Score 5, wrong. The name indeed comes from "Deep Thought", but the reference goes quite a bit further back than that, namely to a "chess playing automaton" that predated computers, and turned out to be a hoax, as it contained a diminuitive chess grandmaster within its confines.
Cute. He died of cancer, so you get to kludge in the same metaphor to plug your megalomaniac, ah, "theory" (when I can find evidence of sound CS or even engineering principles on that page, I'll remove the quotes).
> Can it really be true that the best tool we have for driving nails is a 3000 year old piece of wood with metal on the end?
Or nail guns, as one poster put it. I might note the tremendous variety of nails, not to mention screws, and all the ways to drive them. For the truly heavy duty, we have welding and rivets. Then for the lighter duties, we have glue, velcro, and that tacky blue stuff. Not to mention all the neat movable fasteners out there, there's engineering companies that do nothing but come up with new ones. Draw your own parallels.
And reason number 11 - so that all the java programmers can finally get fed up, switch back to C/C++, and learn how to use malloc, pointers, and free properly!
Yunno, I'm starting to think GNUstep looks the way it does for merely gratuitous reasons, because the interface metaphors it uses were soundly rejected eons ago. It doesn't turn GUI metaphors on their heads, merely on their sides.
Options are typically represented by a long scrolled row of buttons. Maybe this won't be so bad once we all have jog dials, but it's a horrible navigation system. Ask any interface designer what they think of horizontal scrollbars.
Completing the ninety degree flip, we have menus that take the worst of windows and macos. Now not only are menus not attached to the application, they're not attached to anything *at all*, but merely float out there, unattached. I don't remember if they expand over the existing menu (thus making menus hard to navigate) or cascade to the size (thus forcing one to zigzag), but neither is all that useful.
Then there's the retro industrial battleship grey sharp edged 3d look, but I should assume *step is skinnable by now...
"If an accountant buys an object for $2000, which he could have gotten for $64 if he'd taken the right approach, would that make him a bad accountant?"
Makes him a lousy purchasing manager. He's still a fine accountant if he credits and debits the $2000 in the right places...
Actually, C with all its aliasing problems (read: ponters), defeats all sorts of static analysis and other optimizations that could otherwise be done. e.g. you could do copy-on-write at the struct level, or you could rearrange memory for better locality. You just plain can't do that in C, because it enforces a very rigid ABI -- which may be dandy for some programs, like OS's, but makes you otherwise do all that nifty stuff by hand. No one does, ergo the C program is slower. And even then, one technique that optimizes well on one machine is likely to fail miserably on another.
It's not so much the language as it is the runtime. CPU's don't really like to be micromanaged anymore, except by experts (again, like OS's). With a properly tuned runtime (like a good VM -- not saying Java is one), every program gains its benefit. C pretty much completely lacks a runtime layer completely, and the mismatch is starting to show.
Don't know about red bills, but I remember being handed some US Silver Certificates once, which look just like $1 bills, but have little blue banners on them. Legal tender nonetheless. Guy paid for a sandwich with 'em. Those things are worth, like $50 a pop to coin collectors.
And I didn't have any money on me to exchange the damn things in the register with. Fooey.
Re:Yeah, we think highly of foreigners here.
on
Greenbacks No More
·
· Score: 4, Funny
... then I remembered what my sig was after posting that, so at least *I* got a laugh out of it...
Re:Yeah, we think highly of foreigners here.
on
Greenbacks No More
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Arabic numbers?! AYY-rab-ick numbers? Damn, I better write my congressman about this awful plot! They're in our numbers now!
Not a lot of webstarted apps out there, since Sun doesn't seem to be shipping much in the way of useful utils to deploy existing apps with it. There's a list of existing webstarted apps at http://openjnlp.nanode.org/app-list.html
In short, the closer you get to the metal and the more familiar you are with the code that is executing, the better your chances of producing error free programs
I would claim that the first two conditions are often mutually exclusive. I spend far too much time chasing down fencepost errors because some nitwit used a C array and a for loop instead of a STL list and iterator. Said fencepost errors are known to lead to root compromises when performed on the stack (but usually it's on the heap and tends to cause heap corruption... sometimes, in ways that are hard to detect). And often I wonder why an app that spends 99% of its time waiting for user input is being written in C++ anyway, but that's a whole other story.
Basically, I get mired in some stupid piddly implementation detail instead of being able to think about the system, because someone decided to program to the machine instead of to the spec.
No, libraries and frameworks are good. Just don't get seduced by frameworks that claim to do everything, because they usually do so... poorly. Use the right one for the job, and one that's been around the block a few times, and you'll find yourself producing code that works, and even getting over that uneasy feeling that it shouldn't actually work the first time
They never will switch as long as the idiots who decide what to buy continue to fall victim to both their own stupidity (why not listen to your tech staff?) and M$'s flashy marketing and salesdroids.
Or as long as they continue to see a culture around Linux that takes every opportunity to insult and abuse them. See, I don't even care if you're right if you can't talk to me like a civilized intelligent human being.
... When I hear the words "linux culture" I reach for my revolver...
This is a fabulous example of something that still sucks mightily about X, and shows no signs of being fixed. Ok, how a real font system would render a 500 foot tall 'A':
send the 'A' glyph, along with whatever hinting it needs for 'insanely, off the scale big' (i.e. probably the hint for the biggest glyph it defines, like 72 pt). The renderer takes the 'A' and converts it into a series of strokes. The strokes are then rendered into the clipped region, resulting in pretty instantaneous drawing. The font manager decides wisely that this rendered glyph, being "pretty big", shouldn't get cached as a bitmap the next time you want to draw it.
Here's how X does it:
Request the font for the 'A' glyph, scaled to 500 feet tall. Construct an uncompressed 1bpp bitmap of the letter A to give to X to blindly blit onto the screen. Die a miserable thrashing death.
Funny the physics explanation may be, but it's a perfect description of a Monte Carlo algorithm, which is used in everything from economics to nuclear physics.
Ah you are right, I was thinking of an editor I had that used triple-click to select the physical line and quadruple for the logical line. IE goes straight to selecting the logical line (one paragraph or to the next br tag i presume. It's with IE where the behavior gets odd if I double-click ultra-fast (that is, use the doubleclick key), where it often selects the whole logical line anyway.
Anyway, Mozilla's behavior of not ever extending the selection to the logical line is fairly annoying, though not a show-stopper. Its sluggishness in swapping in often is. But it looks like kmeleon is still dead, with no interest by the kmeleon folks in actually fixing the bugs affecting them (this is where I do say it's ok for kmeleon users to at least tell kmeleon developers "fix it yourself, you have the source").
In IE I can quadruple-click (this isn't that hard when you have a mousekey set to doubleclick) and select the whole paragraph. Mozilla isn't even consistent about selecting the whole line when I triple click.
It's caret browsing that's real... neat. I'd call it a lifesaver were it not for the fact that the moment I hit page down, it doesn't go from the caret, it goes from the position the page was in before I started scrolling it with the caret. And naturally it doesn't even move the caret with it.
Was still using an old mozilla because I wanted to keep the site navigation bar, then realized how useless it is when there's no keyboard navigation controls for it (none documented at any rate). Now it's just that I don't feel like taking all day to download it. Maybe if they fixed the bugs that were plaguing kmeleon, I'll get that instead.
Maintainer builds package. Maintainer signs package. Maintainer's key is signed by distribution site. Distribution site's key is signed by many other maintainers, including the maintainer you trust. Big web of trust, long as you remember that they're only verifying authenticity, not intent.
A maintainer's secret key is compromised, without their knowledge, and used to write malware: you are SOL. For all technical purposes, it is the maintainer you trusted that inserted the malware.
Your 'So?' is like saying the bank vault door is useless if the lock on it isn't strong or isn't locked. True enough, but it doesn't really say much unless the lock is indeed weak or unlocked.
Slashdot Mirror
Score 5, wrong. The name indeed comes from "Deep Thought", but the reference goes quite a bit further back than that, namely to a "chess playing automaton" that predated computers, and turned out to be a hoax, as it contained a diminuitive chess grandmaster within its confines.
One should expect this from slashdot I guess.
Cute. He died of cancer, so you get to kludge in the same metaphor to plug your megalomaniac, ah, "theory" (when I can find evidence of sound CS or even engineering principles on that page, I'll remove the quotes).
You should be ashamed of yourself.
> Can it really be true that the best tool we have for driving nails is a 3000 year old piece of wood with metal on the end?
Or nail guns, as one poster put it. I might note the tremendous variety of nails, not to mention screws, and all the ways to drive them. For the truly heavy duty, we have welding and rivets. Then for the lighter duties, we have glue, velcro, and that tacky blue stuff. Not to mention all the neat movable fasteners out there, there's engineering companies that do nothing but come up with new ones. Draw your own parallels.
'course, when all you have is a hammer...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
... it seems odd to rely on one in a language that claims to have no syntax...
There's only one problem. Within one second of eyeballing this, tell me which "tag" is getting closed given the number of close parens:
(foo (bar (baz (mumble (frotz (quux (blerg (feh (foof (yay )))))))
Yes, there are syntax hilighting editors
And reason number 11 - so that all the java programmers can finally get fed up, switch back to C/C++, and learn how to use malloc, pointers, and free properly!
malloc? wuss. real men use sbrk()
moving parts in my PDA would absolutly suck (see: break in five seconds).
Everyone with an iPod begs to differ. I don't recommend dropping your Palm either, BTW.
Yunno, a hitman that doesn't know his mark's name or other information like, oh, where he lives, isn't very useful...
Yunno, I'm starting to think GNUstep looks the way it does for merely gratuitous reasons, because the interface metaphors it uses were soundly rejected eons ago. It doesn't turn GUI metaphors on their heads, merely on their sides.
Options are typically represented by a long scrolled row of buttons. Maybe this won't be so bad once we all have jog dials, but it's a horrible navigation system. Ask any interface designer what they think of horizontal scrollbars.
Completing the ninety degree flip, we have menus that take the worst of windows and macos. Now not only are menus not attached to the application, they're not attached to anything *at all*, but merely float out there, unattached. I don't remember if they expand over the existing menu (thus making menus hard to navigate) or cascade to the size (thus forcing one to zigzag), but neither is all that useful.
Then there's the retro industrial battleship grey sharp edged 3d look, but I should assume *step is skinnable by now...
"If an accountant buys an object for $2000, which he could have gotten for $64 if he'd taken the right approach, would that make him a bad accountant?"
Makes him a lousy purchasing manager. He's still a fine accountant if he credits and debits the $2000 in the right places...
Actually, C with all its aliasing problems (read: ponters), defeats all sorts of static analysis and other optimizations that could otherwise be done. e.g. you could do copy-on-write at the struct level, or you could rearrange memory for better locality. You just plain can't do that in C, because it enforces a very rigid ABI -- which may be dandy for some programs, like OS's, but makes you otherwise do all that nifty stuff by hand. No one does, ergo the C program is slower. And even then, one technique that optimizes well on one machine is likely to fail miserably on another.
It's not so much the language as it is the runtime. CPU's don't really like to be micromanaged anymore, except by experts (again, like OS's). With a properly tuned runtime (like a good VM -- not saying Java is one), every program gains its benefit. C pretty much completely lacks a runtime layer completely, and the mismatch is starting to show.
Erm ... maybe you shouldn't be pulling out a thick wad of cash in a bad part of town, no matter what the denominations? Just a suggestion...
Don't know about red bills, but I remember being handed some US Silver Certificates once, which look just like $1 bills, but have little blue banners on them. Legal tender nonetheless. Guy paid for a sandwich with 'em. Those things are worth, like $50 a pop to coin collectors.
And I didn't have any money on me to exchange the damn things in the register with. Fooey.
... then I remembered what my sig was after posting that, so at least *I* got a laugh out of it ...
Arabic numbers?! AYY-rab-ick numbers? Damn, I better write my congressman about this awful plot! They're in our numbers now!
Not a lot of webstarted apps out there, since Sun doesn't seem to be shipping much in the way of useful utils to deploy existing apps with it. There's a list of existing webstarted apps at http://openjnlp.nanode.org/app-list.html
In short, the closer you get to the metal and the more familiar you are with the code that is executing, the better your chances of producing error free programs
... sometimes, in ways that are hard to detect). And often I wonder why an app that spends 99% of its time waiting for user input is being written in C++ anyway, but that's a whole other story.
... poorly. Use the right one for the job, and one that's been around the block a few times, and you'll find yourself producing code that works, and even getting over that uneasy feeling that it shouldn't actually work the first time
I would claim that the first two conditions are often mutually exclusive. I spend far too much time chasing down fencepost errors because some nitwit used a C array and a for loop instead of a STL list and iterator. Said fencepost errors are known to lead to root compromises when performed on the stack (but usually it's on the heap and tends to cause heap corruption
Basically, I get mired in some stupid piddly implementation detail instead of being able to think about the system, because someone decided to program to the machine instead of to the spec.
No, libraries and frameworks are good. Just don't get seduced by frameworks that claim to do everything, because they usually do so
They never will switch as long as the idiots who decide what to buy continue to fall victim to both their own stupidity (why not listen to your tech staff?) and M$'s flashy marketing and salesdroids.
...
Or as long as they continue to see a culture around Linux that takes every opportunity to insult and abuse them. See, I don't even care if you're right if you can't talk to me like a civilized intelligent human being.
... When I hear the words "linux culture" I reach for my revolver
> Dude, their editors.. That's what editors do... they aren't like the rest of us.
:)
... while I still have a +1 bonus, anyway)
Somehow that actually does make me feel a lot better
(put voluntarily back at score 1
Do I need to bring back my old sig?
Editors, put your commentary in replies like the rest of us.
How's the subscription model going, guys?
This is a fabulous example of something that still sucks mightily about X, and shows no signs of being fixed. Ok, how a real font system would render a 500 foot tall 'A':
send the 'A' glyph, along with whatever hinting it needs for 'insanely, off the scale big' (i.e. probably the hint for the biggest glyph it defines, like 72 pt). The renderer takes the 'A' and converts it into a series of strokes. The strokes are then rendered into the clipped region, resulting in pretty instantaneous drawing. The font manager decides wisely that this rendered glyph, being "pretty big", shouldn't get cached as a bitmap the next time you want to draw it.
Here's how X does it:
Request the font for the 'A' glyph, scaled to 500 feet tall. Construct an uncompressed 1bpp bitmap of the letter A to give to X to blindly blit onto the screen. Die a miserable thrashing death.
Funny the physics explanation may be, but it's a perfect description of a Monte Carlo algorithm, which is used in everything from economics to nuclear physics.
Ah you are right, I was thinking of an editor I had that used triple-click to select the physical line and quadruple for the logical line. IE goes straight to selecting the logical line (one paragraph or to the next br tag i presume. It's with IE where the behavior gets odd if I double-click ultra-fast (that is, use the doubleclick key), where it often selects the whole logical line anyway.
Anyway, Mozilla's behavior of not ever extending the selection to the logical line is fairly annoying, though not a show-stopper. Its sluggishness in swapping in often is. But it looks like kmeleon is still dead, with no interest by the kmeleon folks in actually fixing the bugs affecting them (this is where I do say it's ok for kmeleon users to at least tell kmeleon developers "fix it yourself, you have the source").
Even then, lots of applets are MS pseudo-java (and only work in the Microsoft VM) rather than real Sun/IBM/etc. Java.
Show me one still in use. I was hard-pressed to think of one from 4 years ago except for MSDN's navigator widget (now IE-specific DHTML)
AFAIK the games.yahoo.com used the MS-Java specific crap (for no good reason) last time I checked.
Works fine with the plugin for me. Perhaps you should check your configuration instead of blaming everyone else.
In IE I can quadruple-click (this isn't that hard when you have a mousekey set to doubleclick) and select the whole paragraph. Mozilla isn't even consistent about selecting the whole line when I triple click.
... neat. I'd call it a lifesaver were it not for the fact that the moment I hit page down, it doesn't go from the caret, it goes from the position the page was in before I started scrolling it with the caret. And naturally it doesn't even move the caret with it.
It's caret browsing that's real
Was still using an old mozilla because I wanted to keep the site navigation bar, then realized how useless it is when there's no keyboard navigation controls for it (none documented at any rate). Now it's just that I don't feel like taking all day to download it. Maybe if they fixed the bugs that were plaguing kmeleon, I'll get that instead.
Maintainer builds package. Maintainer signs package. Maintainer's key is signed by distribution site. Distribution site's key is signed by many other maintainers, including the maintainer you trust. Big web of trust, long as you remember that they're only verifying authenticity, not intent.
A maintainer's secret key is compromised, without their knowledge, and used to write malware: you are SOL. For all technical purposes, it is the maintainer you trusted that inserted the malware.
Your 'So?' is like saying the bank vault door is useless if the lock on it isn't strong or isn't locked. True enough, but it doesn't really say much unless the lock is indeed weak or unlocked.