Think about an asteroid of a significant size, something on the order of some percent points of Earth's size. Now, if you break such a beast without making sure all pieces will miss (that is, that your bomb will not only break it, but break in such a way that its resultant angular momentum will change drastically), you have just increased the chance that not one, but two or three asteroids with enough mass to destroy civilisation will hit the planet.
My real problem here is with the amazing jumping genes. Something that, if true, would certanly be both Nobel prize and Armagedon material. Imagine a self-adapting, species-neutral gene. Such a criter would quickly mold the whole planetary ecosystem to its image.
As for Bush, he is a faithful servant of the the big capital in general. If he is involved in this particular incident is irrelevant to the picture.
5. Slashdotter submits oversimplified misinterpretation of would-be conspiracy for publishing. 6. Slashdot editor press "Publish" button without even thinking twice.
Microsoft is deploying a wonderfully automatic update infra-structure. Windows 9x(with a download)/2000/XP and Office 2000/XP are pretty good at telling the user there is a critical update waiting for download and installation. It absolutely NOT above Microsoft to use such an capacity to, for instance, install a new DTD for all their file formats every week. Besides, in an upgrade or two Microsoft may well ask the user to let it update everything without asking. Now, chase this...
I said it elsewhere and I will say it again: Where are the prizes for us clueless? Where is the "Dumbest Death" prize? "Fastest Death"? "Best Death Playing as if it was Quake"? "Most Stupid Level 1 Death"? "Best Level 1 Death While in Level 10 or More" (like starving for lack of attention deep into the mines)?
My son received this beauty this afternoon, Norton got it whitout problems.
But that is not the point. His machine resides in our home network, behind a Linux gateway/firewall. My Linux gateway/firewall, mind you. This lousy little Outlook inhabitant has zero chances of disabling our firewall or opening a arbitrary port somewhere. Anything going in or out has a name in rc.firewall. Anything not mentioned there is not going anywhere.
Granted, I don't have much experience with "personal" firewalls and Windows firewall in general. Are they that easy to disable?
I remember Forth also, I first saw it as a very fast compiler for the Apple II. Besides Reverse Polish Notation, one also learns that a stack can work wonders beyond measure. But I wouldn't recomend it for everyone, the paradigm shift from "normal" languages is fairly great. Scarily so.
Hiding pointers behind a language supported interface (class, generic, etc.) is a Very Good Thing (tm).
Here is where we differ a little. I would say "Having the option of hiding pointers behind a language supported interface (class, generic, etc.) is a Very Good Thing (tm).". My main concern here is not that the pointers are abstracted for the sake of development sanity, my concern is that I can't de-abstract them when I want to and assume full intellectual responsability for my acts.
By the way, my comment about garbage collection and pointer manipulation was not meant to be exclusive. Obviously I know there are tenths of other operations in a functional collector. I was just stressing the point in question, namely pointers.
Point taken, minimal apology and other tidbits
on
wxEmbedded Beta Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I was not writing other languages off. As a matter of fact (and market) I am today a Java programmer.
I should perhaps apologise for being too vague. I consider Java a good language, too. I also consider Python a good language (and Zope is a pretty nice tool). I also like some other languages I will not mention to protect myself from a language flame war (both for quoting or failing to quote something).
My point was more addressed to all the criticism (some of it deserved, most just a nod from language developers and the tech press to mental lazyness) C++ received for being too complex, too big, too low level etc, during the recent years. Perhaps I am old fashioned but I still belive in Knuth's harsh words about the supposed difficulties of learning his book's fictional Assembler - I just don't think someone who calls him/herself a programmer have any excuse for being unable to learn and use any language (OK, except Forth - you have to be a Budhist Martian to like Forth).
You pointed to another important feature I forgot to mention. WxWindows is light years ahead of Win32 or GTK (I have no experience with the Mac port) in terms of code organisation, general API sanity and naming conventions.
After I learned the structure (and here their documentation shines) of the library, I prefer to use Wx instead of native APIs everytime.
You can't live with them, you can't live without them.
Garbage collection is nothing more, nothing less than pointer manipulation. Even in Java. The fact that you can't see or manipulate them is just an insult to the intelligence of the average programmer (or, if I was to flame, a concession to the intelligence of that same average programmer - that guy they keep in a vault in the Paris Museum basement along with the meter bar and the kilo ball), not a indication they are not there.
WxWindows is one of the most magnificent development projects in existence and the fact we hear so little about it is shame upon the technological press in general and the open source information resources in particular.
WxWindows has for years fullfilled the Java promisse in C++: write once, compile and run anywhere, natively. Their approach to the cross-platform problem was always far superior than the Java approach. And I really don't care about recompilation, machines compile code, not me.
Their main public relations problem seems to be the use of an adult language, C++. Yes there are pointers (scaring, isn't it, a type that holds a memory address), there are templates (mostly scary, trully generic containers) and your program interface looks like everything else in the operating system it is running (ludicrous).
And yet, more than nine years later those guys are still there giving the community such a tool. Trully amazing.
And let it teach him/her how much mojo can get wasted by writting informative comments while not logged...
Incidentally, their notion of "custumize" is jolly Linuxian, isnt it? A text associative array of keypad keys translated into coordinates. Joe User, keep away, you are not welcome here...:)
So you haven't yet managed the modern learning techiques available? How do you expect to find or keep your job if you can't extract all useful content from a book by perusing the index and reading two or three careful selected pages plus the command reference table at Apendix A? I am really concerned about your future, mister, really concerned. Clearly you wouldn't have survived for a day during the dot.com boom. What if the economy becomes irrationaly exuberant again? What will you do when they discover you can't learn Magic Bullet v10.3 in two hours and have a presentation for marketing to give the client by the end of the day?
but are still unclear as to the cause of the southern yearly iceage
Thousands upon thousands of penguins living in the southern polar cap. They constantly inhale and exhale the cold air there. Every time they exhale, the air move a little bit north (as everyone of them is always facing north). After some months the whole polar air mass is above the southern continents and it takes another three months for the tropical heath to disperse it. At the same time the penguins are hibernating. Then the penguins wake up and start moving the air again.
An international consortium formed by Autralian, Brazilian and South African tourist industry representatives have a project to kill all penguins (bringing an ethernal summer to the region), but they are being prevented from implementing it by the Greenpeace and a bunch of Linux zealots.
Sorry for the misspelling. That one, specifically was quite a distraction (see the title). But I would love to have a spellchecker.
As for proof, there is plenty of evidence for Evolution, but they won't listen. They will only read it to search for spots where they can apply their sophistry. The problem with these types is that they already have the Truth, so they can not understand why we insist in keep searching for it (and they can't even understand the semantic ocean that separates their Truth from our humble scientific truth).
The objective of modding down as trolls all Creationist comments is twofold:
a) Let people exachange ideas freely without have to deal with/respond to crackpot pseudo-scientific garbage. b) Make all Creationist folk see the Slashdot users as a hopelessly intolerant scientific-minded group, so the Creationists will find other sites to drop their nonsense.
Think of the extend of the powers an agency had to have to erase so many History records in order to have him officially delivering them those same powers an year after he was killed.
I think that any mention to Creationism in a discussion about Evolution here should be modded as a trool. We have wasted enough time and/. have wasted enough space and bandwidth to this particular form of ignorance.
Just a term of comparison, think about someone posting claims that the Earth is flat to any discussion about space missions. I believe the same moderation should apply to other supertitions.
I used CDex last year in a production project: large batches of interviews on CD and MD had to be converted (or recorded into the computer for the MD files) to MP3, cleaned and edited.
CDex never showed a single glitch. It was fast, clean and easy to use. CoolEdit, the proprietary program used to treat the sound files, on the other hand, had problems saving MP3 (it would cut the last few seconds of a file).
What does it emit? Photons. Actually, if you don't know which particle some phenomenon emits, answering "photons" gives you the best chance to be right.
Am I the only one reading CNN that isn't an astrophysisist? Probably. This is Slashdot. Those of us who do not hold a degree in astrophysics could, if we wanted to, but then again we don't and couldn't care less, but that has never kept our mouths shut about anything, has it? Just assume every post starts with a virtual IANAA, except were noticed otherwise.
Naturally it occured to me. If you read my comment carefully, I was NOT stating there was sabotage. I was only pointing that the fact those are liberal counties and the fact that Governor is a Republican is an argument for the sabotage theory, not against it as you implied.
I think you are under the impression the "dotcom" style of software life-cycle (develop today, throw away tomorrow) is the market standard.
Well, it is not. In the real software development world, you don't plan for the next year, you plan at least for the next five years (more, if you are really smart). Or have you not noticed the Y2K panic was mostly caused by 20-30 year old software still being used in production environments?
There many compeling reasons to take cross-platform capabilities into account. There are measured data showing somewhere up the scale it is cheaper to buy a very expensive Sun or IBM machine than keep throwing Intel hardware at a problem. There is also the corporate climate changes and technological advances to take into account. And I am not talking just about Microsoft licensing problems, but also about the forseeable Linux future.
All in all, dismissing the possibility of platform exchange is a risk most large projects prefer not to take, specially because it is more and more an easily avoidable risk.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about an asteroid of a significant size, something on the order of some percent points of Earth's size. Now, if you break such a beast without making sure all pieces will miss (that is, that your bomb will not only break it, but break in such a way that its resultant angular momentum will change drastically), you have just increased the chance that not one, but two or three asteroids with enough mass to destroy civilisation will hit the planet.
My real problem here is with the amazing jumping genes. Something that, if true, would certanly be both Nobel prize and Armagedon material. Imagine a self-adapting, species-neutral gene. Such a criter would quickly mold the whole planetary ecosystem to its image.
As for Bush, he is a faithful servant of the the big capital in general. If he is involved in this particular incident is irrelevant to the picture.
5. Slashdotter submits oversimplified misinterpretation of would-be conspiracy for publishing.
6. Slashdot editor press "Publish" button without even thinking twice.
Microsoft is deploying a wonderfully automatic update infra-structure. Windows 9x(with a download)/2000/XP and Office 2000/XP are pretty good at telling the user there is a critical update waiting for download and installation. It absolutely NOT above Microsoft to use such an capacity to, for instance, install a new DTD for all their file formats every week. Besides, in an upgrade or two Microsoft may well ask the user to let it update everything without asking. Now, chase this...
I said it elsewhere and I will say it again: Where are the prizes for us clueless? Where is the "Dumbest Death" prize? "Fastest Death"? "Best Death Playing as if it was Quake"? "Most Stupid Level 1 Death"? "Best Level 1 Death While in Level 10 or More" (like starving for lack of attention deep into the mines)?
My son received this beauty this afternoon, Norton got it whitout problems.
But that is not the point. His machine resides in our home network, behind a Linux gateway/firewall. My Linux gateway/firewall, mind you. This lousy little Outlook inhabitant has zero chances of disabling our firewall or opening a arbitrary port somewhere. Anything going in or out has a name in rc.firewall. Anything not mentioned there is not going anywhere.
Granted, I don't have much experience with "personal" firewalls and Windows firewall in general. Are they that easy to disable?
I remember Forth also, I first saw it as a very fast compiler for the Apple II. Besides Reverse Polish Notation, one also learns that a stack can work wonders beyond measure. But I wouldn't recomend it for everyone, the paradigm shift from "normal" languages is fairly great. Scarily so.
Hiding pointers behind a language supported interface (class, generic, etc.) is a Very Good Thing (tm).
Here is where we differ a little. I would say "Having the option of hiding pointers behind a language supported interface (class, generic, etc.) is a Very Good Thing (tm).". My main concern here is not that the pointers are abstracted for the sake of development sanity, my concern is that I can't de-abstract them when I want to and assume full intellectual responsability for my acts.
By the way, my comment about garbage collection and pointer manipulation was not meant to be exclusive. Obviously I know there are tenths of other operations in a functional collector. I was just stressing the point in question, namely pointers.
I was not writing other languages off. As a matter of fact (and market) I am today a Java programmer.
I should perhaps apologise for being too vague. I consider Java a good language, too. I also consider Python a good language (and Zope is a pretty nice tool). I also like some other languages I will not mention to protect myself from a language flame war (both for quoting or failing to quote something).
My point was more addressed to all the criticism (some of it deserved, most just a nod from language developers and the tech press to mental lazyness) C++ received for being too complex, too big, too low level etc, during the recent years. Perhaps I am old fashioned but I still belive in Knuth's harsh words about the supposed difficulties of learning his book's fictional Assembler - I just don't think someone who calls him/herself a programmer have any excuse for being unable to learn and use any language (OK, except Forth - you have to be a Budhist Martian to like Forth).
You pointed to another important feature I forgot to mention. WxWindows is light years ahead of Win32 or GTK (I have no experience with the Mac port) in terms of code organisation, general API sanity and naming conventions.
After I learned the structure (and here their documentation shines) of the library, I prefer to use Wx instead of native APIs everytime.
You can't live with them, you can't live without them.
Garbage collection is nothing more, nothing less than pointer manipulation. Even in Java. The fact that you can't see or manipulate them is just an insult to the intelligence of the average programmer (or, if I was to flame, a concession to the intelligence of that same average programmer - that guy they keep in a vault in the Paris Museum basement along with the meter bar and the kilo ball), not a indication they are not there.
WxWindows is one of the most magnificent development projects in existence and the fact we hear so little about it is shame upon the technological press in general and the open source information resources in particular.
WxWindows has for years fullfilled the Java promisse in C++: write once, compile and run anywhere, natively. Their approach to the cross-platform problem was always far superior than the Java approach. And I really don't care about recompilation, machines compile code, not me.
Their main public relations problem seems to be the use of an adult language, C++. Yes there are pointers (scaring, isn't it, a type that holds a memory address), there are templates (mostly scary, trully generic containers) and your program interface looks like everything else in the operating system it is running (ludicrous).
And yet, more than nine years later those guys are still there giving the community such a tool. Trully amazing.
And let it teach him/her how much mojo can get wasted by writting informative comments while not logged...
:)
Incidentally, their notion of "custumize" is jolly Linuxian, isnt it? A text associative array of keypad keys translated into coordinates. Joe User, keep away, you are not welcome here...
So you haven't yet managed the modern learning techiques available? How do you expect to find or keep your job if you can't extract all useful content from a book by perusing the index and reading two or three careful selected pages plus the command reference table at Apendix A? I am really concerned about your future, mister, really concerned. Clearly you wouldn't have survived for a day during the dot.com boom. What if the economy becomes irrationaly exuberant again? What will you do when they discover you can't learn Magic Bullet v10.3 in two hours and have a presentation for marketing to give the client by the end of the day?
Buzz -> Rex -> Bo -> Hamm -> Slink -> Potato -> Woody -> Sarge -> Eugenia
but are still unclear as to the cause of the southern yearly iceage
Thousands upon thousands of penguins living in the southern polar cap. They constantly inhale and exhale the cold air there. Every time they exhale, the air move a little bit north (as everyone of them is always facing north). After some months the whole polar air mass is above the southern continents and it takes another three months for the tropical heath to disperse it. At the same time the penguins are hibernating. Then the penguins wake up and start moving the air again.
An international consortium formed by Autralian, Brazilian and South African tourist industry representatives have a project to kill all penguins (bringing an ethernal summer to the region), but they are being prevented from implementing it by the Greenpeace and a bunch of Linux zealots.
Sorry for the misspelling. That one, specifically was quite a distraction (see the title). But I would love to have a spellchecker.
As for proof, there is plenty of evidence for Evolution, but they won't listen. They will only read it to search for spots where they can apply their sophistry. The problem with these types is that they already have the Truth, so they can not understand why we insist in keep searching for it (and they can't even understand the semantic ocean that separates their Truth from our humble scientific truth).
The objective of modding down as trolls all Creationist comments is twofold:
a) Let people exachange ideas freely without have to deal with/respond to crackpot pseudo-scientific garbage.
b) Make all Creationist folk see the Slashdot users as a hopelessly intolerant scientific-minded group, so the Creationists will find other sites to drop their nonsense.
Yes, I believe it may even work.
Think of the extend of the powers an agency had to have to erase so many History records in order to have him officially delivering them those same powers an year after he was killed.
I think that any mention to Creationism in a discussion about Evolution here should be modded as a trool. We have wasted enough time and /. have wasted enough space and bandwidth to this particular form of ignorance.
Just a term of comparison, think about someone posting claims that the Earth is flat to any discussion about space missions. I believe the same moderation should apply to other supertitions.
I used CDex last year in a production project: large batches of interviews on CD and MD had to be converted (or recorded into the computer for the MD files) to MP3, cleaned and edited.
CDex never showed a single glitch. It was fast, clean and easy to use. CoolEdit, the proprietary program used to treat the sound files, on the other hand, had problems saving MP3 (it would cut the last few seconds of a file).
What the hell is a maser? Microwave Amplification by Stimulation Emission of Radiation.
What does it emit? Photons. Actually, if you don't know which particle some phenomenon emits, answering "photons" gives you the best chance to be right.
Am I the only one reading CNN that isn't an astrophysisist? Probably. This is Slashdot. Those of us who do not hold a degree in astrophysics could, if we wanted to, but then again we don't and couldn't care less, but that has never kept our mouths shut about anything, has it? Just assume every post starts with a virtual IANAA, except were noticed otherwise.
Naturally it occured to me. If you read my comment carefully, I was NOT stating there was sabotage. I was only pointing that the fact those are liberal counties and the fact that Governor is a Republican is an argument for the sabotage theory, not against it as you implied.
Which counties would it make more sense for a Republican to sabotage an election? Liberal or conservative ones? And for a Democrat? See?
I think you are under the impression the "dotcom" style of software life-cycle (develop today, throw away tomorrow) is the market standard.
Well, it is not. In the real software development world, you don't plan for the next year, you plan at least for the next five years (more, if you are really smart). Or have you not noticed the Y2K panic was mostly caused by 20-30 year old software still being used in production environments?
There many compeling reasons to take cross-platform capabilities into account. There are measured data showing somewhere up the scale it is cheaper to buy a very expensive Sun or IBM machine than keep throwing Intel hardware at a problem. There is also the corporate climate changes and technological advances to take into account. And I am not talking just about Microsoft licensing problems, but also about the forseeable Linux future.
All in all, dismissing the possibility of platform exchange is a risk most large projects prefer not to take, specially because it is more and more an easily avoidable risk.