Err, I hope you're right, for Mono's sake. If Microsoft decides that enough's enough -- probably at the exact point in time that Microsoft has decided Mono has done enough to promote.Net technologies to the world, thank you -- and they decide to sue for patent infringement or whatever, well, then a court would get to decide what could happen with an open source project.
Could the exact same scenario happen with an open source project? Well, no. There seem to be particulars in this case that don't translate cleanly to an open source situation. But didn't Richard Stallman have to restart Emacs back in the day because of licensing and contributor issues? If you're not aware, Mr. Stallman is just a wee bit sensitive about these things now.
I think you'd be better of saying that this could never happen if the project were open source, IF: all contributors have responsibly contributed code, everyone involved honors the moral and legal principles of open source development, the project is popular and involvement is well documented, there's a well maintained, redundant code repository... In other words, all the ducks are in order. In the above case, clearly they were not. But while I would agree that open source projects are less susceptible to this kind of problem, I'd be careful stating that they're immune...
C++ has high aspirations in terms of giving the programmer complete control but ultimately fails due to the emergent complexity that results from the inability to fully encapsulate all of the design decisions.
Come on. If you're talking about vectors, lists, sets, queues, stacks, hash_maps, etc., then I think the STL does, via templates, quite a stunning job of encapsulation. Stroustrup's comment in the article concerns wider adoption of the STL as a starting point for more developers, and I challenge straightforward applications developers to disagree with that. In reviewing others' code, I'm frequently surprised to see arrays being used where vectors or lists would suit as well and be safer, and frequently disappointed to see many functions implemented without templates where they could be effectively abstracted and made much more reusable (and refactorable, if that's a word) by using templates. Please tell me where vectors, as an example, fall short in the encapsulation goal.
Where have other languages succeeded? Java provides a base int type and an Integer wrapper, and this is a fundamental data type. Is this success? I just think it's confusing. And what about operator overloading in Java? Yes for Strings but no for user types? I think operator overloading, in a dedicated OOP language of all things, is very important to encapsulation, but Java says "too dangerous"!
Rubbish. And I'm not really meaning to pick on Java. My overall point is that on an application level there is a pie-in-the-sky goal that might be feasible in terms of encapsulation and that's what I believe we should strive for. But on a library or language level, saying C++ is at fault for not ensuring "perfect" encapsulation (and I'm not sure what that is) throughout the libraries is a little naive. Please point out the language that gets anything fully correct without sacrificing something else. I mean, isn't this why we have different languages for different things?
Finally, I don't find that sentence insightful. Saying C++ is "without" safety is only illustrating a complete lack of familiarity with the STL. The programmer does have to keep track of things at times, but nothing even approaches real difficulty until you start creating your own ADTs. Mainstream types of the "Shape" or "Person" or "Animal" ilk are fine and dandy and really no more difficult or "dangerous" than Java or C#. It's not until you get into the implementation of things like "vertex_queue" or "parallel_list" that you, admittedly, start to get into much slower going territory. But there's also a lot of power there, too, power that's taken away in other languages, such as Java, because it's too "dangerous".
Java has freakin' wrappers for ints, an abysmally slow start-up, and is just getting generics. I could go on for hours on how Java is a brilliant marketing effort but a miserable, byzantine morass of hierarchies, but I'll stick responding to your comments.
C++... requires the programmer to obsess on storage allocation and release, yet gives no assistance in this...
Aaannnggghhh! Wrong. Please refer to the header in the STL, to use only when the many various STL containers somehow are insufficient for your job.
Strostrup still insists there's nothing really wrong with his language.
Uhh, okay, but Sun is all too willing to discuss flaws with Java? And God knows, Microsoft is always willing to discuss anything the user is concerned about.
Wirth is a forgotten and bitter man in Switzerland.
Is Wirth really bitter? I wouldn't know, but he's hardly forgotten. There's a whole school of programmers that advocate Delphi which, last I checked, was still being sold to this day. If you don't know what Delphi is, then hit borland.com and educate yourself.
Ada and Modula got this right, but C++ got it wrong. And Strostrup refuses to fix it.
I'm skeptical that Ada has gotten much right, but speaking to the illusion that Stroustrup is Lord God King -- Stroustrup is only one member of a rather large team that actively develops C++ and the STL. It's a committee now, and it ain't solely up to him.
Meanwhile, C++ is being abandoned for Java, C#, C, and scripting languages.
Uh, not for systems, games, or high-performance rapid development it isn't, and you can take that to church, buddy. Also, C is still in widespread use, but Java and C# are suffering the same competition, where there is competition in certain applications, from scripting languages that every non-scripting language suffers. Also, Java and C# are platforms, not simply languages, they're proprietary, and they're proponents depend heavily on making the development community believe that everyone(!) is jumping C++'s ship. Well, everyone isn't. Some developers, especially those that need to, see through the marketing spooge and use what's best for the job, not what Sun and Microsoft tell them to use. Jesus, if we all did what Microsoft wanted us to, we'd all be using VB.NET.
C has little abstraction and little safety. Java has both abstraction and safety. C++ has abstraction without safety, a terrible combination.
This is just a doofy sentence. C has "little" safety but C++ is "without" safety? Dude, learn a language before you start spouting marketing crap. If you don't know why your sentence is completely wrong, then you're not qualified to comment.
Ohhh, please educate me, you moron. As a matter of fact, you dink, I know of at least two O'Relly books that are being used as texts in classes taught at UCI. So thanks for your input, but now you may want to go and pour yourself a nice, warm glass of shut the fuck up.
I'm unclear here -- are you just fond of complaining, or do you have a legitimate suggestion for the author to integrate into possible future editions?
I appreciated your post, with exceptions, right up to the point where you decided to be yet another geekoid asswipe, making some sneering little point while winding tape around your glasses. I reject the notion that because an author wrote a book it's our obligation here to all be constructively helping to better his work. There are enough computer books in the world, and yes in this niche too, to stretch around the world in a line a few times, so it's perfectly legitimate to question his text. Furthermore, unless you've read the book, which I haven't, you've no better idea about the quality of the content than I do. I was questioning something excerpted from the book, while you were speculating on the book's quality and relevance as a text.
There's more to security than checking return values, validating input, and managing strings, such as knowing your APIs and understanding points of entry. But category 4 is ridiculous. Textbook code? What the fuck is textbook code? Have you seen some of the code in textbooks? A lot of it is truly NOT secure. So what the hell does he mean? Just because some guy wrote a book doesn't mean he shouldn't be questioned and it doesn't mean that we're obligated to accept jack or shit about what he has to say. That said, I'll probably check out the book, at least mull it over in the bookstore. But I won't buy it unless I think the rest of his content isn't tilted toward marketing spooge.
In the meantime, take your little comment and shove it up your pocket-protected ass.
I agree.
I'm not sure what "textbook" code means. There are plenty of textbooks out there that have, as examples, bone-chilling examples of C++ code, and a few of those are produced by O'Reilly (see "Practical C++ Programming").
In fact, a great deal of the code I see produced by other programmers is very reasonable and tight, but isn't something I would see in a textbook at all. I think it's possible that this book author has revealed a bias toward the code of book authors...
1. Those who categorize programmers artificially for the sake of a point.
2. Those who categorize programmers incorrectly because they don't know better, but for good reason.
3. Those who categorize programmers because they figure that, by doing so, they will establish themselves as an authority on ranges and types of programming skill.
4. Those who avoid categorizing programmers because they realize that it's kind of goofy to do so.
Everyone knows that there are folks out there that can do their job better than others. But do those categories really exist? It may seem like I'm picking nits, but is there really a class of programmers that writes buggy code almost all of the time? I mean, I suppose there is, but it doesn't seem to me like they'll have a long career in software...
Years of developing software brought me to XEmacs, which is just a subtle variant from FSF's/Richard Stallman's GNU Emacs. Functionally they're, for most practical purposes, identical. Like Emacs, XEmacs has got a learning curve like an Olympic ski jump and it takes a good long while (months) before you're very productive with it. But I can do just about everything with it that I do on a computer: email, programming, Usenet, personal information management (including scheduling and a contact database), screenplay formatting, XML, even ASCII drawing with Emacs' picture-mode.
In short, it's legendary, and probably most everyone here has heard of it. But for those who haven't, and who have a penchant for twiddling and fiddling with software that has about ten thousand options and endless opportunities for customization (gotta learn elisp, a lisp variant, to do it), then I highly, highly recommend XEmacs or, if you want to be a free software purist, go with GNU Emacs, but you'll have to download the source for the moment because last I checked the GNU ftp servers were still recovering from an exploit and trying to gather checksums for potentially compromised software. Yikes!
As far as my writing habits go, it's been enormously convenient for me to apply the quick navigational keystrokes I've learned for Emacs to my writing projects. Everything just becomes so much faster and intuitive. And doing most everything from one customizable editor allows me to create an environment that I understand from my own personal viewpoint without having to learn a slew of special features and keystrokes from other software packages.
Emacs isn't for everyone, I will say that. And since learning many software packages for special purposes -- one for HTML editing, one for XML (like XMLSpy), one for screenplay formatting (like Movie Magic Screenwriter) -- isn't exactly a trial given that it seems like most people's brains seem to adjust to whatever "mode" of work they're currently engaged in, many will choose that route. But again, if you feel so inclined, give Emacs a try, you might grow to love it. But be prepared to give it time.
Oh, and there's always Vim. It's an excellent, ultra-powerful editor that's basically for people that wished they could grok Emacs but, for some sad reason, simply can't.
One improvement is the Documents folder on the desktop.
Wow. Java's really opening up the world to the power of Linux usability. And to think, how many years went by without the Documents folder on the desktop?
That's why successive Windows interfaces have been progressively dumbed-down from the perspective of a highly-computer-literate user. Marketing types refer to this as greater ease of use.
Okay. Usability design types, however, refer to it as "progressive dumbing down".
The Nautilus file browser, while initially set to a large icon view, allowed a side pane and file tree display not unlike Windows Explorer, and it uncomplainingly offered a view of everything in the file system, another feature that presumably would not be welcomed in an enterprise production desktop.
Uncomplainingly? Yeah, okay, it's a word, technically, but it sucks as a word. If the writologist proofreadicated his articlation, he might findify prosage less awkwarditious.
Nevertheless, it's a relief that the usability of Windows Explorer is retained in the Java Desktop.
Also, is Java really open sourced? Is StarOffice? OpenOffice is, but StarOffice, well...
Whatever. The article reads like marketing spooge, and it's based on a demo off a CD. Did this really make Slashdot's home page?
Crap. And to think my post about stripper techno-implants got rejected...
The Google Code Jam is being conducted in conjunction with TopCoder, the coolest, best implemented regular online coding contest. You can go there and download the Arena applet to get an idea of the format of the contest and to get ready by practicing with sample problems. In fact, that's highly recommended since the applet accommodates a very specific kind of contest.
Also, it would be wise to participate in a few live TopCoder rounds, which are held weekly, if you have any hope of being competitive.
... if SCO cared. But they don't. It's a business game, not a technology issue. What they care about is obfuscation, FUD, and legal maneuvering, not technical accuracy. Shouldn't that be fairly obvious by now?
Anyone can browse these posts and discover for themselves what seems to be a frequent trend on Slashdot; most people go ahead and comment without reading the freaking articles that the posts refer to. They read the headline, they read the (frequently misinformed or mis-stated) summary of the submission and then they fire off myriad comments.
These postings are riddled with "Why is this even on here?" and "Is this even a story?" These people didn't read the article. Or, they're idiots. Possibly both.
Why should I pay for something I can download for free?
That's fairly subtle, considering the events of the last day or so. Bravo, and, I think, a point well made.
There are differences, of course, between publicly consumed intellectual property, like music, and sector-targeted intellectual property, like software: Differences in support requirements, public perception of traditional ownership and rights, the respective industries' take on enforcement and public relations, and the kinds and scope of typical license infringement.
But... It's still a good point, so I'm a little disappointed that you're not modded up...
As to culpability, you have a point, to a degree. Musicians, whether they are qualified or not to make their own business career decisions, certainly *should* be qualified or they shouldn't be signing. (It is, I think, important to note that this could be said of a great many individuals in a great many industries.) And yes, they do make mistakes, and yes they pay for them.
There are some mitigating factors, however, and real points to made about our culture, the dreams of artists (as any individual in any career may have dreams about future successes), and the carrots that are waved in front of the faces of artists by an already existing and quite powerful music industry.
Firstly, when discussing artists in the music industry, it's important to include B-level artists, studio musicians, singing groups at various levels of the pipeline, and garage musicians who are working hard to create something, in addition to the luminaries of the industry such as those you mentioned, Prince and U2. These are people that picked up their instruments and started acquiring their performance chops probably between 13 and 18, some of them even younger, and have been playing, practicing and worshipping at the altars of their idols for *years* before they've acquired the musicianship, songwriting ability, and/or singing/dance/performance skills necessary to be interesting to anyone besides their parents.
By the time they hit an age where their talent and skills are formidable enough--and many never do--they are *primed*. They're hungry. These are people that move to different cities for opportunities, who take bum jobs to support their dreams, and who bust their tails on top of the tails they've already been busting to try and get some attention, favorable press, the eyes and ears of someone who has any kind of power.
And why? Because, in order to duplicate the successes of the Princes (who wore the word "Slave" on his forehead for years and only broke from his label after a protracted fight, before he achieved any real independent success, which, by the way, begs the question "Where has he been lately?") and the U2s (who also had their own battles, and who struck out only after riding on the backs of labels to begin with), these younger artists need distribution. You can garner local attention, you can even make your own videos and albums. But there's one thing technology has not enabled, not really, not yet: distribution channels for product.
This is where the RIAA helms the ship. And this is where they're tough to beat. And before anyone goes replying about the Internet and all these downloadable tunes, keep in mind that real distribution isn't just about shipping product, although that is a big portion of the pie, it's also about advertising, branding, image building and a ton of other things. These younger artists have been weaned on the heroes of an entire, and very real, "industry", in all the senses of that word.
So is the RIAA needed? Well, for a national music industry, played by the old rules, yeah, they're needed. Neither Prince, nor U2, would be where they are today if they hadn't first hopped a ride on the RIAA's train. But that doesn't make the RIAA right, and that doesn't make their methods excusable. It just makes them powerful.
God, how many stories are there, from blues musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties, on up to current bands today, like Incubus, getting into wars with their labels either over getting rooked for hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars, or selling millions of albums only to end up having made about $50,000 a piece?
Honestly, I could write on this forever, supplying documentation, examples of my own contracts, anecdotes of friends, war stories... But I hope this point of view has shed some light, from an artist's p
I'm never buying another RIAA-backed CD again. Period. That simple.
I'm a musician. I gig, I play music every day, I record music and I already own a large collection of CDs. Quite honestly, I haven't heard anything in pop music come out in the last five years, besides a very precious few artists, that I've thought was worth the $18 anyway. So it's no big loss to me.
If a new musician comes along whose music I feel I must have, I'll either purchase a CD with a friend and share ownership or I'll employ any of a number of methods available to me to get the music on my hard drive. But since most new music has been utter crap, and it's so rare that I ever hear anything that makes me feel I absolutely must have it at my fingertips, I don't expect this is going to be a big problem for me.
But I do have a big problem with giving another single dime to an industry that fines 12-year-olds in housing projects $2,000 for gay-for-display Britney Spears and nursery rhymes. It's comical, but it's also bullshit, and having been involved with the music industry before I can honestly say it's right in line with their standard operating procedure.
The normal recording contract is roughly 40-60 pages long. By contrast, a typical book publishing contract is 4-12 pages. Typical recording contracts tie up artists for advances, deny artists royalties on new technology media, and itemize costs well into the future of the artists career. The record industry operates like the mafia. So as far as I'm concerned, they can go straight to hell.
Yeah, I'll bet they settled in a day. Because the Brianna story was like the world walking in on the Devil raping a kid, so the RIAA tried to turn it into a finger wagging story.
They suck. I wish them all, to the last of them, the absolutely very worst things in life. Fuck 'em.
... can process Java code that's not a bit slower than native Java on Windows.
Orrr... They can just stick with mod_perl or WebWare for Python or PHP or some other truly open source technology that isn't controlled by forty-thousand corporations all with an invested business interest in competing with Microsoft.
I swear to God, every time I hear a phrase like "suited to the Enterprise" it's accompanied by a Java, Microsoft, or IBM article, all of which have a huge interest in convincing you that in order to sell a widget on the Internet you've absolutely, no-question, gotta have nineteen layers of logical infrastructure completely independent of each other otherwise your site's gonna go down and boy are you going to pay. In the meantime, sites like Yahoo run their e-commerce off of Lisp, PHP is their standardizing implementation language, Amazon is hiring Perl programmers, and Slashdot, a site which regularly DOSes other sites by virtue of it's power to link, runs on Perl.
But if you really want to be successful YOU NEED JAVA FOR THE "ENTERPRISE". Only with Java can you take half the time to express what takes twice as much typing to code. Or maybe by "Enterprise" what everyone really means is the USS Enterprise? Maybe that's why it could max out to warp 7.
... is reviewed here, at the 'net's largest C++-oriented book review site. This review is decidedly in the negative, although Steve Oualline is given a chance to issue a response which is worth reading.
It seems that the 2nd edition of this book may have brought forward some previous problems. I have the first edition but never liked it, never thought it really achieved it's goals.
If you're looking for an uncompromisingly amazing first book on C++, please check out Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. This is how I learned C++ and, by using the concepts of teaching core language skills alongside library concepts and best practices in OOP, it truly accelerates the process. Amazing.
Yeah, bud, while you're posting on this US-hosted, US-funded, US-English Web site you may want to consider that a US viewpoint might carry some weight here.
However, when you go to those immensely powerful European versions of Slashdot you might see other opinions represented with more strength. Now which Web sites would those be?
... From a marketing standpoint. That's it. It's hard to immediately discern how it's pronounced, it's got seven uneven letters, it's relatively long and it has no obvious immediate meaning or collection of related possible meanings based on the roots of the word.
So what if 'ouvert' is 'open' in French. I didn't know that. Lot's of people don't know that. Learning that doesn't make you go "ooooo, that's so cool". It just makes you go, "oh".
Open source projects, especially projects of any magnitude should try, from time to time, for some true open source marketing. Unfortunately, engineers, no matter how smart they may be at one thing, are frequently not as smart as they think they are at many things, and so they drop the ball in some areas. This is a decent example.
Of course, 'Vim' and 'Emacs' aren't exactly stellar examples of naming, either, but on the other hand they haven't had much success outside certain circles, and they're both pretty amazing editors. Someone might say that has more to do with their vertical learning curves compared to, for example, 'Word' but their names certainly didn't help...
Version 0.1 is still better than Outlook Express ever was. Anyone with any experience with the Mozilla products, especially Firebird, knows that each incremental version increase brings loads more functionality, features and options.
So while I would shed a tear over Outlook Express going away, truth is, a rat's ass I do not give.
Slashdot Mirror
-- And Emacs will still be slower than Vim.
Err, I hope you're right, for Mono's sake. If Microsoft decides that enough's enough -- probably at the exact point in time that Microsoft has decided Mono has done enough to promote .Net technologies to the world, thank you -- and they decide to sue for patent infringement or whatever, well, then a court would get to decide what could happen with an open source project.
Could the exact same scenario happen with an open source project? Well, no. There seem to be particulars in this case that don't translate cleanly to an open source situation. But didn't Richard Stallman have to restart Emacs back in the day because of licensing and contributor issues? If you're not aware, Mr. Stallman is just a wee bit sensitive about these things now.
I think you'd be better of saying that this could never happen if the project were open source, IF: all contributors have responsibly contributed code, everyone involved honors the moral and legal principles of open source development, the project is popular and involvement is well documented, there's a well maintained, redundant code repository ... In other words, all the ducks are in order. In the above case, clearly they were not. But while I would agree that open source projects are less susceptible to this kind of problem, I'd be careful stating that they're immune ...
ZEALOTS MUST DIE!!!
Come on. If you're talking about vectors, lists, sets, queues, stacks, hash_maps, etc., then I think the STL does, via templates, quite a stunning job of encapsulation. Stroustrup's comment in the article concerns wider adoption of the STL as a starting point for more developers, and I challenge straightforward applications developers to disagree with that. In reviewing others' code, I'm frequently surprised to see arrays being used where vectors or lists would suit as well and be safer, and frequently disappointed to see many functions implemented without templates where they could be effectively abstracted and made much more reusable (and refactorable, if that's a word) by using templates. Please tell me where vectors, as an example, fall short in the encapsulation goal.
Where have other languages succeeded? Java provides a base int type and an Integer wrapper, and this is a fundamental data type. Is this success? I just think it's confusing. And what about operator overloading in Java? Yes for Strings but no for user types? I think operator overloading, in a dedicated OOP language of all things, is very important to encapsulation, but Java says "too dangerous"!
Rubbish. And I'm not really meaning to pick on Java. My overall point is that on an application level there is a pie-in-the-sky goal that might be feasible in terms of encapsulation and that's what I believe we should strive for. But on a library or language level, saying C++ is at fault for not ensuring "perfect" encapsulation (and I'm not sure what that is) throughout the libraries is a little naive. Please point out the language that gets anything fully correct without sacrificing something else. I mean, isn't this why we have different languages for different things?
Finally, I don't find that sentence insightful. Saying C++ is "without" safety is only illustrating a complete lack of familiarity with the STL. The programmer does have to keep track of things at times, but nothing even approaches real difficulty until you start creating your own ADTs. Mainstream types of the "Shape" or "Person" or "Animal" ilk are fine and dandy and really no more difficult or "dangerous" than Java or C#. It's not until you get into the implementation of things like "vertex_queue" or "parallel_list" that you, admittedly, start to get into much slower going territory. But there's also a lot of power there, too, power that's taken away in other languages, such as Java, because it's too "dangerous".
Java has freakin' wrappers for ints, an abysmally slow start-up, and is just getting generics. I could go on for hours on how Java is a brilliant marketing effort but a miserable, byzantine morass of hierarchies, but I'll stick responding to your comments.
C++Aaannnggghhh! Wrong. Please refer to the header in the STL, to use only when the many various STL containers somehow are insufficient for your job.
Strostrup still insists there's nothing really wrong with his language.Uhh, okay, but Sun is all too willing to discuss flaws with Java? And God knows, Microsoft is always willing to discuss anything the user is concerned about.
Wirth is a forgotten and bitter man in Switzerland.Is Wirth really bitter? I wouldn't know, but he's hardly forgotten. There's a whole school of programmers that advocate Delphi which, last I checked, was still being sold to this day. If you don't know what Delphi is, then hit borland.com and educate yourself.
Ada and Modula got this right, but C++ got it wrong. And Strostrup refuses to fix it.I'm skeptical that Ada has gotten much right, but speaking to the illusion that Stroustrup is Lord God King -- Stroustrup is only one member of a rather large team that actively develops C++ and the STL. It's a committee now, and it ain't solely up to him.
Meanwhile, C++ is being abandoned for Java, C#, C, and scripting languages.Uh, not for systems, games, or high-performance rapid development it isn't, and you can take that to church, buddy. Also, C is still in widespread use, but Java and C# are suffering the same competition, where there is competition in certain applications, from scripting languages that every non-scripting language suffers. Also, Java and C# are platforms, not simply languages, they're proprietary, and they're proponents depend heavily on making the development community believe that everyone(!) is jumping C++'s ship. Well, everyone isn't. Some developers, especially those that need to, see through the marketing spooge and use what's best for the job, not what Sun and Microsoft tell them to use. Jesus, if we all did what Microsoft wanted us to, we'd all be using VB.NET.
C has little abstraction and little safety. Java has both abstraction and safety. C++ has abstraction without safety, a terrible combination.This is just a doofy sentence. C has "little" safety but C++ is "without" safety? Dude, learn a language before you start spouting marketing crap. If you don't know why your sentence is completely wrong, then you're not qualified to comment.
Ohhh, please educate me, you moron. As a matter of fact, you dink, I know of at least two O'Relly books that are being used as texts in classes taught at UCI. So thanks for your input, but now you may want to go and pour yourself a nice, warm glass of shut the fuck up.
I appreciated your post, with exceptions, right up to the point where you decided to be yet another geekoid asswipe, making some sneering little point while winding tape around your glasses. I reject the notion that because an author wrote a book it's our obligation here to all be constructively helping to better his work. There are enough computer books in the world, and yes in this niche too, to stretch around the world in a line a few times, so it's perfectly legitimate to question his text. Furthermore, unless you've read the book, which I haven't, you've no better idea about the quality of the content than I do. I was questioning something excerpted from the book, while you were speculating on the book's quality and relevance as a text.
There's more to security than checking return values, validating input, and managing strings, such as knowing your APIs and understanding points of entry. But category 4 is ridiculous. Textbook code? What the fuck is textbook code? Have you seen some of the code in textbooks? A lot of it is truly NOT secure. So what the hell does he mean? Just because some guy wrote a book doesn't mean he shouldn't be questioned and it doesn't mean that we're obligated to accept jack or shit about what he has to say. That said, I'll probably check out the book, at least mull it over in the bookstore. But I won't buy it unless I think the rest of his content isn't tilted toward marketing spooge.
In the meantime, take your little comment and shove it up your pocket-protected ass.
I agree. I'm not sure what "textbook" code means. There are plenty of textbooks out there that have, as examples, bone-chilling examples of C++ code, and a few of those are produced by O'Reilly (see "Practical C++ Programming"). In fact, a great deal of the code I see produced by other programmers is very reasonable and tight, but isn't something I would see in a textbook at all. I think it's possible that this book author has revealed a bias toward the code of book authors ...
There are 4 types of programming book authors:
...
1. Those who categorize programmers artificially for the sake of a point.
2. Those who categorize programmers incorrectly because they don't know better, but for good reason.
3. Those who categorize programmers because they figure that, by doing so, they will establish themselves as an authority on ranges and types of programming skill.
4. Those who avoid categorizing programmers because they realize that it's kind of goofy to do so.
Everyone knows that there are folks out there that can do their job better than others. But do those categories really exist? It may seem like I'm picking nits, but is there really a class of programmers that writes buggy code almost all of the time? I mean, I suppose there is, but it doesn't seem to me like they'll have a long career in software
Years of developing software brought me to XEmacs, which is just a subtle variant from FSF's/Richard Stallman's GNU Emacs. Functionally they're, for most practical purposes, identical. Like Emacs, XEmacs has got a learning curve like an Olympic ski jump and it takes a good long while (months) before you're very productive with it. But I can do just about everything with it that I do on a computer: email, programming, Usenet, personal information management (including scheduling and a contact database), screenplay formatting, XML, even ASCII drawing with Emacs' picture-mode.
In short, it's legendary, and probably most everyone here has heard of it. But for those who haven't, and who have a penchant for twiddling and fiddling with software that has about ten thousand options and endless opportunities for customization (gotta learn elisp, a lisp variant, to do it), then I highly, highly recommend XEmacs or, if you want to be a free software purist, go with GNU Emacs, but you'll have to download the source for the moment because last I checked the GNU ftp servers were still recovering from an exploit and trying to gather checksums for potentially compromised software. Yikes!
As far as my writing habits go, it's been enormously convenient for me to apply the quick navigational keystrokes I've learned for Emacs to my writing projects. Everything just becomes so much faster and intuitive. And doing most everything from one customizable editor allows me to create an environment that I understand from my own personal viewpoint without having to learn a slew of special features and keystrokes from other software packages.
Emacs isn't for everyone, I will say that. And since learning many software packages for special purposes -- one for HTML editing, one for XML (like XMLSpy), one for screenplay formatting (like Movie Magic Screenwriter) -- isn't exactly a trial given that it seems like most people's brains seem to adjust to whatever "mode" of work they're currently engaged in, many will choose that route. But again, if you feel so inclined, give Emacs a try, you might grow to love it. But be prepared to give it time.
Oh, and there's always Vim. It's an excellent, ultra-powerful editor that's basically for people that wished they could grok Emacs but, for some sad reason, simply can't.
Wow. Java's really opening up the world to the power of Linux usability. And to think, how many years went by without the Documents folder on the desktop?
That's why successive Windows interfaces have been progressively dumbed-down from the perspective of a highly-computer-literate user. Marketing types refer to this as greater ease of use.
Okay. Usability design types, however, refer to it as "progressive dumbing down".
The Nautilus file browser, while initially set to a large icon view, allowed a side pane and file tree display not unlike Windows Explorer, and it uncomplainingly offered a view of everything in the file system, another feature that presumably would not be welcomed in an enterprise production desktop.
Uncomplainingly? Yeah, okay, it's a word, technically, but it sucks as a word. If the writologist proofreadicated his articlation, he might findify prosage less awkwarditious.
Nevertheless, it's a relief that the usability of Windows Explorer is retained in the Java Desktop.
Also, is Java really open sourced? Is StarOffice? OpenOffice is, but StarOffice, well ...
Whatever. The article reads like marketing spooge, and it's based on a demo off a CD. Did this really make Slashdot's home page?
Crap. And to think my post about stripper techno-implants got rejected ...
The Google Code Jam is being conducted in conjunction with TopCoder, the coolest, best implemented regular online coding contest. You can go there and download the Arena applet to get an idea of the format of the contest and to get ready by practicing with sample problems. In fact, that's highly recommended since the applet accommodates a very specific kind of contest.
Also, it would be wise to participate in a few live TopCoder rounds, which are held weekly, if you have any hope of being competitive.
... if SCO cared. But they don't. It's a business game, not a technology issue. What they care about is obfuscation, FUD, and legal maneuvering, not technical accuracy. Shouldn't that be fairly obvious by now?
Anyone can browse these posts and discover for themselves what seems to be a frequent trend on Slashdot; most people go ahead and comment without reading the freaking articles that the posts refer to. They read the headline, they read the (frequently misinformed or mis-stated) summary of the submission and then they fire off myriad comments.
These postings are riddled with "Why is this even on here?" and "Is this even a story?" These people didn't read the article. Or, they're idiots. Possibly both.
That's fairly subtle, considering the events of the last day or so. Bravo, and, I think, a point well made.
There are differences, of course, between publicly consumed intellectual property, like music, and sector-targeted intellectual property, like software: Differences in support requirements, public perception of traditional ownership and rights, the respective industries' take on enforcement and public relations, and the kinds and scope of typical license infringement.
But ... It's still a good point, so I'm a little disappointed that you're not modded up ...
Your post is pretty multi-faceted, and I don't have a lot of time, but I'll try to answer briefly.
... But I hope this point of view has shed some light, from an artist's p
First, read this.
As to culpability, you have a point, to a degree. Musicians, whether they are qualified or not to make their own business career decisions, certainly *should* be qualified or they shouldn't be signing. (It is, I think, important to note that this could be said of a great many individuals in a great many industries.) And yes, they do make mistakes, and yes they pay for them.
There are some mitigating factors, however, and real points to made about our culture, the dreams of artists (as any individual in any career may have dreams about future successes), and the carrots that are waved in front of the faces of artists by an already existing and quite powerful music industry.
Firstly, when discussing artists in the music industry, it's important to include B-level artists, studio musicians, singing groups at various levels of the pipeline, and garage musicians who are working hard to create something, in addition to the luminaries of the industry such as those you mentioned, Prince and U2. These are people that picked up their instruments and started acquiring their performance chops probably between 13 and 18, some of them even younger, and have been playing, practicing and worshipping at the altars of their idols for *years* before they've acquired the musicianship, songwriting ability, and/or singing/dance/performance skills necessary to be interesting to anyone besides their parents.
By the time they hit an age where their talent and skills are formidable enough--and many never do--they are *primed*. They're hungry. These are people that move to different cities for opportunities, who take bum jobs to support their dreams, and who bust their tails on top of the tails they've already been busting to try and get some attention, favorable press, the eyes and ears of someone who has any kind of power.
And why? Because, in order to duplicate the successes of the Princes (who wore the word "Slave" on his forehead for years and only broke from his label after a protracted fight, before he achieved any real independent success, which, by the way, begs the question "Where has he been lately?") and the U2s (who also had their own battles, and who struck out only after riding on the backs of labels to begin with), these younger artists need distribution. You can garner local attention, you can even make your own videos and albums. But there's one thing technology has not enabled, not really, not yet: distribution channels for product.
This is where the RIAA helms the ship. And this is where they're tough to beat. And before anyone goes replying about the Internet and all these downloadable tunes, keep in mind that real distribution isn't just about shipping product, although that is a big portion of the pie, it's also about advertising, branding, image building and a ton of other things. These younger artists have been weaned on the heroes of an entire, and very real, "industry", in all the senses of that word.
So is the RIAA needed? Well, for a national music industry, played by the old rules, yeah, they're needed. Neither Prince, nor U2, would be where they are today if they hadn't first hopped a ride on the RIAA's train. But that doesn't make the RIAA right, and that doesn't make their methods excusable. It just makes them powerful.
God, how many stories are there, from blues musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties, on up to current bands today, like Incubus, getting into wars with their labels either over getting rooked for hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars, or selling millions of albums only to end up having made about $50,000 a piece?
Honestly, I could write on this forever, supplying documentation, examples of my own contracts, anecdotes of friends, war stories
I'm never buying another RIAA-backed CD again. Period. That simple.
I'm a musician. I gig, I play music every day, I record music and I already own a large collection of CDs. Quite honestly, I haven't heard anything in pop music come out in the last five years, besides a very precious few artists, that I've thought was worth the $18 anyway. So it's no big loss to me.
If a new musician comes along whose music I feel I must have, I'll either purchase a CD with a friend and share ownership or I'll employ any of a number of methods available to me to get the music on my hard drive. But since most new music has been utter crap, and it's so rare that I ever hear anything that makes me feel I absolutely must have it at my fingertips, I don't expect this is going to be a big problem for me.
But I do have a big problem with giving another single dime to an industry that fines 12-year-olds in housing projects $2,000 for gay-for-display Britney Spears and nursery rhymes. It's comical, but it's also bullshit, and having been involved with the music industry before I can honestly say it's right in line with their standard operating procedure.
The normal recording contract is roughly 40-60 pages long. By contrast, a typical book publishing contract is 4-12 pages. Typical recording contracts tie up artists for advances, deny artists royalties on new technology media, and itemize costs well into the future of the artists career. The record industry operates like the mafia. So as far as I'm concerned, they can go straight to hell.
Yeah, I'll bet they settled in a day. Because the Brianna story was like the world walking in on the Devil raping a kid, so the RIAA tried to turn it into a finger wagging story.
They suck. I wish them all, to the last of them, the absolutely very worst things in life. Fuck 'em.
... it's too much.
... can process Java code that's not a bit slower than native Java on Windows.
... They can just stick with mod_perl or WebWare for Python or PHP or some other truly open source technology that isn't controlled by forty-thousand corporations all with an invested business interest in competing with Microsoft.
Orrr
I swear to God, every time I hear a phrase like "suited to the Enterprise" it's accompanied by a Java, Microsoft, or IBM article, all of which have a huge interest in convincing you that in order to sell a widget on the Internet you've absolutely, no-question, gotta have nineteen layers of logical infrastructure completely independent of each other otherwise your site's gonna go down and boy are you going to pay. In the meantime, sites like Yahoo run their e-commerce off of Lisp, PHP is their standardizing implementation language, Amazon is hiring Perl programmers, and Slashdot, a site which regularly DOSes other sites by virtue of it's power to link, runs on Perl.
But if you really want to be successful YOU NEED JAVA FOR THE "ENTERPRISE". Only with Java can you take half the time to express what takes twice as much typing to code. Or maybe by "Enterprise" what everyone really means is the USS Enterprise? Maybe that's why it could max out to warp 7.
... is reviewed here, at the 'net's largest C++-oriented book review site. This review is decidedly in the negative, although Steve Oualline is given a chance to issue a response which is worth reading.
It seems that the 2nd edition of this book may have brought forward some previous problems. I have the first edition but never liked it, never thought it really achieved it's goals.
If you're looking for an uncompromisingly amazing first book on C++, please check out Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. This is how I learned C++ and, by using the concepts of teaching core language skills alongside library concepts and best practices in OOP, it truly accelerates the process. Amazing.
Yeah, bud, while you're posting on this US-hosted, US-funded, US-English Web site you may want to consider that a US viewpoint might carry some weight here.
However, when you go to those immensely powerful European versions of Slashdot you might see other opinions represented with more strength. Now which Web sites would those be?
You're an idiot.
... From a marketing standpoint. That's it. It's hard to immediately discern how it's pronounced, it's got seven uneven letters, it's relatively long and it has no obvious immediate meaning or collection of related possible meanings based on the roots of the word.
...
So what if 'ouvert' is 'open' in French. I didn't know that. Lot's of people don't know that. Learning that doesn't make you go "ooooo, that's so cool". It just makes you go, "oh".
Open source projects, especially projects of any magnitude should try, from time to time, for some true open source marketing. Unfortunately, engineers, no matter how smart they may be at one thing, are frequently not as smart as they think they are at many things, and so they drop the ball in some areas. This is a decent example.
Of course, 'Vim' and 'Emacs' aren't exactly stellar examples of naming, either, but on the other hand they haven't had much success outside certain circles, and they're both pretty amazing editors. Someone might say that has more to do with their vertical learning curves compared to, for example, 'Word' but their names certainly didn't help
Well, guess who isn't stopping their development?
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/
Version 0.1 is still better than Outlook Express ever was. Anyone with any experience with the Mozilla products, especially Firebird, knows that each incremental version increase brings loads more functionality, features and options.
So while I would shed a tear over Outlook Express going away, truth is, a rat's ass I do not give.
Slashdot comment counts measured in the tens of thousands and lots of "Karma: Irrelevant"