The main thing that sucked in VB6 was the string handling. It had no equivalent of StringBuilder, and String was an immutable class, so every time you concatenated two strings of length N it allocated a 2N buffer to hold them and copied the data.
You could get around this by rolling your own string handling routines to compensate for this.
The other main thing that sucked was a lack of decent error handling, but with some good libraries and an IDE plugin to make using them less tedious you could have proper stack-based exception handling, almost.
With a few libraries in your toolkit (I wrote a useful object persistence library that handled most of the bother of Class state with a variety of targets, flat files, SQL, XML, etc), you could knock up a useful program faster than most C programmers could write their makefile. With discipline and a few more libraries, you could write very robust and professional code, and yes, even high performance programs - the compiler was the same one that shipped with Visual Studio 6, you just had to avoid using the expensive bits of the VB runtime for performance-critical things. You could even compile VB6 code without the array bounds checking and such, although it was rarely worth it.
bit manipulation code
Yeah, that was tedious. I had to do it for some smartcard authoring software (lots of cards like Mifare 1k have pitiful amounts of space available so you end up using tricks like 6-bit date types and then have to pack them on arbitrary bit offsets), so again, I wrote a library to do it.
VB6 had a low barrier to entry that got it a reputation for amateurish programs - entirely justified.
I would argue that C# is just as good as VB6 for the same role though - the thing that made VB6 shine was the form editor in the IDE. Even the FOSS one - SharpDevelop - has a form editor that makes the VB6 one look tired and old.
I refuse to learn VB.NET, because it's almost but not entirely different and will probably overrwrite my VB6 knowledge, and that, like COBOL, will probably be worth something in the future.
My concerns about this started 16 years ago when I started programming for a living... I always squared it with the fact that I was producing software for the healthcare sector, and that the idea was to give the clinical staff more time to do all the extra things they are asked to do each year.
I still refuse to use automated tills in the supermarket though. It might be a shit job, but I live in a poor area, and a job is a job.
There are only two industries. This has always been true....There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment....After people have everything they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything.
One of my recent jobs has been considering the requirements of storing genetic sequences digitally.... I guess now we'll just put the tissue sample in a box.
It's not even possible to have universally informed consumers, low barriers to entry, etc.
Take healthcare, and the criteria for the perfect market :
Large number of buyers and sellers : will concede that this may be possible. Definitely large number of buyers.
Perfect information - only a small fraction of patients have the medical education required to make appropriate buying decisions
Homogenous products - no way, medical care varies widely in quality because of human elements
No barriers to entry or exit - ginormous barriers, huge amounts of capital required, long training periods for staff, etc
Every participant is a price taker - again, untrue, e.g. pharmaceuticals which are monopoly products with set prices
Perfect factor mobility - factors of production e.g. doctors are not mobile, need licenses to practice, etc
Rational Buyers - no-one is rational about healthcare, because you will pay what you need to
No externalities - plenty of counter examples - e.g. prevention saves money in the long run, but private players not going to fund it
The very notion of specialization, one of the foundations of the modern economy, on it's own, precludes perfect information because the buyer will never know as much about the product as the seller.
The USA spends upwards of $3 trillion a year on healthcare, more than double per capita what the universal, publicly funded UK National Health Service spends.
If they had a similar model to the UK, they'd save enough cash to half-fund a UBI of $12,000 per citizen right there.
Conversely, fiat currencies don't necessarily represent the actual amount of wealth in the economy - hence the economic crash. A currency you can literally just make up out of confidence (or false confidence) isn't representative of real wealth.
You're right in that gold doesn't scale as a currency backing - because the amount of effort required to get it is not a fair representation of economic output any more (it used to be - you needed men and basic equipment so it was a reasonable proxy representation of how much economic surplus you had).
Cryptocoin could be regarded as a currency backing that actually scales with economic output - because there are no physical limits beyond manufacturing the ASICs and generating the energy (until you hit physical limits for those...).
Yeah, I was into photographic equipment as a kid - not so much the photography, because I couldn't afford film and development. But the equipment fascinated me, I'd pick up old pieces at car boot sales - again, for less money than developing a 36-exposure film would cost in those days.
It's a throwback to my earlier days online... I was playing a flight game where you could set your callsign at the time. I like barn owls, so that's what I set as a callsign.
Then I started going online. That name was taken most places, but I was at med school - hence the prefix.
I'm really a doctor! (In the sense that I have a medical degree - I no longer practice).
Well, clearly the only way you can gather this much information is to install a monitor daemon on all their client appliances.
Rather than having it talk to a single central server as it did in this case, why not run that server on a PC in the household and have it sync to that when it's on domestic wifi?
Oh, right : because it wouldn't enable the corporation to collect a huge corpus of highly monetizable data about children for later analysis.
Yes, that's right. For every person it employs, it has $1.7M stashed away. Do you think Steve Jobs personally designed the iPhone, toiled away in the factory making all those iPads, created all that wealth by himself?
Or do you think those 115,000 people helped in some way? Or why else where they employed?
Do you think all the government research that went into the technology in an iPhone helped? Do you think a government funded education helped to create all those engineers and programmers that made it so successful? Do you think that a society which provided a solid base for it's citizens to build on helped create customers for all those iPads?
Why do you think that Apple is a company who's workers created $1.7M of profit - that's surplus, not even including the net value - each, but all that money ended up in a pile in the middle? Do you think that's helpful, or productive?
For perspective, the most expensive civil research project on Earth, the ITER reactor, has cost around $15B. That's trying to solve the energy crisis. Apple sits on that $200B, presumably so they can do a stock repurchase to keep their price up if people think the next iPhone sucks or something.
There's a difference between money, and wealth.
> The Free Market solution is, "bake more pies"!
The free market solution is increasingly "Hey, I've got this great pie machine that can bake more pies, I can fire all my human bakers and maybe shave 5% off the price of my pies to capture the market until my competition is dead." Sooner or later, no-one's going to be able to afford a pie because they all got fired. And the pie makers all scrabble to eliminate the last vestiges of human labour from their bakeries to cut their costs, not realizing that the reason sales are down this quarter is because they fired everyone and now no-one can afford pies.
Sooner or later, someone will realize that if they don't start handing out pies, the bakery door is going to be kicked in by the angry mob declaring the citizens pie revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
The main thing that sucked in VB6 was the string handling. It had no equivalent of StringBuilder, and String was an immutable class, so every time you concatenated two strings of length N it allocated a 2N buffer to hold them and copied the data.
You could get around this by rolling your own string handling routines to compensate for this.
The other main thing that sucked was a lack of decent error handling, but with some good libraries and an IDE plugin to make using them less tedious you could have proper stack-based exception handling, almost.
With a few libraries in your toolkit (I wrote a useful object persistence library that handled most of the bother of Class state with a variety of targets, flat files, SQL, XML, etc), you could knock up a useful program faster than most C programmers could write their makefile. With discipline and a few more libraries, you could write very robust and professional code, and yes, even high performance programs - the compiler was the same one that shipped with Visual Studio 6, you just had to avoid using the expensive bits of the VB runtime for performance-critical things. You could even compile VB6 code without the array bounds checking and such, although it was rarely worth it.
bit manipulation code
Yeah, that was tedious. I had to do it for some smartcard authoring software (lots of cards like Mifare 1k have pitiful amounts of space available so you end up using tricks like 6-bit date types and then have to pack them on arbitrary bit offsets), so again, I wrote a library to do it.
VB6 had a low barrier to entry that got it a reputation for amateurish programs - entirely justified.
I would argue that C# is just as good as VB6 for the same role though - the thing that made VB6 shine was the form editor in the IDE. Even the FOSS one - SharpDevelop - has a form editor that makes the VB6 one look tired and old.
I refuse to learn VB.NET, because it's almost but not entirely different and will probably overrwrite my VB6 knowledge, and that, like COBOL, will probably be worth something in the future.
I'd pay to see the Italian ladies diving team trying to synchronize their entry.
My concerns about this started 16 years ago when I started programming for a living... I always squared it with the fact that I was producing software for the healthcare sector, and that the idea was to give the clinical staff more time to do all the extra things they are asked to do each year.
I still refuse to use automated tills in the supermarket though. It might be a shit job, but I live in a poor area, and a job is a job.
They're already making them : Momentum Machines auto-burger robot.
All it needs is someone to feed it ingredients.
No, they're synthetic.
All new NutriCarb Fries! Made from reprocessed rainforest wood!*
(* some** fries may contain bugs )
(** 86% )
There are only two industries. This has always been true....There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment....After people have everything they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything.
One of my recent jobs has been considering the requirements of storing genetic sequences digitally.... I guess now we'll just put the tissue sample in a box.
It's not even possible to have universally informed consumers, low barriers to entry, etc.
Take healthcare, and the criteria for the perfect market :
The very notion of specialization, one of the foundations of the modern economy, on it's own, precludes perfect information because the buyer will never know as much about the product as the seller.
Bernie Sanders - Not going to win any election
He polls 7-9 points better than Hilary vs Cruz and Trump.
Hilary only has a margin of 3 points on Cruz. That's just way too close for comfort.
Healthcare is the most stark of these.
The USA spends upwards of $3 trillion a year on healthcare, more than double per capita what the universal, publicly funded UK National Health Service spends.
If they had a similar model to the UK, they'd save enough cash to half-fund a UBI of $12,000 per citizen right there.
You can get one for something like $5, shipped via airmail, from China, I know I did.
Now we're crowdfunding a world wide surveillance network.
Conversely, fiat currencies don't necessarily represent the actual amount of wealth in the economy - hence the economic crash. A currency you can literally just make up out of confidence (or false confidence) isn't representative of real wealth.
You're right in that gold doesn't scale as a currency backing - because the amount of effort required to get it is not a fair representation of economic output any more (it used to be - you needed men and basic equipment so it was a reasonable proxy representation of how much economic surplus you had).
Cryptocoin could be regarded as a currency backing that actually scales with economic output - because there are no physical limits beyond manufacturing the ASICs and generating the energy (until you hit physical limits for those...).
It was very briefly Concord because of a hissy-fit that Harold Macmillan threw.
Then Tony Benn (Minister for Technology) put the e back on the end at it's launch.
It is, and always has been, officially, Concorde.
Kids don't have to pay for the film.
Yeah, I was into photographic equipment as a kid - not so much the photography, because I couldn't afford film and development. But the equipment fascinated me, I'd pick up old pieces at car boot sales - again, for less money than developing a 36-exposure film would cost in those days.
Yeah, I thought it sounded like a shorternym for "Kiddy Fiddle"
Probably, I think the GPU part of the SOC is running at a higher clock now.
It's a throwback to my earlier days online... I was playing a flight game where you could set your callsign at the time. I like barn owls, so that's what I set as a callsign.
Then I started going online. That name was taken most places, but I was at med school - hence the prefix.
I'm really a doctor! (In the sense that I have a medical degree - I no longer practice).
Well, clearly the only way you can gather this much information is to install a monitor daemon on all their client appliances.
Rather than having it talk to a single central server as it did in this case, why not run that server on a PC in the household and have it sync to that when it's on domestic wifi?
Oh, right : because it wouldn't enable the corporation to collect a huge corpus of highly monetizable data about children for later analysis.
Wish someone would take me back to the time even 1BTC was $1.50
Apple employs 115,000 people.
It has cash reserves of $200B dollars.
Yes, that's right. For every person it employs, it has $1.7M stashed away. Do you think Steve Jobs personally designed the iPhone, toiled away in the factory making all those iPads, created all that wealth by himself?
Or do you think those 115,000 people helped in some way? Or why else where they employed?
Do you think all the government research that went into the technology in an iPhone helped? Do you think a government funded education helped to create all those engineers and programmers that made it so successful? Do you think that a society which provided a solid base for it's citizens to build on helped create customers for all those iPads?
Why do you think that Apple is a company who's workers created $1.7M of profit - that's surplus, not even including the net value - each, but all that money ended up in a pile in the middle? Do you think that's helpful, or productive?
For perspective, the most expensive civil research project on Earth, the ITER reactor, has cost around $15B. That's trying to solve the energy crisis. Apple sits on that $200B, presumably so they can do a stock repurchase to keep their price up if people think the next iPhone sucks or something.
There's a difference between money, and wealth.
> The Free Market solution is, "bake more pies"!
The free market solution is increasingly "Hey, I've got this great pie machine that can bake more pies, I can fire all my human bakers and maybe shave 5% off the price of my pies to capture the market until my competition is dead." Sooner or later, no-one's going to be able to afford a pie because they all got fired. And the pie makers all scrabble to eliminate the last vestiges of human labour from their bakeries to cut their costs, not realizing that the reason sales are down this quarter is because they fired everyone and now no-one can afford pies.
Sooner or later, someone will realize that if they don't start handing out pies, the bakery door is going to be kicked in by the angry mob declaring the citizens pie revolution.
I love the way the communism is happening on an iMac.
I've seen it, even if it only flicked up on screen in a fleeting glimpse while I was typing another URL.
I'm not sure if this was before "Privacy Mode" became common or not.
I fix this problem by only using NNTP for my porn needs... support staff don't usually download tools using your newsreader....
I do the Japanese Train Driver Thing, making your brain process the idea through extra pathways adds redundancy.
Yeah, and make the requirements on the bot :
1) Your bot must have a unique hash
2) You must sign the hash with a key associated with only your account
I used to like Corewar but the problem is the VM it runs in is too limited in scope for it to be interesting after a while.