Bwahahahahahaaahh! Well, if 2600 says it's true, then it's gotta be!! Of couse, what they're saying is true is that they were lying... like that classic Star Trek episode where Spock frags an android by saying "Now listen carefully: everything McCoy says is a lie..." and McCoy says "I'm lying..."
It's a recursive prank!;)
Hmmm, maybe 2600 is being secretly sponsored by a certificate authority...
IMHO execution time and efficiency on the server side is not a big deal at this time. The problem is the (usually vast) amount of html tags, text, and binary data (usually animated graphics) that are being forced through the Internet, squeezed through ISP/LAN/Modem bottlenecks, and rendered on inefficient browsers.
Your (php,mod_perl,compiled CGI) code can be beautiful, elegant, optimized, efficient, easy to understand, and simple to edit/extend, but it makes little or no difference whatsoever if 100K still has to be delivered to the client, interpreted, and displayed. I think the quantification of 'good web code' should be dominated by "bang per byte the client has to deal with" rather than more traditional programming standards. Subjective, I know, but I think given the current constraints of the medium more attention needs to be paid to what happens on the client end (end-user available bandwidth id not increasing as fast as processing power does {not Moore's law!}).
I am reminded of the American Red Cross' philosophy toward swimming: "Every person a swimmer, every swimmer a lifesaver" or words to that effect. They wish to promote safety in the water by having everyone properly trained to a) swim and b) rescue swimmers in trouble. In the (perhaps never existed) golden age of computing, everyone knew enough about code to write things and understand at least some of other people's code. Some serendipitous results of the OSS movement may be to increase the pool of potential peer reviewers who are qualified to critique code, improve code readability and documentation, (save the whales, halt global warming, and put a chicken in every pot and shoes on all the world's children). Okay, I know. But I think it's possible at least that things will improve in this regard if not to the utopian "Every computer user a coder, and every coder a debugger" state.
I just read an article in Physics Today about new work with Bose-Einstein condensates, and I was surprised at the size (volume?) of the condensates they are making now and the research they are doing with them. It made me think that there may be applications of laser cooling that are yet to be discovered. While I heartily agree with everyone that this is not the new way to chill your Celeron I wouldn't totally rule something like this out -- hahahah okay, here's a thought. One rarely looks foolish making the most outrageous forecasts that don't come true, but your reputation takes a pretty solid hit if you say something will never be true and you are proved wrong...
I partially agree that Windows 2k is getting too bad a rap. I mean, its a damn good OS, ideally.
In all friendliness (please do not consider this a flame), I think the only way you can make this statement is if you have never used a "good OS."
To be fair to you, perhaps this is just a semantic problem -- I for one do not consider "feature-rich" to be "good" unless other criteria of "goodness" -- reliability and scarcity of bugs come to mind -- are also met. soft's kitchen sink approach to OS (and applications) are no doubt satisfactory if sheer number of features are the highest priority. But not everyone agrees with that.
So now that I've made that inflammatory statement, I'm going to have to provide an equally inflammatory support (pause to don asbestos underwear) -- I'm going to submit DEC VMS as a real world example of a "Good OS" (wait, let me finish!). VMS was somewhat feature rich, but it nevertheless had very robust underpinnings (like virtual memory, a journaling filesystem, development API, hideously complete documentation, and the ability to work with a cluster of CPUs) that were well ahead of its time (for small computers anyway). VMS did rather tightly regulate what you could do (particularly with hardware, DEC brand only was the rule in the old days), and I found the user interface frustrating (file names in particular). So perhaps low marks for ease of use and extensibility, but the systems were powerful and pretty much bulletproof -- I never heard of anyone crashing a VMS machine (okay, out with the anecdotes now, everyone over 35 will now come out with the time they saw a VMS machine crash). But I'd say that was a good OS. Couldn't do absolutely everything, but what it could do it did so very well and without gagging. NT on the other hand, barfs every time if you look at it funny. Problem there is probably the kitchen-sink development philosophy, which has infinite possibilities both for capability and failure.
IMHO, the kitchen sink approach can only result in a "good OS" or "good applications" in an open source environment for obvious reasons. Linux is a great example. Just my $0.02...
Ka--CHINNNNGG! Excellent comment. 5 is not high enough moderators -- this comment concisely sums up the main goal of the commercial operators (from pr0nmongers to Microsoft) who have successfully hijacked the Internet.
% dmesg | grep Bogo Calibrating delay loop.. ok - 49.87 BogoMIPS i486dx2-100 btw Got a friend who claims to have a linux caching secondary dns server on a 386 -- see if I can get him to give up the the bogomips figure...
...that SOMEONE out there at least is using Linux and clustering technology(ies!) to do some real work (pause to don asbestos gumby suit), as opposed to merely sucking down Internet bandwidth. Which is what I'm doing right now. Oh no! SIGHYPOCRISY received: Dumping core panic: Hypocrisy error in SIMM 0x0B panic: Hypocrisy error in SIMM 0x0B panic: Hypocrisy error in SIMM 0x0B panic: Hypocrisy error in SIMM 0x0B Syncing filesystems... [11][8][6][3.14159][0][0][0][0][0][0][0][0][-1] System Halted Press any key to reboot
Yes! Yes!!!! I love it! Why stop there? Add more stuff! How about a Trimble TANS Vector system, 4 synchronized p-code GPSes spaced about a meter apart which gives you x, y, z, course, speed, yaw, pitch, and roll in real time... dang... hey, are you married? Oh never mind, I am already.;)
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Yes, indeedie doo, and there have been ports of David Flater's Xtide harmonic tide-prediction program (I know of one for the PalmPilot, so a Palm one is probably not far away), so your little PDA is now your compleat navigator's assistant... God I love this stuff... John Walker, please port Home Planet, so we can do celestial navigation too!!!
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Yes, I agree with Rogerbo -- all of that stuff you listed up there (except for Mach) is UI/shell stuff which could have been developed for A/UX the way Aqua has been developed for OS X. Eye candy. IMHO.
And, excuse me? Web Objects? Back when A/UX was developed, The Web was perhaps only a glimmer in the back of Tim Berners-Lee's mind. Maybe you should have said 'native Gopher support' or something...lol...
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Great review. I have three impressions: 1) MacOS is now MacOSNIX, as well it should be. I always thought A/UX kicked major PC butt, but in this I think I was alone in the world. C'mon, now all, you have to admit, Jobs was ahead of his time with NeXT... (don asbestos suit now);) 2) By doing stoopid stuff in Aqua like shuffling around the buttons on the bar and removing the Apple Menu, Apple is going to piss off many end-user type folks who stuck with Macs even when the OS stunk (and don't give a hoot about the kernel). Bad move, with little to argue for it. Pointless eyecandy. 3) That XML idea for sorting out all those config files and scripts is great! Kudos to those who did it and those who've been saying it all along.
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Thanks! I will look up info on Oberon. Interesting point about Wirth languages getting smaller. That's also an interesting sequence you drew there. I didn't even know there was a followup to m/2 from Wirth. Is it actually a followup or a new thread? Wirth might argue pascal doesn't belong in the same room as m/2 -- what did he say, something like "it's an instructional language, stupid!" cheers z
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Well, come on, PPJ, you have to tell us now. What are the languages that you refer to that are not abominations and crimes against nature? Restrict your answer to languages that are actually useful, and meet your criteria of OOPed, more compact, more consistent and less confusing, while encouraging better programming discipline. Otherwise your comment is just hot grits. I ask this question in genuine curiosity and without sarcasm.
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
... yeah, well could be they're getting a jump on Judge Jackson -- Office for Linux could be the first product of Microsoft's Applications Corp -- OR they are setting up to win the next appeal by saying "Look what we do! We offer our apps software for all platforms!"
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Agreed! C'mon, Rob, it's a compiler and libraries. Not everyone needs to work under the hood on that part of it all. Go forth and build cool open source stuff with it, said the voice of the meta-Philippe to the teeming masses. That's pretty darn supportive if ya ask me. I think "free beer" is a bit too derogatory, as every schoolchild knows you only rent or borrow beer and have to give most of it back in short order -- too much like a shrinkwrap license to me! Z.
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Yeah, I thought that was lame: it was supposed to be funny, but there are plenty of real-world examples of pundits railing against new technology in exactly this way. Television is the best example, but radio did before that as well... in fact the marketers of tv technology spent a fair amount of time and money pushing the idea that it was an interactive family activity to counteract those who (correctly, imho) claimed television would turn people into drooling zombies. These pollsters are just lazy and have rediscovered the wheel in this case. Kinda like one of those ZD columists claming Linux is bad for the desktop because "it's too hard." They just conveniently forgot how hard DOS/Windows was for the last ten years. CONFIG.SYS anyone? Now if you'll excuse me I have to go back to my shootemup video game;)
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Ahhhh, those were the days: Dos 3.x, Desqview, Turbo Debugger AND Borland Turbo Fscking C!!!!! All running on an 8 MHz Z-286 with an ENTIRE 768 Kbytes of RAM. Man, I could do ANYTHING (up to 640K of course). With overlays! Until along came Excel, like the angel with the flaming sword barring the gates to Eden. And, that was the end of all that. Oh well: head for the Penguin, it'll be better than it was, and free, all free...
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Yess! Thank you, Chromatic. I was not the slightest bit impressed by the article that spawned the flames. I don't approve of angry flamage as a rule, but that article was particularly redundant and lame. None of the self-appointed pundits who say 'Windows is easier' acknowledge the fact that the public have been suffering from Windows for a long time, therefore there is lots of pseudo-experience out there. Windows is only 'easier' because of long experience (enforced by monopoly). Your comment succintly summarized this phenomenon. Think about all the PC columnists who whine about Linux (*nix) being 'hard' -- they've all been hacking at AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS for over ten years! If they'd been studying/etc as hard, they'd be *nix gurus! Just my USD2.00E-2.
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
People are more apt to jump on a bandwagon to bash Microsoft for no reason whatsoever than to take free beer.
Utter bullpucky. Your logic is dreadfully flawed. I'd take the free beer, first, every time, and I'm sure most/.ers would too. Plus, it's easier and more fun to bash Microsoft with a few free beers under the belt. Burp. But, even so, the phrase "Microsoft Office 2000: FREE with the purchase of six-pack" has TREMENDOUS appeal. Make it a case and I'll even install it.
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Okay, you're on. I've decided it's too intimidating a problem for an exam question (my students are (pun warning)not rocket scientists, but it will be a homework problem. I'll put the question up on the web: let me know your real email address (decipher mine from the antispam lingo above) and I'll send you the url.
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Okay, this is fun, I'll join in: Problem ultimately boils down to reaction mass use efficiency: chemical rockets really don't use fuel very efficiently, so you have to carry a lot of mass (as fuel) relative to the amount of thrust you get when you burn it. This makes the problem of hovering over an arbitrary spot at an arbitrary (orbital) altitude strictly within the realm of science fiction. Now, of course, there are other kinds of propulsion which are more efficient, like the ion drive on Deep Space 1, but even though it is more efficient it doesn't have enough oomph to do it. Naturally, we don't have fusion engines yet, but they might be able to do it (but this is by no means certain). I'm going to leave the calculation of what kind of fuel efficiency you need to stay poised over Manhattan at 637 km as an exercise for the students in my remote sensing course -- what a great idea for a final exam question, thanks Colonel!!!
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Slashdot Mirror
It's a recursive prank! ;)
Hmmm, maybe 2600 is being secretly sponsored by a certificate authority ...
Your (php,mod_perl,compiled CGI) code can be beautiful, elegant, optimized, efficient, easy to understand, and simple to edit/extend, but it makes little or no difference whatsoever if 100K still has to be delivered to the client, interpreted, and displayed. I think the quantification of 'good web code' should be dominated by "bang per byte the client has to deal with" rather than more traditional programming standards. Subjective, I know, but I think given the current constraints of the medium more attention needs to be paid to what happens on the client end (end-user available bandwidth id not increasing as fast as processing power does {not Moore's law!}).
42!
I am reminded of the American Red Cross' philosophy toward swimming: "Every person a swimmer, every swimmer a lifesaver" or words to that effect. They wish to promote safety in the water by having everyone properly trained to a) swim and b) rescue swimmers in trouble. In the (perhaps never existed) golden age of computing, everyone knew enough about code to write things and understand at least some of other people's code. Some serendipitous results of the OSS movement may be to increase the pool of potential peer reviewers who are qualified to critique code, improve code readability and documentation, (save the whales, halt global warming, and put a chicken in every pot and shoes on all the world's children). Okay, I know. But I think it's possible at least that things will improve in this regard if not to the utopian "Every computer user a coder, and every coder a debugger" state.
I just read an article in Physics Today about new work with Bose-Einstein condensates, and I was surprised at the size (volume?) of the condensates they are making now and the research they are doing with them. It made me think that there may be applications of laser cooling that are yet to be discovered. While I heartily agree with everyone that this is not the new way to chill your Celeron I wouldn't totally rule something like this out -- hahahah okay, here's a thought. One rarely looks foolish making the most outrageous forecasts that don't come true, but your reputation takes a pretty solid hit if you say something will never be true and you are proved wrong ...
In all friendliness (please do not consider this a flame), I think the only way you can make this statement is if you have never used a "good OS."
To be fair to you, perhaps this is just a semantic problem -- I for one do not consider "feature-rich" to be "good" unless other criteria of "goodness" -- reliability and scarcity of bugs come to mind -- are also met. soft's kitchen sink approach to OS (and applications) are no doubt satisfactory if sheer number of features are the highest priority. But not everyone agrees with that.
So now that I've made that inflammatory statement, I'm going to have to provide an equally inflammatory support (pause to don asbestos underwear) -- I'm going to submit DEC VMS as a real world example of a "Good OS" (wait, let me finish!). VMS was somewhat feature rich, but it nevertheless had very robust underpinnings (like virtual memory, a journaling filesystem, development API, hideously complete documentation, and the ability to work with a cluster of CPUs) that were well ahead of its time (for small computers anyway). VMS did rather tightly regulate what you could do (particularly with hardware, DEC brand only was the rule in the old days), and I found the user interface frustrating (file names in particular). So perhaps low marks for ease of use and extensibility, but the systems were powerful and pretty much bulletproof -- I never heard of anyone crashing a VMS machine (okay, out with the anecdotes now, everyone over 35 will now come out with the time they saw a VMS machine crash). But I'd say that was a good OS. Couldn't do absolutely everything, but what it could do it did so very well and without gagging. NT on the other hand, barfs every time if you look at it funny. Problem there is probably the kitchen-sink development philosophy, which has infinite possibilities both for capability and failure.
IMHO, the kitchen sink approach can only result in a "good OS" or "good applications" in an open source environment for obvious reasons. Linux is a great example. Just my $0.02...
Ka--CHINNNNGG! Excellent comment. 5 is not high enough moderators -- this comment concisely sums up the main goal of the commercial operators (from pr0nmongers to Microsoft) who have successfully hijacked the Internet.
% dmesg | grep Bogo Calibrating delay loop.. ok - 49.87 BogoMIPS i486dx2-100 btw Got a friend who claims to have a linux caching secondary dns server on a 386 -- see if I can get him to give up the the bogomips figure...
...that SOMEONE out there at least is using Linux and clustering technology(ies!) to do some real work (pause to don asbestos gumby suit), as opposed to merely sucking down Internet bandwidth. Which is what I'm doing right now. Oh no!
SIGHYPOCRISY received: Dumping core
panic: Hypocrisy error in SIMM 0x0B
panic: Hypocrisy error in SIMM 0x0B
panic: Hypocrisy error in SIMM 0x0B
panic: Hypocrisy error in SIMM 0x0B
Syncing filesystems... [11][8][6][3.14159][0][0][0][0][0][0][0][0][-1]
System Halted
Press any key to reboot
Yes! Yes!!!! I love it! Why stop there? Add more stuff! How about a Trimble TANS Vector system, 4 synchronized p-code GPSes spaced about a meter apart which gives you x, y, z, course, speed, yaw, pitch, and roll in real time... dang... hey, are you married? Oh never mind, I am already. ;)
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Yes, indeedie doo, and there have been ports of David Flater's Xtide harmonic tide-prediction program (I know of one for the PalmPilot, so a Palm one is probably not far away), so your little PDA is now your compleat navigator's assistant... God I love this stuff... John Walker, please port Home Planet, so we can do celestial navigation too!!!
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
And, excuse me? Web Objects? Back when A/UX was developed, The Web was perhaps only a glimmer in the back of Tim Berners-Lee's mind. Maybe you should have said 'native Gopher support' or something ...lol...
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Great review. I have three impressions: ... (don asbestos suit now) ;)
1) MacOS is now MacOSNIX, as well it should be. I always thought A/UX kicked major PC butt, but in this I think I was alone in the world. C'mon, now all, you have to admit, Jobs was ahead of his time with NeXT
2) By doing stoopid stuff in Aqua like shuffling around the buttons on the bar and removing the Apple Menu, Apple is going to piss off many end-user type folks who stuck with Macs even when the OS stunk (and don't give a hoot about the kernel). Bad move, with little to argue for it. Pointless eyecandy.
3) That XML idea for sorting out all those config files and scripts is great! Kudos to those who did it and those who've been saying it all along.
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Thanks! I will look up info on Oberon.
Interesting point about Wirth languages getting smaller. That's also an interesting sequence you drew there. I didn't even know there was a followup to m/2 from Wirth. Is it actually a followup or a new thread? Wirth might argue pascal doesn't belong in the same room as m/2 -- what did he say, something like "it's an instructional language, stupid!" cheers z
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Well, come on, PPJ, you have to tell us now. What are the languages that you refer to that are not abominations and crimes against nature? Restrict your answer to languages that are actually useful, and meet your criteria of OOPed, more compact, more consistent and less confusing, while encouraging better programming discipline. Otherwise your comment is just hot grits. I ask this question in genuine curiosity and without sarcasm.
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
... yeah, well could be they're getting a jump on Judge Jackson -- Office for Linux could be the first product of Microsoft's Applications Corp -- OR they are setting up to win the next appeal by saying "Look what we do! We offer our apps software for all platforms!"
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
I second this question: More specifically, is there going to be a new creation from you such as a (C++)++ ?
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Agreed! C'mon, Rob, it's a compiler and libraries. Not everyone needs to work under the hood on that part of it all. Go forth and build cool open source stuff with it, said the voice of the meta-Philippe to the teeming masses. That's pretty darn supportive if ya ask me. I think "free beer" is a bit too derogatory, as every schoolchild knows you only rent or borrow beer and have to give most of it back in short order -- too much like a shrinkwrap license to me! Z.
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Yeah, I thought that was lame: it was supposed to be funny, but there are plenty of real-world examples of pundits railing against new technology in exactly this way. Television is the best example, but radio did before that as well ... in fact the marketers of tv technology spent a fair amount of time and money pushing the idea that it was an interactive family activity to counteract those who (correctly, imho) claimed television would turn people into drooling zombies. These pollsters are just lazy and have rediscovered the wheel in this case. Kinda like one of those ZD columists claming Linux is bad for the desktop because "it's too hard." They just conveniently forgot how hard DOS/Windows was for the last ten years. CONFIG.SYS anyone? Now if you'll excuse me I have to go back to my shootemup video game ;)
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Ahhhh, those were the days:
Dos 3.x, Desqview, Turbo Debugger AND Borland Turbo Fscking C!!!!! All running on an 8 MHz Z-286 with an ENTIRE 768 Kbytes of RAM. Man, I could do ANYTHING (up to 640K of course). With overlays! Until along came Excel, like the angel with the flaming sword barring the gates to Eden. And, that was the end of all that. Oh well: head for the Penguin, it'll be better than it was, and free, all free...
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Yess! Thank you, Chromatic. I was not the slightest bit impressed by the article that spawned the flames. I don't approve of angry flamage as a rule, but that article was particularly redundant and lame. None of the self-appointed pundits who say 'Windows is easier' acknowledge the fact that the public have been suffering from Windows for a long time, therefore there is lots of pseudo-experience out there. Windows is only 'easier' because of long experience (enforced by monopoly). Your comment succintly summarized this phenomenon. Think about all the PC columnists who whine about Linux (*nix) being 'hard' -- they've all been hacking at AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS for over ten years! If they'd been studying /etc as hard, they'd be *nix gurus!
Just my USD2.00E-2.
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
... So, finish the story: email Gates, then start your stopwatch. ;-)
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Utter bullpucky. Your logic is dreadfully flawed. I'd take the free beer, first, every time, and I'm sure most /.ers would too. Plus, it's easier and more fun to bash Microsoft with a few free beers under the belt. Burp. But, even so, the phrase "Microsoft Office 2000: FREE with the purchase of six-pack" has TREMENDOUS appeal. Make it a case and I'll even install it.
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Okay, you're on. I've decided it's too intimidating a problem for an exam question (my students are (pun warning) not rocket scientists, but it will be a homework problem. I'll put the question up on the web: let me know your real email address (decipher mine from the antispam lingo above) and I'll send you the url.
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Okay, this is fun, I'll join in:
Problem ultimately boils down to reaction mass use efficiency: chemical rockets really don't use fuel very efficiently, so you have to carry a lot of mass (as fuel) relative to the amount of thrust you get when you burn it. This makes the problem of hovering over an arbitrary spot at an arbitrary (orbital) altitude strictly within the realm of science fiction. Now, of course, there are other kinds of propulsion which are more efficient, like the ion drive on Deep Space 1, but even though it is more efficient it doesn't have enough oomph to do it. Naturally, we don't have fusion engines yet, but they might be able to do it (but this is by no means certain). I'm going to leave the calculation of what kind of fuel efficiency you need to stay poised over Manhattan at 637 km as an exercise for the students in my remote sensing course -- what a great idea for a final exam question, thanks Colonel!!!
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."