but all of them are very expressive languages with uncluttered code (compared to C++ or Java), completely type-safe,
Surely you're aware that Dylan is dynamically typed, and thus only "type-safe" in a way that's practically useless for the avoidance of bugs at runtime...
But when Qt is using GPL, suddenly the GNU zealots turn around and say, hey that's bad, you can't write proprietary software with it!
Those aren't the GNU zealots saying that. At least that much should be obvious to anyone who considers other people to be even remotely rational: the GNU zealots are just fine with the GPL. It's the ones who aren't GNU zealots that are complaining about QT being GPLed.
("Insightful", my arse--think "mistaken" and "vitriolic")
Do you feel you have any obligation to reimburse the veteran players who payed the premium prices ($30) for each of these expansions when they were first announced (many times before they were even released)? Either monetarily or through in-game items?
Why would he? Do you get your $8 back when a movie starts playing at the dollar theater?
This is standard price discrimination. You should be accustomed to it by now.
Any number of laws regarding employment discrimination. You wouldn't ask for an interviewee's blood type for the same reason you wouldn't ask for his religion; it would open you up to all sorts of civil suits which you'd almost certainly lose.
The need for an interpreter is nonsense since it can always be avoided.
All you're doing in your proposed situation is partially evaluating the interpreter by hand. I.e., instead of implementing a generic scheme for handling all objects in any program in the way you propose, you only implement the scheme for the objects your program actually instantiates.
Your argument is also trivially defeated by the use of any libraries whatsoever. Given a random void pointer from a random library function, I can't do the same kind of runtime introspection in C that I can do in Python.
Turing completeness is a useless and irrelevant measure of the power of a language. A better measure is was put forward by Paul Graham: One language is "more powerful" than another if, in order to implement the features and capabilities of the latter language, one must write an interpreter in the former language.
That is to say, C simply *can't* do the same kind of runtime object introspection that Python can. In order to achieve that feature using C, a programmer would have to write an interpreter for Python in C. Therefore, Python is more powerful (in this useful way, not in the turing completeness way) than C.
You missed the point. Many places ask for the last four digits of a person's social security number to verify things. The author obviously wasn't suggesting using part of your SSN as a PIN.
How you got to be "Insightful," I don't know. Seems more like lack of sight to me.
More probably, the story submitter is just a standard illiterate slashbot who doesn't know that "guise" implies an ulterior motive.
Jeremy
Re:Email is mostly broken
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 1
The answer lies in authentication - who is sending the email.
No, the answer isn't authentication. The answer is economics.
Right now, the recipient pays the primary cost of an email. All the sender has to do is connec to a server, dump some data, and be done. The recipient, on the other hand, has to sort out to whom that data belongs, store it, cache it, pass it on to other systems, drop it in mailboxes, etc. On top of this, the recipient's server must always be online just in case some more mail comes in.
Instead, the sender should pay these costs. The sender should be the one to store, cache, and deliver email. The sender's server should be the one required always to be online. If the sender were responsible for more of the costs of sending mail, spam wouldn't be such a problem.
A system like this has already been designed, of course: it's Internet Mail 2000 (a somewhat anachronistic name, these days). So many of the things that SMTP servers currently do (mailing list management, mailing list archives, message receipt confirmation, bounces, etc.) would become unnecessary if such a system were in place instead of SMTP.
But alas, SMTP has inertia, and inertia goes a long way, apparently.
There are many ways to make political hay. Sending form letters to your representatives is, in my opinion, one of the least productive methods of making your voice heard.
Do you have any actual evidence to support this opinion, or are you just guessing? Do you honestly believe that any bureaucrat actually reads the letters he's sent?
In reality, letter-sending is probably (yes, I'm making an informed guess here) handled the same way phone calling is handled: some peon in the administration tallies up "yea" letters and "nay" letters and gives the bureaucrat for whom he works a number. In all likelihood, no one who can make decisions ever actually reads the letters involved or even knows that they're form letters.
Today, it's relatively easy to spot the advertising within the page to block it out. Eventually, advertising will become so integrated with the content that you can't automatically detect and strip it out.
"In the business of pushing Bayesian anti-spam filtering"?
Pardon me?
From what product that uses Bayesian filtering is Paul Graham making money?
What service is Paul Graham providing that benefits from the use of Bayesian filtering?
To be "in the business of" something, a person must be "in business" making money from that thing. Where is your evidence that Paul Graham has some financial stake in the success of Bayesian filtering?
As for myself, I've seen none. And I'm calling shenanigans on your attempt to make people believe otherwise.
I'll take stories like this (Roland and all) over the consistently boring "Here's what Apple/Microsoft/SCO/Sony/USPTO is doing today!" stories we're inundated with otherwise.
At least this story is interesting. Why does it piss you off so much that someone makes some money off finding this story? If Roland makes some coin because he's bothered to pay attention to news sites I don't read and report interesting articles to a site I do read, by all means, more power to him! I'm glad he's doing the legwork so I don't have to.
Might not want to use this baby around any volcanic vents and such.
If you're swimming in the superheated water surrounding a volcanic vent on the ocean floor, I'd say you have more pertinent concerns than the extra sulfur your rebreather might be picking up.
Slashdot Mirror
No, and no. The data structure described by Henning-Kamp is not a B-tree, but a heap. Additionally, it's cache-aware, not cache-oblivious.
Don't forget Cherenkov Radiation, which is the actual blue glow that radioactive substances often exhibit and directors often emulate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
Jeremy
Let's take a closer look...
First, we have the story submitter saying this: "developers get together and concentrate on communication rather than just development."
And then we have Theo saying this: "developers suspend their lives for a week to focus entirely on just development."
Hmm...
There was practically an entire page devoted to that in the article.
You did read the article, didn't you?
Who am I kidding? This is slashdot.
Jeremy
Surely you're aware that Dylan is dynamically typed, and thus only "type-safe" in a way that's practically useless for the avoidance of bugs at runtime...
Jeremy
Why all the extra parentheses?
Those aren't the GNU zealots saying that. At least that much should be obvious to anyone who considers other people to be even remotely rational: the GNU zealots are just fine with the GPL. It's the ones who aren't GNU zealots that are complaining about QT being GPLed.
("Insightful", my arse--think "mistaken" and "vitriolic")
Jeremy
Why would he? Do you get your $8 back when a movie starts playing at the dollar theater?
This is standard price discrimination. You should be accustomed to it by now.
Jeremy
Any number of laws regarding employment discrimination. You wouldn't ask for an interviewee's blood type for the same reason you wouldn't ask for his religion; it would open you up to all sorts of civil suits which you'd almost certainly lose.
Jeremy
All you're doing in your proposed situation is partially evaluating the interpreter by hand. I.e., instead of implementing a generic scheme for handling all objects in any program in the way you propose, you only implement the scheme for the objects your program actually instantiates.
Your argument is also trivially defeated by the use of any libraries whatsoever. Given a random void pointer from a random library function, I can't do the same kind of runtime introspection in C that I can do in Python.
Jeremy
If it's great satire, then it's just great satire. Why do you need the author's permission to declare it to be such?
Jeremy
Turing completeness is a useless and irrelevant measure of the power of a language. A better measure is was put forward by Paul Graham: One language is "more powerful" than another if, in order to implement the features and capabilities of the latter language, one must write an interpreter in the former language.
That is to say, C simply *can't* do the same kind of runtime object introspection that Python can. In order to achieve that feature using C, a programmer would have to write an interpreter for Python in C. Therefore, Python is more powerful (in this useful way, not in the turing completeness way) than C.
Jeremy
Except you'd probably be sued, and you'd lose. Sounds like discrimination by blood type to me.
Jeremy
You missed the point. Many places ask for the last four digits of a person's social security number to verify things. The author obviously wasn't suggesting using part of your SSN as a PIN.
How you got to be "Insightful," I don't know. Seems more like lack of sight to me.
Jeremy
More probably, the story submitter is just a standard illiterate slashbot who doesn't know that "guise" implies an ulterior motive.
Jeremy
No, the answer isn't authentication. The answer is economics.
Right now, the recipient pays the primary cost of an email. All the sender has to do is connec to a server, dump some data, and be done. The recipient, on the other hand, has to sort out to whom that data belongs, store it, cache it, pass it on to other systems, drop it in mailboxes, etc. On top of this, the recipient's server must always be online just in case some more mail comes in.
Instead, the sender should pay these costs. The sender should be the one to store, cache, and deliver email. The sender's server should be the one required always to be online. If the sender were responsible for more of the costs of sending mail, spam wouldn't be such a problem.
A system like this has already been designed, of course: it's Internet Mail 2000 (a somewhat anachronistic name, these days). So many of the things that SMTP servers currently do (mailing list management, mailing list archives, message receipt confirmation, bounces, etc.) would become unnecessary if such a system were in place instead of SMTP.
But alas, SMTP has inertia, and inertia goes a long way, apparently.
Jeremy
Do you have any actual evidence to support this opinion, or are you just guessing? Do you honestly believe that any bureaucrat actually reads the letters he's sent?
In reality, letter-sending is probably (yes, I'm making an informed guess here) handled the same way phone calling is handled: some peon in the administration tallies up "yea" letters and "nay" letters and gives the bureaucrat for whom he works a number. In all likelihood, no one who can make decisions ever actually reads the letters involved or even knows that they're form letters.
Jeremy
Since when were patents any less than 17 years in duration?
Since never. And now they're even 20 years.
Jeremy
In Smalltalk? No, you don't.
It wasn't even until rather recently that Strongtalk, a statically-typed variant of Smalltalk, was invented.
Smalltalk doesn't do static typing.
Jeremy
Forget notellmo.tel. in.tel is going to be the first domain sold.
Jeremy
That's already happened. It's called PR.
Jeremy
"In the business of pushing Bayesian anti-spam filtering"?
Pardon me?
From what product that uses Bayesian filtering is Paul Graham making money?
What service is Paul Graham providing that benefits from the use of Bayesian filtering?
To be "in the business of" something, a person must be "in business" making money from that thing. Where is your evidence that Paul Graham has some financial stake in the success of Bayesian filtering?
As for myself, I've seen none. And I'm calling shenanigans on your attempt to make people believe otherwise.
Jeremy
I'll take stories like this (Roland and all) over the consistently boring "Here's what Apple/Microsoft/SCO/Sony/USPTO is doing today!" stories we're inundated with otherwise.
At least this story is interesting. Why does it piss you off so much that someone makes some money off finding this story? If Roland makes some coin because he's bothered to pay attention to news sites I don't read and report interesting articles to a site I do read, by all means, more power to him! I'm glad he's doing the legwork so I don't have to.
Jeremy
If you're swimming in the superheated water surrounding a volcanic vent on the ocean floor, I'd say you have more pertinent concerns than the extra sulfur your rebreather might be picking up.
Jeremy
Simple. Someone paid for it to be on Slashdot.
They ought to publish a price list somewhere for their "slashvertisements."
Jeremy