Slashback: Munich, Harlan, Alacrity

Read on below for tonight's edition of Slashback, with followups to several previous Slashdot stories, including the Linux-in-Munich saga, Harlan Ellison's feud with AOL, Hotmail's response to the growing space for webmail, and more. Read on for the details.

Please don't link "here": case in point. Kent Brewster writes "As previously mentioned here(1), here(2), and here(3), national treasure Harlan Ellison has been fighting a drawn-out battle with AOL over alt.binaries.e-book. Looks like a settlement has been reached; details (such as they are) are on AOL."

Papa Legba adds a link to an informative page on the suit's progress, with lots of informative links.

The basement dwellers burrow deeper. kevin_conaway writes "Accoring to this article on Tech Target, the DNS outage at Akamai was caused by a massive DDOS attack on Akamai's servers. Akamai Technologies Inc. said a 'sophisticated, large-scale distributed denial of service attack' on its domain name service bogged down several of its clients' Web sites yesterday morning, and that it's investigating the incident with federal authorities."

Time to quit your Winin' marmoset writes "As a followup to this story, Dave Winer has posted information about transitioning weblogs.com sites. Rogers Cadenhead and Steve Kirks pitched in to help. The plan includes a 90-day free evaluation period, during which the affected users will be able to make local copies of their data, sign up for paid hosting, or move to another hosting solution."

Pay up, Pal. ack154 writes "Following up from a previous slashdot story, PayPal may have reached a preliminary settlement in the class action lawsuit brought against them in 2002. The lawsuit was regarding the freezing of suspected fraud accounts and communication of limits on accounts. Limited details are available right now, but the eBay announcement states that anyone who signed up for a PayPal account between Oct 1999 and Jan 2004 may be eligible."

Forkenbrock points to this USAToday today article which says that "Ebay's Paypal will pay a total of 9.25 million dollars to its users (businesses and individuals)."

What about Java vs. T++? Stefan de Bruijn was one of several readers who reacted to the benchmarks cited in the Slashdot post titled 'Java faster than C++'.

He writes "I took the liberty to re-write a major piece of the C++ part of the benchmark. Furthermore, the Intel compiler has been tested as well. The Java code was assumed 'correct.'

The results are quite different than the former posting. Here, C++ appears to be a winner for the vast majority of programs; where Java scored better with (recursive) algorithms and the use of file IO (where it must be remarked that the C++ code uses iostreams)." joekaylor writes "I did a similar study 6-months ago to the study sited recently here on Slashdot, and I did it with java jdk 1.4.x. Java performance has been underestimated for QUITE some time. It's not the best tool every time, but it is not considered often enough and for the wrong reasons."

And an anonymous reader writes "This article by USC graphics researchers surveys a number of good (mostly numeric) benchmarks and then explains the theory of why maybe java should be faster than C++. It also raises the (unanswered) question of why geeks (ostensibly intelligent and scientifically-minded people) continue to believe some ideas (for example, 'garbage collection is slow') despite strong evidence to the contrary that has been available for many years."

Well, it's sort of like a gigabyte. helloanand writes "So, a day after yahoo relaunched their email service with 100 MB space, hotmail also expanded their offering to 25 MB. Just logged into my hotmail account and saw the space bumped up. The thing that I noticed is that MSN/Hotmail didn't make a big splash about it. Its actually a good thing for the users. Gmail started this trend by coming up with 1 GB (yes! gigabyte) worth of space. Then yahoo joined the party with their own 100 MB version and now the latest to join in bill gates & co (aka MSN Hotmail). Lets see what other changes does Gmail stimulate to the email service. Also the thing to note is that Google's gmail is being closely observed by the established players like MSN and Yahoo."

Each city represents a star system; players alternate by country. Wudbaer writes "The Munich city council has finally OK'ed the multi-step 30 Million Euro project to migrate the Munich city council to Linux, as heise news reports (German text). The planned high-profile migration of the administration of one of the largest cities in Germany has already created a lot of interest both in pro and anti-OSS camps, and was rumored to have run into substantial problems at the beginning of the year which might have endangered the council's final OK for the project. But now apparently the road is open for the project. Go Tux !"

Marcus links to this announcement on the city government's web page, and suggests that you put it through Google.

securitas writes "Hot on the heels of Munich's decision to go with Linux, the City of Bergen, Norway will replace its Unix and Windows core infrastructure with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8. The second part of the implementation will migrate the city's educational network - with 100 schools and 32,000 users - from 100 Windows application servers to 20 Linux IBM eServer BladeCenters. Bergen is Norway's second-largest city. ZDNet UK's Michael Parsons discusses the choice in an interview with Bergen CTO Ole Bjoern Tuftedal."

Making less of a mess. HishamMuhammad writes "The GoboLinux story featured recently on /. got the project some publicity, but again a number of misconceptions showed up, from people who think we are "just another user-friendly distro", because of our verbose pathnames like /System/Settings. Here is an article I wrote in order to explain the principles behind the design of GoboLinux (also in PDF), which tells our side of the story."

Comments

Thoughts

[(1337) God]

Here are my thoughts on the issues. ROR FP.

1) RE: Linux in Munich

I think Linux is great for government. As long as you standardize on something, that's all that counts, whether it's made by professionals at Microsoft or 16-year olds with a SourceForge page.

2) RE: Ellison vs. AOL

Harlan Ellison hasn't written anything significant since Babylon 5, and that was over 10 years ago in 1994. I wish this feud would just stop because it's a waste of Ellison's time, AOL's time, and our time having to read the news about it. Everyone would truly save money if they just bowed out of the fight right now and cut their losses.

3) RE: Hotmail's response to Gmail

Fine, makes sense. Yahoo also has pledged to provide at least 100MB per use. But the big news is that our friends (job stealers? (-;) in India have announced that the Indian site Rediff has announced the launch of Rediffmail 1 GB (gigabyte), giving virtually unlimited storage space of 1 gigabyte to all its free email users in India and worldwide.

Re:Thoughts

[Total_Wimp]

I subscribe to two different yahoo mail services and I have to say I'm pretty confused about what they heck they're doing. I get Yahoo mail plus which just gave me 2 Gigabytes (yes, gigabytes) for only $20 a year. No free, but a very nice price.

The confusing part is that I also subscribe to Yahoo's business email (don't ask why I do both... It's either complicated, or I'm stupid or both) Anyway, their business mail, which goes for $10 per month, is still only getting 25MB. Note, this is 1/4 the space of what the free email people get and, well, a whole, whole lot less than the mail plus people, but at a much higher price.

As a very long time yahoo mail user I very much applaud the new offerings of Yahoo, but their offerings are very unevenly applied. It's a little frustrating and I'd love to have someone explain it to me.

TW

Re:Thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

1) RE: Linux in Munich

I think Linux is great for government. As long as you standardize on something, that's all that counts, whether it's made by professionals at Microsoft or 16-year olds with a SourceForge page.

Or IBM services. [standardize]

'til dawn...
Silver Surfer

Re:Thoughts

[cpt kangarooski]

Regarding Ellison, he's actually done somewhat less than you think. He came up with story ideas on two, count 'em two episodes (admittedly from 1998) but didn't even do the scripts for either.

Frankly, he's been a jerk about this whole deal -- but then, when has he _not_ been jerk?

Re:Thoughts

[mfarah]

Harlan Ellison hasn't written anything significant since Babylon 5

Actually, Harlan worked there as creative consultant, not as a writer. Sure, he does share story (not script!) credits in a couple episodes, but I still think it's too much to call him a writer in B5.

Straczynski, on the other hand...

Re:Thoughts

[orthogonal]

The confusing part is that I also subscribe to Yahoo's business email (don't ask why I do both... It's either complicated, or I'm stupid or both) Anyway, their business mail, which goes for $10 per month, is still only getting 25MB. Note, this is 1/4 the space of what the free email people get and, well, a whole, whole lot less than the mail plus people, but at a much higher price.

Yahoo's not pricing what's "fair", they're pricing what the market can bear.

They've figured (probably correctly) that business users can and will pay more -- and probably also would find it more disruptive and expensive, in terms of lost business --, to change addresses.

Since businesses can, and will, and have more to lose if they won't, pay more, Yahoo is more than willing to charge business users more.

Re:Thoughts

[MikeXpop]

But the big news is that our friends (job stealers? (-;) in India have announced that the Indian site Rediff has announced the launch of Rediffmail 1 GB (gigabyte), giving virtually unlimited storage space of 1 gigabyte to all its free email users in India and worldwide

Psh. 1 gig, is that all? India's neighbor to the far north, Russia, offers free unlimited email. Yes that's right, unlimited. The only downside is that it's all in Russian, but it doesn't take that long to get used to it. If anyone wants directions on how to sign up, send me an email at my /. username @yandex.ru and I'll see if I can help you out.

Re:Thoughts

[sloanster]

1) RE: Linux in Munich

I think Linux is great for government. As long as you standardize on something, that's all that counts, whether it's made by professionals at Microsoft or 16-year olds with a SourceForge page.

LOL, just curious, how did this silly mickeysoft fanboy crap get modded as interesting?

As far as I can see, Munich will be dealing with IBM and/or Novell/SuSE - I don't believe any of those firms employ 16 year olds...

As to the oft repeated silliness to the effect that linux vendors and developers are teenagers, I actually looked into it and found that the average linux kernel programmer is a 30-something, fully-employed engineer with a technical degree.

So much for stereotypes - sorry to ruin the fun...

Re:Thoughts

[Tarantolato]

but then, when has he _not_ been jerk?

Probably while I was doing more worthwhile things than following hack writers for a dying genre.

Re:Thoughts

[ConceptJunkie]

That's the problem. Ellison is always incoherently pissed off at something, you can never know when it's actually legitimate.

A friend of mine met him at an American Bookseller's Association meeting years ago and commented that it's a shame you can't find his books easier. Harlan's response? "F--- you."

Re:Thoughts

[miu]

A friend of mine met him at an American Bookseller's Association meeting years ago and commented that it's a shame you can't find his books easier. Harlan's response? "F--- you."

Wow, I've been an Ellison fan for about 15 years and even I haven't been able to find all his books (and I've scoured more than a couple used book and thrift stores in my time). What a shitty response to give to a fan.

Re:Thoughts

[miu]

Harlan Ellison hasn't written anything significant since Babylon 5, and that was over 10 years ago in 1994

But lots of his old stuff is gold. He may be something of a dick (although I think the legend may be bigger than reality there), but the man has wrote some of the best short fiction of the 20th century.

Also, as a couple people have mentioned already Harlan was a story consultant (wrote the series bible) and that was about it for B5.

Re:Thoughts

[hunterx11]

Being a jerk isn't always bad, like when he got fired from Disney :)

Re:Thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

2) RE: Ellison vs. AOL

Harlan Ellison hasn't written anything significant since Babylon 5, and that was over 10 years ago in 1994. I wish this feud would just stop because it's a waste of Ellison's time, AOL's time, and our time having to read the news about it. Everyone would truly save money if they just bowed out of the fight right now and cut their losses.

just for clairification he only came up with the ideas, HE DID NOT WRITE THAT EPISODE nor the other one. and it was only a twist/filler in the origional story that was already there.

I have met Harlan, he is a self-ritious asshole and should be look at as a nut like L-Ron hubbard.

he was always a second banana anyways hiding in the shadows of the other great writers of this time... does he have talent? yes... but he is far from a great writer... and it's his asshole attitude that is keeping him from being great.

Re:Thoughts

[ConceptJunkie]

Oh well. He's an angry guy. I can sympathize with that, but assuming my friend was somehow being sarcastic and treating him rudely was way over the top.

I managed to score a few at a used bookstore a couple years ago, and I saw a first edition of one of his books (can't remember which now) at a used bookstore in Fredricksburg, VA several years ago, but I'm not enough of a freak to pay $250 for a book, even one as eminently collectible as that, but I have a friend who does...

There was a biographical piece in one of his books of short stories where he mentions getting picked on as a kid and beat up because he was little and Jewish. I can't help but wonder if he never got over that.

This comes full circle to an idea I had the other day. The media companies have a serious (and legitimate) complaint about piracy, but it is so incredibly easy to find things on BitTorrent sites, and whatever. If they simply would follow that model, I'm sure they could drain off a lot of that piracy by people who would be more than willing to pay to legitimately download these things.

I was looking for an expansion to the game Ground Control, which was only ever offered as a free CD with a magazine a couple years ago. More recent releases of the game contained the expansion, but I already have the game. The _only_ place I could find, after some extensive looking, was amazon.co.uk (not amazon.com) that could put a search out for it used (I successfully found an obscure CD that way, but it took over a year). I put in a couple of orders to search for used versions of it, got fed up and found a Bittorrent source for the thing in (no exaggeration) about 30 seconds. I'll buy it if it comes through, but what a ridiculous situation.

Now if a bunch of dumb kids with questionable morals can set up that kind of network where you can find movies, music, software, etc, that easily, why can't the companies who are actually selling this stuff do it. Because they are so afraid of piracy that they would rather risk wider piracy than sell things on-line without some mythical, perfect, byzantine, Orwellian DRM that only screws the paying customer.

Re:Thoughts

[miu]

I managed to score a few at a used bookstore a couple years ago, and I saw a first edition of one of his books (can't remember which now) at a used bookstore in Fredricksburg, VA several years ago, but I'm not enough of a freak to pay $250 for a book, even one as eminently collectible as that, but I have a friend who does...

I'm not the sort of collector who can pay $250 for a book. I much prefer to find the rare stuff buried in a pile or mouldering on a shelf for $1.95. It's not really the money so much as the childish thrill of finding buried treasure :)

Regarding your point about the distribution systems of the warez kids vs. what the big publishers are willing to put into place: the online used market runs somewhat like this (organization from the bottom with an actual useful middleman). I buy books used from all over the world through bn.com and powell's used service because publishers can't bother to release in the US or make out of print works available (sell me a non-restricted pdf and I'll print the thing myself). I'd be just as happy buying from the publisher, but they choose not to make their older stuff available - now that production cost is not such an issue you would think book and music companies would see the light, but it seems they are committed to the old way of selling their product.

Re:Thoughts

[klevin]

Doen't take much work to print even a restricted pdf. I've long since forgotten which files to modify, but several years back I needed a printout from an ebook I'd purchased in pdf format. It had the "no-print" flag set, but I dug around in the source code for xpdf for a few minutes (a couple of grep runs actually), commented out the lines that check for that flag, recompiled and printed.

I'd already paid for the book, it was my paper and printer and I wasn't selling or even giving it to someone else. I just wanted to have it while I was on vacation. Not the most elegant way to read a book, but I three-hole punched it and stuck it a report folder (hard paper covers, adjustable metal strips that run through the top and bottom paper holes). Worked just fine.

Re:Thoughts

[ConceptJunkie]

And this is what will happen to every DRM system that ever will be created. What the greedy morons can't seem to get through their thick heads, and yes, I believe they are being incredibly short-sighted and, yes, stupid.

Every DRM ever invented will always have a hole in it big enough to drive a truck through: the fact that the media needs to be delivered to human senses. Therefore, no matter what they try, it will always be copyable. Period.

Hotmail? That's a lie!

[AEton]

My Hotmail account still only has 2MB of storage - and every time I leave it alone for more than two days, it fills up with spam. I checked the site pretty carefully for any expansion offers, but it looks like either the poster lied or was one of a select few to get an offer that's unavailable (for free).

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[JPriest]

I just checked my MSN account and I also only still have 3 meg. I clicked the get extra storage link, pricing for a 10 meg account is $19.95/year, and 25 meg accounts are $29.95/year.

For $19.99/year with Yahoo, I can get a 2 Gig account.

I'm glad Yahoo upgraded to 100 megs, I've had the same yahoo alias for several years and never gotten spam to it, I use yahoo notepad all the time.

With hotmail, I have created uncommon aliases and gotten spam to them before even having a chance to give out the address.

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[stevesliva]

Yup, I still have Hotmail's 2MB limit going. Sure is nice watching bounce-notice 40KB viral .pif attachments with my address spoofed as the sender bump my quota up in 2% increments about 5-10 times/day, to say nothing of the dozens of other messages that aren't so large. But I hear that a full Junk Mail folder cannot actually stop incoming mail.

I do however feel like mailing MS a floppy so that they can double my storage. Cheapskates... the postage would cost more.

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[Peter McC]

That's the beauty of hotmail - a full account never stops incoming mail! It just bumps out old stuff! You know, the stuff that you actually wanted to keep. Obviously that's much less useful than some brand-new spam.

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[irokitt]

Absolutely. I logged into my Hotmail account (which I am slowly phasing out in favor of my yahoo account), and the inbox was just 2MB, with a smattering of spam all over it. I've been using Hotmail since pre-Microsoft, but the service has only gotten worse (unexplicably lost e-mails even to other Hotmail users is the worst-when I write a message, I want it to reach the sender!).

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[theyre watching you]

well... i just logged into my free hotmail account and it says i have 10MB. how strange. maybe this confusion is just another part of their Scheme to Take Over the World

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[paxmark1]

Well, I was shocked to log into Yahoo and see that I had TWO GB. I upgraded almost two years ago after throwing around a thesis or two for proofreading, and shit, I don't ever expect to fill it up. POP has a glitch, it has that now also, but not yet for me. The Akamai thing hit hard though, I was throwing another thesis to proof back and forth while that DDOS thng was going down. Still, I like Yahoo

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[mt-biker]

Mine's still 2MB too. :(

And although hotmail's spam filtering seems to have improved recently, it's still enough of a problem for me (keep running up close to the limit).

One thing I found that helped - you can configure hotmail to dump junk-mail rather than filing it. That's keeping me comfortably at 50% at the moment.

I'd love to be able to download some mails out of my hotmail account to free up space there, but that doesn't seem to be an option (OK, it might work with Outlook, but I don't have Outlook).

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[quale]

For downloading from Hotmail without Outlook try out Hotpop - http://www.boolean.ca/hotpop/

Its a pop3 to hotmail proxy that works just fine for me.

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[steveha]

No, Hotmail is owned by Microsoft. They have a Visual Basic to Take Over the World. Scheme is only used by people who talk with a LISP.

(define kidding 1)

steveha

Re:Hotmail? That's a lie!

[phorm]

25 MB seems to be a paid upgrade. See here

I think that's been upped from what it used to be though. I believe that previously the paid upgrades were smaller.

Hotmail now 25 MB

[k4_pacific]

Of course, the reason that Hotmail is 25 MB, and Yahoo is 100 MB, is because Hotmail runs on Windows server, which needs the rest of the space for its system files.

I figured Microsoft would try to turn Hotmail into a category killer by making it UNLIMITED!!! (Actually, they would promise it, but never deliver) They would of course pay for this with the OEM tax on new computers.

Re:Hotmail now 25 MB

[The Bungi]

I'm trying to figure out if you're trying to be funny, dismissive, insulting or something else. Perhaps more specifically, I'm trying to figure out what the overall point of your comment could possibly be. Thus I'm sorta, like... you know, stumped.

As I am distracted by shiny things sometimes I miss the inherent hilarity incorporated into some posts here on Slashdot, so my apologies if that was your intention.

Re:Hotmail now 25 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

Hotmail is stuck in the prehistoric age with 2 MB limits. Man, does Microsoft suck.

Re:Hotmail now 25 MB

[SmittyTheBold]

Which kind of unlimited?

The cell-phone-plan unlimited, where it's unlimited as long as you are e-mailing only other Hotmail users?

Or perhaps the broadband unlimited, where it's unlimited, as long as you stay within the 'reasonable' limits?

Can you tell I'm a bit jaded to 'unlimited' deals?

Hotmail still at 2 MB for me

[macrom]

I just checked and Hotmail is still showing 2 MB for me. This link still shows a fee of $29.95 a year for 25 MB.

I always thought it ludicrous to pay MSN for more space for one simple reason : the only cause of me exceeding my space limit was all of the spam that I got from having a Hotmail account, and Microsoft is still the only company (that I know of) that counts your junk mail folder against your quota. Why should I give them money to house more crap when it's their insecure system that's the cause of all of my spam?

Re:Hotmail still at 2 MB for me

[k4_pacific]

Well, surely the Microsoft brand name is worth paying for. No?

Re:Hotmail still at 2 MB for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should I give them money to house more crap when it's their insecure system that's the cause of all of my spam?

Mod me down if you will, but something needs to be said here. As an open source programmer of 22 years now working on the Windows platform, I have come to an actual *gasp* appreciation of "M$" products (I know, sorry, I will do 3 extra "Hail Torvaldes" tonight). It's easy as hell to complain about how an "insecure system" is the source of all your problems, but I guess it takes a bit more effort to pull up your IDE, get coding, and fix the problem!

The situation seems to be that right now you are getting something for nothing, and it's such a shame that audacious corporation won't give even more. Quite frankly, there is a tradeoff in this scenario - you want service from a rock-solid company, you will have to take the bad with the good - at least your inbox will still be there when you come back from the bathroom.

Re:Hotmail still at 2 MB for me

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Uh .. no

Re:Hotmail still at 2 MB for me

[aixou]

Everytime i open a new hotmail account, it is filled with spam the next day. My yahoo accounts on the other hand get very little even though I use them daily (I don't put them on sign-up forms, but I send and receive email daily) . What's up with this crap? Have spammers hacked Hotmails customer database or what?

Re:Hotmail still at 2 MB for me

[MWelchUK]

Sometimes it seems dubious as to whether Microsoft wants the Hotmail Brand Name.

Re:Hotmail still at 2 MB for me

[stry_cat]

the only cause of me exceeding my space limit was all of the spam that I got from having a Hotmail account, and Microsoft is still the only company (that I know of) that counts your junk mail folder against your quota.

Yahoo! mail counts the Bulk Mail folder against your total. If I don't empty it every few days my account gets full. I'm so looking forward to gmail!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Harlan Ellison

[Angry Toad]

Ellison said: "Through this litigation, I have come to realize that AOL respects the rights of authors and artists, and has a comprehensive system for addressing the complaints of copyright holders.

Wow - I'm genuinely impressed that they managed to get that much out of him. I'd at least expect that he would have gotten pissed off, thrown a tantrum, and then insist that they refer to him by a silly name in the press release.

Re:Harlan Ellison

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean to say "Harlan GNU/Ellison"?

Re:Harlan Ellison

[ScottGant]

And I'm amazed that he could get through the whole thing without telling everyone how great a writer he is and how his original script for "City on the Edge of Forever" was SO much better than what was filmed for the original Star Trek.

Harlan is just pissed no one posts his books

[Black Art]

Harlan's books are rarely posted to alt.binaries.ebooks. The only times i have seen it happen is after he has one of his legendary tanrums.

If he really wants to do justice to the authors whos work does get posted to that group, he should work to see that their work remains in print and available in local bookshops.

Media tie-ins and "books in the world of famous author by someone you never heard of" do more harm to real authors than e-books ever will. The less you can find real authors in your local bookstore, the more people will turn to e-books.

Re:Harlan is just pissed no one posts his books

[1u3hr]

Media tie-ins and "books in the world of famous author by someone you never heard of" do more harm to real authors than e-books ever will.

I've downloaded a few of these. It was interesting and occasionally useful to have the searchable text of a book I was reading (legal printed edition) to find things. But I can't imagine reading a novel that way. Even if I printed it out, it's much less nice to read than in printed and bound form. With online used books (Amazon has them, many others) you can get most books, except for the very newest, for a couple of dollars, less than it would cost me to print it out, even if my time is free. And my public library has its catalogue online, I can search and find books in any branch, reserve them and pick them up a few days later.

Of course, Baen has been putting the full text of a lot of novels online. It's apparently borne out the belief that it would only encourage the hard copy sales.

Re:Harlan is just pissed no one posts his books

[Angst Badger]

Harlan's books are rarely posted to alt.binaries.ebooks. The only times i have seen it happen is after he has one of his legendary tanrums.

I can vouch for this. I download pretty much everything that appears in alt.binaries.ebooks. Not to read it, mind you -- I can't imagine reading anything book-length on a monitor -- but because it's the best source of contemporary English prose for my natural language processing experiments.

Harlan Ellison's books are seldom posted. I wish I could say the same for David Drake.

One of the bigger untold stories

[Anonymous Coward]

Hotmail users have been finding that gmail invites are getting routed to their spam filters, even when they have the spam filter disabled. What's up with that?

Re:One of the bigger untold stories

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't dare suggest that it might be a tactic by Microsoft. They wouldn't attempt to block their users from switching, would they?

Yahoo e-mail

[richwmn]

My yahoo e-mail went to the 100mb limit the other day, but, in addition for the last few months neither the bulk mail (spam) or the trash folder have counted against the limit

Re:Yahoo e-mail

[Apage43]

That's all well and good, but, I got a GMAIL invite. w00t. I love the search box, and, it's got those keyboard shortcuts! I can hit r and reply to a message, it's very nice. I still wonder though, if gMail will eventually provide POP, or maybe IMAP access?

Re:Yahoo e-mail

[Shachaf]

If you're running Windows, you can try POP goes the GMail. It's a POP3/SMTP server, like YahooPOPs for Yahoo.

I really hope MS is planning something...

[Anonymous Coward]

because my hotmail account is still my favorite, except for the space. I dont get any spam at all, because I don't give out my main e-mail to anyone but contacts. hotmail is integrated with Outlook Express, which is real nice.

Re:I really hope MS is planning something...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have got to be kidding. You are, aren't you?

Geez, people these days...

Nothing in this hat but the same old rabbit.

[theirpuppet]

Perhaps it's just a gimmick. All jokes aside, Hotmail is still part of MickeySoft and them increasing it to 25MB is still a joke in the face of what the other big boys are doing.

But, we should still make consideration for the face that hotmail has tons of users. Gmail is new, although there are good minds behind it. Yahoo is looking for any way to make the press. MickeySoft doesn't necessarily need to attract users so much as retain and build upon that retention.

That sounds a bit like Windows Dominance and all the /. stories lately.

Re:Nothing in this hat but the same old rabbit.

[aardvarkjoe]

That sounds a bit like Windows Dominance and all the /. stories lately.

If the limit had been raised to ten gigabytes, everyone would be complaining about how they're using their vast cash reserves to drive everyone else out of the webmail market. If they had left the limit at two megs, the complaint would be that they're just using their market dominance and not innovating. If they got rid of hotmail completely, everyone would be whining about how their five-year-old address was disappearing, and if they sold the hotmail domain to Google, the conspiracy theorists would have a field day.

No matter what the situation, you guys always seem to know Microsoft is at fault. It's just the reason why that changes.

Re:Nothing in this hat but the same old rabbit.

[Anonymous Coward]

"MickeySoft"????

HAHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAHAAH!!!!!!!!!!!!

OMFG, "MickeySoft"????????????????

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OMIGOD, I Absolutely LOVE reading teh SLASHDORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"MickeySoft"???????!!!!!!!???????

HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!! OMG OMG OMG!!!!!!!!

Right. Now do us all a favor and shoot yourself.

Re:Nothing in this hat but the same old rabbit.

[geminidomino]

What a bizarre country! Are you seriously saying they *have* to let you cancel the sales contract unilaterally for no reason other than that you want to?

While I know this is an (admittedly solid) accusation of being anti-MS, it does raise a good point that many of the US-based (possibly elsewhere too) bigCorps seem to forget lately.

"Good PR is a tangible asset."

Re:Nothing in this hat but the same old rabbit.

[silicon not in the v]

I really never understood people sticking with Hotmail accounts. My wife signed up for one several years ago when they were very new. Immediate bombardment of spam. It was so awful right off the bat, that she dumped it quickly for a Yahoo account (and I also got one) when they were still 6MB accounts. It has been bliss since then. Their spam filtering is really great, but more than that is just that there's hardly anything to filter. We each get maybe 1 or 2 a day because we're careful about giving it out. The 100MB storage and 10MB attachments are a great bonus.

Paypal/Email Response

[hypermike]

In this agreement, PayPal does not acknowledge any of the allegations in the lawsuit to be true.

Some agreement, as of now doesnt looks like they are going to admit to anything.

MAIL STORAGE!

FYI: I signed into my blogger account yesterday and had an invite to use gmail. I went over to ebay and it looks like the accounts are only selling for .99 cents haha. I guess Ill keep this one.

Re:Paypal/Email Response

[hypermike]

A side note:

Ive only used blogger for about 3 weeks and even I got an invite. Thats the way to go...

Hooray for Hotmail

[heptapod]

Now I can get 23 more megabytes of penis enlargement, Paris Hilton and weight loss in 30 days messages and I'll still be over quota!

Re:Hooray for Hotmail

[wagemonkey]

Funniest thing I've had from a yahoo groups list was somebody asking what a Paris Hilton was...

Please don't post your answers here, but you can imagine the replies he got!

Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[miu]

A couple of the referenced links on java note that GC is likely to increase memory locality, but I have never seen non-trivial (greater than 20k lines) C or C++ code that did not use a memory arena or customer allocators. Even smaller programs benefit from simple techniques like using std::vector to emulate a std::map for increased memory locality

I think the fact that new/delete are a huge part of the overhead of complicated programs is pretty obvious to anyone who has every profiled their code. Once you throw threads into the mix you will see another massive hit to time spent in allocation.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Um. Both memory arenas and customer allocators are likely to make locality worse... the whole point about garbage collectors is that they compress the objects down and hence improve locality.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[miu]

Um. Both memory arenas and customer allocators are likely to make locality worse... the whole point about garbage collectors is that they compress the objects down and hence improve locality.

Standard malloc/new gives you a first fit or best fit chunk of memory. With a custom allocator you often know the size of object you are allocating and sometimes the order in which those objects will be referenced, you can pre-allocate a chunk of memory of n * 'size' and hand out consecutive 'size' chunks when memory is needed. So, at least as I've always used them, arena and custom allocators compress objects down as well as a garbage collector does.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[Markus Registrada]

The original report (anonymously) parrots common propaganda in favor of garbage collection. In fact, people who think Java is slow think so because when they run real Java programs, they find that real Java programs really do run slowly. The question why has lots of good, easily articulated answers, having to do with virtual memory locality, and cache locality, and cache poisoning, and even hard-to-avoid misconfiguration. (Do you know how much memory to tell your Java runtime to allow each of your programs to use?)

Nobody complains that C++ programs are slow, because they aren't. Nobody is obliged to notice they are C++ programs, because they are easy to install, and they just work. They don't call much attention to themselves, because they rarely suffer from the security flaws common to C programs. (Some people think C++ iostreams are slow, but gcc-3.4's iostreams are as fast as, and often much faster than, libc equivalents; the slowness turned out to be just a bad implementation, now fixed.)

In principle a really good garbage collector might not be slow, for certain common kinds of jobs, However, Java runtimes generally can't use those garbage collectors; they have to use the slow ones instead. Haskell is supposed to be (uniquely) very good at helping its GC maintain locality, but that doesn't matter much because Haskell is slow anyway.

The presence of garbage collection actually prevents the language from offering the kind of automated, encapsulated resource management uniquely possible in C++, leaving coders to use essentially C-like management for resources other than memory. Does garbage collection really carry its weight? It has been years since I last coded a "delete" statement. What could GC possibly do for me, to make up for eliminating the most useful library idioms I have?

GC propaganda is common in academic Computer Science departments, but real programs are built by engineers who are not fooled. LISP has failed to take the world by storm, decade after decade, for sound reasons, just like so many more-modern languages also crippled by GC and LISP apologia. GC doesn't just automate memory management; dependence on it automatically confines the language to niche uses.

You can tell a bad benchmark because it seems to show that languages you already know are slow aren't.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[hunterx11]

Retain counts and the NSAutoreleasePool beat garbage collection AND manual allocation imho :)

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[statusbar]

Nobody complains that C++ programs are slow, because they aren't.

(raising hand) I DO! I DO!

C++ with QT on Mac OS X is horribly slow. I complain all the time. It is MUCH slower than the equivalent java on the same box.

Languages aren't slow or fast. Different implementations of algorithms are slow or fast.

--jeff++

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[LoocSiMit]

In fact, people who think Java is slow think so because when they run real Java programs, they find that real Java programs really do run slowly.

In my experience people find that the GUIs on Java programs run slow. Which they do. That makes the whole thing feel slow. It's a real concern, but not directly related to the language, VM, garbage collection, level of abstraction or the rest.

Gnome is noticably slower on my PC than Win 2000. That does not mean the Linux kernel is slower than the NT5 kernel.

All those benchmarks have shown me is that unless I am writing a huge computationally intensive application then performance should not be one of the criteria on which I decide whether to use C++ or Java.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[AndyS]

And then your apps spend 180 seconds doing a full gc (note: an 8Gig process on a sun box) - because full gcs don't want to use more than one processor.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[Decaff]

they find that real Java programs really do run slowly.

Not true. Most people who run Java programs have no idea that they are running Java programs.

Nobody complains that C++ programs are slow, because they aren't. Nobody is obliged to notice they are C++ programs, because they are easy to install, and they just work. They don't call much attention to themselves, because they rarely suffer from the security flaws common to C programs.

This is so wrong, its hard to know where to start.

First, installation. Java apps can be packaged as a single JAR or WAR file that can be run just by clicking on it, or putting into the right directory of an app server. Alternatively, you can set up networked installs via WebStart. The thing is you can prepare a single binary for all platforms.

With C++ you need to get the right compiled binary for the processor, and the right versions of system libraries: just look at the trials of installing something via rpms.

As for speed - you must have a short memory. In the 80s and early 90s there were serious worries about C++ performance, with many complaints that it was far too slow when compared with C or assembler. Remember the complaints about the speed of early versions of Mozilla? It was so bad that many of us assumed it was some interpreted system. No - it was C++!

As for 'just working' and 'security flaws' this is directly contrary to evidence. Unless you code using bounds-checked collection libraries (which can be intrinsically slow) there is absolutely no difference between C++ and C in terms of memory access, and an equal possibility of buffer overruns.

As for garbage collection: The comment about niche uses is just nonsense. Not by any rational definition could languages such as Java and C# be defined as 'niche'.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[WolfWithoutAClause]

With a custom allocator you often know the size of object you are allocating and sometimes the order in which those objects will be referenced, you can pre-allocate a chunk of memory of n * 'size' and hand out consecutive 'size' chunks when memory is needed.

Sounds like a heck of a lot of fiddling about to me; and brittle code; change the sizes of the objects or allocate an extra object anywhere and suddenly your custom allocator runs like dog food.

I suppose it does depend on how you write the allocator, but it's still not sounding great to me; and if objects get deleted- you're looking at the potential for a *lot* of unused space.

That's the point about GC- it does pretty well most or all of the time.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[Decaff]

In my experience people find that the GUIs on Java programs run slow. Which they do.

That should read some of the GUIs. There are some very fast Java GUIs. SWT, for example, is a thin layer above native GUIs, and is virtually indistinguishable in terms terms of speed. Years ago Netscape produced a very light portable GUI for java called IFC. That was not native GUI but was fast. The only really slow GUI for java is Swing, and even that is not that bad under later versions of 1.4 and on 1.5.

All those benchmarks have shown me is that unless I am writing a huge computationally intensive application then performance should not be one of the criteria on which I decide whether to use C++ or Java.

There is a very good reason to use Java for computational work: it allows you to make use of mixed hardware clusters and grids. It allows computationally intensive code to be highly portable.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Average speed is still higher though :-)

At the end of the day, you use the right tool for the job; I hsve heard of people doing bigger realtime jobs than that using LISP (they partially switched off the GC in that case).

But, because they used LISP, they had a competitive advantage- they could easily add complicated features- and were laughing all the way to the bank.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[scotch]

Writing a memory pool with desired behaviour isn't that hard. There are many off-the shelf ones availsable that aren't brittle, too. For example, boost provides several kinds of memory pools.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[WolfWithoutAClause]

It is hard to write one with good locality of reference. That means that an object is closely placed in memory to an object that it references, even if it is a different type.

If you don't do that you tend to thrash your processor's cache. And that's slow.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[mwood]

Actually I can't think of any Java programs which are noticeably slow once they are running. However, it takes Java just this side of forever to heave itself into memory and settle in before the app. starts, even with a box on which most other (non-Gnome) graphical app.s blink on instantly.

I would love to know what the JRE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. *do* with all of the billions of cycles they spend before anything appears.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[Euphonious Coward]

Most people who run Java programs have no idea that they are running Java programs.

First they had to get a JVM installed. Then they had to try installing another to see if the program would work on that one, instead.

Java apps can be packaged as a single JAR or WAR file that can be run just by clicking on it, or putting into the right directory of an app server. Alternatively, you can set up networked installs via WebStart. The thing is you can prepare a single binary for all platforms.

So, these JAR things identify for me which JVM (and version) they actually have been tested to work with, and install it for me, or find the right one (among the half-dozen JVMs I had to install for the other programs) if it's already installed?

With C++ you need to get the right compiled binary for the processor, and the right versions of system libraries: just look at the trials of installing something via rpms.

One line: "apt-get install <program>". Why would I want a binary for some machine other than what I have?

As for speed - you must have a short memory. In the 80s and early 90s there were serious worries about C++ performance, with many complaints that it was far too slow when compared with C or assembler. Remember the complaints about the speed of early versions of Mozilla? It was so bad that many of us assumed it was some interpreted system. No - it was C++!

Comments pretending to compare speed of C and C++ were obvious fabrications. The compilers generate the same code for the same constructs, C or C++. We have since learned that programs written using exceptions run faster than those in C style.

Mozilla, of course, really is largely interpreted: the language is XUL. However, it doesn't seem slow any more.

(Does repeating others' lies from the '90s improve your own credibility?)

As for 'just working' and 'security flaws' this is directly contrary to evidence. Unless you code using bounds-checked collection libraries (which can be intrinsically slow) there is absolutely no difference between C++ and C in terms of memory access, and an equal possibility of buffer overruns.

C coders and C++ coders code differently. In particular, C++ coders have access to a very rich standard library (not to mention other libraries) in which it would actually be extra work to write code with buffer overruns. Errors are possible in any language; what matters is how easy they are to avoid without giving up performance and control.

It's not very persuasive to experienced people to cite "evidence" without actually presenting any of it.

As for garbage collection: The comment about niche uses is just nonsense. Not by any rational definition could languages such as Java and C# be defined as 'niche'.

I suppose that when you're stuck in a niche, it looks like the whole world. "They ain't ignorant, they just don't know no different."

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[Decaff]

First they had to get a JVM installed. Then they had to try installing another to see if the program would work on that one, instead.

Most people who use java either use the pre-installed VMs for applets, or have the VMs installed for them in their work environment. I suppose to run C++ programs you need nothing whatever installed? No libaries? Just the linux kernel on a bare machine?

As for your comment about versions, that is just silly. You get the latest stable VM from Sun or IBM or whatever, and it runs the java binary. Apart from highly specialised system software, this simply just works. Your comment about 'half a dozen other VMs' is daft exaggeration - that has never been the case, and you know it. Java is one of the most backward-compatible systems ever developed.

One line: "apt-get install ". Why would I want a binary for some machine other than what I have?

I suggest you read the post you are replying to before you comment - I said 'rpm'. The debian apt-get program is a honourable exception. Even then, you might find yourself having to install a dozen new packages *on each machine you have* just to run a small new binary. Also, if you are actually employed by someone, you may have to deal with more than one machine, and perhaps more than one operating system.

Mozilla, of course, really is largely interpreted: the language is XUL. However, it doesn't seem slow any more.

No. Mozilla is not interpreted. XUL is a language for describing user interfaces. Virtually all of Mozilla is C++. Mozilla does not seem slow because teams of skilled developers have worked on it, and because processor speeds have improved about 5x since it was first launched.

The compilers generate the same code for the same constructs, C or C++

True, but as you say below, C++ users don't use the same constructs! They use virtual methods with dynamic lookups, operator overloading, class libraries and run-time type information. These are not C constructs.

C++ coders have access to a very rich standard library (not to mention other libraries) in which it would actually be extra work to write code with buffer overruns.

So these would not be C constructs? What about your previous comment?

If C++ is so good, then why is is that so much C++ code does suffer buffer overruns? Why are there memory leaks?

You are seriously overestimating the way most C++ is written. Most C++ was, for a long time, written very much like C, and used C libraries.

I suppose that when you're stuck in a niche, it looks like the whole world. "They ain't ignorant, they just don't know no different."

I guess that is true, if you have absolutely no idea what the term 'niche' means. If you define 'niche' to include real-time networking, numerical code, general purpose office software, web services, financial applications, embedded software, clustered applications, games, communications, virus detection software, chatroom and instant messaging, image processing, GIS, multimedia, language research, compiler and interpreter writing, on-line banking, e-mail clients and servers as 'niche', then yes, Java is niche.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[Markus Registrada]

Most people who use java either use the pre-installed VMs for applets, or have the VMs installed for them in their work environment. I suppose to run C++ programs you need nothing whatever installed? No libaries? Just the linux kernel on a bare machine?

I don't know of any machine but a Sun that comes with a JVM. Meanwhile, most machines have libstdc++.so and a variety of other libraries -- along with a plethora of C++ programs. Of course you are not obliged to notice what language they're written in.

As for your comment about versions, that is just silly. You get the latest stable VM from Sun or IBM or whatever, and it runs the java binary. Apart from highly specialised system software, this simply just works. Your comment about 'half a dozen other VMs' is daft exaggeration - that has never been the case, and you know it. Java is one of the most backward-compatible systems ever developed.

So, I have the latest one from Sun, and the latest one from IBM, and which ever one Oracle wants its installer to run on, and some older versions for the programs that break when you try to run with the new one.

Mozilla is not interpreted. XUL is a language for describing user interfaces. Virtually all of Mozilla is C++. Mozilla does not seem slow because teams of skilled developers have worked on it, and because processor speeds have improved about 5x since it was first launched.

You seem to parroting, again, the spurious early 90s claims that C++ code is slower than C code. Much of the Mozilla UI is XUL. Lots of it isn't. It was slow, now it isn't, but it's still C++ (sort of) and XUL.

"The compilers generate the same code for the same constructs, C or C++. C++ coders have access to a very rich standard library (not to mention other libraries) in which it would actually be extra work to write code with buffer overruns."

True, but as you say below, C++ users don't use the same constructs! They use virtual methods with dynamic lookups, operator overloading, class libraries and run-time type information. These are not C constructs.

Now you are confusing source code with machine code. These "virtual methods with dynamic lookups" are nothing but calls through function pointers. "Operator overloading and class libraries" are just ordinary function calls, except where they are inline and more resemble macros. The source code is different, the machine code is the same.

People make more mistakes writing code without effective library support, as they must in C. A good language and library help prevent those mistakes without adding overhead. The better source code resolves to the same code that a better coder would have had to write out the hard way.

If C++ is so good, then why is is that so much C++ code does suffer buffer overruns? Why are there memory leaks?

You must be talking about Microsoft code. Memory leaks are a management failure. At Microsoft a memory leak is considered no big deal, because it all gets cleaned up in the next system crash. Now that's garbage collection!

You are seriously overestimating the way most C++ is written. Most C++ was, for a long time, written very much like C, and used C libraries.

It still is, particularly in Microsoft-land -- and in Mozilla, actually.

Nobody can help that lots of bad code is written. Probably each of Java and C++ has more bad code written in it than the other. The difference is that in Java you frequently have no choice but to write bad code, because the language offers no alternative.

Getting back on topic, though, the reason Java offers no alternative is that it lacks the resource-management tools that C++ has, viz. destructors and automatic scoped local-variable and member destruction.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[Anonymous Coward]

Conspirators everywhere! The Computer Science illuminati are out to destroy our perfect language, C++!

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[Decaff]

I don't know of any machine but a Sun that comes with a JVM.

Until very recently, every Windows machine was shipped with a JVM. Read what I had posted - I did not say machines where necessarily shipped with VMs - I said they were often pre-installed in organisations so that users could run Java software.

Meanwhile, most machines have libstdc++.so and a variety of other libraries -- along with a plethora of C++ programs.

Yes, but *which* libstdc++.so? If you are installing software, this matters.

So, I have the latest one from Sun, and the latest one from IBM, and which ever one Oracle wants its installer to run on

These are all compatible. For virtually all software, there is no difference. That is the whole point of Java.

and some older versions for the programs that break when you try to run with the new one.

Yes, people can write very bad code in Java too, but this kind of this is extremely rare.

the spurious early 90s claims that C++ code is slower than C code.

Its not spurious - the speed difference, particularly in matters of inheritance and method lookup, was the subject of a lot of academic study.

These "virtual methods with dynamic lookups" are nothing but calls through function pointers.

No, they are look-up tables, and the lookup has to be done at run time.

Memory leaks are a management failure.

In the previous post, it was stated that they had to be actively produced by the coder due to the new features of C++.

the reason Java offers no alternative...

Just not true. I can ensure that memory is tidied up any time I like, by manually removing references to objects. Look:

myObject = null;

That will do it!

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[Markus Registrada]

Until very recently, every Windows machine was shipped with a JVM. Read what I had posted - I did not say machines where necessarily shipped with VMs - I said they were often pre-installed in organisations so that users could run Java software.

Again, you still have the problem of identifying for any particular program which of several JVMs it should use, and installing that one if it has not been already.

"Meanwhile, most machines have libstdc++.so and a variety of other libraries -- along with a plethora of C++ programs."

Yes, but *which* libstdc++.so? If you are installing software, this matters.

If it is handled completely by apt-get, it can't be a language problem, can it?

"So, I have the latest one from Sun, and the latest one from IBM, and whichever one Oracle wants its installer to run on"

These are all compatible. For virtually all software, there is no difference. That is the whole point of Java.

That's the whole myth of Java. The fact is that they aren't really compatible, and Oracle's installer only works on certain JVMs. Why do people say, "Write once, test everywhere"? In practice, nobody tests everywhere, they say which JVM their program works with.

"the spurious early 90s claims that C++ code is slower than C code."

Its not spurious - the speed difference, particularly in matters of inheritance and method lookup, was the subject of a lot of academic study.

Who do you think you're fooling? (Are you deluded yourself?) There are no secrets to how the language is implemented, and what code is generated. Anybody wasting time on "academic study" was just trying to muddy the water.

(Yes, there were bad early implementations that linked in data and/or code unnecessarily, bloating the memory footprint, or failed to optimize inline functions properly. Somehow I don't think a Java person would want to dwell on the subject of bad early implementations.)

"These "virtual methods with dynamic lookups" are nothing but calls through function pointers."

No, they are look-up tables, and the lookup has to be done at run time.

Ooh, an array-lookup per virtual call, and at runtime. Shiver me timbers! Virtual function calls are used where a C program would use switch statements, with just about the same runtime cost (and, indeed, instruction sequence). But you knew this already, or should have.

"Memory leaks are a management failure."

In the previous post, it was stated that they had to be actively produced by the coder due to the new features of C++.

It's a management failure if coders continue writing C when they have access to C++ language and library features. Indeed, that was one of the problems in the Netscape code base.

"the reason Java offers no alternative..."

Just not true. I can ensure that memory is tidied up any time I like, by manually removing references to objects. Look:

myObject = null;

That will do it!

That looks manual to me, about equivalent to a "delete" statement. Furthermore, and more to the point, it only works when the only resource is memory. There are niches where memory is the only resource, and GC and GC-dependent languages can work fine in them (subject to locality problems). Break out of those niches, and you find yourself managing lots of other resources. In Java, as in LISP, you must do it "by hand", no different from C.

Anticipating the usual "two-step", you will argue that other resources are manipulated so infrequently that this doesn't matter. Of course, in certain niches that's more or less true.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[Decaff]

I don't know why, but you seem to be refusing to read the posts you reply to.

Here is a final attempt.

JVMs are highly compatible. No-one specifies which manufacturer's VM to run on. If they do, its just to show which ones they have tested. Often packages will install VMs simply to ensure that Java is present on the machine (as with Oracle). Even Oracle say that the parts of their product with use Java will run on any manufacturer's VM above a certain level (1.3 I believe). Something as complex as IBM's eclipse will run fine on any manufacturer's VM; Sun, IBM, HP etc. This is fact. If you don't believe me, try it yourself.

C/C++ library compatibilities always have been a problem. apt-get simply allows you to automatically fix compatibility issues, but other packaging systems such as rpms don't do this automatically, and it can be a mess, and installing newer versions of libraries can break other software. This is not a matter of debate - its well documented fact. Type 'libstdc incompatibilities' into Google.

Speed and language implementation issues with C++ aren't trivial or simple. Virtual method lookup is a simple idea in principle, but making it efficient is very important when you might be making millions of such calls each second. Other matters are the overheads of constructor and destructor calling, particularly with deep inheritance. Fast code requires a lot of skill from the coder and quality compilers.

As for management issues and C++ coding, you can't have it both ways. Either C++ is so good that its features prevent problems such as buffer overruns, or it is necessary for management to impose good practice because it is easy for developers.

As for memory and resource management, Java has full control of any resources it needs. You can either let garbage collection deal with files, network sockets, threads, GUI objects etc., or you can manually close those resources. You don't have to do this by hand in Java, but you can if you want to. Garbage collection is not, and never has been, just to do with memory.

Re:Garbage collection vs. manual allocation

[Euphonious Coward]

JVMs are highly compatible. No-one specifies which manufacturer's VM to run on. If they do, its just to show which ones they have tested. ... This is fact. If you don't believe me, try it yourself.

Compatibility was always the claim, but that's "marketing". Experience shows that it is elusive. Saying it doesn't make it so. Wishful thinking doesn't make it so.

C/C++ library compatibilities always have been a problem. apt-get simply allows you to automatically fix compatibility issues, but other packaging systems such as rpms don't do this...

Yes, the RPM packaging conventions are stupidly broken. That obviously has nothing to do with the various languages of the programs packaged. Java program and library RPMs suffer the same "RPM hell" as everything else. Apt (and Debian packaging policies) don't "fix" anything, they just avoid creating the problems in the first place. JVM incompatibilities are of an entirely different order.

Speed and language implementation issues with C++ aren't trivial or simple. Virtual method lookup is a simple idea in principle, but making it efficient is very important when you might be making millions of such calls each second. Other matters are the overheads of constructor and destructor calling, particularly with deep inheritance. Fast code requires a lot of skill from the coder and quality compilers.

Fast code always depends on skilled coding, and always will, but "virtual method lookup" really is trivial. To pretend otherwise is just blowing smoke. There are only two ways to do it -- function pointer calls, and thunks -- both perfectly understood from day one, and both trivial to implement optimally. Constructors and destructors are just functions. Deep inheritance is a systemic architectural flaw, in any language; you can't draw meaningful conclusions from stupid code.

As for management issues and C++ coding, you can't have it both ways. Either C++ is so good that its features prevent problems such as buffer overruns, or it is necessary for management to impose good practice because it is easy for developers.

That's stupid. Netscape coding standards forbade use of modern language features. That is an example of management failure.

As for memory and resource management, Java has full control of any resources it needs. You can either let garbage collection deal with files, network sockets, threads, GUI objects etc., or you can manually close those resources. You don't have to do this by hand in Java, but you can if you want to. Garbage collection is not, and never has been, just to do with memory.

In other words, any resource to be managed has to be known to the runtime, and it will be gathered "someday" (or maybe never), in more or less random order. If that's not good enough, you have no other choice but to do it manually, like C.

Somewhat delightfully ironic.

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw an advert for Windows Server 2003, right now, on this very /. page of all places. Are Microsoft getting a bit more desparate after Munich? :-)

Alas, But Hotmail sucks even more now

[sovtekmidget]

i don't pay anything for yahoo, and they give you ten times what hotmail will give you for free- while microsoft tries to charge you 20 bucks fo a tenth of the space! Also, to no matter what I do, my inbox is filled with atrocious amounts of spam ARRGH!

Re:Alas, But Hotmail sucks even more now

[PiercedSoul]

I can actually open a Hotmail account, but gmail remains inaccessible. Remember when AOL went to flat rate? Let's wait to see if Google can handle the flood of users. And Yahoo still has the slowest site of all the major services, along with too many ads. Then again, I can't count how many times my hotmail account has been unreachable, displaying the 'server is too busy' message. Its just easier to forward everything to my cell phone.

Not hotmail, it's yahoo that could kill gmail

[roror]

Yes, I am talking about gmail demise. We all love google and hate yahoo ads, but, with the release date of gmail still uncertain, privacy rumours in everyones mind, the chance of gmail taking a lead might be really slim. It might verywell be a email_SE (read special edition) for the geeks. Nothing more. I wonder how many would trade the superior spam filtering of yahoo for the 900MB extra storage of gmail. (And we all know how to use adblock don't we ? so the yahoo ad problem is not that much of a problem.) There is atleast 6 months before gmail goes public. Yahoo could make a killing in this period. I don't see many yahooligans moving to gmail - i.e. when they get a chance to. Yahoo has done its homework this time. Just a little bit of storage hammer can keep the gmail away.

Re:Not hotmail, it's yahoo that could kill gmail

[Total_Wimp]

Not to mention the two gigs of storage you get with their mail plus pack for only $20 a year. Two gig storage, no adds, no indexing and POP3 access for less than $2 a month is a hell of a deal. Now if only they'd offer the same thing to their business mail customers.

TW

Re:Not hotmail, it's yahoo that could kill gmail

[dubiousmike]

unfortunately, many of us still feel that Yahoo isn't far enough removed from their shady past (spamming me once they bought Launch, and changed their privacy policy qhich automatically opted me into a bunch of third party mailings).

I do agree that Yahoo is cleaner than Hotmail, but I will certainly move over to try Google once it is available to me. Google has never struck me as dishonest while Yahoo has.

Re:Not hotmail, it's yahoo that could kill gmail

[fisternipply]

Yahoo's pretty good; I've had the premium mail for a couple of years (paid so I could get POP access), and I like it. Obtained a gmail account last week finally, tried it for three days and killed it. Message threads are really cool, but overall it's not *that* much better...so I'm back on Yahoo. I'm guessing I'm not the only one, either.

-fister

Re:Not hotmail, it's yahoo that could kill gmail

[tfoss]

Yes, I am talking about gmail demise.

Oh c'mon, you just wanted the first "Gmail is dying" post, didn't you?

We all love google and hate yahoo ads, but, with the release date of gmail still uncertain, privacy rumours in everyones mind, the chance of gmail taking a lead might be really slim. It might verywell be a email_SE (read special edition) for the geeks. Nothing more

Or maybe it'll do to Yahoo mail what Google did to Yahoo search.

I wonder how many would trade the superior spam filtering of yahoo for the 900MB extra storage of gmail.

Superior? To what? The still beta Gmail filter about which very little is really known? Doesn't it seem likely that a company as into research as Google would be able to create a damn fine filter technology? (Beyond which, I wouldn't even call yahoo's spam filter that good...)

There is atleast 6 months before gmail goes public. Yahoo could make a killing in this period.

Make a killing off of all those users of its free email system?

Yahoo has done its homework this time. Just a little bit of storage hammer can keep the gmail away.

I don't buy it, but more to the point, Gmail is still in beta. Still will be for a while, and making any predictions of how things will go is just kind of silly.

-Ted

Re:Not hotmail, it's yahoo that could kill gmail

[slashrogue]

Email me if you want a gmail invite, cuz yahoo mail sucks. ;)

Re:Not hotmail, it's yahoo that could kill gmail

[Pahalial]

I'm sorry, but gmail's spam filter is still in beta. If you are right and it won't be open to the public for 6 months, then that's 6 months during which to finetune their filters. How long has yahoo had already?

However, my money is on it being released by july, simply based on the massive amounts of invites going out recently. Time will tell.

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Mail me, I'll invite you to gmail... I'm user vmlinuz and the domain is gmail.com

If nothing else, you deserve it for your sig :-)

Gmail -- it's not really about the space

[Ryu2]

It's not really Gmail's storage space that most people (myself included) find compelling about Gmail. Other free services like Spymac (http://www.spymac.net/) offer comparable storage amounts also.

Rather, it's the clean user interface, the automatic threading of messages, and the fast searching that most users (myself included) like.

Only if Yahoo, MS, SBC, et al. can replicate that part of the user experience, will Gmail have a viable competitor.

Re:Gmail -- it's not really about the space

[MBCook]

I don't use Gmail, or Hotmail, or anything like that. I use an e-mail account on my webserver and use Outlook XP for my client software. For all intents and purposes I have unlimited e-mail storage. If I want more, I'd buy a bigger HD.

That said, I LOVE the "lables" features of Gmail. I REALLY hope other places and pieces of software pick that up. I do a form of that now using folders, but of course it's not perfect. I would especially love to see that with my MP3 collection. Again I've found a way to "fake it", but the real thing would work much better.

But the point of this post is I agree with you. If I were to get a webmail account, I would go to Gmail in a heart beat. I trust Google more, the interface is clean, it's got great features (like the "lables" I mentioned), the automatic threading of messages, and of course the 1GB of storage space would be fantastic.

It will take more than a few extra megs of storage to beat Google.

Re:Gmail -- it's not really about the space

[roror]

Agree with the advantages of gmail that you suggested.

I myself like the quick search facility to be extremely useful. And another innovative feature is the concept of label replacing the folders.

About the other things; Autothreading still makes mistakes. I got a pair of messages from orkut today which were grouped as conversation while they were not. What made it more painful was the body of one of the mails were shown as quoted text, which it was clearly not. Now, this could be explained away saying that it's just a beta. But, I really hope they make it right soon. Because, majority including myself are not used to the gmail style of threading! and a _mistake_ in a threading like this, can make it a pain to get used to.

About the clean ness of the UI, I would say it's more sleek than clean .. you can smell the javascript in it. Konqui and opera(can someone confirm this?) doesn't work with it yet. It takes long time for the inbox to load on a slow connection, I guess because of the javascript.

they don't have draft facility yet! i am sure they are on their way for this one (got a mail from gmail today) ..

still .. makes me wonder .. how long before ..

Re:Gmail -- it's not really about the space

[AKAImBatman]

That said, I LOVE the "lables" features of Gmail. I REALLY hope other places and pieces of software pick that up. I do a form of that now using folders, but of course it's not perfect. I would especially love to see that with my MP3 collection. Again I've found a way to "fake it", but the real thing would work much better.

Oooo... now that sounds like a service worth signing up for. How does the whole evite process work, anyway? Are you allocated a certain number of evites, or can you send as many as you like? I'd also love to hear about some of the other features that are unique to GMail.

Given that people have stated that Blogs work as an excellent way of attracting an evite, perhaps someone will one day notice the hard work that went into my journal? Or, maybe not... ;-)

Re:Gmail -- it's not really about the space

[iserlohn]

Gmail is by far the quickest webmail I have ever used. I still prefer my IMAP mailboxes (recently with SA spam filtering, 99.9% accuracy). I have more than 1 GB as we run own own domain and mailserver, but gmail is really attractive as a personal mailbox. I know that I would pay to have IMAP access to gmail, but it looks that that option is unavailable for the near furture.

The reason IMAP is prefered is not because of gmail's web interface being bad. It's really good as a matter of fact. However, I have other mailboxes and would like to consolidate the my mail into one application.

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[deepfusion]

What is really cool, is that if you have SBC DSL like me, you get 2GB of storage with your 'sbc yahoo' email account and another 760MB of 'briefcase' storage. The bad thing about the briefcase is that you can only upload 15MB at a time.

Yahoo Mail

[Anonymous Coward]

I am quite happy with my 2gig of space.

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[Alien54]

I'm waiting to grab myself an address at GMail, though, and then... bye bye Hotmail!

Try Spymac.com which allows anyone to signup for a free 1 gig account

aventuremail.com also is in beta, but allows 2 gig online storage

Premium Yahoo! accounts...

[Anonymous Coward]

My Yahoo! storage just went up to 2 GB.

Has anyone else with a premium Yahoo! account (i.e. SBC Yahoo! DSL e-mail) experienced this?

Re:Premium Yahoo! accounts...

[Anonymous Coward]

My Mail Plus account went up to 2G (!) two days ago.
So far, I've used up to 0% before popping off the messages. Also, the spam filtering has improved, as has the interface in general.

All praise Google for kicking the competitors in the pants.

Re:Premium Yahoo! accounts...

[deepfusion]

I had never 'upgraded' my existing sbcglobal.net account to a 'SBC Yahoo DSL' account, I just always thought it was a waste of time. Then I saw the news article about yahoo going head-to-head with google and offering 2GB to SBC DSL members. Now my previously free Yahoo account has 2GB of space and POP3 access. On top of all that, they still let me keep my old @sbcglobal.net account (which has 10 or 20mb I think).

Re:Premium Yahoo! accounts...

[bennomatic]

Me too! And each message can be up to 10 Mb!

Re:Premium Yahoo! accounts...

[Crash Gordon]

My quota first went to -2048.0MB. I have an email from Yahoo (dated dated 6/14/04, 11:00pm) confirming this:

You are currently exceeding your Yahoo! Mail storage quota by a very large amount. You are only allowed -2048.0MB of storage but you are currently using 0.0MB of storage. [RED FONT]Your account has been temporarily disabled from receiving new messages.[/RED FONT]

Watch those script bugs, folks! :-) Fortunately my email was not actually disabled... And the next day I got an email telling me my capacity was now 2GB. The next thing was to figure out what to do with 2GB, seeing as how I have my in-house mailserver poll Yahoo every minute. So what I did was to create a special folder and a filter to sort incoming messages with a specific tag into that folder. Yahoo's POP access doesn't dump the extra folder's contents, so I can just email stuff to myself and Yahoo will store it for me.

Still not retiring the DAT, though.

No wonder...

[Ianoo]

he thing that I noticed is that MSN/Hotmail didn't make a big splash about it. Its actually a good thing for the users. Gmail started this trend by coming up with 1 GB (yes! gigabyte) worth of space. Then yahoo joined the party with their own 100 MB version and now the latest to join in bill gates & co (aka MSN Hotmail).

No wonder MSN Hotmail isn't making a "big splash about it" considering their service has managed to cough up one fourtieth of Gmail's space and one quarter of Yahoo's space. I'd hardly call that "joining the party" - more like a desperate move. Let's hope that Gmail and a "new wave" of similar services drives these ad-ridden insecure proprietary badly-run messes under once and for all. Who on earth would want to use MSN Hotmail when Gmail goes to full public access?

The Logic of Ellison

[geekwench]

Harlan Ellison is a decent writer. However, he's also a fantastic grandstander. His temper tantrums and aggressive behavior at writers' conventions are nothing short of legendary. The quality of his writing aside (I like most of his short stories), a good portion of his popularity is tied directly in to his notoriety. He knows, much to the chagrin of many people, that his antics keep his books on the shelves where less - colorful - authors disappear from print.
It doesn't surprise me that AOL settled. Having seen the man on one of his torrential rants (not, thankfully, as the focus of his ire), I almost feel sorry for the execs of AOL/Time/Warner, imagining what sort of invective must have been leveled against them.

Re:The Logic of Ellison

[blacklily8]

I must admit I lost a lot of respect for Ellison after reading about his "kick net piracy" campaign. I guess he's pissed that some people are reading his work without permission. Woohoo. I guess something about being commercially published just warps these people's minds; suddenly, it's all about profit and making the cash; the fact that people actually want to read and share your work doesn't mean squat.

Re:The Logic of Ellison

[cei]

He knows, much to the chagrin of many people, that his antics keep his books on the shelves where less - colorful - authors disappear from print.

But the sad fact is that I don't believe any of his novels are currently in print, and of his 30+ short story collections, I think only 3 or 4 are readily available.

I really had high hopes for Borealis publishing's Edgeworks series, but they only managed to get 4 volumes out. I'd love to see Memos from Purgatory and Web of the City published in one volume with an updated introduction to the two...

Re:The Logic of Ellison

[CaptainCarrot]

When selling your work is your bread-and-butter, then HELL YES you care about making the cash! Just like most programmers and engineers care about getting paid for their work every so often. The main reason professional writers like it when people want to read their work is because it means more money for them. Sheesh, what is it with you people who want creative people to starve just so that you can enjoy their work for free?

I know, Harlan's a long way from starving, he's an asshole, the "piracy" here probably took not one cent from his pocket because none of these people were going to run out and buy his books anyway (or they already had and just wanted an e-version) and he doesn't understand USENET in the slightest which made him go after the wrong party here. But there's nothing "warped" about wanting to get paid FOR WHAT YOU DO FOR A LIVING!

Re:The Logic of Ellison

[blacklily8]

Hmmm...Last time I checked, most of our good artists/authors/programmers started off as "starving artists." Indeed, many of the best novels ever written were published after the author's death in near poverty. Once an author, like Ellison, for instance, gets more concerned about profit than prose, well, that's when everything goes to shite. In my view, we'd have better creative work in this country if they didn't earn a dime on any of it.

Re:The Logic of Ellison

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe any of his novels are currently in print, and of his 30+ short story collections, I think only 3 or 4 are readily available.

Gee...maybe that's why his sales are down and online sharing is up? Maybe he oughta bitch at his publishers instead of the Evil Internet.

Re:The Logic of Ellison

[sgtrock]

Someone noted a while back that Ellison didn't really get nasty until he started working regularly in Hollywood. Hollywood, the place where dreams are made of and those who first invent the dreams are routinely shit on. Ellison was always an abrasive sort, but Hollywood taught him to attack first, second, and last or see his visions completely warped by the time they hit the screen. And he's been dealing with Hollywood execs for a looong time.

The example where things didn't go his way that is most commonly quoted is "The City on the Edge of Forever" for Star Trek. He wrote that episode in March of 1966. He was still pissed about how it was altered for airing in 1995 when White Wolf published the unaltered screenplay for him. Mind you, this was an episode of Star Trek won the 1966-67 Writers' Guild of America Award for Best Teleplay, and the 1967 Hugo Award, the first (only) teleplay to ever do so.

He's also seen his stories ripped off for movies and television both, accreditation stripped, and on and on. Yes, he's a vengeful sort. Yes, he's got a blind spot the size of Texas when it comes to the differences between fan driven exposure and corporate ripoffs. Yes, it's clear that he thinks a model like Baen Publishing's Free Library is insane.

IMO he's still one of the most original science fiction and fantasy authors of his generation, and I have a deep and abiding respect for what he has accomplished. I'd love to get him on the side of those who would prefer to see more free exposure of his works. I don't think it'll ever happen, though. His experiences during his career have warped his view of the marketplace pretty badly.

Re:The Logic of Ellison

[CaptainCarrot]

You seem to be saying that because someone starts out at the bottom of his profession out of necessity, he ought to stay there. That's a load of crap. You do good work, you ought to at least have the opportunity to be rewarded commensurately.

You seem to be saying that because some very good novels didn't earn their authors a decent living, then no author ought to be entitled to a living from his writing. That's a load of crap. You obviously have no idea how much work goes into creating good fiction. Doing it well requires an author's full-time attention. If they were forced to do it part time, there would be less of it and it wouldn't be as good.

And if your last point was valid, the best fiction these days would be coming from the fanfic community. Sure, I bet it is. Or is it more likely -- a load of crap?

Re:The Logic of Ellison

[blacklily8]

Let's just put it this way. The overwhelming tendency among creative artists, whether they be musicians or novelists, is to start off with a tremendous BANG!, then go downhill fast as the money comes in. Look at old Metallica vs. new Metallica. Old Star Wars vs. New Star Wars. I don't disagree with you that artists ought to be rewarded highly for great work--it's just that the rewards should be mostly from fame and just knowing that their work got so much attention and made such an impact. If they have to go back to mining coal after their sales drop off, so be it. They had their moment; if they have the talent to pull it off, let them do it. One of the biggest factors stifling innovation and creativity in this country is a bloated intellectual property law. We need to stop thinking of art as products and start rewarding artists for engaging in the process.

Re:The Logic of Ellison

[CaptainCarrot]

I don't disagree with you that artists ought to be rewarded highly for great work--it's just that the rewards should be mostly from fame and just knowing that their work got so much attention and made such an impact.

Again, crap. You can't eat fame. You would deny anyone the opportunity to make a living from their art, and force artists to live on some kind of dole. Note that this leaves others, primarily distributors such as publishers or film studios or record companies, to make all the profits. They get a heathy enough share of the profit as it is -- which to a degree is only fair since they're shouldering the majority of the financial risk -- but you want to give them all of it. Unless you're advocating some kind of tightly controlled economic sector of artistic work where the government essentially regulates prices and distribution. That's absurd; there's no need for that at all. Creative work needs freedom to flourish. A heavily regulated market doesn't provide that. And who's to judge what's valid art and what isn't, and therefore who gets to be on the dole? Right now the market answers that question in a very meaningful way.

And guess what: Artists do "go back to mining coal" when sales drop off, if they haven't made enough in the meantime to live on! Take someone like Greg Kihn. He was a one-hit wonder back in the '80s with "My Love's in Jeopardy" and lived the high life for a few years. He blasted through all the profits from that a long time ago, and is now working as a DJ at a local radio station in San Jose. You're describing the current system exactly. What seems to bother you is that the people currently profiting off older work are those you don't approve of. Tough.

Some people like Greg Kihn, George Lucas, or Piers Anthony might only be capable of producing a small number of quality artistic work. Sometimes they can coast on the notoriety they get from it, like Anthony from the early Xanth books or Lucas from "American Graffiti" and "Star Wars", or, like Kihn, sometimes not. Forcing all artists to create for free won't change that. To imagine it will is to live in a fantasy world.

Geek-machismo..

[k98sven]

It also raises the (unanswered) question of why geeks (ostensibly intelligent and scientifically-minded people) continue to believe some ideas (for example, 'garbage collection is slow') despite strong evidence to the contrary that has been available for many years.

It's not an unanswered question, it was answered quite long ago, in satirical form:
Real programmers don't use Pascal.

The same attitude prevails today, albeit the programming languages are different.

Personally, I've been around long enough to have heard "C is slow, you should be writing that in assembly language". And now the mantra is "Java is slow, you should use C/C++".

That is the first category of machismo anyway: speed-freaks who are quick to recommend C, yet seem surprized when their favorite program turns out to have a buffer-overflow exploit.

The second category appears to be the CS-geek-machismo which is more academic.. These are the guys who are talking about how it all should be Lisp, no matter what. And Java sucks because of its typing, etc. Practical use of the language seems to be of less concern than the design of the language itself for these guys.

Then there are those who believe in using the right tool for the right job. Sadly, you don't hear as much from these guys, probably because macho-geeks are loud and obnoxious by definition.

Anyway, I used to teach a beginners' course in programming, and often got the question on what the 'best' programming language was. I usually answered by asking: "What's the best tool, a screwdriver or a hammer?"

Re:Geek-machismo..

[bennomatic]

Forget about machismo! I'm frickin' lazy, so I program almost exclusively in PERL.

Re:Geek-machismo..

[Too Much Noise]

"What's the best tool, a screwdriver or a hammer?"

how big a hole do you need to punch?

Re:Geek-machismo..

[frank_adrian314159]

"What's the best tool, a screwdriver or a hammer?"

"Show me the bolt you want me to turn with it..."

Re:Geek-machismo..

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be Perl (or perl). The language name is not an acronym.

Re:Geek-machismo..

[Anonymous Coward]

"What's the best tool, a screwdriver or a hammer?"

depends on how you want to kill the baby.

Re:Geek-machismo..

[mabinogi]

Pratical Extration and Reporting Language

Though I agree it's definitely Perl, not PERL, but it's name did originaly come from an acronym.

Re:Geek-machismo..

[Decaff]

Then there are those who believe in using the right tool for the right job.

The idea that developers should switch easily between development languages is one of the great myths of IT. Languages aren't tools: they are entire workshops. Switching may be possible if you work on many very small and entirely independent projects, but for most developers its just not practical or sensible.

For each language that is used in an organisation there has to be an investment in training and the building up of repositories of re-usable code. The last thing you want is to have two developers who both picked what they thought was the best tool for their part of a job trying to combine bits of PERL and Java, or be unable to use large Java class libraries developed over years because someone decided that it would be neat to code a new project in Lisp.

The only sensible approach is to spend a lot of time researching the benefits of different languages and development tools and then standardise on these.

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[Anml4ixoye]

Offtopic:

Your link to saving your friend is wrong. I get a 404. I was able to get to it by going to

http://savemenow2.blog-city.com/

Cory

Re:free gmail invite.

[Aussie]

It's worth a try.

gmail@evilblackdog.com

[Raises hand]

[Atario]

Me too. Completely took me by surprise -- I logged in Monday morning and BAM, everything's different. (No warning! How did Yahoo! manage to do this without tipping off Slashdot??) New look, 2GB storage, no graphical ads, more filters, more address blocks, disposable addresses, trainable spam filter, and so on and so on. Ever since Yahoo! bought Rocketmail and turned it into Yahoo! Mail, I've had to have a .sig explaining that the following lines were an ad and not from me. Well, I've finally taken it off. No more in-mail ads!!

Thank you, Google!

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[adpowers]

There is more to Gmail than just the space, though. There is also the amazing, sleak interface (that runs almost like a client app) and wonderful Google searching of your messages. Plus, it is so damn fast.

That said, I just got five more invitiations today and all my friends already have Gmail. If anyone wants an invite (preferably Hotmail users), then shoot me an e-mail at adpowers@gmail.com. I'll save a spot for Arlen, other than that, it is first come first serve.

Re:free gmail invite.

[honestpuck]

Oh, I can go lower than that ID. tonyw@honestpuck.com Tony Williams

The fastest language is .... Perl

[acomj]

They gave a bunch of programmers some tasks to do. The fastest language was...

perl then java then c then C++.

It had more to do with the perl programmers use of hashes than anything else. Thats the way perl programmer think.

Basically the more difficult you make it to use more efficent data structures the less likely programmers are to use them. C++ even with the STL is non-trivial.

The company I worked for was having trouble with STL three years ago, and only one guy there really knew it well. We were parsing lots of text. Java was easy to use with well documented libraries and surprising fast. And everyone picked up the java programming language quickly.

Will highly optimized C/C++ toast all other languages? Yes, but writting the code is significantly more difficult and time consuming. For many tasks computers are fast enough now where it doesn't matter for many tasks..

Re:The fastest language is .... Perl

[RedWizzard]

Will highly optimized C/C++ toast all other languages? Yes, but writting the code is significantly more difficult and time consuming. For many tasks computers are fast enough now where it doesn't matter for many tasks..

Right, and what all this benchmarking is showing is that the difference between C++ and Java is about 10% overall (though up to 1000% is specific cases). So anyone using the blanket statement "I won't use Java because C++ is much faster" is really only displaying their ignorance.

Re:The fastest language is .... Perl

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not forget Perl tends to be the fastest to write -- and that's the expensive part.

However I'll conveniently ignore the easiest to maintain part. That's a very tired flamewar.

Re:The fastest language is .... Perl

[teval]

How I think of it is this:

If I want a speed demon or something that's going to get really big (a large game that has OpenGL support + shaders for example), I'll use C++.

If I want something just so I can perfom a few quick tasks, and that I can carry around or just for showing people proof that a certain thing works, I'll use perl.

If I want something that works, I want it now, quick and dirty I'll do it in lisp. I say dirty because most people get lost with lisp so they can't read it at all.

It all depends on what I have to do, it's why I don't use java, I don't see a point or something lacking in what I do.

I have no case and I must scream....

[billstewart]

Somebody really needs to put Harlan and RMS in the same room for a while. Maybe with ESR to moderate.

AOL didn't put enough work into blowing off Harlan and his lawyer when they first complained. The DMCA is an awful mess, and people besides Harlan have found even worse things to do with it than he did, but he really does not appear to have understood Usenet or ISPs or the Internet particularly well, except as a medium for evil nassttyy fffffile ssssharrerrrssss to steal hisss preciousssss. Now, piracy is not unknown on Usenet, and while it's not quite mandatory in many of the alt.binaries newsgroups, that's only because spam fills up the rest of the spare bits. But that not only doesn't mean that he can reasonably expect ISPs to pay copyright lawyers to read through every terabyte of slowly-moving-self-parody that comes in on the newsgroups to determine what might or might not be pirated, it also doesn't mean that it's reasonable for him to demand that they block access to material or sites that their subscribers might try to access, any more than he can reasonably demand that Xerox not sell devices that facilitate book piracy.

GoboLinux - Lookin' goooooood!

[youknowmewell]

GoboLinux seems to be very unique and well thought out. I wouldn't be suprised if this distro gains momentum much like Gentoo has.

One thing I've always come to expect with Windows is that when I install some software, if I go with the default install it will go into C:/Program Files and there I will find almost all the programs installed on my computer. Linux, up until Gobo, has been harder to predict in this sense.

Re:GoboLinux - Lookin' goooooood!

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I enjoyed reading his article. I really like his ideas about layout, especially the versatility of build systems to install to arbitrary locations. If it works out in practice as well as I imagine it should inside my head after reading about it, then I hope it sees wider adoption. I certainly like what I see in Gobo more than what I see in Redhat/Fedora. I've been meaning to break ranks with the Fedora crowd and I have Gentoo ISOs downloaded and ready to go, but maybe I'll give a shot at Gobo, I can always install it into a vmware virtual machine and play around without wiping my primary system.

There's one thing he said that I was wondering if someone could answer for me:

in a properly configured shell like the one that comes by default with GoboLinux, typing /Programs takes the exact same number of keystrokes as typing /usr: slash, lowercase p, Tab.

If I try this in Fedora Core 1, it doesn't work. It's failing because of case-sensitivity. So I presume by his statement that he means to say that RedHat and Fedora do not know how to properly configure a default shell. I did a little search through the bash manual and didn't find anything about altering the way tab completion works (case sensitivity, etc). So I wonder if I need a different sh like zsh or something, if bash doesn't have that ability, or if I missed the proper steps.

Re:GoboLinux - Lookin' goooooood!

[julesh]

One thing I've always come to expect with Windows is that when I install some software, if I go with the default install it will go into C:/Program Files and there I will find almost all the programs installed on my computer. Linux, up until Gobo, has been harder to predict in this sense.

Are you taking the piss, or what? When you install programs on Linux, they go under /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin, unless they're a core system program in which case they go in /bin. Administrative programs go in the equivalent .../sbin directories. Library files go in the equivalent .../lib directories. Application data goes into a /usr/share/ directory, if it has been written to modern standard, or possibly /usr/lib/ if it is older. For programs that might need to be started at boot time, a script goes into /etc/rc.d/init.d to do it.

This is nearly as simple as the Windows equivalent, and has the advantage that programs are by default installed on the path. (Yes, some of us wish Windows would have a more sensible system for this)

Re:GoboLinux - Lookin' goooooood!

[julesh]

When you install programs on Linux, they go under /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin, unless they're a core system program in which case they go in /bin. Administrative programs go in the equivalent .../sbin directories. Library files go in the equivalent .../lib directories. Application data goes into a /usr/share/ directory, if it has been written to modern standard, or possibly /usr/lib/ if it is older. For programs that might need to be started at boot time, a script goes into /etc/rc.d/init.d to do it.

I just thought... that all sounds like its much more complicated than the Windows equivalent. But it isn't - here's the Windows equivalent:

When you install programs on Windows, they go under c:\Program files\appname, unless they're a core system program in which case they go in c:\windows or c:\windows\system32. Administrative programs sometimes go into c:\windows\system32 and sometimes into a directory under c:\program files, depending on the author's preference. Library files generally go into c:\windows or c:\windows\system32, but are sometimes placed in the same directry as the program. Application data goes into c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\appname on Windows 2000 or above, and into a similar but different location on other versions. For programs that might need to be started at boot/login time, either an entry is created in the registry or a shortcut is placed in the start menu/programs/startup directory.

I think that makes Windows _more_ complicated, although that's a matter of opinion.

Re:GoboLinux - Lookin' goooooood!

[youknowmewell]

From reading the article, I get the impression that looking at /bin is equivalent to looking into /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin. That is, they all show ALL executables in all the directories. Maybe I didn't get what was said, but I think this is correct.

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[Anonymous Coward]

this offer of 25MB has been out since december 2003 and it's for primary accounts with msn9. people who have "upgrdaed" from msn8 to msn9 will see the change in storage on their primary accounts--not the ten free secord accounts, which will stay at 10MB.

gmail is amazing

[rbright]

I simply don't see how anyone who has actually used GMail could honestly think it has any competition at all.

And I don't mean from Yahoo!, Hotmail, or the latest 2GB provider. I mean any mail client period. Web-based or otherwise.

Yes the 1GB storage capacity is awesome, but it's just icing on the cake to an amazing interface. GMail is a pleasure to use.

It's not just faster than any other web-based mail client. It's faster than any other website period. Assuming a decent amount of bandwidth, it's faster than most locally running GUI clients, except for possibly KMail or mutt.

The interface is revolutionary. It makes hot new clients like Thunderbird look backward. Expect to see GUI client knockoffs as soon it gets out of beta.

GMail kicks ass, pure and simple. It will be a very, very difficult for anyone else to catch up. The only thing Yahoo! and Hotmail have going for them right now is existing userbase and name recognition. But Google has that too and I bet that can transfer a lot of that over to GMail if they try hard enough.

Re:free gmail invite.

[lubricated]

you win. I didn't think anyone would post their address without spam proofing it first. but whatever.

Re:free gmail invite.

[Aussie]

He wasn't joking.
Thanks Mike :)

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[los furtive]

Since Yahoo upped their limit Google has been giving me five Gmail invites a day... ChrisLamothe@gmail.com I'll be glad to hook you up, already done it for two slashdot strangers.

Re:free gmail invite.

[Aussie]

I didn't think anyone would post their address without spam proofing it first

A throw away, just need to update spam filtering.

Thanks again.

Re:free gmail invite.

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I should call the friend of mine with user number 3.

Re:free gmail invite.

[SirRandom]

I wonder how low mine is...

Re:free gmail invite.

[Eric Clark]

eclark@hoser.com

I fear no spam.

It's the hammer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh, it's the hammer, of course! What are you, retarded or something?

Yes, and you'll never use more than 640Kb of RAM!

[ScottZ]

What?!

If they did extend it to all users, I would recommend reading the Usage agreement VERY, very closely. GMail's business model would be 'molto sexy'to the Borg. The current CEO is a guy recorded on video okaying IP theft and plaigerism to developers.

[-Meme insertion test failed-]

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[los furtive]

Okay, I gave away my five invites, you'll have to ask someone else, to those that got them, enjoy! To the rest, you will be slowly digested by google's advertising bots over the span of a thousand megabytes.

Yahoo has upgraded existing paying customers

[Gregoyle]

I found out along with everyone else a couple days ago that Yahoo had upgraded their mail services, but the post doesn't mention the upgrade they made to those of us paying for services through them.

About a year ago I upgraded my Yahoo account to 25MB of storage for something like $20 a year. It was worth it to me because that was the email address I had used for years, and i wanted to be able to access every important message I had gotten in a few years from anywhere (I'm in the military). Yahoo had bumped up my inbox size a couple times before (I think new users got 4 MB but mine had gone up to 8 by that time). But I was running out of room and wanted to keep my messages.

So anyway, I logged on a couple days ago, and my mailbox had been upgraded to 2 GB. Damn.

It also turned out that they had implemented almost every feature I had wanted, and a few that I didn't know I wanted. I almost never get a spam mail, partly through discipline and partly through Yahoo's pretty decent spam filtering. The one feature I really wanted was the ability to search through all my mail. They put this in, and along with a few other features (like filtering rules and better spam protection), put in a feature which i had never actually wanted before, but that was only because I had never thought of it.

I think it's called something like "Address Guard", and it's a lot like what American Express is doing with its credit cards for online purchases. They realized that you can never stop ALL the spam, so they made it so you can make throwaway email addresses that link to your actual address. You give out your throwaway, and if you start getting spammed at it you can just delete it, and ::poof::, all the spam starts bouncing. I think you can make as many as you'd like, one for each site where you feel it's necessary. That is way cool. (I know you can do this with your own private server as well, but that would cost a lot more and be less accessable).

The enormous mailbox limit has given rise to a new feature request. Now i wish they had a remote disk function, where I could back up part of my hard drive on their servers. A 200 MB PGP disk could hold just about all my sensitive files (including scans of all my military records) and make them accessable from anywhere. I know there are services (like .mac) that do this, but with a 2 GB space I could even keep multiple versions of the backup. As it is they have a 10 MB message size limit.

Gobo Linux...

[evilviper]

After reading the doc, I think I can answer all questions rather quickly...

Q: Why change the directory names/structure?
A: Because he can. No other reason.

Q: Why aren't user and superuser programs seperate?
A: He just does not understand the numerous benefits of doing so. I really mean that.

Q: How can I boot into a skeleton (single-user, root / only) system?
A: You can't. He's decided that you must use bootable media, and no other way. I leave it to you to discuss the problems with that...

Q: How about remote mounts and/or seperate partitions?
A: You have one choice... Union mounts. He believes doing it the normal Unix way is morally wrong, or something like that.

Q: Why is the name of root changed?
A: This is a multi-part answer:

1. He dreams of a no-root system, where everything is peaches and cream, but since it doesn't work well in the real world, there is still a root.
2. He feels more secure in the cloud of obscurity that comes when root isn't named "root".
3. He likes people to ask, so he can take the opportunity to rant about how a Unix user/root system is wrong, and terrible. He's not trying to work on the new (theoretically superior) system, he just wants to complain.

I think that covers it pretty well.

Re:Gobo Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Q: Why aren't user and superuser programs seperate?
A: He just does not understand the numerous benefits of doing so. I really mean that.

How did this get "Insightful"?

What benefits? The added security that comes from knowning users must type /sbin/halt instead of just halt? As he points out, many superuser programs are already in /bin, and it doesn't do any harm.

Note: I've never used Gentoo, but the arguments he makes are mostly good (apart from the 'root' nonsense).

Re:Gobo Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Take "He believes doing it the normal Unix way is morally wrong, or something like that." for instance. Complete crap, he says nothing like that.

Re:Gobo Linux...

[evilviper]

What benefits? The added security that comes from knowning users must type /sbin/halt instead of just halt?

You, as well, don't know the advantages.

First, there is the fact that it's easier to check the permissions on all programs that should be SUID/SGID. If you just have them all in /bin, you won't notice if one is no longer SUID/SGID (by accident, by software upgrade, by anything), nor are you likely to notice if a program is executable by users when it shouldn't be. It's just much nicer to have a collection of all the special programs in one place.

In addition to that, OpenBSD now has a policy that partitions that don't contain /sbin, or /usr/sbin are mounted with "nosuid" by default. That means tons of added security by having all SUID programs in one place, where they can be controlled, and additional restrictions can be imposed.

BTW, it's pure luck I saw your post... I don't see AC posts, so reply logged-in if you aren't just trolling.

Re:Gobo Linux...

[tal197]

First, there is the fact that it's easier to check the permissions on all programs that should be SUID/SGID. If you just have them all in /bin, you won't notice if one is no longer SUID/SGID (by accident, by software upgrade, by anything), nor are you likely to notice if a program is executable by users when it shouldn't be.

Depends how it got there. If it was by extracting an archive, all SUID bits should be cleared by the extractor. Personally, I prefer to use sudo to track all extra privs in one place, and keep all executables on a nosuid partition (/uri/0install is always mounted nosuid, for example).

However, the comment you replied to was "Q: Why aren't user and superuser programs seperate?". Your reply is about one-directory-per-program, not about the separation between /bin and /sbin.

Re:Gobo Linux...

[evilviper]

Your reply is about one-directory-per-program, not about the separation between /bin and /sbin.

No, my comment is about seperation between /bin and /sbin. Read it a few more times...

Akamai DDoS May Have Used HTTP Proxies

[Rob Riggs]

I'm beginning to think that part of the DDoS against Akamai was through the use of open HTTP proxies. A friend who uses Mandrake experienced a what appeared to be a DoS attack on his network Wednesday night and asked me to help. The cause was a bunch of bogus HTTP proxy requests from outside his network. Turns out Mandrake's apache2-mod-proxy module was installed and has proxying turned on by default in the config file. He was not aware HTTP proxying was enabled. He was getting a ton of obviously bogus requests directed at a number of the domains listed in the article.

As an aside, my Fedora servers have mod_proxy installed, but Fedora's Apache package does not turn on proxying by default. Mandrake should probably follow suite and disable proxying in their packaged config file.

Re:Akamai DDoS May Have Used HTTP Proxies

[ites]

I commented in a previous article that the Akamai collapse was a DDoS.

My theory is this: someone is selling a massive network of zombies and is demonstrating the power they wield. The idea being, if you can bring down Akamai, you can bring down anyone.

stagnant

[twitter]

But, we should still make consideration for the fact that hotmail has tons of users.

It's sheer software fanaticism coupled with greed that has stagnated Hotmail. I can consider Hotmail's user load for about half a second. Then I remember Hotmail's history and know that Microsoft has taken a cool thing and run it into the ground.

Microsoft has wasted tons of money and time converting Hotmail over to their own OS. The effort failed more than once and they had to increase the number of machines just to keep up with stagnant or declining demand. Their own consultants use the Hotmail example of Unix virtues. Is it any wonder that the only improvements have been cosmetic and trivial?

The list of improvements is slim. Microsoft has added some spam filtering, "folders". They have also improved the attachment dialogs so that it's easier to fill your 2500KB. You also get more adds. Singles adds my wife finds cheesy and offensive.

The service has been unusable for a couple of years. My wife seems happy with it, but she's also happy with clear channel and other advert heavy broadcasts. Watching her try to get things done with it is sort of like watching someone try to eat well buttered, American rice with chopsticks. It's impossible for her and family members to exchange files over 2K despite cable modems at both ends.

Oh well.

Re:stagnant

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators: Please note that "twitter" is a known fanatical psycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft bashing. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" or "fanboy" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, twitter is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.

I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.

If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.

To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. I mean, this is an article about email disclaimers, right? The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx. WTF?

Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.

More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one.

More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories, more offtopic FUD and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants, promptly proven wrong. Worse even, twitter wants to be RMS, apparently (that first one is a winner). I mean, really. You think?

FUD,

ditto

[TubeSteak]

i want to see screen shots as proof. otherwise he's lying or got lucky

Thanks for the offer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Will e-mail you soon. That address would be MikeXpop@yandex.ru right? Thanks so much. Have a nice day.

vmlinuz@gmail.com

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be vmlinuz@gmail.com, right?

the *real* killer free email service...

[maxpublic]

...would allow me to implement my own white list. Imagine getting mail only from those people I've authorized, and *never ever* having to deal with a single piece of spam.

I can do that now, of course, with my own server - and I do. But with my region's uncertain, semi-regular power flickers, along with inexplicable ups and downs of my cable service, I'd like a white-list free account that I *know* I'll be able to get to no matter where I am and regardless of whether or not my servers are rebooting or temporarily down because my cable service hiccuped.

Max

Re:the *real* killer free email service...

[evilviper]

I can do that now, of course, with my own server

You are rather slow...

Just about every webmail service allows you to define filter rules. One rule to deliver all mail to trash, then a rule for each sender you want to allow, and you're all set. I've done this on yahoo mail myself a couple years ago.

I think whitelisting is a horrible idea myself, but there you go.

Re:the *real* killer free email service...

[Captain DaFt]

I use Cashette.com's free email service for that.
If they aren't on my approved list, they don't get in. (Unless they pay me!) };->

Re:the *real* killer free email service...

[Pahalial]

Crikey. Even hotmail's offered whitelists for years. It only allows mail from contacts + safe list addresses.

Re:the *real* killer free email service...

[maxpublic]

Just about every webmail service allows you to define filter rules. One rule to deliver all mail to trash, then a rule for each sender you want to allow, and you're all set. I've done this on yahoo mail myself a couple years ago.

Free Yahoo only allows for 15 filters. That's one to put everything into the trash, and a maximum of 14 folks from different addresses.

I may be slow, but if you only know 14 people you might ever want to get mail from (including business mail and confirmation mail) then you've got to be one of the most unpopular folks in the western hemisphere.

Max

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this makes me a horrible, horrible person. I know it makes me a whore, but I'm going to ask anyway. Anyone with a spare invite and no sense of decency, please send it to cooldragon85@hotmail.com

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[Anonymous Coward]

I will be happy to offer a Gmail invitation to you IF you need.

Re:free gmail invite.

[zoloto]

worth a shot..

I would like a gmail acount. mark@xwebnet.com (I hope no one spams me...)

I'd love a gmail invite also! email me here:

unixgold@hotmail.com

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[Rob Bos]

gotmail - search google - will retrieve & forward from a hotmail account.

I'm out, but I can add you to the queue

[adpowers]

Hey guys. Sorry, but I'm out now. If you e-mail me, I can add you to the queue, but there are already 40 people in line.

Just to see what a slashdotted e-mail address looks like, click to see a screenshot of my gmail inbox. Hehe, ouch.

Andrew

Re:I'm out, but I can add you to the queue

[Anonymous Coward]

Please mod down after an hour or 2

I can spread the love a little bit. Email gridlock at you-know-where - priority given to @hotmail people.

Java? Bah! Bow to the mighty Ruby!

[murr]

The biggest problem in the Java vs. C++ benchmark is that it benchmarks mostly toy problems and library fuinction. The toy problems are extremely sensitive to algorithmic changes.

Here's my implementation of the Ackermann function in Ruby:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

def ack(m,n)
case m
when 0
return n+1
when 1
return n+2
when 2
return 2*n+3
else
return ack(m-1, n>0 ? ack(m,n-1) : 1)
end
end

n = ARGV.length > 0 ? ARGV[0].to_i : 1
puts "ack(3,#{n}): #{ack(3,n)}"

Not only is this massively faster (in an interpreted language) than either Java or C++, but it also handles much bigger input arguments, because ruby supports bignums (on my machine, it calculated ack(3,400) pretty much instantaneously.

Re:Java? Bah! Bow to the mighty Ruby!

[fcw]

massively faster than either Java of C++

Well, here's my quick translation of your ruby program into standard Java:

import java.math.*;

public class Ack {
public static final BigInteger ZERO =BigInteger.ZERO;
public static final BigInteger ONE =BigInteger.ONE;
public static final BigInteger TWO =new BigInteger("2");
public static final BigInteger THREE=new BigInteger("3");

public static BigInteger ack(BigInteger m, BigInteger n) {
if (m.compareTo(ZERO)==0)
return n.add(ONE);
else if (m.compareTo(ONE)==0)
return n.add(TWO);
else if (m.compareTo(TWO)==0)
return n.multiply(TWO).add(THREE);
else
return ack(m.subtract(ONE),
(n.compareTo(ZERO)==1)?ack(m ,n.subtract(ONE)):ONE);
}

public static void main(String[] argv) {
BigInteger n;
if (argv.length>0)
n=new BigInteger(argv[0]);
else
n=ONE;

System.out.println("ack(3,"+n+"): "+Ack.ack(THREE,n));
}
}

And here's the result of running them on the same box:

$ time ruby ack.rb 1
ack(3,1): 13

real 0m0.012s
user 0m0.007s
sys 0m0.004s
$ time java Ack 1
ack(3,1): 13

real 0m0.335s
user 0m0.276s
sys 0m0.057s
$ time java Ack 4000
ack(3,4000): 10545632747447544800831118353892730905472153288746 18215274242760193405542490267564086380169853769762 65127526051845734584307574541553924650253848499620 09747230835739555509511165063176514217595144029269 24233939961159106574671153266590049600742793808715 68888308630032623306123527348665004688403453178276 82909192659080006261449337975120168551283590471588 27775372216705609581200490075588671820949973544102 29961868038372695956112435481736430429861625922267 20652740935478691839578172875661515205794534930055 10928245266598946448490001411468517578592580229965 37741869558593893402586734045454713775637550563648 57616203107496981461475886908955370300111653269956 31205441179838065117739849181635139906135093370339 03633028446734995685325837043941268801434706180632 88016704983013888960482783178496135115198059482982 12319917537847423860456133285437815912498953730301 18182703324208691715113292564276935653629958724023 80223275270069839174738813225300872718711481159216 04548097686323917337510315464738565758286051190176 68969896327521015302140885265128635030064347228891 40363795344461720684163949730768722010186041008431 71137716560478179781334107521452451800761231736908 11900368499835556742232444443370901780036605655287 595005

real 0m0.668s
user 0m0.598s
sys 0m0.070s
$ time ruby ack.rb 4000
ack(3,4000): 10545632747447544800831118353892730905472153288746 18215274242760193405542490267564086380169853769762 65127526051845734584307574541553924650253848499620 09747230835739555509511165063176514217595144029269 24233939961159106574671153266590049600742793808715 68888308630032623306123527348665004688403453178276 82909192659080006261449337975120168551283590471588 27775372216705609581200490075588671820949973544102 29961868038372695956112435481736430429861625922267 20652740935478691839578172875661515205794534930055 10928245266598946448490001411468517578592580229965 3774186955859389340258673404545471

Re:Java? Bah! Bow to the mighty Ruby!

[murr]

[In response to my claim that my Ruby solution was "massively faster than either Java or C++]:

Well, here's my quick translation of your ruby program into standard Java

My point was not that the ruby solution did not apply to other languages, or that ruby was an inherently fast language, but that the naive implementation of this problem was so inefficient that it could easily be improved upon.

Thank you google

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wanted to thank Google for creating gmail

signed,
- Seagate Employee

Re:free gmail invite.

[hackman]

I'll bite, I've been on /. for awhile and could use a gmail account.

Paypal's geographic settlement limits

[tcoady]

The link to the paypal announcement leads to an invite to mail them for more information, which I did, and discovered these are the limits to their largesse: If you opened a PayPal account between October 1, 1999 and January 31, 2004, you are a member of the class unless you fit into one of the following exclusions. Excluded from the class are: any judicial officer to whom the lawsuit is assigned; any current or former employee, officer, or director of PayPal; anyone who resides in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands, or United Kingdom; and all persons who timely and validly request exclusion from the class.

Hotmail down to 500 KB for me

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple of weeks ago, I deleted a whole bunch of emails from Hotmail. The emails are gone, but Hotmail still records the space as taken. Now, with everything deleted from the account (mails, address book, and I have been desparate enough to try this) Hotmail says I am using 1.5M of my available storage. Has this happened to anyone else, and were you able to fix the problem?

Of course, writing to Hotmail got absolutely f-all response apart from a generic auto-reply, and that was after hunting around for ages trying to find an actual address to which I could report the problem.

The only reason I've stuck with Hotmail was that I could download an archive my original emails, headers and all, albeit via a complicated process involving Outlook Express and a dbx to eudora converter program. Now, though, with a 100M Yahoo account and POP access from any platform (not just OE and Windows), I'll be converting by the end of the month. Pity I signed up for Yahoo too late and couldn't get the same user name as my Hotmail account. Oh, and I do have GMail, with just the right login name, but until I can download original emails I won't be using that full time.

It'll be a relief to move away, actually, as Hotmail has been like death from a thousand cuts. Why, oh why, on the same, slow, crappy connection, does Yahoo load up immediately, while Hotmail spins for ever? (BSD versus MS servers?) Oh, and spam in your Junk Mail folder DOES count towards your limit, as when the spam brings your account total over 2M, everything else gets bounced.

I've been intrigued by the suggestion on Slashdot to get myself a free domain name and set up my own mailserver. Sounds interesting, but the main stumbling block for me is getting and paying for a permanent internet connection in my student res, and getting a spare computer to act as the server.

Of course it is fast Batman.

[jotaeleemeese]

It is a beta product with only a few thousend users.... Bat-doh!

"Vast majority", huh?

[mik]

Here, C++ appears to be a winner for the vast majority of programs; where Java scored better with (recursive) algorithms and the use of file IO (where it must be remarked that the C++ code uses iostreams).

I RTFA, and I don't see a "vast majority" of C++ over java - the best C++ (intel) beats the best java (server) times 8 to 6... the same margin that server java beats the best G++. For an on-the-fly compiled system which is fully debuggable and fully portable, this isn't anywhere near a decisive victory, IMHO.

I think the questions to ask are (1) why the heck doesn't C++ win in every case [RTOtherFA for some examples] and (2) what is it about the outliers that make the java vs c++ results so different [obviously, they aren't actually doing the same thing].

Java and C++ are rather different: memory management, object model, portability, even strings (2byte vs 1byte chars) lead to real performance and expressive power (read, "low maintenance") differences.

Bottom line is that fair (that is, useful) benchmarking is a very tricky business - you need much more carefully designed tests to really get at the differences.

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[brkumar]

Another portal - Rediff (rediffmail.com) is now offering 1 Gb email. A news report to this effect can be found on their web site at: http://in.rediff.com/money/2004/jun/17rediff.htm.

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[Jim74]

I opened a SpyMac account a month or so ago for the 1 gig space, figuring it would be great for the Yahoo Groups I belong to. Only problem is that SpyMac is currently blocking ALL e-mail from Yahoo Groups. Back on 5/15 they reported it was just a temporary issue, but have given no estimate on a fix as of yet, and have been VERY rude to anyone trying to get an answer, if they respond at all. SpyMac Yahoo Groups Forum

Don't forget the registrey

[lokedhs]

Just because windows hides all it's magic in that blob of binary data called the registry doesn't mean it's any easier.

Mail server

[phorm]

You could probably manage a small personal mail server in something as small as a Pentium 200MMX. Mine is a K6-2/400 and it runs nicely.

In fact, less is better. So long as it does the job, a lower speed computer should use less power (which, believe it or not, becomes a factor of consideration for a machine that's on 24/7)

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[byolinux]

I'll give away any invites I get too: macboy@gmail.com

Re:The Truth About Hotmail

[Alien54]

thanks

darn typos.

she's a geekette, too.

Re:free gmail invite.

[lubricated]

Now that is a trully low ID. I guess I'll give another invite.

Will the PayPal Settlement be Paid to Paypal?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Seems to me the easiest thing would be to unfreeze the affected accounts and just drop the settlement share into the appropriate account- or is that too easy?

"national treasure" Harlan Ellison

[cardshark2001]

I think the author was being funny. I certainly found this to be hilarious.

Harlan is a genius when it comes to writing, no doubt about it. However, when it comes to dealing with people, he is an ass.

My father and stepmother went to one of his book signings. Long story short - he hit on my stepmother, and offered to feed a guy his camera who took a picture of him. A real class act, that guy. He'll probably sue me for posting this. Bring it on, tough guy!

Loading and verifying classes

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what is happening is that you are 1) loading a VM, and 2) loading and verifying all the classes used by that app. It is a little like getting the Windows startup lag everytime you launch an app.

I find it interesting that Python apps just snap right up compared to Java, even though Python code runs slower. I read on a SUN web page that the Java emphasis is on security, hence all the loading, checking, and verifying of classes that isn't going on in Python.

City on the Edge of Forever

[Anonymous Coward]

His original script had low-level Enterprise crew members trafficking in drugs, and a drugged-out crew member beams down, goes through the Time Portal, and messes everything up. The "suits" changed it to McCoy accidentally injecting himself when the Enterprise hits a "subspace speed bump."

The reason for the change was that the Enterprise crew are all Eagle Scouts who would never do drugs, and besides, this is was the 60's and Star Trek was prime-time family entertainment. Besides, Star Trek covered a lot of 60's social issues in sci-fi disguise, including a "lotus eater's" episode where Kirk loses control of his ship to these plant spores that turn his crew (including Spock) into hippies.

This business of "Hollywood changed my script" and "I demand my artistic integrity" is all a crock. It is like going to work for Ford Motor as an engineer and complaining that the company doesn't share your views of sustainable development and mass transit.

On a more practical level, a TV series requires a certain "playbook" that everyone follows -- if your right for that kind of environment, it has to be a collaborative effort, and you have to tolerate some censorship of your ideas.

Finally, was "City on the Edge of Forever" that great? It was a good story, and we all like the young Joan Collins, but it was pretty standard sci-fi time-travel paradox material unless I missed something.

Re:City on the Edge of Forever

[sgtrock]

To quote myself:

Mind you, this was an episode of Star Trek won the 1966-67 Writers' Guild of America Award for Best Teleplay, and the 1967 Hugo Award, the first (only) teleplay to ever do so.

Sounds like both his peers and sci fi fans both regarded it as some of the best stuff written that year. :)

Holy Moronic Trolls Batman!

[harborpirate]

So, last things first:

You can tell a bad benchmark because it seems to show that languages you already know are slow aren't.

Thats just great. "Oh, what they're saying doesn't match my preconcieved notions, so they must be wrong." Is your last name Stalin, perhaps? Because thats classic crazed dictator logic there.

Now for the rest of this crappy troll:

The original report (anonymously) parrots common propaganda in favor of garbage collection.

I've never heard of spreading information about a better method of doing something referred to as "propoganda". Oh yeah, pointer allocation/deallocation and direct memory access are SOOOO much better. Next you're gonna tell me I should be using GOTO statements. Absolutely rediculous.

In fact, people who think Java is slow think so because when they run real Java programs, they find that real Java programs really do run slowly.

So you ran a poorly written Java program once, 5 years ago, and it was slow. Tried it lately? Somehow I strongly doubt it.

Nobody is obliged to notice they are C++ programs, because they are easy to install, and they just work.

Oh really? They "just work", huh? So your C++ program that you created runs equally well on Linux, Windows, and OS X without separate compiles? Because Java can do that. C++ works great when you can compile for a specific platform, but to claim that it "just works" is a rediculous statement. I encourage you to try to run those windows binaries you've compiled on Linux. Have fun.

They don't call much attention to themselves, because they rarely suffer from the security flaws common to C programs.

This is a patently rediculous statement. You can run any C command from within a C++ program. Because C++ is a wrapper around C! C++ is no more secure than C, and to suggest such is misguided to say the least.

In principle a really good garbage collector might not be slow, for certain common kinds of jobs, However, Java runtimes generally can't use those garbage collectors; they have to use the slow ones instead.

Bah: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-2001/jw-1 207-java101.html

...automated, encapsulated resource management uniquely possible in C++...

Dude, what do you think garbage collection is? "Automated, encapsulated resource management" is an excellent description of garbage collection in Java.

GC propaganda is common in academic Computer Science departments, but real programs are built by engineers who are not fooled.

<Sarcasm TYPE="DRIPPING">

Oh yes, those academic bufoons! They don't know anything next to us in the trenches. They sit in their ivory tower and play with slow languages and espouse worthless advice. Why, they wouldn't know the first thing next to a self taught coder! Save your breath you academic morons, memory deallocation and GOTOs are there for a reason, and I'm going to use them!

</Sarcasm>

LISP has failed to take the world by storm, decade after decade, for sound reasons...

Agreed. "Sound reasons" being LISP is not applicable to a lot of common problems that computer programmers need to solve. We need to create GUIs and code that is organized in easily understood objects, not run set based logic to solve complex artificial intellegence conundrums. If we needed to do mostly the latter, LISP would be everywhere. LISP has its niche. It is very good at what it does, which is compute set based problems. It is not good at what it doesn't. The same is true of C++.

GC doesn't just automate memory management; dependence on it automatically confines the language to niche uses.

The LACK of garbage collection is something that most programs will not require. I would

Litany of tool abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

My father worked as a research engineer, but at home he had tools and worked on hobby projects. Grandpa (Dad's father-in-law), however, was a carpenter who build store fixtures, and he often looked upon Dad as "one of those engineers without enough practical knowledge to look after his tools." This childhood experience led me to the litany of tool abuse:

Where a socket wrench is called for, use a box wrench.

Where a box wrench is called for, use a Crescent wrench.

Where a Crescent wrench is called for, use . . . pliars.

The litany concludes with the many uses for the flat-bladed screwdriver, and how one size of Philips screw driver fits all Philips screws. It is little wonder that the seat adjusting nut on my bicycle had rounded edges and how every screwdriver in the house had rounded corners.

So, turning a bolt with either a screwdriver or a hammer does not seem far fetched.

Re:The Il-Logic of the "Ellison Effect"

[geekwench]

Okay, as one of those "creative types", I have to offer a rebuttal.

IANAA(uthor), but as a science-fiction loving, convention-attending geekette, I know several. Many talented, published writers don't make it to the point where their writing supports them. That field is as chancy as, say, acting; and it takes damn good luck in combination with hard work and talent to make it as a full-time author. Now, just because a published writer relies on a day job to pay the bills doesn't make them any less a professional writer. He/she is still getting a royalty check, however small (and most of them are). But, even a small check is one heck of an incentive to keep writing. You say that they shouldn't receive any financial gain for their work, however, on the basis that there would be better creative work. I disagree; one has only to browse any website specializing in "fan fiction" to see Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) in its full glory. If creative types were not allowed to profit from their abilities, society wouldn't see a proliferation of good quality, because there wouldn't be any incentive for the creative types to do the work.

Now, as to my own circumstance: I am an artist, I work in several different media, but I'm most focused on custom jewelry. I carve models for lost-wax casting, draw initial designs, and do all of the fabrication, stone setting and finishing by myself. One necklace can have a huge investment of time, effort, and energy behind it. Contrary to popular belief, jewelers don't make money; jewelers make jewelry. Materials are expensive. If I didn't make a dime off of my labor, I couldn't afford to keep working, and this is my day job. I'm good at office work, sure; but I'm passionate about my creative efforts, and there's the difference.

By your argument, any number of talented, creative people might just as well work at a fast-food joint and never create anything, because the time and effort that it takes to hone those talents into real skills will never be rewarded. Yes, some creative types become obsessed with their bank accounts. Most don't, however; and to deny them a chance to get paid for doing something that they are really, really good at seems like a very draconian measure. Punish the spoiled brats and prima donnas; yes. Don't buy what they produce. But condemning all in order to reach the guilty few is overkill.

Re:The Il-Logic of the "Ellison Effect"

[blacklily8]

Even if there were no IP laws in place protecting creative works, publishers (and the tenth or fiftieth or whatever it is they offer to authors) would still be making money selling books. Why? Because there's still enough old-fashioned types out there who hate reading online because they can't bring the monitor into the bathtub with them. Authors of the future are going to have to find new ways to earn money from their work than trying to control its distribution. I'd say, start with the given that people will copy your work all over the place, then think of ways you could profit. One of my good friends (who is a published author) is conducting an experiment with a process model. Her novel is free to everyone--however, there's a catch. She publishes a chapter at the time, then elicits feedback from her readers about what will happen in the next chapter. She admits that she listens a bit more carefully to readers who DONATE money than to those who don't. Results? So far, $200. Sure, chump change, but it's more than most short story writers get (usually $50-$200). My prophecy is that artists of the future will work more like those of our ancient past; namely, the bards, griots, and so on that were paid performers. We already see this taking place to some extent with artists like Prince shifting his attention to profiting from concerts rather than albums. The Internet provides a way for artists to interact with audiences in ways that traditional novelists and the like could not; readers can expect more influence over the process than ever before.