java object model is a lot closer to the Simula object model which is much older and simpler than C++'s. I mean garbage collection is a pretty big part of the object model and Java has it and C++ doesn't. C++ has templates and Java doesn't.
E-mail: Use the phones.
What if you only have an email address for someone you need to contact?
Web: Read a book
What if there is no book on the topic, only a web page?
Any data that is transferred could just as easily go by modem.
Oh yeah, a hundred telecommuters are going to hit each companies two or three remaining modems. Now maybe thousands of telecommuters out of work for a week is not quite an economic shock comparable to September 11 but it sure wouldn't be good for the economy.
Documentum has long been the leader in large scale "document management" and they are still around. They are probably overkill for small or medium sized businesses though.
Last years Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to the first experimenters who created this sixth (depending on how you count) state of matter
How would I count if I wanted to get to six? Solid, liquid, gas, plasma, condensate, ???
Don't forget, the "unwritten rules" of the Internet as a non-commercial venue included the Web(!) at first; there were always "dot-com" addresses, but outright advertising was seriously frowned upon. However, had this fundamentalist purity somehow miraculously stayed intact, most of us would probably be out of a job today. I know I would.
It is not right to treat PULL information sources like web sites as analogous to PUSH information sources. The commercialization was never the problem for any but a tiny fraction of people. If you had done a "Canter and Siegel" about the Israeli/Palestinian question you would have been flamed also. The only reason that commercialism made it worse is because it was clear that if there was profit in it there would be no end to it.
Okay, you've probably beaten the lowest priced Dell (I'm too lazy to check), but Circuit City has machines for as low as $474.95 for an eMachines or $569.00 for a Compaq. The Compaq has roughly the same specs as the Mac (minus monitor). My habit is to buy the cheapest computer available and use it for a year and a half and then buy another cheap one. I don't change my monitor that often so I don't want to buy one with each computer. The computer at Circuit City is a Compaq Presario 5000. As I admitted before, Macs are probably competitive in the mid-range. But if you want a CHEAP COMPUTER you would have to buy a used Mac to get to PC-like prices.
Now lets look at it: First off, price. The bottom line iMac is actually very cheap and when you compare it to a packaged PC deal with 3 year warranty, you'll actually find the prices are roughly the same and the Mac has more features.
According to sfgate, the cheapest of the new iMacs $1,399.00. I've seen it elsewhere at $1294.00. Dell's cheapest Pentium 4 is $1,086.17 and $906.17 if you already have a monitor as many of us do. And that's to say nothing of eMachines! Macs may be competitive at the mid-range but if you want a cheap box, Apple is not where I would turn.
What's the difference between a computer novice and a computer salesman? About a week.
Quake [X] will never be written in Java.
Never is a long time. You must have some special insight into the future to argue with such authority against Moore's law. Don't you think there was a day when they said that Quake could never be written in C?
2. SPAM click rates will continue to fall, and bandwidth costs will soar, so eventually the point will be reached that most SPAM will no longer be viable economically- this may be some time away, but I think it is certainly a possibility.
Bandwidth costs are not storing. There is a ton of left over bandwidth from theYes, expert witnesses will be available in high stakes cases. But in most of high stakes cases people will learn to be careful and do negotiations through lawyers anyhow. The problem is going to be in the small claims cases where the judge is in a hurry, the parties don't have lawyers, etc. Those cases often seem to come down to he said/she said already and if "he" or "she" happens to be a computer person they could make their side of the story much more believable quite cheaply with a forged email.
One thing that worries me about this decision is that I'm not sure whether your average judge knows how easy it is to forge emails. I could come to court with a bunch of ASCII that I claim you sent me. If the judge isn't techno-savvy he'll think that's "proof" that you sent it. The other thing that bothers me is mentioned in the article. People think about email as an informal medium like conversation. They'll be afraid to use it if they think that it's legally the same as writing a formal contract. Or they'll have to put a stupid .sig: "this email does not represent a legally binding contract."
There really aren't that many famous female free software hackers. I can think of a famous female free software MANAGER and a WRITER but few software developers. That's really amazing and deserves further investigation. Female software developers are a small minority to start with but somehow open source/free software seems to weed them out even more. I could hypothesize why this is (probably a variety of reasons) but I think it deserves indepth study. It would be great to poll male and female CS graduates on a variety of ambitions and emotions and then track which ones become open source hackers. It would also be useful to track their career paths. If most women are pushed into relationship-oriented jobs (management, marketing, phone support) then they may not have the opportunity to even play with open source software enough to want to contribute to it.
I'm no found of the CPCC but this Lawrence Wade guy needs to get a life. He's surfing the web and just looking around for copyright violations? Is an IP lawyer or something?
Holy crap! Excuse me for being a doubting thomas, but can you point to some evidence about the $0.21 tax on CD-R (Data - not audio). If your right about that, I think I might seek out a lawyer and try to sue the RIAA. I'm not kidding at all.
We're talking about Canada so I don't know if the RIAA is even involved. There is something in Canada called the CPCC and it exists to collect this money and disburse it. Yes, CD-Rs get taxed at $0.21, which is cheaper than the $0.77 for CD-R Audios. See http://www.cpcc.ca/English/FAQ/faq.html.It kind of makes you wonder about Canadian sanity.
Please understand that this is a proposal from the people who would collect this money. It does not represnt the position of the Canadian government or the Canadian people. It is a starting point for the negotiations:
Pursuant to subsection 83(6) of the Copyright Act, the Copyight Board hereby publishes the statement filed by the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) on February 11, 2002, with respect to the levies it proposes to collect, effective January 1,2003, for the sale, in Canada, of blank audio recording media.
This is essentially a wishlist from the organization that represents the copyright owners. Think of it as an initial bargaining position. They will back off if there is massive pushback from consumers and manufacturers. The manufacturers should be particularly upset. Think of how pissed off you would be if you made an MP3 player that was taxed but a similar product was not taxed because it advertised itself as a "personal organizer WITH MP3 CAPABILITY." Think about if you are a microdrive manufacturer and your product has to compete with slightly bigger drives that are not considered "microdrives." I don't see how this thing could go through without major changes. Surely the manufacturers will scream bloody murder.
It says nothing about memory sold separate from the device.
Actually, a different part of the article addresses memory sold separate from the device. That's the part that really pisses me off. If I buy a microdrive for my camera I'm paying a pirating tax on it??
Yes, you can write to your Member of Parliament but the PDF also says how you can directly comment to the board. You need to read it to understand how to have the most impact. There are certain arguments that they feel they cannot accept because of the overriding law. I think the weakest point would be the idea that a removable flash memory storage device is an "audio recording device." These things are used as much in digital cameras and PDAs as in MP3 players. Once they start expanding the definition in this way they will eventually get to plain old hard drives eventually.
$21 for each gigabyte of memory in each non-removable hard drive incorporated into each MP3 player or into each similar device with an internal hard drive that is intended for use primarily to record and play music.
It says nothing about memory sold separate from the device. Therefore it will quickly become apparent that it makes sense to sell the hard drive separately. The same goes for the provision on memory. If it doesn't come with the device it seems like it isn't taxed.
Someone please moderate the parent up! I could repeat what it says and karma-whore but I'd rather help the poster get his intelligent argument promoted!