So do you beleive this dodgy-looking website? Show me the articles in respected online journals that take them seriously, otherwise we should treat them as possible cranks, probable scam, or at best unproven.
Imagine a app thats a cross between Ask Jeeves and Gnutella. You ask a questoin, other people see it, if they know the answer they might answer you with it.
I have the right to ignore others
on
MAPS Sued Again
·
· Score: 2
> Most importantly, do I have the right to ignore others
We do. Anyone who doesn't believe this, deserves to be phoned every 15 minutes, 24-hours a day, by telemarketers, and have Jehovah's witness's and other religios groups come round trying to convert them daily.
It's a natural conseqence of Freedom of speech plus a crowded marketplace.
> Oh, come ON people. It's EXTEREMELY unlikely there's life on mars right now.
I agree.
> You'd need a research base there and a LOT of money and effort to determine if life is there
I disagree completely. To paraphrase Dr. James Lovelock's arguments, look at the only place we are sure that there is life - earth.
The presence of life on earth is frickin' *unmissable* from a million miles away, right down to the copious oxygen and methane in the atmosphere, which wouldn't be there at all otherwise, it sticks out like the very *colour* of the land masses. Life expands. Evolution radiates into all possible niches. It doesn't hide. Like Microsoft it expands, embraces, and extends.
Therefor, (given the limitations of generalising from only one example), when looking for life on other planets, expect it to stick out like a sore thumb.
Therefor, mars is, with a fair degree of certainty, currently barren.
We used to do that on the ZX spectrum. The RAM contained a pointer to the adress of the bitmaps for the char set. Normally this pointed into the ROM, but you could set it to point into the RAM, and do your own font (as much as 8*8 pixels allows the concept of "font") or draw little aliens and move them around the screen by writing basic or ASM.
Back in the day....
do maintenance work... Some members of our team are convinced that delphi programmers only continue to use it for the job security that it brings.
<sarcasm>
So I hope that you are now using one of those readable, easily-maintianable laguages like PERL, VB, APL or raw C
</sarcasm>
Delphi encourages readable, well structured, OO code to a greater extent than any of those languages. For eg.g, what else do you think spelling out begin and end is for?
However, you can write unmaintainable code in any language. If your coder sucked then no language can help you.
management has resolved never to undertake another project in delphi ever again on pain of death due to the problems it has caused
Availability. It's not easy getting a Linux distro here in South Africa, since your options are to either buy it or download it. If you're looking to buy it, you'll have to get it shipped in from overseas and buy it over the internet,....
Support: but here you've got to pretty much figure it out as you go...
Help who? The good of the individual is not the good of the species. For instance, weeding out the weaker ones with a good plauge or something strengthens the species, but is kinda hard on the physically weedy ones. You know, geeks who post to slashdot and people like that.
"good of the species" is the the theory anyway. It didn't work for the aboriginal inhabitants of North & South Amrica.
IANAP (I am not a Physicist), but I would hazard a guess that it is impossible to perform a computation without moving a few quanta of matter or energy around, thus there must be a theoretical minimum amount of energy needed to do a single computation. Also a theoretical minimum size and maximum speed.
And if you keep halving size, you get there in log time, ie sooner than you'd think.
My completly uninformed opinion is that silicon has a couple of decades left at best, but computation in general has a century or so before it runs up against the minimum scales and maximum efficiencies of matter and light.
> Fox's Law: The estimated time that Moore's Law will hold true will always be close to the time it takes to turn the latest theory into a commercial product.
First off, Moore's law is not a law as in a law of Nature or physics. it should really be called "Moore's observation.
Second, there are fundamanetal limits to silicon which will be reached sooner or later. Maybe the limits are further out than we think, but you can't shrink those wires for ever.
But that doesn't matter. Take a look in Ray Kurtzwiel's badly written but provocative book "the Age of Spritiual Machines". There is a passage in there which lists the processing power, bang for the buck available, back to the 1890s. Moore's 'law' holds, more or less, back all this time.
Kurtzwiel's commentary on Moore's law is that Moore's law is evidently not a property of silicon, but of the marketplace, and that we have nothing to fear, silicon will be replaced by something else. No doubt that revolution will be slashdotted.
Typical Californian hyper-optimism, but he may be right in this, at least for the next few hundred years - remember, no matter what the medium, you can't keep doubling the performance indefinitely.
> My point is that C... can be considered to be a universal machine language.
Point taken: Everything ultimately executes as machine code, C is a better machine code.
> Even Java could be turned into C with a compiler
Depends on how you look at it. When you get to languages like LISP or perl (and java? and C#?) that don't map easily to C becuase of thier dynamic nature, these can still all be turned into a C source for a binary.
But if you look inside this program, you will find that it contains so many suport routines and is so data-driven that it may as well be considered to be interpreter + data bundled into one program.
Any language that gives you the ability to build up a string ot text at runtime, and then execute it as if it were program source (perl does this, C# not), IMHO cannot be said to be able to be reduced down to a C program.
Reduced down to an interpreter + data in C yes. A C program, no. It remains to be seen if C# atributes will prevent this translation.
> If it is, then a compiler that emits C code compilable by gcc should be built. End of story.
>I think Microsoft would hate that
I agree that standards are good, but it is worth remembering that MS has with C# played ball to greater extent than Sun has with Java (read the article!)
But your assumption that a language is only good if it reducable to C is questionable at best. Read the article again, especially where AH talks about atributes. I don't see that being turned in to generated C easily.
Yeah, and if you take those books seriouusly, you should also be worried about invading undead spirits that can only be stopped by a lone hero's desperate mission.
Peter F Hamilton is entertianment. That's where it ends. Armada storms caused by rocket exhausts are there purely as an atmospheric setting, not inteded to be any kind of sensisble prediction.
Sure there is a lot of interesting tech in there. *All* of has surfaced before in other Sci-Fi novels. What makes PFH so entertaining is that he throws all of it, lock stock and barel, from '50s lensman space opera sagas to '90 cyberpunk wetware into one massive cauldron, and still manages to tell a readable story of pure fantasy.
> Well, duh. Did he expect independent commercial software shops to share their code with each other?
No, he expects them to all use a common set of core libraries that implement common functionality, up to sophisticated things like printer configuration.
>> Miguel is an open admirer of how Microsoft does software development. > Someone please tell me this is a belated April Fools joke!
Oh, let me guess, you think that MS became the world's largest and most profitable software company without being able to do anything right? C'mon dude, there must be something to learn from them. A few good software development concepts, for instance.
> He goes on to make reasonably valid points about how "reusable components" are available under Windows. What he misses is that this puts other software shops completely at the mercy of the components' owner, Microsoft.
You are entirely right about the reuse, but I'm not sure that Miguel necisarily misses the ownership bit. I doubt that he's admiring that part of the MS method.
> Is he proposing a Unix where everyone is similarly dependent on GNOME's components?
Hm, can you be dictated to by a firm vending a GPL'd library? Methinks that the situation is more open then. You can always fork...
Slashdot Mirror
Please, when designing the the data format of these things, just make it a bucket 'o bits.
Don't require special region-unlocking/decryption hardware! Make it simple and flexible.
> the cure for malaria has been found.
So do you beleive this dodgy-looking website? Show me the articles in respected online journals that take them seriously, otherwise we should treat them as possible cranks, probable scam, or at best unproven.
You mean just like the question exchange
> Most importantly, do I have the right to ignore others
We do. Anyone who doesn't believe this, deserves to be phoned every 15 minutes, 24-hours a day, by telemarketers, and have Jehovah's witness's and other religios groups come round trying to convert them daily.
It's a natural conseqence of Freedom of speech plus a crowded marketplace.
> Oh, come ON people. It's EXTEREMELY unlikely there's life on mars right now.
I agree.
> You'd need a research base there and a LOT of money and effort to determine if life is there
I disagree completely. To paraphrase Dr. James Lovelock's arguments, look at the only place we are sure that there is life - earth.
The presence of life on earth is frickin' *unmissable* from a million miles away, right down to the copious oxygen and methane in the atmosphere, which wouldn't be there at all otherwise, it sticks out like the very *colour* of the land masses. Life expands. Evolution radiates into all possible niches. It doesn't hide. Like Microsoft it expands, embraces, and extends.
Therefor, (given the limitations of generalising from only one example), when looking for life on other planets, expect it to stick out like a sore thumb.
Therefor, mars is, with a fair degree of certainty, currently barren.
We used to do that on the ZX spectrum. The RAM contained a pointer to the adress of the bitmaps for the char set. Normally this pointed into the ROM, but you could set it to point into the RAM, and do your own font (as much as 8*8 pixels allows the concept of "font") or draw little aliens and move them around the screen by writing basic or ASM.
Back in the day....
X-feces?
I was frustrated..for about 20 seconds, before I set my browser to a larger font.
Oh, read the article before you rant, why don't you.
DOH!
Says me, currently (and as always) in Africa, on the internet, running a Linux web server at a startup with commercial potential.
Africa is a continent not a frickin' desert island. There are 40 million people in this country alone (South Africa) & that's not the largest.
<sarcasm> So I hope that you are now using one of those readable, easily-maintianable laguages like PERL, VB, APL or raw C </sarcasm>
Delphi encourages readable, well structured, OO code to a greater extent than any of those languages. For eg.g, what else do you think spelling out begin and end is for?
However, you can write unmaintainable code in any language. If your coder sucked then no language can help you.
management has resolved never to undertake another project in delphi ever again on pain of death due to the problems it has caused
Idiocy is its own punishment
Availability. It's not easy getting a Linux distro here in South Africa, since your options are to either buy it or download it. If you're looking to buy it, you'll have to get it shipped in from overseas and buy it over the internet, ....
Support: but here you've got to pretty much figure it out as you go...
Wrong, try Obsidian Systems for starters.
I second that. Once you've found the bug, you are 90% done. This *is* parallelizable.
Quality control on the submitted fixes is not much of a bottleneck.
> Often I solve problems well beyond my capabilities
So what your'e saying is that you can do stuff that you can't do?
> will actually help natural selection?
Help who? The good of the individual is not the good of the species. For instance, weeding out the weaker ones with a good plauge or something strengthens the species, but is kinda hard on the physically weedy ones. You know, geeks who post to slashdot and people like that.
"good of the species" is the the theory anyway. It didn't work for the aboriginal inhabitants of North & South Amrica.
And if you keep halving size, you get there in log time, ie sooner than you'd think.
My completly uninformed opinion is that silicon has a couple of decades left at best, but computation in general has a century or so before it runs up against the minimum scales and maximum efficiencies of matter and light.
> Fox's Law: The estimated time that Moore's Law will hold true will always be close to the time it takes to turn the latest theory into a commercial product.
First off, Moore's law is not a law as in a law of Nature or physics. it should really be called "Moore's observation.
Second, there are fundamanetal limits to silicon which will be reached sooner or later. Maybe the limits are further out than we think, but you can't shrink those wires for ever.
But that doesn't matter. Take a look in Ray Kurtzwiel's badly written but provocative book "the Age of Spritiual Machines". There is a passage in there which lists the processing power, bang for the buck available, back to the 1890s. Moore's 'law' holds, more or less, back all this time.
Kurtzwiel's commentary on Moore's law is that Moore's law is evidently not a property of silicon, but of the marketplace, and that we have nothing to fear, silicon will be replaced by something else. No doubt that revolution will be slashdotted.
Typical Californian hyper-optimism, but he may be right in this, at least for the next few hundred years - remember, no matter what the medium, you can't keep doubling the performance indefinitely.
> Is it just me or was this strip not funny?
It's just you. This was the funniest thing that they've done in weeks.
> My point is that C ... can be considered to be a universal machine language.
Point taken: Everything ultimately executes as machine code, C is a better machine code.
> Even Java could be turned into C with a compiler
Depends on how you look at it. When you get to languages like LISP or perl (and java? and C#?) that don't map easily to C becuase of thier dynamic nature, these can still all be turned into a C source for a binary.
But if you look inside this program, you will find that it contains so many suport routines and is so data-driven that it may as well be considered to be interpreter + data bundled into one program.
Any language that gives you the ability to build up a string ot text at runtime, and then execute it as if it were program source (perl does this, C# not), IMHO cannot be said to be able to be reduced down to a C program.
Reduced down to an interpreter + data in C yes. A C program, no. It remains to be seen if C# atributes will prevent this translation.
And that we've been hallucinating windows these last few years. Wise up and smell the components.
> If it is, then a compiler that emits C code compilable by gcc should be built. End of story.
>I think Microsoft would hate that
I agree that standards are good, but it is worth remembering that MS has with C# played ball to greater extent than Sun has with Java (read the article!)
But your assumption that a language is only good if it reducable to C is questionable at best. Read the article again, especially where AH talks about atributes. I don't see that being turned in to generated C easily.
Yeah, and if you take those books seriouusly, you should also be worried about invading undead spirits that can only be stopped by a lone hero's desperate mission.
Peter F Hamilton is entertianment. That's where it ends. Armada storms caused by rocket exhausts are there purely as an atmospheric setting, not inteded to be any kind of sensisble prediction.
Sure there is a lot of interesting tech in there. *All* of has surfaced before in other Sci-Fi novels. What makes PFH so entertaining is that he throws all of it, lock stock and barel, from '50s lensman space opera sagas to '90 cyberpunk wetware into one massive cauldron, and still manages to tell a readable story of pure fantasy.
> Well, duh. Did he expect independent commercial software shops to share their code with each other?
No, he expects them to all use a common set of core libraries that implement common functionality, up to sophisticated things like printer configuration.
>> Miguel is an open admirer of how Microsoft does software development.
> Someone please tell me this is a belated April Fools joke!
Oh, let me guess, you think that MS became the world's largest and most profitable software company without being able to do anything right? C'mon dude, there must be something to learn from them. A few good software development concepts, for instance.
> He goes on to make reasonably valid points about how "reusable components" are available under Windows. What he misses is that this puts other software shops completely at the mercy of the components' owner, Microsoft.
You are entirely right about the reuse, but I'm not sure that Miguel necisarily misses the ownership bit. I doubt that he's admiring that part of the MS method.
> Is he proposing a Unix where everyone is similarly dependent on GNOME's components?
Hm, can you be dictated to by a firm vending a GPL'd library? Methinks that the situation is more open then. You can always fork...
This is now way offtopic, but anyway, change the Inc(i) line to
:= i + Sizeof(TRSomeDataType);
i
As I said, the equivalent C code "p++;" would be shorter, but do you really want to encourage this kind of code?
Here a compilable code sample of pointers and pointer arithmetic in Delphi:
:= Pointer($BADBEEF); := integer(p); := pointer(i);
procedure PointerAdd;
var
p: pointer;
i: integer;
begin
p
i
inc(i);
p
end;
The equavalent C code would be shorter, but so what - you want people to do this kind of thing often?
Oh, and there's no garbage collection in Delphi either.