I really think the Iraqi people have had enough of the US testing out its latest weapons on them. The whole thing has really been a big showroom for the defence companies.
Yes you are absolutely right. They all use the CLR, which uses Garbage collection. Reference counting had some problems in that if you had objects pointing to each other (e.g. a parent and child in a tree being aware of one another) reference counting could not automatically clear them up.
VB does let you develop quite rapidly, but no more rapidly than most languages that have built-in GUI builders. The language lacked some important features such as inheritance, but it was still possible to write good applications. The problem is that because VB was easy to use, management would often employ morons to use it. I'm talking about VB6 here, not the new VB.NET (which I don't use).
As for rewriting your VB apps in a "real language" like C++, well, VB is a real language. It manages it's own objects using reference counting (the new VB.NET uses Garbage collection) and you really need something like that for rapid business development. I shudder to think of all the memory leaks that would arise in an equivalent C++ program.
You can buy them fairly cheaply. The are known as "Ghost Phones". They normally seem to be a software hacked version of an early 2000s mobile that looks a bit out of place among the modern fancy phones. You can probably get more modern versions too though.
The Russian government has often assassinated enemies with stupidly obvious methods like exotic poisons delivered through micro-machines pellets. The whole point of killing with these methods is to send a signal and leave little doubt who was responsible.
However, killing him has probably backfired since more people know about the FSB bombing allegations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bo mbings#FSB_involvement) than before. The allegations seem quite credible. It's very much like a 911 conspiracy, i.e. Stage a terrorist outrage as an excuse to start a war. However, unlike 911 conspiracies, you find that you are not rolling your eyes with this one.
True. 3D is not the most important thing. Having a very large field of view is the key to making you feel you are there. Sadly, most head mounted displays have a very poor FOV, even the very expensive ones.
Some kinds of nano-particles may be dangerous but we shouldn't get the wrong impression that Nanotechnology is itself dangerous. Similarly, microscopic particles can be dangerous but we don't think of micro-scale technologies such as Microprocessors as being dangerous.
I've thought about this quite a bit. The enabling technology would be Molecular Manufacturing, i.e. The original vision of Eric Drexler. You could have a microwave oven sized device that takes in a raw chemical feed and constructs your objects. I'm sure that there will still be issues of copyright but there would also be a thriving open source culture. There would be open source chairs, tables and probably more complex efforts such as electrical goods.
One problem I can foresee though is safety. If I made an open source chair that worked fine for me but collapsed for heavier people (and killed a few), I would feel pretty bad. Who is going to test the open-source physical objects for safety?
This thing is supposed to transmit at 6.4MHz. Searching for 6.4Mhz on Google brings back many many links about devices for which that frequency is important. And we wouldn't just be talking about a little bit of radio interference. This would be high power interference.
They did not 'discontinue' classic VB in the sense that they will not fix library bugs as and when they come up
Mainstream Support for Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 ended on March 31, 2005. Extended support will end in March 2008. So we are now in the Extended Phase where "Critical Updates will be available for a fee." That doesn't really fill me with confidence.
or maintain your old applications as is and write your newer stuff in a language which meets your current needs
As long as the newer stuff doesn't have to communicate with the older stuff, all is well. Otherwise its Interop Hell.
I did not start off as a C# developer, I switched from C++ because I liked the language features in C# better
C# has a lot to offer, but there are some things "missing" compared to C++. For example, I really like the ability in C++ to "protect" objects. i.e. If you want to pass an object into a function and the function shouldn't change it, you can pass it by constant reference. No such facility exists in C#. You have to "trust" that the function won't change your object.
The Algol, LISP, and Fortran programmers either stuck with their language of choice and still use it to this day or they switched to something else when their needs changed.
Exactly. Any Business that has written products in these languages can change to another language when it suits them, because the languages still exist. Companies are still making Fortran compilers and IDE's. In the case of VB, Microsoft has effectively forced you to change languages at potentially huge financial cost.
a lot of the OSS development out there is actually done in C with GCC
Not for rapid business development I shouldn't think. Anyway, what I mean is making use of open source stuff, not writing it. Lots of Business are now thinking of or are actively moving over to open source technologies to reduce the risk of depending on one company. i.e. Microsoft.
I don't really know what's going on in General, but several of the European companies we were working with were planning to switch over to Linux, Java and as much "open-source" technology as they could. They informed us of their plans and indicated that if we wanted to do business in the future, we should also move in the same direction.
After seeing how bad the "converter" was we quickly abandoned the idea of automatically converting to VB.NET or anything else. Even in principle there are many problems with automatic conversion such as issues caused by the fact that objects lives are no longer so predictable (reference counting vs Garbage Collection). And if you have tried to do clever stuff in VB6 to get around its limitations (like we did), you are really in trouble.
So we also decided the best thing was to rewrite things component by component, or at the very least write all new components in C# and use INTEROP. However, we found interop to be absolute hell. After I left the company they hired a.NET consultant and I have since found out that they had such problems communicating between the different.NET and VB components that they resorted to communicating via the database in some awkward way (I shudder).
I suppose that as long as you stick to developing using Mono and as long as Microsoft do not shut Mono down in the future in some legal attack, developing with C# is safe. Obviously if you develop using Visual Studio you will end up using all sorts of things that won't work with Mono. Even so, the fact the Microsoft dumped a language that so many people were using does not fill me with confidence.
Obviously Microsoft has a lot of momentum but if I were in charge of a business I would sooner choose Java than.NET. Sun are actually interested in having a cross-platform system whereas Microsoft are too tied up with pushing Windows. And now that Java is going fully open-source, it's an even more attractive option.
It has a sophisticated pattern recognition which can detect the difference between humans and trees
That's not really good enough. I think there will be a lot of objections over the wildlife that would be targeted and killed. They will have to improve their algorithms to distinguish between animals and humans. Of course, this inevitably leads to a large scale onslaught of North Korean soldiers dressed up as pantomime horses.
I think the Onyx Concept phone makes more sense. The company has developed a very robust and versatile touch sensitive film, which can then be placed over the screen and used as a keyboard. The idea is that the whole phone is one big screen and the keys can appear in any size and shape depending on the task at hand. That way you can have both a big screen and a big keyboard rather than having a compromise between the two.
Apparently their their touch screen technology allows for two finger input and proximity sensing which opens up even more possibilities.
I thought readers would be interested in exactly why Microsoft spends so much effort on backwards compatibility
Shame they don't do that with other products. They discontinued the VB language (forget about VB.NET, not the same!) and left thousands of companies in the lurch. Millions of dollars were invested in writing VB products around the world and many of the companies do not have the finances to completely rewrite their products again in a new language. I suspect that many of them are keeping quiet since making a big noise about it would frighten both customers and investors.
I was therefore happy to hear that Java is going open source. Perhaps we can now consider it "safe" to use.
It's the Universe making solar power hard, not a conspiracy of apparently-omnipotent "evil executives".
I'm not sure that's entirely true. If solar power did become insanely cheap, (e.g. 40% efficient solar sheets that cost $10 per square meter) then the oil industry would massively suffer. Even if they owned all the solar cell manufacturers, I doubt they could ever make as much money from solar as they can from oil. Coming from this position it would make perfect business sense to use your lobbying power to prevent national/state funding of solar power research as much as possible. I certainly can't see much evidence of large scale funding of solar research. In contrast there is rather a lot of funding for Fusion research.
Given the huge potential of solar power, I wonder why there is no "National Solar Research Initiative" receiving billions in funding. I don't know if there is any lobbying against solar research going on, but it would seem like a good business strategy to do so.
There were plenty of reports of men being barred from leaving Fallujah by US forces. It reminds me of Israel's warnings for people to leave south Lebanon, but at the same time announcing they would destroy any vehicles they see moving. Anyway, if I were a man living in Falljuah at the time, I would worry about ending up in Abu Grahib, even if I had nothing to do with the insurgency. Lots of people stay behind despite the danger for a whole variety of reasons, just consider hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. And how about if Hezbollah warned all Israelis to leave a town because they were trying to destroy army Facilities with rockets. If Israelis decided to ignore the warnings, does that mean its their own fault if they get killed? Would that then exonerate Hezbollah? Of course not.
The fun of Digital technology is surely the miniaturization and the convenience. To me DSLRs provide neither. I think the less imposing something is, the more you will use it. I have a Camcorder, but I hardly ever use it. It's really not the sort of thing you want to carry around and whip out. You just look a jerk with a Camcorder in your hands. However, since I got my little Sony Cybershot (which also takes great 640x480 Videos), I've been videoing a lot of stuff.
Many people consider Fallujah to be collective punishment. Perhaps the large scale assault was really intended to teach the population a lesson for supporting the insurgency. As President, Bush must take ultimate responsibility for the assault, just like Saddam must take responsibility for his orders.
If Iraq took over the US, George Bush would be up on all sorts of war crimes charges. The terrible assault on Fallujah would be one of them. Most houses were badly damaged or destroyed and civilian casualties showed evidence of the use of Phosphorus weapons.
Saddam Hussein killed hundreds of Shia because of an attempt on his life, and US Forces destroyed Fallujah because some "Contractors" (Mercenaries working for Blackwater USA) were killed there.
Both were effectively revenge attacks and collective punishment is explicitly illegal under Article 33 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The Shock and Awe campaign that started the war would no doubt also be brought into question.
I find it amazing that given the enormous potential of solar power, there is so little money being invested. When it comes to fusion, governments invest billions in international programmes, yet invest virtually nothing for solar research. Why is that? Is it due to lobbying from oil companies?
It's all so stupid. They could massively reduce the piracy and make a lot of money at the same time by adopting the Blockbuster postal DVD model. i.e. A system where you pay a flat rate of $20 or so a month and you can download and watch whatever you want. It would be far better than Blockbuster since with DVD's there are a limited supply and you often have to wait months to get what you want. No such problem exists with online media. There would really be no point in pirating anything since you could watch what you want when you want for a really cheap price. I don't care if they DRM it since it's rental and I wouldn't expect to actually own anything.
The Studios could cut the Broadcasters and advertisers out of the loop by offering their content to us directly. Obviously they would need to band together and create a blockbusterish front company to collect all the different content together conveniently.
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I really think the Iraqi people have had enough of the US testing out its latest weapons on them. The whole thing has really been a big showroom for the defence companies.
Yes you are absolutely right. They all use the CLR, which uses Garbage collection. Reference counting had some problems in that if you had objects pointing to each other (e.g. a parent and child in a tree being aware of one another) reference counting could not automatically clear them up.
VB does let you develop quite rapidly, but no more rapidly than most languages that have built-in GUI builders. The language lacked some important features such as inheritance, but it was still possible to write good applications. The problem is that because VB was easy to use, management would often employ morons to use it. I'm talking about VB6 here, not the new VB.NET (which I don't use).
As for rewriting your VB apps in a "real language" like C++, well, VB is a real language. It manages it's own objects using reference counting (the new VB.NET uses Garbage collection) and you really need something like that for rapid business development. I shudder to think of all the memory leaks that would arise in an equivalent C++ program.
You can buy them fairly cheaply. The are known as "Ghost Phones". They normally seem to be a software hacked version of an early 2000s mobile that looks a bit out of place among the modern fancy phones. You can probably get more modern versions too though.
The Russian government has often assassinated enemies with stupidly obvious methods like exotic poisons delivered through micro-machines pellets. The whole point of killing with these methods is to send a signal and leave little doubt who was responsible.
o mbings#FSB_involvement) than before. The allegations seem quite credible. It's very much like a 911 conspiracy, i.e. Stage a terrorist outrage as an excuse to start a war. However, unlike 911 conspiracies, you find that you are not rolling your eyes with this one.
However, killing him has probably backfired since more people know about the FSB bombing allegations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_b
True. 3D is not the most important thing. Having a very large field of view is the key to making you feel you are there. Sadly, most head mounted displays have a very poor FOV, even the very expensive ones.
Some kinds of nano-particles may be dangerous but we shouldn't get the wrong impression that Nanotechnology is itself dangerous. Similarly, microscopic particles can be dangerous but we don't think of micro-scale technologies such as Microprocessors as being dangerous.
From the BBC article
[b]The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres, the researchers said.[/b]
Many Meters = Interference
I've thought about this quite a bit. The enabling technology would be Molecular Manufacturing, i.e. The original vision of Eric Drexler. You could have a microwave oven sized device that takes in a raw chemical feed and constructs your objects. I'm sure that there will still be issues of copyright but there would also be a thriving open source culture. There would be open source chairs, tables and probably more complex efforts such as electrical goods.
One problem I can foresee though is safety. If I made an open source chair that worked fine for me but collapsed for heavier people (and killed a few), I would feel pretty bad. Who is going to test the open-source physical objects for safety?
This thing is supposed to transmit at 6.4MHz. Searching for 6.4Mhz on Google brings back many many links about devices for which that frequency is important. And we wouldn't just be talking about a little bit of radio interference. This would be high power interference.
They did not 'discontinue' classic VB in the sense that they will not fix library bugs as and when they come up
Mainstream Support for Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 ended on March 31, 2005. Extended support will end in March 2008. So we are now in the Extended Phase where "Critical Updates will be available for a fee." That doesn't really fill me with confidence.
or maintain your old applications as is and write your newer stuff in a language which meets your current needs
As long as the newer stuff doesn't have to communicate with the older stuff, all is well. Otherwise its Interop Hell.
I did not start off as a C# developer, I switched from C++ because I liked the language features in C# better
C# has a lot to offer, but there are some things "missing" compared to C++. For example, I really like the ability in C++ to "protect" objects. i.e. If you want to pass an object into a function and the function shouldn't change it, you can pass it by constant reference. No such facility exists in C#. You have to "trust" that the function won't change your object.
The Algol, LISP, and Fortran programmers either stuck with their language of choice and still use it to this day or they switched to something else when their needs changed.
Exactly. Any Business that has written products in these languages can change to another language when it suits them, because the languages still exist. Companies are still making Fortran compilers and IDE's. In the case of VB, Microsoft has effectively forced you to change languages at potentially huge financial cost.
a lot of the OSS development out there is actually done in C with GCC
Not for rapid business development I shouldn't think. Anyway, what I mean is making use of open source stuff, not writing it. Lots of Business are now thinking of or are actively moving over to open source technologies to reduce the risk of depending on one company. i.e. Microsoft.
I don't really know what's going on in General, but several of the European companies we were working with were planning to switch over to Linux, Java and as much "open-source" technology as they could. They informed us of their plans and indicated that if we wanted to do business in the future, we should also move in the same direction.
After seeing how bad the "converter" was we quickly abandoned the idea of automatically converting to VB.NET or anything else. Even in principle there are many problems with automatic conversion such as issues caused by the fact that objects lives are no longer so predictable (reference counting vs Garbage Collection). And if you have tried to do clever stuff in VB6 to get around its limitations (like we did), you are really in trouble.
.NET consultant and I have since found out that they had such problems communicating between the different .NET and VB components that they resorted to communicating via the database in some awkward way (I shudder).
.NET. Sun are actually interested in having a cross-platform system whereas Microsoft are too tied up with pushing Windows. And now that Java is going fully open-source, it's an even more attractive option.
So we also decided the best thing was to rewrite things component by component, or at the very least write all new components in C# and use INTEROP. However, we found interop to be absolute hell. After I left the company they hired a
I suppose that as long as you stick to developing using Mono and as long as Microsoft do not shut Mono down in the future in some legal attack, developing with C# is safe. Obviously if you develop using Visual Studio you will end up using all sorts of things that won't work with Mono. Even so, the fact the Microsoft dumped a language that so many people were using does not fill me with confidence.
Obviously Microsoft has a lot of momentum but if I were in charge of a business I would sooner choose Java than
It has a sophisticated pattern recognition which can detect the difference between humans and trees
That's not really good enough. I think there will be a lot of objections over the wildlife that would be targeted and killed. They will have to improve their algorithms to distinguish between animals and humans. Of course, this inevitably leads to a large scale onslaught of North Korean soldiers dressed up as pantomime horses.
I think the Onyx Concept phone makes more sense. The company has developed a very robust and versatile touch sensitive film, which can then be placed over the screen and used as a keyboard. The idea is that the whole phone is one big screen and the keys can appear in any size and shape depending on the task at hand. That way you can have both a big screen and a big keyboard rather than having a compromise between the two.
Apparently their their touch screen technology allows for two finger input and proximity sensing which opens up even more possibilities.
I thought readers would be interested in exactly why Microsoft spends so much effort on backwards compatibility
Shame they don't do that with other products. They discontinued the VB language (forget about VB.NET, not the same!) and left thousands of companies in the lurch. Millions of dollars were invested in writing VB products around the world and many of the companies do not have the finances to completely rewrite their products again in a new language. I suspect that many of them are keeping quiet since making a big noise about it would frighten both customers and investors.
I was therefore happy to hear that Java is going open source. Perhaps we can now consider it "safe" to use.
As the elevator ascends, it will be gaining angular momentum. For this to work you would need a lateral thrust. Where is that going to come from?
Given the huge potential of solar power, I wonder why there is no "National Solar Research Initiative" receiving billions in funding. I don't know if there is any lobbying against solar research going on, but it would seem like a good business strategy to do so.
There were plenty of reports of men being barred from leaving Fallujah by US forces. It reminds me of Israel's warnings for people to leave south Lebanon, but at the same time announcing they would destroy any vehicles they see moving. Anyway, if I were a man living in Falljuah at the time, I would worry about ending up in Abu Grahib, even if I had nothing to do with the insurgency. Lots of people stay behind despite the danger for a whole variety of reasons, just consider hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. And how about if Hezbollah warned all Israelis to leave a town because they were trying to destroy army Facilities with rockets. If Israelis decided to ignore the warnings, does that mean its their own fault if they get killed? Would that then exonerate Hezbollah? Of course not.
The fun of Digital technology is surely the miniaturization and the convenience. To me DSLRs provide neither. I think the less imposing something is, the more you will use it. I have a Camcorder, but I hardly ever use it. It's really not the sort of thing you want to carry around and whip out. You just look a jerk with a Camcorder in your hands. However, since I got my little Sony Cybershot (which also takes great 640x480 Videos), I've been videoing a lot of stuff.
Many people consider Fallujah to be collective punishment. Perhaps the large scale assault was really intended to teach the population a lesson for supporting the insurgency. As President, Bush must take ultimate responsibility for the assault, just like Saddam must take responsibility for his orders.
If Iraq took over the US, George Bush would be up on all sorts of war crimes charges. The terrible assault on Fallujah would be one of them. Most houses were badly damaged or destroyed and civilian casualties showed evidence of the use of Phosphorus weapons.
Saddam Hussein killed hundreds of Shia because of an attempt on his life, and US Forces destroyed Fallujah because some "Contractors" (Mercenaries working for Blackwater USA) were killed there.
Both were effectively revenge attacks and collective punishment is explicitly illegal under Article 33 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The Shock and Awe campaign that started the war would no doubt also be brought into question.
I find it amazing that given the enormous potential of solar power, there is so little money being invested. When it comes to fusion, governments invest billions in international programmes, yet invest virtually nothing for solar research. Why is that? Is it due to lobbying from oil companies?
It's all so stupid. They could massively reduce the piracy and make a lot of money at the same time by adopting the Blockbuster postal DVD model. i.e. A system where you pay a flat rate of $20 or so a month and you can download and watch whatever you want. It would be far better than Blockbuster since with DVD's there are a limited supply and you often have to wait months to get what you want. No such problem exists with online media. There would really be no point in pirating anything since you could watch what you want when you want for a really cheap price. I don't care if they DRM it since it's rental and I wouldn't expect to actually own anything.
The Studios could cut the Broadcasters and advertisers out of the loop by offering their content to us directly. Obviously they would need to band together and create a blockbusterish front company to collect all the different content together conveniently.
It sounds like something out of that film with Michael Douglas, "The Game".