This leaves little to distinguish them from terrorists other than the fact that they don't kill people."
So you mean, appart from the fact that they lack the defining characteristic of terrorists, these people are just like terrorists. This is a bit like saying "This leaves little to distinguish them from thieves other than the fact that they don't steal anything".
[My posting skills need work, apologies for the previous two incomplete replies].
The fact remains that your wages were payed by the government for work which had no value on the free market. Thus, you were given something. Your tiresome drivel about how no-one could do anything whatsoever unless assholes like you joined the military merits no response. Most of the progress in the history of human civilization has been driven by people sitting at "little desks" creating the scientific and artistic achievements which have had lasting value for humanity. It is those people who have given the military something worth protecting, and it's a shame they get no credit for it, while people like you get modded up for ranting on and on about your asses (working them off, busting them, presenting them for kissing, etc. etc.)
The fact remains that your wages were payed by the government for work which had no value on the free market. Thus, you were given something. Your tiresome drivel about how no-one could do anything whatsoever unless assholes like you joined the military merits no response. Most of the progress in the history of human civilization has been driven by people sitting at "little desks" creating the scientific and artistic achievements which have had lasting value for humanity. It is those people who have given the military something
Modern C++ features like templates are really a godsend in many application development projects
Of course, static polymorphism has been implemented much better in functional languages (e.g. ML and Haskell). The C++ attempt is painfully verbose and hacked-on.
and.NET... is that even ported to other operating systems yet (maybe the mono project, but I'm not sure how far developed that is)?
It's more or less fully developed, as a quick trip to Google would have told you. The only thing missing from a portability aspect is a mature implementation of Windows.Forms.
OK. I think VMs are a bit of a red herring here though. Using a high-level language (VM or no VM) allows you to get rid of memory protection, and this is what can make system calls much faster (*). In fact, the language needn't even be high level, it just needs to have bounds checking and constrained pointer semantics -- Fortran would probably do the trick. In the real world, where there aren't any mainstream OSs written in safe languages, this is admittedly an academic point, and you're quite right that there's no reason why Java should be faster for repeatedly calling UNIX system calls.
(*) If there's no memory protection, calling a system call is just like calling any other function. There's in fact not any very clear boundry between different applications at all -- you just have a number of different threads of execution.
Again, read the post you're replying to. He wasn't talking about JVMs, he was talking about operating systems written in safe, high-level programming languages. Get with it!
For other system calls that can't be cached, java and C will have similar performace...
You should read the post you're replying to. He's not comparing the performance of Java and C, he's comparing the time taken to make a system call on an OS written in a low-level language like C (with the associated memory protection overhead) with the time taken to make a system call on an OS written in a safe, high-level language (e.g. a Lisp machine OS). If you write the OS in a safe language, you can get rid of the kernel/userspace divide and the overhead which it creates.
Apple has always maintained the policy of not breaking code unless the developer takes shortcuts. Then you have problems in the future..........Some other applications, like games, that took shortcuts to get better performance, don't work.
It looks like I'll have to repeat exactly what I said before. 1) The latest version of the Apple development tools will not run except in the latest version of OS X (last time I checked). 2) The same goes for the latest version of Fink. 3) I don't want to pay for upgrades when Linux is a viable alternative. I'm not sure what you're talking about in the quote above, really.
And if you are using Linux, why do you even care about OS X? Do you dual-boot?
I'm perfectly happy coding on my PowerBook 12" Rev. C. Tiger, if anything, has made it better. I didn't buy Panther for my iMac. It stayed on Jaguar. I never had any problems with things going from the iMac to the PowerBook.
Again, not sure what you're getting at. Great for you, but I've explained why it is that upgrading to the latest version of OS X would be necessary for my purposes, and why I prefer to run Linux for this reason. I care about OS X only insofar as I get a bit anoyed by people saying that I'm stupid for not using it. I'm stupid for not shelling out on a new OS every 1-2 years?
When will people learn that you don't have to pay for the brand-new version of OS X each year?
Plenty of people still run Jaguar. And also, OS X isn't that old.
Look, I don't want to run an old version of OS X without access to the latest edition of Apple's developer tools, when the alternative is getting regular free upgrades with Linux. Why would I want to keep running an old version of OS X?
Mac hardware's nothing special - it's primarily the software that makes Macs so great in comparison to a typical Windows/Linux/BSD PC. Why the heck would anyone buy a Mac and then install a Linux on it? Just doesn't make sense.
Wrong on all counts. First, some Mac hardware is pretty good value, in particular the 12" notebooks. Most PC notebooks at a similar price point are larger and have lower build quality.
Second, you have to pay for a new version of OS X every year. And if you don't upgrade, you lose out on the latest development tools. Linux is a big win in this respect.
Third, OS X software isn't all that, and I find the UI quite irritating. Overall, I'm much happier running Linux on my Powerbook.
The growth of the electronics industry certainly did come about as a result of widespread delivery of electricity. But you don't know what hidden costs came along with it. You can see what happened, but you can't see what didn't happen. The growth of the electronics industry came at the cost of some other industry. And you don't know whether or not the electronics industry wouldn't have happened anyway if done entirely privately. In which case you'd have both the electronics industry and this other industry that was lost. But now we have lost that other industry and are that much poorer.
Your argument assumes two unlikely things:
1) If not for government funding of the electronics industry, another industry with equally profound consequences for economic growth and efficiency would have developed.
2)The electronics industry actually would have developed without government help.
The probability of the conjunction of (1) and (2) is extremely low, and so in actual fact it is very unlikely that the broken window fallacy applies in this case. This is an empirical question: it is a priori possible that the fallacy applies, but you have no evidence that this is actually the case.
The same is true with subsidized wireless. We take away some other industry in order to promote wireless. You see the benefit of wireless, but you don't know what other industry suffers because of it. You don't know how an entire population of people might have spent their money if they hadn't been forced to pay for it in taxes to subsidize wireless.
Precisely, we don't know any of this stuff. But looking at the results of the economics industry, I'd say the government got a pretty good return on their investment. Again, it seems very unlikely that an equally important industry could have developed in place of the electronics industry. And moreover, consider all the enormous industries which have developed on the back of the electronics industry.
In order to agree with Keynes, you have to believe that it's economically productive to pay someone to dig a hole, just to pay them again to fill it back up. I can't agree with that so I dismiss Keynes.
Why can't you agree with it? Economies are artificial systems with strange properties. If you base economic analysis on abstract concepts such as "money" and "profit", you should not be at all surprised when maximising (say) economic growth can be done through intuitively nonproductive activities. There is no law of nature which precludes an activity which is intuitively entirely pointless from being logical if one has a particular economic goal in mind.
I'd also point out that you're neglecting to consider the "hidden benefits" of employing the hole digger/filler. You will have gained someone with expertese in digging and filling holes, and (for some suitable substitution of [useful skill] for "hole digging and filling"), this may well be a good thing.
So to answer your ignorant question: Correct, your 'contribution' would be of no value.
Yes. This shows how absurd your position is, you see.
Furthermore, you should be banished from the country if you happen to live in the USA. ( assuming you disagree with the constitution and its original 10 amendments thats is )
Yep, quite right too. It's about time America brought in the thought police (aren't they mentioned in the constitution somewhere?)
PS, I'm done dealing with you. This is far too OT now to continue.
Or in other words, "I'm a silly troll who knows he's wrong".
Why don't you look at the fact that free software existed long before Richard Stallman decided that that was the only acceptable name for it and that Richard Stallman has long been replaced as an important figure in the GNU project other than as an unwashed zealot-figurehead.
I never suggested that RMS invented free software. But his contribution in terms of publicising it and writing it is very significant. And there was no really worked out philosophy of free software before the GNU project and the GPL, so far as I'm aware.
He started GCC; it has been rewritten and is maintained by others.
He started coreutils; they've been rewritten and is maintained by others.
He started glibc; it has been rewritten and is maintained by others.
This is a list of important projects which RMS has initiated. It doesn't really support your argument -- it just shows how important he is.
His entire argument eventually rests on the premise that free software is good because it promotes sharing; anything that prevents free software must be bad; therefore, patents are bad and should not exist. I'm sorry, but anyone with some intellectual honesty will tell you that that argument is specious.
How is it specious? If free software is good and patents interfere with it, it seems reasonable to infer that patents are bad. Maybe you could demonstrate some intellectual honesty yourself and actually explain why such an argument is specious, and moreover demonstrate that RMS has actually made such an argument (I suspect it is a straw man).
Apples are tasty; tasty things are good; putting penicillin on an apple makes it taste bad; so, penicillin is bad and should not exist.
Oh dear, how silly. How about the following. Freedom of speech is good; government control of the press interferes with freedom of speech; therefore government control of the press is bad. Sounds reasonable? You see, arguments using this schema are sometimes valid and sometimes invalid: you need to explain why the argument you're discussing is one of the invalid instances of this schema, not just invoke the schema and leave it at that.
f he's against my freedom that is guaranteed by the 2nd amendment, then nothing, i repeat NOTHING he says has any relevance at all.
He is just a raving lunatic.
Aha! So it is because you're stupid. Really, just because someone is in favour of gun control (and I have absolutely no idea whether or not RMS is, I'm just guessing...) doesn't mean that their other opinions aren't worth listening to. You might want to try engaging my or Stallman's arguments instead of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting libertarian slogans (contrary to common Slashdot wisdom, this is neither big nor clever).
Sounds like he's against the freedom guaranteed by the 2nd amendment of the US constitution.
Perhaps he is. So what? His analogy doesn't really suggest his feelings one way or the other, but from his general poltitical views it wouldn't surprise me if RMS was against the 2nd ammendment. This has nothing to do with the issue of software patents.
So in his mind, a freedom is ok if HE supports it.. But if he doesnt support it then its not a freedom?
No, you're not making any sense. Like anybody, RMS thinks that people should be free to do some things (e.g. write software without fear of infringing patents) and not free to do other things (e.g. rape your sister). You can quite coherently recognize something as a freedom but oppose it at the same time -- even if you are generally in favour of as much freedom as possible.
Never took the man seriously before, now i know why: Aside from his mindless rants that often border on lunacy, he's also a hyprocrit.
Have you ever thought it might be because you're stupid?
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Yes, but the BSDs use gcc.
This leaves little to distinguish them from terrorists other than the fact that they don't kill people."
So you mean, appart from the fact that they lack the defining characteristic of terrorists, these people are just like terrorists. This is a bit like saying "This leaves little to distinguish them from thieves other than the fact that they don't steal anything".
[My posting skills need work, apologies for the previous two incomplete replies]. The fact remains that your wages were payed by the government for work which had no value on the free market. Thus, you were given something. Your tiresome drivel about how no-one could do anything whatsoever unless assholes like you joined the military merits no response. Most of the progress in the history of human civilization has been driven by people sitting at "little desks" creating the scientific and artistic achievements which have had lasting value for humanity. It is those people who have given the military something worth protecting, and it's a shame they get no credit for it, while people like you get modded up for ranting on and on about your asses (working them off, busting them, presenting them for kissing, etc. etc.)
The fact remains that your wages were payed by the government for work which had no value on the free market. Thus, you were given something. Your tiresome drivel about how no-one could do anything whatsoever unless assholes like you joined the military merits no response. Most of the progress in the history of human civilization has been driven by people sitting at "little desks" creating the scientific and artistic achievements which have had lasting value for humanity. It is those people who have given the military something
The fact remains that your wages were payed by the government, for work which had no value on the free market. Thus, you were given something.
Or you could use OCaml. That has static polymorphism, objects (both superior to the C++ equivalents) and native code compilation.
Modern C++ features like templates are really a godsend in many application development projects
Of course, static polymorphism has been implemented much better in functional languages (e.g. ML and Haskell). The C++ attempt is painfully verbose and hacked-on.
if you care about performance at all, you need to know your datatypes ahead of time?
Not if you have an optimising JIT. Then you only need to know your datatypes at runtime.
and .NET... is that even ported to other operating systems yet (maybe the mono project, but I'm not sure how far developed that is)?
It's more or less fully developed, as a quick trip to Google would have told you. The only thing missing from a portability aspect is a mature implementation of Windows.Forms.
OK. I think VMs are a bit of a red herring here though. Using a high-level language (VM or no VM) allows you to get rid of memory protection, and this is what can make system calls much faster (*). In fact, the language needn't even be high level, it just needs to have bounds checking and constrained pointer semantics -- Fortran would probably do the trick. In the real world, where there aren't any mainstream OSs written in safe languages, this is admittedly an academic point, and you're quite right that there's no reason why Java should be faster for repeatedly calling UNIX system calls.
(*) If there's no memory protection, calling a system call is just like calling any other function. There's in fact not any very clear boundry between different applications at all -- you just have a number of different threads of execution.
Again, read the post you're replying to. He wasn't talking about JVMs, he was talking about operating systems written in safe, high-level programming languages. Get with it!
For other system calls that can't be cached, java and C will have similar performace...
You should read the post you're replying to. He's not comparing the performance of Java and C, he's comparing the time taken to make a system call on an OS written in a low-level language like C (with the associated memory protection overhead) with the time taken to make a system call on an OS written in a safe, high-level language (e.g. a Lisp machine OS). If you write the OS in a safe language, you can get rid of the kernel/userspace divide and the overhead which it creates.
You can avoid system call overhead by writing the OS in a safe language, removing the need for memory protection and the kernel/userspace divide.
So there.
Apple has always maintained the policy of not breaking code unless the developer takes shortcuts. Then you have problems in the future..........Some other applications, like games, that took shortcuts to get better performance, don't work.
It looks like I'll have to repeat exactly what I said before. 1) The latest version of the Apple development tools will not run except in the latest version of OS X (last time I checked). 2) The same goes for the latest version of Fink. 3) I don't want to pay for upgrades when Linux is a viable alternative. I'm not sure what you're talking about in the quote above, really.
And if you are using Linux, why do you even care about OS X? Do you dual-boot? I'm perfectly happy coding on my PowerBook 12" Rev. C. Tiger, if anything, has made it better. I didn't buy Panther for my iMac. It stayed on Jaguar. I never had any problems with things going from the iMac to the PowerBook.
Again, not sure what you're getting at. Great for you, but I've explained why it is that upgrading to the latest version of OS X would be necessary for my purposes, and why I prefer to run Linux for this reason. I care about OS X only insofar as I get a bit anoyed by people saying that I'm stupid for not using it. I'm stupid for not shelling out on a new OS every 1-2 years?
I should also mention that a lot of other useful software (e.g. Fink) won't work on older OS X versions.
When will people learn that you don't have to pay for the brand-new version of OS X each year? Plenty of people still run Jaguar. And also, OS X isn't that old.
Look, I don't want to run an old version of OS X without access to the latest edition of Apple's developer tools, when the alternative is getting regular free upgrades with Linux. Why would I want to keep running an old version of OS X?
Mac hardware's nothing special - it's primarily the software that makes Macs so great in comparison to a typical Windows/Linux/BSD PC. Why the heck would anyone buy a Mac and then install a Linux on it? Just doesn't make sense.
Wrong on all counts. First, some Mac hardware is pretty good value, in particular the 12" notebooks. Most PC notebooks at a similar price point are larger and have lower build quality.
Second, you have to pay for a new version of OS X every year. And if you don't upgrade, you lose out on the latest development tools. Linux is a big win in this respect.
Third, OS X software isn't all that, and I find the UI quite irritating. Overall, I'm much happier running Linux on my Powerbook.
The growth of the electronics industry certainly did come about as a result of widespread delivery of electricity. But you don't know what hidden costs came along with it. You can see what happened, but you can't see what didn't happen. The growth of the electronics industry came at the cost of some other industry. And you don't know whether or not the electronics industry wouldn't have happened anyway if done entirely privately. In which case you'd have both the electronics industry and this other industry that was lost. But now we have lost that other industry and are that much poorer.
Your argument assumes two unlikely things:
1) If not for government funding of the electronics industry, another industry with equally profound consequences for economic growth and efficiency would have developed.
2)The electronics industry actually would have developed without government help.
The probability of the conjunction of (1) and (2) is extremely low, and so in actual fact it is very unlikely that the broken window fallacy applies in this case. This is an empirical question: it is a priori possible that the fallacy applies, but you have no evidence that this is actually the case.
The same is true with subsidized wireless. We take away some other industry in order to promote wireless. You see the benefit of wireless, but you don't know what other industry suffers because of it. You don't know how an entire population of people might have spent their money if they hadn't been forced to pay for it in taxes to subsidize wireless.
Precisely, we don't know any of this stuff. But looking at the results of the economics industry, I'd say the government got a pretty good return on their investment. Again, it seems very unlikely that an equally important industry could have developed in place of the electronics industry. And moreover, consider all the enormous industries which have developed on the back of the electronics industry.
In order to agree with Keynes, you have to believe that it's economically productive to pay someone to dig a hole, just to pay them again to fill it back up. I can't agree with that so I dismiss Keynes.
Why can't you agree with it? Economies are artificial systems with strange properties. If you base economic analysis on abstract concepts such as "money" and "profit", you should not be at all surprised when maximising (say) economic growth can be done through intuitively nonproductive activities. There is no law of nature which precludes an activity which is intuitively entirely pointless from being logical if one has a particular economic goal in mind.
I'd also point out that you're neglecting to consider the "hidden benefits" of employing the hole digger/filler. You will have gained someone with expertese in digging and filling holes, and (for some suitable substitution of [useful skill] for "hole digging and filling"), this may well be a good thing.
Maybe because the Constitution's authors didn't have computers or wireless networks?
Humour bypass. OP was being ironic you idiot.
So to answer your ignorant question: Correct, your 'contribution' would be of no value.
Yes. This shows how absurd your position is, you see.
Furthermore, you should be banished from the country if you happen to live in the USA. ( assuming you disagree with the constitution and its original 10 amendments thats is )
Yep, quite right too. It's about time America brought in the thought police (aren't they mentioned in the constitution somewhere?)
PS, I'm done dealing with you. This is far too OT now to continue.
Or in other words, "I'm a silly troll who knows he's wrong".
Oh God, this "the 2nd ammendment cannot be argued against" meme is more common than I thought. Learn to think, people.
Sorry, there is no valid arguement or debate against the 2nd amendment. its clear and absolute.
No it's not.
And if you disagree with it, then you have nothing of value to say on ANY subject, no matter how smart you may *think* you are.
Hmm, let's say I was against the 2nd ammendment and I'd just solved a difficult problem in mathematics. Would my contribution be of no value?
Why don't you look at the fact that free software existed long before Richard Stallman decided that that was the only acceptable name for it and that Richard Stallman has long been replaced as an important figure in the GNU project other than as an unwashed zealot-figurehead.
I never suggested that RMS invented free software. But his contribution in terms of publicising it and writing it is very significant. And there was no really worked out philosophy of free software before the GNU project and the GPL, so far as I'm aware.
He started GCC; it has been rewritten and is maintained by others. He started coreutils; they've been rewritten and is maintained by others. He started glibc; it has been rewritten and is maintained by others.
This is a list of important projects which RMS has initiated. It doesn't really support your argument -- it just shows how important he is.
His entire argument eventually rests on the premise that free software is good because it promotes sharing; anything that prevents free software must be bad; therefore, patents are bad and should not exist. I'm sorry, but anyone with some intellectual honesty will tell you that that argument is specious.
How is it specious? If free software is good and patents interfere with it, it seems reasonable to infer that patents are bad. Maybe you could demonstrate some intellectual honesty yourself and actually explain why such an argument is specious, and moreover demonstrate that RMS has actually made such an argument (I suspect it is a straw man).
Apples are tasty; tasty things are good; putting penicillin on an apple makes it taste bad; so, penicillin is bad and should not exist.
Oh dear, how silly. How about the following. Freedom of speech is good; government control of the press interferes with freedom of speech; therefore government control of the press is bad. Sounds reasonable? You see, arguments using this schema are sometimes valid and sometimes invalid: you need to explain why the argument you're discussing is one of the invalid instances of this schema, not just invoke the schema and leave it at that.
f he's against my freedom that is guaranteed by the 2nd amendment, then nothing, i repeat NOTHING he says has any relevance at all. He is just a raving lunatic.
Aha! So it is because you're stupid. Really, just because someone is in favour of gun control (and I have absolutely no idea whether or not RMS is, I'm just guessing...) doesn't mean that their other opinions aren't worth listening to. You might want to try engaging my or Stallman's arguments instead of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting libertarian slogans (contrary to common Slashdot wisdom, this is neither big nor clever).
Sounds like he's against the freedom guaranteed by the 2nd amendment of the US constitution.
Perhaps he is. So what? His analogy doesn't really suggest his feelings one way or the other, but from his general poltitical views it wouldn't surprise me if RMS was against the 2nd ammendment. This has nothing to do with the issue of software patents.
So in his mind, a freedom is ok if HE supports it.. But if he doesnt support it then its not a freedom?
No, you're not making any sense. Like anybody, RMS thinks that people should be free to do some things (e.g. write software without fear of infringing patents) and not free to do other things (e.g. rape your sister). You can quite coherently recognize something as a freedom but oppose it at the same time -- even if you are generally in favour of as much freedom as possible.
Never took the man seriously before, now i know why: Aside from his mindless rants that often border on lunacy, he's also a hyprocrit.
Have you ever thought it might be because you're stupid?