the fact that one of your edits have been shunned does not make it a less valid source.
Actually it does. Wikipedia was supposed to be the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, but it has long since lost its neutrality.
if a few corporations close the internet as we know it, as their fenced gardens, all of your freedom goes away.
You don't have that freedom on wikipedia either. That it's people doing it for their own self-importance rather than material profit in some ways makes it worse; they're harder to predict and work around.
nobody can remember the over-hyped "PS2 emotion engine"
Hmm? I remember, and it seems to have fulfilled it. The PS2's graphics look good enough that I don't care about better. Or rather, while I do care, it doesn't get in the way of games - in the N64 or anything earlier, the graphics are always obviously unrealistic, wheras IME the PS2 is as convincing as modern games or even movie CG. And as for the "players feeling real emotion" part, well, for me that's been true since at least Chrono Trigger. I don't even like the PS2 (the games available by and large don't interest me, and I've grown out of consoles in general), but I think it fulfilled its promises, and IIRC it remains the best selling games console of all time.
The point is that open source makes it possible for every tin-pot dictator to have his own customized web browser (and mandate all his citizens to use it) - wheras if he asked MS to produce a custom version of IE with his evil logging in, they'd tell him where to stuff it (at least in theory). Which is true as far as it goes, but really just a side effect of the way open source lowers the barrier to entry, for everyone.
I'd agree with you if it were easy to get an IPv6 subnet of your own (actually assigned to you, not just probably not used by anyone else like that webpage gives you). But it isn't. I tried to IPv6 my home network a couple of years ago, and for supposedly non-scarce addresses they're actually harder to get hold of (as a private individual) than IPv4 addresses.
Why? Would be US interested in importing anti-hydrogen? What for?
It's not about moving it between countries, it's about being able to make it in one big accelerator and then transport it to labs around the world. That would be very useful for science.
So a partial achivement in 1995 is not good enough?
Most new achievements are incremental improvements on previous ones.
Sure, but that's always explicit. You'll never call a library function and have it make your method return, whereas you can call a library function and have it make your method throw an exception.
It is not uncommon for a new language to be somewhat compatible with another language. In fact, C++ itself is a prime example of this.
Sure. But it's very uncommon for a new language to have quite as many features (many of which overlap in terms of what they do) as C++ (just compare the length of the C++ standard to any other one), and if one was proposed it would (quite rightly) be derided as overly cluttered, complex, impossible to learn from scratch.
That said, you have a strange idea of "didn't work out". Namespaces are a critical feature to C++
I was under the impression there was a consensus they weren't really working; see the need to use unordered_map so as not to conflict with hash_map.
While the library interfaces could always stand some improvement, I hardly find it a showstopper that a few interfaces are still on char* --- there might even be good reasons for it (think about it).
No one problem is ever a showstopper. But C++ has hundreds of little corners like this that would make absolutely no sense in a new language, and together they make it harder to learn; they're there solely for the sake of compatibility with previous versions. Which makes sense, but only if you take the (frankly obvious) position that C++0x is not a new language, but a revision of an existing one.
Using C++ does force you to think about exceptions, and in particular about resource management in the presence of exceptions, which is where the real headaches come from. Of course C allows you to do the same thing with goto, but hopefully by now people know better than that.
It takes a very strange cast of mind to translate "illegal to be distributed as free software" as "open".
It's a published standard, from a real standards body. The insanities of patent law are problems with patent law, not problems with H264, and the standards body did everything they reasonably could to work around them.
Contrast VP8. It's not even a published standard, it's a case of "this dump of convoluted C code is the standard"; it's not practical to implement it independently from the spec because there is no spec (or rather, when google's implementation differs from the spec, it's the spec that they change). It's not been standardized by a standards body outside of google. It may turn out to have fewer patent worries, and if so I can see the merit of that, but considered in isolation it's far less open, and frankly I doubt they've really managed to avoid all the patents.
Um, if you can't distinguish between x264 and theora then you're in no position to be making any judgements on x264 vs vp8 - in fact, I'm surprised if you can tell the difference between any video codecs from the last ten years or so, theora vs x264 is not subtle. Which probably puts you in with most of the population in not caring about video quality - but accept that there are people who do.
If it's a new language then it should get rid of features that didn't work out - drop namespaces, make everything use std::string rather than char*, reclaim some low-level syntax (e.g. []) for something more useful in high-level programming (lists?)... etc.
Have you tried: a) C# (I know, I know, but it actually makes a lot of the right choices; it's pretty good as an incrementally-improved Java (which in turn was an incrementally-improved C++)). b) One of the strongly typed functional languages - OCaml or the like. It's a different style of programming, but one that ultimately makes you a better programmer, in any language.
Really, nobody should be using Chrome anyway. Firefox has a much, much better spec on nearly every level, is open source, has the adblock extension available....
Firefox performance is terrible, it uses oodles of memory, and extensions are a terrible idea (didn't we realise this back when they were called ActiveX?). If you're on windows you're on a closed OS (that could have any number of fundamental vulnerabilities) anyway, so insisting on an open browser is a bit backwards. On Linux, if you're going to insist on non-chrome there are much better alternatives (konqueror is the best browser out there IMO. Even one of the wrappers around gecko - epiphany, or whatever it's called - will get you much better performance than firefox. Heck, mozilla seamonkey performs a lot better than firefox.)
Yes the patented codec may be slightly better now, but if an open codec becomes the standard then in the long term we're better off as it will be easier for people to make improvements to it.
Except the "standard" has already been set in stone. There are outright bugs in VP8 that damage quality, but google refuses to fix them because that would break compatibility with existing bitstreams. Which reminds me of the story of make's creator refusing to change its stupid tabs/spaces handling because he already had ten users.
I admit I find it rather strange that you consider legality to be a mere 'meta' issue. Do you regularly break the law in your daily business life, and expect others to?
I do, and I bet you do too; pretty much any driver does, for starters. The law has grown beyond the point where any individual can even comprehend it, yet alone abide by it.
Yes, really. There is no animated PNG. There is MNG for that purpose, but it never caught on - to the extent that IIRC Mozilla removed their code for it, because there was no-one to maintain it.
Well sure. But being able to carry around antimatter in a box (or rather a shipping container) would be nice, and I suspect very useful for physics (letting labs around the world get a supply for study from somewhere bigger).
Don't compare Apple's policies to what you think they should be; compare them instead to what the carrier Nazis used to enforce.
Maybe it's different in the US, but over here carriers enforced nothing. I paid for the data plan, and I could do whatever I wanted with it - install any programs I wanted, even write my own, "tether" to my laptop, no trouble.
2. Neils Bohr invented his preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics because we was inspired by Kant.
And thereby set back quantum mechanics a century or more.
3. Adam Smith was a "moral philosopher." Before him economics didn't exist.
In those days everyone was a philosopher. But the heirs of historical philosophers are not those who call themselves philosophers today; rather, they're the followers of the he best and most successful branch of philosophy, natural philosophy - which we now regard as the distinct discipline of science.
The anti-hydrogen atoms were only stable in the particle-physicist sense - IIRC they lasted about 5 seconds. If someone's built an antimatter container that can keep it around for, say, long enough to fly it across the atlantic, that really is a new achievement.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it does. Wikipedia was supposed to be the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, but it has long since lost its neutrality.
if a few corporations close the internet as we know it, as their fenced gardens, all of your freedom goes away.
You don't have that freedom on wikipedia either. That it's people doing it for their own self-importance rather than material profit in some ways makes it worse; they're harder to predict and work around.
Hmm? I remember, and it seems to have fulfilled it. The PS2's graphics look good enough that I don't care about better. Or rather, while I do care, it doesn't get in the way of games - in the N64 or anything earlier, the graphics are always obviously unrealistic, wheras IME the PS2 is as convincing as modern games or even movie CG. And as for the "players feeling real emotion" part, well, for me that's been true since at least Chrono Trigger. I don't even like the PS2 (the games available by and large don't interest me, and I've grown out of consoles in general), but I think it fulfilled its promises, and IIRC it remains the best selling games console of all time.
The point is that open source makes it possible for every tin-pot dictator to have his own customized web browser (and mandate all his citizens to use it) - wheras if he asked MS to produce a custom version of IE with his evil logging in, they'd tell him where to stuff it (at least in theory). Which is true as far as it goes, but really just a side effect of the way open source lowers the barrier to entry, for everyone.
I'd agree with you if it were easy to get an IPv6 subnet of your own (actually assigned to you, not just probably not used by anyone else like that webpage gives you). But it isn't. I tried to IPv6 my home network a couple of years ago, and for supposedly non-scarce addresses they're actually harder to get hold of (as a private individual) than IPv4 addresses.
It's not about moving it between countries, it's about being able to make it in one big accelerator and then transport it to labs around the world. That would be very useful for science.
So a partial achivement in 1995 is not good enough?
Most new achievements are incremental improvements on previous ones.
Sure, but that's always explicit. You'll never call a library function and have it make your method return, whereas you can call a library function and have it make your method throw an exception.
Sure. But it's very uncommon for a new language to have quite as many features (many of which overlap in terms of what they do) as C++ (just compare the length of the C++ standard to any other one), and if one was proposed it would (quite rightly) be derided as overly cluttered, complex, impossible to learn from scratch.
That said, you have a strange idea of "didn't work out". Namespaces are a critical feature to C++
I was under the impression there was a consensus they weren't really working; see the need to use unordered_map so as not to conflict with hash_map.
While the library interfaces could always stand some improvement, I hardly find it a showstopper that a few interfaces are still on char* --- there might even be good reasons for it (think about it).
No one problem is ever a showstopper. But C++ has hundreds of little corners like this that would make absolutely no sense in a new language, and together they make it harder to learn; they're there solely for the sake of compatibility with previous versions. Which makes sense, but only if you take the (frankly obvious) position that C++0x is not a new language, but a revision of an existing one.
Using C++ does force you to think about exceptions, and in particular about resource management in the presence of exceptions, which is where the real headaches come from. Of course C allows you to do the same thing with goto, but hopefully by now people know better than that.
What's kept us on jpeg rather than jpeg2k is, surprise surprise, patent issues. I suspect that's the case for your other examples too.
It's a published standard, from a real standards body. The insanities of patent law are problems with patent law, not problems with H264, and the standards body did everything they reasonably could to work around them.
Contrast VP8. It's not even a published standard, it's a case of "this dump of convoluted C code is the standard"; it's not practical to implement it independently from the spec because there is no spec (or rather, when google's implementation differs from the spec, it's the spec that they change). It's not been standardized by a standards body outside of google. It may turn out to have fewer patent worries, and if so I can see the merit of that, but considered in isolation it's far less open, and frankly I doubt they've really managed to avoid all the patents.
Silverlight/Moonlight. Hilarious but true.
Um, if you can't distinguish between x264 and theora then you're in no position to be making any judgements on x264 vs vp8 - in fact, I'm surprised if you can tell the difference between any video codecs from the last ten years or so, theora vs x264 is not subtle. Which probably puts you in with most of the population in not caring about video quality - but accept that there are people who do.
In theory yes, but IME okular gets the rendering better sometimes. Don't ask me why. Also the interface is nicer.
Qt is great, but it's even better if you use it from Python.
Uh, you can set posts listed as funny to be adjusted by -5 in your preferences.
If it's a new language then it should get rid of features that didn't work out - drop namespaces, make everything use std::string rather than char*, reclaim some low-level syntax (e.g. []) for something more useful in high-level programming (lists?)... etc.
Have you tried: a) C# (I know, I know, but it actually makes a lot of the right choices; it's pretty good as an incrementally-improved Java (which in turn was an incrementally-improved C++)). b) One of the strongly typed functional languages - OCaml or the like. It's a different style of programming, but one that ultimately makes you a better programmer, in any language.
Firefox performance is terrible, it uses oodles of memory, and extensions are a terrible idea (didn't we realise this back when they were called ActiveX?). If you're on windows you're on a closed OS (that could have any number of fundamental vulnerabilities) anyway, so insisting on an open browser is a bit backwards. On Linux, if you're going to insist on non-chrome there are much better alternatives (konqueror is the best browser out there IMO. Even one of the wrappers around gecko - epiphany, or whatever it's called - will get you much better performance than firefox. Heck, mozilla seamonkey performs a lot better than firefox.)
Except the "standard" has already been set in stone. There are outright bugs in VP8 that damage quality, but google refuses to fix them because that would break compatibility with existing bitstreams. Which reminds me of the story of make's creator refusing to change its stupid tabs/spaces handling because he already had ten users.
I do, and I bet you do too; pretty much any driver does, for starters. The law has grown beyond the point where any individual can even comprehend it, yet alone abide by it.
Yes, really. There is no animated PNG. There is MNG for that purpose, but it never caught on - to the extent that IIRC Mozilla removed their code for it, because there was no-one to maintain it.
Well sure. But being able to carry around antimatter in a box (or rather a shipping container) would be nice, and I suspect very useful for physics (letting labs around the world get a supply for study from somewhere bigger).
Maybe it's different in the US, but over here carriers enforced nothing. I paid for the data plan, and I could do whatever I wanted with it - install any programs I wanted, even write my own, "tether" to my laptop, no trouble.
And thereby set back quantum mechanics a century or more.
3. Adam Smith was a "moral philosopher." Before him economics didn't exist.
In those days everyone was a philosopher. But the heirs of historical philosophers are not those who call themselves philosophers today; rather, they're the followers of the he best and most successful branch of philosophy, natural philosophy - which we now regard as the distinct discipline of science.
The anti-hydrogen atoms were only stable in the particle-physicist sense - IIRC they lasted about 5 seconds. If someone's built an antimatter container that can keep it around for, say, long enough to fly it across the atlantic, that really is a new achievement.