we've seen this before, including your claim that the real professionals won't use it.
It is true for the next 2-3 years. In the meantime MSFT will pump millions in it, and leverage its monopoly to push the format/protocol/API whatever.
It will reach the mediocre level at some time, it will never surpass the original (PDF in this case) but it will become "good enough" for 95% of normal users including "normal professionals".
Because of the small remaining group of users for "the real thing", it will retreat into the professional and expensive market and become irrelevant to normal users.
We have seen this pattern before with various protocols, with the web browser, with opengl/directx. It might happen again if they pump enough effort into this and the authorities keep sleeping and let a convicted monopolist misuse its monopoly once more.
For cases where you have to free resources, use try/finally. As far as memory is concerned: nowadays we have garbage collectors:). Even though Java is lacking in some respects compared to C++, garbage collection is a huge plus and but for the most low level tasks, having to deal with memory is insane.
I've used C++ for 10 and C for over 15 years (a.o. in embedded and hard real-time applications), so I have had my deal of manual memory management.
Btw you can ease the pain in C++ if you write decent destructors, and as a rule allocate memory and class instances inside methods on the stack instead of on the heap as you did in your examples.
The costs of time lost due to end-users fiddling with spreadsheets, and even add train people to do that, I don't think this is a good idea.
Once a spreadsheet has grown beyond the trivial, and it starts using macro's and pieces of VB, it has become a software program.
Why do so many people assume that anyone with a bit of brains can write decent professions software (i.e. with certain quality standards)? Who don't they think that anyone with a bit of brains can design a building or a bridge?
Instead it would be better to give in and make sure that there is enough budget to let the real software people develop. It is fooling yourself to save money in the IT department, then throw it out of the window by letting amateurs make their own software, both in terms of lost time and in terms of errors and bad quality costing loads of money.
The difference between a spreadsheet and an ordinary document is that a speadsheet is a kind of programming environment. End-users who think they can do the same job as professional software developers often build monstrous spreadsheets full of formulars, macro's and some VB for excel.
I work at a large bank, making software to support the investment strategists. Often we find such situations where some strategist has built his own "program" using spreadsheets and sometimes some access "database". And in 99% of such cases these, of course, contain severe errors and thus produce garbage. I can imagine very well that this costs an enormous amount of money yearly.
For years it has been a heated debate when we make some software program, if it should have an "export to excel" function or not. The end-users want it, in order to keep some control and be able to suck the data out of our system and then start playing around with their own "programs". The project management often want to prevent this (depending on the current political balance and power) because it is known that such playing around massively costs time, leads to irrational business processes and mostly causes erronous numbers and calculations to be used as basis for strategic decisions.
Apart from exceptions, you can fully replace goto statements by using small methods and bailing out in the middle, i.e. put a return statement somewhere before the end of the method.
Should you need some statement before truely returning, you can:
* use a try/finally block or * call your method from an extra method, return in the middle and put the 'end' statement in the extra method
IOW: I see no reason at all for a goto statement if you only jump forward.
Indeed, there are lots of players without DRM. I don't understand why people don't pay a bit attention (verify they can use the player as a mass storage device to put MP3's on them.
For example pockettunes for palm-OS is a great player. I put my T5 in "drive mode" which makes the internal and external (1GB sD card) memory available via USB as a mass storage device.
I think the industry might force (in some legislations such as the US) the producers of specific MP3 players to implement DRM. But since pocket PC and palm-OS devices are freely programmable and have become very good MP3 players as well, they lose. 1GB now costs less than $100 and prices keep dropping fast.
It won't be long before you don't need a HDD based MP3 player to store your complete music collection.
Re:Mindshare and image bloodbath for BitKeeper
on
Linus Drops BitKeeper
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
And you know that Linus reverse engineered UNIX? He recreated a system with the same API. What is wrong with that? There would be no progress at all if we weren't "stealing" each others ideas all the time. Neither in science, nor in art, nor in (software) engineering.
I find the current brainwashing efforts of "intellectual property" proponents to make us believe there is anything wrong with reverse engineering highly immoral, contradictory with human civilization and ignoring its history.
However, the grandparent article didn't really suggest that Linus use SVN, since as you pointed out he won't due to lack of a distributed repository. The statement on the similarity of versioning concept between SVN and the description of what Linus alledgedly is implementing on his own is correct.
Looking at a list of new stuff in JDO 2 compared to JDO 1, it is obvious that all that happened between version 1 and 2 is to copy features from Hibernate.
This goes from the most fundamental one, namely to specify an ORM, to many details such as an API to get a single result instead of a Collection from a query.
Bitkeeper is just a commercial product with an exception for a specific case. This exception, as we have seen now, can be withdrawn just like that.
It proves only that a free license is important. Both GPL and BSD are free licenses, each with advantages and disadvantages. But at least, both are free.
It is not necessary to drag in the old BSD vs. GPL discussion here; the issue is completely different.
In the long run, yes. But releasing the amount of CO2 in 200 years that has been stored away over a period of millions of years does increase CO2 for a "short" period of time (on a geological time scale).
Burning fuels that store the CO2 now and release it now (both on a time scale of months) does not have this "short" term effect.
I doubt if tabbed browsing can help IE, since it has been available for a long time now in IE-based browsers such as IE2/Maxthon. Only an effective protection against spam and good ad blocking might help, but I doubt very much if MSFT can deliver that.
Of course MSFT would not openly adopt java and modify it again, since officially they are using.NET. However since.NET and Java are in fierce competition, for enterprise development.NET is still in its infancy but MSFT is trying to change this, I could imagine MSFT to sponsor or otherwise help 'grassroots' development of competing java versions.
These versions of course would add some candy to attract developers (such as operator overloading) while destroying the 100% compatability that java offers, creating confusion and thus discrediting java for enterprise development.
By the way, someone wrote that.NET is open and specified at ECMA. This is not entirely true: Only C# the language and CLR the VM are, but.NET including its framework and libraries are not (e.g. windows forms). For Java OTOH, the complete JDK, i.e. everything you need to build applications not only parts of it, is openly specified and available cross platform.
Others might argue that the same forking might happen to PHP, perl etc. However, do not forget that MSFT actually has tried to fork an incompatible version of Java, they never tried such a thing with other 'cross-platform' language.
Why? Because Java is the only real threat. Java's real importance is in 'enterprise' development; many large companies have been developing in Java for the last 3-5 years, the importance of Java in such environments dwarfs any other development platform, except maybe for cobol. Thus Java remains the most likely target for sabotage actions, and needs to be protected vehemently.
Especially now that Java is in direct competition with.NET, further sabotage actions are not unlikely..NET is just as protected, if not more (also protected by patents probably). For Java at least the spec is open: anyone may make an alternative implementation. For.NET there is no open formal spec at all, and alternative implementations have an unclear legal status.
i remember using a 'vectorizing' fortran compiler on a convex "mini super" in 1988. It had vector units and in those days such hardware with automatically vectorizing fortran compilers was quite common.
I think convex even added vectorizing to its C compiler at the time.
Which is exactly why the big corporations, with full pockets of money but empty innovation, are bribing politicians to grant them eternal monopolies via patents and ever longer copyright expiry dates. It is their way of keeping the real innovators out of the market and continue to remain as parasites in the market, sucking money out of society to transfer to a happy few.
So I am not too hopeful of these innovations. The only hope is that america will fail to blackmail the rest of the world to adopt similar laws that only serve to preserve the vested interest of these corporations.
Apple has a history of being very nasty. Don't forget the FSF boycott of Apple, whereas MSFT apparently was never deemed worthy by the FSF for a boycott.
It is only because they are so much smaller that most have not noticed, but this is a company with a very narrow view. The image of Apple may be very cool, and that may blind many people for the true nature of Apple. But don't be fooled, the recent lawsuits show that Apple still has the same tendencies.
they are NOT violating patents, since said patents do not (yet) exist in europe. Surely they should not have avoided to "violate" against such an immoral concept.
Also, the problem with most "violated" patents even in areas where these do exist (i.e. only the US), almost all of these are patents that should not have been awarded because of obviousness, prior art etc. Only the incompetence of the USPO made such patents possible. What "they should do" is do "violate" these patents and then challenge them in court, however for FOSS developers without much money that is not really possible.
Such claims must be made, since it is in the same league as MSFT and others threatening to leave europe if software patents are not introduced (which is nonsense just the same).
Some of the (evil) politicians keep claiming that the proposed law does not allow pure software patents. We do need warnings like this to set this false claim straight. Since many politicians and also companies in europe do want to use linux, making such threats might help to prevent the introduction of software patents.
this is not true 'information' that is being given to the danish minister, but nothing less than extortion. Thus illegal and punishable similar to a coup d'état and other democracy threatening actions.
has a sound approach to this trade off. It is encouraged that you look at the generated sql, via HQL you can greatly influence the generated sql yet it is automatically adapted to the current sql dialect.
If you need, you can use direct SQL instead of HQL, e.g. to add optimizer hints. Those parts would have to be ported, but in practice it is only a few spots in an application that are really performance ciritical. Thus you can not 100% eliminate portability issues, but you can reduce them to a very small fraction of the application yet do not compromise performance at all.
As for id-generators: hibernate has about 10 built-in methods, a.o. oracle sequences, but also a table where the application may reserve id-s in (large) blocks thus removing the potential bottleneck with that. (sequences have their drawbacks too). A third way is to generate a unique 16-byte id by mixing in ip address, JVM starting time and a counter (however id's generated in the DB would have to use some other scheme without overlap in this case).
And we rely hardly on desktop components, except for offfice. All banking apps are either 3270 screens (so a good 3270 emulator is a must) or webapps. There is a strong push since 3-4 years to move every software towards webapps. If a project needs a fat/rich client, they have to go through great lengths to justify the need. Permission is hardly ever granted.
For some exceptions a citrix solution is considered. Even though no concrete plans exist to migrate the desktop away from windows (AFAIK) it seems that all preparations to do so are being made already.
i don't know about the US, but in most civilized countries debts cannot be inherited, only positive assets.
so anyone with not much assets to leave as a heritage could and should undertake such kind of "last will" actions in order to sabotage the media industry criminals
Slashdot Mirror
we've seen this before, including your claim that the real professionals won't use it.
It is true for the next 2-3 years. In the meantime MSFT will pump millions in it, and leverage its monopoly to push the format/protocol/API whatever.
It will reach the mediocre level at some time, it will never surpass the original (PDF in this case) but it will become "good enough" for 95% of normal users including "normal professionals".
Because of the small remaining group of users for "the real thing", it will retreat into the professional and expensive market and become irrelevant to normal users.
We have seen this pattern before with various protocols, with the web browser, with opengl/directx. It might happen again if they pump enough effort into this and the authorities keep sleeping and let a convicted monopolist misuse its monopoly once more.
For cases where you have to free resources, use try/finally. As far as memory is concerned: nowadays we have garbage collectors :). Even though Java is lacking in some respects compared to C++, garbage collection is a huge plus and but for the most low level tasks, having to deal with memory is insane.
I've used C++ for 10 and C for over 15 years (a.o. in embedded and hard real-time applications), so I have had my deal of manual memory management.
Btw you can ease the pain in C++ if you write decent destructors, and as a rule allocate memory and class instances inside methods on the stack instead of on the heap as you did in your examples.
The costs of time lost due to end-users fiddling with spreadsheets, and even add train people to do that, I don't think this is a good idea.
Once a spreadsheet has grown beyond the trivial, and it starts using macro's and pieces of VB, it has become a software program.
Why do so many people assume that anyone with a bit of brains can write decent professions software (i.e. with certain quality standards)? Who don't they think that anyone with a bit of brains can design a building or a bridge?
Instead it would be better to give in and make sure that there is enough budget to let the real software people develop. It is fooling yourself to save money in the IT department, then throw it out of the window by letting amateurs make their own software, both in terms of lost time and in terms of errors and bad quality costing loads of money.
The difference between a spreadsheet and an ordinary document is that a speadsheet is a kind of programming environment. End-users who think they can do the same job as professional software developers often build monstrous spreadsheets full of formulars, macro's and some VB for excel.
I work at a large bank, making software to support the investment strategists. Often we find such situations where some strategist has built his own "program" using spreadsheets and sometimes some access "database". And in 99% of such cases these, of course, contain severe errors and thus produce garbage. I can imagine very well that this costs an enormous amount of money yearly.
For years it has been a heated debate when we make some software program, if it should have an "export to excel" function or not. The end-users want it, in order to keep some control and be able to suck the data out of our system and then start playing around with their own "programs". The project management often want to prevent this (depending on the current political balance and power) because it is known that such playing around massively costs time, leads to irrational business processes and mostly causes erronous numbers and calculations to be used as basis for strategic decisions.
Apart from exceptions, you can fully replace goto statements by using small methods and bailing out in the middle, i.e. put a return statement somewhere before the end of the method.
Should you need some statement before truely returning, you can:
* use a try/finally block
or
* call your method from an extra method, return in the middle and put the 'end' statement in the extra method
IOW: I see no reason at all for a goto statement if you only jump forward.
And jumping back is, as we agree, inacceptible.
Indeed, there are lots of players without DRM. I don't understand why people don't pay a bit attention (verify they can use the player as a mass storage device to put MP3's on them.
For example pockettunes for palm-OS is a great player. I put my T5 in "drive mode" which makes the internal and external (1GB sD card) memory available via USB as a mass storage device.
I think the industry might force (in some legislations such as the US) the producers of specific MP3 players to implement DRM. But since pocket PC and palm-OS devices are freely programmable and have become very good MP3 players as well, they lose. 1GB now costs less than $100 and prices keep dropping fast.
It won't be long before you don't need a HDD based MP3 player to store your complete music collection.
And you know that Linus reverse engineered UNIX? He recreated a system with the same API. What is wrong with that? There would be no progress at all if we weren't "stealing" each others ideas all the time. Neither in science, nor in art, nor in (software) engineering.
I find the current brainwashing efforts of "intellectual property" proponents to make us believe there is anything wrong with reverse engineering highly immoral, contradictory with human civilization and ignoring its history.
It is what subversion is doing.
However, the grandparent article didn't really suggest that Linus use SVN, since as you pointed out he won't due to lack of a distributed repository. The statement on the similarity of versioning concept between SVN and the description of what Linus alledgedly is implementing on his own is correct.
Looking at a list of new stuff in JDO 2 compared to JDO 1, it is obvious that all that happened between version 1 and 2 is to copy features from Hibernate.
This goes from the most fundamental one, namely to specify an ORM, to many details such as an API to get a single result instead of a Collection from a query.
Since Bitkeeper is not BSD either.
Bitkeeper is just a commercial product with an exception for a specific case. This exception, as we have seen now, can be withdrawn just like that.
It proves only that a free license is important. Both GPL and BSD are free licenses, each with advantages and disadvantages. But at least, both are free.
It is not necessary to drag in the old BSD vs. GPL discussion here; the issue is completely different.
In the long run, yes. But releasing the amount of CO2 in 200 years that has been stored away over a period of millions of years does increase CO2 for a "short" period of time (on a geological time scale).
Burning fuels that store the CO2 now and release it now (both on a time scale of months) does not have this "short" term effect.
I doubt if tabbed browsing can help IE, since it has been available for a long time now in IE-based browsers such as IE2/Maxthon. Only an effective protection against spam and good ad blocking might help, but I doubt very much if MSFT can deliver that.
Of course MSFT would not openly adopt java and modify it again, since officially they are using .NET. However since .NET and Java are in fierce competition, for enterprise development .NET is still in its infancy but MSFT is trying to change this, I could imagine MSFT to sponsor or otherwise help 'grassroots' development of competing java versions.
.NET is open and specified at ECMA. This is not entirely true: Only C# the language and CLR the VM are, but .NET including its framework and libraries are not (e.g. windows forms). For Java OTOH, the complete JDK, i.e. everything you need to build applications not only parts of it, is openly specified and available cross platform.
These versions of course would add some candy to attract developers (such as operator overloading) while destroying the 100% compatability that java offers, creating confusion and thus discrediting java for enterprise development.
By the way, someone wrote that
Others might argue that the same forking might happen to PHP, perl etc. However, do not forget that MSFT actually has tried to fork an incompatible version of Java, they never tried such a thing with other 'cross-platform' language.
.NET, further sabotage actions are not unlikely. .NET is just as protected, if not more (also protected by patents probably). For Java at least the spec is open: anyone may make an alternative implementation. For .NET there is no open formal spec at all, and alternative implementations have an unclear legal status.
Why? Because Java is the only real threat. Java's real importance is in 'enterprise' development; many large companies have been developing in Java for the last 3-5 years, the importance of Java in such environments dwarfs any other development platform, except maybe for cobol. Thus Java remains the most likely target for sabotage actions, and needs to be protected vehemently.
Especially now that Java is in direct competition with
i remember using a 'vectorizing' fortran compiler on a convex "mini super" in 1988. It had vector units and in those days such hardware with automatically vectorizing fortran compilers was quite common.
I think convex even added vectorizing to its C compiler at the time.
Which is exactly why the big corporations, with full pockets of money but empty innovation, are bribing politicians to grant them eternal monopolies via patents and ever longer copyright expiry dates. It is their way of keeping the real innovators out of the market and continue to remain as parasites in the market, sucking money out of society to transfer to a happy few.
So I am not too hopeful of these innovations. The only hope is that america will fail to blackmail the rest of the world to adopt similar laws that only serve to preserve the vested interest of these corporations.
Apple has a history of being very nasty. Don't forget the FSF boycott of Apple, whereas MSFT apparently was never deemed worthy by the FSF for a boycott.
It is only because they are so much smaller that most have not noticed, but this is a company with a very narrow view. The image of Apple may be very cool, and that may blind many people for the true nature of Apple. But don't be fooled, the recent lawsuits show that Apple still has the same tendencies.
they are NOT violating patents, since said patents do not (yet) exist in europe. Surely they should not have avoided to "violate" against such an immoral concept.
Also, the problem with most "violated" patents even in areas where these do exist (i.e. only the US), almost all of these are patents that should not have been awarded because of obviousness, prior art etc. Only the incompetence of the USPO made such patents possible. What "they should do" is do "violate" these patents and then challenge them in court, however for FOSS developers without much money that is not really possible.
Such claims must be made, since it is in the same league as MSFT and others threatening to leave europe if software patents are not introduced (which is nonsense just the same).
Some of the (evil) politicians keep claiming that the proposed law does not allow pure software patents. We do need warnings like this to set this false claim straight. Since many politicians and also companies in europe do want to use linux, making such threats might help to prevent the introduction of software patents.
this is not true 'information' that is being given to the danish minister, but nothing less than extortion. Thus illegal and punishable similar to a coup d'état and other democracy threatening actions.
Why is there no criminal act? I think there is, since false arguments are being used to pressure democratically elected politicians.
If overthrouwing the government is illegal, this should be illegal too, and deserves harsh punishment for the persons involved.
has a sound approach to this trade off.
It is encouraged that you look at the generated sql, via HQL you can greatly influence the generated sql yet it is automatically adapted to the current sql dialect.
If you need, you can use direct SQL instead of HQL, e.g. to add optimizer hints. Those parts would have to be ported, but in practice it is only a few spots in an application that are really performance ciritical. Thus you can not 100% eliminate portability issues, but you can reduce them to a very small fraction of the application yet do not compromise performance at all.
As for id-generators: hibernate has about 10 built-in methods, a.o. oracle sequences, but also a table where the application may reserve id-s in (large) blocks thus removing the potential bottleneck with that. (sequences have their drawbacks too). A third way is to generate a unique 16-byte id by mixing in ip address, JVM starting time and a counter (however id's generated in the DB would have to use some other scheme without overlap in this case).
indeed, i used moox for a while and found it subjectively to be slower, and also it had more bugs. since then I use only the normal firefox builds.
And we rely hardly on desktop components, except for offfice. All banking apps are either 3270 screens (so a good 3270 emulator is a must) or webapps. There is a strong push since 3-4 years to move every software towards webapps. If a project needs a fat/rich client, they have to go through great lengths to justify the need. Permission is hardly ever granted.
For some exceptions a citrix solution is considered. Even though no concrete plans exist to migrate the desktop away from windows (AFAIK) it seems that all preparations to do so are being made already.
i don't know about the US, but in most civilized countries debts cannot be inherited, only positive assets.
so anyone with not much assets to leave as a heritage could and should undertake such kind of "last will" actions in order to sabotage the media industry criminals