Consider totally flat c-code, that is long enough that it's not immediately visible - you have absolutely NO IDEA about what block is what if the starting {:s are outside of your view, whereas with whitespace blocks are still clearly separate.
The nice thing about using a fixed block delimeter as opposed to white space, imho, is that it doesn't add "context" to the idea of what's important to a reader, versus what's important to a compiler. Further, it can bring you closer to the model of generating human and machine output from the same document (which has some merit and proponents).
Also, if you have a flat c file, just run indent. Because the blocking is context independent, you can apply any style to the code that makes it easy for you to read.
"The story indicates the method could be useful on space missions or other difficult working conditions."
Hmm, I read this and though more along the lines of a guy in a black outfit with a breathing problem saying: "Your thoughts betray you. Your feelings for them are strong...."
God help the poor sucker in an interrogation room after this.
Amazingly enough, with modern unmaned warfare, you could now be on the front lines from a cushioned seat in the states. It reminds me way too much of Ender's game. When war becomes a video game, does it also become too tempting to just bomb everything?
There's a great book covering the current state of nutritional research from the Harvard School of Public Health: Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy. It's about $15 US, and worth every penny.
Bottom line: If you make stuff cheaper, society as a whole benefits. Yes there are painful individual cases where people lose their jobs, but because the house is so much cheaper, they don't have to work huge hours to buy a house when they do get a new job.
I understand the argument, but I think that it leaves out a crucial point. If the standard of living and cultural values were everywhere equal, then there are no implications to buying the cheapest global labor to get a task completed. However, if you are searching for the lowest cost of production, independent of it's source, you are tacitly approving and supporting a set of cultural values that you may not agree with. This is how you wind up with major corporations supplying rugs and apparel produced in sweat shops by children. If markets are amoral, and price is the only driver, then why not use slave labor? Definitely a cost reduction.
Ultimately, there is an implicit "import" for every "export". The import is a set of cultural values. For every imported good you buy, you are supporting the values and objectives of that society. Further, if you don't factor this value based cost into your decissions, then ultimately you are importing the another cultures values as it represents the lifestyle you will have to adopt to compete.
While I agree that readability is important, I don't believe that this is so much a function of the language, as a function of coding standards and documentation for a particular project. Obfuscated java is no less readable than obfuscated Perl. On the other hand, a project that is well documented and coded to a style standard can be easily maintained in assembly.
The concept seems so simple, but the reality is much more complex. IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist), but orbital mechanics just don't work at all like you're used to things working on earth (or in Star [Trek|Wars]).
Agreed, but with products like STK, and Kalman Filtering techniques, it's not out of the real of possibility to hand over ops to University Engineering departments. In many cases, this is the source for the theories and sensors onboard the spacecraft.
Windows is no more guilty of doing this than any number of Linux distros -- but the end user ought to have the ability to install or not install those bundled apps.
Regardless of whether Media Player is bundled with the OS, or considered a separate app, the vast majority of users will still have it installed as the only OS they will ever have is the one installed by the hardware vendor. I would guess that most desktop consumers simply want to pull the machine out of the box and see it work. Hooking in a monitor, keyboard, and mouse is pushing the envelope. If you also sent a set of CDs with the default apps necessary to view email, listen to a CD, etc..., there will probably be a lot of returns, and a shift to bundled vendors.
If the question is "if Yahoo has any record of invention", then citing one example is a valid response. I'm sure they've done good work since 94, but this was the one example that stuck out in my experience as their most dramatic impact.
Sure they do, Yahoo was one of the first places you go go to find a broadly categorized collection of links. Before yahoo, you're best bet was either usenet, or navigating through narrowly organized hotlists. Yahoo helped design the look and feel of the web as most people know it.
If you actually do some research, you would see that the population of Antartica includes representatives from 27 nations, with Australia coming in 5th in the number of personnel behind the US, Chile, Argentina, and Russia. I'm fairly confident that if and when any other countries decide to become a signatory to the treaty, and build research stations, they will be welcome.
On a more important note, when did \. become so broken that obvious trolls, with arguements with such a solid foundation as "everybody knows", get modded +5 insightful?
I'm re-reading them again right now actually, just because I got bored and wanted something to read. It's really, really sad, knowing what they are going to come to, since the first few books are just awesome. He's managed to create this incredibly intricate and believable world, and then proceeds to run all the characters into the ground...
I would recommend "The Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List" as a good reference for finding alternatives. It's really a fantastic resource (it's where I found "A Song of Fire and Ice"). I stopped reading the WOT when it seemed to cross from "great series" to "author's pension plan".
I am just sick of seeing little popups and crap on webpages that use Java (real java).
How how is this a repudiation of the language or it's portability. If these we're implemeted via some sort of embedded perl or python, would these languages suck as well? If someone embeds a trojan or backdoor in some program written in C/C++, does that mean these languages now suck?
Let me clarify a little the point I was trying to make. In the windows world, the bits to connect via pipes and filters just don't exist. It's write from whole cloth, or use the subset of functionionality that comes prepackaged with your IDE every time you want to do a task. Sure the GUIs are pretty, but each GUI represents a complete processing chain. (e.g. trying to get a data stream from a tape drive == !fun)
OTOH, in the UNIX world, pipes and filters represents the dominant paradigm. Thus each GUI represents a thin layer on top of existing well interfaced components. Much nicer.
If more GUIs are really what's needed in the UNIX world, then writing them is not a problem. I think as Linux and OSS has become more prevalent, the problem has moved to "which of the 10 or so GUI based things do you want to download from SourceForge that can do your task". Thus the problem is not a lack of GUIs, but a lack of monolithic control of what the GUI will be, and where to get it from.
I think something that you tend to find in the UNIX world as well is that the end user apps exist, but just within a different context than most people think. I do a lot of scientific computing. We have written and used several GUI driven apps to do much of our work, all on some UNIX variant. We're just focused on a different end-user than Spolsky's.
But do you trust the janitor? What about the security guard? What about the 16 year old kid who came in to work with Mom and is bored and wandering the halls?
"The end app that will be used without piping off to other apps, without having to support connections to 15 other things, whatever. Just what the user needs right then and there."
I'm sorry, but this is not a feature, it's a flaw. What user X "needs right then and there" is probably not what user Y "needs right then and there". If you design your API's and software to meet X's needs, and ignore Y's, or more appropriately, force user Y to accept that he should be like user X, how is this "end-user focused" in Y's eyes? It's ok to say for X, here's your app, but to then tell Y to shut-up and take it is unacceptable.
Fundamentally the UNIX models of "layers" and "pipes & filters" are far more powerful. At the end, you can provide a GUI for X, a GUI for Y, you can batch process all of the data, who cares. Fundamentally, your GUI is a thin wrapper of existing, well tested functionality, not a reinvent the wheel, "guess what this does" exercise in futility.
The UN is non-democratic insofar as your country's delegate was not DIRECTLY elected by you, but how many americans voted for Donald Rumsfeld or Colin Powell? (hint - none, they were appointed). UN delegations are similarly appointed by the governments they represent.
Ah, good example, but you are missing a critical point. The Secretaries of State, Defense, whatever, in the US are members of the Executive branch and are subordinates of the President. They are bound by the same series of checks and balances that bind other members of the executive branch.
Similarly, In Parliamentary systems of government, the Prime Minister can just as quickly be recalled with a vote of no confidence and their policies can be overturned.
On the otherhand, the UN seeks to be an autonomous executive and legislative body, whose members could be checked iff the states have these checks in place. In general, I would contend that this simply isn't the case. Further, the idea that you should personally give any weight to a capricious body that sees fit to, with a straight face, elect Libya to the head of the human rights commision is laughable. As long as we're on a roll, why not make North Korea head of the UN/ITU.
Additionally, who the hell said the UN should have the right to regulate the Internet other than the UN? If they decide they want to have a conference on what I can have for breakfast, they can kiss my ass.
Clients that require such features are a minimal market. Linux is better choice for 95% of the clients. Most clients would rather have a platform that has a future, not a past.
However, such clients are often willing to pay a premium for these features that are not always of interest to the 95% you mention. This cost makes up for the size of the market. In economics, it's called an "economy of scale", and it accounts for the seemingly more expensive cost of systems that are of interest to a small market segment.
Also, it's not just SUN. It's for the same "5% markets" that other OSes (e.g. VxWorks) exist. It's also why some p3 laptops cost $7000, when a top of the line Alienware costs half as much. It's that the market for laptops that can get shot by a 45 while getting pissed on by an elephant is small, and hence pays more for older technologies.
Supply and Demand - Behold the power of the maket!
Slashdot Mirror
Consider totally flat c-code, that is long enough that it's not immediately visible - you have absolutely NO IDEA about what block is what if the starting {:s are outside of your view, whereas with whitespace blocks are still clearly separate.
The nice thing about using a fixed block delimeter as opposed to white space, imho, is that it doesn't add "context" to the idea of what's important to a reader, versus what's important to a compiler. Further, it can bring you closer to the model of generating human and machine output from the same document (which has some merit and proponents).
Also, if you have a flat c file, just run indent. Because the blocking is context independent, you can apply any style to the code that makes it easy for you to read.
"The story indicates the method could be useful on space missions or other difficult working conditions."
Hmm, I read this and though more along the lines of a guy in a black outfit with a breathing problem saying: "Your thoughts betray you. Your feelings for them are strong...."
God help the poor sucker in an interrogation room after this.
Amazingly enough, with modern unmaned warfare, you could now be on the front lines from a cushioned seat in the states. It reminds me way too much of Ender's game. When war becomes a video game, does it also become too tempting to just bomb everything?
There's a great book covering the current state of nutritional research from the Harvard School of Public Health: Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy. It's about $15 US, and worth every penny.
Bottom line: If you make stuff cheaper, society as a whole benefits. Yes there are painful individual cases where people lose their jobs, but because the house is so much cheaper, they don't have to work huge hours to buy a house when they do get a new job.
I understand the argument, but I think that it leaves out a crucial point. If the standard of living and cultural values were everywhere equal, then there are no implications to buying the cheapest global labor to get a task completed. However, if you are searching for the lowest cost of production, independent of it's source, you are tacitly approving and supporting a set of cultural values that you may not agree with. This is how you wind up with major corporations supplying rugs and apparel produced in sweat shops by children. If markets are amoral, and price is the only driver, then why not use slave labor? Definitely a cost reduction.
Ultimately, there is an implicit "import" for every "export". The import is a set of cultural values. For every imported good you buy, you are supporting the values and objectives of that society. Further, if you don't factor this value based cost into your decissions, then ultimately you are importing the another cultures values as it represents the lifestyle you will have to adopt to compete.
or it is a standard not controlled by a single "for profit" entity
The standards are driven and approved via the Java Community Process which includes many people and organizations.
Ok - the ground control software for the NASA Mars Rovers. Or how about Satellite tracking visualization software. There's ShowSky , and I'd venture a guess that there's a whole host of other places it's being used in in-house and scientific apps that don't get the same press as the next release of the Sims.
While I agree that readability is important, I don't believe that this is so much a function of the language, as a function of coding standards and documentation for a particular project. Obfuscated java is no less readable than obfuscated Perl. On the other hand, a project that is well documented and coded to a style standard can be easily maintained in assembly.
The concept seems so simple, but the reality is much more complex. IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist), but orbital mechanics just don't work at all like you're used to things working on earth (or in Star [Trek|Wars]).
Agreed, but with products like STK, and Kalman Filtering techniques, it's not out of the real of possibility to hand over ops to University Engineering departments. In many cases, this is the source for the theories and sensors onboard the spacecraft.
Sometimes they do. Here's an article about NASA's handover of SAMPEX ops to the University of Maryland's Aerospace Engineering department.
Windows is no more guilty of doing this than any number of Linux distros -- but the end user ought to have the ability to install or not install those bundled apps.
Regardless of whether Media Player is bundled with the OS, or considered a separate app, the vast majority of users will still have it installed as the only OS they will ever have is the one installed by the hardware vendor. I would guess that most desktop consumers simply want to pull the machine out of the box and see it work. Hooking in a monitor, keyboard, and mouse is pushing the envelope. If you also sent a set of CDs with the default apps necessary to view email, listen to a CD, etc..., there will probably be a lot of returns, and a shift to bundled vendors.
"A lot of people consider water vapor to be a green house gas."
It's all true, not to mention all of its other horrible effects! You can trust these guysthough brother, they have seen the light.
If the question is "if Yahoo has any record of invention", then citing one example is a valid response. I'm sure they've done good work since 94, but this was the one example that stuck out in my experience as their most dramatic impact.
Sure they do, Yahoo was one of the first places you go go to find a broadly categorized collection of links. Before yahoo, you're best bet was either usenet, or navigating through narrowly organized hotlists. Yahoo helped design the look and feel of the web as most people know it.
If you actually do some research, you would see that the population of Antartica includes representatives from 27 nations, with Australia coming in 5th in the number of personnel behind the US, Chile, Argentina, and Russia. I'm fairly confident that if and when any other countries decide to become a signatory to the treaty, and build research stations, they will be welcome.
On a more important note, when did \. become so broken that obvious trolls, with arguements with such a solid foundation as "everybody knows", get modded +5 insightful?
SWIG can be useful also.
True proof that money is a poor measure of societal value.
I'm re-reading them again right now actually, just because I got bored and wanted something to read. It's really, really sad, knowing what they are going to come to, since the first few books are just awesome. He's managed to create this incredibly intricate and believable world, and then proceeds to run all the characters into the ground ...
I would recommend "The Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List" as a good reference for finding alternatives. It's really a fantastic resource (it's where I found "A Song of Fire and Ice"). I stopped reading the WOT when it seemed to cross from "great series" to "author's pension plan".
I am just sick of seeing little popups and crap on webpages that use Java (real java).
How how is this a repudiation of the language or it's portability. If these we're implemeted via some sort of embedded perl or python, would these languages suck as well? If someone embeds a trojan or backdoor in some program written in C/C++, does that mean these languages now suck?
Let me clarify a little the point I was trying to make. In the windows world, the bits to connect via pipes and filters just don't exist. It's write from whole cloth, or use the subset of functionionality that comes prepackaged with your IDE every time you want to do a task. Sure the GUIs are pretty, but each GUI represents a complete processing chain. (e.g. trying to get a data stream from a tape drive == !fun)
OTOH, in the UNIX world, pipes and filters represents the dominant paradigm. Thus each GUI represents a thin layer on top of existing well interfaced components. Much nicer.
If more GUIs are really what's needed in the UNIX world, then writing them is not a problem. I think as Linux and OSS has become more prevalent, the problem has moved to "which of the 10 or so GUI based things do you want to download from SourceForge that can do your task". Thus the problem is not a lack of GUIs, but a lack of monolithic control of what the GUI will be, and where to get it from.
I think something that you tend to find in the UNIX world as well is that the end user apps exist, but just within a different context than most people think. I do a lot of scientific computing. We have written and used several GUI driven apps to do much of our work, all on some UNIX variant. We're just focused on a different end-user than Spolsky's.
But do you trust the janitor? What about the security guard? What about the 16 year old kid who came in to work with Mom and is bored and wandering the halls?
"The end app that will be used without piping off to other apps, without having to support connections to 15 other things, whatever. Just what the user needs right then and there."
I'm sorry, but this is not a feature, it's a flaw. What user X "needs right then and there" is probably not what user Y "needs right then and there". If you design your API's and software to meet X's needs, and ignore Y's, or more appropriately, force user Y to accept that he should be like user X, how is this "end-user focused" in Y's eyes? It's ok to say for X, here's your app, but to then tell Y to shut-up and take it is unacceptable.
Fundamentally the UNIX models of "layers" and "pipes & filters" are far more powerful. At the end, you can provide a GUI for X, a GUI for Y, you can batch process all of the data, who cares. Fundamentally, your GUI is a thin wrapper of existing, well tested functionality, not a reinvent the wheel, "guess what this does" exercise in futility.
And moreover, the questions begs to be asked: where the hell is Osama? The man needs a DIALYSIS MACHINE!
Dunno, ask these guys.
The UN is non-democratic insofar as your country's delegate was not DIRECTLY elected by you, but how many americans voted for Donald Rumsfeld or Colin Powell? (hint - none, they were appointed). UN delegations are similarly appointed by the governments they represent.
Ah, good example, but you are missing a critical point. The Secretaries of State, Defense, whatever, in the US are members of the Executive branch and are subordinates of the President. They are bound by the same series of checks and balances that bind other members of the executive branch.
Similarly, In Parliamentary systems of government, the Prime Minister can just as quickly be recalled with a vote of no confidence and their policies can be overturned.
On the otherhand, the UN seeks to be an autonomous executive and legislative body, whose members could be checked iff the states have these checks in place. In general, I would contend that this simply isn't the case. Further, the idea that you should personally give any weight to a capricious body that sees fit to, with a straight face, elect Libya to the head of the human rights commision is laughable. As long as we're on a roll, why not make North Korea head of the UN/ITU.
In short, your argument is about as valid as saying that because Sweden has a parliament, then they have no right to oppose the EU.
Additionally, who the hell said the UN should have the right to regulate the Internet other than the UN? If they decide they want to have a conference on what I can have for breakfast, they can kiss my ass.
Clients that require such features are a minimal market. Linux is better choice for 95% of the clients. Most clients would rather have a platform that has a future, not a past.
However, such clients are often willing to pay a premium for these features that are not always of interest to the 95% you mention. This cost makes up for the size of the market. In economics, it's called an "economy of scale", and it accounts for the seemingly more expensive cost of systems that are of interest to a small market segment.
Also, it's not just SUN. It's for the same "5% markets" that other OSes (e.g. VxWorks) exist. It's also why some p3 laptops cost $7000, when a top of the line Alienware costs half as much. It's that the market for laptops that can get shot by a 45 while getting pissed on by an elephant is small, and hence pays more for older technologies.
Supply and Demand - Behold the power of the maket!