"Genetic?" if the parents are not autistic, then it can't be their fault. It would be the fault of the "non-autistic" ancestor who had children with an autistic person.
I don't think it is classically genetic so much as a mutation caused by environmental issues. It may simply be that paople are having children later in life and the older you get the higher the likelihood of autism and other birth defects.
There's also the issue that if she can't blame someone else the only obvious alternative is to blame herself. Something few people would willingly face the possibility of doing.
I find it difficult to believe that the parent of an autistic child is to be "blamed." At this stage in the game, no one knows what causes autism so it is too early to asses blame.
Let me first say that I dislike comcast and as soon as there is some real competition I will drop them. I.E. when FiOS comes to town, fuck comcast.
That being said, they are in a bad position of having to provide high speed service to a lot of people cheaply.
The 70 year old grandmother pays as much as the P2P users but the P2P software is designed to maximize throughput typically at the expense of the other network users. So, while someone is "gaming" the network to get better bandwidth, granny is having a hard time downloading pictures of her grandkids.
There are times when there are no "good" answers to a problem, only degrees of less bad. I'm not trying to defend Comcast, per se', I'm just trying to have an open mind about the issue. Bandwidth throttling/shaping is a necessary part of network management, I don't have a problem with it as long as it is applied fairly and without prejudice.
That's not how copyrights work. By default, you have no right to do anything with someone else's copyrighted work.
This is, of course, complete nonsense and exactly what the media companies want to to think. The mere act of an entity "publishing" i.e. making something available to the public, gives "the public" certain rights to that material. These rights are embodied by "fair use."
If you want more rights than fair use provides, then you need an agreement.
Yes, distributing the driver itself is "dangerous" as "infringement" has been made intentionally ambiguous by the media companies to cast the broadest definitions. Just being sued by these behemoths is damaging, so its best to avoid it.
That being said, from a legal point of view, he should be in the clear, but big evil corp will use copyright ambiguity. It is best to use a patching strategy to avoid all risk.
All that being said, what Creative did is tortuous interference and that is grounds for a suit. He has certainly suffered emotional distress, how could he not, being threatened by a large corporation's lawyers?
I wrote the last time this came up that Daniel did nothing wrong. All he did is phrase his donations plea poorly.
Since the drivers he made available were generally available anyway, he did not run afoul of copyright for making his changes available. (assuming he uses the words "for support work" and not "for the drivers") He could use "patch" just to be 100% sure.
As a consultant I can (and have done) modify third party hardware and software for the benefit of a customer who has proper ownership of the hardware and license to the software and I may change for that service and there's NOTHING the third party vendor can do about it.
The relationship Daniel has with the user of a driver with his modifications is of no business to Creative. In fact, Creative may be worried that they are interfering with Daniels business. If you are curious look up "Tortuous Interference."
Daniel *did* make money from his work. He could have a case against Creative's very public accusation.
Some select quotes: For Windows Vista, Microsoft had to change their design and development strategy in order to comply with the DoJ and EU regulations regarding the anti-trust issues present in previous versions of Windows; specifically, the integration of assistive applications such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player into the core operating system. Competitors complained that offering internet and media solutions with the operating system harmed competition in the marketplace (despite other operating systems such as Mac OS X and Linux apparently being immune from such criticism).
Well, the rules are different for a monopoly and second, on Linux all the pieces are quite separate and replaceable, especially the media and web browser.
In response to this, Microsoft made fundamental changes to the way Windows Vista was linked together; shifting more towards modular designs rather than the monolithic processes used in previous versions of Windows
Bzzzt! Wrong, this is an outright lie or they guy is a complete idiot. It's all just DLLs the way it has always been.
I could go on, but the first half of the post is a set of bogus excuses that don't even touch the real issues. So how much quality would follow?
If Microsoft was at all smart, they would use a light weight "Windows on Windows" strategy similar to how they implemented 16 bit Windows on the NT base on a new VERY stripped-down 64 bit Windows kernel and use virtualization of every Windows application.
In this day and age, it makes no sense to me to write another massive OS.
There is an uncomfortable feeling between police, politicians, and the military for "intelligent" types.
Lawyers are wimps, just give them money and they'll shut up.
Scientists are "hot house flowers" who deal with theory and few ever produce much more than papers.
Mathematicians, give me a break, kill me with long division?
Engineers, we are a real threat, we know shit and we know how to apply it. More than that, we often work under pressure and think about fixing problems before they happen. Also, I don't know a single "good" engineer that couldn't blow up a building if we were so inclined.
Using a cantenna, the "smart" students should aim the directional wifi to their dorms and surf on the library IP address. That would be funny. Then the university would HAVE to defend itself against this nonsense instead of throwing its students under the wheels.
To establish prior art you need to publish. The problem is that magazines and journals are fairly selective about content because they have to pay or the content has to fit their market or be interesting in some way. Then there is credibility, if you write an article about recommendations or motor control methodology, something you've done as a hobby project, a magazine or journal may not choose to publish because it can not properly verify the content.
We need to create an "on-line" and perhaps paper "journal" that will accept all technical submissions and publish them in a way that fits the USPTO's definition of "published" to establish prior art. That way *all* ideas get covered easily.
I've written a lot of articles and only been published a few times, its hard to get published. There are lots of would be authors out there and a lot of subject matter being written about.
The ISO standard, besides showing how corrupting Microsoft's monopoly money is, changes nothing.
We have the same situation today as we did yesterday.
(1) A "standard" which is only a standard because a monopoly uses it. (2) A "standard" which is independently implemented by (n>1) vendors.
So, as long as *we* the technologically literate stay "on message" like the P.R. spinmasters, we can use this in our favor.
The "April fools document standard" AFDS for short, should be as well known as the "halloween documents." And when they ask why it is called the "april fools document standard," tell them.
The person "modding" the driver has a license to use that driver. The person receiving the driver must have a license because they have a creative labs card.
So, there is no "infringement" here.
Daniel should phrase what he does better, he isn't getting donations for the "driver," as this is a free download and already licensed by creative. He is getting donations for the "work" of modding. In other words, he is being paid for support not the driver.
Thus he is not running afoul of any IP laws. He is lawfully applying his expertise to private customers running third party hardware and and software, which they have the right to use.
I have written two recommendations systems and have taken a crack at the Netflix prize (but have been hard pressed to make time for the serious work.)
The article is informative and generally correct, however, having done this sort of stuff on a few projects, I have some problems with the netflix data.
First, the data is bogus. The preferences are "aggregates" of rental behaviors, whole families are represented by single accounts. Little 16 year old Tod, likes different movies than his 40 year old dad. Not to mention his toddler sibling and mother. A single account may have Winnie the Pooh and Kill Bill. Obviously, you can't say that people who like Kill Bill tend to like Winnie the Pooh. (Unless of course there is a strange human behavioral factor being exposed by this, it could be that parents of young children want the thrill of vicarious killing, but I digress)
The IMDB information about genre is interesting as it is possibly a good way to separate some of the aggregation.
Recommendation systems tend to like a lot of data, but not what you think. People will say, if you need more data, why just have 1-5 and not 1-10? Well, that really isn't much more added data it is just greater granularity of the same data. Think of it like "color depth" vs "resolution" on a video monitor.
My last point about recommendations is that people have moods are are not as predictable as we may wish. On an aggregate basis, a group of people is very predictable. A single person setting his/her preferences one night may have had a good day and a glass of wine and numbers are higher. The next day could have had a crappy day and had to deal with it sober, the numbers are different.
You can't make a system that will accurately predict responses of a single specific individual at an arbitrary time. Let alone based on an aggregated data set. That's why I haven't put much stock in the Netflix prize. Maybe someone will win it, but I have my doubts. A million dollars is a lot of money, but there are enough vagaries in what qualifies as a success to make it a lottery or a sham.
If this is real and the (gasp) "standard" was approved, we should all start calling it the "Fools Standard" in everything we write, thus putting the proper "spin" on it.
I wonder what the middle eastern religions, the trifecta judaism, christianity, and islam, will have to say about it. Either the universe is teaming with life, or we are the only ones. I find it hard to believe we are the only ones, so sooner or later will find proof of life somewhere.
That requirement of knowledge make for better engineers, IMHO.
I'd argue the only real reason it did is that it filtered out the people who couldn't grasp those concepts. I don't believe that knowledge is useful today, except applied in the same context -- filtering out people who have no skill.
You may think that, but that is an opinion about knowledge based on ignorance. Even today, there are times when various old bits of knowledge come in handy for explaining why certain things happen that are not immediately obvious.
If it is as efficient and is as predictable in implementation as C, but has additional features that help you write code, why not use it?
That's a LOT of assumptions in one sentence. Let me enumerate them:
* If it is as efficient
* and is as predictable in implementation
* but has additional features that help you write code
* features that help you write code are desirable (as opposed to features that help you write better code, or help you write more efficiently)
* Or, alternately, the features C++ adds help you write better code, or help you write it more efficiently.
If you compile code written as basically "C" code in C++ and make use of default parameters and the stronger type checking, it is as efficient, is is as predictable, does have the features that help (default parameters, type checking), it does make code better.
You should dump out the assembler to prove it to yourself. Oh, wait, isn't that one of those knowledge things you say you don't need?
Besides, while I'd agree object-oriented programming is important, you don't need C++ classes to do it, or even anything vaguely resembling C++ classes. The logical hierarchies you're talking about don't need to be rigidly applied as a language feature.
No thanks, I've done my time, in the '80s, hacking out structure based object oriented frameworks in C. C++ is far better and more efficient and allows the compiler to do "early binding" and be more efficient.
We needed to know how macros in the assembler worked.
Really? In what way is that valuable? I can see how it would be interesting, but I can't imagine how it would make my programs better in any measurable way.
Well, in those days, with absurdly small limits on program size, you absolutely needed to know how many bytes your function would take. It sometimes meant being more than the 2K eprom. That requirement of knowledge make for better engineers, IMHO.
C++ has its flaws, absolutely. However, if you use "C" constructs, it is as efficient and as readable as C.
And slower to compile, for no good reason. And still might have some syntactical surprises. If you use 'C' constructs, why not just write C?
Well, C++ has some programming advantages that C does not have. Better type semantics and checking, default parameter values, etc. If it is as efficient and is as predictable in implementation as C, but has additional features that help you write code, why not use it? The C++ compiler can actually make "C" type programming safer with no cost.
Unfortunately, C++ is neither, and most experts will tell you to use a subset of the language. In today's world, the main place where C++ is invaluable is for code which must perform well, especially when you need enough of it that writing it all in assembly is out of the question. But as someone else posted, the proper subset of C++ to fill that role is C.
"C" isn't a proper subset of C++. The "class" construct makes all the difference. Using classes to represent logical hierarchies is very important to good software design.
Yes, the grass is always greener. The pony express was good enough, but then they invented the telegraph, then they insisted we needed telephones, and then email, and now the web and IM. Think how great the pony express would be if we had just concentrated on perfecting it instead of getting all distracted by new-fangled innovations?
It is an absurd strawman argument. *All* progress is not good and *all* progress is not bad. The merits of "good" vs "bad" progress is based on fact and reason. The mere fact that you try to invoke this sort of nonsensical argument means you have no real factual argument to support your opinion.
Is HDMI better than DVI? Of course not, it only serves *AA interests. Is margarine better than butter? No. Is Monosodium glutimate better than salt? I's hydrogenated oil better than natural oil? Is ".NET" better than "java?" many of these "progress" issues are never really or clearly obvious and are often much more complex.
When you can articulate an opinion that means something, come back and post again little boy.
I've been programming since 1974 -- I started with a PDP 7 and an Altair 8800 and I'm currently writing code (C++, Java, Python) for Google. And I have a 4-digit slashdot ID, so get off my lawn!:-)
It's good to see that dinosaurs still roam.
I guess I'm a pedantic fool, because it's obvious to me that C++ is a mess
I never said it wasn't. It is far from perfect, of course.
It's not that it's impossible to write good C++. But compared to more modern languages it takes a lot more expertise, discipline, and especially time, so it's a lot more expensive than it should be. And, of course, there's always the temptation to cut the expense a little and then you have crappy code.
I have a very different perspective. A "good" programmer/developer will naturally want a more powerful language.
The problem is that C++ was initially a bit of a hack (remember cfront?) and then it was taken over by vast committees that used it as a vehicle to rationalize all their pet features. To see what can be done with a fresh start, take a look at the programming language D.
It is always tempting to let the problems on which you focus to distract you from the advantages you have, i.e. the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
I have been programming computers since 1976, and back then it was BASIC on a PDP-8e. Depending on your perspective, that either makes me experienced or a dinosaur. Keep your opinions, and enjoy them. Unless tragedy strikes, you too will hopefully gain some experience in life and be forced to listen to those who don't know 1/10th of what you do, and be forced to look back on your own behavior and wince about things you've said and thought to be right that were actually misinformed.
OK, "off my lawn" speech over.
IMHO everyone who complains about C++ is a pedantic fool. Nothing is perfect, no language, no computer, nothing. I loved what Stroustrup said in the article about becoming "language lawyers," rather than programmers. I am frequently amused about java vs c++ or.net vs c++ arguments. With the [java |.net] proponents focusing on ambiguities in C++ or (gasp) pointers.
I come from a more renaissance period of computer science. Practitioners found it both necessary and valuable to know and understand "how" their programs actually worked. We needed to know how macros in the assembler worked. How addresses in labels got fixed up by the linker. How machine instruction permutations were constructed based on the assembler instructions. How to write an efficient "divide" function because the processor only added and subtracted. Forget floating point. Not to mention the mathematical efficiency of algorithms and so forth. Most of this stuff is black magic to most programmers today.
C++ has its flaws, absolutely. However, if you use "C" constructs, it is as efficient and as readable as C. If you conceptualize the logical constructs of your application as a hierarchy of objects, it can do that too. You can even easily and efficiently use assembler and pure C functions.
The root cause of bad C++ is bad C++ programmers. It is not COBOL and it will not protect you from doing something stupid. Just because you can do something syntactically correct, doesn't mean it is logically correct. A good rule of thumb to think about is this: If you don't understand how it will work, don't do it.
The argument that some features shouldn't be in C++ because of these problems sort of misses the point. A bicycle falls over without training wheels but is useless for serious riding with them. C++ without the features that can be misused would merely be a bicycle with training wheels.
Stop wanting everything to be "easier" to learn, some things become "easier" with learning.
Appending "whether you agree or disagree" is just a disclaimer people use when they want to defend something they already know is indefensible.
I wasn't attempting to defend or attack anything. I was merely pointing out that regardless or your opinion of what they are doing, it is clear this is a separate and distinctly different incident and it doesn't make any real sense that there would be a connection.
Or maybe it was scientology after all, because people would come to the conclusion you just posted. What is this? "Get Smart." The simplest answer is usually the correct one.
Slashdot Mirror
"Genetic?" if the parents are not autistic, then it can't be their fault. It would be the fault of the "non-autistic" ancestor who had children with an autistic person.
I don't think it is classically genetic so much as a mutation caused by environmental issues. It may simply be that paople are having children later in life and the older you get the higher the likelihood of autism and other birth defects.
There's also the issue that if she can't blame someone else the only obvious alternative is to blame herself. Something few people would willingly face the possibility of doing.
I find it difficult to believe that the parent of an autistic child is to be "blamed." At this stage in the game, no one knows what causes autism so it is too early to asses blame.
Let me first say that I dislike comcast and as soon as there is some real competition I will drop them. I.E. when FiOS comes to town, fuck comcast.
That being said, they are in a bad position of having to provide high speed service to a lot of people cheaply.
The 70 year old grandmother pays as much as the P2P users but the P2P software is designed to maximize throughput typically at the expense of the other network users. So, while someone is "gaming" the network to get better bandwidth, granny is having a hard time downloading pictures of her grandkids.
There are times when there are no "good" answers to a problem, only degrees of less bad. I'm not trying to defend Comcast, per se', I'm just trying to have an open mind about the issue. Bandwidth throttling/shaping is a necessary part of network management, I don't have a problem with it as long as it is applied fairly and without prejudice.
That's not how copyrights work. By default, you have no right to do anything with someone else's copyrighted work.
This is, of course, complete nonsense and exactly what the media companies want to to think. The mere act of an entity "publishing" i.e. making something available to the public, gives "the public" certain rights to that material. These rights are embodied by "fair use."
If you want more rights than fair use provides, then you need an agreement.
Yes, distributing the driver itself is "dangerous" as "infringement" has been made intentionally ambiguous by the media companies to cast the broadest definitions. Just being sued by these behemoths is damaging, so its best to avoid it.
That being said, from a legal point of view, he should be in the clear, but big evil corp will use copyright ambiguity. It is best to use a patching strategy to avoid all risk.
All that being said, what Creative did is tortuous interference and that is grounds for a suit. He has certainly suffered emotional distress, how could he not, being threatened by a large corporation's lawyers?
I wrote the last time this came up that Daniel did nothing wrong. All he did is phrase his donations plea poorly.
Since the drivers he made available were generally available anyway, he did not run afoul of copyright for making his changes available. (assuming he uses the words "for support work" and not "for the drivers") He could use "patch" just to be 100% sure.
As a consultant I can (and have done) modify third party hardware and software for the benefit of a customer who has proper ownership of the hardware and license to the software and I may change for that service and there's NOTHING the third party vendor can do about it.
The relationship Daniel has with the user of a driver with his modifications is of no business to Creative. In fact, Creative may be worried that they are interfering with Daniels business. If you are curious look up "Tortuous Interference."
Daniel *did* make money from his work. He could have a case against Creative's very public accusation.
Some select quotes:
For Windows Vista, Microsoft had to change their design and development strategy in order to comply with the DoJ and EU regulations regarding the anti-trust issues present in previous versions of Windows; specifically, the integration of assistive applications such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player into the core operating system. Competitors complained that offering internet and media solutions with the operating system harmed competition in the marketplace (despite other operating systems such as Mac OS X and Linux apparently being immune from such criticism).
Well, the rules are different for a monopoly and second, on Linux all the pieces are quite separate and replaceable, especially the media and web browser.
In response to this, Microsoft made fundamental changes to the way Windows Vista was linked together; shifting more towards modular designs rather than the monolithic processes used in previous versions of Windows
Bzzzt! Wrong, this is an outright lie or they guy is a complete idiot. It's all just DLLs the way it has always been.
I could go on, but the first half of the post is a set of bogus excuses that don't even touch the real issues. So how much quality would follow?
If Microsoft was at all smart, they would use a light weight "Windows on Windows" strategy similar to how they implemented 16 bit Windows on the NT base on a new VERY stripped-down 64 bit Windows kernel and use virtualization of every Windows application.
In this day and age, it makes no sense to me to write another massive OS.
There is an uncomfortable feeling between police, politicians, and the military for "intelligent" types. Lawyers are wimps, just give them money and they'll shut up. Scientists are "hot house flowers" who deal with theory and few ever produce much more than papers. Mathematicians, give me a break, kill me with long division? Engineers, we are a real threat, we know shit and we know how to apply it. More than that, we often work under pressure and think about fixing problems before they happen. Also, I don't know a single "good" engineer that couldn't blow up a building if we were so inclined.
Engineers can't lie LOL, hysterical. I'm sorry, engineers are GREAT liars!! We have to do time sheets and status reports!!
Using a cantenna, the "smart" students should aim the directional wifi to their dorms and surf on the library IP address. That would be funny. Then the university would HAVE to defend itself against this nonsense instead of throwing its students under the wheels.
To establish prior art you need to publish. The problem is that magazines and journals are fairly selective about content because they have to pay or the content has to fit their market or be interesting in some way. Then there is credibility, if you write an article about recommendations or motor control methodology, something you've done as a hobby project, a magazine or journal may not choose to publish because it can not properly verify the content.
We need to create an "on-line" and perhaps paper "journal" that will accept all technical submissions and publish them in a way that fits the USPTO's definition of "published" to establish prior art. That way *all* ideas get covered easily.
I've written a lot of articles and only been published a few times, its hard to get published. There are lots of would be authors out there and a lot of subject matter being written about.
The ISO standard, besides showing how corrupting Microsoft's monopoly money is, changes nothing.
We have the same situation today as we did yesterday.
(1) A "standard" which is only a standard because a monopoly uses it.
(2) A "standard" which is independently implemented by (n>1) vendors.
So, as long as *we* the technologically literate stay "on message" like the P.R. spinmasters, we can use this in our favor.
The "April fools document standard" AFDS for short, should be as well known as the "halloween documents." And when they ask why it is called the "april fools document standard," tell them.
The person "modding" the driver has a license to use that driver. The person receiving the driver must have a license because they have a creative labs card.
So, there is no "infringement" here.
Daniel should phrase what he does better, he isn't getting donations for the "driver," as this is a free download and already licensed by creative. He is getting donations for the "work" of modding. In other words, he is being paid for support not the driver.
Thus he is not running afoul of any IP laws. He is lawfully applying his expertise to private customers running third party hardware and and software, which they have the right to use.
I have written two recommendations systems and have taken a crack at the Netflix prize (but have been hard pressed to make time for the serious work.)
The article is informative and generally correct, however, having done this sort of stuff on a few projects, I have some problems with the netflix data.
First, the data is bogus. The preferences are "aggregates" of rental behaviors, whole families are represented by single accounts. Little 16 year old Tod, likes different movies than his 40 year old dad. Not to mention his toddler sibling and mother. A single account may have Winnie the Pooh and Kill Bill. Obviously, you can't say that people who like Kill Bill tend to like Winnie the Pooh. (Unless of course there is a strange human behavioral factor being exposed by this, it could be that parents of young children want the thrill of vicarious killing, but I digress)
The IMDB information about genre is interesting as it is possibly a good way to separate some of the aggregation.
Recommendation systems tend to like a lot of data, but not what you think. People will say, if you need more data, why just have 1-5 and not 1-10? Well, that really isn't much more added data it is just greater granularity of the same data. Think of it like "color depth" vs "resolution" on a video monitor.
My last point about recommendations is that people have moods are are not as predictable as we may wish. On an aggregate basis, a group of people is very predictable. A single person setting his/her preferences one night may have had a good day and a glass of wine and numbers are higher. The next day could have had a crappy day and had to deal with it sober, the numbers are different.
You can't make a system that will accurately predict responses of a single specific individual at an arbitrary time. Let alone based on an aggregated data set. That's why I haven't put much stock in the Netflix prize. Maybe someone will win it, but I have my doubts. A million dollars is a lot of money, but there are enough vagaries in what qualifies as a success to make it a lottery or a sham.
That being said, the data is fun to work with!!
Well a few points:
If this is an April fools joke it isn't funny.
If this is real and the (gasp) "standard" was approved, we should all start calling it the "Fools Standard" in everything we write, thus putting the proper "spin" on it.
I imagine the discovery of alien life forms could well be troubling for atheists though.
I don't understand this statement, please explain. I'm an atheist and I can't imagine why it would be troubling.
I wonder what the middle eastern religions, the trifecta judaism, christianity, and islam, will have to say about it. Either the universe is teaming with life, or we are the only ones. I find it hard to believe we are the only ones, so sooner or later will find proof of life somewhere.
That requirement of knowledge make for better engineers, IMHO.
I'd argue the only real reason it did is that it filtered out the people who couldn't grasp those concepts. I don't believe that knowledge is useful today, except applied in the same context -- filtering out people who have no skill.
You may think that, but that is an opinion about knowledge based on ignorance. Even today, there are times when various old bits of knowledge come in handy for explaining why certain things happen that are not immediately obvious.
If it is as efficient and is as predictable in implementation as C, but has additional features that help you write code, why not use it?
That's a LOT of assumptions in one sentence. Let me enumerate them:
* If it is as efficient
* and is as predictable in implementation
* but has additional features that help you write code
* features that help you write code are desirable (as opposed to features that help you write better code, or help you write more efficiently)
* Or, alternately, the features C++ adds help you write better code, or help you write it more efficiently.
If you compile code written as basically "C" code in C++ and make use of default parameters and the stronger type checking, it is as efficient, is is as predictable, does have the features that help (default parameters, type checking), it does make code better.
You should dump out the assembler to prove it to yourself. Oh, wait, isn't that one of those knowledge things you say you don't need?
Besides, while I'd agree object-oriented programming is important, you don't need C++ classes to do it, or even anything vaguely resembling C++ classes. The logical hierarchies you're talking about don't need to be rigidly applied as a language feature.
No thanks, I've done my time, in the '80s, hacking out structure based object oriented frameworks in C. C++ is far better and more efficient and allows the compiler to do "early binding" and be more efficient.
We needed to know how macros in the assembler worked.
Really? In what way is that valuable? I can see how it would be interesting, but I can't imagine how it would make my programs better in any measurable way.
Well, in those days, with absurdly small limits on program size, you absolutely needed to know how many bytes your function would take. It sometimes meant being more than the 2K eprom. That requirement of knowledge make for better engineers, IMHO.
C++ has its flaws, absolutely. However, if you use "C" constructs, it is as efficient and as readable as C.
And slower to compile, for no good reason. And still might have some syntactical surprises. If you use 'C' constructs, why not just write C?
Well, C++ has some programming advantages that C does not have. Better type semantics and checking, default parameter values, etc. If it is as efficient and is as predictable in implementation as C, but has additional features that help you write code, why not use it? The C++ compiler can actually make "C" type programming safer with no cost.
Unfortunately, C++ is neither, and most experts will tell you to use a subset of the language. In today's world, the main place where C++ is invaluable is for code which must perform well, especially when you need enough of it that writing it all in assembly is out of the question. But as someone else posted, the proper subset of C++ to fill that role is C.
"C" isn't a proper subset of C++. The "class" construct makes all the difference. Using classes to represent logical hierarchies is very important to good software design.
Yes, the grass is always greener. The pony express was good enough, but then they invented the telegraph, then they insisted we needed telephones, and then email, and now the web and IM. Think how great the pony express would be if we had just concentrated on perfecting it instead of getting all distracted by new-fangled innovations?
It is an absurd strawman argument. *All* progress is not good and *all* progress is not bad. The merits of "good" vs "bad" progress is based on fact and reason. The mere fact that you try to invoke this sort of nonsensical argument means you have no real factual argument to support your opinion.
Is HDMI better than DVI? Of course not, it only serves *AA interests. Is margarine better than butter? No. Is Monosodium glutimate better than salt? I's hydrogenated oil better than natural oil? Is ".NET" better than "java?" many of these "progress" issues are never really or clearly obvious and are often much more complex.
When you can articulate an opinion that means something, come back and post again little boy.
I've been programming since 1974 -- I started with a PDP 7 and an Altair 8800 and I'm currently writing code (C++, Java, Python) for Google. And I have a 4-digit slashdot ID, so get off my lawn! :-)
It's good to see that dinosaurs still roam.
I guess I'm a pedantic fool, because it's obvious to me that C++ is a mess
I never said it wasn't. It is far from perfect, of course.
It's not that it's impossible to write good C++. But compared to more modern languages it takes a lot more expertise, discipline, and especially time, so it's a lot more expensive than it should be. And, of course, there's always the temptation to cut the expense a little and then you have crappy code.
I have a very different perspective. A "good" programmer/developer will naturally want a more powerful language.
The problem is that C++ was initially a bit of a hack (remember cfront?) and then it was taken over by vast committees that used it as a vehicle to rationalize all their pet features. To see what can be done with a fresh start, take a look at the programming language D.
It is always tempting to let the problems on which you focus to distract you from the advantages you have, i.e. the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
I have been programming computers since 1976, and back then it was BASIC on a PDP-8e. Depending on your perspective, that either makes me experienced or a dinosaur. Keep your opinions, and enjoy them. Unless tragedy strikes, you too will hopefully gain some experience in life and be forced to listen to those who don't know 1/10th of what you do, and be forced to look back on your own behavior and wince about things you've said and thought to be right that were actually misinformed.
.net vs c++ arguments. With the [java | .net] proponents focusing on ambiguities in C++ or (gasp) pointers.
OK, "off my lawn" speech over.
IMHO everyone who complains about C++ is a pedantic fool. Nothing is perfect, no language, no computer, nothing. I loved what Stroustrup said in the article about becoming "language lawyers," rather than programmers. I am frequently amused about java vs c++ or
I come from a more renaissance period of computer science. Practitioners found it both necessary and valuable to know and understand "how" their programs actually worked. We needed to know how macros in the assembler worked. How addresses in labels got fixed up by the linker. How machine instruction permutations were constructed based on the assembler instructions. How to write an efficient "divide" function because the processor only added and subtracted. Forget floating point. Not to mention the mathematical efficiency of algorithms and so forth. Most of this stuff is black magic to most programmers today.
C++ has its flaws, absolutely. However, if you use "C" constructs, it is as efficient and as readable as C. If you conceptualize the logical constructs of your application as a hierarchy of objects, it can do that too. You can even easily and efficiently use assembler and pure C functions.
The root cause of bad C++ is bad C++ programmers. It is not COBOL and it will not protect you from doing something stupid. Just because you can do something syntactically correct, doesn't mean it is logically correct. A good rule of thumb to think about is this: If you don't understand how it will work, don't do it.
The argument that some features shouldn't be in C++ because of these problems sort of misses the point. A bicycle falls over without training wheels but is useless for serious riding with them. C++ without the features that can be misused would merely be a bicycle with training wheels.
Stop wanting everything to be "easier" to learn, some things become "easier" with learning.
Appending "whether you agree or disagree" is just a disclaimer people use when they want to defend something they already know is indefensible.
I wasn't attempting to defend or attack anything. I was merely pointing out that regardless or your opinion of what they are doing, it is clear this is a separate and distinctly different incident and it doesn't make any real sense that there would be a connection.
Or maybe it was scientology after all, because people would come to the conclusion you just posted. What is this? "Get Smart." The simplest answer is usually the correct one.