Slashdot Mirror

The case won't reach trial. These people are rolling the dice on threatening Intel with some negative publicity and getting a settlement. Remember how much money Intel lost on the PR fallout from the F00F bug? Intel does, too.

Sounds like he is re-inventing C#.
But forgot the most for powerful feature of C# -
Attributes, which allows you to do things like XmlSerialization with no hand-written code. I think Attribs will improve the way we write DB clients.
If you want to see an example, go see Example4, listing one.

It's also annoying he never mentions the term "boxing" and "unboxing" when he talks about turning 'ints' etc into objects. Sometimes you can borrow a page from your competitors' vocabulary.

Also - how about adding the following C# language features:
A) foreach(Type t in mylist){...} to prepare ground for templates
B) tailcall IL instruction to allow Prolog etc
C) System.Windows.Forms for a fast windows kit
(goodness, IBM had to invent their own AWT replacement to create eclipse IDE)
D) enums which can be flags, which can be or'd together
E) events + function pointers ("delegates" in msspeak)

go mono! /g

• 1, and it's super bitchen kewl l337! :)
• 2, and it will never change
• 3, just the way I like it
• 4, but only because I let my family use it
• 5, have started finding excuses to use others computers
• 6, pleading to the gods
• 7, would research new computers, if I could get on the $#^$in internet!
• 8, making excuses not to go in computer room, thinking it will all be OK...
• 9, trying to use the power of suggestion on children to make them ask for a 'new' computer
• 10, feeling sorry for yourself, like a peice of you is missing. End up donaiting computer to CowboyNeal

I'm amazed that there is nothing here about Tcl. I use everything from shell to C to Perl, but Tcl is consistenly one of my favorite languages. I don't know why it doesn't get more respect.

Anyway, Activestate is a great place to start, especially the cookbook. The weekly Tcl-URL is published at Dr Dobbs. The Tcl Developer Xchange also has a lot of resources. Most of the major Tcl developers hang out in comp.lang.tcl (probably one of the most civil newsgroups there is). Quick answers to questions are always available there.

Assuming that MS doesn't turn out to be as insolvent as Worldcom or Enron, their current strategy seems to lead them out of software development and into providing services. With software no longer their primary money maker, it'll be pushed to the side probably much the same way that stability and security have been pushed asided for new features.

This may be one of a long chain of public announcements leading to MS support of OSS while they try to figure out how to lock in OSS users.

I used to work at Aimster, and received their shaft when the CEO (John Deep) decided not to pay anybody, and let them continue working without telling them there wasn't any money left. Apparently they're now making some money off the work of the backs of now-laid-off programmers, which must be a great business model, though I don't know how I could live with myself doing what they did.

Here are some links to some journal entries I wrote as the stuff was happening:

http://slashdot.org/~Evro/journal/2128
http://slashdot.org/~Evro/journal/1918
http://slashdot.org/~Evro/journal/1118

Remember: everything you've ever been read about Aimster in the press was a lie. It was not created by John Deep, nor his daughter (Madeline, called Aimster as a way to launch her "modeling career" on the backs of the programmers).

Another tidbit: February 14, 2001 - Video (Real Player only, apparently) of John Deep at the O'Reilly P2P conference, where he babbled on for a very long time (about 12 minutes) about how his daughter is the software and other stupid garbage. You can see that he sounds really crazy here, especially compared to people like Ray Ozzie who actually have legitimate business experience.

there is an interview with craig available as mp3 (over 70 minutes) that deals with details of the technology at google and how it changed since mr. silverstein started at google.

Interesting. According to this (note the URL, someone has a sense of humor) MS would turn down feature requests that didn't improve the Xbox's "gaming" performance/ability. I'm glad to see that that was all a lot of bull shit.

Hey yall,

Well I guess my favorite (since I'm a hardware guy) would have to be the Pentum 1 F00F bug. When that instruction was issued to the Processor it would lockup tighter than a drum. :) If you are bored you can go here to find out more about it.

It's nice to think of bugs that can make us smile, but I was shook up by one bug in hardware, the infamous Intel Pentium f00f bug. This caused calculations to go wrong, sometimes. Not often, quite rarely, but sometimes. Now, my job (or anyway, part of it) was to design programs that ran calculations to calculate the risk of a serious (fatal) genetic disease being inherited by an unborn from its mother. For some serious diseases, the hospital I worked at offered abortions for those mothers, if they wished. Whatever your views on such terminations, I made damned sure my code was clean and as bug free as I could make it. Then, I come across Usenet messages that the Pentiums I am using have a floating point bug. This is when such bugs become - literally - life or death problems for users. I believe that we were never effected (we reacted quickly and ran on 486's until we found that the cpu's we had were bug free), but it is a sobering lesson.

Not true, as turning on one flag would resurrect said code. See Figure 6.

For normal users, however, yes... the code was as good as gone. It -is- still there, tho.

Samuel Plimsoll, M.P. (1824-1898) Samuel Plimsoll brought about one of the greatest shipping revolutions ever known by shocking the British nation into making reforms which have saved the lives of countless seamen. By the mid-1800's, the overloading of English ships had become a national problem. Plimsoll took up as a crusade the plan of James Hall to require that vessels bear a load line marking indicating when they were overloaded, hence ensuring the safety of crew and cargo. His violent speeches aroused the House of Commons; his book, Our Seamen, shocked the people at large into clamorous indignation. His book also earned him the hatred of many shipowners who set in train a series of legal battles against Plimsoll. Through this adversity and personal loss, Plimsoll clung doggedly to his facts. He fought to the point of utter exhaustion until finally, in 1876, Parliament was forced to pass the Unseaworthy Ships Bill into law, requiring that vessels bear the load line freeboard marking. It was soon known as the "Plimsoll Mark" and was eventually adopted by all maritime nations of the world.

The risks,issues and solutions for providing a more secure operating and application enviroment have been known for decades. Those who do not already comprehend the issues and are willing to learn, should take some time out to listen to some of the speeches at Dr. Dobbs Journal's Technetcast security archives, starting with Meeting Future Security Challenges by Dr. Blaine Burnam, Director, Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) and previously with the National Security Agency (NSA)

The design and implementation of some applications and servers are just too unsafe to use in the "open ocean" of the internet.

Numerous security experts have railed against Microsoft's lack of security, best summed up by Bruce Schneier Founder and CTO Counterpane Internet Security, Inc who rightly stated ...

Honestly, security experts don't pick on Microsoft because we have some fundamental dislike for the company. Indeed, Microsoft's poor products are one of the reasons we're in business. We pick on them because they've done more to harm Internet security than anyone else, because they repeatedly lie to the public about their products' security, and because they do everything they can to convince people that the problems lie anywhere but inside Microsoft. Microsoft treats security vulnerabilities as public relations problems. Until that changes, expect more of this kind of nonsense from Microsoft and its products. (Note to Gartner: The vulnerabilities will come, a couple of them a week, for years and years...until people stop looking for them. Waiting six months isn't going to make this OS safer.)

However Microsoft's products are not alone in the presence of vulnerabilities, this is a major issue for Linux/BSD and Unix as well as any other OS and vendor.

In a recent speech Fixing Network Security by Hacking the Business Climate Bruce Schneier claimed that for change to occur, the software industry must become libel for damages from "unsecure" software, however historically, this has not always been the case, since most businesses can insure against damages and pass the cost along to the consumer.

The Ford Pinto and more recently the Ford Explorer's tires are two examples of public and media pressure being more successful than just threat of lawsuits. Even so, eventually though public pressure the governments around the world have to step in and pass regulations that set up a minimum set of requirements an automobile has to meet to be deemed "road worthy". This includes crash testing as well as the inclusion of safety equipment on all models. The requirement are not constant and change to meet the expectations and demands of the public and lawmakers.

The onus is not only on the automotive industry itself but also on the users. Most countries require that all automobiles undergo regular inspection and maintain an up to date "Warrant of Fitness".

In the same way, if you want a secure IT infrastructure, eventually the software design, implementation and each deployment will have to undergo the same type of regulation and scrutiny.

Samuel Plimsoll, M.P. (1824-1898) Samuel Plimsoll brought about one of the greatest shipping revolutions ever known by shocking the British nation into making reforms which have saved the lives of countless seamen. By the mid-1800's, the overloading of English ships had become a national problem. Plimsoll took up as a crusade the plan of James Hall to require that vessels bear a load line marking indicating when they were overloaded, hence ensuring the safety of crew and cargo. His violent speeches aroused the House of Commons; his book, Our Seamen, shocked the people at large into clamorous indignation. His book also earned him the hatred of many shipowners who set in train a series of legal battles against Plimsoll. Through this adversity and personal loss, Plimsoll clung doggedly to his facts. He fought to the point of utter exhaustion until finally, in 1876, Parliament was forced to pass the Unseaworthy Ships Bill into law, requiring that vessels bear the load line freeboard marking. It was soon known as the "Plimsoll Mark" and was eventually adopted by all maritime nations of the world.

The risks,issues and solutions for providing a more secure operating and application enviroment have been known for decades. Those who do not already comprehend the issues and are willing to learn, should take some time out to listen to some of the speeches at Dr. Dobbs Journal's Technetcast security archives, starting with Meeting Future Security Challenges by Dr. Blaine Burnam, Director, Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) and previously with the National Security Agency (NSA)

The design and implementation of some applications and servers are just too unsafe to use in the "open ocean" of the internet.

Numerous security experts have railed against Microsoft's lack of security, best summed up by Bruce Schneier Founder and CTO Counterpane Internet Security, Inc who rightly stated ...

Honestly, security experts don't pick on Microsoft because we have some fundamental dislike for the company. Indeed, Microsoft's poor products are one of the reasons we're in business. We pick on them because they've done more to harm Internet security than anyone else, because they repeatedly lie to the public about their products' security, and because they do everything they can to convince people that the problems lie anywhere but inside Microsoft. Microsoft treats security vulnerabilities as public relations problems. Until that changes, expect more of this kind of nonsense from Microsoft and its products. (Note to Gartner: The vulnerabilities will come, a couple of them a week, for years and years...until people stop looking for them. Waiting six months isn't going to make this OS safer.)

However Microsoft's products are not alone in the presence of vulnerabilities, this is a major issue for Linux/BSD and Unix as well as any other OS and vendor.

In a recent speech Fixing Network Security by Hacking the Business Climate Bruce Schneier claimed that for change to occur, the software industry must become libel for damages from "unsecure" software, however historically, this has not always been the case, since most businesses can insure against damages and pass the cost along to the consumer.

The Ford Pinto and more recently the Ford Explorer's tires are two examples of public and media pressure being more successful than just threat of lawsuits. Even so, eventually though public pressure the governments around the world have to step in and pass regulations that set up a minimum set of requirements an automobile has to meet to be deemed "road worthy". This includes crash testing as well as the inclusion of safety equipment on all models. The requirement are not constant and change to meet the expectations and demands of the public and lawmakers.

The onus is not only on the automotive industry itself but also on the users. Most countries require that all automobiles undergo regular inspection and maintain an up to date "Warrant of Fitness".

In the same way, if you want a secure IT infrastructure, eventually the software design, implementation and each deployment will have to undergo the same type of regulation and scrutiny.

Samuel Plimsoll, M.P. (1824-1898) Samuel Plimsoll brought about one of the greatest shipping revolutions ever known by shocking the British nation into making reforms which have saved the lives of countless seamen. By the mid-1800's, the overloading of English ships had become a national problem. Plimsoll took up as a crusade the plan of James Hall to require that vessels bear a load line marking indicating when they were overloaded, hence ensuring the safety of crew and cargo. His violent speeches aroused the House of Commons; his book, Our Seamen, shocked the people at large into clamorous indignation. His book also earned him the hatred of many shipowners who set in train a series of legal battles against Plimsoll. Through this adversity and personal loss, Plimsoll clung doggedly to his facts. He fought to the point of utter exhaustion until finally, in 1876, Parliament was forced to pass the Unseaworthy Ships Bill into law, requiring that vessels bear the load line freeboard marking. It was soon known as the "Plimsoll Mark" and was eventually adopted by all maritime nations of the world.

The risks,issues and solutions for providing a more secure operating and application enviroment have been known for decades. Those who do not already comprehend the issues and are willing to learn, should take some time out to listen to some of the speeches at Dr. Dobbs Journal's Technetcast security archives, starting with Meeting Future Security Challenges by Dr. Blaine Burnam, Director, Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) and previously with the National Security Agency (NSA)

The design and implementation of some applications and servers are just too unsafe to use in the "open ocean" of the internet.

Numerous security experts have railed against Microsoft's lack of security, best summed up by Bruce Schneier Founder and CTO Counterpane Internet Security, Inc who rightly stated ...

Honestly, security experts don't pick on Microsoft because we have some fundamental dislike for the company. Indeed, Microsoft's poor products are one of the reasons we're in business. We pick on them because they've done more to harm Internet security than anyone else, because they repeatedly lie to the public about their products' security, and because they do everything they can to convince people that the problems lie anywhere but inside Microsoft. Microsoft treats security vulnerabilities as public relations problems. Until that changes, expect more of this kind of nonsense from Microsoft and its products. (Note to Gartner: The vulnerabilities will come, a couple of them a week, for years and years...until people stop looking for them. Waiting six months isn't going to make this OS safer.)

However Microsoft's products are not alone in the presence of vulnerabilities, this is a major issue for Linux/BSD and Unix as well as any other OS and vendor.

In a recent speech Fixing Network Security by Hacking the Business Climate Bruce Schneier claimed that for change to occur, the software industry must become libel for damages from "unsecure" software, however historically, this has not always been the case, since most businesses can insure against damages and pass the cost along to the consumer.

The Ford Pinto and more recently the Ford Explorer's tires are two examples of public and media pressure being more successful than just threat of lawsuits. Even so, eventually though public pressure the governments around the world have to step in and pass regulations that set up a minimum set of requirements an automobile has to meet to be deemed "road worthy". This includes crash testing as well as the inclusion of safety equipment on all models. The requirement are not constant and change to meet the expectations and demands of the public and lawmakers.

The onus is not only on the automotive industry itself but also on the users. Most countries require that all automobiles undergo regular inspection and maintain an up to date "Warrant of Fitness".

In the same way, if you want a secure IT infrastructure, eventually the software design, implementation and each deployment will have to undergo the same type of regulation and scrutiny.

Subject: "Opening the Open Source Debate"

Date: 31 May 2002 15:45:59 +1200

Some references you might wish to consider before publishing your article "Opening the Open Source Debate"

http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/f_headline.cgi ?bw.053002/221502375

Bruce Schneier, one of the recognized leading expert on computer security on Kerckhoffs' Principle and Secrecy, Security, and Obscurity of software.

http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0205.html#1

Dr. Blaine Burnham, Director, Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) and previously with the National Security Agency (NSA), gives an keynote speech overview of current encryption and security technologies and outlines possible strategies for future defense.

http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.html?st ream_id=411

Also you might wish to address the issue of Microsoft's disproportionately high number of open vulnerabilities in its Internet Explorer components. All of which where discovered without access to the source code.

http://jscript.dk/unpatched/

Richard Purcell, Microsoft's director of corporate privacy, has recently stated that any major improvement in regard to the security of it's products may be at least "5, 10 years, maybe".

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may 2002/tc20020523_6029.htm

As for the issue of Trojan horse injection into open source code, it is far from being an open source only issue.

http://www.eeggs.com/

Or were all the "Easter Eggs" currently found in Microsoft's products officially authorized?

If you are looking for a methodology for providing a suitably secure and hardened solution, start with a real world example.

http://www.openbsd.org/security.html

I welcome any open debate.

And also, perhaps, misinformation, with history being colored to suit MS's corporate image. For example, there's this from the March 1998 Dr. Dobb's Journal: "According to The New Yorker, 'after Microsoft bought the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia and turned it into...Encarta...the entry on Bill Gates changed.' The clause 'known as a tough competitor who seems to value winning in a competitive environment over money' was changed to read, 'known for his personal and corporate contributions to charity and educational organizations.'"

I have to admit, I got more information about Echolon from a talk on DDJ's Technetcast:

'ECHELON and The Insecurity Industry' at
http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.htm l?st ream_id=423

It was Widnows 3.1; here's Microsoft's response.

It was Widnows 3.1; here's Microsoft's response.

Just to be clear, all processors out there have bugs. The pentium bug is in no way exceptional. The only reason it deserves to be there is beacuse the list is called "a collection of famous software bugs that caused large scale disasters.

What is exceptional is that instead of just announcing a new erratum (which is what Intel and most cpu makers normally do in such a case), Intel tried to bury the problem, initially denying that it existed and then denying that anyone would ever run into the problem. This really pissed off the numerical computing community and destroyed confidence in the accuracy of intel's floating point unit. That's why it was a public relations fiasco.

see:

• Pentium Crosses the Great Divide
• P54C Erratum 23 (FDIV bug).

Just to be clear, all processors out there have bugs. The pentium bug is in no way exceptional. The only reason it deserves to be there is beacuse the list is called "a collection of famous software bugs that caused large scale disasters.

What is exceptional is that instead of just announcing a new erratum (which is what Intel and most cpu makers normally do in such a case), Intel tried to bury the problem, initially denying that it existed and then denying that anyone would ever run into the problem. This really pissed off the numerical computing community and destroyed confidence in the accuracy of intel's floating point unit. That's why it was a public relations fiasco.

see:

• Pentium Crosses the Great Divide
• P54C Erratum 23 (FDIV bug).

Some stats? Just by knowing how much more well-defined C++'s type-system is compared to C is enough to get an intuitive sense that there will be cases where C++ will out-perform it. As for a specific example, type-based alias analysis is one that seems to have been getting attention lately. C++'s templates, are probably the most remarkable example, as they can permit optimizations beyond the ability of current Fortran compilers.

Both of them are so fast already though that comparing them for the most part isn't all that interesting. Awhile back, Alexander Stepanov created the Abstraction Penalty benchmark to test the effect of using abstraction features in C++ like the STL. Over the past several years I've noticed that the penalty is usually close to nothing, if not sometimes less than -- indicating a speedup.

I've have found it an excellent relief from the mundane of C/C++ while re-inforcing the natural idioms of generic programming. I'm Looking forward to working with the Boost Python Library

A survey contrast of Python and C++ http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2002- April/096602.html Cross platform, Batteries included, good natured community, and script -> OO Ready got me interested, "like I think" factors got me hooked. (I'm a C++/C applications developer.) The Weekly Guide to Python Resources

So, you were the guy giving the billy bob jimmy jack line?

I have lived in Huntsville over fifteen years and have never experienced this before. An hour out into the county, perhaps, but not in Huntsville. Huntsville is listed as a "Top 10" place to live if you're a programmer.
Aside from the plethora of idiots making knee-jerk comments about the place, Huntsville is an awesome place to live.

If you get DDJ, read the Swaine's Flames column on Slashdot's New Business Model.

You're off by a factor of 10. As you can read in this interview, the scheduling latency in BeOS was around 250 microseconds back in july 1999, when a Pentium III 550 was the fastest Pentium CPU you could get. I'm pretty sure latency didn't get 10 times worse since then, in fact I'd be suprised if wasn't much better on current hardware.

You might find this interesting, then.

to teach a non-programmer...absolutely wonderful about assembly, and to a certain degree C

I agree that a very high-level language is probably not the optimum way to teach programming, especially Java (a lot of the I/O and graphics stuff is way to complex for new programmers), but I don't think assembly or C is the way to go. Both languages require a relatively good understanding of computer architecture right from the beginning--there is no easing into it, especially in assembly.

Despite what seems to be a general sentiment against it, I think C++ is a great way to start, especially now the STL. The C++ I/O libraries are pretty easy to use, and the STL gives you quite a bit of high-level functionality. Having strings makes the initial steps a lot easier to grasp. New programmers won't ask "well, why do I have to do all this?" when they want to do some basic string manipulation. They can ease into that question in time, while using the same language. You can also use C++ to learn about OO techniques. The first language I learned was C++ (the first programming book I found), and I found classes to be an intuitive way to model "things" in code. At first it's always concrete classes, but as you learn you start to code more abstract classes. The power and flexibility you have with C++ make it a great language to learn with.

There is pretty good presentation (real video) featuring Bjarne Stroustrup that gives a better defence than I offer.

No surprise that frameworks designed for the same market provide similar interfaces. J2EE and CLR compete for infrastructure ubiquity, so their goal is to be portable and invisible. The interesting work takes place at the layer below (operating system VM) and layer above (application-specific libraries).

The layer below will be done by Sun, Microsoft and assorted platform vendors. Over time, the VM's will be optimized up to platform limits. But the application layer will remain wide open for innovative, industry-specific libraries.

Vigorous competition will take place among Visual Basic and Java/J2EE components (ported to their web-services equivalent). To speculate on the topology of that landscape, one could interview domain experts (e.g. telecom, bioinformatics, finance, geodata, defence) about their investment in application toolkits.

A question worth asking -- at what stage of its evolution will the Apache API gain "language" status?

Don't miss the Feb 2002 article on the MIT Lightweight Languages Workshop.

Rich

Dr Dobbs Journal ran an article (not available online - only the source of the program) here

It described what the author called a "parasitic computer." The function was rather trivial and has no real benifit, but the premise was that by passing three numbers to a web server your could check to see if the sum of two of them were equal to the thrid by using the checksum of the results. The article went on to explain that this was more of a proof of concept, and that later down the road you could see some more neat-o-rific hacks similar in style to this that took advantage of remote functionalities on host computers while other clients were the parasites. Interesting article and very cool thoughts on the future of ideas like this if you get a chance to get a dead tree copy of the issue.

I recommend reading this article on DDJ on the lightweight languages workshop at MIT. It talks about Python and similar languages, and their role in the world. Note that both the LL1 workshop and the FSF are at MIT.

There probably doesn't even exist a single Windows source tree.

Yes there is. I've worked on it briefly and at the time it was roughly 680MB. This included tons of custom utils and custom versions of assemblers and compilers. (So much for a Chinese wall).

There's nothing magic about M$ code. I've seen better code, but I've also seen worse. It's not terribly difficult to understand the overall structure though.

Even if it did exist, what would programmers say other than "yes, with enough hacking, we can separate this out"? I mean, with enough hacking, you can get OS/2 to emulate Windows, or Linux. And if Windows cannot be split up, it only means that it is not well-modularized (but you guessed that already).

The point is to seperate out a piece that used to be seperate in the first place. (e.g. the browser). All this stuff happens at the shell level and only requires a small part of the source tree. I think it would take very little effort to prove that it can be done (easily).

We need a diversity of operating systems, and that's what remedies should be aimed at. Leave Microsoft's source code alone.

The only way to achieve that is when there is such a thing as fair competition. There's nothing wrong with being a monopoly,- the abuse of power to make competition almost impossible is.

This brings up an other subject that I happened upon whilst looking at the Windows source, and something that may help unravel the infamous AARD code.

If I can make a suggestion: request the entire source tree for Windows 3.1. In the himem.sys source subtree there is a file called sipsim.obj. It's a small file and it contains 1(one) function: ISMSDOS. This function is the AARD code. Even within M$ this file was not distributed as source.

The fact that the function is called ISMSDOS is pretty clear indication that Schulman was right in what he suspected: an attempt to make the code not run on anything but MS-DOS.

If they "can't find" the code, I may be able to assist. ;o)

Ok, here's my facts.

Anders Hejlsberg won the 2001 Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award. Quote: "Hejlsberg is best known as author of Borland's Turbo Pascal"

Anders Hejlsberg wrote the Pascal compiler core. Quote: "Borland licensed the Pascal compiler core, written by Anders Hejlsberg (Poly Data was the name of his company in Denmark), and added the user interface and editor."

And, "Anders Hejlsberg is famous in the programming world for creating the Turbo Pascal compiler and leading the team that designed Delphi."

Your turn.

Another good example, as covered in Dr. Dobbs last issue, is Mondrian. You can read a paper about it here(it's a PDF). You can download the compiler and view documentation at the mondria-script web-site.

Here's a blurb from Dr. Dobbs:
Mondrian is a modern, purely functional language specifically designed to leverage the possibilities of the .NET Framework.

With better encoding and compression of the document index, a high quality web search engine may fit onto a 7Gb drive of a new PC.

As far as I remember, the the bug in the original pentium was a floating point flaw that led to wrong calclulations under certain circumstances.

I have a reply to your comment, and a reply to your .sig.

First, your comment:
Yes, Microsoft will try to outrun you be rev'ing their software faster. It's called churn; they live and die by it. But they also do... much nastier things to make your code stop working (like the Stealth Virus I just linked to). It all depends on how much of a threat they think you are.

Second, your .sig:
Slashdot does tell you when Editors are moderating your posts. In the Slashdot messaging system, you can turn on "notify me of moderation", and every time an Editor moderates one of your posts, you will get a message saying that "a User gave your comment a score of blah blah blah". This is because Editors are actually called "Users" at Slashdot. You can read more about this if you like, but basically, this is a solved problem.

> Game consoles like to call themselves 64bit because they can move 64bits at a time.
Unfortunately ture, the early consoles would play marketing games like this.

> By that standard even the Pentiums were 64bit.

The (classic) Pentium is classified as 32-bit because the *general purpose* CPU registers are only 32 bits. (There are a few 64-bit registers, i.e. TimeStampCounter, etc)

With MMX/SSE, the PentiumIII is actually a 32-bit / 128-bit hybrid. It has *native* instructions and registers for *both* 32 and 128-bit processing.

http://x86.ddj.com/articles/sse_pt2/simd2.htm

> However both the PS2 and PentiumIII are really 32bit.

Incorrect.

Pentium) I explained this above.

PS2) Do you even program on a PS2??

I think you need to re-read your "EE User's Manual", "EE Overview Manual", and "EE Core User's Manual" (Section 1.4) The core internal bus is 128 bits, and *ALL* the General Purpose Registers (total of 32) are 128 bits. What do you think LQ and SQ do? They load/store 128-bits to/from a register!

Now, it is true, that most PS2 instructions only deal with 32-bit (word) and 64-bits (doublewords), but there are native 128-bit multimedia instructions.

Don't let the fact that the PS2 treats the 128-bit registers as 2 * 64-bits, or 4 * 32-bits confuse you.

Technically the PS2 is a 64-bit/128-bit hybrid, much the same way the PentiumIII is.

Cheers

http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=1782/ddj0112a/0112a .htm

Learn for yourself what happened to DR-DOS [...]

Okay, so I downloaded the source for Bob and made it (quick and easy on my Win2k box using CygWin tools...) but now what do I do with it? There's a couple samples, but not much else and there's no docs in the bob.zip file and looking up "Bob" on Google is an effort in futility... (Hey, but there's also a "Dylan" programming language.)

Anyone have a link to some syntax? I found this on DDJ but it's only a description of the article, not the article.

-Russ

Doctor Dobb's Journal (Doctor Dobbs' Journal of Computer Callisthenics and
Orthodontics at the time) and Byte were both around at least from the mid-70's. DDJ's website says 1976 for them. This site says Sepember 1975 for Byte.

This DDJ article tells you how Intel started implementing 36-bit memory addressing way back in P5 (Pentium) days.

testing binary tree
elements = 235807
235807 insertions in 97.995633 seconds
tree depth = 7882
235807 lookups in 95.111857 seconds

testing hash table
elements = 235807
235807 insertions in 0.442643 seconds
tree depth = 63709 (number of buckets in use)
235807 lookups in 0.345933 seconds

testing ternary tree
elements = 235807
235807 insertions in 0.744229 seconds
tree depth = 93
235807 lookups in 0.386081 seconds

Chances are Larry Ellison -- the brilliant, but boneheaded, bossman at Oracle -- is not a warm and fuzzy kind of guy. Not the kind of buddy you'd belly up to the bar with, one hand hanging onto a brew, the other his shoulder, singing college fight songs after the big game. No, he's definitely more of a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy.

For instance, in a display of pique that rolled eyes even in consumer-crazed Silicon Valley, Ellison has threatened to sue San Jose, California, because the city won't let him land his personal jet at city-owned San Jose International Airport after 11:30 at night or before 6:30 in the morning. "San Jose has no right to tell me when I can land my airplane," Ellison said.

In an effort to improve the quality of life for city residents who live near the airport, San Jose prohibits airplanes of a certain size or greater from landing in the middle of the night. Small planes, or those experiencing air-traffic delays or mechanical difficulties, can land. Ellison's top-of-the-line Gulfstream Aerospace G-5 jet falls into the too-big-to-land-at-night category. It is worth noting, of course, that not only does Ellison not live near the airport, he doesn't even live in San Jose. But then laws put in place for the public welfare apparently don't apply to Ellison -- he's continued to land late at night at least nine times over the past two years, ignoring pleas from sleepy residents and the city.

I remembered this from the dead-tree edition, and luckily it's one of the articles that has full text available online.

Check it out here...

I travel by plane for several hours each week. Lately I've been downloading stuff from Dr. Dobb's technetcast and loading it into my portable MP3 player for listening on the plane. I've also got one of those cassette adapters that I use in my car.

They have short stuff and long stuff on lots of geeky topics. If you've got a cassette player in your car in addition to your CD player, this is much quicker and simpler than burning a CD.

Micros~1 ripped Anders Heilsberg, C# chief architect, from Borland, as well as several Borland's Senior Engineers.
Anders wrote Turbo Pascal in 1982, and was chief architect of Delphi 1.0 and 2.0
Ander Heilsberg received the 2001 Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award.

In this LinuxWorld interview look what Stroustrup is hoping to someday have in the C++ standard for libraries. It's a joke, almost all of those features are already in Java. As Stroustrup says, a standard GUI framework is not "politically feasible".

Now go listen to what Linux Torvalds is saying about what he finds to be the most exciting thing to happen to Linux the past year. Hint, it's not the completion of the kernel 2.4.x, it's KDE. The foundation of KDE's success is the triumph of Qt as the de facto standard that a large community has embraced to build an entire reimplementation of end user applications.

To fill the void of a standard GUI framework for C++, Microsoft has dictated a set of de facto standards for Windows, and Trolltech has successfully pushed Qt as the de facto standard for Linux.

I claim that as a whole the programming community doesn't care whether a standard is de jure or de facto, but they do care that SOME standard exists. When it comes to talking people into making the investment of time and money to learn a platform on which to base their careers, a multitude of incompatible choices is NOT the way to market.

I find talking about LISP as one language compared to Java to be a complete joke. Whose LISP? Scheme? Whose version of Scheme, GNU's Guile? Is the Elisp in Emacs the most widely distributed implementation of LISP? Can Emacs be rewritten using Guile? What is the GUI framework for all of LISP? Anyone come up with a set of LISP APIs that are the equivalent of J2EE or Jini?

I find it extremely disheartening that the same people who can grasp the argument that the value of networks lies in the communication people can do are incapable of applying the same reasoning to programming languages. Is it that hard to read Odlyzko and not see that people just want to do the same thing with programming languages--talk among themselves. The modern paradigm for software where the money is being made is getting things to work with each other. Dinosaur languages that wait around for decades while slow bureaucratic committees create nonsolutions are going to get stomped by faster moving mammals such as Java pushed by single-decision vendors. And so are fragmented languages with a multitude of incompatible and incomplete implementations such as LISP.