mrorganic, COM with Delphi is also easy. Writing Corba stuff in the early years required 100 lines of C++ or so per routine (forgot). That was before they even had the notion of a unified client interface. But that wasn't exactly the point I think of the rant. The rant confused a lot of things: the essential simplicity of COM, the sometimes confusing interfaces built on top of it, and the hard problems COM tries to solve. What are you going to do if you have a single-threaded component in a multi-threaded application? Forbid that? Make the multi-threaded application single-threaded? Such things work with COM. That's not bad. Transparant access over the network? Works as well. And used by a lot of people. There is always room for improvement. And I haven't seen any alternative with a significant following.
mx assumes that all good interfaces are text based. Supposedly the founders of the Internet new all about this. What about DNS? It's binary. NFS? Binary RPC. NTP? Binary as well. I also like text interfaces, but the Internet is not build on it exclusively.
And on another front, I still have to reply to a private reaction I got with regards to a post about causes of gun killings in relation to Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine". The following points were raised in that email:
- The population density metric doesn't give any more conclusive answers, because it isn't true for Japan.
I don't know a lot about Japan, but their society could be quite different. It is true for The Netherlands for example. But I don't think a single cause is the answer. And population density only has a correlation with crime, I'm not aware of research showing conclusive causal effects. Except interesting (science) fiction that is. - Moore is only raising questions. That's the point.
But why the "or are we nuts" subtitle at the beginning? Why making a joke of the word documentary by staging buying a gun at a bank, faking Charles Heston speeches, alleging that a factory that makes space rockets has something to do with atomic weapons? 11,127 homicides by gun in the US? According to the FBI it's around 8500 deads by gun. - It might be the media, because that way you don't think about DMCA, Patriot Act, Homeland
Security Dept., FCC & broadcasting & ownership rights, ...
I don't believe the media in the US is controlled by the government. They certainly have an agenda, and as most journalist vote Democrats, its your guess what agenda that might be. - Did anyone of the stories of the past months about viruses and worms mention that you're only vulnerable if you use Microsoft software? Did they mention there are alternatives?
Good point. Media is biased. I agree with that. - Because he gets you to react, it engaged you. That's what good storytelling is about.
Maybe. But I know that I always resent it deeply when I thought when something was true, because I had seen it on TV, and later on it was a deeply skewed documentary, leaving out most of the really interesting facts.
On this subject, let me refer to and quote Theodore Dalrymple's 1998 essay on New Zealand crime. This great UK humanitarian, Doctor and advocate for the emancipation of the underclass from destructive liberal theories, injects more sense into each paragraph than Michael Moore in all its documentaries and books (quoted freely from NZPundit:
Such a society--prosperous, democratic, egalitarian--should be virtually free of crime, if the commonplace liberal explanations of criminality were true. But they aren't, and New Zealand is now almost as crime-ridden as its mother country, itself the most crime-ridden nation in western Europe (along with prosperous, democratic, egalitarian Holland). Indeed, in the ever-upward trend in the crime figures, New Zealand is only a handful of years behind Britain and, in point of homicide, a few years in advance of it. This fact is of great theoretical interest, or ought to be: it is an overwhelming refutation of the standard liberal explanations of crime.