Any helpful links to a good C++ API (not GUI toolkits) which is both POSIX and Windows might make me use that some more.
C++ has been around so long that by now there are jillions (possibly even hojillions) of C++ libraries/frameworks/APIs. Since you say you don't need a GUI kit, and assuming you are doing server programming, you might find ACE helpful.
I used ACE for a previous multithreaded server and the project was very successful. We developed on Linux and FreeBSD but had no difficulty porting to Solaris, and could have ported to Windows with a couple of days of effort (we had use the occasional POSIX-specific idiom, but this was our own fault, not the toolkit).
The author, Douglas Schmidt, is a well-known standards wonk and performance freak -- an interesting combination that results in a kit that provides full cross-platform support while running hard with C++'s approach of "you don't pay for it if you don't use it." The kit included a full CORBA ORB that supported realtime operation (ie, bounded maximum delay).
Probably the best compliment I ever heard about ACE was a from a very senior coworker who commented that ACE was "not bad, for C++." Trust me -- from him, that was high, high praise.
Having said all that, when I have to share the tree with other developers, Java is my favorite mainstream language.
I don't have a Gmail account either, so I'll speculate too. I don't see why you couldn't take your sorting methods, and instead of outputting a web page, just output some XML or some other information on the threading structure of that mail box. Then you can display it as a web page, or as a folder in Kmail or whatever. You might need to store your mail in some Gmail database or whatever, but it could be separated.
These are implementation details. Before you could even get as far as this, you'd need to know that the model presented to the user is going to involve a threaded view of their mailbox, with various sorting criteria.
But as it happens you have underestimated the gmail guys. By approaching the problem from the point of view of user goals, they have started from first principles and built a new way of looking at one's mailbox, in which (for example) conversations are kept together forever (redundant quoted text is tastefully hidden by default), potentially able to be continued at any time, with fast searching.
This is arguably not revolutionary -- web forums like/. and USENET readers have worked this way for some time -- but gmail applies it to email better than any other MUA I've used before, and it couldn't have happened if the developers had approached the problem in a typical "programmery" way by building an uninspiried "bucket of messages" mail-folder mangement API like C-Client and leaving the UI folks to put a pretty skin on top of it.
Chirac gets 20%, LePen gets 17%, Jospin gets 16%. Now suddenly the election is between Chirac and LePen, and Chirac is now the shoe-in even though the majority of the voters originally wanted "Anything but Chirac"
That sounds like a reasonable outcome to me: you are describing a single-winner election, and from your vote breakdown it looks likely that Chirac was the Condorcet winner. What other outcome would have been better, given that set of voter preferences, in your view?
As a geek, I too tend to have trouble grasping the political realities inherent in the standards process. But even I can see that the IETF is in no position to "make" MS dedicate a patent. If the IETF makes outrageous demands, MS will just take their ball and go home (or, more likely, to a more vendor-friendly standards organization like OASIS), and the IETF will see the further erosion of its influence over the real world of deployed Internet software.
Yes, you needed to somehow get hold of a TCP stack before you could download with TCP. But there were other ways of downloading before TCP, you know. You could dial into a BBS with a terminal program and use zmodem, for example (and in fact zmodem was and still is a much better protocol for bulk downloads over a modem than TCP).
But usually you'd get a TCP stack on the floppy your ISP gave you when you signed up. Like many small ISPs we used to distribute an install floppy containing the shareware version of Trumpet Winsock, which included a PPP dialer. When MS finally came out with a free install kit for making floppies for Windows 3.1 that included IE, the Windows TCP stack, and a nice dialer it was like a godsend (even though we viscerally hated what MS was trying to do with IE).
Compatibility with widely-implemented and familiar user interface conventions is a worthwhile goal, regardless of who is copying whom, and is not a good example of innovation one way or the other.
If you want some real examples, how about the web and internet email, both of which were first implemented in open source before the term had even been invented?
Anyway the post you followed up said nothing about open source. It was arguing that Microsoft--not Apple, IBM, or Xerox--eschews innovation in favor of proven ideas. It is a fact that MS has done this and has been very successful. Postings about this fact are known to bring out the usual subjects with high UIDs spouting attacks on OSS advocates.
<sarcasm>You know, a binary format would be even easier to parse!</sarcasm>
What? No it wouldn't. Have you ever tried to write code for a binary format? Among other things you need to worry about packing, integer bit widths, and byte order, none of which are standardized across compiler/OS/machine architecture. There's reasons IT as a whole is switching en masse over to text-based formats like XML (and it sure isn't for performance).
Anyway djb's file formats are universally trivial for even a human to read once you know the invariably-simple notation, and unlike other ad-hoc fomats they have the advantage of rigorous semantics.
Downloading seems legal; uploading might not be
on
Napster Canada Launched
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Downloading is apparently legal in Canada, but uploading might not be.
Canadians are currently permitted to borrow a friend's CD and make copies for personal, non-commercial use. However they are not allowed to make a copy for someone else. It is widely believed that this allows downloading but not uploading.
The CRIA has launched John Doe lawsuits against uploaders but recently suffered a legal setback when a judge ruled that they had failed to provide sufficient evidence of a copyright violation to subpoena the identities of some anonymous uploaders. However, members of the federal government have promised new legislation to close what they call "legal loopholes". That may just have been election year pandering. We'll have to wait and see.
In any case there are many Canadians who would willingly pay a reasonable amount per song to purchase music via download in order to get known quality, selection, and lack of liability. I would be one of them except that I refuse to pay money for DRM-encumbered files -- if I pay to buy something, I expect to own it.
How is that an international group awarding an honor to an American film could be an example of "Anti-American sentiment?" Did you perhaps mean to say "Anti-Bush sentiment," or does your belief system not allow for any distinction between the two concepts?
How can IQ *rise everywhere*, when the system itself is based on relative measurement to the average?
Good question. It turns out that the constant renormalization of the tests is what helped the Flynn effect remain unrecognized for so long. Flynn had found groups of people who had been given multiple versions of the same test, and wondered why they invariably performed significantly better on the older versions of the test. This had been noticed before by IQ researchers, but they tended dismiss the effect as an uninteresting artifact of the renormalization process. Flynn, however, was not an IQ researcher but a Marxist-egalitarian political scientist deeply skeptical of IQ testing, and so had no motivation to leave such discrepencies unexamined.
It has long been assumed that the reason elderly people do more poorly at IQ tests is because IQ falls gradually as one ages, but Flynn showed that this isn't what is happening at all -- instead, the normalized tests have been getting harder! If given an old test, older people score just as well as younger people given a newer test.
You might be right in this specific case, since Apple has to worry about Microsoft and Sony muscling in on their turf, but defensive patents just aren't as useful as they once were. Increasingly, patent action is being initiated by litigation firms that do nothing but buy up IP and litigate it. Since they have no actual business activities to threaten they are immune from patent countersuits. (Cue mouldy old joke about patenting patent extortion.)
When was the last time someone died of a computer worm from some's priated copy of windows?
Last year was the most recent occasion, to my knowledge. After the northwestern blackout there was much speculation that the Blaster worm had contributed to the failure, but officials pooh-poohed these theories at first. Finally, in late August, officials admitted that Blaster "degraded the performance of several communications lines linking key data centers used by utility companies to manage the power grid."
Considering that the SIIA says that as
much as half of all software is pirated, there's a good chance that pirated copies of Windows contributed significantly to the situation.
SLAX didn't spent over $50 million promoting Linux
What does that have to do with the alleged artwork misuse? If I give lots of money to some charity you approve of, does that mean I get to come to your house and help myself to your CDs?
Wow, did your comment ever stir up a hornets nest of fundies, generously come out of the woodwork to prove your point for you! Where do they come from, anyway? Is there some mailing list connected to a central bunker, with a kaxlon and a flashing red light, sending out announcements that evolution has been mentioned in a thread at the following URL?
Whenever I am reading text and notice it using the word "evolutionist" it's like a lightbulb goes on, and it's suddenly clear why the preceding paragraphs were salted liberally with incoherent bogosity. Calling someone an "evolutionist" in this day and age is a bit like using "geosphericalist" as a pejorative in the 19th century. It's a waste of time arguing -- just smile and nod and back away slowly.
For anyone with legitimate interest in the arguments there's always talk.origins.
I'm pretty sure he was referring to the old Usenet meme "Death of the net predicted; film at 11" (with "the net" in question being Usenet, not the web or even the internet -- this usage predated Usenet's being carried over the Arpanet in any mass way, back when UUCP was still the main transport).
I'm told that it was first bandied about during the panic the first time Usenet traffic exceeded the ability of a 9600bps link to keep up with it over a 24 hour period.
Real's own consultants warned them well in advance about the long-term consequences of their anti-customer behaviour. Real ignored these warnings, and then ignored the resulting customer outrage for nearly five years as they built up one of the worst cases of company bad-will in software history.
While I personally am downloading their new software to see if they have learned their lesson, I can hardly fault others for writing this off as too little, too late.
Circumstantial evidence doesn't mean "bad" evidence; it's a technical term that essentially covers anything except direct eyewitness testimony. Since nobody claims to have personally observed cigarette smoke particles entering cells and causing tumors, any evidence is circumstantial by definition. This doesn't necessarily make it unpersuasive, however -- fingerprint and DNA evidence is also classified as circumstantial.
The referenced studies also show that the range of
variation within each sex is greater than the
difference between them.
Without seeing the data it's easy to handwave and spin the difference as huge or insignificant.
Having said that, the much-used phrase "variation within [exceeds] difference between them" raises red flags for me. In many cases this phrase carries no real information and is used to dissemble or obfuscate.
It seems like it may be a case of using technical terms correctly, but in a way calculated to cause laymen to misunderstand a certain way based on the plain-English meaning of the words.
Viewing a plot of two overlapping normal-distribution curves might help illustrate my concerns.
After reading the description of his library I had the same thought. What exactly is the point of releasing trival, 10-minutes-to-rewrite-from-scratch stuff like this under the GPL rather than any of the other open-source licenses?
The only reason I can think of off hand is to bait clueless developers into shipping it with a commercial product so you can come along and hassle them about it later. In my experience, working programmers outside the Slashdot-reloading set tend to have trouble grasping the subtle distinctions among the BSD/GPL/LGPL licenses, so this activity doesn't seem very sporting.
There's little point trying to prescribe correct language -- it only serves to annoy others and worsen your own blood pressure. And most of the time there turns out to be a reason people use language the way they do.
In this case, there are a relatively small number of possible TLAs so collisions are common. Using the TLA as an adjective -- which requires a noun for it to modify -- has become a common way of providing context for the TLA. For many people, the small amount of redundancy seems to be worth the convenience of not having to spell out the full phrase.
Slashdot Mirror
I used ACE for a previous multithreaded server and the project was very successful. We developed on Linux and FreeBSD but had no difficulty porting to Solaris, and could have ported to Windows with a couple of days of effort (we had use the occasional POSIX-specific idiom, but this was our own fault, not the toolkit).
The author, Douglas Schmidt, is a well-known standards wonk and performance freak -- an interesting combination that results in a kit that provides full cross-platform support while running hard with C++'s approach of "you don't pay for it if you don't use it." The kit included a full CORBA ORB that supported realtime operation (ie, bounded maximum delay).
Probably the best compliment I ever heard about ACE was a from a very senior coworker who commented that ACE was "not bad, for C++." Trust me -- from him, that was high, high praise.
Having said all that, when I have to share the tree with other developers, Java is my favorite mainstream language.
But as it happens you have underestimated the gmail guys. By approaching the problem from the point of view of user goals, they have started from first principles and built a new way of looking at one's mailbox, in which (for example) conversations are kept together forever (redundant quoted text is tastefully hidden by default), potentially able to be continued at any time, with fast searching.
This is arguably not revolutionary -- web forums like /. and USENET readers have worked this way for some time -- but gmail applies it to email better than any other MUA I've used before, and it couldn't have happened if the developers had approached the problem in a typical "programmery" way by building an uninspiried "bucket of messages" mail-folder mangement API like C-Client and leaving the UI folks to put a pretty skin on top of it.
But usually you'd get a TCP stack on the floppy your ISP gave you when you signed up. Like many small ISPs we used to distribute an install floppy containing the shareware version of Trumpet Winsock, which included a PPP dialer. When MS finally came out with a free install kit for making floppies for Windows 3.1 that included IE, the Windows TCP stack, and a nice dialer it was like a godsend (even though we viscerally hated what MS was trying to do with IE).
PDF. Why not have a look at it?
If you want some real examples, how about the web and internet email, both of which were first implemented in open source before the term had even been invented?
Anyway the post you followed up said nothing about open source. It was arguing that Microsoft--not Apple, IBM, or Xerox--eschews innovation in favor of proven ideas. It is a fact that MS has done this and has been very successful. Postings about this fact are known to bring out the usual subjects with high UIDs spouting attacks on OSS advocates.
Anyway djb's file formats are universally trivial for even a human to read once you know the invariably-simple notation, and unlike other ad-hoc fomats they have the advantage of rigorous semantics.
Canadians are currently permitted to borrow a friend's CD and make copies for personal, non-commercial use. However they are not allowed to make a copy for someone else. It is widely believed that this allows downloading but not uploading.
The CRIA has launched John Doe lawsuits against uploaders but recently suffered a legal setback when a judge ruled that they had failed to provide sufficient evidence of a copyright violation to subpoena the identities of some anonymous uploaders. However, members of the federal government have promised new legislation to close what they call "legal loopholes". That may just have been election year pandering. We'll have to wait and see.
In any case there are many Canadians who would willingly pay a reasonable amount per song to purchase music via download in order to get known quality, selection, and lack of liability. I would be one of them except that I refuse to pay money for DRM-encumbered files -- if I pay to buy something, I expect to own it.
How is that an international group awarding an honor to an American film could be an example of "Anti-American sentiment?" Did you perhaps mean to say "Anti-Bush sentiment," or does your belief system not allow for any distinction between the two concepts?
It has long been assumed that the reason elderly people do more poorly at IQ tests is because IQ falls gradually as one ages, but Flynn showed that this isn't what is happening at all -- instead, the normalized tests have been getting harder! If given an old test, older people score just as well as younger people given a newer test.
You might be right in this specific case, since Apple has to worry about Microsoft and Sony muscling in on their turf, but defensive patents just aren't as useful as they once were. Increasingly, patent action is being initiated by litigation firms that do nothing but buy up IP and litigate it. Since they have no actual business activities to threaten they are immune from patent countersuits. (Cue mouldy old joke about patenting patent extortion.)
Considering that the SIIA says that as much as half of all software is pirated, there's a good chance that pirated copies of Windows contributed significantly to the situation.
"Welcome...to the end of the computer age! MUHAHAHAHA!"
Whenever I am reading text and notice it using the word "evolutionist" it's like a lightbulb goes on, and it's suddenly clear why the preceding paragraphs were salted liberally with incoherent bogosity. Calling someone an "evolutionist" in this day and age is a bit like using "geosphericalist" as a pejorative in the 19th century. It's a waste of time arguing -- just smile and nod and back away slowly.
For anyone with legitimate interest in the arguments there's always talk.origins.
I'm told that it was first bandied about during the panic the first time Usenet traffic exceeded the ability of a 9600bps link to keep up with it over a 24 hour period.
While I personally am downloading their new software to see if they have learned their lesson, I can hardly fault others for writing this off as too little, too late.
Circumstantial evidence doesn't mean "bad" evidence; it's a technical term that essentially covers anything except direct eyewitness testimony. Since nobody claims to have personally observed cigarette smoke particles entering cells and causing tumors, any evidence is circumstantial by definition. This doesn't necessarily make it unpersuasive, however -- fingerprint and DNA evidence is also classified as circumstantial.
Having said that, the much-used phrase "variation within [exceeds] difference between them" raises red flags for me. In many cases this phrase carries no real information and is used to dissemble or obfuscate.
It seems like it may be a case of using technical terms correctly, but in a way calculated to cause laymen to misunderstand a certain way based on the plain-English meaning of the words. Viewing a plot of two overlapping normal-distribution curves might help illustrate my concerns.
After reading the description of his library I had the same thought. What exactly is the point of releasing trival, 10-minutes-to-rewrite-from-scratch stuff like this under the GPL rather than any of the other open-source licenses?
The only reason I can think of off hand is to bait clueless developers into shipping it with a commercial product so you can come along and hassle them about it later. In my experience, working programmers outside the Slashdot-reloading set tend to have trouble grasping the subtle distinctions among the BSD/GPL/LGPL licenses, so this activity doesn't seem very sporting.
It's true: if you don't count all the sites running non-Microsoft software, more sites run Microsoft software.
So what?
There's little point trying to prescribe correct language -- it only serves to annoy others and worsen your own blood pressure. And most of the time there turns out to be a reason people use language the way they do.
In this case, there are a relatively small number of possible TLAs so collisions are common. Using the TLA as an adjective -- which requires a noun for it to modify -- has become a common way of providing context for the TLA. For many people, the small amount of redundancy seems to be worth the convenience of not having to spell out the full phrase.