You don't need tools to write in Java -- people managed before fancy IDEs came along.
I'm pretty sure anyone who did that will be taking early retirement for their RSI. Java has its place but writing it unassisted is literally physically painful.
new tab for konsole? just double-click on a free area of the tab bar.
That hides the feature and is harder to use.
As for the desktop and panel right-click... Are you sure you are not confusing gnome and KDE. 'cause I can add any service menu to the right click. In fact the desktop and panel of KDE4 are way more configurable than the ones from KDE3.
He's complaining about the way you add new "widgets" to the panel, or move it around.
As someone who learnt it as a first language, java is a horrible first language. Just look at Java's hello world (it's about eight lines, one of which starts "public static void main") - it's intimidating as hell compared to something like python ("print 'hello world'"). Java forces you to understand the notion of classes from the get-go (or cargo-cult a bunch of arbitrary crap before and after your actual program), which is a whole load of trouble you don't need when you're learning basic concepts like a for loop. And that's without even going into the lack of an interpreter or first-class functions.
If you have a decent flat surface and take your shoe off you can use a normal mouse perfectly well with your foot. Decent control (gets better with practice, and it feels like having fine control over your leg should be useful for something), and leaves both hands free for the keyboard.
The reason is that a web page is the most effective way to make a cross-platform UI. It's hilarious and tragic, but true, and so pragmatic developers follow along with it, rolling our eyes and letting faster processors handle the overhead.
I presume he's talking about functors - you can overload the "() operator" in C++ (the same way you overload any other operator), so you can create classes that act as functions. They can be used without modifying existing code, so they're more useful than the myriad java Function interfaces, but they still require masses of typing.
This is one of the reasons the criticism of gold or bitcoins as deflationary is laughable. Our existing monetary system would be mind bendingly deflationary without constant injections of monetary inflation (bailouts, interest rate cuts, Fed POMOs etc.).
So our existing monetary system has all the problems of bitcoin, except that for our existing monetary system there are solutions for these problems and for bitcoin there aren't.
Text files that are over 20 years old are very hard to read.
If you're talking about actual text files, no. They're the same format they've always been.
Most of them are microsoft files and even Word can't read them.
Well, that's your problem right there. But even then, it's not hard to read old word files, you just need to be willing to put in a bit of time and effort to run an old version of word under emulation.
What are the odds of a file created toady[sic] being readable in a 100 years?
Probably higher than the same odds for a book. Any file that people are actually reading will be maintained, and files that are just "dumped" out there on the internet have a much better chance than a book you don't care about, simply because it's trivial for anyone who cares even a tiny bit to make their own copy of a digital file.
Files are easily lost, much easier than a book. One hard drive crash can wipe out all your books.
Sure, but you can store five copies of your digital book collection in less space than it would take to store a tiny fraction of them in hard copy. The fact that people don't says more about how much value they place on their books than on the inherent reliability of the digital medium.
If no one maintains a given book file it will cease to exist and no one will find it in a box in some one's attic 200 years from now.
I wouldn't count on that. I've dropped SD cards down the sofa, and just one of them could hold an entire library with ease. Gold-plated contacts would probably survive 200 years, and even if they didn't they could easily be replaced. The actual memory is solid-state and should be good for centuries. As you say, CDs and DVDs have limited lifetimes, but what you're forgetting is so do books. Cheap paper rots in a few decades, it's only in carefully controlled archives that you can reliably keep books for hundreds of years - and comparable solutions exist for digital data. Those books found in attics are a small proportion where we were lucky, and we've got just as much chance of being similarly lucky with DVDs and the like.
We already lose thousands if not millions of books each year - no-one cares about most of them. Cheap novels die quickly, while the kind of books that university libraries keep copies of last much longer, but if no-one's using even those kind of books then they won't be replaced when they're eventually lost or damaged. The best we could ever hope for would be to save every book that at least one person cared about - and digital puts us much closer to being able to do that than hardcopy.
I've written C where I needed to, and of course I wrote bits and pieces around its problems - though these (quite rightly) belong to what are now previous employers. But in most cases it's just a load of time and effort overhead for little benefit. Your libraries may let you find memory management problems quicker, but they don't save you having to think about the memory management, wasting brainspace that would be better used on the problem the application's trying to solve. (Either that or they abstract it away enough that you no longer have hand control - at which point, you've just come a long way around to where those of us in better languages already are). As for maintenance, I can make, test and release a bugfix in less time than it takes a decent-sized C program to compile.
When we come to libraries, you seem to be taking the position that your code will always be better than other people's. Maybe that's the case for you, but it trivially isn't for the vast majority of programmers. For any normal programmer, reimplementing functionality found in an existing library is just a waste of their time - custom code is more likely to be buggy than a widely used library (because the average programmer won't be better than the library's authors, and there will have been more opportunity to find bugs in the library). I fear you're wasting your talents doing things that have already been done, and making your applications use less memory rather than making them do more.
C++, of course, is something you can quite easily write a very large program in, or operating system for that matter.
The current security records of major operating systems suggest otherwise. I don't think C++ is a sensible choice for large-scale projects, because the implications of a single mistake anywhere in the code can be enormous.
No, I'm good enough to realize that my time is better spent actually solving problems than doing manual memory management (which is and always will be tedious and error-prone). And unless you're claiming you've never introduced a memory leak or a race condition, then no, in C you will produce more bugs in the same program.
Consequently used modern C++ doesn't behave any different from a GCd language.
Except all your lines are two hundred characters long, full of std:: and angle brackets.
Sure, it's possible to write code like you'd get in a modern GC'd language in C++. But why would you? It's not going to perform better (see the article, the performance was the same until they brought in a C++ expert to very carefully tune the C++ version), and it's going to be harder to write, and buggier.
Are both of them better than my $100 headphones? yes.
Have you got a double-blind test to back that up? "Audiophiles" aren't mocked because the differences are tiny, but because they're usually not there at all.
Perhaps we should show the security flaws in real life system. Guess what? Nothing is secure. If LulzSec were serial killers would it still be the same for you? Proving how insecure our frail human necks are?
They wouldn't be able to kill many people, which is rather the point.
The reason you aren't murdered for every interaction you've ever had is not because you were secure. This is bullshit, anti-social, watching-the-world-burn asshattery.
Whatever the intent, the effects of what they're doing are quite plausibly positive. A publicly visible breach like this will do a lot less damage (both to the users and their credit card companies) than a stealthy breach by profit-driven criminals; if it prevents the latter, it's ultimately more than worth it.
You are at the mercy of everybody, and the only way to stop this kind of behavior is through social pressure which will come in the form of being able to identify internet users.
No. The internet's anonymity is its greatest asset; the correct answer is to require identification for access. Passwords are broken as a means of doing this, but it can be done.
I notice you don't mention URLs in your list. They're a lot harder to do speech recognition on because they don't form well-separated dictionary words the way most other input does. And while I'm sure google would love us to all just search for things rather than using web addresses, I'm not willing to go there yet.
the cost of mining increases exponentially by design
And so for the value of bitcoins to match the cost of mining, as you just claimed was expected, the value of bitcoins has to increase exponentially.
But also because the bitcoin economy doesn't necessarily need to grow to $20 million, if it's used mainly for "in flight" transactions.
For it to be practical to use bitcoins like that, we would need reliable exchanges with low fees. The only way you could operate such an exchange is having large reserves, and then we're back at the same problem. $20 million is just an impractically small quantity to form a liquid global currency.
Please. You can buy all sorts of crap with USD, at stable rates, just as you can (with a little more effort) with gold, just as you couldn't with WDM, and just as you can't with bitcoins.
It's expected that the market value of Bitcoins will settle at just above the cost of mining, if you mine very efficiently.
Which if bitcoin is successful can only happen with massive deflation, because if the whole economy runs on bitcoins and there are 20 million in total, the value of each has to be huge.
People who got in early will gain. I don't see anything wrong with that. It's the same as if I'd bought shares in Amazon when they were still running out of a garage.
No it isn't; at any point in Amazon's history, you had to pay n% of their current value to get n% of their stock. Not 2^kn% where k is how many years it's been running, which seems to be how bitcoin works.
None of those were as heavily skewed as BitCoin. Imagine if the first prospector to arrive in California had walked away with half the gold in the entire universe.
My Windows 7 desktop and laptop both boot in 20 seconds from an SSD
That's quite a long time if you just want to look something up
For recovery you can boot a CD or USB flash drive, and in fact that is the only option if your HDD is failing and you want to do emergency data recovery
No it isn't; sure this is probably equivalent to a USB flash drive on a technical level, but it's much easier for the user.
I already do quick bits of web browsing on my phone and will probably get a tablet to do it at some point
Phones and tablets still don't have a decent input method. Even just typing a URL is painful.
Making a better version for iFolk alone is evil, and I suspect that's what he mistook it for. I'm reminded of the BBC insisting for years that they couldn't possibly make non-DRM streams available for linux users, and then the iphone got them right away.
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You don't need tools to write in Java -- people managed before fancy IDEs came along.
I'm pretty sure anyone who did that will be taking early retirement for their RSI. Java has its place but writing it unassisted is literally physically painful.
new tab for konsole? just double-click on a free area of the tab bar.
That hides the feature and is harder to use.
As for the desktop and panel right-click... Are you sure you are not confusing gnome and KDE. 'cause I can add any service menu to the right click. In fact the desktop and panel of KDE4 are way more configurable than the ones from KDE3.
He's complaining about the way you add new "widgets" to the panel, or move it around.
As someone who learnt it as a first language, java is a horrible first language. Just look at Java's hello world (it's about eight lines, one of which starts "public static void main") - it's intimidating as hell compared to something like python ("print 'hello world'"). Java forces you to understand the notion of classes from the get-go (or cargo-cult a bunch of arbitrary crap before and after your actual program), which is a whole load of trouble you don't need when you're learning basic concepts like a for loop. And that's without even going into the lack of an interpreter or first-class functions.
Oh man you're right, look at Somalia they don't have any immigration problems.
If you have a decent flat surface and take your shoe off you can use a normal mouse perfectly well with your foot. Decent control (gets better with practice, and it feels like having fine control over your leg should be useful for something), and leaves both hands free for the keyboard.
The reason is that a web page is the most effective way to make a cross-platform UI. It's hilarious and tragic, but true, and so pragmatic developers follow along with it, rolling our eyes and letting faster processors handle the overhead.
You mean you can't? And people usually claim FreeBSD has fewer features...
I presume he's talking about functors - you can overload the "() operator" in C++ (the same way you overload any other operator), so you can create classes that act as functions. They can be used without modifying existing code, so they're more useful than the myriad java Function interfaces, but they still require masses of typing.
Even if all that were true (and it isn't), needing to recompile your programs separately for each processor out there would kill such a platform dead.
So our existing monetary system has all the problems of bitcoin, except that for our existing monetary system there are solutions for these problems and for bitcoin there aren't.
If you're talking about actual text files, no. They're the same format they've always been.
Most of them are microsoft files and even Word can't read them.
Well, that's your problem right there. But even then, it's not hard to read old word files, you just need to be willing to put in a bit of time and effort to run an old version of word under emulation.
What are the odds of a file created toady[sic] being readable in a 100 years?
Probably higher than the same odds for a book. Any file that people are actually reading will be maintained, and files that are just "dumped" out there on the internet have a much better chance than a book you don't care about, simply because it's trivial for anyone who cares even a tiny bit to make their own copy of a digital file.
Files are easily lost, much easier than a book. One hard drive crash can wipe out all your books.
Sure, but you can store five copies of your digital book collection in less space than it would take to store a tiny fraction of them in hard copy. The fact that people don't says more about how much value they place on their books than on the inherent reliability of the digital medium.
If no one maintains a given book file it will cease to exist and no one will find it in a box in some one's attic 200 years from now.
I wouldn't count on that. I've dropped SD cards down the sofa, and just one of them could hold an entire library with ease. Gold-plated contacts would probably survive 200 years, and even if they didn't they could easily be replaced. The actual memory is solid-state and should be good for centuries. As you say, CDs and DVDs have limited lifetimes, but what you're forgetting is so do books. Cheap paper rots in a few decades, it's only in carefully controlled archives that you can reliably keep books for hundreds of years - and comparable solutions exist for digital data. Those books found in attics are a small proportion where we were lucky, and we've got just as much chance of being similarly lucky with DVDs and the like.
We already lose thousands if not millions of books each year - no-one cares about most of them. Cheap novels die quickly, while the kind of books that university libraries keep copies of last much longer, but if no-one's using even those kind of books then they won't be replaced when they're eventually lost or damaged. The best we could ever hope for would be to save every book that at least one person cared about - and digital puts us much closer to being able to do that than hardcopy.
When we come to libraries, you seem to be taking the position that your code will always be better than other people's. Maybe that's the case for you, but it trivially isn't for the vast majority of programmers. For any normal programmer, reimplementing functionality found in an existing library is just a waste of their time - custom code is more likely to be buggy than a widely used library (because the average programmer won't be better than the library's authors, and there will have been more opportunity to find bugs in the library). I fear you're wasting your talents doing things that have already been done, and making your applications use less memory rather than making them do more.
C++, of course, is something you can quite easily write a very large program in, or operating system for that matter.
The current security records of major operating systems suggest otherwise. I don't think C++ is a sensible choice for large-scale projects, because the implications of a single mistake anywhere in the code can be enormous.
No, I'm good enough to realize that my time is better spent actually solving problems than doing manual memory management (which is and always will be tedious and error-prone). And unless you're claiming you've never introduced a memory leak or a race condition, then no, in C you will produce more bugs in the same program.
Consequently used modern C++ doesn't behave any different from a GCd language.
Except all your lines are two hundred characters long, full of std:: and angle brackets.
Sure, it's possible to write code like you'd get in a modern GC'd language in C++. But why would you? It's not going to perform better (see the article, the performance was the same until they brought in a C++ expert to very carefully tune the C++ version), and it's going to be harder to write, and buggier.
Are both of them better than my $100 headphones? yes.
Have you got a double-blind test to back that up? "Audiophiles" aren't mocked because the differences are tiny, but because they're usually not there at all.
Perhaps we should show the security flaws in real life system. Guess what? Nothing is secure. If LulzSec were serial killers would it still be the same for you? Proving how insecure our frail human necks are?
They wouldn't be able to kill many people, which is rather the point.
The reason you aren't murdered for every interaction you've ever had is not because you were secure. This is bullshit, anti-social, watching-the-world-burn asshattery.
Whatever the intent, the effects of what they're doing are quite plausibly positive. A publicly visible breach like this will do a lot less damage (both to the users and their credit card companies) than a stealthy breach by profit-driven criminals; if it prevents the latter, it's ultimately more than worth it.
You are at the mercy of everybody, and the only way to stop this kind of behavior is through social pressure which will come in the form of being able to identify internet users.
No. The internet's anonymity is its greatest asset; the correct answer is to require identification for access. Passwords are broken as a means of doing this, but it can be done.
I notice you don't mention URLs in your list. They're a lot harder to do speech recognition on because they don't form well-separated dictionary words the way most other input does. And while I'm sure google would love us to all just search for things rather than using web addresses, I'm not willing to go there yet.
the cost of mining increases exponentially by design
And so for the value of bitcoins to match the cost of mining, as you just claimed was expected, the value of bitcoins has to increase exponentially.
But also because the bitcoin economy doesn't necessarily need to grow to $20 million, if it's used mainly for "in flight" transactions.
For it to be practical to use bitcoins like that, we would need reliable exchanges with low fees. The only way you could operate such an exchange is having large reserves, and then we're back at the same problem. $20 million is just an impractically small quantity to form a liquid global currency.
Am I just getting old?
Yes.
Please. You can buy all sorts of crap with USD, at stable rates, just as you can (with a little more effort) with gold, just as you couldn't with WDM, and just as you can't with bitcoins.
It's expected that the market value of Bitcoins will settle at just above the cost of mining, if you mine very efficiently.
Which if bitcoin is successful can only happen with massive deflation, because if the whole economy runs on bitcoins and there are 20 million in total, the value of each has to be huge.
People who got in early will gain. I don't see anything wrong with that. It's the same as if I'd bought shares in Amazon when they were still running out of a garage.
No it isn't; at any point in Amazon's history, you had to pay n% of their current value to get n% of their stock. Not 2^kn% where k is how many years it's been running, which seems to be how bitcoin works.
None of those were as heavily skewed as BitCoin. Imagine if the first prospector to arrive in California had walked away with half the gold in the entire universe.
My Windows 7 desktop and laptop both boot in 20 seconds from an SSD
That's quite a long time if you just want to look something up
For recovery you can boot a CD or USB flash drive, and in fact that is the only option if your HDD is failing and you want to do emergency data recovery
No it isn't; sure this is probably equivalent to a USB flash drive on a technical level, but it's much easier for the user.
I already do quick bits of web browsing on my phone and will probably get a tablet to do it at some point
Phones and tablets still don't have a decent input method. Even just typing a URL is painful.
Making a better version for iFolk alone is evil, and I suspect that's what he mistook it for. I'm reminded of the BBC insisting for years that they couldn't possibly make non-DRM streams available for linux users, and then the iphone got them right away.