Well, the compiler itself it quite good, and actually manages to create code that runs faster than Sun's VM on occations. Last I looked, however, the Sun VM is faster overall, since it can do stuff like inlining virtual methods, which a static compiler is unable to do.
However, the biggest problem with the GNU compiler is the lack of compliant class libraries. The GNU Classpath project, which aims at creating an open source cleanroom implementation of the Sun class libraries are severely behind. My optimistic guesstimate would place them at being about 3 years from full 1.5 compatibility, at which time we're probably using the beta of 1.7.
However, GNU Classpath has an easier job ahead of them than the Mono folks, which begs the question as to why they chose to go with the Microsoft technology in the first place.
1. Moving implies a certain instability of the supporting surface (be it your lap, hands, or a desk)
You've never travelled on an ICE train, have you?
2. Moving vehicles are often noisy, making it difficult to concentrate.
You've never travelled on an ICE train, have you?
3. Carrying a laptop around with you every day from point A to point B is of more practical value than doing so with a book.
You won't get any argument from me there, but I'm in the minority here compared to the rest of the world. Believe it or not, most people do not agree with us.
It is pretty much standard practice in high-profile cases, which is why you notice them all the time. However, crimes such as speeding and rarely appealed. But then again, they don't end up on the front page of slashdot either.
HL2 is an exception. Your typical PC game that seels well sells about half a million copies. This is less than even a poor seller on PS2. There is a reason the PC game section has shrunk from 50% to about 15% of shelf space in the last two years at my local mall.
I believe this is what people would call a "strawman argument".
The grandparent poster claimed that it's not expensive to make a good tv show. You yourself agreed with this. The reason it's so expensive to make your voice heard is because you need to may more money than the others to cut through their marketing. With less money in the business, there will be less money for marketing, which will level the playing field a bit for the independents.
For you, as an independent media maker, do you really find the current situation better than what we'd have with a more "flexible" media distribution system?
Those articles were talking about non-EU countries selling to the EU. And I feel the articles you linked to explains themselves pretty well. In fact, they seem to agree with me.
ereader.com probably has a sales office somehwere in the EU. There is no such thing as "EU VAT", and the VAT you saw was most likelt the VAT in the country from which you order.
Basically, you most probably want to order from the EU (and pay VAT in the country of sale) rather than order from the US and pay import taxes which tend to be higher than the VAT.
The fact that the prices were quoted in USD has nothing to do with it (there might be some law stating which currencies should be used for quoting prices within the EU, but I have no idea about that).
I'm not trying to troll or anything, I honestly want to know how inter-state trade regulations work in the US.
As a EU citizen I'm allowed to buy anything from any EU country paying sales tax in the country from which I purchase the goods. It's a key part of the "free movement of goods and services" idea upon which the EU is founded.
To me, it seems as though trade between US states are more restricted than between EU countries. Is this correct?
Quickly? The Netscape wource was released in 1998. Not to take away from the great work that has been done, but I'm not sure I'd call 7 years of open source development "quick". Especially considering the fact that they already had a working[1] browser to start with.
I believe that only acknowleges to the messaging server that the subscriber receieved and handled the message. The publisher is not involved in the message anymore at that time.
But the durable subscriber need to be registered for that to work, no? The sender has no way of knowing if his message was actually receieved by any subscriber or if it ended up in the bit bucket.
But that was my point exactly. There are a 100 different ways to write something, and getting it right can be frustratingly difficult. However, once it's written it's very easy to read.
In my opinion, that is the completely opposite compared to what you want from a quick one-shot scripting language. Those should be easy to write and it really doesn't matter if it's hard to read or not. Perl and TECO are good examples of this.
Your post was modded +2 insightful by the time I wrote this. I sincerely hope it gets modded up higher.
I have been writing some AppleScript, and it's definately one of the few "read only" languages out there. There are languages which are "read write", such as Java which are both easy to read and reasy to write. Then there are languages such as Perl (or why not TECO) which are "write only", i.e. very hard to read. However, as I mentioned, AppleScript is one of the very few "read only" languages.
There are quite horrible subtle details that you have to pay attention to. Things like wether your list of files is actually a list of files or a list of file names. The automatic conversion makes the difference irrelevant most of the time, except when things just break and you have no idea what you did wrong.
How about some examples. Here's the command to set the background colour of the topmost terminal window to green:
tell application "Terminal" to set background color of the first window to "green"
In comparison, the Java version of the above code would look something like this:
The above assumes that.getWindows() returns a List of windows, and like all lists,.get(0) returns its first element.
AppleScript is object oriented, and as you can see, the "of" keyword behaves like the "." operator in Java, except that the arguments are swapped. The "the" keyword is always ignored, and plural words are lists (for example, the "windows" member of the Terminal application class. "first window" (i.e. "first" followed by the singular form of the list member) returns the first element in that list. Simple, right?
It gets worse. Here's a line from a script I wrote (although I believe this particular line was copy-pasted from some others script). It sets a variable itunesRunning to true if iTunes is running:
set itunesRunning to ((application processes whose name is equal to "iTunes") count) is greater than 0
I'll leave it as an excersice to the reader to figure out exactly why you have to write it like that.
The problem is that you constantly have to look in the manual to figure out exactly how you are supposed to pass your command arguments. Suppose you have a command "send message" that sends a message to a user on IRC. Now, how do I figure out how to pass the user name and the message to send as arguments? Depending on the developer it might be:
send message to user "jim" message text "hello, how are you"
Or, it could be:
send message to channel member whose nick is "jim" with text "hello, how do you feel this time?"
Don't take me wrong, I really like AppleScript. I just wished the syntax was better.
Someone registered microsoft.com where the first "o" is a cyrrilic version of the letter, a long time ago. I saw it many months ago.
And at least in GNOME, that version is extremely difficult to tell apart form the real one, and on other OS'es with better font rendering, it's identical as it should be.
Well, considering the fact that mysql is the windows of the database world (crappy product, people use it despite its crappiness) it's going to be hard for any product to unseat it.
But they didn't go that way, and restarting Linux kernel development would be pretty stupid, IMO.:-)
In a way, you could see the new HURD to be a restart of the Linux kernel development. I.e. a new, better(?), kernel. And I wouldn't call it stupid, quite the contrary. New development is always good.
The funny thing is that back when Linux was started, it could been seen as a restart of the HURD kernel development. What goes around comes around.:-)
Some some reason, none of the people who replied to my post understood what I was saying. I believe this is because the parent to whom I replied was modded -1 blaimbait and was therefore invisible to the others.
The modded-down poster said
But this is another step backwards for European National sovereignty
implying that the EU is bad and we should become isolated nations. I don't agree with that. In fact, I think it's a win for European democracy.
1) Is it? In What whay? Let me guess, you're british, swedish or danish? To those (maybe I should say us, but it's not my fault where I live) every EU decision is a step backwards for "national sovereignty".
Those licenses are compatible in the sense that code written under those licenses can be incorporated in a GPL project. However, the opposite is not true. I cannot, for example, take GNU licensed code and put it in a BSD-licensed ("modified BSD licensed", to be formally correct) project. This is exactly what the grandfather post was getting at, the compatibility is one-way.
Personally I don't use the term "viral" but this is the point the people who do base that accusation on.
Slashdot Mirror
However, the biggest problem with the GNU compiler is the lack of compliant class libraries. The GNU Classpath project, which aims at creating an open source cleanroom implementation of the Sun class libraries are severely behind. My optimistic guesstimate would place them at being about 3 years from full 1.5 compatibility, at which time we're probably using the beta of 1.7.
However, GNU Classpath has an easier job ahead of them than the Mono folks, which begs the question as to why they chose to go with the Microsoft technology in the first place.
It is pretty much standard practice in high-profile cases, which is why you notice them all the time. However, crimes such as speeding and rarely appealed. But then again, they don't end up on the front page of slashdot either.
HL2 is an exception. Your typical PC game that seels well sells about half a million copies. This is less than even a poor seller on PS2. There is a reason the PC game section has shrunk from 50% to about 15% of shelf space in the last two years at my local mall.
The grandparent poster claimed that it's not expensive to make a good tv show. You yourself agreed with this. The reason it's so expensive to make your voice heard is because you need to may more money than the others to cut through their marketing. With less money in the business, there will be less money for marketing, which will level the playing field a bit for the independents.
For you, as an independent media maker, do you really find the current situation better than what we'd have with a more "flexible" media distribution system?
Those articles were talking about non-EU countries selling to the EU. And I feel the articles you linked to explains themselves pretty well. In fact, they seem to agree with me.
Basically, you most probably want to order from the EU (and pay VAT in the country of sale) rather than order from the US and pay import taxes which tend to be higher than the VAT.
The fact that the prices were quoted in USD has nothing to do with it (there might be some law stating which currencies should be used for quoting prices within the EU, but I have no idea about that).
In sweden we pay 25%. Other countries have different VAT levels. I believe germany is 16% but don't quote me on that.
That restriction is most likely illegal and is being challenged in court right now as far as I know.
If that is the case, then the implication made in the article, the Amazon customers might be in trouble, is completely wrong?
As a EU citizen I'm allowed to buy anything from any EU country paying sales tax in the country from which I purchase the goods. It's a key part of the "free movement of goods and services" idea upon which the EU is founded.
To me, it seems as though trade between US states are more restricted than between EU countries. Is this correct?
[1] for appropriate values of "working"
"religion" doesn't fight it. Only a small part of a particular religion does.
I believe that only acknowleges to the messaging server that the subscriber receieved and handled the message. The publisher is not involved in the message anymore at that time.
But the durable subscriber need to be registered for that to work, no? The sender has no way of knowing if his message was actually receieved by any subscriber or if it ended up in the bit bucket.
As a concequence of this, you cannot have guaranteed delivery to the receiever on a topic, since there may be zero or more receievers.
In my opinion, that is the completely opposite compared to what you want from a quick one-shot scripting language. Those should be easy to write and it really doesn't matter if it's hard to read or not. Perl and TECO are good examples of this.
I have been writing some AppleScript, and it's definately one of the few "read only" languages out there. There are languages which are "read write", such as Java which are both easy to read and reasy to write. Then there are languages such as Perl (or why not TECO) which are "write only", i.e. very hard to read. However, as I mentioned, AppleScript is one of the very few "read only" languages.
There are quite horrible subtle details that you have to pay attention to. Things like wether your list of files is actually a list of files or a list of file names. The automatic conversion makes the difference irrelevant most of the time, except when things just break and you have no idea what you did wrong.
How about some examples. Here's the command to set the background colour of the topmost terminal window to green:
In comparison, the Java version of the above code would look something like this:The above assumes thatAppleScript is object oriented, and as you can see, the "of" keyword behaves like the "." operator in Java, except that the arguments are swapped. The "the" keyword is always ignored, and plural words are lists (for example, the "windows" member of the Terminal application class. "first window" (i.e. "first" followed by the singular form of the list member) returns the first element in that list. Simple, right?
It gets worse. Here's a line from a script I wrote (although I believe this particular line was copy-pasted from some others script). It sets a variable itunesRunning to true if iTunes is running:
I'll leave it as an excersice to the reader to figure out exactly why you have to write it like that.The problem is that you constantly have to look in the manual to figure out exactly how you are supposed to pass your command arguments. Suppose you have a command "send message" that sends a message to a user on IRC. Now, how do I figure out how to pass the user name and the message to send as arguments? Depending on the developer it might be:
Or, it could be:Don't take me wrong, I really like AppleScript. I just wished the syntax was better.And at least in GNOME, that version is extremely difficult to tell apart form the real one, and on other OS'es with better font rendering, it's identical as it should be.
Well, considering the fact that mysql is the windows of the database world (crappy product, people use it despite its crappiness) it's going to be hard for any product to unseat it.
That's the argument the pro-patent-lobby in the EU use.
The funny thing is that back when Linux was started, it could been seen as a restart of the HURD kernel development. What goes around comes around. :-)
The modded-down poster said
implying that the EU is bad and we should become isolated nations. I don't agree with that. In fact, I think it's a win for European democracy.2) Even if it was, why is that a bad thing?
Personally I don't use the term "viral" but this is the point the people who do base that accusation on.