I'm not really a Perl fan, and don't consider it good for "programming in the large". For that you might use Ruby better, but only if you don't need speed.
For its original purpose however, small scripts handling large files or other datastreams and searching those, Perl is unparallelled.
It comes close to the speed of C for such I/O tasks, which cannot be said of any other scripting language. Especially Ruby, while beautiful, is way too slow for such tasks.
No I don't think so. I think Freenet is a reaction on unjust authorities cracking down on people, be it political suppression in China or the because of the devious idea of "intellectual property" (a concept I utterly reject) in the "free" world.
It is the authorities that provoke the extreme reaction of using an encrypted network to protect peoples rights and privacy. If the authorities would not be so unjust, normal and decent people would not have anything to hide, and freenet would not have to exist.
Net everything that runs on a virtual machine must necessarily be "fundamentally equal", as is "proven" by the fact that most CPU's may be emulated in a virtual machine, yet many languages that compile directly into i386 are fundamentally different.
Yes, one could even imagine totally different languages for CLR. However, as long as you want.net languages to share the.net class library (i.e. use C# written classes fully in another.net language, and use classes written in the other.net language in C#), the languages MUST be fundamentally equal. If you would have fundamentally different features (such as multiple inheritance) you BREAK the possibility to fully cross the language borders and call each others classes.
Why do you think that most native languages can only share the lowest common denominator, C, to glue things together? Java can call C, Fortran can call C, Python can call C, etc. etc. But they cannot call each other directly. It is impossible, unless the language are all the same in disguise, which is the case currently with all.net languages.
If you would make a really different language running on.net, then what would be the point? You would not be able to use the.net libraries, so the language would be "stand alone". In that case you might as well compile the language natively instead.
The goal of governments is not to do anything as cheap as possible, but to do the right thing.
The right thing, IMHO, is that no state may make itself dependant on a single external (commercial) entity. I would say, no matter what the cost, it is the obligation of any decent government to free themselves of any strangleholds that may exist.
As a side effect, it will be much much cheaper in the long term. Someone must make a first step; after that, the compatability issues shall diminish, and others to follow (e.g. other cities) shall have less problems. Once we are saved from the dictate of proprietary file formats (getting rid of which does cost some money initially) the savings are enormous.
Contrary to quoted companies, states do not only have to look at next quarters financial, i.e. be extremely short sighted, but have to think on timescales of up to 50 years.
Resistance to change within Munich's Rathaus (City Hall) has also been cited in the German press as a source of problems that might delay the project.
Hmm, what to think of this? I MSFT bribing people to generate "resistance"? I could imagine them to use all means to sabotage this project. The outcome of this project is a big example for many others, I think they'll fight with all means possible. Knowing the company, that excludes almost nothing...
If I were in this project team or part of the politicians that made this decision, I would surely monitor any resistant people very closely (including their bank accounts).
Java is available on many more platforms though. And the JVM spec is open, plus all classes are available in source code.
As for.net, only parts have been opened. Large and essential parts are closed and subject to change. Its potential for "run everywhere" is much smaller, and danger for vendor lock in much higher.
Technically,.NET/C# is just like JVM/Java. Except that Java is older and more mature, which has advantages but also some disadvantages (cannot break backwards compatability). Many of C# extra "features" are unnecessary "syntactic sugar", some are superfluous and harmful, and those that are truely useful appear in JDK 1.5 soon. Plus, in JDK 1.5 gets features such as generics which are coming in.net as well, but at a much later time.
You can also compile many language in JVM, but SUN has never used that as a selling point since it is pretty silly. All.net languages are fundamentally equal, just the syntax is different.
Pity I don't have moderation points. I can't stand the kind of blatant lies the AC posted that you are reacting on. It is the tactics of trying to brainwash people by repeating lies over and over again, hoping people start to believe it. Grrr.
I was using about this configuration (20Mhz powerPC and vxworks) for prototypes of similar robots. At that time, the real thing (to go into space) would run into a few kilobytes without real operating system (just an ADA runtime) on some mil-std obscure CPU.
At those times, we dreamed of being able to put our prototypes into space instead. It is nice to read that that has come true:)
In the 1970's most european countries made the switch to SI units. All had to go through this process which is not easy but very beneficial in the end. I find it incredible and very irritating that most of the US, even sensible people such as physisists, just were too lazy to do the same.
XML is no more "non-proprietary" as ASCII or binary MSB or LSM or whatever encoding format is "non-proprietary". People keep confusing the fact that XML is "human readable" with all kind of other attributes.
XML is no more but a way to express data of any kind. The fact that it seems human readable because tags might have meaningful names that might enable easy interpretation of what an XML document means, does not mean that the data can really and unambiguously be interpreted. Unless a specification is given (no, a DTD or schema does not give a specification on the meaning of the data, they just specifify when a particular XML document is "valid" or not) it is no more useful than any other format (whether binary or not).
If they really need to take pathetic steps like this to fitght counterfeit, it is already lost.
If you really want to prevent it, there is no way around abolishing cash and replacing it entirely by chipcards. It would solve many problems including money laundring, theft etc.
Currently running slackware 9, would love to switch to FreeBSD. But I absolutely need vmware. I know version 3 has been ported, but vmware GSX has not and I'm not sure how well vmware version 3 runs.
The only way to guarantee being able to tap voip is to generally outlaw and/or regulate cryptography, such as only allowing very weak cryptography, or mandating a scheme where all keys have to be known with the state authorities.
At the same time, such a system (key escrow) will make use of cryptography across national borders impossible, since there is no state or supranational authority (such as the UN) that would be trusted by all national states to keep the keys needed for decryption.
Can you imagine France to use cryptography using keys known by the US authorities? Can you imagine the US using a system whose keys are entrusted to some U.N. authority? In the latter case, if the US would want to get a key in order to decrypt some domestic voip conversation, would the UN allow it?
In other words: if the US really wants to keep this possibility, the only option is to either outlaw cryptography totally, or to mandate a scheme that can only work domestically and outlawing all other forms of cryptography.
Either way, international ecommerce is killed.
I think that the US autorities, whether they like it or not, have to be prepared for a time where they can no longer tap communications at all, or they must accept a severe blow to the global (and thus national) economy.
Apart from my own benchmarks (I have done benchmarking professionally and still like to do some benchmarks now and then) which I did not publicize, google for jvm clr benchmark delivered a.o.:
Really, look for yourself. The only ones that have clr/C# win are sites that are either affiliated with MSFT or generally pro windows.
I have tested some classes of problems myself (mainly cellular automata such as the Game of Life etc.) and found recent JVM versions to reach about 80-90% of raw C(++) speed, and having a lead of about 10-20% on C#.
I keep wondering why so many people assume that C# is faster. Why do so many people, even on slashdot, blindly believe MSFT propaganda without even doing some research or benchmarks for themselves? That is really frightning.
I admit I don't know the details of neither JVM "machine language" nor CLR, but independent benchmarks, both "real world" and syntetic ones, consistently show the lead that the JVM has, despite of MSFT propaganda.
Do you have real experience with JVM versus CLR real world "high performance computing"? I bet not, since otherwise you would not have written this. There may be a lack of value classes and multi-dimensional arrays as compared to CLR, but the JIT is better. Various benchmarks have shown 10-20% faster execution speed for JVM versus CLR..NET is only faster when it comes to GUI's, because of greater usage of platform dependent (native) code.
If SUN extends the intermediate language specifically targetted to high speed computing, the advantage shall even increase.
Why use the CLR, when the JVM is already faster?!?
Mainly it is missing support for normal SQL (92). They may be talking about "ansi 99 stored procedures", but what's the use as long as essential features in SQL (ansi 92) such as subqueries are still not supported, and as long as transactions are still an add on and not standard?
Adding features before "growing up" is not a good sign. I don't call adding features before essential functionality growing up.
But it is not the same as a true threaded view based on subject. You can't even change the thread a mail appears in by the way. If someone replies to a message but changes the subject, outlook insists on putting it in the original thread, and there is no way of changing that. It is pretty useless because of that, IMHO.
I have been reading mailing lists for 10 years using GNUS, the usenet client for emacs. GNUS has many other "backends", not only nntp/usenet. You can really read mailing lists as if they were newsgroups. You can configure your "post" to just send the message to the list server, and your usenet kill files (and score files) are applied to these "groups" just like elsewhere.
GNUS can even read your inbox and split your mails into different "groups"/lists based on criteria you configure, you don't need procmail for that.
And it has a slashdot backend, to convert slashdot into a newsgroup:) (but I'm not using it at the moment).
At the moment we are using 31-dec-9999 as infinity (the max date Oracle can represent). I think chances are pretty slim that todays systems are still running in 9999.
Not necessarily shall India become just as expensive. As long as there is a local elite, still quite large because the total population of India is huge, can accept much lower wages and still have a very good life, they can continue to kill western economy and way of life (until the corps are stopped).
The Indian elite can do this because the rest of the people live in misery and do anything for a little bit of money, including to send their little children to work. The caste system and child labor are still widespread in India. We can't possibly compete morally with a system like that.
they were replaced by jobs in growth fields such as IT. Will there be new growth areas this time, or will we see permenantly higher unemployment and lower incomes?
That is the key question, and the believe that something else will be a good replacement for these job losses, as happened in the past, is what keeps many from being alerted about this development.
I am not so optimistic however; at the moment it is not just a single profession or industry being made redundant; although the emphasis at this time is on IT, in fact it is any kind of "knowledge work" and many other kinds of jobs too that are under attack. I cannot imagine a replacement for all of this. Also, in the past, there still was a fundamental advantage, skills and infrastructure that "the west" had over "cheap labor" elsewhere. Now this time, I don't see any fundamental advantage left.
When it comes to prestigous projects, somehow it is always France that gets the deal within the EU. This is so irritating and inacceptible.
Just because the french are the best lobbyists and diplomats and most ruthlessly serve solely their own interests, while demanding from others to serve the public interest, they get their way all the time.
I really hope this deal goes to Japan (ps. I'm dutch).
Maybe less mpg, but total use for flight is much higher because distances are higher.
I think that in 50 years time, when fossile fuel is running out and has become a scarce resource, we have to diminish long distance travel in general, making flight very expensive and vanishing.
Also, you might not compare a public transport vehicle such as a 747-400 with a car. Better compare a car with a 1-4 person small plane or a train or coach with an 747-400. Your comparison is not very fair.
Slashdot Mirror
ctwm and tvtwm were one of the oldest window managers with virtual desktops, derived from one of the oldest X window managers twm (uwm was older).
Here is an interesting family tree of twm descendants, showing the first virtual desktop window managers appearing in 1990/1991.
I'm not really a Perl fan, and don't consider it good for "programming in the large". For that you might use Ruby better, but only if you don't need speed.
For its original purpose however, small scripts handling large files or other datastreams and searching those, Perl is unparallelled.
It comes close to the speed of C for such I/O tasks, which cannot be said of any other scripting language. Especially Ruby, while beautiful, is way too slow for such tasks.
No I don't think so. I think Freenet is a reaction on unjust authorities cracking down on people, be it political suppression in China or the because of the devious idea of "intellectual property" (a concept I utterly reject) in the "free" world.
It is the authorities that provoke the extreme reaction of using an encrypted network to protect peoples rights and privacy. If the authorities would not be so unjust, normal and decent people would not have anything to hide, and freenet would not have to exist.
Net everything that runs on a virtual machine must necessarily be "fundamentally equal", as is "proven" by the fact that most CPU's may be emulated in a virtual machine, yet many languages that compile directly into i386 are fundamentally different.
.net languages to share the .net class library (i.e. use C# written classes fully in another .net language, and use classes written in the other .net language in C#), the languages MUST be fundamentally equal. If you would have fundamentally different features (such as multiple inheritance) you BREAK the possibility to fully cross the language borders and call each others classes.
.net languages.
.net, then what would be the point? You would not be able to use the .net libraries, so the language would be "stand alone". In that case you might as well compile the language natively instead.
Yes, one could even imagine totally different languages for CLR. However, as long as you want
Why do you think that most native languages can only share the lowest common denominator, C, to glue things together? Java can call C, Fortran can call C, Python can call C, etc. etc. But they cannot call each other directly. It is impossible, unless the language are all the same in disguise, which is the case currently with all
If you would make a really different language running on
The goal of governments is not to do anything as cheap as possible, but to do the right thing.
The right thing, IMHO, is that no state may make itself dependant on a single external (commercial) entity. I would say, no matter what the cost, it is the obligation of any decent government to free themselves of any strangleholds that may exist.
As a side effect, it will be much much cheaper in the long term. Someone must make a first step; after that, the compatability issues shall diminish, and others to follow (e.g. other cities) shall have less problems. Once we are saved from the dictate of proprietary file formats (getting rid of which does cost some money initially) the savings are enormous.
Contrary to quoted companies, states do not only have to look at next quarters financial, i.e. be extremely short sighted, but have to think on timescales of up to 50 years.
Resistance to change within Munich's Rathaus (City Hall) has also been cited in the German press as a source of problems that might delay the project.
Hmm, what to think of this? I MSFT bribing people to generate "resistance"? I could imagine them to use all means to sabotage this project. The outcome of this project is a big example for many others, I think they'll fight with all means possible. Knowing the company, that excludes almost nothing...
If I were in this project team or part of the politicians that made this decision, I would surely monitor any resistant people very closely (including their bank accounts).
Java is available on many more platforms though. And the JVM spec is open, plus all classes are available in source code.
.net, only parts have been opened. Large and essential parts are closed and subject to change. Its potential for "run everywhere" is much smaller, and danger for vendor lock in much higher.
.NET/C# is just like JVM/Java. Except that Java is older and more mature, which has advantages but also some disadvantages (cannot break backwards compatability). Many of C# extra "features" are unnecessary "syntactic sugar", some are superfluous and harmful, and those that are truely useful appear in JDK 1.5 soon. Plus, in JDK 1.5 gets features such as generics which are coming in .net as well, but at a much later time.
.net languages are fundamentally equal, just the syntax is different.
As for
Technically,
You can also compile many language in JVM, but SUN has never used that as a selling point since it is pretty silly. All
Pity I don't have moderation points. I can't stand the kind of blatant lies the AC posted that you are reacting on. It is the tactics of trying to brainwash people by repeating lies over and over again, hoping people start to believe it. Grrr.
But you have to add the manufacturing costs, and the fact that it is a criminal waste of resources to set up such a "throw away" system.
If this would catch on, it would cause enormous amounts of dvd disks ending up in the trashcan. IMO such thoughtless waste should be forbidden.
I was using about this configuration (20Mhz powerPC and vxworks) for prototypes of similar robots. At that time, the real thing (to go into space) would run into a few kilobytes without real operating system (just an ADA runtime) on some mil-std obscure CPU.
:)
At those times, we dreamed of being able to put our prototypes into space instead. It is nice to read that that has come true
In the 1970's most european countries made the switch to SI units. All had to go through this process which is not easy but very beneficial in the end. I find it incredible and very irritating that most of the US, even sensible people such as physisists, just were too lazy to do the same.
XML is no more "non-proprietary" as ASCII or binary MSB or LSM or whatever encoding format is "non-proprietary". People keep confusing the fact that XML is "human readable" with all kind of other attributes.
XML is no more but a way to express data of any kind. The fact that it seems human readable because tags might have meaningful names that might enable easy interpretation of what an XML document means, does not mean that the data can really and unambiguously be interpreted. Unless a specification is given (no, a DTD or schema does not give a specification on the meaning of the data, they just specifify when a particular XML document is "valid" or not) it is no more useful than any other format (whether binary or not).
If they really need to take pathetic steps like this to fitght counterfeit, it is already lost.
If you really want to prevent it, there is no way around abolishing cash and replacing it entirely by chipcards. It would solve many problems including money laundring, theft etc.
Currently running slackware 9, would love to switch to FreeBSD. But I absolutely need vmware. I know version 3 has been ported, but vmware GSX has not and I'm not sure how well vmware version 3 runs.
The only way to guarantee being able to tap voip is to generally outlaw and/or regulate cryptography, such as only allowing very weak cryptography, or mandating a scheme where all keys have to be known with the state authorities.
At the same time, such a system (key escrow) will make use of cryptography across national borders impossible, since there is no state or supranational authority (such as the UN) that would be trusted by all national states to keep the keys needed for decryption.
Can you imagine France to use cryptography using keys known by the US authorities? Can you imagine the US using a system whose keys are entrusted to some U.N. authority? In the latter case, if the US would want to get a key in order to decrypt some domestic voip conversation, would the UN allow it?
In other words: if the US really wants to keep this possibility, the only option is to either outlaw cryptography totally, or to mandate a scheme that can only work domestically and outlawing all other forms of cryptography.
Either way, international ecommerce is killed.
I think that the US autorities, whether they like it or not, have to be prepared for a time where they can no longer tap communications at all, or they must accept a severe blow to the global (and thus national) economy.
Apart from my own benchmarks (I have done benchmarking professionally and still like to do some benchmarks now and then) which I did not publicize, google for jvm clr benchmark delivered a.o.:
5 20 %23p_the_problem_with_cameron/view
0 78
http://www.jroller.com/page/cpurdy/20030519
http://www.manageability.org/blog/archive/20030
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/6/25/122237/
just to mention a few.
Really, look for yourself. The only ones that have clr/C# win are sites that are either affiliated with MSFT or generally pro windows.
I have tested some classes of problems myself (mainly cellular automata such as the Game of Life etc.) and found recent JVM versions to reach about 80-90% of raw C(++) speed, and having a lead of about 10-20% on C#.
I keep wondering why so many people assume that C# is faster. Why do so many people, even on slashdot, blindly believe MSFT propaganda without even doing some research or benchmarks for themselves? That is really frightning.
I admit I don't know the details of neither JVM "machine language" nor CLR, but independent benchmarks, both "real world" and syntetic ones, consistently show the lead that the JVM has, despite of MSFT propaganda.
Do you have real experience with JVM versus CLR real world "high performance computing"? I bet not, since otherwise you would not have written this. There may be a lack of value classes and multi-dimensional arrays as compared to CLR, but the JIT is better. Various benchmarks have shown 10-20% faster execution speed for JVM versus CLR. .NET is only faster when it comes to GUI's, because of greater usage of platform dependent (native) code.
If SUN extends the intermediate language specifically targetted to high speed computing, the advantage shall even increase.
Why use the CLR, when the JVM is already faster?!?
Mainly it is missing support for normal SQL (92). They may be talking about "ansi 99 stored procedures", but what's the use as long as essential features in SQL (ansi 92) such as subqueries are still not supported, and as long as transactions are still an add on and not standard?
Adding features before "growing up" is not a good sign. I don't call adding features before essential functionality growing up.
But it is not the same as a true threaded view based on subject. You can't even change the thread a mail appears in by the way. If someone replies to a message but changes the subject, outlook insists on putting it in the original thread, and there is no way of changing that. It is pretty useless because of that, IMHO.
I have been reading mailing lists for 10 years using GNUS, the usenet client for emacs. GNUS has many other "backends", not only nntp/usenet. You can really read mailing lists as if they were newsgroups. You can configure your "post" to just send the message to the list server, and your usenet kill files (and score files) are applied to these "groups" just like elsewhere.
:) (but I'm not using it at the moment).
GNUS can even read your inbox and split your mails into different "groups"/lists based on criteria you configure, you don't need procmail for that.
And it has a slashdot backend, to convert slashdot into a newsgroup
At the moment we are using 31-dec-9999 as infinity (the max date Oracle can represent). I think chances are pretty slim that todays systems are still running in 9999.
Not necessarily shall India become just as expensive. As long as there is a local elite, still quite large because the total population of India is huge, can accept much lower wages and still have a very good life, they can continue to kill western economy and way of life (until the corps are stopped).
The Indian elite can do this because the rest of the people live in misery and do anything for a little bit of money, including to send their little children to work. The caste system and child labor are still widespread in India. We can't possibly compete morally with a system like that.
they were replaced by jobs in growth fields such as IT. Will there be new growth areas this time, or will we see permenantly higher unemployment and lower incomes?
That is the key question, and the believe that something else will be a good replacement for these job losses, as happened in the past, is what keeps many from being alerted about this development.
I am not so optimistic however; at the moment it is not just a single profession or industry being made redundant; although the emphasis at this time is on IT, in fact it is any kind of "knowledge work" and many other kinds of jobs too that are under attack. I cannot imagine a replacement for all of this. Also, in the past, there still was a fundamental advantage, skills and infrastructure that "the west" had over "cheap labor" elsewhere. Now this time, I don't see any fundamental advantage left.
When it comes to prestigous projects, somehow it is always France that gets the deal within the EU. This is so irritating and inacceptible.
Just because the french are the best lobbyists and diplomats and most ruthlessly serve solely their own interests, while demanding from others to serve the public interest, they get their way all the time.
I really hope this deal goes to Japan (ps. I'm dutch).
Maybe less mpg, but total use for flight is much higher because distances are higher.
I think that in 50 years time, when fossile fuel is running out and has become a scarce resource, we have to diminish long distance travel in general, making flight very expensive and vanishing.
Also, you might not compare a public transport vehicle such as a 747-400 with a car. Better compare a car with a 1-4 person small plane or a train or coach with an 747-400. Your comparison is not very fair.