Dick smith is a hypocrite, all his electronics stores revolved around importing the cheapest crap from overseas, so now for him to say buy australian is a huge backflip.
Back when that was happening with dick smith, australia was still manufacturing lots of stuff, now we're just importing everything, whilst exporting the raw materials.
You do realize that the "dick smith" electronics store was sold to woolies in 1982? 60% in 1980, then the rest in 1982. Are you really talking about the store during the 70's? In addition, it does not make someone a hypocrite to behave in a different way to what the once did. Is the reformed alcoholic a hypocrite for wanting tighter alcohol regulation? You really haven't thought this through.
See this is exactly the ignorance I am trying to fight! That you imagine modern innovation is a product of financial institutions boggles the mind! This is a chicken and egg situation, and you are claiming that egg has feathers! Modern financial institutions are a product of need brought about by massive industrial development. I am not denying the need, I am decrying the abuse. To put it in over-simplified terms, the financial institutions are the middle men in all the commerce that occurs, all the development, all the property. They take a percentage for their services, and there is nothing particularly upsetting about this. Where it becomes a problem is when more money is being removed from the overall system through abuses in the methods. HFT fits this bill, and I see no reason not to decry it. Invest in that which will ennoble; science, arts, engineering, and stop playing these foolish games.
You're still thinking too small, you thinking of things as they are. Think clean slate, think start again. Remove all the existing pre-suppositions, and work out a system based on what we need. In fact, there are many people who have done just that, and the technical difficulties are really not that great; of course the political and practical realities seem insurmountable. My point is that the intrinsic value of our evolved, poorly designed, and out-of-date system is actually very low. It may be true that a 6ms latency reduction will improve the current system, but it's the wrong end of the problem. We need serious reform, not slight movements towards a localized minimum. My outrage is that this silly human system, slowly evolved to make it easier to trade that pig without actually transferring the pig, has now absorbed humanity to the point where it has real negative impacts on the pig (I.e. the reality behind the system). My anger is at the waste.
Your an idiot hiding behind anonymity, be a man and log in! Using the term "zero sum" was meant in the casual manner of common conversation meaning "of no real benefit", not in a strict economic sense. If your reading comprehension skills were above that of a 6'th grader, you'd also notice I have been employing the use of hyperbole. I don't need a rather poor economics lesson from someone of such spectacular ignorance who can't even close an italics tag; go back to your basement.
Give me a team of 20 programmers, 2 years and unlimited political cooperation, and I will give you a financial system with unlimited liquidity, complete security, and a tiny drain on the global economy. The thing you don't seem to get, is that there is no value in any of this. A few bits in a database are equivalent to a good meal; except that they aren't. It's all just a way to help us keep score as we go about doing the things that matter. The problem is that the "game" is now more important than the reality, and we all suffer as a result. If too many people go around collecting the colored beads, and not enough people are growing the crops, then we all starve to death.
I fail to see the benefit to society in your example. What has been produced in this trade that makes society better? If an engineer designs a better tractor, or a scientist advances human knowledg, or a software developer helps create software that automatically load balances distributed natural power generation loads; society is clearly advanced. HFT is a clear example of a large amount of work being performed to acheive absolutely nothing. Nothing except making the perpetrator wealthy at the expense of the rest of society. What exactly has the trade done to improve society? What is the value that justifies this enormous revenue? The engineer can point at the bridge, the scientist his paper, and the trader? Just his big stack of Gold! They are simply modern day pirates without the romance. Leeches I called them for leeches they are. As with all parasites; the host can endure but too many may kill it. (and if you can fumigate, all the better).
The entire finance sector fills me with equal parts revulsion and sadness. This is yet another example of enormous resources consumed for no net gain to society. At least in this case something (however unnecessary), tangible is produced as a result. Think of the huge numbers of brilliant mathematical and programming minds that have been consumed by this nonsense! Think of the resources and financial liquidity that is reinvested into this zero sum game! Every hour of work, every employee, every structure erected in praise of this wholly disgusting idol of modern nihilism, makes the rest of our society just that little bit worse. To those who would praise the enabling power of our new financial systems I say Pah! We can create better financial systems within virtual worlds. The only intrinsic value in the financial institutions is the power it gives; and this has been abused for all it is worth! Give me back my engineers! Give me back my scientists! Give me back my hope for a better future!
As I pointed out earlier, this was a completely contrived example. On our real system we are looking at data volumes of about this kind of changes/second from which I based my calculations. The actual usage of shared_ptr and it's impact on memory usage/performance is far more complicated than what I demonstrated in my example, and I'm not going to try and explain it all here. To clarify further this is a code base of approx 20 million lines or so (last I checked about 3 years ago), and I am describing the data volume on one machine. It is expected that the system will scale linearly across multiple machines, but the data volume/machine is the all important factor from the end users cost calculations (licensing costs are a big factor here). My point was to try and show that little things such as a shared_ptr, can have a large impact when you have so many operations being performed per second (as we do). As I also said, I code in both.Net (which i understand to be very similar to Java) and C++, and we did go through a process of trying to perform our I/O via managed code, however the performance just wasn't there (particulary with memory overhead). Outside of I/O we use.Net for all new code. C++ still has it's place in high performance code, but it isn't quite as nice to use, and is harder to do "right". I love them both.
Why generate temporary objects in the millions? drawing from an (garbage-collected) object pool can often make a colossal difference to performance.
Let's say I'm an I/O server processing the data from a moderate number of clients say 5000. These clients are sending me updates for a small data set, let's say 2000 points, once a second. My job is to pluck that data off the wire, format it as required by the rest of the sub-systems, then commit it off to say a database. Say it takes about one second for me receive a response from the system on average, before I can dispose of the data update. 5000*2000, means I've got about 10 million little data items I'm processing per second. Let's add another wrinkle. Worst case, I need to buffer that data in the case of a lost database connection for up to 15 min to give enough time for the database to restart or some such thing. 9e9 data updates in memory. Lets say each update consists of a 32 bit number, a 64 bit timestamp, and a 16 bit status field. That's 14 bytes in total. 14 * 9e9 = 1.8e11 bytes. 117.4 GB. Shit, I may be a big server, but I don't have that much memory!. OK fine, maybe I can make my safety margin smaller, lets just go for 4 min, if we can last 4 min, there will be just enough time for a redundancy switch-over for my database. Still need 31.3GB of memory. My server has 8 cores, and 16GB of ram, but it's still just not quite enough. 1.5 minutes. OK, now we can handle it, 11.7 GB. I also need to keep a reference to all these little data updates. If I go for a smart pointer, that's sizeof(std::tr1::shared_ptr) which = 8 bytes. 6.7GB. Dammit!, still over the 16GB. What if I use a bald ptr? sizeof(thing*) = 4 bytes = 3.35GB. Just fits. There is also a performance penalty for creating my smart pointers. This is obviously a contrived example, but it's not too far off the kinds of problems that have had to be solved in my current place of employment. If you go managed for this kind of stuff, the overheads become too large and the ability to scale is greatly impacted. I know this, because we tried it and just weren't able to get the scalability into the same order of magnitude. As I said before, just use the right tool for the job.
Multi-core may be new, but multi-processor certainly is not. Do you think multi-threading was only thought about since the advent of multi-core processors? I am a C# and a C++ programmer, and I started life as a low level C programmer, so I can see the pros/cons of the various approaches..Net (and I assume Java) is clearly the better option for the majority of application development being performed today. The reasons for this are the extensive libraries, large communities, and highly sophisticated tool sets (such as the IDE, unit testing integration, performance profiling, etc). However there is one glaring exception to this, and that when you need to scale. If you need to scale, CPU and memory will frequently become your bottle-neck, and your work at minimizing these will define the limits of your scaleability. Here is where C++ really shines, I can code using all the modern safe techniques, but I can get down to the metal to optimize the hot path when I need to. I can take the smartpointers off those transactional objects that are generated in the millions to save memory and speed. I can't do this in.Net. In summary, if you are writing a desktop app, use Java or.Net, if you are writing a server app, use C++ or equivalent. I love both for different reasons; just pick the right tool for the job!
5mg is about the mass of a grain of sand, not all that disproportionate to a micrometeoroid. If the human carrying spaceship can't survive a collision with such a mass, I think we've got bigger things to worry about. Cluttering the orbit zones with this stuff may pose a problem from a "grit" perspective, but nothing that can't be solved with some wipers.
Also, if you know any C++ programmers you'd know that boost et. al. are almost never ever allowed into any big product.
Say what? BOOST usage is controlled in large projects; as in most projects will pick and choose relevant parts of BOOST (usually through some formal or informal process), and forbid others. It's a ridiculous assertion to suggest that most "big" products would not use BOOST, but rather re-invent the wheel. To suggest that BOOST is not used by the majority of professional C++ developers is pure disinformation. Your ignorance is continuing to show.
It really amazes me how people on slashdot fail to read the sentences other people write, assume some arbitrary point and then goes on a rave about it.
Read the sentence you quoted again, "For me...", see that bold word means it is something that applies to me as in an individual who isn't you, nor working at your company.
Oh I'm sorry. I see my mistake now; by adding "for me", you are allowed to make statements that cannot be challenged. "It's my opinion man".
For me, people that unreasonably hide behind an 'opinion' in an attempt to exclude debate are arseholes; but that's only my take on it.
The three Cs are better for you? Well all power to you then.
You have a mistaken assumption. I use C# at work, because that is my work, but I don't see any qualitative difference between it and Java. I was using it as an example of having used both forms of tools. YMMV.
Also, your last statement seems a bit out of context, you need to write your arguments down in a post rather than go over them in your head and only write down your conclusion. I have no idea what you are going on about...
It doesn't really surprise me that you no idea about what I'm talking about, because you clearly had no idea what you were talking about in your initial comment. I'd try to educate you, but I sadly think it'd be a waste of time.
Modern C++ is coded with smart pointers and the STL, which resolves both of the issues you mention. Yes there is a small performance penalty to pay, but profiling will reveal if these have any real impact. If so, the pointers can nude up to optimize the hot-path, something you just can't do outside of C++. To me, this is the power. I can be safe by default, and C or even asm, if I need to. Overkill on non performance critical projects, but the best tool for the job when it is. C++, the big ugly Swiss army knife.
For me it doesn't matter which language is faster, I'm using the one that solves my problem the fastest (e.g. shippable product fastest) and right now, Java is the main player for me.
I don't agree with this statement. C++ may have a higher cost in training (I.e. the amount of time to reach high capability), and you may need to use a third party library such as BOOST to avoid re-writing some fundamentals (depending on what you're doing), but I see no reason why C++ takes any longer. At my work, we are a C#, C and C++ shop. The right tool is used for the right job, and C/C++ code takes no longer to write, nor has greater bugs.
Also, since our CPUs aren't getting any faster, we need to use languages that makes threading easier the safest way and on that topic, Java is miles ahead of C++. (Java used to have an utterly broken threading model, but these days it works [tm]).
C++ defines no threading model, and I'd suggest that Java out of box is also inadequate..Net with parallels is the first with a general pratical model, that doesn't require enormous amounts of effort to acheive the equivalent of a single threaded performance. My point is that in the present day you are basically required to write your own asynchronous task based model that is capable of scheduling across multiple cores. Threads alone just don't cut it, and once youve written your task based asnychronous framework, you can reuse it to your hearts content (such as.Nets parralles).
Well, it looks like I got a bunch of things wrong. First of all, it's not GM in general that was the issue with regards to regulation, but rather foods modified via a bacteriophage or virus not being classed as GM and hence not being regulated or tested in the same way. The person I mentioned was not against genetically modifying plants, she just had a strong conviction that the current safe guards and regulation were inadequate in regards to this modification vector (and I guess in my mind I conflated a specific issue as being a more general one). Yeah so... whoops, just another ignorant software guy mouthing off.
I think it is very important that your voice is part of this discussion as you have first hand knowledge and are presenting a view that will otherwise be drowned in a sea of "GM is bad" posts. My sister has subsequently given me a great deal more information on this topic (she has a gift for explaining the science to an ignorant layperson such as myself), so I think I now understand a bit more.
On the patenting side, no mention of patenting of genes was made, and I don't believe genes are currently patentable in Australia (a quick google suggests some big decisions are pending). The impression that I have been given, though, is that the scientists are often at odds with industry on this issue, and large pressure is being brought to bear from US corporate interests.
I am a software deveolper, my ignorance on all things biological is indeed profound. However the person I was talking to was indeed a plant molecular biologist, a professor at one of australias leading research universities. I simply regaled the information as best as I understood it, undoubtedly adding the bias of the originator, and a little of my own. I may have some of the facts a little off, but I know I got the gist.
You seem to have a wealth of information on the topic. In the interests of transparency, would you care to tell me if I am conversing with someone from academia or someone actually working to create such products? If from academia, can you explain why this person is so concerned? Is she simply the one lone loony plant molecular biologist? (actually my sister is doing her PhD in plant molecular biology, and I'm pretty sure she endorsed these concerns as well. Perhaps the lone two? Maybe it's only women?).
We're running out of antibiotics that there aren't any bugs resistant to, and no new ones are in development because the pharmaceuticals don't see any profit in it.[*]
Wrong! My little sister is doing her PHD in trying to find new types of antibiotics. Trust me, there is a fortune to be made (not for her). The problem, and the thing that is truely scary, is that these bugs are now resistant to entire classes of antibiotics. This means that the vast vast majority of new antibiotics are already useless. So yeah, at the moment we are stairing down the barrel of a future without being able to treat infection, unless we can stop this shit AND come up with an entire new class of antibiotics. It's too late for this lot. Wish my sister success.
I have no problems at all with genetically modified foods. I consider opposition to them as crazy hippy bullshit and Id consider myself very liberal.
You're either ignorant or an idiot. I'm thinking probably idiot, but let's assume ignorance for the sake of argument.
It is not "hippies" who have an issue with genetically modified produce (what is a hippie in this day and age anyway?). The argument as put to me by a molecular biologist is as follows. Take a plant, such as wheat, splice in a gene for it to express a new chemical that acts as a pesticide (warning! Massive simplification). Patent and profit. Instead of growing wheat and applying pesticide, the pesticide is now a part of the plant. Of course if you're going to create a new pesticide, there is a mass of pesky regulation requiring stringent testing etc etc. Not so for our new gentically modified plant! The regulation lags the science. See, this is not the same as species cultivation, in this case we are splicing in completely foreign genes to produce completely impossible (from nature), results. And if we're going to do this, we need to do a good deal of testing to make sure it's safe. Even more than normal, because we don't just spray the chemical on the top, it's an integral part of the plant. Because there is very little to no regulation, less testing is done. Worse, cross-contamination means that if these guys screw up in a big way, it's going to be nigh impossible to ever get it out of our crops. So yeah, treading carefully would be smart. Of course, big companies don't need to be smart, they can just use the profits to buy their way out of trouble.
It's all well and good having super fast transmission capabilities but do we have anything that can process/store data as quickly? It's an honest question as I've always been lead to believe that data storage is the bottleneck.
Infrastructure is where this is important. There are these extremely expensive cables made of glass under the ocean connecting various land masses. It's extremely convenient to be able to upgrade the boxes at either end instead of laying more tubes (*warning* simplification!). You don't need to store the data (at least not in one box), you just need to switch it. This is why fiber is so awesome; people just keep on discovering new ways to jam more down those pipes!
I think you would find Kohlberg's stages of moral development an interesting read. In essence, most people are at Stage 4, which essentially is "belief in authority". Unfortunately, there are as many Stage 2 "I'm just in it for myself" arseholes as there are Stage 5 and Stage 6 "Only the just laws should be obeyed" enlightened thinkers. We need more people to level up.
I think the research environment is fundamentally different from a commercial environment. In many software projects the requirements are continually changing. This is not a result of poor planning by the people requesting the software, but rather the desire to take best advantage of new scientific information as it becomes available. The resulting informal code development is very efficient for the project, but produces code that is difficult to transport to other projects.
Your situation is not different to many commercial environments. In fact, this is one of the largest problems in software development (notice I use the word development, not engineering). There are ways to write quality, flexible, extendible, maintainable programs in these environments, but it is much harder. I'm not talking out of my arse here, I've been in this game for many years now, and have seen approaches that work, and ones that fail. If the resultant program is truly "use once, then throw away", then continue as you are. If you find that you want to build on it later, or give it to others, then there are existing techniques that can assist. The smart approach is to add some of these ideas that look as though they would help, one at a time, and only keeping them if they help. Your right when you say that your environment is "fundamentally different", my experience has been that everyone's situation is unique, but there are certain tools, techniques, and strategies that pre-exist, and may save you time if you spend a little time investigating whether they're right for your environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Dick smith is a hypocrite, all his electronics stores revolved around importing the cheapest crap from overseas, so now for him to say buy australian is a huge backflip. Back when that was happening with dick smith, australia was still manufacturing lots of stuff, now we're just importing everything, whilst exporting the raw materials.
You do realize that the "dick smith" electronics store was sold to woolies in 1982? 60% in 1980, then the rest in 1982. Are you really talking about the store during the 70's? In addition, it does not make someone a hypocrite to behave in a different way to what the once did. Is the reformed alcoholic a hypocrite for wanting tighter alcohol regulation? You really haven't thought this through.
And they will be able to do all those things in version 2.0 ;)
See this is exactly the ignorance I am trying to fight! That you imagine modern innovation is a product of financial institutions boggles the mind! This is a chicken and egg situation, and you are claiming that egg has feathers! Modern financial institutions are a product of need brought about by massive industrial development. I am not denying the need, I am decrying the abuse. To put it in over-simplified terms, the financial institutions are the middle men in all the commerce that occurs, all the development, all the property. They take a percentage for their services, and there is nothing particularly upsetting about this. Where it becomes a problem is when more money is being removed from the overall system through abuses in the methods. HFT fits this bill, and I see no reason not to decry it. Invest in that which will ennoble; science, arts, engineering, and stop playing these foolish games.
You're still thinking too small, you thinking of things as they are. Think clean slate, think start again. Remove all the existing pre-suppositions, and work out a system based on what we need. In fact, there are many people who have done just that, and the technical difficulties are really not that great; of course the political and practical realities seem insurmountable. My point is that the intrinsic value of our evolved, poorly designed, and out-of-date system is actually very low. It may be true that a 6ms latency reduction will improve the current system, but it's the wrong end of the problem. We need serious reform, not slight movements towards a localized minimum. My outrage is that this silly human system, slowly evolved to make it easier to trade that pig without actually transferring the pig, has now absorbed humanity to the point where it has real negative impacts on the pig (I.e. the reality behind the system). My anger is at the waste.
I just explained how I could do it orders of magnitudes more efficiently. Try to look at the rest of my comment and wake up from the dream.
Your an idiot hiding behind anonymity, be a man and log in! Using the term "zero sum" was meant in the casual manner of common conversation meaning "of no real benefit", not in a strict economic sense. If your reading comprehension skills were above that of a 6'th grader, you'd also notice I have been employing the use of hyperbole. I don't need a rather poor economics lesson from someone of such spectacular ignorance who can't even close an italics tag; go back to your basement.
Give me a team of 20 programmers, 2 years and unlimited political cooperation, and I will give you a financial system with unlimited liquidity, complete security, and a tiny drain on the global economy. The thing you don't seem to get, is that there is no value in any of this. A few bits in a database are equivalent to a good meal; except that they aren't. It's all just a way to help us keep score as we go about doing the things that matter. The problem is that the "game" is now more important than the reality, and we all suffer as a result. If too many people go around collecting the colored beads, and not enough people are growing the crops, then we all starve to death.
I fail to see the benefit to society in your example. What has been produced in this trade that makes society better? If an engineer designs a better tractor, or a scientist advances human knowledg, or a software developer helps create software that automatically load balances distributed natural power generation loads; society is clearly advanced. HFT is a clear example of a large amount of work being performed to acheive absolutely nothing. Nothing except making the perpetrator wealthy at the expense of the rest of society. What exactly has the trade done to improve society? What is the value that justifies this enormous revenue? The engineer can point at the bridge, the scientist his paper, and the trader? Just his big stack of Gold! They are simply modern day pirates without the romance. Leeches I called them for leeches they are. As with all parasites; the host can endure but too many may kill it. (and if you can fumigate, all the better).
The entire finance sector fills me with equal parts revulsion and sadness. This is yet another example of enormous resources consumed for no net gain to society. At least in this case something (however unnecessary), tangible is produced as a result. Think of the huge numbers of brilliant mathematical and programming minds that have been consumed by this nonsense! Think of the resources and financial liquidity that is reinvested into this zero sum game! Every hour of work, every employee, every structure erected in praise of this wholly disgusting idol of modern nihilism, makes the rest of our society just that little bit worse. To those who would praise the enabling power of our new financial systems I say Pah! We can create better financial systems within virtual worlds. The only intrinsic value in the financial institutions is the power it gives; and this has been abused for all it is worth! Give me back my engineers! Give me back my scientists! Give me back my hope for a better future!
As I pointed out earlier, this was a completely contrived example. On our real system we are looking at data volumes of about this kind of changes/second from which I based my calculations. The actual usage of shared_ptr and it's impact on memory usage/performance is far more complicated than what I demonstrated in my example, and I'm not going to try and explain it all here. To clarify further this is a code base of approx 20 million lines or so (last I checked about 3 years ago), and I am describing the data volume on one machine. It is expected that the system will scale linearly across multiple machines, but the data volume/machine is the all important factor from the end users cost calculations (licensing costs are a big factor here). My point was to try and show that little things such as a shared_ptr, can have a large impact when you have so many operations being performed per second (as we do). As I also said, I code in both .Net (which i understand to be very similar to Java) and C++, and we did go through a process of trying to perform our I/O via managed code, however the performance just wasn't there (particulary with memory overhead). Outside of I/O we use .Net for all new code. C++ still has it's place in high performance code, but it isn't quite as nice to use, and is harder to do "right". I love them both.
Why generate temporary objects in the millions? drawing from an (garbage-collected) object pool can often make a colossal difference to performance.
Let's say I'm an I/O server processing the data from a moderate number of clients say 5000. These clients are sending me updates for a small data set, let's say 2000 points, once a second. My job is to pluck that data off the wire, format it as required by the rest of the sub-systems, then commit it off to say a database. Say it takes about one second for me receive a response from the system on average, before I can dispose of the data update. 5000*2000, means I've got about 10 million little data items I'm processing per second. Let's add another wrinkle. Worst case, I need to buffer that data in the case of a lost database connection for up to 15 min to give enough time for the database to restart or some such thing. 9e9 data updates in memory. Lets say each update consists of a 32 bit number, a 64 bit timestamp, and a 16 bit status field. That's 14 bytes in total. 14 * 9e9 = 1.8e11 bytes. 117.4 GB. Shit, I may be a big server, but I don't have that much memory!. OK fine, maybe I can make my safety margin smaller, lets just go for 4 min, if we can last 4 min, there will be just enough time for a redundancy switch-over for my database. Still need 31.3GB of memory. My server has 8 cores, and 16GB of ram, but it's still just not quite enough. 1.5 minutes. OK, now we can handle it, 11.7 GB. I also need to keep a reference to all these little data updates. If I go for a smart pointer, that's sizeof(std::tr1::shared_ptr) which = 8 bytes. 6.7GB. Dammit!, still over the 16GB. What if I use a bald ptr? sizeof(thing*) = 4 bytes = 3.35GB. Just fits. There is also a performance penalty for creating my smart pointers. This is obviously a contrived example, but it's not too far off the kinds of problems that have had to be solved in my current place of employment. If you go managed for this kind of stuff, the overheads become too large and the ability to scale is greatly impacted. I know this, because we tried it and just weren't able to get the scalability into the same order of magnitude. As I said before, just use the right tool for the job.
Multi-core may be new, but multi-processor certainly is not. Do you think multi-threading was only thought about since the advent of multi-core processors? I am a C# and a C++ programmer, and I started life as a low level C programmer, so I can see the pros/cons of the various approaches. .Net (and I assume Java) is clearly the better option for the majority of application development being performed today. The reasons for this are the extensive libraries, large communities, and highly sophisticated tool sets (such as the IDE, unit testing integration, performance profiling, etc). However there is one glaring exception to this, and that when you need to scale. If you need to scale, CPU and memory will frequently become your bottle-neck, and your work at minimizing these will define the limits of your scaleability. Here is where C++ really shines, I can code using all the modern safe techniques, but I can get down to the metal to optimize the hot path when I need to. I can take the smartpointers off those transactional objects that are generated in the millions to save memory and speed. I can't do this in .Net. In summary, if you are writing a desktop app, use Java or .Net, if you are writing a server app, use C++ or equivalent. I love both for different reasons; just pick the right tool for the job!
5mg is about the mass of a grain of sand, not all that disproportionate to a micrometeoroid. If the human carrying spaceship can't survive a collision with such a mass, I think we've got bigger things to worry about. Cluttering the orbit zones with this stuff may pose a problem from a "grit" perspective, but nothing that can't be solved with some wipers.
Also, if you know any C++ programmers you'd know that boost et. al. are almost never ever allowed into any big product.
Say what? BOOST usage is controlled in large projects; as in most projects will pick and choose relevant parts of BOOST (usually through some formal or informal process), and forbid others. It's a ridiculous assertion to suggest that most "big" products would not use BOOST, but rather re-invent the wheel. To suggest that BOOST is not used by the majority of professional C++ developers is pure disinformation. Your ignorance is continuing to show.
It really amazes me how people on slashdot fail to read the sentences other people write, assume some arbitrary point and then goes on a rave about it.
Read the sentence you quoted again, "For me...", see that bold word means it is something that applies to me as in an individual who isn't you, nor working at your company.
Oh I'm sorry. I see my mistake now; by adding "for me", you are allowed to make statements that cannot be challenged. "It's my opinion man".
For me, people that unreasonably hide behind an 'opinion' in an attempt to exclude debate are arseholes; but that's only my take on it.
The three Cs are better for you? Well all power to you then.
You have a mistaken assumption. I use C# at work, because that is my work, but I don't see any qualitative difference between it and Java. I was using it as an example of having used both forms of tools. YMMV.
Also, your last statement seems a bit out of context, you need to write your arguments down in a post rather than go over them in your head and only write down your conclusion. I have no idea what you are going on about...
It doesn't really surprise me that you no idea about what I'm talking about, because you clearly had no idea what you were talking about in your initial comment. I'd try to educate you, but I sadly think it'd be a waste of time.
Modern C++ is coded with smart pointers and the STL, which resolves both of the issues you mention. Yes there is a small performance penalty to pay, but profiling will reveal if these have any real impact. If so, the pointers can nude up to optimize the hot-path, something you just can't do outside of C++. To me, this is the power. I can be safe by default, and C or even asm, if I need to. Overkill on non performance critical projects, but the best tool for the job when it is. C++, the big ugly Swiss army knife.
For me it doesn't matter which language is faster, I'm using the one that solves my problem the fastest (e.g. shippable product fastest) and right now, Java is the main player for me.
I don't agree with this statement. C++ may have a higher cost in training (I.e. the amount of time to reach high capability), and you may need to use a third party library such as BOOST to avoid re-writing some fundamentals (depending on what you're doing), but I see no reason why C++ takes any longer. At my work, we are a C#, C and C++ shop. The right tool is used for the right job, and C/C++ code takes no longer to write, nor has greater bugs.
Also, since our CPUs aren't getting any faster, we need to use languages that makes threading easier the safest way and on that topic, Java is miles ahead of C++. (Java used to have an utterly broken threading model, but these days it works [tm]).
C++ defines no threading model, and I'd suggest that Java out of box is also inadequate. .Net with parallels is the first with a general pratical model, that doesn't require enormous amounts of effort to acheive the equivalent of a single threaded performance. My point is that in the present day you are basically required to write your own asynchronous task based model that is capable of scheduling across multiple cores. Threads alone just don't cut it, and once youve written your task based asnychronous framework, you can reuse it to your hearts content (such as .Nets parralles).
Well, it looks like I got a bunch of things wrong. First of all, it's not GM in general that was the issue with regards to regulation, but rather foods modified via a bacteriophage or virus not being classed as GM and hence not being regulated or tested in the same way. The person I mentioned was not against genetically modifying plants, she just had a strong conviction that the current safe guards and regulation were inadequate in regards to this modification vector (and I guess in my mind I conflated a specific issue as being a more general one). Yeah so... whoops, just another ignorant software guy mouthing off.
I think it is very important that your voice is part of this discussion as you have first hand knowledge and are presenting a view that will otherwise be drowned in a sea of "GM is bad" posts. My sister has subsequently given me a great deal more information on this topic (she has a gift for explaining the science to an ignorant layperson such as myself), so I think I now understand a bit more.
On the patenting side, no mention of patenting of genes was made, and I don't believe genes are currently patentable in Australia (a quick google suggests some big decisions are pending). The impression that I have been given, though, is that the scientists are often at odds with industry on this issue, and large pressure is being brought to bear from US corporate interests.
You seem to have a wealth of information on the topic. In the interests of transparency, would you care to tell me if I am conversing with someone from academia or someone actually working to create such products? If from academia, can you explain why this person is so concerned? Is she simply the one lone loony plant molecular biologist? (actually my sister is doing her PhD in plant molecular biology, and I'm pretty sure she endorsed these concerns as well. Perhaps the lone two? Maybe it's only women?).
We're running out of antibiotics that there aren't any bugs resistant to, and no new ones are in development because the pharmaceuticals don't see any profit in it.[*]
Wrong! My little sister is doing her PHD in trying to find new types of antibiotics. Trust me, there is a fortune to be made (not for her). The problem, and the thing that is truely scary, is that these bugs are now resistant to entire classes of antibiotics. This means that the vast vast majority of new antibiotics are already useless. So yeah, at the moment we are stairing down the barrel of a future without being able to treat infection, unless we can stop this shit AND come up with an entire new class of antibiotics. It's too late for this lot. Wish my sister success.
I have no problems at all with genetically modified foods. I consider opposition to them as crazy hippy bullshit and Id consider myself very liberal.
You're either ignorant or an idiot. I'm thinking probably idiot, but let's assume ignorance for the sake of argument.
It is not "hippies" who have an issue with genetically modified produce (what is a hippie in this day and age anyway?). The argument as put to me by a molecular biologist is as follows. Take a plant, such as wheat, splice in a gene for it to express a new chemical that acts as a pesticide (warning! Massive simplification). Patent and profit. Instead of growing wheat and applying pesticide, the pesticide is now a part of the plant. Of course if you're going to create a new pesticide, there is a mass of pesky regulation requiring stringent testing etc etc. Not so for our new gentically modified plant! The regulation lags the science. See, this is not the same as species cultivation, in this case we are splicing in completely foreign genes to produce completely impossible (from nature), results. And if we're going to do this, we need to do a good deal of testing to make sure it's safe. Even more than normal, because we don't just spray the chemical on the top, it's an integral part of the plant. Because there is very little to no regulation, less testing is done. Worse, cross-contamination means that if these guys screw up in a big way, it's going to be nigh impossible to ever get it out of our crops. So yeah, treading carefully would be smart. Of course, big companies don't need to be smart, they can just use the profits to buy their way out of trouble.
...Properly designed setups will have an air-gap...
Very very few industrial site have the "air-gap" any more. I suppose all the rest are improperly designed?
Real-time's desirable- but for some networks, having the hole's too much of a risk- .
For whom is it too much of a risk? Power stations? Mines? Water Treatment? None of the sites I work with have an air-gap any more.
especially if you've got a Windows based HMI system or similar in the mix. Seriously.
I'd say that the vast majority of SCADA/HMI systems run on Windows. In critical infrastructure. Without an air gap.
I sure as hell hope there are other ways of securing a network
It's all well and good having super fast transmission capabilities but do we have anything that can process/store data as quickly? It's an honest question as I've always been lead to believe that data storage is the bottleneck.
Infrastructure is where this is important. There are these extremely expensive cables made of glass under the ocean connecting various land masses. It's extremely convenient to be able to upgrade the boxes at either end instead of laying more tubes (*warning* simplification!). You don't need to store the data (at least not in one box), you just need to switch it. This is why fiber is so awesome; people just keep on discovering new ways to jam more down those pipes!
I think you would find Kohlberg's stages of moral development an interesting read. In essence, most people are at Stage 4, which essentially is "belief in authority". Unfortunately, there are as many Stage 2 "I'm just in it for myself" arseholes as there are Stage 5 and Stage 6 "Only the just laws should be obeyed" enlightened thinkers. We need more people to level up.
I think the research environment is fundamentally different from a commercial environment. In many software projects the requirements are continually changing. This is not a result of poor planning by the people requesting the software, but rather the desire to take best advantage of new scientific information as it becomes available. The resulting informal code development is very efficient for the project, but produces code that is difficult to transport to other projects.
Your situation is not different to many commercial environments. In fact, this is one of the largest problems in software development (notice I use the word development, not engineering). There are ways to write quality, flexible, extendible, maintainable programs in these environments, but it is much harder. I'm not talking out of my arse here, I've been in this game for many years now, and have seen approaches that work, and ones that fail. If the resultant program is truly "use once, then throw away", then continue as you are. If you find that you want to build on it later, or give it to others, then there are existing techniques that can assist. The smart approach is to add some of these ideas that look as though they would help, one at a time, and only keeping them if they help. Your right when you say that your environment is "fundamentally different", my experience has been that everyone's situation is unique, but there are certain tools, techniques, and strategies that pre-exist, and may save you time if you spend a little time investigating whether they're right for your environment.