I work on a vertical app, source code isn't terribly interesting.
No NDA or anything like that. My contract doesn't include absolutely anything related to programming. I'm simply hired to code for X hours a week.
Again, that's irrelevant for the purpose of the discussion. I MIGHT be willing to sign NDAs and agreements, PROVIDED I get something out of it. No way I'm agreeing to anything of the sort attached to a license from a third party manufacturer who isn't paying me, or who I may be paying for the privilege of looking at their precious code. If they charge for that I'm certainly not giving a cent for it.
I dont know if you have a job yet, but this is pretty much par for the course when you get one.
I have, since several years. And no, it isn't, at least for mine.
I am a software developer. My current contract says I cannot work for another company in the same line of work for 6 months after I leave. This prevents our competitors from poaching me and also prevents me from setting up my own business and taking any of their clients with me.
My contract includes nothing of the sort.
This misses the point anyway. Such a thing MIGHT be acceptable for me with a contract. But no way I'm allowing some random third party that's not paying me to do anything of the sort to me. As a software developer I can't afford to get locked out of an entire area just because I looked at the source to debug something. No way. Thank you very much, but MS can take their source and stick it where the sun doesn't shine, if it's going to offer it under terms like that.
I seriously hope you change your mind about Microsoft. I mean, I hope that the community--those who make the decisions--are willing to work with Microsoft or at least hear them out. The open source community and licenses should be safe enough that anyone can use them or take part in them without finding a haft of a knife in their back. If they aren't, they need to be changed, hence all the debate on the GPLv3. If you're telling me that Microsoft is exploiting the Open Source Initiative for their own good, I question who's at fault here--Microsoft or OSI? Because Microsoft excels at making software make money, open source should excel just at making software work for everyone.
Sorry, but MS is very, very hard to trust. They'd be willing to let you look at Windows/.NET/whatever code alright. Only I would expect this would come with strings attached that'd ensure you'd be "contaminated" for the purpose of contributing to anything related. Say, they let you look at MS SQL, and then the moment you try to contribute to MySQL/Postgres they'd claim you're stealing their IP or something of the sort.
Personally, I wouldn't touch any source from MS with a 10 foot pole, unless BSD or GPL licensed. What do they need their own license for anyway? Like there aren't enough already.
Which is exactly the reason for printing the votes.
If somebody suspects the counting was rigged, they take the paper votes and count that, by hand.
To avoid something slipping by you could do a sanity check, by counting X% of the paper votes, and verifying that the percentages are close enough to what the machine said.
Most filesystems don't, what you see is an error from the drive which propagates up the chain until the OS gives you an error message.
The hard disk has some redundant info for the sector and by using ECC can determine whether the sector is good. If it didn't read well, then it'll mark it as a "pending sector" (you can see this in SMART), and try to read it until it works or the sector is overwritten. Once it gets the correct data, it'll remap it to a spare area. That part is something the OS usually didn't notice.
Now if that fails, the drive has no choice but to return an error to the OS, which ends up giving you an error message.
FAT is far too simple for anything as fancy as its own ECC checks, by the way. At most it can detect obvious corruption in its structures, such as a file that according to the FAT is located after the end of the disk, but it won't notice corruption in files at all, unless the problem is that the drive fails to read a sector. But in that case it's the drive which detects it, and FAT would let it slip through if the drive didn't detect it.
Generally I have very few nice things to say about MS, but I doubt they're stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot in such a way. The biggest advantage of Windows vs Linux ATM is that Windows still has an edge usability-wise. Enough crap like that, and people will start moving despite various inconveniences.
But, what if MS simply got sick of various crap that infests Windows and decided to patent things they might do, so that they can sue the makers without needing an anti-spyware law? An anti-spyware law would probably be seriously hard to create and enforce, and would be open to a lot of interpretation, while patent infringement is probably much more straightfoward.
If I needed something of the sort I think I'd prefer something shiny and futuristic looking. Maybe something like from the
Fullmetal Alchemist anime.
If it's going to look obviously artificial at least it could be something that looks cool.
A month or so ago, Linden Lab introduced a new enhancement called WINDLIGHT to the world. It's purpose was to make the worlds SKY more realistic and "prettier". Once the enhancement was added, people immediately started to complain. The lag was so horrendous that within 2 hours time, Linden Lab pulled WINDLIGHT and has YET to re-introduce it.
Bullshit. Windlight is a purely client-side effect, it has no effect on the grid itself. It's also been available for a few weeks, too.
The problem here is that nobody in SL knows what "lag" is. The concept of "lag" on SL is all of: asset server performance, sim performance, SL network to user, AND rendering performance, lumped together. All of which are quite different things too.
For example, windlight: is not related to the asset server, is not related to the sim and doesn't require active SL/grid to viewer communication. If it slows things down too much then your computer simply can't render it fast enough, so you'll have to disable it.
"invade" is a bit of a strong word and likely not even accurate. it's not as if second life was happy just humming along losing money providing this virtual world at their own cost and for no benefit.
Haha, you think they were providing it for free?
Initially SL had paid accounts. Now it's free, but: If you want to own land you need pay for it, no way to get out of that one. And you can buy an "island" which are "priced at US$1,675 for 65,536 square meters (about 16 acres). Monthly land fees for maintenance are US$295."
From the statistics, you can see there were 8336 of those in June, with 928 added during the month.
IMO, it doesn't seem like LL is in such a desperate needs of marketers. Most of those are from normal users.
The 40K is the number of people logged in right now. People generally don't stay connected to SL 24/7.
I don't get what's the obsession with the numbers -- there's no way to count it properly anyway. There's no exact way to decide how many users it has. Some people will use it every day. Some only on weekends. Some will go on holidays, not log in for a month, then come back.
Windows and Mac OS are also getting progressively better.
Right, that must be why everybody is asking me how to get a computer without Vista.
Yes, yes, give me the big lecture on how it works just fine. Then try to copy a vector image around in Linux.
Not going to, because I haven't tried to do that in several years. My "desktop usage" involves a web browser, pgadmin3, Second Life, and the SL source in kdevelop. If I write any text it's in LaTeX. So I can't really comment on how well that sort of thing works.
It seems logical that Linux will keep getting progressively better.
It's "Linux desktop" for me already. All of my computers now exclusively run Linux. I have no Windows installs on my server, firewall, laptop or desktop, and only have a couple of Win2K installs in vmware lying around mostly for the very rare times when I need to compile something for Windows.
For me, the switch to Linux was gradual. I didn't just one day decide to do the switch. Over time, my working Windows installs started failing and I found myself using Linux instead, as it was easier than to spend a weekend reinstalling everything. Eventually I was spending months without booting it, and finally it vanished completely when I upgraded hard disks and didn't have any reason to install it.
I don't really see a "Year of Linux desktop" happening. People seem to like their weird theories about what's holding Linux back, as if changing directory structure, or getting rid of X would suddenly make Linux become really popular overnight. It won't. People will gradually fix the problems there are, and its market share will progressively go up, as people run out of reasons not to use it.
OOXML is XML -- if you want to extract plain text from it just feed it through a XML parser and strip all the tags. You can do something similar with Office's format, but the solution will be far less perfect and contain lots of junk.
In fact, I just tried that. One of my.doc files filtered through strings is unreadable. There are newlines at weird points in the output, some text is outright missing (I imagine that because internally.doc is at least part memory dump, and so the text inside isn't necessarily stored in order), and there's random junk like this in various places. Here you have an excerpt:
Documentaci n, apoyo, formaci n y actualizaciones. Copia de seguridad. Compatibilidad y enlaces. FALTA ALGO PAGE PAGE &`#$ Xkf# EXkf# TEMA 5 - APLICACIONES DE PROP SITO GENERAL Y ESPEC FICO galmarro Normal sanleged Microsoft Word 9.0
Here's what it took to get a very readable plaintext out of an OOXML file:
perl -MXML::Parser -e '$p = new XML::Parser(Handlers => {Char => sub { print $_[1]; }}); $p->parsefile("content.xml");'
It's pretty much the data in plaintext. Unlike what results from.doc it's actually readable, and could be printed with minimal and very easily automatable reformatting. In fact, looking at OOXML, the document itself is separated from various misc stuff like settings, so parsing content.xml you get just the content.
If you have a real commercial application, you can pay for Qt. It's not the cheapest thing ever, but neither are developers.
Now, what the LGPL requires you is that your application works with a modified library. You don't need to provide any source of your app for that. If the library is a.so or.DLL, then the application will automatically work with any library that exposes the same interface, you don't need to do anything about it. Part 1 says exactly that.
The problem with that method is that it'll work well only so long it's not widely used. The security of this relies on one thing only: That people have restricted access to the system. The "password" itself isn't secret.
So suppose I'm the sysadmin at a small company, and you use this for opening a door or something like that. If the system is under my control I can easily practice all I want with it, then duplicate your signature on an ATM or whatever else uses the system.
I don't get the point of standing in a huge queue for something. Wait a couple of weeks and you'll be able to just walk into the shop and buy it without waiting, plus you get to find out whether the first version is worth buying at all.
IIRC, the explanation for that I saw was that it's too complicated and does too little good. I think it has even been done, but wasn't successful.
Inside a hard disk it's pretty cramped already. Adding extra voice coils, arm assemblies, etc. is complicated, adds extra heat output, and increases the probability of a failure. A multihead drive would probably cost more than two normal ones and not have much of an edge performance-wise.
Well, that's just the thing that makes me wonder if there's any point in going in this direction. Spinning that much faster would require some really good bearings and a platter made of unobtainium (IIRC, at the current speeds, the forces trying to shatter the platter are quite significant already).
Besides, it seems that the new way of doing this is with Flash or something similar. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what we'll have everywhere 10 years from now. No seek latency, you can get more speed by internally RAID-ing it, low power usage, no noise, less heat. Flash has a write limit, but unlike hard disks Flash fails predictably and nowhere near as horribly as a hard disk. A Flash drive should be able to very precisely (unlike hard disks even with SMART) tell you it's about to run out of spare sectors.
Hard disk speed comes from several factors: Data density: The more densely it's packed, the more data per second passes under the head Rotational speed: The faster it spins, the more data per second passes under the head Latency, a combination between the seek latency (how long it takes the disk assembly to move to the location), and rotational latency (how long it takes for the platter to rotate to the required position), determines how long it will will take the disk to start reading data from somewhere else.
They don't explain how the laser is mounted. If the laser is sitting in the same place as the current magnetic head, then that the head can potentially read/write 100 times faster doesn't really matter, when there's no way the disk itself can be made spin 100 times faster. 7200RPM are about the fastest you can stick in a normal case without extra cooling without it melting.
So, the disk can't be made to spin much faster, making the assembly move much faster is difficult and bumps into rotational latency anyway, and they aren't packing data more tightly because they admit the footprint of their laser is bigger than used by current tech. So again, even if their head can read/write 100x faster, does it even matter given that it'll never be given the opportunity of doing so?
The article is unclear on the details. Are they making a hard disk with an optical head? In that case will it really help that much, given the problems with making the disk spin faster, and the seek latency? There are 15K RPM drives already, only they're a bad idea for consumers as they're noisy and require cooling that's not available in most consumer oriented computer cases.
Also, 99% of UPS units don't convert AC to DC unless it's charging the batteries. Normally this would only be a trickle charge. If the UPS is providing power, you're in a critical situation anyways, I wouldn't worry about the fact that a UPS isn't particularly efficient, as you're probably spending 99% of your time not on UPS.
That's a cheap, consumer oriented UPS. Datacenters use the kind described, ones that are always doing the AC -> DC -> AC conversion. What this achieves is that instead of the UPS taking over when the line voltage isn't good, the UPS is always providing clean power because everything goes through it. One of the advantages is that this kind has no delay for switching between AC and battery, as there's no switching involved.
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I work on a vertical app, source code isn't terribly interesting.
No NDA or anything like that. My contract doesn't include absolutely anything related to programming. I'm simply hired to code for X hours a week.
Again, that's irrelevant for the purpose of the discussion. I MIGHT be willing to sign NDAs and agreements, PROVIDED I get something out of it. No way I'm agreeing to anything of the sort attached to a license from a third party manufacturer who isn't paying me, or who I may be paying for the privilege of looking at their precious code. If they charge for that I'm certainly not giving a cent for it.
I have, since several years. And no, it isn't, at least for mine.
My contract includes nothing of the sort.
This misses the point anyway. Such a thing MIGHT be acceptable for me with a contract. But no way I'm allowing some random third party that's not paying me to do anything of the sort to me. As a software developer I can't afford to get locked out of an entire area just because I looked at the source to debug something. No way. Thank you very much, but MS can take their source and stick it where the sun doesn't shine, if it's going to offer it under terms like that.
Sorry, but MS is very, very hard to trust. They'd be willing to let you look at Windows/.NET/whatever code alright. Only I would expect this would come with strings attached that'd ensure you'd be "contaminated" for the purpose of contributing to anything related. Say, they let you look at MS SQL, and then the moment you try to contribute to MySQL/Postgres they'd claim you're stealing their IP or something of the sort.
Personally, I wouldn't touch any source from MS with a 10 foot pole, unless BSD or GPL licensed. What do they need their own license for anyway? Like there aren't enough already.
Which is exactly the reason for printing the votes.
If somebody suspects the counting was rigged, they take the paper votes and count that, by hand.
To avoid something slipping by you could do a sanity check, by counting X% of the paper votes, and verifying that the percentages are close enough to what the machine said.
Most filesystems don't, what you see is an error from the drive which propagates up the chain until the OS gives you an error message.
The hard disk has some redundant info for the sector and by using ECC can determine whether the sector is good. If it didn't read well, then it'll mark it as a "pending sector" (you can see this in SMART), and try to read it until it works or the sector is overwritten. Once it gets the correct data, it'll remap it to a spare area. That part is something the OS usually didn't notice.
Now if that fails, the drive has no choice but to return an error to the OS, which ends up giving you an error message.
FAT is far too simple for anything as fancy as its own ECC checks, by the way. At most it can detect obvious corruption in its structures, such as a file that according to the FAT is located after the end of the disk, but it won't notice corruption in files at all, unless the problem is that the drive fails to read a sector. But in that case it's the drive which detects it, and FAT would let it slip through if the drive didn't detect it.
Generally I have very few nice things to say about MS, but I doubt they're stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot in such a way. The biggest advantage of Windows vs Linux ATM is that Windows still has an edge usability-wise. Enough crap like that, and people will start moving despite various inconveniences.
But, what if MS simply got sick of various crap that infests Windows and decided to patent things they might do, so that they can sue the makers without needing an anti-spyware law? An anti-spyware law would probably be seriously hard to create and enforce, and would be open to a lot of interpretation, while patent infringement is probably much more straightfoward.
If I needed something of the sort I think I'd prefer something shiny and futuristic looking. Maybe something like from the Fullmetal Alchemist anime. If it's going to look obviously artificial at least it could be something that looks cool.
We have a name for you as well
What do you mean failed? It's at http://jira.secondlife.com/
Bullshit. Windlight is a purely client-side effect, it has no effect on the grid itself. It's also been available for a few weeks, too.
The problem here is that nobody in SL knows what "lag" is. The concept of "lag" on SL is all of: asset server performance, sim performance, SL network to user, AND rendering performance, lumped together. All of which are quite different things too.
For example, windlight: is not related to the asset server, is not related to the sim and doesn't require active SL/grid to viewer communication. If it slows things down too much then your computer simply can't render it fast enough, so you'll have to disable it.
Haha, you think they were providing it for free?
Initially SL had paid accounts. Now it's free, but: If you want to own land you need pay for it, no way to get out of that one. And you can buy an "island" which are "priced at US$1,675 for 65,536 square meters (about 16 acres). Monthly land fees for maintenance are US$295."
From the statistics, you can see there were 8336 of those in June, with 928 added during the month.
IMO, it doesn't seem like LL is in such a desperate needs of marketers. Most of those are from normal users.
Um, there are quite a bit more than 40K users.
The 40K is the number of people logged in right now. People generally don't stay connected to SL 24/7.
I don't get what's the obsession with the numbers -- there's no way to count it properly anyway. There's no exact way to decide how many users it has. Some people will use it every day. Some only on weekends. Some will go on holidays, not log in for a month, then come back.
Somewhat like IRC, but in 3D.
There are places to see, games, streaming music, etc. You can use scripted weapons and try to kill each other Quake style in designated areas.
My personal usage is chat, and working on the SL source
It seems logical that Linux will keep getting progressively better.
It's "Linux desktop" for me already. All of my computers now exclusively run Linux. I have no Windows installs on my server, firewall, laptop or desktop, and only have a couple of Win2K installs in vmware lying around mostly for the very rare times when I need to compile something for Windows.
For me, the switch to Linux was gradual. I didn't just one day decide to do the switch. Over time, my working Windows installs started failing and I found myself using Linux instead, as it was easier than to spend a weekend reinstalling everything. Eventually I was spending months without booting it, and finally it vanished completely when I upgraded hard disks and didn't have any reason to install it.
I don't really see a "Year of Linux desktop" happening. People seem to like their weird theories about what's holding Linux back, as if changing directory structure, or getting rid of X would suddenly make Linux become really popular overnight. It won't. People will gradually fix the problems there are, and its market share will progressively go up, as people run out of reasons not to use it.
What library? SDL maybe? Or OpenGL? Those things are pretty standard. And even portable.
Not even on Windows there's a "standard library" of any sort, it's not like games can be written only in one language or using only one graphics API.
Ok, just finally realized that OOXML is the MS format and not the Open Office one. Seems like I should get some sleep, heh.
OOXML is XML -- if you want to extract plain text from it just feed it through a XML parser and strip all the tags. You can do something similar with Office's format, but the solution will be far less perfect and contain lots of junk.
In fact, I just tried that. One of my
Here's what it took to get a very readable plaintext out of an OOXML file: It's pretty much the data in plaintext. Unlike what results from
If you have a real commercial application, you can pay for Qt. It's not the cheapest thing ever, but neither are developers.
.so or .DLL, then the application will automatically work with any library that exposes the same interface, you don't need to do anything about it. Part 1 says exactly that.
Now, what the LGPL requires you is that your application works with a modified library. You don't need to provide any source of your app for that. If the library is a
The problem with that method is that it'll work well only so long it's not widely used. The security of this relies on one thing only: That people have restricted access to the system. The "password" itself isn't secret.
So suppose I'm the sysadmin at a small company, and you use this for opening a door or something like that. If the system is under my control I can easily practice all I want with it, then duplicate your signature on an ATM or whatever else uses the system.
What's the rush?
I don't get the point of standing in a huge queue for something. Wait a couple of weeks and you'll be able to just walk into the shop and buy it without waiting, plus you get to find out whether the first version is worth buying at all.
IIRC, the explanation for that I saw was that it's too complicated and does too little good. I think it has even been done, but wasn't successful.
Inside a hard disk it's pretty cramped already. Adding extra voice coils, arm assemblies, etc. is complicated, adds extra heat output, and increases the probability of a failure. A multihead drive would probably cost more than two normal ones and not have much of an edge performance-wise.
Well, that's just the thing that makes me wonder if there's any point in going in this direction. Spinning that much faster would require some really good bearings and a platter made of unobtainium (IIRC, at the current speeds, the forces trying to shatter the platter are quite significant already).
Besides, it seems that the new way of doing this is with Flash or something similar. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what we'll have everywhere 10 years from now. No seek latency, you can get more speed by internally RAID-ing it, low power usage, no noise, less heat. Flash has a write limit, but unlike hard disks Flash fails predictably and nowhere near as horribly as a hard disk. A Flash drive should be able to very precisely (unlike hard disks even with SMART) tell you it's about to run out of spare sectors.Yes I did.
Hard disk speed comes from several factors:
Data density: The more densely it's packed, the more data per second passes under the head
Rotational speed: The faster it spins, the more data per second passes under the head
Latency, a combination between the seek latency (how long it takes the disk assembly to move to the location), and rotational latency (how long it takes for the platter to rotate to the required position), determines how long it will will take the disk to start reading data from somewhere else.
They don't explain how the laser is mounted. If the laser is sitting in the same place as the current magnetic head, then that the head can potentially read/write 100 times faster doesn't really matter, when there's no way the disk itself can be made spin 100 times faster. 7200RPM are about the fastest you can stick in a normal case without extra cooling without it melting.
So, the disk can't be made to spin much faster, making the assembly move much faster is difficult and bumps into rotational latency anyway, and they aren't packing data more tightly because they admit the footprint of their laser is bigger than used by current tech. So again, even if their head can read/write 100x faster, does it even matter given that it'll never be given the opportunity of doing so?
The article is unclear on the details. Are they making a hard disk with an optical head? In that case will it really help that much, given the problems with making the disk spin faster, and the seek latency? There are 15K RPM drives already, only they're a bad idea for consumers as they're noisy and require cooling that's not available in most consumer oriented computer cases.
That's a cheap, consumer oriented UPS. Datacenters use the kind described, ones that are always doing the AC -> DC -> AC conversion. What this achieves is that instead of the UPS taking over when the line voltage isn't good, the UPS is always providing clean power because everything goes through it. One of the advantages is that this kind has no delay for switching between AC and battery, as there's no switching involved.