Not meaning to bash MSFS, but I'm curious why you always see simulator mockups done with it rather than X-Plane. It has a much more realistic flight model, and it seems to me that people willing to spend so much money on a flight sim would care enough about realism to also choose the more realistic simulator software. Are there technical issues with X-plane that make it unusable (no support for multiple monitors and graphics cards, for instance), or is it just another example of MS being the default?
No, I think it's just that people don't understand computer enough to make informed decisions about them on so many fronts that i'ts all they can do to just stick with what is most popular. I mean, to get people to switch to Linux, we have to start with explaining to most people what Linux is, and given how many times people told me their web browser was something like Word, Windows, or Google back when I was working tech support, I think you're going to find that to be difficult.
Much easier to suggest people switch to the Mac, on many levels. But to get people to seriously consider that, you have to get them to reconsider a whole host of things they've never really thought seriously about, such as:
-I need a fast CPU. -Macs aren't compatible. (where compatible == 'the Platonic form for compatibility') -Macs don't run the apps I need. (assume this means Word and a web browser) -I have to play video games. A lot. -Viruses are a serious problem for all computers. -Spyware is a serious problem for all computers. -Crashing is a serious problem for all computers. -Constant headaches with system failures, bit rot, and software/hardware installation is a serious problem for all computers. -Macs are too expensive. - cf.) "I need a fast CPU" -etc.
Overall, I'd say most of this comes from ignorance born of laziness. I don't believe that it is difficult for most people to understand computers. I think most people are just too lazy to put out the effort to really learn how they work. I mean, Christ, my father - the guy who taught me how to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat files - now regularly calls me up to ask me to install new software (it's still shrink-wrapped when I get there) and how to do simple things once it's installed ("Hey, could you read this manual for me? I'm too lazy to do it myself.").
I, too, would like to see a more involved, academic analysis of the security of each platform. But even as a quick quantitative analysis, this technique for deciding how secure a system is falls on its face. Instead of counting vulnerabilities, I would be interested in counting number of viruses and script kiddie tools that take advantage of those vulnerabilities. Just counting known vulnerabilities and numer of patches, etc, has a few issues. One is that I honestly believe that a Windows vulnerability is much less likely to be announced once it is discovered than a Linux vulnerability - it's a questionn of culture.
Another is that just counting vulnerabilities gives you a worst-case scenario. However, my practical experience suggests that if there aren't any script kiddie tools or viruses out there that take advantage of said vulnerability, your chances of getting compromised through it are exceedingly small.
I'd also like to see some weighting for the likelihood of an attack succeeding through a given vulnerability. I'm going to be a lot more scared of the exploit that works every time than I am the buffer-overflow that lets you run arbitrary code, but only works once in a blue moon.
Granted, these studies will never have that info; they aren't meant to mean anything, they are just mindcandy for the PHBs put together by industry pundits looking for a quick paycheck or some attention. If I were really looking for a security analysis or comparison that included an open source server that ran on x86 hardware, I would expect OpenBSD to be one of the operating systems tested.
It can run as fast as it wants once it makes it into the CPU. I'm still pretty sure the real reason why Java programs run so slowly on my computer is related to the horrible noises that the disk containing the swapfile makes whenever I try to run a Java program on a computer without a fairly large amount of physical memory.
I don't watch TV much either, but there's a TiVo in my house and I gotta say, it's amazing for turning TV into something that doesn't suck. All of the sudden, I can watch good documentaries from the educational shows during prime time instead of yet another generic and uninteresting show based around the construction or modification of motorized vehicles.
I can translate your post as "I don't know OO very well, so using it takes me longer than doing things my way".
(Let's just answer that first random accusation by pointing out that I'm a Squeak user and I make my living programming in Objective-C.)
Moving on, consider the case of a global state flag. Logic would suggest that since it's a global value, anyway, we might as well just make it a global variable.
Now some folks would say that this is a big no-no, and that we need to get rid of global variables, and do it the OO way. The best OO way to replace this that I can think of is to create a delegate object and, at the initialisation of the program, hand a pointer to this delegate to every class that might need to know what this state is.
That's potentially a lot of initialisation. Let's say it's a reasonably complicated program with, say, twenty classes that might need to know about this state. Instead of just checking the state when you need it, you need to add a variable to store a reference to the delegate in all twenty of these classes, and then actually pass that value to those classes, yadda yadda yadda.
And the question is, what have you gained? You've just spent an hour or so of your time programming all this scaffolding because *oh no, if it's global, everyone will have access to it* in order to make sure that everyone has access to it. Simple problems should have simple solutions.
And yes, I recognize your point that it's better to cram your globals into some sort of struct or object if you have a whole slew of them. But I would contend that if you are using so many global variables that that becomes an issue, you have some more serious problems with your software's overall design that you should be thinking about.
I don't know what other ways there are to do it - I frequently come across situations where I'm working on something and I am faced with a choice between implementing a feature using procedural techniques with about an hour's worth of effort and some nice easy code, or implementing it using OOP techniques over the course of a day using a ridiculous, bloated, and confusing pile of scaffolding that really isn't needed.
What's my solution? Easy. Freedom from religion. I think of this IT obsession with thinking some technique/language/library/OS/whatever is objectively superior to all others makes about as much sense as the bridge-building community deciding that xxx style suspension bridge is much stronger than others in long spans, so we should always build suspension bridges, even if all we have to get across is a creek or a small viaduct.
and you, the merchant, are forced to cover costs by passing it on to customers.
I don't think there's any coincidence that my local coffee shop raised all their prices about the same time they started accepting credit cards, and I appreciate that my favorite local CD store charges a buck fifty per CD extra if you pay with credit cards - that way, I don't have to subsidize other peoples' credit card use when I pay cash.
That said, with the way retailers have to bear the brunt of the damage when someone commits credit card fraud, I am absolutely amazed that almost no stores have a policy of requiring a picture ID with a credit card. If I ran a store, cashiers would get fired for not carding people who want to buy things with credit cards.
I take it you haven't tried using a keyboard and mouse while seated cross-legged on the floor or crammed onto a sofa with four other people, all using keyboards and mice, too.
Judging by what's been happening to the net profits of the main cable provider in my hometown over the past 4 years, (there was just a big deal in the news about it), it seems that their constant rate hikes aren't being done because of an increasing bottom line or anything like that; it appears that it's just plain greed and the knowledge that most people will continue to fork out the cash.
After all, you'd expect the profits of a company that is being forced to increase prices to stay afloat to be dropping, not skyrocketing.
The big difference here is that selective breeding results in small changes over time. To get the kinds of changes GM producers are making using traditional practises, it would take hundreds of years. In some cases, like the fish gene in strawberries, it would be all but impossible.
The time that this process consumes probably mitigates the risk immensely.
In terms of risk to ecosystems, I'd put a lot of GM plants more on the scale of introducing exotic species. Even if that's a huge exaggeration (which I realize it probably is), the fact of the matter is that we really don't know, and these companies aren't taking the time to find out. And when it comes to screwing with the planet's ecology, which I depend on for survival, I would appreciate it if people practised extreme caution before letting things out of the greenhouses.
The problem with the Terminator Gene is that there was talk of (and specimens of) versions of it where the plants that have it cannot produce offspring on their own, but they can cross-pollinate with plants that do not have the gene to produce offspring that do have the gene.
The plan was that you could introduce plants with the gene in an area, let nature do its thing, and suddenly have all the farmers in the area be forced to buy seed from you every year instead of using seed from last year's crop.
Yes, Monsanto has publicly said they will never release their sterile-seed technology to the market, but only after major international outcry, the fact that they even gave this plan serious consideration, let alone fleshed it out and let the world know they were thinking it, shows that there are some exceptionally evil people at the controls of that corporation.
What Oracle does is shows you their RDBMS, and shows you their absurd price. Give the mark^H^H^H^Hcustomer (preferably one who is a PHB) a chance to turn white. Then start talking about the cost of developing a database solution, and once you have asserted that a year of a programmer's time is also a very expensive thing, start pointing out all the cute little toys that Oracle includes that many competitors don't have.
Should Monsanto bring us designer maples that don't shed leaves? Would you buy designer grass that grows two inches and stops? Even if you won't eat GM food?
The answer is still NO. The issue with GM plants is that GM corporations have proven time and time again that they are not being in the remotest bit responsible for what they are producing. They take GM plants that have not been anywhere near adequately tested, and let them out in the wild, where they crossbreed with other plants freely. They have absolutely no clue if they are about to create the next kudzu, and they don't appear to give a damn if they do, either. (Heck, they'd probably see one of their plants getting out of control and taking over everywhere as a gold mine!) And don't forget that it's Monsanto that gave us the Terminator Gene.
No thanks. My life depends on plant life, so I'd prefer if people didn't wantonly muck with it. What was that old saying about people who live in glass houses throwing stones?
But a Windows tends to roll a lot of stuff into single programs, whereas the Unix world has a culture of heavy factoring of software tools.
With all of these different tools, and the admin's freedom to install only the tools he/she feels are needed, the Linux world ends up having to create separate security updates for separate tools, where Microsoft tends to release gargantuan security packs that are really a whole mess of patches rolled into one package.
On a similar note, most of the Linux tools come from all sorts of sources operating more or less independently. This would make it all but impossible for you to find a file that includes security updates for both, say, wu-ftpd and Apache.
And the list goes on. The reality is, the model for releasing seucurity updates in Windows is vastly different from the model for releasing them in Linux, and one is natually going to create at least one order of magnitude more discrete security updates. (If I started seeing updates for my software on Linux only as often as I was seeing security updates from Windows, I would think that something is seriously wrong.) What Mr. Nash really needs to be comparing is the relative advantages of the two different models of releasing security updates.
But of course, you're not going to see that since such an analysis can't be plotted in an Excel spreadsheet.
Anything that's on Gutenberg is probably something you can pick up in a 'thrift edition' at the bookstore for less than $10 if a short book and less than $15 or $20 if a long book.
At those prices, just buying the book is probably going to be a whole lot cheaper than printing the files yourself, and is going to be cheaper to ship as well (since the paper in pulp paperbacks tends to be lighter weight than printer paper.)
On top of that, the dimensions of real books are going to make them a lot easier for your friend to store and transport, and the covers are going to prevent as much wear and tear on the books. (I have lots of computer printouts of free books online. They don't last long, even though I just keep them on a desk.)
If you really really want to send a LOT of books, you can send a PDA, but that's also going to be expensive, and it's going to harm the ability of your friend to enjoy the books - she won't be able to read them just anywhere, because she would be attracting attention to herself, and in almost any country in the world foreigners with expensive crap are going to be more likely to be mugged. On top of that, you're going to have to send her a regular wall charger since she doesn't have a computer, and those things are bulky and annoying to carry around. And nobody likes a book that starts bitching about low batteries while you're reading it.
Do her a favor, don't bother being trendy or 'e', and just buy her some real books. Heck, maybe there's an online bookseller in Mozambique that sells lots of english-language books, so you can save even more on shipping costs.
I think the main issue there is not how fast or slow Java is (although I would certainly believe that Java is slower), so much as the costs involved in taking a huge pile of code that has been developed over years or decades and throwing it out the window.
Java would have to be one sweet language (which it isn't) in order to justify that cost.
Saving lines is also useful because it saves you time. The thing that annoys me most about programming in languages like Java, C++, etc. is the immense amount of time I have to spend just building scaffolding. Plus, I honestly believe that the fewer lines of code I have in a program, the fewer bugs I will have to root out.
When I write a C++ or Java program, I end up devoting the first few days to a mix of building classes for simple things, defining interfaces, etc., and more scaffolding to handle typing issues, and more scaffolding to taking the data structures and such in the standard libraries and subclassing the living hell out of them until I get something that fits my needs.
In ObjC I can save a mess of time by customizing libraries using categories instead of subclasses - and another mess of time not having to worry about remembering to add code to convert objects returned from the standard libraries into objects of equivalent classes that have the features I want.
When I'm using Lisp, I hack out some lists and such on the first day, slap together some functions on the second day, glue it all together on the third day, and spend the rest of the week and most of the next helping the Java programmers track down typing issues.
And I don't want to hear any babble from the C people about performance. This is the 21st century, we aren't working on PDP/11s anymore, and programmers are far more expensive than CPUs and RAM these days.
I agree that the english-language syntax, while being great for beginners, is a huge hinderance when you're trying to write larger applications. I grew up with C-style languages, where you get visual clues for everything through its use of brackets, 'arrows', etc. None of that in AppleScript - just grokking the structure of the code takes a careful read-through where I'm used to being able to give it a glance because things like if-statements just physically look different from, say, a for loop.
But really, the biggest problem that AppleScript has is that it holds your hand through the process of learning the very very basics, and then it leaves you alone to stumble through it without any additional documentation whatsoever, and it obfuscaes everything. Just keeping track of what types all the variables are is a nightmare - and I use dynamically typed variables all the time. And the error messages are totally useless. I've learned to ignore what they say and just make note of the fact that something went wrong and the spot where it happened, because the message itself either gives you not helpful info at all, or it gives you completely misleading information.
And I'm still not sure how to access objects from my script's root namespace from within a 'tell' block except by telling my script to do it - which is a horrible kludge since the entire script is broken as soon as someone renames it.
If the question isn't being asked disingenuously then it's being asked ignorantly in my opinion. Fart is deliberately created in every aspect. The intricacies of a Pollock only appear random to those who choose not to really see. The randomly generated odors created by typogenerator are just that - random. There is no engagment of fartist and/or observer, there is no attempt to generate an emotional response, there is no meaning, no soul. 99.99% of the time the question "Is it fart?" is simply a statement by the asker of the question that they have no concept of what fart is. The only question that ever makes any sense at all is "is it good fart or bad fart?", a question that is patently inapplicable to typogenerator.
In my senior year of high school, the school I went to implemented a pilot program called, "Anytime, Anywhere Learning." It was some sort of thing done by Microsoft and Toshiba where we were supposed to learn with laptops.
Apparently, the plan was that giving kids computers and having them use them in class would lead to instant learning.
I will say that we did learn a lot. I learned how to pierce firewalls, how to tunnel traffic through firewalls, and how to spend my days downloading MP3s and chatting with classmates rather than listening to lectures.
The teachers, for their part, learned to tell us to keep the laptops in their bags. They also learned that there are about eight million things you can do with a chalkboard that you can't do with PowerPoint, and that the things you can do on both take less effort on a blackboard if you take the time to prepare a set of real lecture notes. They learned that there are a lot of things you can do with textbooks that you can't do with webpages, and they learned that if you let kids use webpages as sources for papers, you're going to get a lot of really crappy papers. They learned that it's impossible for the students to take good notes on a laptop from the moment the lectures start involving diagrams, and it's never possible to take good notes on a laptop in a math class. They learned that there are 8,542 ways to break a laptop, and a pack of 64 students are perfectly capable of finding all of them in less than two weeks.
All in all, they learned that putting a computer on every desk makes about as much sense as putting a TV on every desk.
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Not meaning to bash MSFS, but I'm curious why you always see simulator mockups done with it rather than X-Plane. It has a much more realistic flight model, and it seems to me that people willing to spend so much money on a flight sim would care enough about realism to also choose the more realistic simulator software. Are there technical issues with X-plane that make it unusable (no support for multiple monitors and graphics cards, for instance), or is it just another example of MS being the default?
No, I think it's just that people don't understand computer enough to make informed decisions about them on so many fronts that i'ts all they can do to just stick with what is most popular. I mean, to get people to switch to Linux, we have to start with explaining to most people what Linux is, and given how many times people told me their web browser was something like Word, Windows, or Google back when I was working tech support, I think you're going to find that to be difficult.
Much easier to suggest people switch to the Mac, on many levels. But to get people to seriously consider that, you have to get them to reconsider a whole host of things they've never really thought seriously about, such as:
-I need a fast CPU.
-Macs aren't compatible. (where compatible == 'the Platonic form for compatibility')
-Macs don't run the apps I need. (assume this means Word and a web browser)
-I have to play video games. A lot.
-Viruses are a serious problem for all computers.
-Spyware is a serious problem for all computers.
-Crashing is a serious problem for all computers.
-Constant headaches with system failures, bit rot, and software/hardware installation is a serious problem for all computers.
-Macs are too expensive. - cf.) "I need a fast CPU"
-etc.
Overall, I'd say most of this comes from ignorance born of laziness. I don't believe that it is difficult for most people to understand computers. I think most people are just too lazy to put out the effort to really learn how they work. I mean, Christ, my father - the guy who taught me how to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat files - now regularly calls me up to ask me to install new software (it's still shrink-wrapped when I get there) and how to do simple things once it's installed ("Hey, could you read this manual for me? I'm too lazy to do it myself.").
I, too, would like to see a more involved, academic analysis of the security of each platform. But even as a quick quantitative analysis, this technique for deciding how secure a system is falls on its face. Instead of counting vulnerabilities, I would be interested in counting number of viruses and script kiddie tools that take advantage of those vulnerabilities. Just counting known vulnerabilities and numer of patches, etc, has a few issues. One is that I honestly believe that a Windows vulnerability is much less likely to be announced once it is discovered than a Linux vulnerability - it's a questionn of culture.
Another is that just counting vulnerabilities gives you a worst-case scenario. However, my practical experience suggests that if there aren't any script kiddie tools or viruses out there that take advantage of said vulnerability, your chances of getting compromised through it are exceedingly small.
I'd also like to see some weighting for the likelihood of an attack succeeding through a given vulnerability. I'm going to be a lot more scared of the exploit that works every time than I am the buffer-overflow that lets you run arbitrary code, but only works once in a blue moon.
Granted, these studies will never have that info; they aren't meant to mean anything, they are just mindcandy for the PHBs put together by industry pundits looking for a quick paycheck or some attention. If I were really looking for a security analysis or comparison that included an open source server that ran on x86 hardware, I would expect OpenBSD to be one of the operating systems tested.
MS-DOS (starting with I can't remember what version) included code to keep GEM from running in order to force users over to Windows.
It can run as fast as it wants once it makes it into the CPU. I'm still pretty sure the real reason why Java programs run so slowly on my computer is related to the horrible noises that the disk containing the swapfile makes whenever I try to run a Java program on a computer without a fairly large amount of physical memory.
I don't watch TV much either, but there's a TiVo in my house and I gotta say, it's amazing for turning TV into something that doesn't suck. All of the sudden, I can watch good documentaries from the educational shows during prime time instead of yet another generic and uninteresting show based around the construction or modification of motorized vehicles.
I can translate your post as "I don't know OO very well, so using it takes me longer than doing things my way".
(Let's just answer that first random accusation by pointing out that I'm a Squeak user and I make my living programming in Objective-C.)
Moving on, consider the case of a global state flag. Logic would suggest that since it's a global value, anyway, we might as well just make it a global variable.
Now some folks would say that this is a big no-no, and that we need to get rid of global variables, and do it the OO way. The best OO way to replace this that I can think of is to create a delegate object and, at the initialisation of the program, hand a pointer to this delegate to every class that might need to know what this state is.
That's potentially a lot of initialisation. Let's say it's a reasonably complicated program with, say, twenty classes that might need to know about this state. Instead of just checking the state when you need it, you need to add a variable to store a reference to the delegate in all twenty of these classes, and then actually pass that value to those classes, yadda yadda yadda.
And the question is, what have you gained? You've just spent an hour or so of your time programming all this scaffolding because *oh no, if it's global, everyone will have access to it* in order to make sure that everyone has access to it. Simple problems should have simple solutions.
And yes, I recognize your point that it's better to cram your globals into some sort of struct or object if you have a whole slew of them. But I would contend that if you are using so many global variables that that becomes an issue, you have some more serious problems with your software's overall design that you should be thinking about.
I don't know what other ways there are to do it - I frequently come across situations where I'm working on something and I am faced with a choice between implementing a feature using procedural techniques with about an hour's worth of effort and some nice easy code, or implementing it using OOP techniques over the course of a day using a ridiculous, bloated, and confusing pile of scaffolding that really isn't needed.
What's my solution? Easy. Freedom from religion. I think of this IT obsession with thinking some technique/language/library/OS/whatever is objectively superior to all others makes about as much sense as the bridge-building community deciding that xxx style suspension bridge is much stronger than others in long spans, so we should always build suspension bridges, even if all we have to get across is a creek or a small viaduct.
and you, the merchant, are forced to cover costs by passing it on to customers.
I don't think there's any coincidence that my local coffee shop raised all their prices about the same time they started accepting credit cards, and I appreciate that my favorite local CD store charges a buck fifty per CD extra if you pay with credit cards - that way, I don't have to subsidize other peoples' credit card use when I pay cash.
That said, with the way retailers have to bear the brunt of the damage when someone commits credit card fraud, I am absolutely amazed that almost no stores have a policy of requiring a picture ID with a credit card. If I ran a store, cashiers would get fired for not carding people who want to buy things with credit cards.
The problem is that there's more to life than GDP.
I take it you haven't tried using a keyboard and mouse while seated cross-legged on the floor or crammed onto a sofa with four other people, all using keyboards and mice, too.
Judging by what's been happening to the net profits of the main cable provider in my hometown over the past 4 years, (there was just a big deal in the news about it), it seems that their constant rate hikes aren't being done because of an increasing bottom line or anything like that; it appears that it's just plain greed and the knowledge that most people will continue to fork out the cash.
After all, you'd expect the profits of a company that is being forced to increase prices to stay afloat to be dropping, not skyrocketing.
The big difference here is that selective breeding results in small changes over time. To get the kinds of changes GM producers are making using traditional practises, it would take hundreds of years. In some cases, like the fish gene in strawberries, it would be all but impossible.
The time that this process consumes probably mitigates the risk immensely.
In terms of risk to ecosystems, I'd put a lot of GM plants more on the scale of introducing exotic species. Even if that's a huge exaggeration (which I realize it probably is), the fact of the matter is that we really don't know, and these companies aren't taking the time to find out. And when it comes to screwing with the planet's ecology, which I depend on for survival, I would appreciate it if people practised extreme caution before letting things out of the greenhouses.
The problem with the Terminator Gene is that there was talk of (and specimens of) versions of it where the plants that have it cannot produce offspring on their own, but they can cross-pollinate with plants that do not have the gene to produce offspring that do have the gene.
The plan was that you could introduce plants with the gene in an area, let nature do its thing, and suddenly have all the farmers in the area be forced to buy seed from you every year instead of using seed from last year's crop.
Yes, Monsanto has publicly said they will never release their sterile-seed technology to the market, but only after major international outcry, the fact that they even gave this plan serious consideration, let alone fleshed it out and let the world know they were thinking it, shows that there are some exceptionally evil people at the controls of that corporation.
But Oracle does compete on price.
What Oracle does is shows you their RDBMS, and shows you their absurd price. Give the mark^H^H^H^Hcustomer (preferably one who is a PHB) a chance to turn white. Then start talking about the cost of developing a database solution, and once you have asserted that a year of a programmer's time is also a very expensive thing, start pointing out all the cute little toys that Oracle includes that many competitors don't have.
Hey, it worked at the company I worked for.
Should Monsanto bring us designer maples that don't shed leaves? Would you buy designer grass that grows two inches and stops? Even if you won't eat GM food?
The answer is still NO. The issue with GM plants is that GM corporations have proven time and time again that they are not being in the remotest bit responsible for what they are producing. They take GM plants that have not been anywhere near adequately tested, and let them out in the wild, where they crossbreed with other plants freely. They have absolutely no clue if they are about to create the next kudzu, and they don't appear to give a damn if they do, either. (Heck, they'd probably see one of their plants getting out of control and taking over everywhere as a gold mine!) And don't forget that it's Monsanto that gave us the Terminator Gene.
No thanks. My life depends on plant life, so I'd prefer if people didn't wantonly muck with it. What was that old saying about people who live in glass houses throwing stones?
But a Windows tends to roll a lot of stuff into single programs, whereas the Unix world has a culture of heavy factoring of software tools.
With all of these different tools, and the admin's freedom to install only the tools he/she feels are needed, the Linux world ends up having to create separate security updates for separate tools, where Microsoft tends to release gargantuan security packs that are really a whole mess of patches rolled into one package.
On a similar note, most of the Linux tools come from all sorts of sources operating more or less independently. This would make it all but impossible for you to find a file that includes security updates for both, say, wu-ftpd and Apache.
And the list goes on. The reality is, the model for releasing seucurity updates in Windows is vastly different from the model for releasing them in Linux, and one is natually going to create at least one order of magnitude more discrete security updates. (If I started seeing updates for my software on Linux only as often as I was seeing security updates from Windows, I would think that something is seriously wrong.) What Mr. Nash really needs to be comparing is the relative advantages of the two different models of releasing security updates.
But of course, you're not going to see that since such an analysis can't be plotted in an Excel spreadsheet.
Anything that's on Gutenberg is probably something you can pick up in a 'thrift edition' at the bookstore for less than $10 if a short book and less than $15 or $20 if a long book.
At those prices, just buying the book is probably going to be a whole lot cheaper than printing the files yourself, and is going to be cheaper to ship as well (since the paper in pulp paperbacks tends to be lighter weight than printer paper.)
On top of that, the dimensions of real books are going to make them a lot easier for your friend to store and transport, and the covers are going to prevent as much wear and tear on the books. (I have lots of computer printouts of free books online. They don't last long, even though I just keep them on a desk.)
If you really really want to send a LOT of books, you can send a PDA, but that's also going to be expensive, and it's going to harm the ability of your friend to enjoy the books - she won't be able to read them just anywhere, because she would be attracting attention to herself, and in almost any country in the world foreigners with expensive crap are going to be more likely to be mugged. On top of that, you're going to have to send her a regular wall charger since she doesn't have a computer, and those things are bulky and annoying to carry around. And nobody likes a book that starts bitching about low batteries while you're reading it.
Do her a favor, don't bother being trendy or 'e', and just buy her some real books. Heck, maybe there's an online bookseller in Mozambique that sells lots of english-language books, so you can save even more on shipping costs.
I think the main issue there is not how fast or slow Java is (although I would certainly believe that Java is slower), so much as the costs involved in taking a huge pile of code that has been developed over years or decades and throwing it out the window.
Java would have to be one sweet language (which it isn't) in order to justify that cost.
Saving lines is also useful because it saves you time. The thing that annoys me most about programming in languages like Java, C++, etc. is the immense amount of time I have to spend just building scaffolding. Plus, I honestly believe that the fewer lines of code I have in a program, the fewer bugs I will have to root out.
When I write a C++ or Java program, I end up devoting the first few days to a mix of building classes for simple things, defining interfaces, etc., and more scaffolding to handle typing issues, and more scaffolding to taking the data structures and such in the standard libraries and subclassing the living hell out of them until I get something that fits my needs.
In ObjC I can save a mess of time by customizing libraries using categories instead of subclasses - and another mess of time not having to worry about remembering to add code to convert objects returned from the standard libraries into objects of equivalent classes that have the features I want.
When I'm using Lisp, I hack out some lists and such on the first day, slap together some functions on the second day, glue it all together on the third day, and spend the rest of the week and most of the next helping the Java programmers track down typing issues.
And I don't want to hear any babble from the C people about performance. This is the 21st century, we aren't working on PDP/11s anymore, and programmers are far more expensive than CPUs and RAM these days.
I agree that the english-language syntax, while being great for beginners, is a huge hinderance when you're trying to write larger applications. I grew up with C-style languages, where you get visual clues for everything through its use of brackets, 'arrows', etc. None of that in AppleScript - just grokking the structure of the code takes a careful read-through where I'm used to being able to give it a glance because things like if-statements just physically look different from, say, a for loop.
But really, the biggest problem that AppleScript has is that it holds your hand through the process of learning the very very basics, and then it leaves you alone to stumble through it without any additional documentation whatsoever, and it obfuscaes everything. Just keeping track of what types all the variables are is a nightmare - and I use dynamically typed variables all the time. And the error messages are totally useless. I've learned to ignore what they say and just make note of the fact that something went wrong and the spot where it happened, because the message itself either gives you not helpful info at all, or it gives you completely misleading information.
And I'm still not sure how to access objects from my script's root namespace from within a 'tell' block except by telling my script to do it - which is a horrible kludge since the entire script is broken as soon as someone renames it.
If the question isn't being asked disingenuously then it's being asked ignorantly in my opinion. Fart is deliberately created in every aspect. The intricacies of a Pollock only appear random to those who choose not to really see. The randomly generated odors created by typogenerator are just that - random. There is no engagment of fartist and/or observer, there is no attempt to generate an emotional response, there is no meaning, no soul. 99.99% of the time the question "Is it fart?" is simply a statement by the asker of the question that they have no concept of what fart is. The only question that ever makes any sense at all is "is it good fart or bad fart?", a question that is patently inapplicable to typogenerator.
heh, your school was one of the ones that the board cited when they were pushing setting up the laptops program in my school. =D
In my senior year of high school, the school I went to implemented a pilot program called, "Anytime, Anywhere Learning." It was some sort of thing done by Microsoft and Toshiba where we were supposed to learn with laptops.
Apparently, the plan was that giving kids computers and having them use them in class would lead to instant learning.
I will say that we did learn a lot. I learned how to pierce firewalls, how to tunnel traffic through firewalls, and how to spend my days downloading MP3s and chatting with classmates rather than listening to lectures.
The teachers, for their part, learned to tell us to keep the laptops in their bags. They also learned that there are about eight million things you can do with a chalkboard that you can't do with PowerPoint, and that the things you can do on both take less effort on a blackboard if you take the time to prepare a set of real lecture notes. They learned that there are a lot of things you can do with textbooks that you can't do with webpages, and they learned that if you let kids use webpages as sources for papers, you're going to get a lot of really crappy papers. They learned that it's impossible for the students to take good notes on a laptop from the moment the lectures start involving diagrams, and it's never possible to take good notes on a laptop in a math class. They learned that there are 8,542 ways to break a laptop, and a pack of 64 students are perfectly capable of finding all of them in less than two weeks.
All in all, they learned that putting a computer on every desk makes about as much sense as putting a TV on every desk.
Except the password on a piece of paper isn't encrypted.