compilers! you can't program sh*t on a windows install without buying separate software.
Lets see. I've got a free copy of the Visual C++.NET 2005 compiler, its one of the most ISO compliant compilers available. GCC I've got on here. Perl. Etc... You can get all of that from Microsoft as a free download.
your choice of how your desktop environment looks
You can replace the shell on windows. It isn't commonly done, but its quite doable.
games, not just freecell and solitaire
Ok, Windows doesn't come with much in the way of games compared to Linux, but aftermarket, Windows wins hands down.
real networking tools, such as nmap, a variety of firewalls, heck the list is too long to begin here
If the project is an integrated hardware/software solution, where there is one team with control over all aspects of each side of that, with narrowly defined operating parameters, then, maybe some sort of liability makes sense.
But, lets take a typical Windows app here(you can insert any other general purpose OS and the point is still valid). I'm writing a text editor for Windows in Visual Basic.NET. Should I be responsible for it crashing or blowing up your OS? Even if the bug is technically in the code I wrote, perhaps its only a bug because the.NET framework didn't check some input properly? Or because the third party component I used accessed an "internal use only" part of the Win32 API. Or maybe the specific operations I used tripped up an obscure CPU bug under certain conditions.
Are these my fault for not writing code properly for that platform, or are they the other persons fault?
Software liability for general purpose computer systems simply will not work. For special purpose computers with the entire system under the control of a single agency, maybe.
That is an interesting show, but here is the rundown:
Kirk is played as a younger Picard. He's not Kirk at all, maybe tad bit like Riker but nowhere near Kirk.
Spock is too much like Data. Data and Spock may fill the same role in driving along their respective stories, but they are quite a bit different. Spock tried to control and purge his emotions, whereas Data tried to embrace any half assed sense of emotion he could figure out. That is a very critical difference, especially given the surface similarities between the characters, missing that is going to screw things up.
McCoy isn't too bad, but is done a little too much to the stereotype. The actor is way, way too young. PRobably about half the age DeForest Kelley was at the time.
Uhura is done fairly decently.
Chekov seemed almost but not quite satirical.
The acting in general was pretty bad even when they got their character right in general.
Hidden Frontiers is much better. Acting is mostly decent(often surprisingly so for a fan series), and only one main character is Captain Shelby(remember Rikers first officer when Capt Picard was assimilated? thats her). She's different from her TNG appearances, but the changes are believable because of experience and maturing over the years. Of the fan series I've seen, its the best, and its gotten better over time.
Did he really bring the Borg to the Alpha Quadrant, or was that an inevitability that he prepared the Alpha Quadrant to face by showing them to Capt. Picard?
Look at many of the tests Q put Picard and his crew through. Several of them did seem tailored to highlight personal or cultural weakneses in humans, and in the end didn't really do much if any harm. Almost like Q(the DeLancie Q at least) was focused on guiding humanity along rather than toying with them.
Perhaps in the end, his tests that forced Picard and crew to think outside the box, and the preview he gave them of the Borg was what actually saved the Federation from defeat and assimilation?
The term WMD was something coined by the Bush spin doctors
Ummm no. That was a standard term at least as far back as 1996 when I joined the Marine Corps to serve as an Intelligence Analyst. It wasn't thrown about as a buzzword, but it was a term used for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, at least within the military.
The Star Trek writers probably were more inspired by current events than history.
Perhaps, but the fact that even the original series can spark useful thought regarding more current issues is quite an amazing feat. It struck close enough to the core of what it means to be human to be very relevant no matter the state of world politics.
If you want bad acting, check out the Star Wars Holiday Special. You'll have to google it yourself, but its out there, and its bad. Exeter deserves an oscars sweep compared to the SWHS.
My hotmail account forms a critical part of my spam defense.
No, I'm not joking. I use hotmail for web registrations and putting my email addy out unobfuscated in some public place. After a website has proven to be trustworthy and important, THEN I update my info to point the site to my ISP or gmail address. It is very useful in that regard, catches the spam so the email services I rely on can stay fairly clean and useable.
Of course, I eventually have to ditch my current hotmail address when it gets overwhelmed(my current one has lasted disturbingly long in a useable state), but its a useful tool while it lasts.
It would take some mighty impressive features to get me to use something else for webmail. Depending on how well I find the searching and threading features to work, I might even switch to gmail for my primary email account, its some good stuff.
Is a tame example of the horror which is COBOL. Thats almost a fucking comment, not program code. Typing COBOL is like typing up a novel.
How about this simple structured variable declaration?
01 EMPLOYEE-RECORD.
05 EMPLOYEE-NAME PIC X(20) VALUE SPACE.
05 EMPLOYEE-DEP PIC X(10) VALUE SPACE.
05 PAY-RATE PIC 9V99 VALUE ZERO.
This is just too much. Oh, if you need more than one of these? You have to type the whole thing out again. And if you(or a team member) used EMPLOYEE-NAME for a field elsewhere? The syntax to disambiguate that gives me nightmares.
Granted there are a few high points in COBOL, it's built in facilities for handling flat files aren't bad, and its case structure is incredibly flexible. But on the whole, the language is so painfully verbose as to sap the motivation from your blood to do any more than enough work to not fail the class.
ACtually, there will automatically be some bias... intentional or otherwise.
Have each language expert come with a program spec. It will obviously be biased towards the experts own language, but with all languages having a program biased towards them you can eliminate the bias by stacking opposing biases against each other. Rather than trying to avoid the bias, use the bias itself to reduce its impact.
See BLURB in the qmail package for some of the reasons that qmail is so much smaller than sendmail. There's nothing inherently complicated about writing a mailer. (Except RFC 822 support; but that's only in qmail-inject.) Security holes can't show up in features that don't exist.
2. Write bug-free code.
I've mostly given up on the standard C library. Many of its facilities, particularly stdio, seem designed to encourage bugs. A big chunk of qmail is stolen from a basic C library that I've been developing for several years for a variety of applications. The stralloc concept and getln() make it very easy to avoid buffer overruns, memory leaks, and artificial line length limits."
A couple points on these bits.
1) Qmail as stated here doesn't do as much as other mail server packages. As stated here Qmail is only 11k lines of code. Between having fewer features and fewer lines of code, its going to have fewer bugs. But what do you say to the people that need features that require writing half a million lines of code? Programs that big will have bugs. QMail is trivial compared to other, buggier, programs that are depended on. For comparison, I was unable to find a reference for the lines of code in the Linksys firmware. But, going with an average of 80 characters per line, I come up with over a million lines. This is an apples to planets comparison here.
2) As stated in point 7 there, he has control over external libraries. That will dramatically decrease bugs over relying on standard facilities since hte support libraries and the application can be designed as one unit- which, if you re read my original comment, was one way to avoid bugs that I put forward. But it isn't always an option to write your own support libraries.
The smaller the program, and the more control the development team has over the programs environment, the less buggy the code will be(assuming equally competent developers). Qmail is a tiny program with significant control over its supporting libraries, bug free is not very difficult to achieve in that case.
Bugs in software are inevitable... its a fact of life.
The only chance of having a bug free system is one organization having control of the entire system from hardware design, to the firmware, to the OS, the support libraries, and the application software. In the current IT world, where your hardware consists of generic components from half a dozen manufacturers, your OS from someone else, and application software and support libraries from other companies, none of which have influence over each other and have minimal if any chance to look at the detailed design of the other components it has to work with... Bugs are simply unavoidable. They can be minimized, and the effects minimized further, but they simply cannot be prevented with enough reliability for liability lawsuits to be remotely fair. It simply is not possible.
Which, of course, is why computers where human life is at stake should be designed as complete units, or at the very least all parties involved should have access to all the documentation and source code of the other parties involved, so they can really dig deep and make sure they don't trip up on "noone in their right mind would EVER send that data to this function".
An interesting thing is some of the research with ice cores in antarctica. There are some signs that just prior to the last ice age, there was a period of significant global warming. Once it hit the critical level, that allowed enough precipitation at the poles for the glaciers to be pushed south. Before the warming, there was virtually no precipitation because it all stayed frozen to the ground.
So we might not be seeing a situation where we will bake ourselves, but the runup to another ice age. This of course assumes that the global warming that has been detected over the last century is not simply normal climactic fluctuations. We probably won't be able to tell with any certainty for another centry, at least.
Renewables certainly need to be developed. But it will take quite some time for them to be up and runnin a significant portion of the worlds power grid. Even with a heavy research push, it will probably take so long to get renewable power up and running that we will have a critical problem with the oil supply.
What I see as best...
Stage 1, short term would be to build more coal plants. With modern technology coal can burn about as clean as oil, and they can be built faster than nuke plants. We also have far more coal than oil, so this will be better for us long term even if the stages were to stop here.
Stage 2, mid term would be to start building more nuclear plants. The technology is more complex so it would take longer to build them, security concerns would also delay the build and activation times which is why I advocate coal as the short term fix. Eventually, the coal and oil plants could be taken offline and key plants placed into emergency reserve in case there are problems with the nukes.
Stage 3, long term is where the renewable sources come in. To be practical, a lot of research needs to be done. We have enough coal and uranium to get us there, but not nearly enough oil to hold us until renewable sources are practical for widespread use.
YEs, renewable sources are where we should place our hopes for the long term. But we cannot ignore the short term- if we destroy ourselves and our planet in the short term, all the long term hopes for renewable energy will be for nothing. We'd be dead by then.
A friend of mine is a drug addict- whats helped both of us deal with that is humor, little jokes and such...
More on topic, I have a cousin with schizophrenia- one of her favorite shirts is one with the words "You're just jealous because the voices talk to me" because, well, she really does have voices so she laughs when she sees that. It helps her cope.
But, after an hour of reconfiguring our cable modem connection every possible way short of USB(which we didn't have the cable for anyways), I get told "Well, we are upgrading routers in your area, that must be it, try again in an hour or so"...
IDIOT! If you told me that when we started we could have saved a lot of your time and mine.
Though, he may have said that as a last ditch way of saying "I have no fucking clue so lets make something up"
Midichlorians are probably the star wars galaxy term for mitochondria, little things that live in our cells passed down via the maternal line.
The idea of mitochondria granting special powers is actually old... Parasite Eve for Playstation used that, that was based on some other story, and the concept of power being passed via the maternal line is as old as time itself.
It actually was not something he just pulled out of his ass, there is established literary and mythological basis for the midichlorian thing.
And if midichlorian is just another word for mitochondria, a transfusion wouldn't work- Yoda comes from a vastly different genetic line.
Slashdot Mirror
compilers! you can't program sh*t on a windows install without buying separate software.
Lets see. I've got a free copy of the Visual C++.NET 2005 compiler, its one of the most ISO compliant compilers available. GCC I've got on here. Perl. Etc... You can get all of that from Microsoft as a free download.
your choice of how your desktop environment looks
You can replace the shell on windows. It isn't commonly done, but its quite doable.
games, not just freecell and solitaire
Ok, Windows doesn't come with much in the way of games compared to Linux, but aftermarket, Windows wins hands down.
real networking tools, such as nmap, a variety of firewalls, heck the list is too long to begin here
*pets his *nix tools on his windows box*
*a powerful command prompt for expert users*
Bash, ksh, csh not powerful enough for you?
If the project is an integrated hardware/software solution, where there is one team with control over all aspects of each side of that, with narrowly defined operating parameters, then, maybe some sort of liability makes sense.
.NET. Should I be responsible for it crashing or blowing up your OS? Even if the bug is technically in the code I wrote, perhaps its only a bug because the .NET framework didn't check some input properly? Or because the third party component I used accessed an "internal use only" part of the Win32 API. Or maybe the specific operations I used tripped up an obscure CPU bug under certain conditions.
But, lets take a typical Windows app here(you can insert any other general purpose OS and the point is still valid). I'm writing a text editor for Windows in Visual Basic
Are these my fault for not writing code properly for that platform, or are they the other persons fault?
Software liability for general purpose computer systems simply will not work. For special purpose computers with the entire system under the control of a single agency, maybe.
White is colored white, black is colored black, chartreuse is colored chartreuse...
That is an interesting show, but here is the rundown:
Kirk is played as a younger Picard. He's not Kirk at all, maybe tad bit like Riker but nowhere near Kirk.
Spock is too much like Data. Data and Spock may fill the same role in driving along their respective stories, but they are quite a bit different. Spock tried to control and purge his emotions, whereas Data tried to embrace any half assed sense of emotion he could figure out. That is a very critical difference, especially given the surface similarities between the characters, missing that is going to screw things up.
McCoy isn't too bad, but is done a little too much to the stereotype. The actor is way, way too young. PRobably about half the age DeForest Kelley was at the time.
Uhura is done fairly decently.
Chekov seemed almost but not quite satirical.
The acting in general was pretty bad even when they got their character right in general.
Hidden Frontiers is much better. Acting is mostly decent(often surprisingly so for a fan series), and only one main character is Captain Shelby(remember Rikers first officer when Capt Picard was assimilated? thats her). She's different from her TNG appearances, but the changes are believable because of experience and maturing over the years. Of the fan series I've seen, its the best, and its gotten better over time.
Was Q a villain?
Did he really bring the Borg to the Alpha Quadrant, or was that an inevitability that he prepared the Alpha Quadrant to face by showing them to Capt. Picard?
Look at many of the tests Q put Picard and his crew through. Several of them did seem tailored to highlight personal or cultural weakneses in humans, and in the end didn't really do much if any harm. Almost like Q(the DeLancie Q at least) was focused on guiding humanity along rather than toying with them.
Perhaps in the end, his tests that forced Picard and crew to think outside the box, and the preview he gave them of the Borg was what actually saved the Federation from defeat and assimilation?
The term WMD was something coined by the Bush spin doctors
Ummm no. That was a standard term at least as far back as 1996 when I joined the Marine Corps to serve as an Intelligence Analyst. It wasn't thrown about as a buzzword, but it was a term used for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, at least within the military.
The Star Trek writers probably were more inspired by current events than history.
Perhaps, but the fact that even the original series can spark useful thought regarding more current issues is quite an amazing feat. It struck close enough to the core of what it means to be human to be very relevant no matter the state of world politics.
If you want bad acting, check out the Star Wars Holiday Special. You'll have to google it yourself, but its out there, and its bad. Exeter deserves an oscars sweep compared to the SWHS.
And in the first episode, her ship falling apart around her, she fixes her damned hair.
My hotmail account forms a critical part of my spam defense.
No, I'm not joking. I use hotmail for web registrations and putting my email addy out unobfuscated in some public place. After a website has proven to be trustworthy and important, THEN I update my info to point the site to my ISP or gmail address. It is very useful in that regard, catches the spam so the email services I rely on can stay fairly clean and useable.
Of course, I eventually have to ditch my current hotmail address when it gets overwhelmed(my current one has lasted disturbingly long in a useable state), but its a useful tool while it lasts.
I like my gmail:)
It would take some mighty impressive features to get me to use something else for webmail. Depending on how well I find the searching and threading features to work, I might even switch to gmail for my primary email account, its some good stuff.
McCoy though, was in his 40s or so IIRC. The guy they have doing him looks to be in his 20's. way too young.
oh my god.
At least that isn't as bad as the Star Wars Holiday Special.
If I had a system like that lying around, I'd seriously contemplate something this insane simply "because I can"
How about this simple structured variable declaration?This is just too much. Oh, if you need more than one of these? You have to type the whole thing out again. And if you(or a team member) used EMPLOYEE-NAME for a field elsewhere? The syntax to disambiguate that gives me nightmares.
Granted there are a few high points in COBOL, it's built in facilities for handling flat files aren't bad, and its case structure is incredibly flexible. But on the whole, the language is so painfully verbose as to sap the motivation from your blood to do any more than enough work to not fail the class.
ACtually, there will automatically be some bias... intentional or otherwise.
Have each language expert come with a program spec. It will obviously be biased towards the experts own language, but with all languages having a program biased towards them you can eliminate the bias by stacking opposing biases against each other. Rather than trying to avoid the bias, use the bias itself to reduce its impact.
Will George Ricaurte be stripped of his doctorate?
" 1. Keep it simple, stupid.
See BLURB in the qmail package for some of the reasons that qmail is so much smaller than sendmail. There's nothing inherently complicated about writing a mailer. (Except RFC 822 support; but that's only in qmail-inject.) Security holes can't show up in features that don't exist.
2. Write bug-free code.
I've mostly given up on the standard C library. Many of its facilities, particularly stdio, seem designed to encourage bugs. A big chunk of qmail is stolen from a basic C library that I've been developing for several years for a variety of applications. The stralloc concept and getln() make it very easy to avoid buffer overruns, memory leaks, and artificial line length limits."
A couple points on these bits.
1) Qmail as stated here doesn't do as much as other mail server packages. As stated here Qmail is only 11k lines of code. Between having fewer features and fewer lines of code, its going to have fewer bugs. But what do you say to the people that need features that require writing half a million lines of code? Programs that big will have bugs. QMail is trivial compared to other, buggier, programs that are depended on. For comparison, I was unable to find a reference for the lines of code in the Linksys firmware. But, going with an average of 80 characters per line, I come up with over a million lines. This is an apples to planets comparison here.
2) As stated in point 7 there, he has control over external libraries. That will dramatically decrease bugs over relying on standard facilities since hte support libraries and the application can be designed as one unit- which, if you re read my original comment, was one way to avoid bugs that I put forward. But it isn't always an option to write your own support libraries.
The smaller the program, and the more control the development team has over the programs environment, the less buggy the code will be(assuming equally competent developers). Qmail is a tiny program with significant control over its supporting libraries, bug free is not very difficult to achieve in that case.
Bugs in software are inevitable... its a fact of life.
The only chance of having a bug free system is one organization having control of the entire system from hardware design, to the firmware, to the OS, the support libraries, and the application software. In the current IT world, where your hardware consists of generic components from half a dozen manufacturers, your OS from someone else, and application software and support libraries from other companies, none of which have influence over each other and have minimal if any chance to look at the detailed design of the other components it has to work with... Bugs are simply unavoidable. They can be minimized, and the effects minimized further, but they simply cannot be prevented with enough reliability for liability lawsuits to be remotely fair. It simply is not possible.
Which, of course, is why computers where human life is at stake should be designed as complete units, or at the very least all parties involved should have access to all the documentation and source code of the other parties involved, so they can really dig deep and make sure they don't trip up on "noone in their right mind would EVER send that data to this function".
An interesting thing is some of the research with ice cores in antarctica. There are some signs that just prior to the last ice age, there was a period of significant global warming. Once it hit the critical level, that allowed enough precipitation at the poles for the glaciers to be pushed south. Before the warming, there was virtually no precipitation because it all stayed frozen to the ground.
So we might not be seeing a situation where we will bake ourselves, but the runup to another ice age. This of course assumes that the global warming that has been detected over the last century is not simply normal climactic fluctuations. We probably won't be able to tell with any certainty for another centry, at least.
Renewables certainly need to be developed. But it will take quite some time for them to be up and runnin a significant portion of the worlds power grid. Even with a heavy research push, it will probably take so long to get renewable power up and running that we will have a critical problem with the oil supply.
What I see as best...
Stage 1, short term would be to build more coal plants. With modern technology coal can burn about as clean as oil, and they can be built faster than nuke plants. We also have far more coal than oil, so this will be better for us long term even if the stages were to stop here.
Stage 2, mid term would be to start building more nuclear plants. The technology is more complex so it would take longer to build them, security concerns would also delay the build and activation times which is why I advocate coal as the short term fix. Eventually, the coal and oil plants could be taken offline and key plants placed into emergency reserve in case there are problems with the nukes.
Stage 3, long term is where the renewable sources come in. To be practical, a lot of research needs to be done. We have enough coal and uranium to get us there, but not nearly enough oil to hold us until renewable sources are practical for widespread use.
YEs, renewable sources are where we should place our hopes for the long term. But we cannot ignore the short term- if we destroy ourselves and our planet in the short term, all the long term hopes for renewable energy will be for nothing. We'd be dead by then.
How the hell are you supposed to know your crop is infected? Do the altered ones turn neon blue for easy ID or something?
Humor really is important.
A friend of mine is a drug addict- whats helped both of us deal with that is humor, little jokes and such...
More on topic, I have a cousin with schizophrenia- one of her favorite shirts is one with the words "You're just jealous because the voices talk to me" because, well, she really does have voices so she laughs when she sees that. It helps her cope.
But, after an hour of reconfiguring our cable modem connection every possible way short of USB(which we didn't have the cable for anyways), I get told "Well, we are upgrading routers in your area, that must be it, try again in an hour or so"...
IDIOT! If you told me that when we started we could have saved a lot of your time and mine.
Though, he may have said that as a last ditch way of saying "I have no fucking clue so lets make something up"
Midichlorians are probably the star wars galaxy term for mitochondria, little things that live in our cells passed down via the maternal line.
The idea of mitochondria granting special powers is actually old... Parasite Eve for Playstation used that, that was based on some other story, and the concept of power being passed via the maternal line is as old as time itself.
It actually was not something he just pulled out of his ass, there is established literary and mythological basis for the midichlorian thing.
And if midichlorian is just another word for mitochondria, a transfusion wouldn't work- Yoda comes from a vastly different genetic line.