> Garbage collection has already been implemented into C++
If it ain't in the spec, it ain't in C++. You can use garbage-collecting class libraries -- which only work with those classes. You can use a conservative gc, which usually makes running finalizers a rather laborious process. And none of them have a standard library API or predictable behavior. Just because you can grovel the stack looking for pointers, that doesn't make the runtime garbage collected. Just because you can glue gc on does not make C++ garbage collected. Take Ada95 on the other hand, which does have standard garbage collection that you can turn off when you don't want it.
These people seem to sort of be the poster children for why linux can be used on the desktop.
I don't get it. I've always done this in windows too. Used zipdisks for big files I didn't want to fill my mailbox with. Didn't have to mount and umount the disk either.
Re:Why people use Netscape instead of IE or Mozill
on
Netscape 6.1
·
· Score: 2
> support for roaming profiles
IE bundled this into windows logins. Different user, different bookmarks, different settings. Not terribly "roaming" unless you have an NT server to to do a domain login on, not the most reliable thing at 28.8 on the road...
> excellent support for large and complex collections of bookmarks
Funny thing that, I use the filesystem to manage my bookmarks, using explorer, which lets me move things around with a more familiar interface than netscape. I can import bookmarks over a remote share or from email with drag-and-drop. Managing my bookmarks doesn't require a modal dialog.
> slick javascript programmable "personal toolbar" buttons which can be very handy for instant searches and lookups of any term on any page
Bookmarklets (as such javascript bookmarks are nicknamed) are also available on IE. In fact there's more of them for IE. And a personal toolbar does exist, in fact it's pretty much the way I manage bookmarks 99% of the time.
> a very capable mail client written by people that bothered to read the MIME and MHTML RFCs before writing code
IE lets me choose my mail client -- I prefer Eudora. In fact, IE for solaris (which manages to be slower, bloatier and crashier than netscape) lets me use dtmail and mutt.
> and an open mailbox format that interoperates with literally thousands of mailbox manipulation power tools.
Whereas windows has MAPI, a standard API for accessing and manipulating mailboxes. Power tools able to understand this API include Perl and Python. It's a windows philosophy -- where unix has file formats, windows has interfaces.
You could think of Curl technology as a way to deploy a specialized XML viewer.
Whereas I can think of Macromedia Flash as a way to deploy a generalized XML viewer (xmlsockets, XML oject). It's also cross-platform, free-beer, royalty-free, already deployed on the vast majority of browsers, low-bandwidth, streamable, and works with with LiveConnect so I can call Javascript for DHTML integration, and Java for, oh yes, database connectivity. In fact I've recently used flash for this very purpose... it was still largely a piece of graphical eye candy, but we (two people, who can't afford your licensing fees and wouldn't suffer our customers privacy being invaded) made it do some serious work too, including using this holy XML stuff on the backend (written in python).
You might consider taking some of this back to your marketing department. Even all the technical things aside, you must have been smoking some amazing crack to think people would submit to that privacy policy.
> [PHP] is a mediocre language embedded in a great dynamic web pages environment.
Don't have to tell me twice. Passes all objects by value, making them immutable, unless you use by-reference semantics, which you now have to do in function declarations (call-time byref semantics have been deprecated if not outright removed now). Uses the === operator, worst syntax ever, lifted from ecmascript, guess they expected people to think 'eq' had perl's broken implementation. === didn't even work on objects until I complained to the designers that I wanted an identity compare -- I had to explain the very concept of object identity to them and advocate its relevance. Then it was implemented to have the exact same semantics as the member-for-member compare of ==, but even slower. There's still no identity compare, so I still couldn't do something as simple as a search for a node in a tree without having to use some kind of unique id field in every object in the system -- which is exactly what they suggested I do. This didn't help the fact that my system was working on copies until I discovered PHP's pass-by-value semantics when I wondered why none of my objects were getting updated by my transform algorithms.
Not sure if inheritance is working yet.
PHP has no concept of namespaces, and dumps hundreds of functions with hundreds more to come in a global namespace, and you cannot wrap these functions (I eventually wrote a hack to do so, it's lost and was tricky to implement the first time, so don't bother asking). You can't selectively load these extensions, you must recompile the whole language. (I understand you can now disable individual functions in a config file, my primary concern. My hack allows you to disable and wrap builtin functions in the language itself)
PHP took what was looking to be a better OO language than perl and managed to rip out anything meaningful about OOP. When I aired these problems, I was told by the designers that a) PHP is not an object-oriented language, and b) it was not and never will be designed for the uses I was putting it through. And I was designing an ASP-like application framework with it, something that should have been in the domain of a "web language".
Then I discovered FastCGI and Template Toolkit for perl, which had everything I wanted, and I never looked back.
Call this the 'pluggable protocol' model. It also allows for multiple special purpose protocols to operate at the same time. There could be a protocol designed specifically for MMORPGs, for example, that was optimized for minimizing latency.
Ok, first make it routable. That's IP. (use IP6 if you want it sans cruft).
Now you need to address a target on the system, by a number perhaps, since you can't just have every process on the target system inspect every packet. You need to be able to send a chunk of data to a process on a system. That'd be UDP.
Now you need to make sure your data arrives. RDP (TCP's less-talented cousin that died in its crib)
Now you need to make sure it arrives in order. TCP.
Just for fun, let's allow people to add arbitrary metadata to a really low level of the protocol by sticking extra headers on the packet. That would be IP6 again.
And guess what, TCP and UDP don't even have to sit on IP (it's just unlikely they won't). It's a protocol graph, not a straight line stack. In short, it already is pluggable. You just need root to start generating anything below raw IP... you can try generating your own ethernet frames if you want, but unless you've developed the perfect AI that knows what you really mean with such packets and routes them appropriately, you're going to have a hard time working without some standard platform.
It seems it's pretty modular and "pluggable" as it is. In fact it was designed that way. Reinventing this particular wheel is not likely to make it rounder.
To get the real message here, we have to replace every instance of the term "intelligent network" with "telephony network". So we see that what the businesses really want, is a high bandwidth telephony network.
And that's almost what we got. The ISO protocol suite with X.25, requiring all kinds of telephony switching infrastructure all the way down, restricting networking pretty much to remote access, almost won over TCP/IP. And it wasn't the dirty Yankees, it was the PTT monopolies of Europe collaborating with ECMA, shoving it through ISO and marketing it heavily at the US. Michael Padlipsky did a wonderful job advocating for TCP/IP with RFC's 871, 873, and 874. One of my favorites from him was when he was speculating as to why ECMA was pushing for such an inefficient CPU-intense protocol stack: ```... the "M", recall, is for "Manufacturers"''
I doubt TCP/IP is going away. Ever dial 10-10-321 or any other 10-10 service? All IP telephony. Telcos are investing billions into IP networks, and they'll sell it to anyone with money to burn. They have everything to lose by tossing that out. And until they can figure out a way to make one-way wires, DSL and cable are still going to enjoy upstream speed too (people do send attachments and such).
Now they may try to filter out everything not using their proprietary software, but I don't think the government for example would like its purchasing list for email and other communication software circumscribed like that, so it'd only happen at that all-important Last Mile. Watch that space closely and don't take shit when they start restricting it -- complain loud and long to them, not just slashdot.
> but it does require the sectioning off of the internet.
Odd, I type any address in the AOL keyword bar and up it pops up in the diminished MDI windowlet that is basically just embedded IE. I don't use a single premium service. I am annoyed that I don't get POP mail, but I sure don't see a whole lot of "sectioning off". With AOL you pay for, well, vapid content you could probably get by customizing a yahoo page to always show entertainment news as the front-page item (that's what really repulses me about AOL). I'm not saying they're not into lock-in, but AOL would lose most of its customers if it told them one day they couldn't use the web. As for port blocking, I telnet to weird ports all the time and can even portscan (though I was a little afraid that they'd take it as "hacking" and nuke me).
AOL might have something like half the ISP market sewn up, but they're becoming more and more a glorified website, and that's what their customers seem to want. Seems to me the Internet is winning even against this juggernaut.
(No I don't use AOL by choice, I'm broke and using another's account, beggars can't be choosers.)
Re:Be made a lot of good choices and still they're
on
Be Buyout Looms Closer
·
· Score: 2
4) They just didn't listen to developers...
Neither does Microsoft
Oh aren't you just full of analytic wisdom with your point-for-point repartee. Microsoft, see, they're bad guys, right? I mean, they must not listen to developers because well that would be bad if they didn't and they have to be bad guys so that you can say how bad they are, and they're big and mean and bad and oh wow hey I could go on and on but I'll let the rest of slashdot do that for me until the fucking cows come home, have calves, and i'm grilling their fucking hindquarters on my hibachi.
Hundred bucks and I can get enough developer documentation and SDK's bigger than a stack of encyclopedias if i printed 'em out. It's called MSDN. Most of it's even online for free. Clue check, there's a reason people develop for Microsoft SDK's.
How fast is it, how fast is it at xxxxx clients (where xxxxx is a big number), how much memory does it take up (and at xxxxx clients), how much code has to be rewritten to support it, how much support does it have for future target platforms, how many platforms require admin intervention to roll it out on (usually in the form of installing dependencies). How many existing technologies in use does it integrate with, how many technologies will have to be migrated to something else?
A java platform may win on some of these points, and I'd really appreciate seeing those points argued, not vagaries like the Betterment of Society. That along with spelling "Microsoft" correctly, or at least the two letters MS. C'mon, you can do it if you try (though perhaps there's a certain Randroid charm in M$)
Lemme amend my post about Bollow and Coxall and just say Read the thread (search forward for "dotGNU banning"). This guy has some serious anger issues.
Then again, by that point they may realize.NET is a crock of crap and have moved on completely --.NET is a strategic move to take on Sun and J2EE and ONE, not an effort to really change the world for the better).
Do you honestly think J2EE and ONE (whatever the hell ONE is, I couldn't get any info on what it really was when I worked for Sun) are some kind of philanthropy or some great cultural contribution like Michaelangelo or Shakespeare? Good freakin god, is there anyone left who is capable of evaluating platforms on objective criteria?
I see Coxall with a persecution complex, Bollow with a control issue over the word "we", and a whole lot of rah-rah Java boosterism on the dotgnu side from people who don't even know what operator overloading and generic programming is. Then gratuitous mono-bashing in the FAQ's (simply saying you have a difference in opinion should have been fine). I don't see a lot of hope for dotgnu, and frankly not a lot for mono if Coxall is allowed to set the tone on the list.
It would be really nice to see other companies such as Sun invest in Mono and push it far beyond what.NET plans to do.
Sun wouldn't touch it with a bargepole unless it was written in the Java language, for the Java virtual machine, targeting the J2EE Java class collection. In short, you can use any language you like as long as it's Java, and run it on any platform you want as long as it's Java.
(I am well aware that there are many languages targeting the JVM. Not one of them receives so much as recognition from Sun, much less moral support, far less technical support)
Has anyone asked/answered this question? Most of his viewpoints never seem to agree with the general populace here (at least from what I have seen), so what is he doing telling us what we will/wont like?
God forbid opinions differ. And god forbid I ever be considered one of the general populace of slashdot.
ObReview: corny eye candy. i had to suspend my disbelief of the dubious parts (like the indestructable ship's bridge), but marky mark's acting job made it all that much harder. final fantasy had better eye candy for its vapid plot. --
The thing with Perl is, it's a wonderful language when you're writing the code, and a royal pain in the arse 6 months later when you have to debug it.
Not perl's problem. Ever try to debug C code using triple indirection? I left a few thousand lines of perl code running a system that are as perfectly readable to anyone with a grasp of OOP and structured programming as with any other language. No games with the namespace, no typeglobs, no cute shortcuts, no gee-wiz stuff like closures or dynamic scope. And oodles of API documentation.
A language that doesn't let you hang yourself is like a car that doesn't go fast enough to crash. --
> They illegally attacked Java, fragmented it, and now refuse to support in XP
I'm not even going to beat the dead horse of Java partisanship that's so obvious here, but the reason they don't support it in XP is that Sun prohibits them from shipping a JVM in XP. --
> The guy was arrested for creating and selling a device which breaks Adobe's "encryption".
Correct, the advanced e-book processor, which comes bundled with exactly zero (0) copyrighted e-books, which you are instead encouraged to legally purchase, download, and then view on the e-book processor.
They came for him with guns and batons, and threw him into an iron cage with murderers for writing a compatible product. He didn't even need to look at Adobe's copyrighted source to do it. Adobe and their ilk have made it a federal felony to break their file formats.
Yep, it was a crime, this is the new kind of crime congress rolled over and passed. Corruption isn't just draining your wallet now, it's threatening people's lives. --
They will care when Windows XP tells tham that they're not allowed to play the music they just copied off a CD they bought.
And they'll sit back and take it and just play it off the CD, because a life without the latest nsync CD apparently isn't worth living for most of them.
They will care when Passport gets cracked or DOSed and their buddy lists or email or credit card numbers are lost or stolen
No they won't, they'll just want to make sure that the hacker gets thrown in prison, beaten and raped, and in their heart of hearts, hope he gets killed. Banks still get robbed, most people assume the site has the same security as a bank and that it took some master criminal to commit this heinous act.
> Consumer rejection killed the DivX disc
I suspect it was the fact that it was Circuit City alone against a much bigger set of folks who didn't care to change standards due to the slower market penetration inherent in requiring a telephone-connected device, which by the way, cost more. Look for DIVX to return in future DVD players as an enhancement. --
Slashdot Mirror
> Garbage collection has already been implemented into C++
If it ain't in the spec, it ain't in C++. You can use garbage-collecting class libraries -- which only work with those classes. You can use a conservative gc, which usually makes running finalizers a rather laborious process. And none of them have a standard library API or predictable behavior. Just because you can grovel the stack looking for pointers, that doesn't make the runtime garbage collected. Just because you can glue gc on does not make C++ garbage collected. Take Ada95 on the other hand, which does have standard garbage collection that you can turn off when you don't want it.
Answer: "Email the file to yourself."
These people seem to sort of be the poster children for why linux can be used on the desktop.
I don't get it. I've always done this in windows too. Used zipdisks for big files I didn't want to fill my mailbox with. Didn't have to mount and umount the disk either.
> support for roaming profiles
IE bundled this into windows logins. Different user, different bookmarks, different settings. Not terribly "roaming" unless you have an NT server to to do a domain login on, not the most reliable thing at 28.8 on the road...
> excellent support for large and complex collections of bookmarks
Funny thing that, I use the filesystem to manage my bookmarks, using explorer, which lets me move things around with a more familiar interface than netscape. I can import bookmarks over a remote share or from email with drag-and-drop. Managing my bookmarks doesn't require a modal dialog.
> slick javascript programmable "personal toolbar" buttons which can be very handy for instant searches and lookups of any term on any page
Bookmarklets (as such javascript bookmarks are nicknamed) are also available on IE. In fact there's more of them for IE. And a personal toolbar does exist, in fact it's pretty much the way I manage bookmarks 99% of the time.
> a very capable mail client written by people that bothered to read the MIME and MHTML RFCs before writing code
IE lets me choose my mail client -- I prefer Eudora. In fact, IE for solaris (which manages to be slower, bloatier and crashier than netscape) lets me use dtmail and mutt.
> and an open mailbox format that interoperates with literally thousands of mailbox manipulation power tools.
Whereas windows has MAPI, a standard API for accessing and manipulating mailboxes. Power tools able to understand this API include Perl and Python. It's a windows philosophy -- where unix has file formats, windows has interfaces.
You could think of Curl technology as a way to deploy a specialized XML viewer.
... it was still largely a piece of graphical eye candy, but we (two people, who can't afford your licensing fees and wouldn't suffer our customers privacy being invaded) made it do some serious work too, including using this holy XML stuff on the backend (written in python).
Whereas I can think of Macromedia Flash as a way to deploy a generalized XML viewer (xmlsockets, XML oject). It's also cross-platform, free-beer, royalty-free, already deployed on the vast majority of browsers, low-bandwidth, streamable, and works with with LiveConnect so I can call Javascript for DHTML integration, and Java for, oh yes, database connectivity. In fact I've recently used flash for this very purpose
You might consider taking some of this back to your marketing department. Even all the technical things aside, you must have been smoking some amazing crack to think people would submit to that privacy policy.
> [PHP] is a mediocre language embedded in a great dynamic web pages environment.
Don't have to tell me twice. Passes all objects by value, making them immutable, unless you use by-reference semantics, which you now have to do in function declarations (call-time byref semantics have been deprecated if not outright removed now). Uses the === operator, worst syntax ever, lifted from ecmascript, guess they expected people to think 'eq' had perl's broken implementation. === didn't even work on objects until I complained to the designers that I wanted an identity compare -- I had to explain the very concept of object identity to them and advocate its relevance. Then it was implemented to have the exact same semantics as the member-for-member compare of ==, but even slower. There's still no identity compare, so I still couldn't do something as simple as a search for a node in a tree without having to use some kind of unique id field in every object in the system -- which is exactly what they suggested I do. This didn't help the fact that my system was working on copies until I discovered PHP's pass-by-value semantics when I wondered why none of my objects were getting updated by my transform algorithms.
Not sure if inheritance is working yet.
PHP has no concept of namespaces, and dumps hundreds of functions with hundreds more to come in a global namespace, and you cannot wrap these functions (I eventually wrote a hack to do so, it's lost and was tricky to implement the first time, so don't bother asking). You can't selectively load these extensions, you must recompile the whole language. (I understand you can now disable individual functions in a config file, my primary concern. My hack allows you to disable and wrap builtin functions in the language itself)
PHP took what was looking to be a better OO language than perl and managed to rip out anything meaningful about OOP. When I aired these problems, I was told by the designers that a) PHP is not an object-oriented language, and b) it was not and never will be designed for the uses I was putting it through. And I was designing an ASP-like application framework with it, something that should have been in the domain of a "web language".
Then I discovered FastCGI and Template Toolkit for perl, which had everything I wanted, and I never looked back.
I'll sign no petition. I'm voting with my feet. Bookmark deleted.
Call this the 'pluggable protocol' model. It also allows for multiple special purpose protocols to operate at the same time. There could be a protocol designed specifically for MMORPGs, for example, that was optimized for minimizing latency.
... you can try generating your own ethernet frames if you want, but unless you've developed the perfect AI that knows what you really mean with such packets and routes them appropriately, you're going to have a hard time working without some standard platform.
Ok, first make it routable. That's IP. (use IP6 if you want it sans cruft).
Now you need to address a target on the system, by a number perhaps, since you can't just have every process on the target system inspect every packet. You need to be able to send a chunk of data to a process on a system. That'd be UDP.
Now you need to make sure your data arrives. RDP (TCP's less-talented cousin that died in its crib)
Now you need to make sure it arrives in order. TCP.
Just for fun, let's allow people to add arbitrary metadata to a really low level of the protocol by sticking extra headers on the packet. That would be IP6 again.
And guess what, TCP and UDP don't even have to sit on IP (it's just unlikely they won't). It's a protocol graph, not a straight line stack. In short, it already is pluggable. You just need root to start generating anything below raw IP
It seems it's pretty modular and "pluggable" as it is. In fact it was designed that way. Reinventing this particular wheel is not likely to make it rounder.
To get the real message here, we have to replace every instance of the term "intelligent network" with "telephony network". So we see that what the businesses really want, is a high bandwidth telephony network.
And that's almost what we got. The ISO protocol suite with X.25, requiring all kinds of telephony switching infrastructure all the way down, restricting networking pretty much to remote access, almost won over TCP/IP. And it wasn't the dirty Yankees, it was the PTT monopolies of Europe collaborating with ECMA, shoving it through ISO and marketing it heavily at the US. Michael Padlipsky did a wonderful job advocating for TCP/IP with RFC's 871, 873, and 874. One of my favorites from him was when he was speculating as to why ECMA was pushing for such an inefficient CPU-intense protocol stack: ```... the "M", recall, is for "Manufacturers"''
I doubt TCP/IP is going away. Ever dial 10-10-321 or any other 10-10 service? All IP telephony. Telcos are investing billions into IP networks, and they'll sell it to anyone with money to burn. They have everything to lose by tossing that out. And until they can figure out a way to make one-way wires, DSL and cable are still going to enjoy upstream speed too (people do send attachments and such).
Now they may try to filter out everything not using their proprietary software, but I don't think the government for example would like its purchasing list for email and other communication software circumscribed like that, so it'd only happen at that all-important Last Mile. Watch that space closely and don't take shit when they start restricting it -- complain loud and long to them, not just slashdot.
> but it does require the sectioning off of the internet.
Odd, I type any address in the AOL keyword bar and up it pops up in the diminished MDI windowlet that is basically just embedded IE. I don't use a single premium service. I am annoyed that I don't get POP mail, but I sure don't see a whole lot of "sectioning off". With AOL you pay for, well, vapid content you could probably get by customizing a yahoo page to always show entertainment news as the front-page item (that's what really repulses me about AOL). I'm not saying they're not into lock-in, but AOL would lose most of its customers if it told them one day they couldn't use the web. As for port blocking, I telnet to weird ports all the time and can even portscan (though I was a little afraid that they'd take it as "hacking" and nuke me).
AOL might have something like half the ISP market sewn up, but they're becoming more and more a glorified website, and that's what their customers seem to want. Seems to me the Internet is winning even against this juggernaut.
(No I don't use AOL by choice, I'm broke and using another's account, beggars can't be choosers.)
4) They just didn't listen to developers...
Neither does Microsoft
Oh aren't you just full of analytic wisdom with your point-for-point repartee. Microsoft, see, they're bad guys, right? I mean, they must not listen to developers because well that would be bad if they didn't and they have to be bad guys so that you can say how bad they are, and they're big and mean and bad and oh wow hey I could go on and on but I'll let the rest of slashdot do that for me until the fucking cows come home, have calves, and i'm grilling their fucking hindquarters on my hibachi.
Hundred bucks and I can get enough developer documentation and SDK's bigger than a stack of encyclopedias if i printed 'em out. It's called MSDN. Most of it's even online for free. Clue check, there's a reason people develop for Microsoft SDK's.
> And what is an objective criteria?
How fast is it, how fast is it at xxxxx clients (where xxxxx is a big number), how much memory does it take up (and at xxxxx clients), how much code has to be rewritten to support it, how much support does it have for future target platforms, how many platforms require admin intervention to roll it out on (usually in the form of installing dependencies). How many existing technologies in use does it integrate with, how many technologies will have to be migrated to something else?
A java platform may win on some of these points, and I'd really appreciate seeing those points argued, not vagaries like the Betterment of Society. That along with spelling "Microsoft" correctly, or at least the two letters MS. C'mon, you can do it if you try (though perhaps there's a certain Randroid charm in M$)
Lemme amend my post about Bollow and Coxall and just say Read the thread (search forward for "dotGNU banning"). This guy has some serious anger issues.
Then again, by that point they may realize .NET is a crock of crap and have moved on completely -- .NET is a strategic move to take on Sun and J2EE and ONE, not an effort to really change the world for the better).
Do you honestly think J2EE and ONE (whatever the hell ONE is, I couldn't get any info on what it really was when I worked for Sun) are some kind of philanthropy or some great cultural contribution like Michaelangelo or Shakespeare? Good freakin god, is there anyone left who is capable of evaluating platforms on objective criteria?
I see Coxall with a persecution complex, Bollow with a control issue over the word "we", and a whole lot of rah-rah Java boosterism on the dotgnu side from people who don't even know what operator overloading and generic programming is. Then gratuitous mono-bashing in the FAQ's (simply saying you have a difference in opinion should have been fine). I don't see a lot of hope for dotgnu, and frankly not a lot for mono if Coxall is allowed to set the tone on the list.
It would be really nice to see other companies such as Sun invest in Mono and push it far beyond what .NET plans to do.
Sun wouldn't touch it with a bargepole unless it was written in the Java language, for the Java virtual machine, targeting the J2EE Java class collection. In short, you can use any language you like as long as it's Java, and run it on any platform you want as long as it's Java.
(I am well aware that there are many languages targeting the JVM. Not one of them receives so much as recognition from Sun, much less moral support, far less technical support)
> By that rationale, no one can sell a CD player without the permission of the copyright holder.
That's pretty much how it works for DVD players. Expect them to try their damndest to phase out CD's for audio DVD's.
Don't give me any shit about using FrontPage. I always demand HTTP 2.0 compliance
HTML is at version 4.01, HTTP is at 1.1. What is this HTTP 2.0 compliance you're talking about?
--
Exhibit 1: on the control of perceptions by major media outlets.
> Didn't you people ever watch the x files.. people disappear all the time
QED
--
> Get Dmitri to go on a hunger strike or something
How noble of you. Maybe if he killed himself he might be even more useful as a martyr.
--
Your own sig stands in ironic contrast to your point. You start first, mister Galt.
--
Has anyone asked/answered this question? Most of his viewpoints never seem to agree with the general populace here (at least from what I have seen), so what is he doing telling us what we will/wont like?
God forbid opinions differ. And god forbid I ever be considered one of the general populace of slashdot.
ObReview: corny eye candy. i had to suspend my disbelief of the dubious parts (like the indestructable ship's bridge), but marky mark's acting job made it all that much harder. final fantasy had better eye candy for its vapid plot.
--
The thing with Perl is, it's a wonderful language when you're writing the code, and a royal pain in the arse 6 months later when you have to debug it.
Not perl's problem. Ever try to debug C code using triple indirection? I left a few thousand lines of perl code running a system that are as perfectly readable to anyone with a grasp of OOP and structured programming as with any other language. No games with the namespace, no typeglobs, no cute shortcuts, no gee-wiz stuff like closures or dynamic scope. And oodles of API documentation.
A language that doesn't let you hang yourself is like a car that doesn't go fast enough to crash.
--
> They illegally attacked Java, fragmented it, and now refuse to support in XP
I'm not even going to beat the dead horse of Java partisanship that's so obvious here, but the reason they don't support it in XP is that Sun prohibits them from shipping a JVM in XP.
--
> The guy was arrested for creating and selling a device which breaks Adobe's "encryption".
Correct, the advanced e-book processor, which comes bundled with exactly zero (0) copyrighted e-books, which you are instead encouraged to legally purchase, download, and then view on the e-book processor.
They came for him with guns and batons, and threw him into an iron cage with murderers for writing a compatible product. He didn't even need to look at Adobe's copyrighted source to do it. Adobe and their ilk have made it a federal felony to break their file formats.
Yep, it was a crime, this is the new kind of crime congress rolled over and passed. Corruption isn't just draining your wallet now, it's threatening people's lives.
--
They will care when Windows XP tells tham that they're not allowed to play the music they just copied off a CD they bought.
And they'll sit back and take it and just play it off the CD, because a life without the latest nsync CD apparently isn't worth living for most of them.
They will care when Passport gets cracked or DOSed and their buddy lists or email or credit card numbers are lost or stolen
No they won't, they'll just want to make sure that the hacker gets thrown in prison, beaten and raped, and in their heart of hearts, hope he gets killed. Banks still get robbed, most people assume the site has the same security as a bank and that it took some master criminal to commit this heinous act.
> Consumer rejection killed the DivX disc
I suspect it was the fact that it was Circuit City alone against a much bigger set of folks who didn't care to change standards due to the slower market penetration inherent in requiring a telephone-connected device, which by the way, cost more. Look for DIVX to return in future DVD players as an enhancement.
--
Don't let the simplicity fool you, though: It may be very hard or even impossible to access this interface
:)
Well sure, it is for me too, but that's because my license was for a different installed base and expired at least 25 years ago
--