With CLR/.NET there's no one to sue Microsoft when they go and take what is touted as being an open spec and change their
implementation of it.
Nor should there be. Just as no-one can sue the GNU project for not making g++ ANSI compliant.
The important thing about standards is that it provides a target for developers. I can write ANSI-C++ code, as opposed to just writing code that works with a given implementation. Learning which quirks the different implementations have is some work, but at least I can start with a standard target.
That will lead to.NET software that people will think can run on any.NET platform that actually only
runs on MS's.NET.
The worst that could happen is it could lead to one-platform binaries.
Sure, it's an ECMA standard, but that doesn't keep MS from introducting their own "extensions" to it
which lock users into MS.NET while still giving the illusion of not being MS-specific.
Standards are supposed to codify existing practice. You can't write useful software if you insist on everything to go through a standardisation process. The standard is not MS specific, but extensions may be. There also may be other extensions, that are specific to UNIX or Linux, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.
The real benefit of having a standard is that there is some well-defined notion of what is "standard" and what is an "extension".
But we all know that MS plays dirty. Other posters have given examples already. Which makes me question whether Miguel
is being utterly naive in thinking that Microsoft won't screw the Mono project.
They might want to screw the mono project, but they can't. The worst they could do is provide proprietary extensions. This would partially sabotage Windows compatibility, but it would not stop Mono from being useful in its own right.
The key point here is that the platform is going to be useful in its own right, it's not just a Microsoft emulator.
If GNOME is ported to Mono, along with GTK, what else could be? Maybe Mozilla, Jabber, Apache and who knows
what? If MS intentionally break compatability with Mono, then we'd have two similar architectures with a whole bundle of
applications.
I strongly agree with this sentiment. Microsoft can
extend it, but then, so can we (-; and we could make it work to our advantage. I haven't been a great fan of GNOME, but I think Miguel's new vision is a winner.
Pricewatch turns up a lot of dishonest vendors. I cross-reference price-watch hits with reseller ratings. Over time, I developed a few favourite vendors that proved reliable and had good service. There's only so much I'm prepared to do to save a dollar, especially when saving that dollar often costs you the peace of mind that dealing with an honest vendor gives you.
Also, you can be sure he will try and get his copy legislated as the one true XFree86. He may even eventually claim that he created it. Funny though, how easily the GPL stops stuff like that
If he can get his copy "legislated as the one true XFree86", he can probably not only squash the GPL in court, but also fly, leap tall buildings in a single bound, and breathe fire.
> Maybe I'm paranoid, but maybe RMS is not very enthusiastic about C++ support because GNOME would look even worse in comparison to KDE, once a good C++ compiler is available?
Paranoid, stupid?
He actually makes an interesting point. I mean, they released a g++ 3.0 that would not correctly compile KDE. It appears that the associated ABI bugs are not going to be addressed until 3.1. And they've dropped the ball on it badly enough that it's been forked twice over the last few years.
Up to and including 2.95.x, there were a lot of very obvious and annoying bugs with g++ (no namespace std, no stringstream class, no ios_base
class, etc)
I don't see any conspiracy theories, but it doesn't seem that gcc have historically given C++ a very high priority.
I couldn't agree more. Even though the code I write needs to run fast, a little extra speed is just not worth the development effort of having to put up with a broken compiler. Once gcc 3.x is at the point where it can compile KDE (which basically means they need to nail down the ABI), I'm not going to look back. The support for the standard is several orders of magnitude better than that in earlier releases.
Compile speed is also a big issue for me, and I'd guess anyone who compiles C++ code.
I recently finished a PhD in math, and I am now programming. My observation is, the moment the word gets out that you have any competency whatsoever with computers, everyone is onto you. It's almost as if there was this big sign up -- Wanted -- Competent Computer Professionals. Even after the dotcom slump, knowing something about computers implies you are in demand. I would say I got pulled in mor eby the sheer gravitational force than anything else. I've been programming for years as a hobby, and when it came time to look for jobs, the computing jobs were hunting for me, while one has to fight like all hell to get a short term academic position in math (postdocs are 1-3 years, and then you're back to looking for a job again)
I'm not sure why you regard such a career track as "non-traditional". It is in fact part of a more general tradition -- a tradition of people who are educated as generalists confronting the economic reality that when they work in the real world, while they may indeed draw upon the skills they acquired in their education, the actual work they do will be very different.
Whats so frustrating about your argument is that you manage to brush off a tremendous
amount of effort in research without adding or substituting a single shred of fact in it's place
But the original poster didn't "brush off" the said research. He merely pointed out that the researcher was biased, and that has an effect on the research.
The evidence for the extreme brutality/racism exhibited by the USA throughout it's history is
so easy to find that if you don't see it you must be working real hard.
But he didn't say that there was no "extreme brutality/racism" in the history of the USA.
It is true that there is "brutality and racism" in Americas history, but this quality is certainly not unique to America, in fact it's been a problem in nearly all multi-ethnic states.
Actually an "IDE" that produced a simple, readable, and editable file would probably do everything you can do with Makefiles. This is because it would be easy to write programs that could find all the source code and thus run doxygen and the other stuff you are mentioning.
KDevelop uses automake and autoconf at the back end.
You can certainly edit the files, though you need to take care that you don't edit it in a way that lets it get overwritten
I know there are good tools out their for Liinux. What I want to see is MSDEV with MFC on top of it, and then you'll have me as a developer. Point me to the SINGLE download for this, and you have another Linux developer.
You don't even need to download if your distribution is up to date -- KDevelop should come with the distribution. I suggest you invest a couple of dollars in a CD of the latest release of a decent distribution. Alternatively, you could download the ISOs
These books always try to cover too large fields. I guess reading the title is enough to realize that. I have bought a couple of programming books like this one, and they are always very interesting. But they never go in to the depth of any area, so it's quite impossible to acctually learn any real programming from them. So, it usually ends up with the fact that I'm finding the information I wanted where I should have looked in the first place, on the web.
The books are intended as a primer to get you up to speed, so that you'll be able to work with the reference docs once you're done with their tutorial. You won't find this much in the way of good tutorial material on the web.
And in my experience, it works. I don't know why you're going to the web all the time, most of the stuff in this book has reasonable reference documentation.
..that's about the size of the typical introductory C++ book these days, isn't it?
This is part of the "telephone book" trend. Because C++ is popular, there are a lot of heavy C++ books written by incompetents.
I wonder if they think anyone's going to actually read all of those pages ?
FYI, if you're looking for a more concise, yet readable intro to C++, see "Accelerated C++", Koenig and Moo. The book is 300 pages long, and it covers all the essentials. Accelerated C++ has introduced iterators, exceptions, std::string, std::vector and std::list by page 100, whereas most books are still explaining if/then at that stage.
Most Linux programming books deal almost exclusively with C, since a good number of programs (and the kernel) are C. However, I am looking for a high-quality book about Linux programming with C++.
You'll have a hard time finding such a book, and there's a good reason for this -- Linux books tend to document the POSIX and X/Open APIs. Basically, the traditional APIs are all C based.
There are books for C++ libraries like Qt and KDE, but the Qt documentation is so good that you're better off just using the online version.
If you're fond of dead trees, I suggest you print out the tutorials.
Regarding learning C++ on Linux, I'd suggest you
focus on mastering C++ (BTW, one book is NOT enough. Not even close), and try to learn some of the C APIs. It's also interesting to try things like wrapping things in classes (eg Sockets)
Actually, you have no clue about what I was exhibiting in my post.
Perhaps you should have been more clear then. Your post was an incoherent and angry rant, and then you follow up with another angry rant because you're not perceived as a middle-of-the-road, reasonable sort of guy.
Since you seem to have zero interest in actually understanding where I am coming from or what my facts are,
See: "bad faith"
I won't bore you with the details.
Well OK, but that's not a very effective way to get your message across, is it ?
Put it this way -- Ho wasn't the one who had a problem with the idea of unifying the country in a general election. North Vietnam was only illegitimate to the degree that the idea of maintaining a division was illegitimate.
The USSR has been funding Ho Chi Minh since the early 50's!
... which is, coincidentally, shortly after the US were propping up the French occupation of Vietnam. With the US backing the colonials, the USSR was an obvious place to look to for support.
They were slaughtering and starving 300,000 people before the US took action. Next time there is famine in Somalia or elsewhere, I dare you to say the USA should stay home.
One of the things I despise about the far left is
this tendency to howl about the consequences of
military action, but wash their hands of the
consequences of inaction. This is not only intellectually dishonest, the lack of willingness
to accept the consequences of their policy ideas
is outright cowardly.
The facts are we did not respond to terrorism for eight years during the Clinton presidency, and we were attacked numerous times. The first bombing of the WTC, the bombing of two US embassies, the attack of marine quarters of Suadi Arabia, the bombing of the USS Cole. Every time we did nothing.
This is not quite accurate. Clinton did launch
cruise missile strikes. They also had operatives
on the ground in Afghanistan trying to locate
Osama so they could capture or kill him. They were also pressing the Taliban to hand over Osama.
Clinton also had an attack launched on Iraq
shortly after the UN inspectors were kicked out,that
appeared to be an attempt to get Saddam.
It's true that most of these operations weren't
terribly succesful, but it's not true that Clinton didn't do anything.
Also, to say our motivations were racist is too call Clinton a racist. The raid in Mogadishu took place in Oct. of '93, and Clinton ultimately is responsible.
The guy you are replying to is exhibiting a dishonest behaviour that we often see from extremists -- trying to rewrite a policy that had
bipartisan support as a partisan issue that had
almost universal support among intellectually honest people on both sides of the political fence. As
for the "racist" tag, damned if they do, damned if they don't, huh ? If they let them starve, that'd be "racist" too.
Sure, Chomsky states facts. But he discards all the facts which contradicts his arguments. For example, one of his longest standing claims is that America was acting as the aggressor in Vietnam, ignoring the fact that the Soviet Union funded VC had been terrorizing the South
While I'm not endorsing Chomsky, you are just wrong here. The history of Vietnam goes back further than North and South. Basically, "South Vietnam" was not a legitimate state. It was an extension of the colonial rule of the French, and the division of Vietnam was supposed to be a temporary measure (it was to be unified in a general election) IOW, the very existence of "South Vietnam" was a provocation.
Good points, but the left do not have a monopoly on this sort of conduct. One common piece of sophistry
from rightists is to misrepresent the mainstream
leftist position, by attacking extremist straw men.
Why is no one talking about the expanding gulf of earnings mentioned in the review? 80%(!!!) of
Americans have their effective income reduced by 19% in about 20 years
"Effective earnings" is a term that has several assumptions built into it.
Technology has
resulted in vast increases in living standards for everyone. IMO, a working class American is closer
to a rich American in terms of lifestyle, than
they are to a working class foreigner. The real class distinctions are between, not within countries.
Wait till the high tech "globalization" hits you (and I
think it will be much sooner that 10-15 years), and your job is now being done someone else in India or
China (no disrespect to workers in that country at all!). Then you sit there and wonder: what the hell
happened? Then you think and remember who benefits from all this, and who makes the rules, and how
come the rules seem right, but the outcome feel so damn wrong?
The absence of globalisation creates an
aristocracy of citizenship, while globalisation
pushes the economy towards meritocracy. This is
made quite explicit in the tendency of Chinese and
Indians, who often view immigration as the only
means available to advance.
There is a repressive class heirarchy now, it's the distinction between rich and poor countries. This distinction is enforced by immigration laws.
Boundaries between countries are being used as a
sort of class division. Globalisation does not create an exploited class, it merely undercuts the aristocracy of citizenship, and opens up the possibility that the divisions between rich and poor might not be borders between countries.
As for the question about why does the outcome "feel so damn wrong", while the rules "seem right", any outcome that doesn't benefit oneself will always "feel" wrong.
The outcome of strong national borders, where Americans live comfortable lives, supported by third world slaves, doesn't "feel wrong" to most Americans, because this outcome works well for them.
The main people who benefit from this are people in
third world countries. Globalisation grants them a semblence of social mobility that would be otherwise unavailable. The aristocracy don't really benefit from this -- they are the beneficiaries of all forms of aristocracy, and changing from one form of aristocracy to the next
doesn't help them a great deal.
I'm sorry, but I think you're in denial. Think about the decline in the art of assembly programming.
Twenty years ago almost everyone did some of it, now you'd be hard pressed to get an assembler "hello
world" out of 95% of the programmers out there.
I bet 20 years ago, not many people understood the
material in "design patterns" either. Coding has not become any simpler. The increase in technology
has resulted in an increase in the complexity of applications. There is no trend towards "less programming".
I think there's a flaw or two in the theory, however. the book apparently tells us that we will all
become more like workers in the third world, but that the internet will help democratize us more and
make us more astute on world happenings. we will all magically become citizens of the world;
international boundaries will fade in importance.
It's called globalisation, and it's already happening.
third-world workers struggle to get by and have little chance to become more knowledgable
about the outside world
........
What's happened is that within a given country, reforms to capitalism have resulted in a new social mobility. The real class system is between
different countries. This system can be maintained
at present, because the regulation between borders
of different countries is more clearly defined, and more overtly forceful than barriers between class within a country. Rich country/poor country is the new replacement for ruling class/working class.
I believe you're mistaken in your assumption that
globalisation will necessarily result in the
return of class divisions -- what it's more likely to do is make class divisions more visible to us because the working class will not be separated from the ruling class by oceans.
BTW, I think that the regulation of immigration is
such a severe obstruction to social mobility (to the
extent that moving upward requires immigration)
that there will not be less social mobility as a result of globalisation.
Students shouldn't cheat, but professors shouldn't toss around those accusations lightly either.
For the most part, they don't "toss around accusations lightly", because it's actually fairly
difficult and inconvenient to pursue academic dishonesty cases, and it often results in a "slap on
the wrist". Professors are generally not
supposed to deduct points for cheating, they are
expected to take it up with the Deans office. This
would explain why your friend was hauled in front of the "appeal session" -- it's the only legitimate process profs have to deal with students suspected of cheating.
A lot of the stories I hear about students plagiarizing each other's code is done without the other student's permission. Many systems have files readable by other students by default, and students don't bother to read-protect their files.
Most of the schmucks who cheat on assignments as trivial as these wouldn't know how to
view the files of another user.
Slashdot Mirror
Nor should there be. Just as no-one can sue the GNU project for not making g++ ANSI compliant. The important thing about standards is that it provides a target for developers. I can write ANSI-C++ code, as opposed to just writing code that works with a given implementation. Learning which quirks the different implementations have is some work, but at least I can start with a standard target.
That will lead to .NET software that people will think can run on any .NET platform that actually only
runs on MS's .NET.
The worst that could happen is it could lead to one-platform binaries.
Sure, it's an ECMA standard, but that doesn't keep MS from introducting their own "extensions" to it which lock users into MS.NET while still giving the illusion of not being MS-specific.
Standards are supposed to codify existing practice. You can't write useful software if you insist on everything to go through a standardisation process. The standard is not MS specific, but extensions may be. There also may be other extensions, that are specific to UNIX or Linux, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. The real benefit of having a standard is that there is some well-defined notion of what is "standard" and what is an "extension".
They might want to screw the mono project, but they can't. The worst they could do is provide proprietary extensions. This would partially sabotage Windows compatibility, but it would not stop Mono from being useful in its own right. The key point here is that the platform is going to be useful in its own right, it's not just a Microsoft emulator.
If GNOME is ported to Mono, along with GTK, what else could be? Maybe Mozilla, Jabber, Apache and who knows what? If MS intentionally break compatability with Mono, then we'd have two similar architectures with a whole bundle of applications.
I strongly agree with this sentiment. Microsoft can extend it, but then, so can we (-; and we could make it work to our advantage. I haven't been a great fan of GNOME, but I think Miguel's new vision is a winner.
Pricewatch turns up a lot of dishonest vendors. I cross-reference price-watch hits with reseller ratings. Over time, I developed a few favourite vendors that proved reliable and had good service. There's only so much I'm prepared to do to save a dollar, especially when saving that dollar often costs you the peace of mind that dealing with an honest vendor gives you.
If he can get his copy "legislated as the one true XFree86", he can probably not only squash the GPL in court, but also fly, leap tall buildings in a single bound, and breathe fire.
He actually makes an interesting point. I mean, they released a g++ 3.0 that would not correctly compile KDE. It appears that the associated ABI bugs are not going to be addressed until 3.1. And they've dropped the ball on it badly enough that it's been forked twice over the last few years. Up to and including 2.95.x, there were a lot of very obvious and annoying bugs with g++ (no namespace std, no stringstream class, no ios_base class, etc) I don't see any conspiracy theories, but it doesn't seem that gcc have historically given C++ a very high priority.
Compile speed is also a big issue for me, and I'd guess anyone who compiles C++ code.
Cheers,
I'm not sure why you regard such a career track as "non-traditional". It is in fact part of a more general tradition -- a tradition of people who are educated as generalists confronting the economic reality that when they work in the real world, while they may indeed draw upon the skills they acquired in their education, the actual work they do will be very different.
But the original poster didn't "brush off" the said research. He merely pointed out that the researcher was biased, and that has an effect on the research.
The evidence for the extreme brutality/racism exhibited by the USA throughout it's history is so easy to find that if you don't see it you must be working real hard.
But he didn't say that there was no "extreme brutality/racism" in the history of the USA. It is true that there is "brutality and racism" in Americas history, but this quality is certainly not unique to America, in fact it's been a problem in nearly all multi-ethnic states.
KDevelop uses automake and autoconf at the back end. You can certainly edit the files, though you need to take care that you don't edit it in a way that lets it get overwritten
You don't even need to download if your distribution is up to date -- KDevelop should come with the distribution. I suggest you invest a couple of dollars in a CD of the latest release of a decent distribution. Alternatively, you could download the ISOs
Even the bigger acts don't always make money. Their revenue is much higher, but so are their costs.
The books are intended as a primer to get you up to speed, so that you'll be able to work with the reference docs once you're done with their tutorial. You won't find this much in the way of good tutorial material on the web. And in my experience, it works. I don't know why you're going to the web all the time, most of the stuff in this book has reasonable reference documentation.
This is part of the "telephone book" trend. Because C++ is popular, there are a lot of heavy C++ books written by incompetents. I wonder if they think anyone's going to actually read all of those pages ?
FYI, if you're looking for a more concise, yet readable intro to C++, see "Accelerated C++", Koenig and Moo. The book is 300 pages long, and it covers all the essentials. Accelerated C++ has introduced iterators, exceptions, std::string, std::vector and std::list by page 100, whereas most books are still explaining if/then at that stage.
You'll have a hard time finding such a book, and there's a good reason for this -- Linux books tend to document the POSIX and X/Open APIs. Basically, the traditional APIs are all C based. There are books for C++ libraries like Qt and KDE, but the Qt documentation is so good that you're better off just using the online version. If you're fond of dead trees, I suggest you print out the tutorials.
Regarding learning C++ on Linux, I'd suggest you focus on mastering C++ (BTW, one book is NOT enough. Not even close), and try to learn some of the C APIs. It's also interesting to try things like wrapping things in classes (eg Sockets)
Cheers,
Perhaps you should have been more clear then. Your post was an incoherent and angry rant, and then you follow up with another angry rant because you're not perceived as a middle-of-the-road, reasonable sort of guy.
Since you seem to have zero interest in actually understanding where I am coming from or what my facts are,
See: "bad faith"
I won't bore you with the details.
Well OK, but that's not a very effective way to get your message across, is it ?
Put it this way -- Ho wasn't the one who had a problem with the idea of unifying the country in a general election. North Vietnam was only illegitimate to the degree that the idea of maintaining a division was illegitimate.
The USSR has been funding Ho Chi Minh since the early 50's!
One of the things I despise about the far left is this tendency to howl about the consequences of military action, but wash their hands of the consequences of inaction. This is not only intellectually dishonest, the lack of willingness to accept the consequences of their policy ideas is outright cowardly.
The facts are we did not respond to terrorism for eight years during the Clinton presidency, and we were attacked numerous times. The first bombing of the WTC, the bombing of two US embassies, the attack of marine quarters of Suadi Arabia, the bombing of the USS Cole. Every time we did nothing.
This is not quite accurate. Clinton did launch cruise missile strikes. They also had operatives on the ground in Afghanistan trying to locate Osama so they could capture or kill him. They were also pressing the Taliban to hand over Osama. Clinton also had an attack launched on Iraq shortly after the UN inspectors were kicked out,that appeared to be an attempt to get Saddam. It's true that most of these operations weren't terribly succesful, but it's not true that Clinton didn't do anything.
Also, to say our motivations were racist is too call Clinton a racist. The raid in Mogadishu took place in Oct. of '93, and Clinton ultimately is responsible.
The guy you are replying to is exhibiting a dishonest behaviour that we often see from extremists -- trying to rewrite a policy that had bipartisan support as a partisan issue that had almost universal support among intellectually honest people on both sides of the political fence. As for the "racist" tag, damned if they do, damned if they don't, huh ? If they let them starve, that'd be "racist" too.
While I'm not endorsing Chomsky, you are just wrong here. The history of Vietnam goes back further than North and South. Basically, "South Vietnam" was not a legitimate state. It was an extension of the colonial rule of the French, and the division of Vietnam was supposed to be a temporary measure (it was to be unified in a general election) IOW, the very existence of "South Vietnam" was a provocation.
"Effective earnings" is a term that has several assumptions built into it. Technology has resulted in vast increases in living standards for everyone. IMO, a working class American is closer to a rich American in terms of lifestyle, than they are to a working class foreigner. The real class distinctions are between, not within countries.
Wait till the high tech "globalization" hits you (and I think it will be much sooner that 10-15 years), and your job is now being done someone else in India or China (no disrespect to workers in that country at all!). Then you sit there and wonder: what the hell happened? Then you think and remember who benefits from all this, and who makes the rules, and how come the rules seem right, but the outcome feel so damn wrong?
The absence of globalisation creates an aristocracy of citizenship, while globalisation pushes the economy towards meritocracy. This is made quite explicit in the tendency of Chinese and Indians, who often view immigration as the only means available to advance. There is a repressive class heirarchy now, it's the distinction between rich and poor countries. This distinction is enforced by immigration laws. Boundaries between countries are being used as a sort of class division. Globalisation does not create an exploited class, it merely undercuts the aristocracy of citizenship, and opens up the possibility that the divisions between rich and poor might not be borders between countries.
As for the question about why does the outcome "feel so damn wrong", while the rules "seem right", any outcome that doesn't benefit oneself will always "feel" wrong. The outcome of strong national borders, where Americans live comfortable lives, supported by third world slaves, doesn't "feel wrong" to most Americans, because this outcome works well for them.
The main people who benefit from this are people in third world countries. Globalisation grants them a semblence of social mobility that would be otherwise unavailable. The aristocracy don't really benefit from this -- they are the beneficiaries of all forms of aristocracy, and changing from one form of aristocracy to the next doesn't help them a great deal.
I bet 20 years ago, not many people understood the material in "design patterns" either. Coding has not become any simpler. The increase in technology has resulted in an increase in the complexity of applications. There is no trend towards "less programming".
It's called globalisation, and it's already happening.
third-world workers struggle to get by and have little chance to become more knowledgable about the outside world
........
What's happened is that within a given country, reforms to capitalism have resulted in a new social mobility. The real class system is between different countries. This system can be maintained at present, because the regulation between borders of different countries is more clearly defined, and more overtly forceful than barriers between class within a country. Rich country/poor country is the new replacement for ruling class/working class.
I believe you're mistaken in your assumption that globalisation will necessarily result in the return of class divisions -- what it's more likely to do is make class divisions more visible to us because the working class will not be separated from the ruling class by oceans. BTW, I think that the regulation of immigration is such a severe obstruction to social mobility (to the extent that moving upward requires immigration) that there will not be less social mobility as a result of globalisation.
For the most part, they don't "toss around accusations lightly", because it's actually fairly difficult and inconvenient to pursue academic dishonesty cases, and it often results in a "slap on the wrist". Professors are generally not supposed to deduct points for cheating, they are expected to take it up with the Deans office. This would explain why your friend was hauled in front of the "appeal session" -- it's the only legitimate process profs have to deal with students suspected of cheating.
Most of the schmucks who cheat on assignments as trivial as these wouldn't know how to view the files of another user.
Changes as small as variable names and function names are likely to result in different binaries if you do this.