I actually listed the GNU compilers in error; it's rather innovative in some of its workings, but just another toolchain under it all. Apache was also probably a poor choice as an example.
Enlightenment, though, or DR-17 anyway, is most definitely innovative. It's the first desktop shell to do a lot of what it does, and is on the whole an impressive feat of engineering, even if it's still not finished.
"Your computer" isn't "cyberspace" unless you're running an unpatched Windows install, and in any case, encrypting the file guards against most problems. It has the problem of creating a single point of failure, though; if a cracker figures out the one password you use to store all your other passwords, then rather than losing just your bank account or just your e-mail or something of that sort, your whole online identity is compromised. Regardless, though, an encrypted file is still probably best so long as you pick a really good password for it; you can use good passwords everywhere without worrying about forgetting them, and it isn't quite as easily compromisable as a slip of paper (which is extraordinarily easy to compromise with a bit of social engineering).
It was only a matter of time until somebody started doing it...
True, but I can't be the only one who's a little disgusted that advertising is so invasive and prevalent that something like this can even be considered a possibility in the first place.
Bittorrent isn't intended to protect your identity. It never was. The fact that it's commonly used for activities that might get people in trouble is just due to lack of a poweful, easy-to-use solution in the arena of programs that do protect your identity (see: Freenet, Tor, and MUTE), and possibly in part to bad planning on the part of an increasingly fragmented and confused base of illegal file-sharers.
Bittorrent isn't designed for distribution of subversive or otherwise contraband content; it's designed to take the load off the backs of legitimate distributors of large files. There's nothing stopping the *AA from shutting servers down, and to the best of my knowledge this feature was not created with the intent of making it difficult for anybody to do so. Bittorrent might be optimal for quickly getting large files, but it isn't intended to protect anybody from anything; for that, you'll want to look into things like MUTE or Tor. The download speeds are not as high, but you aren't going to get caught.
Bittorrent, basically, is a content distribution system, not a copyright-circumvention system. The latter exists, but those need quite a bit more work before they get to the level Bittorrent has attained in terms of popularity and usability (and considering the purpose, this might be a good thing.)
Not everybody is good at charity; sometimes, someone's better at advancing science (in this case, computer science) than at helping the poor through traditional means.
Bittorrent is a brilliant system, and the fact that it's not saving any starving children's lives at this very moment does not mean that it's not a worthwhile thing. If we all concentrated, as you suggest, on charity all of the time, science would become stagnant, and we'd be in a far worse condition than we are now.
I don't know why I'm responding to this; the parent is obviously a troll, but just in case it's at all serious, I may as well reply anyway now that I've gotten this typed up.
As a Java developer for the past 7 years, can someone remind me as to how Java will benefit from being open source?
Ever tried running Java on *BSD? It works to some extent, but it isn't pretty. Having an open implementation could mean that Java and Java Server Pages would become more widely accepted in servers running open systems.
They've got a very good chance of winning, I think. Bill Gates already has a good portion of (people|shills) thinking that GPL == communism; strike one. Free software firms are by nature not very big donators at election time; strike two.
What about strike three? Good question. I only have two strikes, in fact, but the baseball analogy is fun nonetheless.
cron, init, et al. were all doing basically the same thing: starting up processes. Quite frankly, I think this system is great; I'm no Apple-head, but I have to confess that *nix boot-up can be nightmarish. On a server that's rebooted maybe once or twice a year, this is acceptable, but on a laptop, something more substantial is needed. launchd seems to provide this, and while it may do separate tasks and violate the "UNIX philosophy" to some extent, there are cases when having a unified tool for separate but similar tasks can make a system run much more cleanly.
I2P isn't ready for prime-time yet. The code can't handle large numbers of network users currently (though that's on the way to being fixed), and the developer prefers to test things on a smaller network.
As such, I can't say that linking to the project's homepage from Slashdot right now is a very good idea.
Actually, most people don't have a problem with the patent system, because they have no idea that there might in fact be anything wrong with the patent system. Fun experiment: Ask someone you know in real life what they think about software patents. If they respond to you with more than a blank stare, they're an exception rather than the rule.
Most people in the software industry have problems with software patents, but being that they make up a relatively small subset of the unwashed voting masses, this doesn't make any perceptible difference; as long as the issue is ignored by media and people's collective attentions are diverted by concerns with gay marriage, abortion, and other relatively unimportant issues, Nathan Myhrvold's statement is going to be pretty well accurate.
How the hell is this insightful? Budget concerns != social issues; there's a slight difference between a corporation being concerned about how much it will be taxed and a corporation supporting a bill on, say, abortion. That's not to say there's a problem with doing either, but they are not the same thing.
The point is that you have to cast to a string in order to get string functionality. That only one cast is needed instead of two is beside the point; it's still clunky, and languages with built-in string support are much better about string manipulation than C++.
It's clunky, and something of a workaround; strings are still treated as char * types internally unless stated otherwise, so you have to jump through some hoops to get proper string manipulation. You can't, for instance, do this:
std::string s = "Hello, " + "World";
C++ interprets that as adding two pointers to type char together, which does nothing useful whatsoever. Instead, you have to do this:
std::string s = (std::string)"Hello, " + (std::string)"World";
Further, string manipulation is inconsistent; many of even the C++ standard library functions don't handle strings themselves. Ever tried initializing an fstream to a string? You can't do it; you have to use the string's c_str() method.
I program in C++ a lot and do appreciate a lot of the language's strengths (templates are brilliant for implementing data structures), but there are definitely some things that it is not good at, and string handling is one of them.
What's so difficult about specifying to the editor through some sort of dialog box that x chunk of text is supposed to be a paragraph, and that y chunk is supposed to be a heading?
If you want my opinion, the reason semantic coding isn't done more often in visual editors is that it doesn't have value to the market that they're being sold to; if you're using Dreamweaver, you don't care about writing easy-to-maintain or clean-looking code--you just want a good-looking web page that people can navigate, and damned if you're going to worry about semantic details on the way.
Note: I do all of my web work in Vim, and do think that XHTML is a pretty neat thing (though it'd be a lot neater if 90% of the web-browsing world supported it); I'm just commenting on the fact that if you're using WYSIWYG editors, you don't worry about the quality of your source, so any effort on the part of said editors to do so is pointless.
It's a physical requirement for an IP address to be used in order to access a web site, whereas this is an artificially imposed constraint. It's the difference between taking your address in order to deliver a package to your door and, say, fingerprinting you when you buy a product from somewhere.
What of people who don't have Internet connections, or people who have to pay high rates for their internet access and receive one of these doctored PDFs on a CD or floppy disk? Are they just screwed in this?
Slashdot Mirror
I actually listed the GNU compilers in error; it's rather innovative in some of its workings, but just another toolchain under it all. Apache was also probably a poor choice as an example.
Enlightenment, though, or DR-17 anyway, is most definitely innovative. It's the first desktop shell to do a lot of what it does, and is on the whole an impressive feat of engineering, even if it's still not finished.
Certainly not desktop environments, servers, remote shells, anonymizing (or swarming) networks, or compilers.
Because all of those things are just replacements for commercial applications, and did nothing new.
"Your computer" isn't "cyberspace" unless you're running an unpatched Windows install, and in any case, encrypting the file guards against most problems. It has the problem of creating a single point of failure, though; if a cracker figures out the one password you use to store all your other passwords, then rather than losing just your bank account or just your e-mail or something of that sort, your whole online identity is compromised. Regardless, though, an encrypted file is still probably best so long as you pick a really good password for it; you can use good passwords everywhere without worrying about forgetting them, and it isn't quite as easily compromisable as a slip of paper (which is extraordinarily easy to compromise with a bit of social engineering).
#include <stdio.h>
#define NINE 8 + 1
#define SIX 1 + 5
int
main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
printf("\nWhat do you get when you multiply six by nine? %d", SIX * NINE);
return 0;
}
True, but I can't be the only one who's a little disgusted that advertising is so invasive and prevalent that something like this can even be considered a possibility in the first place.
Bittorrent isn't intended to protect your identity. It never was. The fact that it's commonly used for activities that might get people in trouble is just due to lack of a poweful, easy-to-use solution in the arena of programs that do protect your identity (see: Freenet, Tor, and MUTE), and possibly in part to bad planning on the part of an increasingly fragmented and confused base of illegal file-sharers.
Bittorrent isn't designed for distribution of subversive or otherwise contraband content; it's designed to take the load off the backs of legitimate distributors of large files. There's nothing stopping the *AA from shutting servers down, and to the best of my knowledge this feature was not created with the intent of making it difficult for anybody to do so. Bittorrent might be optimal for quickly getting large files, but it isn't intended to protect anybody from anything; for that, you'll want to look into things like MUTE or Tor. The download speeds are not as high, but you aren't going to get caught.
Bittorrent, basically, is a content distribution system, not a copyright-circumvention system. The latter exists, but those need quite a bit more work before they get to the level Bittorrent has attained in terms of popularity and usability (and considering the purpose, this might be a good thing.)
Not everybody is good at charity; sometimes, someone's better at advancing science (in this case, computer science) than at helping the poor through traditional means.
Bittorrent is a brilliant system, and the fact that it's not saving any starving children's lives at this very moment does not mean that it's not a worthwhile thing. If we all concentrated, as you suggest, on charity all of the time, science would become stagnant, and we'd be in a far worse condition than we are now.
I don't know why I'm responding to this; the parent is obviously a troll, but just in case it's at all serious, I may as well reply anyway now that I've gotten this typed up.
Ever tried running Java on *BSD? It works to some extent, but it isn't pretty. Having an open implementation could mean that Java and Java Server Pages would become more widely accepted in servers running open systems.
"Lisa, if we don't watch the commercials, it's like we're stealing TV!"
Forget that. This would be a perfect application for Dijjer.
They've got a very good chance of winning, I think. Bill Gates already has a good portion of (people|shills) thinking that GPL == communism; strike one. Free software firms are by nature not very big donators at election time; strike two.
What about strike three? Good question. I only have two strikes, in fact, but the baseball analogy is fun nonetheless.
cron, init, et al. were all doing basically the same thing: starting up processes. Quite frankly, I think this system is great; I'm no Apple-head, but I have to confess that *nix boot-up can be nightmarish. On a server that's rebooted maybe once or twice a year, this is acceptable, but on a laptop, something more substantial is needed. launchd seems to provide this, and while it may do separate tasks and violate the "UNIX philosophy" to some extent, there are cases when having a unified tool for separate but similar tasks can make a system run much more cleanly.
I2P isn't ready for prime-time yet. The code can't handle large numbers of network users currently (though that's on the way to being fixed), and the developer prefers to test things on a smaller network.
As such, I can't say that linking to the project's homepage from Slashdot right now is a very good idea.
Actually, most people don't have a problem with the patent system, because they have no idea that there might in fact be anything wrong with the patent system. Fun experiment: Ask someone you know in real life what they think about software patents. If they respond to you with more than a blank stare, they're an exception rather than the rule.
Most people in the software industry have problems with software patents, but being that they make up a relatively small subset of the unwashed voting masses, this doesn't make any perceptible difference; as long as the issue is ignored by media and people's collective attentions are diverted by concerns with gay marriage, abortion, and other relatively unimportant issues, Nathan Myhrvold's statement is going to be pretty well accurate.
How the hell is this insightful? Budget concerns != social issues; there's a slight difference between a corporation being concerned about how much it will be taxed and a corporation supporting a bill on, say, abortion. That's not to say there's a problem with doing either, but they are not the same thing.
I wasn't aware of that first syntax; that's actually pretty nice. Thanks!
Regardless, though, there are some things with strings that C++ just isn't good at, as I mentioned.
The point is that you have to cast to a string in order to get string functionality. That only one cast is needed instead of two is beside the point; it's still clunky, and languages with built-in string support are much better about string manipulation than C++.
It's clunky, and something of a workaround; strings are still treated as char * types internally unless stated otherwise, so you have to jump through some hoops to get proper string manipulation. You can't, for instance, do this:
C++ interprets that as adding two pointers to type char together, which does nothing useful whatsoever. Instead, you have to do this:
Further, string manipulation is inconsistent; many of even the C++ standard library functions don't handle strings themselves. Ever tried initializing an fstream to a string? You can't do it; you have to use the string's c_str() method.
I program in C++ a lot and do appreciate a lot of the language's strengths (templates are brilliant for implementing data structures), but there are definitely some things that it is not good at, and string handling is one of them.
The different languages ARE separated into different compilers.
What's so difficult about specifying to the editor through some sort of dialog box that x chunk of text is supposed to be a paragraph, and that y chunk is supposed to be a heading?
If you want my opinion, the reason semantic coding isn't done more often in visual editors is that it doesn't have value to the market that they're being sold to; if you're using Dreamweaver, you don't care about writing easy-to-maintain or clean-looking code--you just want a good-looking web page that people can navigate, and damned if you're going to worry about semantic details on the way.
Note: I do all of my web work in Vim, and do think that XHTML is a pretty neat thing (though it'd be a lot neater if 90% of the web-browsing world supported it); I'm just commenting on the fact that if you're using WYSIWYG editors, you don't worry about the quality of your source, so any effort on the part of said editors to do so is pointless.
Indeed, part of me worries about the dangers of computer addiction.
Fortunately, though, the other part knows better, so I don't get too jittery when I'm away from them for a while.
You must be new here.
I think it's very telling that the parent was modded "Funny"...
It's a physical requirement for an IP address to be used in order to access a web site, whereas this is an artificially imposed constraint. It's the difference between taking your address in order to deliver a package to your door and, say, fingerprinting you when you buy a product from somewhere.
What of people who don't have Internet connections, or people who have to pay high rates for their internet access and receive one of these doctored PDFs on a CD or floppy disk? Are they just screwed in this?