Yes, saying bad things about Microsoft is frowned upon.
OOXML & bribes, anyone? SCO? Patent threats? Netscape? Holding back the web for 10 years? Countless other acts of evil bullshit?
I guess this is the same kind of denial that makes HN throw a hissy-fit at trying to bring up the very real problem that is Islam (in Europe).
See no evil, hear no evil.. What a wonderful community of very intelligent people we have here, heads firmly lodged in their asses. Let's never talk about anything that really matters in the world.
Saying "lololol M$ i hope they die" is frowned upon. Post something with content, support your whining, talk about it.
Microsoft have opened their internal development to the world over the past few years - this blog entry is an example - from all kinds of development teams, we have enormous amounts of insight into many of Microsoft's major products and access to give feedback to people who care.
Don't just focus on the 'evil bullshit' (much of which is probably not 'evil', just the inertia of a huge company).
You can't just drop "Islam is a very real problem" into the middle of a rant about a software company and expect people to think you're not a nutter.
Post something with content, support your whining, talk about it.
Content? I did mention a few examples, didn't I? Well then, would you care to tell me why they're all invalid? I've done this kind of thing before, and every time someone disparages MS here, he's treading on thin ice. There will always be MS-apologists around.
Microsoft have opened their internal development to the world over the past few years
They sure have made a show of being more "open" to please/distract programmers, that's all.
You can't just drop "Islam is a very real problem" into the middle of a rant about a software company and expect people to think you're not a nutter.
I realize this is something that people don't want to hear, and can't process without adjusting their conceptions of things, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Want some content? Here's a video of angry muslims in London: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoMeUcC_M20. One of the signs they're proudly displaying says "Europe, you will pay. Your annihilation is on its way!!!".
Does that sound a tad threatening to you? That protest is probably related to events in 2004, when they actually killed a Dutch film director, Theo Van Gogh, for releasing this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tvH_uowO-0 .. Yes, they killed a man for making a short movie.
The average muslim you meet will most likely tell you that Islam is a "religion of peace", but what they don't mention is that if you say otherwise, they'll kill you. If it's such a mellow religion, why is there a protest full of its followers waving signs saying that they'll destroy Europe then?
Western people believe the line about a religion of peace because they want to, because we should all just get along and coexist in peace and harmony. That's just the humane way of life that we as Westerners are wired to like and want, but that's not what muslims have in mind.
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Update:
Quick! Someone call PG and get him to delete this thread so no one else will see what I'm saying here!
Content? I did mention a few examples, didn't I? Well then, would you care to tell me why they're all invalid?
They are invalid in a discussion about IE9 developments because they aren't about IE9. They are valid in a discussion about web development in general... except they are arguing against your citing 'netscape' and 'holding back web development' because this blog is about MS not holding back web development and not destroying a competing browser. In other words, Microsoft has moved on from those (e.g. this page) so those aren't good support for your complaints anymore.
People in this page are saying bad things about Microsoft, about their javascript interpreter speed, their lack of canvas support and rounded corners and font handling and they aren't being voted down. Any guesses why?
I am an MS apologist. I have worked with their stuff for the last six years and find it (mostly) better than I previously thought, and not deserving of quite as much of the mudslinging as actually happens online.
Islam
Don't know anything much about Islam and couldn't give two whoots. Particularly don't want to discuss religion or country/world politics on HN, even more so in a thread about an IT topic. By the way, I also don't want to discuss dishwasher detergent, pie recipes, good books on optical illusions or how to build a canoe.
They are invalid in a discussion about IE9 developments because they aren't about IE9.
Well then, why did you insist that I should "support my whining"? I'm pretty sure my "whining" was just as not related to IE9 as it is now.
Besides, if you squint and look really hard, you'll notice my goal here was not really to discuss the finer points of IE 9. You've obviously got a problem with that, but how much would you surmise I care?
They are valid in a discussion about web development in general... except they are arguing against your citing 'netscape' and 'holding back web development' because this blog is about MS not holding back web development and not destroying a competing browser.
I take it that MS discussing IE 9 on a blog means that they actually never did any of the things I listed?
People in this page are saying bad things about Microsoft, about their javascript interpreter speed, their lack of canvas support and rounded corners and font handling and they aren't being voted down. Any guesses why?
Wouldn't this be related to "holding back web development"?
I am an MS apologist. I have worked with their stuff for the last six years and find it (mostly) better than I previously thought, and not deserving of quite as much of the mudslinging as actually happens online.
Glad you came clean. Even I realize that they've been working hard to improve the .NET platform. They have to, because their grip on the world is dependent on developers, developers, developers.. Did you see what they did to improve IE while they weren't worried? Oh that's right! -Nothing.
Don't know anything much about Islam and couldn't give two whoots.
See, now that's the exact same problem I'm trying to solve. You should know that there are people following a 1300-year-old sacred manual on how to behave that says "kill everyone who's not a muslim", and it's happening in 2000-fucking-9.
You don't see Christians going on Crusades anymore, but you do see enraged muslims shouting that they'll destroy Europe. And Europe's collective reaction? -To apologize, look away, and hope that they calm down.
Everyone else on this page is posting interesting observations on Microsoft, development, and the web. It makes me angry that you've come into my little garden of contemplation and started yelling about irrelevant subjects.
Yeah, or you could give things some thought, find out for yourself, and join the choir. Instead, you're proudly taking in the scenery inside your rectum.
I was just trying to spread awareness. It feels weird to even say that, but something has to be done. Of course, it could be argued that this is not the place for warning the world about the insanity that is Islam, but what is?
There's no forum in the world for talking about how dangerous Islam is, where people wouldn't already agree.
HN on the other hand, is full of intelligent people who certainly should be able to handle coming across material that is unpleasant to digest, and adjust their world views accordingly.
There really was some kind of protest full of enraged muslims in London, who were pretty much saying that they'll destroy Europe, and it sure wasn't the only enraged protest they've made. They really genuinely did kill a man for making a short movie that talked about Islam. Shouldn't this kind of stuff at least raise an eyebrow or two? Can you really dismiss all of this as Crazy Talk? Should you? Or should you maybe find out for yourself? Go on, confirm that I'm crazy. I dare you!
There's a blogger in Finland who's been talking about Islam & (muslim) immigrants for years, but only became famous last year when enough people noticed. He became the victim of a nation-wide witch-hunt lead by the local media, and eventually even got fined for something he said on his blog. You see, in Finland we have freedom of speech as long as we're careful not to say anything unpleasant. I was somewhat surprised he didn't get thrown in jail.
What the blogger has done requires giant balls of steel. What I'm doing here is the only thing I'm aware I can, however misplaced or aggravating it might be.
Right, because you just start downloading for example something named Transformers.Revenge.of.the.Fallen.2009.IMAX.720P.BDRip.X264-TLF, assuming that it's umm.. something in the public domain?
Who knows, it might be a movie too! You certainly don't - you just like to download random stuff that looks vaguely familiar for some totally mysterious reason, hoping that you'll be entertained by it.
I don't understand how your train of thought arrived at that destination, but it must have gotten derailed somewhere along the way.
I'm just bored of the endless fashion strutting that goes on recently in programming. I think it's irrelevant and tiring.
If a language solved a problem 5 years ago, it'll solve the same problem today. It won't die unless something else is found that solves the problem in a better way.
Yeah, why bother keeping up with advances in the field? Back in my day, sonny, we used our Java 1.4, and that's the way we likes it. Any new ideas should be immediately rejected as "fashion strutting", especially new ideas that have been successfully implemented in other languages for decades.
The technique of composing classes from parts has recently been popularized by Smalltalk, Perl 6, Perl 5 (Moose), and Scala. (Scala's implementation is intentionally limited for some reason; look to Moose for the most reliable implementation that people actually use for Real Work.)
If you want to do this in Java, you would have to create a class like:
This is a lot of code to write, which is why people just cut-n-paste instead.
Also, Java is not merely 5 years behind, so it is worthwhile to look back farther to find ideas that Java could embrace. Java would do well to steal a sane object system like CLOS or Moose; it could really eliminate a lot of boilerplate. (One thing I think is annoying about Java is how much work the constructor has to do. In Lisp and Perl, I never write my own constructors, the object system does it for me. This means that things can be composed without the programmer having to know every detail, including which position each attribute initializer should be in.)
Anyway, if you really think Java is the state of the art, you should look around a bit more. Yes, it's silly that people want to do their own type checking in "dynamic languages", but that's not why they use them -- it's all the other features that they want. The lack of static type checking is an unfortunate overreaction to C and C++.
Soviet tanks were not exactly 'state of the art' either, but they worked pretty good. What's 'hot' doesn't automatically qualify to solve things for the longer term, in fact being 'hot' is a fantastic reason to stay clear of a technology, because if it is in fashion this year it could very well be out of fashion next year.
Yeah, except many of these ideas have been production-tested for 25+ years.
Remember that Java is the language that introduced garbage collection to the world. Before Java, it was basically an untested academic thing that Lisp machines did. Why be liberal with such a radical new idea and conservative with things that let you implement programs the same way you do now but with less typing? It makes very little sense.
Not to mention that I have never said a thing about things like "public static void". I specifically mentioned the object system above and how much manual easy-to-get-wrong code is required simply to make things that have an equals method also have a "not equals" method.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother arguing with axod. Wait, I always wonder that...
Come on. How often do you really need an equals method in your classes? It's not a big deal. (No, I'm not one of those people who insist on writing equals/hashcode/toString on everything even when it's not being used).
I wonder why I try to bring sanity to these sorts of discussions also :/
Since Java lacks generics, there are many kinds of code which require duplicate code in Java. Specifically, every place where you would use generics in another language (Templates in C++, or TypeClasses in Haskell, for instance).
Java definitely supports generics as of 1.5 - did you mean that it doesn't support generics to the extent of C++? Most basic uses (containers) are identical between the languages, and while Java doesn't allow compile-time "duck typing" that C++ does, you can fake it by using the "? extends SomeInterface" syntax.
Java supports type erasure, which it idiosyncratically calls "generics", even though it does not allow generic programming. A generic function in a language with actual generics can work generically, on more than one type. A "generic" function in Java can work on exactly one type, namely the type which the "generic" type becomes after type erasure.
You can use "? extends SomeInterface" only if you write SomeInterface wrappers for every type which you want to use "generically." This is boilerplate relative to most other languages.
Personally, I find this boilerplate equivalent to the comments one has to write documenting the requirements of the type, with the added benefit of readable error messages when you pass the wrong type. In other words, I find:
// T here is a type that must support these two operations:
// bool froznit();
// void frobnob(Foo* foo);
template <class T> class Frozner { ... }
And
public interface SomeStupidName {
public bool froznit();
public void frobnob(Foo foo);
}
public class Frozner<? extends SomeStupidName> { ... }
I think that has to do a lot with Java's heritage.
What they were shooting for seems to have been something that combines the syntax of C and some of C++ for easy access to a large pool of existing programmers but without those 'scary pointers', and the memory leak issues associated with bad programming habits in C and C++.
I am more interested in writing good programs than "just getting something done". That means using tools with the appropriate level of expressiveness, of which Java and C are neither.
Ask me which of Common Lisp, Haskell, and Perl I prefer, then call me a "<language> programmer". Remember, in the other threads, I am advocating combinations of features that do not currently exist in any programming language. I may be a "<language> programmer", I guess, but that <language> does not actually exist. Meta...
(You are the one who thinks that every feature that Java has is essential for programming, and every feature it's missing is <some cynical weasel-words here>. That is indicative of seeing the world through Java-colored glasses.)
I don't disagree with anything you've said, but the author of the post made the same point - languages don't die unless they are completely replaced. The author thinks that Java may live on for decades.
He has taken the unfortunate, but popular, definition of a dead programming language: one which has stopped evolving. Of course, such a language is no more dead than sharks.
Although I will agree with you in general about Java, I have to say that problems/challenges change, therefore you need new specific languages or automation tools for the job.
In my point of view Java is just the tool to create new domain specific languages that solve these new problems.
But, general languages that just make just a bit shorter or less verbose (as everyone who likes to dismiss Java uses quite often), to create a class won't do it for me to change language/platform.
I'll pretend you're asking in earnest: Depending on the need, you have a bevy of parser-generators to choose from. My favorite is SableCC.
Or, if you want something lightweight where you effectively have a DSL without creating an actual language, look towards static imports + fluent interfaces + builder pattern:
The issue here is not abuse of the guidelines, it's that western people typically don't want to see anything like this, because it goes against their worldview. I understand the feeling.
But most people finding this kind of material uncomfortable doesn't change the fact that it should be brought up more, to raise awareness. Things are different in some European countries, where muslim immigrants are most definitely a problem, but where the governments suppress all negative publicity about it.
You don't actually know anything about what's going on, obviously, so it would be a good idea to find out for yourself, and form your very own opinion about these things. Peace & Harmony is not the reality, it's what we as westerners are wired to want to believe.
By the way, censoring this submission from HN because of the content would be tantamount to what European governments are doing. Inconvenient truths should not be swept under the rug, they need more sunlight.
I've done quite a bit of studying on this topic before 9-11 (and before all the sensationalist books and such)
I honestly don't think this group wants to know, shiranaihito. They are unable to process this information (and I haven't reviewed much except the first video) in any kind of reasonable dispassionate way.
If it were rock-collecting practices of men who wore turbans, complete with flash graphics and a twitterfeed? Different story entirely. But this is just too much for them. It conflicts with so many preconceived notions and ideas and requires such a rethinking of western cosmopolitan virtues that it's a non-starter. (although I agree it is important and interesting)
Indeed, the problem is that people just flat out refuse to process this information, because it's unpleasant. The exact same thing happens everywhere in Europe too, and is the biggest obstacle to eventually dealing with the problems.
To process this, along with some other things in life, one needs to be able to adjust his worldviews, and to entertain the notion that perhaps whatever his current belief of something is might be wrong.
It just seemed to me that a forum with lots of really intelligent people might be able to handle this material in a reasonable way.
It may prove to be really freaking unfortunate if our only option is to just let Islam in Europe unfold.
After what you said, I'm surprised that you flagged this too. Is preventing discussion really the right choice here? It's cute how you already got an upvote for the word "flagged".
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And the thread is dead. The esteemed HN community did a nice job of self-censoring dissidence.
> I downvote because I have been personally offended by something that has been said. Most often I have been offended by the sin of bad taste.
> I suffer in the same way as I do when I witness incredibly stupid people on television, or very bad music, or indeed when I find myself buttonholed into a painfully tedious conversation with someone who is similarly lacking in good taste, be it social, intellectual, aesthetic or otherwise. I suffer and therefore I downvote, in an attempt to exorcise my pain.
Are you for real? I guess I should downvote you for deeply offending me by needing to get over yourself.
There's nothing cryptographically wrong with SSL (TLS and SSL are mostly synonyms in modern systems that disallow SSLv1 and SSLv2). SSL is actually an example of a cryptosystem done very right, which has survived and adapted to 15+ years of attacks. If you read the protocol, you will see lots of places that seem clunky, and almost all of them are countermeasures to older attacks.
The fact that a protocol with the same objectives as SSL that you wrote today would be far simpler and more straightforward than SSL is evidence of how important it is to use SSL, because you are not going to think of all the attacks that people like Paul Kocher thought of when they reviewed and modified the protocol.
As Thomas said, I was treating "SSL" and "TLS" as synonyms.
There are two major problems with SSL:
1. It's very complex and has a lot of optional components an attacker can select. This means that (a) it's very likely that SSL implementations will have bugs; (b) it's very likely that those bugs won't be triggered in common use, and will thus tend to remain unfixed; and (c) if an attacker can find such a bug, he can probably trigger it.
2. It relies on a very large number of single points of failure -- namely, Certificate Authorities. CAs screw up all the time, and an attacker only needs to find one screwy CA in order to pretend to be whoever he wants.
In many situations SSL is the best option available; but that doesn't mean that it's a good option, only that it's the least bad option.
Actually I think I've read something about the different levels of SSL. I suppose it's possible to somehow limit the available modes, to avoid exposing vulnerabilities.
an attacker only needs to find one screwy CA in order to pretend to be whoever he wants.
- What's a screwy CA, and how does the pretending work? .. If it's possible to describe roughly.
Maybe it's not a lame greed lawsuit? Nokia has IP in every GSM phone... Perhaps Apple isn't licensing like they are supposed to? We'll have to see how it pans out.
The actions take place in a context, and just because there are empowered women doing sex-charged performances in San Francisco doesn't mean the event in Taiwan was empowering.
Does it mean those women in Taiwan weren't empowered then? Besides, maybe that kind of thing is common in Taiwan, and nothing to get all worked up about (especially on the other side of the planet).
To the women, it was probably just a business transaction, and the geeks probably enjoyed it. No one got hurt or degraded.
