Since most apps that hog resources have no valid reason, perhaps a built in delay that grows proportionally to the resources already allocated.
So they'll just set up a loader to start with the OS and hoard the resources so they are ready if the program is ever loaded.
For the few cases where it is actually justifiable, have a tuning parameter "allow_rapacious_resource_hogging". No venor is going to want to telkl the user to enable that unless they have a REALLY strong justification!:-)
They won't. They'll simply tell the user that the program needs to be run as root.
Imagine if you upload manga scans to Flickr, and it automatically translates them to English.
I guess it's just a matter of time before Viz and other manga translators try to have this thing declared illegal. We can't have people importing their own manga from Japan, now can we ? After all, then Viz couldn't take years to translate it.
I wonder how they're going to go about it. Maybe language barrier could be considered effective copy protection ? It's not that different from crypting schemes like the CSS, and has been used as a crypting scheme before.
Sure, but the crust is only 30-50 km thick. And mining in the mantle does not seem feasible to me.
Which reminds me of the obvious: the mantle is molten rock. It is hot, and heats up the crust above it. So all you have to do is bore down 25-45 km, until the rock becomes red-hot, and then pour down water, and you get back steam, which can be used to drive turbines.
The whole Earth is a giant nuclear generator. We just have to find a way to extract the energy.
The good news is that the Shuttle is supposed to go away in a couple of years -- 2010 and be replaced by a super-duper low cost, reusable, launch vehicle called Orion in 2014. What are they going to use in the intervening 4 years? I haven't a clue. What will keep Orion from being a typical US manned spaceflight project -- over weight, over budget, late and lame? Again, no clue.
I wonder. The world economy is about due another recession, and certainly seems to be headed for trouble. If that happens, how much funding will the NASA get ? Enough to actually build the Orion at all ?
I predict that once the Shuttle is retired, that's it for US manned space flight, at least until technology advances enough to make private manned space flights a reality.
And if there are 1000 kids in the school, the chances that there's nobody who can kick your ass is 0.1%, so chances are you're going to have to try a different strategy with them. Or get your ass kicked just like you did before you decided that violence is the only answer to everything.
Is every last one of those 1000 kids a bully ? And, like another poster said, you don't actually have to beat them, just make yourself a painful enough target that they'll pass.
And to the best of my knowledge, there is no other strategy - you can tell the teachers and you can tell your parents, but the latter can't help you and the former can't be bothered. So you either fight back or hide somewhere. I chose the latter, not having had access to martial arts, and as a result I still, at 28 years old, feel uncomfortable near people, especially if they're between me and an escape route. Thanks to lots of good medicine it is mere uncomfort and vague feeling of threat, rather than an outright panic.
But... I don't have a social life, since I simply can't make myself approach people. I've never have a girlfriend, and likely never will, for the same reason. I spend my Friday nights with my computer, and never go out. I underachieve in nearly everything for the simple reason that actually interacting with people makes me nervous and unable to concentrate more on what I'm supposed to be doing than on watching for signs of attack. Because of all this I have no social skills, which of course simply makes it even harder to interact, and consequently I propably seem not quite right in the head to whoever I'm interacting with - and I suppose they're right there.
That is the price of not fighting back. I couldn't, not having the skills to, and so my life's a total wreck, and likely always will be. I don't want anyone else to have to go through that; that's why I advocate teaching the would-be-victims martial arts, so they don't have to be victims.
Well. Didn't that come out as self-pitying rant about my personal history. Feel free to post some condescending remark about choosing to not live in the jungle. Just dont' expect the beasts there to care.
Making snide remarks on Slashdot isn't going to change the law of the jungle.
True. But some of us choose not to live in the jungle.
Schoolkids don't have that option, or at least those who's parents can't afford a private tutor don't. And empty platitudes don't help them any.
Yeah, but there's always going to be a softest target. Presumably you think it's ok that the kid in the wheelchair or on crutches gets royally screwed because the last few millennia of civilisation haven't happened in your personal world?
Another strawman. I have never approved bullying anyone. I have simply responded to a poster who wanted to protect his children from it. Why you take this to mean that I approve of someone else getting bullied I have no idea of.
And the last few millenia of civilization is basically a long list of one group after another being persecuted and sometimes massacred. If anything it makes clear that weakness and vulnerability are deadly.
Actually, I feed my kids and try to do something about world famine. As my daughter happens to be by far the smallest in her class, if I'd been clueless enough to teach her that the way to respond to bullying was with violence I'd probably have had to collect her in a box at the end of her first week at school.
So tell me: if some group of thugs decides it's great fun to punch her in the guts and watch her trying to regain breath, and makes a daily habit out of it, just what is the response you've taught her ? Because that's what bullies do. Bullying isn't namecalling, it isn't taunts, it isn't spreading nasty rumors. It is hurting the
I dunno how he did it, but apparently that guy has forfeited his soul TWICE!
He didn't sell or forfeit it, he licensed it with a condition which allowed him to terminate the license at will, which he did to relicense it under similar but reworded license.
You can not in retrospect claim someone didn't buy (gain ownership) to the product if you didn't make that completely clear beforehand.
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." - Darth Vader and, apparently, the Copyright Empire.
There is nothing you can't do if you have sufficient power and ruthlessness. Since money represents power - or, to be exact, resources - in a capitalist system, and since corporations are both rich and amoral, there is very little they can't do.
Sure. Then the only people being bullied will be the weak and disabled.
Only the weak - defined as not being able to kick the ass of whoever tries to bully them - get bullied as is. People who beat up anyone who tries to bully them are rarely choosen as targets, at least more than once. The only way to ensure you won't be bullied is to become strong, defined as capable and willing to use violence to defend yourself.
Making snide remarks on Slashdot isn't going to change the law of the jungle.
Oh, and those in a smaller gang than the bullies (who are taking the same martial arts classes, by the way).
Maybe, but even gangs usually go after softer targets.
After all, bullying doesn't matter as long as it happens to somebody else, does it?
So, are you going to feed your children, or are you going to refuse as long as there is famine in the world ?
Yes, because the bullying he suffered through was clearly *nobody's fault* except his own. Get a clue. Instead of blaming the victims, why don't you punish the guilty?
Maybe he's a bully himself, and is trying to justify his actions ? Blaming the victim is a known psychological defense in violent criminals. And of course no one wants to admit that they are guilty of anything bad.
I was quite happy to see this bylaw get passed. As a victim of bullies for years (until I had no choice but to fight back), I was happy to see that my son (just about 2 years old) shouldn't have to deal with the same things I did.
If you want to ensure that your son doesn't get bullied, then enroll him into a good martial arts class; the kind which teaches people how to beat the living crap out of people, rather than sports or philosophies. The sad fact is that not being able to defend yourself makes you a victim; and ultimately you can't trust anyone else - not the teachers, not the police, and sure as hell not some politician trying to get political points - to defend you.
Yes it can. Simply providing the programmer a way to remove that reference counter would do it.
There is - just set the reference to null. Or do you perhaps mean a way to force all references to this object to become null ? That would have rather nasty side effectsfor any other code using the object.
Additionally, the programmer can be wrong - that's the programmer's prerogative, and the system should detect and handle that appropriately - but the tool to do so is still necessary in order to deliver true performance applications.
Yes, because garbage collection is the performance killer in Java.
The first question answers whether the pointer is valid - i.e. directly returned from a call to malloc() or from a buffer within one directly returned from a call to malloc() - and the second question answers the size of buffer and if there is enough space to so something. This could be easily tracked, though it would add a little overhead, and would be of great use in Defensive Programming technique.
It wouldn't be just a little overhead: either you travel the list of malloc-returned pointers, or you keep them in a hashtable of some sort. Since I predict few programmers would bother using this - since they don't bother checking for NULL or buffer length now - associating this cost with every C program (as having the functionality in the C library would require one to do) is not really justified.
Even worse is that it doesn't solve the problem. What if, just after you checked the pointer for validity, another thread frees it ? Your program ends up misbehaving. Or what if you check the pointer for validity, and some function call a bit later ends up freeing it ? Don't forget that C++ has the lovely feature of opeation overloading, so the call could happen as a result of any operation and be quite effectively hidden. Are you going to recheck the pointer after every operation ?
Garbage collection solves this problem automatically and with minor or no performance hit.
My pro-Death Penalty argument is basically the same as your rabid dog argument. Sidestep the moral issue entirely. It's not about whether or not this person deserves to die or be killed, or whether or not we have the moral right to kill him or her, or eye for an aye, or any of that crap. It's simply that they have proven that they are unable to function in society, and so we preserve society by removing them from society.
Permanently
You do realize, of course, that this is essentially the same argument that Soviet Russia and Communist China used to justify eliminating the political dissidents and everyone else they considered dangerous ? Preservation of society went over right and wrong, and so anyone who endangered or could possibly endanger communism was killed.
Besides, the exact same argument can be used to justify killing everyone who isn't contributing to the society more than they are receiving from it. The mentally ill, for example, who Nazi Germany killed with exactly that same justification: it was good for the society. And of course the mentally ill are more likely to commit violent crimes than Joe Average, so off with their heads.
Finally, didn't the murderer also say to himself: "I don't care if this person deserves to die, it benefits me, so die he will" ? And that's assuming the worst sort of amoral scum, the kind who does wrong and doesn't care, rather than one who mistakenly thought his actions justified. Do you truly wish the society to use the same argument and thereby descend to the level of what the parent termed as a "rabid dog" ?
It seems to me that your pro-Death Penalty argument puts you into rather barbaric company, and even into the company of the very people you argued should be killed. Should you also join them in the Death Row; after all, you did argue that killing is okay if it benefits the society, so you may engage in it yourself someday, so better pre-empt the threat ?
The problem comes in when you understand that the legal system makes mistakes, and you take into account the fact that the person you are so blithely condemning to death may not have done the thing that they were convicted of. That's a pretty big deal. Lot of societies view it as a deal breaker.
Since you argued that the good of society outweights the question of whether or not the accused deserves to die, is this actually a problem ? Kill him; he might be guilty, and even if he isn't, it will act as a deterrent. If it turns out that he wasn't, fabricate evidence to preserve the illusion of unerrability of the system.
Once you stop worrying about what people deserve, it opens all kinds of fascinating possibilites. I wonder if you are willing to agree the logical consequences of your argument ?
The only difference is what causes the memory leak: In non-GC languages it's forgetting to use free(), in GC languages it's forgetting to null every reference to that memory (or at least every reference which isn't itself in unreferenced objects).
At least Java has weak references which do not prevent the object from being garbage collected and are auto-nulled when it goes, and optionally get added to a notify queue. Very useful for implementing collections:).
The problem GC solves is not memory leaks. The problem it solves are dangling pointers/references (i.e. if you have a non-null reference, with GC you are guaranteed it points to a valid object, while in non-GC languages it might point to a freed object, or even into some other object allocated later into the same memory).
But solving dangling pointers has the added effect of making memory leaks less likely to occur. Without GC you have no way of knowing if a particular object/memory area is referenced by someone else, and as such risk either a dangling pointer or memory leak no matter what you do. Yes, there are ways to work around this - strict policies on who "owns" the object, smart pointers with reference counting, etc - but they they are ultimately just bandaids. By making dangling pointers impossible GC removes the problem of when to free the memory, which makes memory management a lot simpler.
This is especially important for open-sourced programs which tend to grow organically over time, with developers coming and going. If even one doesn't know about a particular memory area ownership policy, the end result is a bug. Of course the same is true for any large enough application: as soon as you have more than one programmer, there's a possibility that they fail to adhere to the same policy and cause all kinds of fascinating bugs.
No, I'm saying that it should be possible for the programmer to, at the very least, tell the GC that memory chunk X is no longer needed, so the GC knows 100% for sure that it can de-allocate that memory.
Except that it can't. The programmer could be wrong or purposefully lying, and in fact still have a reference to this object. This, then, breaks type safety and might allow arbitrary code execution flaws.
Besides, a modern relocating garbage collector doesn't free a memory chunk, but simply goes through and moves all live objects into the start of the heap, leaving the rest a single free chunk. In this scheme telling the system that a given chunk is free is not useful in any way.
Sure, it'd make the GC a bit more complex, but it would also help out with managing resources - for efficient programs, a programmer must be able to say "I don't need this memory any more, please take it back, and let me use it elsewhere, for other things, in the program". Java doesn't provide that.
Yes it does. Not having any references to the object in any live object means that the memory it used may be reused after the next garbage collection cycle, which occurs automatically when free memory in the heap runs out.
Which brings my second point - even with your original version, this cannot always be done in some languages as some languages remove the ability to free resources. For example, so far as I am aware - and so far as I can tell - Java cannot free memory resources outside of the garbage collector. So much for a programmer being able to manage their resources properly - this is probably also one of the big reasons Java sucks at performance.
Are you trying to argue that it's a bad thing that you can't leave dangling pointers in Java ?
If you can't code without hand-holding tools like automatic garbage collection, perhaps you belong in a different profession!
Statements like this are why I prefer Java programs to C ones. Mandatory bounds checking means that no macho idiot can turn it off, no matter how full of hubris he is. But even assuming a 100% perfect coder, does it really make sense to use his precious time to worry about memory management when the computer can do that automagically ?
Electricity itself improves the quality of our lives more than we can even imagine and has risen from being a luxury to a necessity. But the current prices we pay are still luxurious. We will eventually be quite willing to pay dearly for it once we're forced to, even as we cope with the global hangover created by the cheap electricity of today.
Assuming, of course, that we can't get fusion, solar power satellites, geothermal energy (there's plenty of it anywhere, if you simply dig deep enough) or other such near-limitless energy sources working. But nice doomsday scenario nonetheless.
The least bad thing about it is that I can safely skip all the stupid crap I don't understand -- it's going to be web 2.0 wankery anyways, so it's not a problem if I don't give a damn and stick to getting things done.
Yeah. Wouldn't want the stuff to interfere with your productive Web-surfing;).
The thing about Windows is: it just freakin' works for the non-technically-inclined.
No it doesn't. You said so yourself: "If I had a nickel for every time someone called me about something "catastrophically wrong" with their computer and it turned-out to be something as dumb as an icon missing or something wasn't installed at all, I would have enough nickels to buy slashdot!" Windows doesn't work for non-technically-inclined, because it's just so freakin' easy to screw it up if you don't know what you're doing - which the non-technically-inclined don't, by definition, do.
In any case, the stores could simply offer several versions of the same computer, with different OSes or non at all. It's not like the choices are preinstalled Windows or a bag of parts you need to assemble by soldering them together yourself.
Take this bundling away from them and POOF! They're lost.
It is indeed amazing how supposedly intelligent people turn utterly helpless when they sit in front of the computer, becoming apparenly incapable of even trying . Maybe it's because Windows is so fragile, making them afraid of breaking things if they use trial and error.
I guess that means that Windows actively hinders learning, which isn't particularly surprising since the only reason Microsoft programs keep on being used is force of habit rather than any actual merit.
So, looking at the game market, what game titles have been out there that have any level of nudity that can be considered an artistic addition to the story, rather than as a very poor way to try to sell more copies to the young male audience?
Ying Yan! X-Change Alternative, which, ironically, is a porn game. The sex scenes and sexual elements in it are absolutely vital to the plot.
Of course a case may be made that it doesn't really count, being a choose-your-own-adventure rather than what's usually considered a game, but that's a debate for another time.
Star Control 2 / Ur-Quan Masters also has a sex scene, but the cowards censored it by making the screen black out. It isn't quite vital to the plot like X-Change's scenes are, but fits it nonetheless.
Lastly, Nethack has sex scenes with succubi. They are every bit as graphical as the rest of the game. They can have a dramatic effect on the player character, and may mean the difference between winning or losing the game.
well, anybody with a brain. those that do shop there don't realize that used game sales are as big a threat to the video game industry as piracy.
Yeah. But do you know what really thrates an industry ? Ebay. It allows people to get old stuff cheap, instead of doing their consumerist duty and buying everything brand new.
Yes, buying used stuff is equivalent to stealing from the manufacturer ! Please write to your Congressperson immediately so that we may end this horrible, unfiar practice. I shall write to the Finnish Parliament and point out that an american is considering this legislation; that should make them push it through post haste. They may not even themselves know what, exacly speaking, is illegal according to the new law, like happened with Lex Karpela, but it's not like that has ever stopped them before.
Slashdot Mirror
Try this:
#include <cstdio>
using std:cout; int main() { int *i; { i = NULL; cout
OMG it crashes ! C++ is shit ! I can make it crash when I purposefully create a program to do so !
So they'll just set up a loader to start with the OS and hoard the resources so they are ready if the program is ever loaded.
They won't. They'll simply tell the user that the program needs to be run as root.
I guess it's just a matter of time before Viz and other manga translators try to have this thing declared illegal. We can't have people importing their own manga from Japan, now can we ? After all, then Viz couldn't take years to translate it.
I wonder how they're going to go about it. Maybe language barrier could be considered effective copy protection ? It's not that different from crypting schemes like the CSS, and has been used as a crypting scheme before.
"When you're self-translating manga, you're supporting communism !"
Which reminds me of the obvious: the mantle is molten rock. It is hot, and heats up the crust above it. So all you have to do is bore down 25-45 km, until the rock becomes red-hot, and then pour down water, and you get back steam, which can be used to drive turbines.
The whole Earth is a giant nuclear generator. We just have to find a way to extract the energy.
I wonder. The world economy is about due another recession, and certainly seems to be headed for trouble. If that happens, how much funding will the NASA get ? Enough to actually build the Orion at all ?
I predict that once the Shuttle is retired, that's it for US manned space flight, at least until technology advances enough to make private manned space flights a reality.
How could he ? He isn't using murder simulators to train, after all. Or... could this all be revenge for never finishing Tetris ?
Is every last one of those 1000 kids a bully ? And, like another poster said, you don't actually have to beat them, just make yourself a painful enough target that they'll pass.
And to the best of my knowledge, there is no other strategy - you can tell the teachers and you can tell your parents, but the latter can't help you and the former can't be bothered. So you either fight back or hide somewhere. I chose the latter, not having had access to martial arts, and as a result I still, at 28 years old, feel uncomfortable near people, especially if they're between me and an escape route. Thanks to lots of good medicine it is mere uncomfort and vague feeling of threat, rather than an outright panic.
But... I don't have a social life, since I simply can't make myself approach people. I've never have a girlfriend, and likely never will, for the same reason. I spend my Friday nights with my computer, and never go out. I underachieve in nearly everything for the simple reason that actually interacting with people makes me nervous and unable to concentrate more on what I'm supposed to be doing than on watching for signs of attack. Because of all this I have no social skills, which of course simply makes it even harder to interact, and consequently I propably seem not quite right in the head to whoever I'm interacting with - and I suppose they're right there.
That is the price of not fighting back. I couldn't, not having the skills to, and so my life's a total wreck, and likely always will be. I don't want anyone else to have to go through that; that's why I advocate teaching the would-be-victims martial arts, so they don't have to be victims.
Well. Didn't that come out as self-pitying rant about my personal history. Feel free to post some condescending remark about choosing to not live in the jungle. Just dont' expect the beasts there to care.
Schoolkids don't have that option, or at least those who's parents can't afford a private tutor don't. And empty platitudes don't help them any.
Another strawman. I have never approved bullying anyone. I have simply responded to a poster who wanted to protect his children from it. Why you take this to mean that I approve of someone else getting bullied I have no idea of.
And the last few millenia of civilization is basically a long list of one group after another being persecuted and sometimes massacred. If anything it makes clear that weakness and vulnerability are deadly.
So tell me: if some group of thugs decides it's great fun to punch her in the guts and watch her trying to regain breath, and makes a daily habit out of it, just what is the response you've taught her ? Because that's what bullies do. Bullying isn't namecalling, it isn't taunts, it isn't spreading nasty rumors. It is hurting the
He didn't sell or forfeit it, he licensed it with a condition which allowed him to terminate the license at will, which he did to relicense it under similar but reworded license.
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." - Darth Vader and, apparently, the Copyright Empire.
There is nothing you can't do if you have sufficient power and ruthlessness. Since money represents power - or, to be exact, resources - in a capitalist system, and since corporations are both rich and amoral, there is very little they can't do.
Let's hope that Rule #34 won't hold this time...
Only the weak - defined as not being able to kick the ass of whoever tries to bully them - get bullied as is. People who beat up anyone who tries to bully them are rarely choosen as targets, at least more than once. The only way to ensure you won't be bullied is to become strong, defined as capable and willing to use violence to defend yourself.
Making snide remarks on Slashdot isn't going to change the law of the jungle.
Maybe, but even gangs usually go after softer targets.
So, are you going to feed your children, or are you going to refuse as long as there is famine in the world ?
But a nice strawman nonetheless.
Maybe he's a bully himself, and is trying to justify his actions ? Blaming the victim is a known psychological defense in violent criminals. And of course no one wants to admit that they are guilty of anything bad.
If you want to ensure that your son doesn't get bullied, then enroll him into a good martial arts class; the kind which teaches people how to beat the living crap out of people, rather than sports or philosophies. The sad fact is that not being able to defend yourself makes you a victim; and ultimately you can't trust anyone else - not the teachers, not the police, and sure as hell not some politician trying to get political points - to defend you.
There is - just set the reference to null. Or do you perhaps mean a way to force all references to this object to become null ? That would have rather nasty side effectsfor any other code using the object.
Yes, because garbage collection is the performance killer in Java.
It wouldn't be just a little overhead: either you travel the list of malloc-returned pointers, or you keep them in a hashtable of some sort. Since I predict few programmers would bother using this - since they don't bother checking for NULL or buffer length now - associating this cost with every C program (as having the functionality in the C library would require one to do) is not really justified.
Even worse is that it doesn't solve the problem. What if, just after you checked the pointer for validity, another thread frees it ? Your program ends up misbehaving. Or what if you check the pointer for validity, and some function call a bit later ends up freeing it ? Don't forget that C++ has the lovely feature of opeation overloading, so the call could happen as a result of any operation and be quite effectively hidden. Are you going to recheck the pointer after every operation ?
Garbage collection solves this problem automatically and with minor or no performance hit.
You do realize, of course, that this is essentially the same argument that Soviet Russia and Communist China used to justify eliminating the political dissidents and everyone else they considered dangerous ? Preservation of society went over right and wrong, and so anyone who endangered or could possibly endanger communism was killed.
Besides, the exact same argument can be used to justify killing everyone who isn't contributing to the society more than they are receiving from it. The mentally ill, for example, who Nazi Germany killed with exactly that same justification: it was good for the society. And of course the mentally ill are more likely to commit violent crimes than Joe Average, so off with their heads.
Finally, didn't the murderer also say to himself: "I don't care if this person deserves to die, it benefits me, so die he will" ? And that's assuming the worst sort of amoral scum, the kind who does wrong and doesn't care, rather than one who mistakenly thought his actions justified. Do you truly wish the society to use the same argument and thereby descend to the level of what the parent termed as a "rabid dog" ?
It seems to me that your pro-Death Penalty argument puts you into rather barbaric company, and even into the company of the very people you argued should be killed. Should you also join them in the Death Row; after all, you did argue that killing is okay if it benefits the society, so you may engage in it yourself someday, so better pre-empt the threat ?
Since you argued that the good of society outweights the question of whether or not the accused deserves to die, is this actually a problem ? Kill him; he might be guilty, and even if he isn't, it will act as a deterrent. If it turns out that he wasn't, fabricate evidence to preserve the illusion of unerrability of the system.
Once you stop worrying about what people deserve, it opens all kinds of fascinating possibilites. I wonder if you are willing to agree the logical consequences of your argument ?
At least Java has weak references which do not prevent the object from being garbage collected and are auto-nulled when it goes, and optionally get added to a notify queue. Very useful for implementing collections :).
But solving dangling pointers has the added effect of making memory leaks less likely to occur. Without GC you have no way of knowing if a particular object/memory area is referenced by someone else, and as such risk either a dangling pointer or memory leak no matter what you do. Yes, there are ways to work around this - strict policies on who "owns" the object, smart pointers with reference counting, etc - but they they are ultimately just bandaids. By making dangling pointers impossible GC removes the problem of when to free the memory, which makes memory management a lot simpler.
This is especially important for open-sourced programs which tend to grow organically over time, with developers coming and going. If even one doesn't know about a particular memory area ownership policy, the end result is a bug. Of course the same is true for any large enough application: as soon as you have more than one programmer, there's a possibility that they fail to adhere to the same policy and cause all kinds of fascinating bugs.
Except that it can't. The programmer could be wrong or purposefully lying, and in fact still have a reference to this object. This, then, breaks type safety and might allow arbitrary code execution flaws.
Besides, a modern relocating garbage collector doesn't free a memory chunk, but simply goes through and moves all live objects into the start of the heap, leaving the rest a single free chunk. In this scheme telling the system that a given chunk is free is not useful in any way.
Yes it does. Not having any references to the object in any live object means that the memory it used may be reused after the next garbage collection cycle, which occurs automatically when free memory in the heap runs out.
Are you trying to argue that it's a bad thing that you can't leave dangling pointers in Java ?
Statements like this are why I prefer Java programs to C ones. Mandatory bounds checking means that no macho idiot can turn it off, no matter how full of hubris he is. But even assuming a 100% perfect coder, does it really make sense to use his precious time to worry about memory management when the computer can do that automagically ?
Because they are built around old Pentium processors. It's just a little rounding error, nothing to be upset about.
In other news, several telecom companies have offered to by old Pentiums for their billing systems.
Assuming, of course, that we can't get fusion, solar power satellites, geothermal energy (there's plenty of it anywhere, if you simply dig deep enough) or other such near-limitless energy sources working. But nice doomsday scenario nonetheless.
Yeah. Wouldn't want the stuff to interfere with your productive Web-surfing ;).
No it doesn't. You said so yourself: "If I had a nickel for every time someone called me about something "catastrophically wrong" with their computer and it turned-out to be something as dumb as an icon missing or something wasn't installed at all, I would have enough nickels to buy slashdot!" Windows doesn't work for non-technically-inclined, because it's just so freakin' easy to screw it up if you don't know what you're doing - which the non-technically-inclined don't, by definition, do.
In any case, the stores could simply offer several versions of the same computer, with different OSes or non at all. It's not like the choices are preinstalled Windows or a bag of parts you need to assemble by soldering them together yourself.
It is indeed amazing how supposedly intelligent people turn utterly helpless when they sit in front of the computer, becoming apparenly incapable of even trying . Maybe it's because Windows is so fragile, making them afraid of breaking things if they use trial and error.
I guess that means that Windows actively hinders learning, which isn't particularly surprising since the only reason Microsoft programs keep on being used is force of habit rather than any actual merit.
Ying Yan! X-Change Alternative, which, ironically, is a porn game. The sex scenes and sexual elements in it are absolutely vital to the plot.
Of course a case may be made that it doesn't really count, being a choose-your-own-adventure rather than what's usually considered a game, but that's a debate for another time.
Star Control 2 / Ur-Quan Masters also has a sex scene, but the cowards censored it by making the screen black out. It isn't quite vital to the plot like X-Change's scenes are, but fits it nonetheless.
Lastly, Nethack has sex scenes with succubi. They are every bit as graphical as the rest of the game. They can have a dramatic effect on the player character, and may mean the difference between winning or losing the game.
Yeah. But do you know what really thrates an industry ? Ebay. It allows people to get old stuff cheap, instead of doing their consumerist duty and buying everything brand new.
Yes, buying used stuff is equivalent to stealing from the manufacturer ! Please write to your Congressperson immediately so that we may end this horrible, unfiar practice. I shall write to the Finnish Parliament and point out that an american is considering this legislation; that should make them push it through post haste. They may not even themselves know what, exacly speaking, is illegal according to the new law, like happened with Lex Karpela, but it's not like that has ever stopped them before.