As I understand it, the various evolutionary mechanism theories attempt to explain why existing lineages of organisms change over time the way they do. These theories could be said to explain the origin of human from non-human life, which is a different matter entirely.
Thank you for providing a textbook illustration of the attitude in question.
I'm posting this at work, where I run Mozilla on FreeBSD. I find the Microsoft-only future increasingly scary, so I really really hope that
Mozilla (and the open source UI community in general, really) starts paying attention to the results of their free user testing.
If they don't though, in two years time you and the other two remaining Mozilla users can at least console each other with your obviously superior intelligence.
There are other examples of this counterproductive attitude ("our UI testers find FOO confusing, so they must all be incompetent") among Mozilla's developers.
In MSIE, when you are done with a browser window you can close it by selecting Close from the File menu. Close is always the last item on the menu.
In Mozilla, this same gesture make the entire application quit, causing dozens of apparently unrelated windows to suddenly vanish.
Hundreds of testers were surprised and dismayed that their entire working set of windows was lost when they renamed a bookmark and then tried to close the bookmark editor.
All were basically told to piss up a rope because the concept of a global self-destruct button dangling from the bottom of every File menu (while the more commonly used Close command is buried in the clutter further up) is enshrined in some ivory tower Mozilla UI principle.
> Imagine for a moment that there was a database > created that contained almost every single set > of expressions and solutions for (insert your > programming language here).
I'd love to have my effectiveness augmented by such a system, and would have no fear of its rendering me obsolete. Bring it on.
The only thing that surprises me is that decision makers still take these "analysts" seriously, even though it has been demonstrated time and time again that they are laughably out of touch with what is happening in the real world (outside the endless insular boardroom/trade-rag circle jerk that seems to provide all their data).
cygwin can be pretty slow depending on what
you are doing. The biggest problem areas seem to be POSIX operations that don't map well onto Win32 (like fork(), which must be emulated with file mappings), and operations like process creation that Unix software assumes to be cheap but that actually are quite expensive on windows.
It's true that for things like tooling around in bash you won't notice any speed difference most of time.
Doh! Somehow I attached my reply to the wrong parent. The above was supposed to be a reply to the guy wondering what would happen if your ISP filterered (or transparently proxied) outgoing TCP port 25, _and_ locked down permitted From: addresses.
If they do, then just use the submission port, 587. That's what it's for, after all.
It eliminates a whole class of headaches caused by using the same port (25) for both outgoing mail from one's own subscribers and for incoming mail from the rest of the world.
Stop relying on perfect software to protect your systems. Run the damn thing in a chroot[...]
Defense-in-depth is a Good Thing, but this doesn't mean you should relax and get sloppy with
one layer just because you have other layers
behind it.
Suppose you were choosing which of two cars to buy. One model has a history of catastrophic brake problems, and on two recent occasions has been recalled after negative press following bouts of spectacular fatal collisions. (For the sake of argument, assume the two models are comparable in
other respects.)
Do you (A) buy the model with dodgy brakes, but install a better airbag and seatbelt and write a will; or (B) buy the other one instead, possibly installing the safety equipment anyway?
Since qmail has already had one exploit in its history, why should we believe that the rest of DJB's software is any more secure?
Out of curiosity, which exploit were you thinking of..
is it one of the DOS attacks, or the overflow bug in the third-party vpopmail add-on? (Wait, maybe you mean this one!)
To answer your rhetorical question, I don't think anyone believes that djbdns is inherently more secure than qmail (although it is a lot easier to configure qmail in an insecure way, if for no other reason than that it's capable of running programs from.qmail files). I trust both of them a lot more than I'd ever trust BIND, though,
even if that isn't saying much at this point.
It's possible to avoid the high-risk areas of
C--the standard libraries in particular--while still
enjoying the benefits of it's simplicity, speed,
and ubiquity.
If you are worried about null-terminated strings, perhaps in light of
Theo de Raadt's estimate that half of all calls to
stncpy() and strncat() were
botched,
there are
alternative representations available that
are easy to use correctly and have withstood
extensive real-world testing.
I tried to go to the URL, but got this unbelievable nonsense:
We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended
for access only from within the United States.
It boggles the mind that they appear to have gone out of their way to make their site incredibly inconvenient to use (but at least we're back on topic!:). I guess I could always hop in the car and drive to an internet cafe in Seattle, but it hardly seems worth it.
I tried the anonymizer but it didn't seem to work.
Anyone with a US IP feel like setting up a public proxy just for sho.com?
Lucent PMVision comes to mind. It's been a couple of years since I last ran it, but it's performance was quite adequate even on the wimpy pentium box I was using at the time.
And then there's always the Oracle admin tools,
which are written in Java and-- um, Ok, let's forget about them for now.:)
When mining information from web logs about minority OS
usage, be warned that at least some browsers are misinformed about the OS. In particular,
many of the BSD users running Netscape are running the Linux binary (since it's more up-to-date and crashes less often).
It would be interesting to know how common this is--from what I've seen in passing comments on FreeBSD-hackers, I'd guess quite common for FreeBSD users at least--and to what extent it undercounts minority OSes in these kinds of statistics.
the sound engineers that were selected to test the quality were all from RIAA organizations. And of course, RIAA wants the cracks to fail.
The listening tests were all supposed to be double-blind, though. Only the "ear-goldenness" of the listeners should matter, and not their organizational affiliation, unless your fear is that the RIAA members secretly employ clairvoyants.:)
So are you Canadian or not? I realize there are other possibilities (dual citizenship, or absentee ballot), but this apparent contradiction demands explanation.:)
128kbps mp3s often sound like crap anyway, though, especially when used to encode classical music. A much better comparison would have been with the output of a CD player.
Even then, you'd need to ensure that the
rest of the audio reproduction path was the same: a CD played on crappy speakers will almost always sound worse than a high-quality analog setup with top-notch speakers.
Finally, keep in mind that these kinds of do-it-yourself experiments are notoriously lax at controlling for confirmation bias. This is particularly troublesome when your goal is to measure something as subjective as audio perception.
This is actually how "use constant" works internally: it fakes up a subroutine that (implicitly) returns the requested value. Since the subroutine is defined at compile time, and the compiler sees that it returns a constant value, the constant value is inlined in place of the subroutine call.
So, constants work and are exactly as fast as you'd expect, even though it may seem odd to people without backgrounds in functional languages that a constant is really a special case of a function, but with a built-in performance hack.:)
Here's a question: if you could start from scratch and define a new form of IP just to cover software, what would it look like?
Here's my half-baked idea: short-duration copyright, with source code held in escrow as a condition of obtaining the protection (perhaps the source could be distributed with the program compressed and encrypted, and the agency granting the protection would release the decryption key after 5 years or whatever so you wouldn't be stuck with an unusable binary if the vendor disappeared).
Re:I disagree with this one bit:
on
Author Unknown
·
· Score: 1
it continually amazes me, however, that they can track down a cyber-pedophile, or the Una-bomber, but they
are powerless to stop mass mailings from ISP]s that specifically dont allow them.
The difference is that spamming (unfortunately)
isn't against the law. ISPs almost always know
who owned the originating IP, but all they can
(cost-effectively) do is cancel the account.
Slashdot Mirror
As I understand it, the various evolutionary mechanism theories attempt to explain why existing lineages of organisms change over time the way they do. These theories could be said to explain the origin of human from non-human life, which is a different matter entirely.
On a Mac, the menu is not attached to the window so there is no ambiguity about whether the command affects the window or the entire application.
I'm posting this at work, where I run Mozilla on FreeBSD. I find the Microsoft-only future increasingly scary, so I really really hope that Mozilla (and the open source UI community in general, really) starts paying attention to the results of their free user testing.
If they don't though, in two years time you and the other two remaining Mozilla users can at least console each other with your obviously superior intelligence.
In MSIE, when you are done with a browser window you can close it by selecting Close from the File menu. Close is always the last item on the menu.
In Mozilla, this same gesture make the entire application quit, causing dozens of apparently unrelated windows to suddenly vanish.
Hundreds of testers were surprised and dismayed that their entire working set of windows was lost when they renamed a bookmark and then tried to close the bookmark editor.
All were basically told to piss up a rope because the concept of a global self-destruct button dangling from the bottom of every File menu (while the more commonly used Close command is buried in the clutter further up) is enshrined in some ivory tower Mozilla UI principle.
Gravitational lensing has been observed; here are some photos.
> Imagine for a moment that there was a database
> created that contained almost every single set
> of expressions and solutions for (insert your
> programming language here).
I'd love to have my effectiveness augmented by such a system, and would have no fear of its rendering me obsolete. Bring it on.
The only thing that surprises me is that decision makers still take these "analysts" seriously, even though it has been demonstrated time and time again that they are laughably out of touch with what is happening in the real world (outside the endless insular boardroom/trade-rag circle jerk that seems to provide all their data).
It's true that for things like tooling around in bash you won't notice any speed difference most of time.
It eliminates a whole class of headaches caused by using the same port (25) for both outgoing mail from one's own subscribers and for incoming mail from the rest of the world.
Suppose you were choosing which of two cars to buy. One model has a history of catastrophic brake problems, and on two recent occasions has been recalled after negative press following bouts of spectacular fatal collisions. (For the sake of argument, assume the two models are comparable in other respects.)
Do you (A) buy the model with dodgy brakes, but install a better airbag and seatbelt and write a will; or (B) buy the other one instead, possibly installing the safety equipment anyway?
To answer your rhetorical question, I don't think anyone believes that djbdns is inherently more secure than qmail (although it is a lot easier to configure qmail in an insecure way, if for no other reason than that it's capable of running programs from .qmail files). I trust both of them a lot more than I'd ever trust BIND, though,
even if that isn't saying much at this point.
I'm afraid I'm not grasping the connection between 'void main' and software quality (or lack of same). Could you elaborate?
If you are worried about null-terminated strings, perhaps in light of Theo de Raadt's estimate that half of all calls to stncpy() and strncat() were botched, there are alternative representations available that are easy to use correctly and have withstood extensive real-world testing.
I tried the anonymizer but it didn't seem to work. Anyone with a US IP feel like setting up a public proxy just for sho.com?
And then there's always the Oracle admin tools, which are written in Java and-- um, Ok, let's forget about them for now. :)
It would be interesting to know how common this is--from what I've seen in passing comments on FreeBSD-hackers, I'd guess quite common for FreeBSD users at least--and to what extent it undercounts minority OSes in these kinds of statistics.
> So that's why I voted Gore [...]
So are you Canadian or not? I realize there are other possibilities (dual citizenship, or absentee ballot), but this apparent contradiction demands explanation. :)
Even then, you'd need to ensure that the rest of the audio reproduction path was the same: a CD played on crappy speakers will almost always sound worse than a high-quality analog setup with top-notch speakers.
Finally, keep in mind that these kinds of do-it-yourself experiments are notoriously lax at controlling for confirmation bias. This is particularly troublesome when your goal is to measure something as subjective as audio perception.
You don't actually need an explicit return:
:)
sub foo { "bar" }
This is actually how "use constant" works internally: it fakes up a subroutine that (implicitly) returns the requested value.
Since the subroutine is defined at compile time, and the compiler sees that it returns a constant value, the constant value is inlined in place of the subroutine call.
So, constants work and are exactly as fast as you'd expect, even though it may seem odd to people without backgrounds in functional languages that a constant is really a special case of a function, but with a built-in performance hack.
Here's a question: if you could start from scratch and define a new form of IP just to cover software, what would it look like?
Here's my half-baked idea: short-duration copyright, with source code held in escrow as a condition of obtaining the protection (perhaps the source could be distributed with the program compressed and encrypted, and the agency granting the protection would release the decryption key after 5 years or whatever so you wouldn't be stuck with an unusable binary if the vendor disappeared).
RealAroma had a hilarious parody in this vein waaay back in '96. I think it's kinda cool that someone's going to actually do it.
(Hopefully this isn't redundant..)
The "Packers" vs. "Mappers" distinction looks a lot like the Sensing vs. iNtuiting distiction in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and it's ilk.
See http://www.keirsey.com for an online MBTI clone, or http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html for a more skeptical look at MBTI.