It might do a very good job wrestling control over the financial system from unreliable governments, though. If I were living in Venezuela, for example, I'd much prefer to own bitcoin, rather than the local currency. And if it grows big enough it will be a threat to every other currency on the planet.
What you're asking is extremely unfair, especially from users who are not used to think like IT-lawyers. To them "Acrobat" is not just "reading PDFs", it is a whole set of capabilities including things you won't find in free alternatives (like encryption, form support, etc.). Asking users to articulate those needs individually, when they can summarize with the phrase "I need Acrobat", which they already know and of which they already know it supports their needs, is both unfair and unrealistic.
And it's not just capabilities, it's also a general lack of hassle. I use OpenOffice a lot, but frequently it fucks up the layout of Word documents. As a user I neither want nor need that hassle.
Look at it from a users' perspective: what they have now works. What you are selling is a journey into a world of pain, hassle, and "sorry we can't do that". Why would they want that? What tangible (i.e. not abstract) advantage do you offer to make all that worthwhile?
A black hole with the mass of the known universe would have a radius of 13.7 billion lightyears, and a density far less than the highest vacuum that humans have ever produced.
Wait, what? Then how is our universe different from a black hole? Given that it apparently has the same size, mass, and density...
From what I can tell, the programming on the spacecraft functioned fine, and operated according to the time-honored "garbage in, garbage out" principle. It was given instructions to orient itself towards Earth and ignite its engines, and it did. Those instructions were wrong, but that is very much a configuration error, not a programming error.
Stop blaming programmers for all the world's ills.
I have trouble understanding how anyone would want to rely on anything made by Google, given their history of dropping services that aren't immediately profitable to them. I don't mind occasionally using their search engine, but any kind of business model that depends on _anything_ from Google is just a really bad idea, since it might disappear from one moment to the next.
I'm in the process of implementing a scripting engine. V8 was on the shortlist for evaluation, and ultimately discarded for one reason only: it is made by Google, and for all I know it could disappear tomorrow (and be replaced by something I cannot integrate).
Back in 1994 when I got my first HP-UX, I set it up with SIX work spaces
Back in 1985 we had different workspaces (we called them "screens") on our Amigas, each with its own resolution and color depth. And switching between them was instantaneous, rather than invoking a long, painful drawing cycle like your HPUX machine did a decade later.
Eventually some other OS might stumble on the power and elegance of AmigaOS, but I'm not holding my breath...
True, but those are examples of C++ doing stuff C can't do to begin with. How would C deal with overloaded operators for a numeric class? You'll need separate functions, that need long names because there is no function overloading either and everything lives in the same (only) namespace, _and_ you have to rearrange your uses of your numeric class from the familiar infix style to a completely unreadable functional style (i.e. "bignum_mult (bignum_add (a, b), c);" instead of "(a + b) * c);").
How about those templates? The only alternative you have in C is #defines. Don't tell me that nightmare is somehow going to be more readable than its C++ equivalent for anything non-trivial. And your code generation absolutely explodes because those #defines get expanded everywhere.
Rule of 3/5? C should be happy to have that luxury. Instead you get "my_struct_type_copy (a, b);" if your struct happens to be non-trivial. And don't ever forget one, because the compiler is perfectly happy just giving you a shallow copy.
As for IO streams, the C++ community is in full agreement that it was not designed very well (hey, early days of the language...). There are plenty of alternatives now, and one of those is likely to be standardized sooner or later.
What on Earth makes you think C is less verbose than C++? In C, you have to manually, painstakingly free every resource, while C++ does it all for you. In C, you are checking for errors on every single function invocation throughout your program, while C++ requires only a handful of strategically placed try/catch blocks. In C, dealing with strings or dynamic arrays is a source of endless pain and misery, but C++ makes it a snap - and gets all the resource allocation right as well, without even having to think about it. And let's not even get started on anything more complex than that, like hashmaps: C has you casting, checking for errors, and clearing up resources throughout the length and width of your program, while C++ makes it safe, effortless, and completely pain free.
And in those cases where C++ looks more verbose than C, it is actually doing stuff C will not do for you in the first place.
That's a 32-bit, 1GB, Windows 7 based mini-laptop that I use when I travel. Previous versions of Firefox ran so slowly that I was about to replace the laptop by something more capable (think '20s delay when switching tabs'), but Firefox 57 runs well enough on it that this won't be necessary.
Oh, and why I like that laptop: unlike a tablet, it has a large enough disk that I can make backups of my photos during the trip. And it's light, small, and so cheap that it isn't worth stealing, so I don't feel worried leaving it in the hotel.
You could of course take five minutes to study how well communism has actually done in the history of our world. You'll find that communist nations tend to kill large numbers of their own citizens (why would communism do that? Because it gives a few people unlimited power over everybody else), and require fences - not to keep hopeful immigrants out, but to keep their own citizens from escaping.
Unfortunately they are so expensive, because of intense lobbying efforts against them. The machinery and buildings themselves are nothing special. It's all the opposition that drags the process out almost indefinitely that makes it so horribly expensive.
How would you tell the curvature of the sphere from the edge of the disk?
I mean, we are talking about people that are utterly convinced there is an edge, yet somehow afraid to go there and stare into the abyss. If through some miracle he survives, he will be sure to tell us we all got it wrong and the earth is indeed flat. And since he has been "in space", he will count as an expert.
If your car or phone was built to the same standards, and had proper maintenance applied throughout its lifetime, it would last a lot longer as well. Of course you would be using a 30-year old car or phone, something you would probably consider to be completely unacceptable: the car uses far too much fuel and doesn't have any modern safety features, and the phone doesn't do any of the things you'd want a phone to do. The same is true for nuclear plants: we have much safer designs now.
Unfortunately we cannot build them, because of the great success of the anti-nuclear lobby.
It's a bit of a shame really. If we had continued building nuclear plants we might even have avoided the whole climate change discussion - or we might have been worried about global cooling, and discussing how much CO2 we need to release into the atmosphere to keep the temperature comfortable. But hey, at least the environmentalists won that round...
I don't share your optimism. A very large number of people is deeply invested in the idea that society can be created as an utopia. They feel actively threatened by statements contradicting that view, and will not stop at anything to destroy the threat.
> If you want to see why there was such a backlash to his memo, I think it can be made clearer in light of the #metoo discussion we are presently having.
I don't see why. The memo didn't deal with rape at work in any kind of way. It had a different subject.
> In the case of the major tech firm I used to work for, it was always quietly dealt with or outright swept under the rug, paying a quiet settlement and forcing the victim into a nondisclosure agreement. The victimizer got a slap on the wrist but was consideres too important to let go.
Good on you for speaking out now, then! Instead of, say, standing up for the victims at the time when it actually happened. Really shows what you're made of.
> That's the backdrop for this memo and why it landed with a wet splat. It is callous to those who have had illegal things done to them against their will at work.
Nope. Because this memo was not about rape at work.
> I don't have much sympathy for DaMoore, he could have made his helpful suggestions directly to HR. He wanted the most attention though.
No; he was taking part in an ongoing internal discussion and posting a _reply_ on an _internal_ forum in Google. He was not the person who broke company confidentiality and posted it on the internet. Incidentally, was this person ever found and punished?
> goatse
And don't forget to mention his KKK-membership, his nazi sympathies, the fact that he eats baby pandas every sunday, and the fact that he is a known child molester. Geez...
Could we perhaps do the naming and shaming _after_ a conviction in a court of law? Rather than destroying someone based on nothing but hearsay and rumor?
This is just incredibly disappointing. You are a tech news site; not the judge, jury, and executioner of someone's reputation.
I read roughly two meters worth of books per year, which comes down to six or so per month. Obviously it depends a lot on the books themselves: a 1500 page monster will take considerably longer than a pocket. And collections of short stories take forever, since I tend to stop after each story to ruminate on it.
This number is considerably higher than five years ago, because back then I was mostly reading magazines. I decided to give up on that particular hobby and start reading books again - in part because I had so many unread books lying around. At the current speed, it will take another four years or so to get through the backlog.
This month I read the Witcher saga. Of course I can't help comparing it to the games, which I also played. In the book Geralt bows to anyone and everyone (unlike the game, which informs you he has a reputation for never bowing to anyone), and is a hell of a lot more sexually repressed. His combat style, full of pirouettes, is easily recognizable, but he seems to completely forget about his ability to cast signs during the course of the story.
The first two books basically read like a collection of side quests from Witcher 3. The next five books are the main quest, which centers on the war with Nilfgaard, and focuses on Ciri more than on Geralt. I found I didn't really appreciate the writing style: too much of the story is told from the point of view of various future historians, there is too much attention to minor characters who usually die soon anyway, the story jumps haphazardly through time and space, and the author has an unpleasant knack for throwing in tiny details that have huge repercussions, winking to the reader to show how clever he is. These are not major irritants, and the whole saga is certainly worth a read, especially if you liked the games as well, but I think it would have been more enjoyable had it simply focused on Geralt and his adventures as a witcher.
Like a blood sample. So every time you want to log in to funnycatpictures.com and post to its mighty forum, you just jab a needle in your vein for a second and let the analyser do its thing.
Seriously, could they come up with any idea more stupid than this? It requires you to carry a specific object with you, and to never ever lose that object. The pattern matching must be fuzzy enough that the same object shown in different lighting, under different angles, etc. is still allowed, but strict enough that a similar object is not. And it must allow for differences in background as well.
And of course your security is shot if any of your photos is captured. Or if another of your (public) photos accidentally reveals the item. So let's see: it must be something you always carry with you, yet isn't visible on any public photos. Your underwear, maybe? I can just see myself logging in in the local Starbucks...
Slashdot Mirror
Bowl shaped? BOWL SHAPED? If it were bowl shaped, the rain would eventually FILL IT UP and we would ALL DROWN!
It might do a very good job wrestling control over the financial system from unreliable governments, though. If I were living in Venezuela, for example, I'd much prefer to own bitcoin, rather than the local currency. And if it grows big enough it will be a threat to every other currency on the planet.
You put it in the title but there is no explanation. Just another stupid attention grabbing headline, then...
What you're asking is extremely unfair, especially from users who are not used to think like IT-lawyers. To them "Acrobat" is not just "reading PDFs", it is a whole set of capabilities including things you won't find in free alternatives (like encryption, form support, etc.). Asking users to articulate those needs individually, when they can summarize with the phrase "I need Acrobat", which they already know and of which they already know it supports their needs, is both unfair and unrealistic.
And it's not just capabilities, it's also a general lack of hassle. I use OpenOffice a lot, but frequently it fucks up the layout of Word documents. As a user I neither want nor need that hassle.
Look at it from a users' perspective: what they have now works. What you are selling is a journey into a world of pain, hassle, and "sorry we can't do that". Why would they want that? What tangible (i.e. not abstract) advantage do you offer to make all that worthwhile?
A black hole with the mass of the known universe would have a radius of 13.7 billion lightyears, and a density far less than the highest vacuum that humans have ever produced.
Wait, what? Then how is our universe different from a black hole? Given that it apparently has the same size, mass, and density...
>If ne of those telescopes were to spot an asteroid impacting us in one hundred years, we would be motivated to develop the ability to deflect it.
Any attempt at deflecting the asteroid would probably be stopped by religious fanatics, anti-scientists, and social justice warriors.
From what I can tell, the programming on the spacecraft functioned fine, and operated according to the time-honored "garbage in, garbage out" principle. It was given instructions to orient itself towards Earth and ignite its engines, and it did. Those instructions were wrong, but that is very much a configuration error, not a programming error.
Stop blaming programmers for all the world's ills.
I have trouble understanding how anyone would want to rely on anything made by Google, given their history of dropping services that aren't immediately profitable to them. I don't mind occasionally using their search engine, but any kind of business model that depends on _anything_ from Google is just a really bad idea, since it might disappear from one moment to the next.
I'm in the process of implementing a scripting engine. V8 was on the shortlist for evaluation, and ultimately discarded for one reason only: it is made by Google, and for all I know it could disappear tomorrow (and be replaced by something I cannot integrate).
Thank you for sharing this with us. It helps remind us that there are actual people on the other side of the screen.
Now the new war is atom vs sublime.
Are those editors or superheroes?
Back in 1994 when I got my first HP-UX, I set it up with SIX work spaces
Back in 1985 we had different workspaces (we called them "screens") on our Amigas, each with its own resolution and color depth. And switching between them was instantaneous, rather than invoking a long, painful drawing cycle like your HPUX machine did a decade later.
Eventually some other OS might stumble on the power and elegance of AmigaOS, but I'm not holding my breath...
True, but those are examples of C++ doing stuff C can't do to begin with. How would C deal with overloaded operators for a numeric class? You'll need separate functions, that need long names because there is no function overloading either and everything lives in the same (only) namespace, _and_ you have to rearrange your uses of your numeric class from the familiar infix style to a completely unreadable functional style (i.e. "bignum_mult (bignum_add (a, b), c);" instead of "(a + b) * c);").
How about those templates? The only alternative you have in C is #defines. Don't tell me that nightmare is somehow going to be more readable than its C++ equivalent for anything non-trivial. And your code generation absolutely explodes because those #defines get expanded everywhere.
Rule of 3/5? C should be happy to have that luxury. Instead you get "my_struct_type_copy (a, b);" if your struct happens to be non-trivial. And don't ever forget one, because the compiler is perfectly happy just giving you a shallow copy.
As for IO streams, the C++ community is in full agreement that it was not designed very well (hey, early days of the language...). There are plenty of alternatives now, and one of those is likely to be standardized sooner or later.
Though not necessarily more verbose than C++.
What on Earth makes you think C is less verbose than C++? In C, you have to manually, painstakingly free every resource, while C++ does it all for you. In C, you are checking for errors on every single function invocation throughout your program, while C++ requires only a handful of strategically placed try/catch blocks. In C, dealing with strings or dynamic arrays is a source of endless pain and misery, but C++ makes it a snap - and gets all the resource allocation right as well, without even having to think about it. And let's not even get started on anything more complex than that, like hashmaps: C has you casting, checking for errors, and clearing up resources throughout the length and width of your program, while C++ makes it safe, effortless, and completely pain free.
And in those cases where C++ looks more verbose than C, it is actually doing stuff C will not do for you in the first place.
That's a 32-bit, 1GB, Windows 7 based mini-laptop that I use when I travel. Previous versions of Firefox ran so slowly that I was about to replace the laptop by something more capable (think '20s delay when switching tabs'), but Firefox 57 runs well enough on it that this won't be necessary.
Oh, and why I like that laptop: unlike a tablet, it has a large enough disk that I can make backups of my photos during the trip. And it's light, small, and so cheap that it isn't worth stealing, so I don't feel worried leaving it in the hotel.
>Why would communism mean that?
You could of course take five minutes to study how well communism has actually done in the history of our world. You'll find that communist nations tend to kill large numbers of their own citizens (why would communism do that? Because it gives a few people unlimited power over everybody else), and require fences - not to keep hopeful immigrants out, but to keep their own citizens from escaping.
Unfortunately they are so expensive, because of intense lobbying efforts against them. The machinery and buildings themselves are nothing special. It's all the opposition that drags the process out almost indefinitely that makes it so horribly expensive.
How would you tell the curvature of the sphere from the edge of the disk?
I mean, we are talking about people that are utterly convinced there is an edge, yet somehow afraid to go there and stare into the abyss. If through some miracle he survives, he will be sure to tell us we all got it wrong and the earth is indeed flat. And since he has been "in space", he will count as an expert.
Why don't you simply disable all of Google Analytics?
If your car or phone was built to the same standards, and had proper maintenance applied throughout its lifetime, it would last a lot longer as well. Of course you would be using a 30-year old car or phone, something you would probably consider to be completely unacceptable: the car uses far too much fuel and doesn't have any modern safety features, and the phone doesn't do any of the things you'd want a phone to do. The same is true for nuclear plants: we have much safer designs now.
Unfortunately we cannot build them, because of the great success of the anti-nuclear lobby.
It's a bit of a shame really. If we had continued building nuclear plants we might even have avoided the whole climate change discussion - or we might have been worried about global cooling, and discussing how much CO2 we need to release into the atmosphere to keep the temperature comfortable. But hey, at least the environmentalists won that round...
I don't share your optimism. A very large number of people is deeply invested in the idea that society can be created as an utopia. They feel actively threatened by statements contradicting that view, and will not stop at anything to destroy the threat.
> If you want to see why there was such a backlash to his memo, I think it can be made clearer in light of the #metoo discussion we are presently having.
I don't see why. The memo didn't deal with rape at work in any kind of way. It had a different subject.
> In the case of the major tech firm I used to work for, it was always quietly dealt with or outright swept under the rug, paying a quiet settlement and forcing the victim into a nondisclosure agreement. The victimizer got a slap on the wrist but was consideres too important to let go.
Good on you for speaking out now, then! Instead of, say, standing up for the victims at the time when it actually happened. Really shows what you're made of.
> That's the backdrop for this memo and why it landed with a wet splat. It is callous to those who have had illegal things done to them against their will at work.
Nope. Because this memo was not about rape at work.
> I don't have much sympathy for DaMoore, he could have made his helpful suggestions directly to HR. He wanted the most attention though.
No; he was taking part in an ongoing internal discussion and posting a _reply_ on an _internal_ forum in Google. He was not the person who broke company confidentiality and posted it on the internet. Incidentally, was this person ever found and punished?
> goatse
And don't forget to mention his KKK-membership, his nazi sympathies, the fact that he eats baby pandas every sunday, and the fact that he is a known child molester. Geez...
Could we perhaps do the naming and shaming _after_ a conviction in a court of law? Rather than destroying someone based on nothing but hearsay and rumor?
This is just incredibly disappointing. You are a tech news site; not the judge, jury, and executioner of someone's reputation.
I read roughly two meters worth of books per year, which comes down to six or so per month. Obviously it depends a lot on the books themselves: a 1500 page monster will take considerably longer than a pocket. And collections of short stories take forever, since I tend to stop after each story to ruminate on it.
This number is considerably higher than five years ago, because back then I was mostly reading magazines. I decided to give up on that particular hobby and start reading books again - in part because I had so many unread books lying around. At the current speed, it will take another four years or so to get through the backlog.
This month I read the Witcher saga. Of course I can't help comparing it to the games, which I also played. In the book Geralt bows to anyone and everyone (unlike the game, which informs you he has a reputation for never bowing to anyone), and is a hell of a lot more sexually repressed. His combat style, full of pirouettes, is easily recognizable, but he seems to completely forget about his ability to cast signs during the course of the story.
The first two books basically read like a collection of side quests from Witcher 3. The next five books are the main quest, which centers on the war with Nilfgaard, and focuses on Ciri more than on Geralt. I found I didn't really appreciate the writing style: too much of the story is told from the point of view of various future historians, there is too much attention to minor characters who usually die soon anyway, the story jumps haphazardly through time and space, and the author has an unpleasant knack for throwing in tiny details that have huge repercussions, winking to the reader to show how clever he is. These are not major irritants, and the whole saga is certainly worth a read, especially if you liked the games as well, but I think it would have been more enjoyable had it simply focused on Geralt and his adventures as a witcher.
...but I'm too tired to write one. Help me, someone ;-)
Like a blood sample. So every time you want to log in to funnycatpictures.com and post to its mighty forum, you just jab a needle in your vein for a second and let the analyser do its thing.
Seriously, could they come up with any idea more stupid than this? It requires you to carry a specific object with you, and to never ever lose that object. The pattern matching must be fuzzy enough that the same object shown in different lighting, under different angles, etc. is still allowed, but strict enough that a similar object is not. And it must allow for differences in background as well.
And of course your security is shot if any of your photos is captured. Or if another of your (public) photos accidentally reveals the item. So let's see: it must be something you always carry with you, yet isn't visible on any public photos. Your underwear, maybe? I can just see myself logging in in the local Starbucks...