"MS Windows instability over the years is a prime example of using C++ when C was a much better choice to build an OS."
As somebody who has also been in programming for 30 years, I can categorically state that Windows was written in C and assembler up to and including version 3.X, and those versions were even less stable than modern ones, so Windows' problems have nothing whatsoever to do with bits of it now being written in C++.
" MI is a good thing, its just that most modern languages don't implement it because its hard for the compiler writers."
The problem is that, as the MI mechanism in C++ so excellently demonstrates, coming up with a good way of doing it that doesn't introduce at least as many problems as it solves is what's difficult, not implementing the mechanism itself. An excellent example of this is a common MI ambiguity caused by multiple base classes having member functions with the same names and input parameters. C++ handles this situation via kludges of such epic proportions that calling it "a designed feature" would be stretching the term to a degree where one would also have to call the ability to ruin electronic devices when poured into them a "designed feature" of soft drinks.
"I vaguely remember that he was one to the people consistently pushing for extensions to copyright length here in the UK."
Copyright extensions for recordings, not all copyrights.
"Note how here in the UK copyright is now Life + 70 years..."
Recordings have a 50 year copyright. The life+70 bit comes from the Berne Convention, to which the UK is a signatory, but the Berne Convention doesn't cover recorded works, so their copyright period is set by individual countries.
Anything that uses shared resources is a bitch because of the the potential for race conditions and deadlocks, and the fact that very few computer subsystems or peripherals are inherently parallel in and of themselves means that some threads in non-trivial applications will end having to contend with other threads for shared resources at some point, unless of course they're using an OS that manages resource contention issues automatically, i.e. not one of the mainstream offerings on the sorts of computers most of us are expected to program for.
"we've been using the same basic single-core architecture for the last, what, 30 or 40 years? "
This may be true of personal computers, but it's far from being the case with computing in general, where parallel systems were already sufficiently established by the 1980s to produce not only a variety of formal design methodologies, but also computer languages that embodied one or more of them, e.g. Occam, which was based on Communicating Single Processes algebra.
"This isn't anything fancy and new. These ideas have been around for a long time."
I have a book called "Parallel Program Design: A Foundation" by Chandy and Misra that was printed in 1988, and there isn't much in it that was new then, so it has indeed been around for a fair while.
"Apple restricts the use of the Mac OS to people who own Apple hardware."
They do indeed, but that's not the same as _restricting sales_ of OS X to people who own Apple hardware.
"So, sure, you can buy it if you do your computing with a pile of pebbles, but you can't use it."
There are plenty of things besides OS X that require another thing from a specific manufacturer but can be bought by people who don't have whatever they're meant to work with, e.g. add-ons and accessories for specific brands and models of power tools, various types of razor blades, console games, and mobile phone accessories. Nobody's restricting the sale of "Little Big Planet" to people who have access to a PlayStation-3, so you're quite free to buy as many copies as you like to use as coasters, Frisbees, or reflectors for bicycles, and the same is true of OS X.
IANAL, but I think it might have just a little to do with the fact that books and cars are completely different, and are therefore also subject to completely different laws, just as (for example) a Wendy-house doesn't usually require any permission to put on your property, but a 600ft transmitter mast probably does.
"with the help of Psystar, they can do Intel-based RECTANGLES!"
I'd be tempted very by a PC that's a rectangle, because all Apple's offerings have an annoying extension into the third dimension that prevents me from stacking an infinite number of them in any space of sufficient width and height.
"which gives Apple a $129 profit on every Pystar sale"
Because as every student of Slasconomics knows, dealers always sell products for the same price that they pay for them, and manufacturers don't have any production, shipping, or administration costs, so everything that people buy is 100% pure profit for whoever produces it.
"how long can they justifiably continue to style themselves as "new"?"
They'll do so until nobody alive remembers "old Labour", i.e. a party which, like the Conservatives and Liberals during the same period, actually had people in it who entered politics because they believed in the core principles of the parties they belonged to, and stuck to those principles irrespective of whether they happened to be popular with the press or not.
Of course, all that's in the past now, because we've entered the period of the self-serving career politician whose only principle is "what's best for me", which at the moment largely consists of being a vizier in Emperor Murdoch's court. Note that I'm not just referring to New Labour here, because the same thing is true of today's Tories and LibDems as well.
"Running as an admin is OSX is not a good practice."
An excellent piece of advice. IMO one of the flaws with OS X is the fact that the installer doesn't automatically set up a standard user account in addition to the admin account, and then lets the admin account be used for automatic log-ins when the machine boots.
"they don't have the numbers to make it a target for malware authors yet."
My theory is that there are three factors that account for the notable lack of really dangerous Mac malware:
1) A paucity of expertise, especially in Eastern Europe, where Macs are extremely rare, and low-level programmers who know a lot about them are even rarer. This is in stark contrast to Windows, where there's a literally vast amount of information and plenty of ready-made free and commercial toolkits that potential malware authors can use to target XP in particular with relative ease.
2) Macs are much more of moving target than Windows, where XP which was launched in 2001 is still dominant, with no sign of that situation changing for some years. This is far from being the case with Apple's user base, who are using two completely different CPU types to host OS X versions ranging from (at least) 10.3 to 10.5, so writing something that successfully targeted a worthwhile proportion of them before Apple got a patch out to close whatever hole(s) it uses is extremely difficult, especially given the fact that Mac owners seen to be more rigourous in applying the latest patches than Windows users.
3) The average Mac user is far more likely to seek out both on-line and printed sources of Mac-specific information than the average Windows user, so they have a much greater tendency to hear about any threats and how to counter them before they have much of a chance to propagate.
So while that 5% share which largely consists of the more affluent personal computer users looks like a fairly tempting target initially, it's virtually impossible for any malware author to realistically attack more than a small fraction of that 5% for a worthwhile length of time, and even that would require a lot of personal detective work and experimentation to achieve with the current levels of information and tools.
"they do have huge developers constantly adding features"
As president of the International Council For Being Offended On Behalf Of Everyone, I am haughtily informing you that those who don't want to be accused of blatant hugeism should use the more politically correct "circumference-challenged" term when referring to larger than average people. Please bear this in mind when posting in the future, because developers do after all have feelings that can be hurt just like everyone else.
"if your objects contain only functions and no attributes, they are not objects"
The people who invented the term "Object Oriented Programming" together with much of the other terminology we use today while designing and implementing Smalltalk would disagree with you.
"Calm down man! I don't use mail and end of story. You have to live with that."
I do not however have to live with your claim that large numbers of people use office suites to do nothing more than write letters based on the anecdotal example of what you and the people you know do with them. And I also don't have to live with your claim that OpenOffice is ideal for even this simple application, because there are many different types of letter for many different purposes, not just the sort you and the people you know happen to write.
"You are trying to put your world view on everybody's head."
I fail to see how refuting your claim that "many people don't do this kind of stuff" based on purely the anecdotal evidence of you and the people you know counts as trying to put my world view on your or anyone else's head.
"Neither I nor the people I know need to print frickin mail labels that's it."
Mailing labels in and of themselves aren't the point of my argument, but merely serve as a convenient example of the general geek propensity to recommend things to others based on what the geek and his pals do instead of what the person they're recommending it to wants to do. That's what the AC further up this thread was alluding to, and it's what you were doing when you claimed that OpenOffice was suitable for the large numbers of people who write, save, and print letters without even thinking about the possibility that you and the people you know might be non-typical in even this very narrow area of all the possible uses to which an entire integrated office automation suite can be put.
"OpenOffice is good enough for me."
This does not however mean it's good enough for the large numbers of other people who you claimed it would be perfect for.
The Romans didn't call him (or rather them) an emperor either. The term "Imperium" didn't actually refer to an empire, so an "Imperator" wasn't an emperor in the modern sense, hence the fact that the first Caesar (Julius) was elected as Dictator For Life.
I don't have much faith in Wikipedia, but this entry is fairly accurate:
"I didn't said that OpenOffice is only suitable for trivial business tasks and home use. I said it is suitable for some common business tasks and home use."
You said the following:
"They type letter, save / print and bam. End of story."
Typing and printing a letter is easily within the capabilities of WordPad on Windows and similar simple "comes with the OS" applications on other platforms such as the Mac's TextEdit.app (which despite the name is rather more than a text editor) or KWrite on Linux with KDE, so it is indeed a trivial task that doesn't require or justify large, complex application bundles to perform.
"I work at one of the largest oil companies in the world and never seen anyone printing a mailing label either and home or at work."
Whereas other people who work at companies or other organisations (e.g. some charities) that _actually ship stuff_ tend to see rather a lot of them.
"People just e-mail each other."
You obviously have a special EMAIL system that can send and receive parcels, which are the primary use for mailing labels (most business correspondence is sent in window envelopes). Unfortunately, I and many others have to make do with the less capable EMAIL Mk. 1 that's limited to binary information, so stuff we order tends to arrive by other means, usually with a mailing label on it that by some miraculous process seems to have been printed by a computer.
"Besides, I don't use snail mail anymore and none of my friends use it either."
And you being a typical example of the entirety of humanity everywhere in the world thus proves that mailing labels are something only a tiny minority of ancient curmudgeons could possibly have a use for.
"Besides, I don't use snail mail anymore and none of my friends use it either."
And obviously no gifts sent or received by mail, so welcome to the lonely geek that nobody would even consider spending a cent on because he's far too stingy to buy gifts for anyone else.
"If something is not useful to you, it doesn't means that it is useless."
Then why are you trying to argue that mailing labels are useless because you have no use for them?
"I said many people simply don't do this kind of stuff."
Are you seriously suggesting that printing mailing labels is such an uncommon task that the stupid hoops he had to jump through to do it with OpenOffice is justified?
"They type letter, save / print and bam. End of story.
For those, OpenOffice is perfect."
So, by your own words, you're claiming that OpenOffice is only suitable for trivial business tasks and home use "out of the box", assuming of course that said home users don't want to run off some mailing labels to (for example) ease the task of sending out Christmas cards and gifts to family and friends.
This is a non-trivial problem due to the fact that there's a _vast_ amount of both internal corporate and commercial software written for Access that can't easily be replaced by something else.
"sheep don't follow the dog, they do the exact opposite - they run away from the dog."
Ewes run away, but rams (which are also sheep) can be dangerous to both dogs and humans, although their actual aggression levels depend on a variety of factors (some are, for various reasons, more timid and therefore manageable than others).
Queen Victoria must obviously have a step down in England, Australia, Canada, NZ, etc., where she was only a queen, but a definite step up in India, where she was an Empress.
Slashdot Mirror
"MS Windows instability over the years is a prime example of using C++ when C was a much better choice to build an OS."
As somebody who has also been in programming for 30 years, I can categorically state that Windows was written in C and assembler up to and including version 3.X, and those versions were even less stable than modern ones, so Windows' problems have nothing whatsoever to do with bits of it now being written in C++.
" MI is a good thing, its just that most modern languages don't implement it because its hard for the compiler writers."
The problem is that, as the MI mechanism in C++ so excellently demonstrates, coming up with a good way of doing it that doesn't introduce at least as many problems as it solves is what's difficult, not implementing the mechanism itself. An excellent example of this is a common MI ambiguity caused by multiple base classes having member functions with the same names and input parameters. C++ handles this situation via kludges of such epic proportions that calling it "a designed feature" would be stretching the term to a degree where one would also have to call the ability to ruin electronic devices when poured into them a "designed feature" of soft drinks.
"I vaguely remember that he was one to the people consistently pushing for extensions to copyright length here in the UK." Copyright extensions for recordings, not all copyrights. "Note how here in the UK copyright is now Life + 70 years ..."
Recordings have a 50 year copyright. The life+70 bit comes from the Berne Convention, to which the UK is a signatory, but the Berne Convention doesn't cover recorded works, so their copyright period is set by individual countries.
"Coherent I/O is a bitch"
Anything that uses shared resources is a bitch because of the the potential for race conditions and deadlocks, and the fact that very few computer subsystems or peripherals are inherently parallel in and of themselves means that some threads in non-trivial applications will end having to contend with other threads for shared resources at some point, unless of course they're using an OS that manages resource contention issues automatically, i.e. not one of the mainstream offerings on the sorts of computers most of us are expected to program for.
"we've been using the same basic single-core architecture for the last, what, 30 or 40 years? "
This may be true of personal computers, but it's far from being the case with computing in general, where parallel systems were already sufficiently established by the 1980s to produce not only a variety of formal design methodologies, but also computer languages that embodied one or more of them, e.g. Occam, which was based on Communicating Single Processes algebra.
"This isn't anything fancy and new. These ideas have been around for a long time."
I have a book called "Parallel Program Design: A Foundation" by Chandy and Misra that was printed in 1988, and there isn't much in it that was new then, so it has indeed been around for a fair while.
"You're being pedantic."
Welcome to Slashdot.
"Apple restricts the use of the Mac OS to people who own Apple hardware."
They do indeed, but that's not the same as _restricting sales_ of OS X to people who own Apple hardware.
"So, sure, you can buy it if you do your computing with a pile of pebbles, but you can't use it."
There are plenty of things besides OS X that require another thing from a specific manufacturer but can be bought by people who don't have whatever they're meant to work with, e.g. add-ons and accessories for specific brands and models of power tools, various types of razor blades, console games, and mobile phone accessories. Nobody's restricting the sale of "Little Big Planet" to people who have access to a PlayStation-3, so you're quite free to buy as many copies as you like to use as coasters, Frisbees, or reflectors for bicycles, and the same is true of OS X.
"The legal issue is, OS X was never really sold as a "full install" product. It's only sold as an "upgrade license"
Where does it say that on either the OS X retail box or in the EULA?
"Why is it OK to hack a car but not a book?"
IANAL, but I think it might have just a little to do with the fact that books and cars are completely different, and are therefore also subject to completely different laws, just as (for example) a Wendy-house doesn't usually require any permission to put on your property, but a 600ft transmitter mast probably does.
"with the help of Psystar, they can do Intel-based RECTANGLES!"
I'd be tempted very by a PC that's a rectangle, because all Apple's offerings have an annoying extension into the third dimension that prevents me from stacking an infinite number of them in any space of sufficient width and height.
"As soon as Apple can't restrict sales of Mac OS X to people who own Apple hardware"
Please provide some evidence showing that Apple have restricted the sale of (the Mac version of) OS X to people who own Apple hardware.
"which gives Apple a $129 profit on every Pystar sale"
Because as every student of Slasconomics knows, dealers always sell products for the same price that they pay for them, and manufacturers don't have any production, shipping, or administration costs, so everything that people buy is 100% pure profit for whoever produces it.
"how long can they justifiably continue to style themselves as "new"?"
They'll do so until nobody alive remembers "old Labour", i.e. a party which, like the Conservatives and Liberals during the same period, actually had people in it who entered politics because they believed in the core principles of the parties they belonged to, and stuck to those principles irrespective of whether they happened to be popular with the press or not.
Of course, all that's in the past now, because we've entered the period of the self-serving career politician whose only principle is "what's best for me", which at the moment largely consists of being a vizier in Emperor Murdoch's court. Note that I'm not just referring to New Labour here, because the same thing is true of today's Tories and LibDems as well.
It would be more correct to say that idiot-proofing anything results in it ending up as something that only an idiot would want.
"Running as an admin is OSX is not a good practice."
An excellent piece of advice. IMO one of the flaws with OS X is the fact that the installer doesn't automatically set up a standard user account in addition to the admin account, and then lets the admin account be used for automatic log-ins when the machine boots.
"they don't have the numbers to make it a target for malware authors yet."
My theory is that there are three factors that account for the notable lack of really dangerous Mac malware:
1) A paucity of expertise, especially in Eastern Europe, where Macs are extremely rare, and low-level programmers who know a lot about them are even rarer. This is in stark contrast to Windows, where there's a literally vast amount of information and plenty of ready-made free and commercial toolkits that potential malware authors can use to target XP in particular with relative ease.
2) Macs are much more of moving target than Windows, where XP which was launched in 2001 is still dominant, with no sign of that situation changing for some years. This is far from being the case with Apple's user base, who are using two completely different CPU types to host OS X versions ranging from (at least) 10.3 to 10.5, so writing something that successfully targeted a worthwhile proportion of them before Apple got a patch out to close whatever hole(s) it uses is extremely difficult, especially given the fact that Mac owners seen to be more rigourous in applying the latest patches than Windows users.
3) The average Mac user is far more likely to seek out both on-line and printed sources of Mac-specific information than the average Windows user, so they have a much greater tendency to hear about any threats and how to counter them before they have much of a chance to propagate.
So while that 5% share which largely consists of the more affluent personal computer users looks like a fairly tempting target initially, it's virtually impossible for any malware author to realistically attack more than a small fraction of that 5% for a worthwhile length of time, and even that would require a lot of personal detective work and experimentation to achieve with the current levels of information and tools.
"they do have huge developers constantly adding features"
As president of the International Council For Being Offended On Behalf Of Everyone, I am haughtily informing you that those who don't want to be accused of blatant hugeism should use the more politically correct "circumference-challenged" term when referring to larger than average people. Please bear this in mind when posting in the future, because developers do after all have feelings that can be hurt just like everyone else.
"if your objects contain only functions and no attributes, they are not objects"
The people who invented the term "Object Oriented Programming" together with much of the other terminology we use today while designing and implementing Smalltalk would disagree with you.
"Calm down man! I don't use mail and end of story. You have to live with that."
I do not however have to live with your claim that large numbers of people use office suites to do nothing more than write letters based on the anecdotal example of what you and the people you know do with them. And I also don't have to live with your claim that OpenOffice is ideal for even this simple application, because there are many different types of letter for many different purposes, not just the sort you and the people you know happen to write.
"You are trying to put your world view on everybody's head."
I fail to see how refuting your claim that "many people don't do this kind of stuff" based on purely the anecdotal evidence of you and the people you know counts as trying to put my world view on your or anyone else's head.
"Neither I nor the people I know need to print frickin mail labels that's it."
Mailing labels in and of themselves aren't the point of my argument, but merely serve as a convenient example of the general geek propensity to recommend things to others based on what the geek and his pals do instead of what the person they're recommending it to wants to do. That's what the AC further up this thread was alluding to, and it's what you were doing when you claimed that OpenOffice was suitable for the large numbers of people who write, save, and print letters without even thinking about the possibility that you and the people you know might be non-typical in even this very narrow area of all the possible uses to which an entire integrated office automation suite can be put.
"OpenOffice is good enough for me."
This does not however mean it's good enough for the large numbers of other people who you claimed it would be perfect for.
"Few would have called Caesar king."
The Romans didn't call him (or rather them) an emperor either. The term "Imperium" didn't actually refer to an empire, so an "Imperator" wasn't an emperor in the modern sense, hence the fact that the first Caesar (Julius) was elected as Dictator For Life.
I don't have much faith in Wikipedia, but this entry is fairly accurate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperium
"I didn't said that OpenOffice is only suitable for trivial business tasks and home use. I said it is suitable for some common business tasks and home use."
You said the following:
"They type letter, save / print and bam. End of story."
Typing and printing a letter is easily within the capabilities of WordPad on Windows and similar simple "comes with the OS" applications on other platforms such as the Mac's TextEdit.app (which despite the name is rather more than a text editor) or KWrite on Linux with KDE, so it is indeed a trivial task that doesn't require or justify large, complex application bundles to perform.
"I work at one of the largest oil companies in the world and never seen anyone printing a mailing label either and home or at work."
Whereas other people who work at companies or other organisations (e.g. some charities) that _actually ship stuff_ tend to see rather a lot of them.
"People just e-mail each other."
You obviously have a special EMAIL system that can send and receive parcels, which are the primary use for mailing labels (most business correspondence is sent in window envelopes). Unfortunately, I and many others have to make do with the less capable EMAIL Mk. 1 that's limited to binary information, so stuff we order tends to arrive by other means, usually with a mailing label on it that by some miraculous process seems to have been printed by a computer.
"Besides, I don't use snail mail anymore and none of my friends use it either."
And you being a typical example of the entirety of humanity everywhere in the world thus proves that mailing labels are something only a tiny minority of ancient curmudgeons could possibly have a use for.
"Besides, I don't use snail mail anymore and none of my friends use it either."
And obviously no gifts sent or received by mail, so welcome to the lonely geek that nobody would even consider spending a cent on because he's far too stingy to buy gifts for anyone else.
"If something is not useful to you, it doesn't means that it is useless."
Then why are you trying to argue that mailing labels are useless because you have no use for them?
"I said many people simply don't do this kind of stuff."
Are you seriously suggesting that printing mailing labels is such an uncommon task that the stupid hoops he had to jump through to do it with OpenOffice is justified?
"They type letter, save / print and bam. End of story.
For those, OpenOffice is perfect."
So, by your own words, you're claiming that OpenOffice is only suitable for trivial business tasks and home use "out of the box", assuming of course that said home users don't want to run off some mailing labels to (for example) ease the task of sending out Christmas cards and gifts to family and friends.
"All but access works through wine"
This is a non-trivial problem due to the fact that there's a _vast_ amount of both internal corporate and commercial software written for Access that can't easily be replaced by something else.
"sheep don't follow the dog, they do the exact opposite - they run away from the dog."
Ewes run away, but rams (which are also sheep) can be dangerous to both dogs and humans, although their actual aggression levels depend on a variety of factors (some are, for various reasons, more timid and therefore manageable than others).
Queen Victoria must obviously have a step down in England, Australia, Canada, NZ, etc., where she was only a queen, but a definite step up in India, where she was an Empress.