Great - there is still only one compiler to support "export" - almost 10 years after the standard was defined - and you speak about next standard. So when will the compiler we see the first compiler to support you new library?
Martin
PS: I know a language where all generics are "export" and all compiler support it - since 1983. So it is possible to implement.
I know it is not in the nerd mindset, but yes, you can move forward with a new version before completely finishing the previous version of something. Out in the real world it is in fact quite common.
This is doubly true in this case, since the reality is that export was a badly conceived feature to begin with, that might very well be removed from the next standard because it is so difficult to implement. So the next standard does in fact fix that little problem as well.
Your implicit assertion that C++ compilers are immature because of this missing feature is, of course, complete laughable. C++ has had very solid compiler support for a very long time now.
Hmm, arguing in a very old post is not likely to be read by anyone but I'll try anyway:
We have started, we're building Iter at the moment, and by the time Iter is in full swing we'll be working on the next one. They're going just about as fast as they can, but it'll still take too long.
Just to be clear: I was not arguing that fusion is the only possible future, or that we should exclude alternatives, I was arguing not to discard it just because it is not ready right now.
Your statement that "we" are building Iter at the moment intrigues me: are you actually working for Iter?
Why accept that fusion can advance but dismiss fission; surely if it was dangerous then it must be now right?
I'm not dismissing fission at all! I was under the impression that you were dismissing fusion simply because it is still very much under development. My argument is that this development is necessary - even if we don't know _right now_ if the power plants will ever be economically viable.
Three Mile Island was handled fine and nothing came of it, and Windscale was about generating plutonium for a nuclear device and bears no resemblance to a nuclear plant (and although it's not nuclear power so I'm not interested in defending Windscale; it wasn't a big deal; some short-lived radiation was leaked through the scrubbers, but we don't even know if it caused any health problems to anyone).
How about this? Sure, it is not the accident we were talking about, but it is the same plant (more or less), and it is very much part of the fission industry.
It also demonstrates my main concern with fission: no accountability, and the people in charge care only about the bottom line. And I will maintain that fission is too dangerous as long as that attitude of "nothing wrong here, not our problem" persists.
Besides reactors developed since those early ones are far safer, we have come a long way technologically since the cold war....
I have no problem with it, it's very promising. My problem is with people who say "lets not work our problems out; once [new technology] arrives that'll be taken care of".
And how many of those new reactor designs have actually been built? To my knowledge, none. So your "safe" reactors are in fact just as hypothetical as fusion plants.
In terms of deaths per gigawatt nuclear will be one of the safest records of all power sources (unless you consider everyone who got cancer in Europe or Russia for the last few decades to be a direct cause of Chernobyl).
So you would say it was a minor incident, in the end?
Just as a thought experiment, what is this were to happen, not in thinly-populated Ukraine, but somewhere in overcrowded western Europe or Japan?
The people and wildlife which are killed (or displaced) when hydro-electric plants get built, disasters like the Piper Alpha platform fire, coal mine collapses and slag heap landslides, mining accidents, these are seen as an unfortunate industrial accidents which we have to accept.
All of those are, in the end, minor and localized problems. The problem with nuclear is that it is _not_ a localized problem when things go wrong.
With fission though a single accident can hold back progress and research and result in policy changes and hysterical opposition for decades to come.
Without such opposition, fission would never become any safer. And I'm not convinced that the people running the plants care more about safety than about the bottom line, even today.
There's not even a way in the C or C++ core language to start a new thread. And with many different third party libraries, there'll never be a reliable standard way to do it.
Never? A standard, reliable way to do it will be part of C++0x - so that's hardly "never"...
But aren't courts tired of getting used for this type of thing? That's like two guys organizing a public boxing match between themselves. They get a ring, a referee, a crowd... As soon as round 1 starts, they look at each other and decide it's not worth fighting. If all they wanted was to compare each other's muscles, couldn't they have done this privately instead of wasting a bunch of people's time?
I'm sure they are pretty tired of drugdealing, homicide, and theft as well - and yet those things keep popping up in court all the time...
We don't know when it'll be ready: I went to a talk by one of the guys behind the JET reactor and he said 30-40 years before the first commercial reactor
Well, all the more reason to get started right away then!
We don't know how much it'll cost: What use will fusion be if it costs more than current power sources?
Are you looking at cost including all development of the technology or cost once the technology is mature? Have you included costs that are not directly related to running the fusion plant, such as environmental cost of alternatives?
It isn't radiation free: The huge neutron flux it outputs makes the reactor walls highly radioactive, it produces high-level nuclear waste just like any fission plant
It is not at all "like any fission plant". The volumes and halflife of the waste are much smaller, and therefore much more managable. Think "hundreds of years" instead of hundreds of thousands.
It needs tritium: Yes fusion plants can produce tritium, but this is a long process and means that even once the technology is ready it'll still be a couple of decades before we have enough tritium being generated to start up large numbers of new power plants
Tritium is helpful but not required.
Fusion is very promising, if only because it has no proliferation worries, but other than that all of the advantages that count are already available in fission reactors.
The fuel for fusion reactors is effectively unlimited while uranium is a finite resource just like oil. The amount of radioactive waste is far more managable with fusion. And there is no risk of a meltdown. Other than that, they are completely the same...
The power is cheap and will scale: Many European countries get the majority of their power from it
That's only true for France.
We have plenty of nuclear fuel: There won't ever be a nuclear fuel crisis because before we've used the enrichable uranium ore, and then reprocessed and reused all of the nuclear waste in our breeder reactors, the sun will be dead.
I'm not sure about breeder reactors so you _could_ be right on that score, but given the bullshit you spew elsewhere it is hard to believe...
Think solar is renewable? Not as renewable as nuclear.
???
It's safe: If the only reason for not going for it is an accident 30 years ago when the technology was in its infancy that's great
It has had plenty of accidents so far, and that "one" accident you refer to (probably meant to be Chernobyl, but possibly Three Mile Island or Windscale) laid waste to a significant part of a country. I'm not opposed to fission power at all, but don't bullshit us about safety. There is a clear risk and the potential damage done if something goes wrong is immense.
It's available now: We cannot wait for the perfect power supply. We need to change over now. We've got the fuel, the tech, the experience.
Uhm... Are you selling these things by any chance? And what exactly is your problem with the development of nuclear fusion?
All we need is for the public to get their heads out of their asses and learn to accept compromise.
All we really need is a commitment from the people running the plant that they will never compromise on safety, never lie about accidents, and be the first people on the spot to clean up after it all goes south. As long as they have a healthy attitude of fear about their job I'm fine with nuclear fission.
I'm not fine with some commercial company running a plant at lowest possible cost, far away from corporate HQ, compromising on safety factors and ignoring best practices. Unfortunately, that is reality for many plants today.
I'd also like an answer to the question of what the people in Iran, North Korea, and Afghanistan (to name just three) are supposed to do for their energy generation needs. Because I'm actually more comfortable with fission right next door than fission in countries with weak oversight or malicious intentions...
Now the big question would be whether they made money that way, which I assume they did. After all, how do you pay for a 65TB server with corresponding bandwidth?
Paid subscriptions, most likely. And a terabyte worth of HD space is only about 80 euro's these days, so the total expense does not have to be that high.
But... 65TB... Assuming you watch 8 hours of movies per day, that would still add up to about 8 years of watching. Why could anyone possibly want that?
I'd mod you up if I had points;-) Maybe it is just advancing age (I'm 38, for crying out loud), but sometimes tech discussion do sound like that to me.
By the way, your new startup sounds like a slightly dirty cross between a social site and a search engine... I would like to throw money at you for some reason.
We've been using voting machines in Brazil for quite some time now, always with satisfatory results
that makes me wonder: how hard is it to hack a piece of paper and a pen? if you have the means and a set objective, you can "hack" anything. And you don't even need a computer to do so.
The difference is numbers. A single programmer in the right place can hack an entire election, untraceable for anybody else. To perform a similar hack in a pen and paper system you would need thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. The chances of none of them talking are slim, thus there is a much better chance of people finding out about the fraud.
On the 364 days of the year when you just go to work or the supermarket, an electric vehicle would be fine, even in Australia. As for your family across the country, if you take the 7:45 train from Sydney you are in Melbourne at 18:55. In the meantime you can read a book, or look out the window, or whatever you want to do.
Well, obtaining a french phonebook shouldn't be too hard. Beyond that point it is just a question of setting up a distributed system for sending out infringement notices (they should not come from one source or look too identical, since that makes them too easy to filter). This will clog up the courts, and will knock the entire nation of France of the internet in short order.
You can use a round-robin scheduler to prioritize other traffic over p2p (in other words, let p2p soak up the bandwidth that remains after all the "normal" internet activities have taken their share). But there is a world of difference between that and what these companies apparently want to do: filter content selectively and block some protocols entirely.
I have no problems with assigning a lower-priority to p2p. I do have a serious problem with my ISP deciding what I can and cannot see and do.
This is not about starving to death, this is about your "right" to own a Hummer for driving the two miles to the shopping mall. Instead you may have to do so in an electric vehicle.
But no! An electric vehicle is *inconvenient* when you want to go on a road trip (which never happens, but just in case you might want to)! Or when you want to haul entire trees out of the forest (which you never do either, but again, just in case)! And your friends will laugh at you!
So you'd rather make the Earth uninhabitable than give up that large, wasteful vehicle you didn't need in the first place. That's the real choice here: losing a tiny fraction of your convenience, vs. death and destruction for a very large part of the worlds' population.
There's really no equivalent for the GUI -- users will relate better to one big monolith, even if it's just a frontend for a bunch of small tools.
If there is one thing I positively hate, it's that.
The reason why is simple: those TCL/TK-and-then-call-a-commandline-tool apps never, never, never deal with error conditions correctly. In other words, it works while everything is fine and dandy - and then when the shit hits the fan, as it invariably does, you must still go out and delve into the commandline. And by definition that happens at a time when you have other problems to deal with.
How do we blame George W. Bush for this when Barack Obama is the president now?
The same way Clinton was always blamed when Bush was president? "he made that law" or even "he never did anything to overturn that law" would be fine...
Re:Parents choose their baby's name
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 1
The problem with "genetic choice" is that we haven't been around long enough to know the purpose of all of our traits. If enough people were to, for example, not pass on the sicle cell trait who's to say that humanity won't be wiped out by a malaria epidemic? Of course, that's an outlandish scenario, but it's meant to raise a point not prove one. We just don't know why humanity comes in all of our different variations. It's a dangerous game to start removing traits artificially.
LK
Yes, but that is why this plan is so brilliant: it is only available to very rich people, so it is the rich bastards that will be wiped out when the next killer disease strikes!
There are a host of other problems, of course. The bottom line is that even in LEO there is no mass production system, except perhaps for a single constellation like GPS.
Sorry, but that's just not true. Telecom satellites are being mass-produced, it is only the large, expensive, and very unique scientific spacecraft that use non-standard parts. And then only for those instruments: many of the other parts (entire buses, but also smaller parts like solar panels, power conditioners, star trackers, computers, propulsion systems, etc.) are off the shelf components these days.
We are already getting to the point where you can simply plug in different simulations of specific parts during the design phase, and quickly make a trade off between comparable components from different manufacturers in that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Great - there is still only one compiler to support "export" - almost 10 years after the standard was defined - and you speak about next standard. So when will the compiler we see the first compiler to support you new library?
Martin
PS: I know a language where all generics are "export" and all compiler support it - since 1983. So it is possible to implement.
I know it is not in the nerd mindset, but yes, you can move forward with a new version before completely finishing the previous version of something. Out in the real world it is in fact quite common.
This is doubly true in this case, since the reality is that export was a badly conceived feature to begin with, that might very well be removed from the next standard because it is so difficult to implement. So the next standard does in fact fix that little problem as well.
Your implicit assertion that C++ compilers are immature because of this missing feature is, of course, complete laughable. C++ has had very solid compiler support for a very long time now.
Hmm, arguing in a very old post is not likely to be read by anyone but I'll try anyway:
We have started, we're building Iter at the moment, and by the time Iter is in full swing we'll be working on the next one. They're going just about as fast as they can, but it'll still take too long.
Just to be clear: I was not arguing that fusion is the only possible future, or that we should exclude alternatives, I was arguing not to discard it just because it is not ready right now.
Your statement that "we" are building Iter at the moment intrigues me: are you actually working for Iter?
Why accept that fusion can advance but dismiss fission; surely if it was dangerous then it must be now right?
I'm not dismissing fission at all! I was under the impression that you were dismissing fusion simply because it is still very much under development. My argument is that this development is necessary - even if we don't know _right now_ if the power plants will ever be economically viable.
Three Mile Island was handled fine and nothing came of it, and Windscale was about generating plutonium for a nuclear device and bears no resemblance to a nuclear plant (and although it's not nuclear power so I'm not interested in defending Windscale; it wasn't a big deal; some short-lived radiation was leaked through the scrubbers, but we don't even know if it caused any health problems to anyone).
How about this? Sure, it is not the accident we were talking about, but it is the same plant (more or less), and it is very much part of the fission industry.
It also demonstrates my main concern with fission: no accountability, and the people in charge care only about the bottom line. And I will maintain that fission is too dangerous as long as that attitude of "nothing wrong here, not our problem" persists.
Besides reactors developed since those early ones are far safer, we have come a long way technologically since the cold war. ...
I have no problem with it, it's very promising. My problem is with people who say "lets not work our problems out; once [new technology] arrives that'll be taken care of".
And how many of those new reactor designs have actually been built? To my knowledge, none. So your "safe" reactors are in fact just as hypothetical as fusion plants.
In terms of deaths per gigawatt nuclear will be one of the safest records of all power sources (unless you consider everyone who got cancer in Europe or Russia for the last few decades to be a direct cause of Chernobyl).
So you would say it was a minor incident, in the end?
Just as a thought experiment, what is this were to happen, not in thinly-populated Ukraine, but somewhere in overcrowded western Europe or Japan?
The people and wildlife which are killed (or displaced) when hydro-electric plants get built, disasters like the Piper Alpha platform fire, coal mine collapses and slag heap landslides, mining accidents, these are seen as an unfortunate industrial accidents which we have to accept.
All of those are, in the end, minor and localized problems. The problem with nuclear is that it is _not_ a localized problem when things go wrong.
With fission though a single accident can hold back progress and research and result in policy changes and hysterical opposition for decades to come.
Without such opposition, fission would never become any safer. And I'm not convinced that the people running the plants care more about safety than about the bottom line, even today.
There's not even a way in the C or C++ core language to start a new thread. And with many different third party libraries, there'll never be a reliable standard way to do it.
Never? A standard, reliable way to do it will be part of C++0x - so that's hardly "never"...
But aren't courts tired of getting used for this type of thing? That's like two guys organizing a public boxing match between themselves. They get a ring, a referee, a crowd... As soon as round 1 starts, they look at each other and decide it's not worth fighting. If all they wanted was to compare each other's muscles, couldn't they have done this privately instead of wasting a bunch of people's time?
I'm sure they are pretty tired of drugdealing, homicide, and theft as well - and yet those things keep popping up in court all the time...
We don't know when it'll be ready: I went to a talk by one of the guys behind the JET reactor and he said 30-40 years before the first commercial reactor
Well, all the more reason to get started right away then!
We don't know how much it'll cost: What use will fusion be if it costs more than current power sources?
Are you looking at cost including all development of the technology or cost once the technology is mature? Have you included costs that are not directly related to running the fusion plant, such as environmental cost of alternatives?
It isn't radiation free: The huge neutron flux it outputs makes the reactor walls highly radioactive, it produces high-level nuclear waste just like any fission plant
It is not at all "like any fission plant". The volumes and halflife of the waste are much smaller, and therefore much more managable. Think "hundreds of years" instead of hundreds of thousands.
It needs tritium: Yes fusion plants can produce tritium, but this is a long process and means that even once the technology is ready it'll still be a couple of decades before we have enough tritium being generated to start up large numbers of new power plants
Tritium is helpful but not required.
Fusion is very promising, if only because it has no proliferation worries, but other than that all of the advantages that count are already available in fission reactors.
The fuel for fusion reactors is effectively unlimited while uranium is a finite resource just like oil. The amount of radioactive waste is far more managable with fusion. And there is no risk of a meltdown. Other than that, they are completely the same...
The power is cheap and will scale: Many European countries get the majority of their power from it
That's only true for France.
We have plenty of nuclear fuel: There won't ever be a nuclear fuel crisis because before we've used the enrichable uranium ore, and then reprocessed and reused all of the nuclear waste in our breeder reactors, the sun will be dead.
I'm not sure about breeder reactors so you _could_ be right on that score, but given the bullshit you spew elsewhere it is hard to believe...
Think solar is renewable? Not as renewable as nuclear.
???
It's safe: If the only reason for not going for it is an accident 30 years ago when the technology was in its infancy that's great
It has had plenty of accidents so far, and that "one" accident you refer to (probably meant to be Chernobyl, but possibly Three Mile Island or Windscale) laid waste to a significant part of a country. I'm not opposed to fission power at all, but don't bullshit us about safety. There is a clear risk and the potential damage done if something goes wrong is immense.
It's available now: We cannot wait for the perfect power supply. We need to change over now. We've got the fuel, the tech, the experience.
Uhm... Are you selling these things by any chance? And what exactly is your problem with the development of nuclear fusion?
All we need is for the public to get their heads out of their asses and learn to accept compromise.
All we really need is a commitment from the people running the plant that they will never compromise on safety, never lie about accidents, and be the first people on the spot to clean up after it all goes south. As long as they have a healthy attitude of fear about their job I'm fine with nuclear fission.
I'm not fine with some commercial company running a plant at lowest possible cost, far away from corporate HQ, compromising on safety factors and ignoring best practices. Unfortunately, that is reality for many plants today.
I'd also like an answer to the question of what the people in Iran, North Korea, and Afghanistan (to name just three) are supposed to do for their energy generation needs. Because I'm actually more comfortable with fission right next door than fission in countries with weak oversight or malicious intentions...
I'm utterly amazed that in some countries you can apparently go to jail for using a certain type of telephone...
In South Korea? Are you an expert on S. Korean law now, too?
I'm sorry, have we flamed before?
Don't forget big corporations. They are legally people, after all, so after three violations they too can be disconnected.
...I've run into a number of browser plugins and other utility programs designed to stop timewasting).
You can just stick slashdot.org in your hosts file and be done with it, no need for a plugin...
Now the big question would be whether they made money that way, which I assume they did. After all, how do you pay for a 65TB server with corresponding bandwidth?
Paid subscriptions, most likely. And a terabyte worth of HD space is only about 80 euro's these days, so the total expense does not have to be that high.
But... 65TB... Assuming you watch 8 hours of movies per day, that would still add up to about 8 years of watching. Why could anyone possibly want that?
How do Dreamweaver compare to Vim?
Dreamweaver do have a spellchecker, for starters...
I'd mod you up if I had points ;-) Maybe it is just advancing age (I'm 38, for crying out loud), but sometimes tech discussion do sound like that to me.
By the way, your new startup sounds like a slightly dirty cross between a social site and a search engine... I would like to throw money at you for some reason.
I was going to say, "damn, we *just* missed it!"
... the semantics of the construct make it impossible to pass NULL.
void bar (int &intref)
{
intref++;
}
void foo ()
{
int *intptr = NULL;
bar (*intptr); // learn something new every day!
}
We've been using voting machines in Brazil for quite some time now, always with satisfatory results
that makes me wonder: how hard is it to hack a piece of paper and a pen? if you have the means and a set objective, you can "hack" anything. And you don't even need a computer to do so.
The difference is numbers. A single programmer in the right place can hack an entire election, untraceable for anybody else. To perform a similar hack in a pen and paper system you would need thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. The chances of none of them talking are slim, thus there is a much better chance of people finding out about the fraud.
On the 364 days of the year when you just go to work or the supermarket, an electric vehicle would be fine, even in Australia. As for your family across the country, if you take the 7:45 train from Sydney you are in Melbourne at 18:55. In the meantime you can read a book, or look out the window, or whatever you want to do.
Well, obtaining a french phonebook shouldn't be too hard. Beyond that point it is just a question of setting up a distributed system for sending out infringement notices (they should not come from one source or look too identical, since that makes them too easy to filter). This will clog up the courts, and will knock the entire nation of France of the internet in short order.
You can use a round-robin scheduler to prioritize other traffic over p2p (in other words, let p2p soak up the bandwidth that remains after all the "normal" internet activities have taken their share). But there is a world of difference between that and what these companies apparently want to do: filter content selectively and block some protocols entirely.
I have no problems with assigning a lower-priority to p2p. I do have a serious problem with my ISP deciding what I can and cannot see and do.
This is not about starving to death, this is about your "right" to own a Hummer for driving the two miles to the shopping mall. Instead you may have to do so in an electric vehicle.
But no! An electric vehicle is *inconvenient* when you want to go on a road trip (which never happens, but just in case you might want to)! Or when you want to haul entire trees out of the forest (which you never do either, but again, just in case)! And your friends will laugh at you!
So you'd rather make the Earth uninhabitable than give up that large, wasteful vehicle you didn't need in the first place. That's the real choice here: losing a tiny fraction of your convenience, vs. death and destruction for a very large part of the worlds' population.
There's really no equivalent for the GUI -- users will relate better to one big monolith, even if it's just a frontend for a bunch of small tools.
If there is one thing I positively hate, it's that.
The reason why is simple: those TCL/TK-and-then-call-a-commandline-tool apps never, never, never deal with error conditions correctly. In other words, it works while everything is fine and dandy - and then when the shit hits the fan, as it invariably does, you must still go out and delve into the commandline. And by definition that happens at a time when you have other problems to deal with.
So just Don't Do It, Ok?
Remind me again how much money Firefox nets each year...
It would be worth billions if only there wasn't a competitor that gave away a similar product for free!
I thought I'd mention that since the summary can't be bothered...
How do we blame George W. Bush for this when Barack Obama is the president now?
The same way Clinton was always blamed when Bush was president? "he made that law" or even "he never did anything to overturn that law" would be fine...
The problem with "genetic choice" is that we haven't been around long enough to know the purpose of all of our traits. If enough people were to, for example, not pass on the sicle cell trait who's to say that humanity won't be wiped out by a malaria epidemic? Of course, that's an outlandish scenario, but it's meant to raise a point not prove one. We just don't know why humanity comes in all of our different variations. It's a dangerous game to start removing traits artificially.
LK
Yes, but that is why this plan is so brilliant: it is only available to very rich people, so it is the rich bastards that will be wiped out when the next killer disease strikes!
There are a host of other problems, of course. The bottom line is that even in LEO there is no mass production system, except perhaps for a single constellation like GPS.
Sorry, but that's just not true. Telecom satellites are being mass-produced, it is only the large, expensive, and very unique scientific spacecraft that use non-standard parts. And then only for those instruments: many of the other parts (entire buses, but also smaller parts like solar panels, power conditioners, star trackers, computers, propulsion systems, etc.) are off the shelf components these days.
We are already getting to the point where you can simply plug in different simulations of specific parts during the design phase, and quickly make a trade off between comparable components from different manufacturers in that way.