Why? Is it a parody, scholarly work, or other protected derivative work? Is it a backup or time-shift of a broadcast
signal? No
Repeat after me: Puuuuubbbbblllliiiicccc Ddddddoooooommmmaaaaiiiiinnnn wherein just about any use is fair use. So I can play my Beethoven's fifth reproduction all I want... (note that in this instance a specific performance of music that is effectively public domain is still unique and copyrightable, so you make up your own, as DTMF ain't that hard, burning copies of a recording by $orchestra is still piracy).
I think that they suffered from this very problem.
No, Intel just fucked up. Purely human error in designing the lookup tables for floating point division.
Let's
guarantee we are getting quality products (though from AMD, it's less than likely).
Uhhh... yeah. Last I checked AMD made some pretty damn good parts and always has. AMD's chips haven't always been performance leaders, but to my knowledge they haven't had quite the cavalcade of errors intel has (F00F anyone?).
Oh, and the part where you're rabbiting on about quantum tunneling, well, this is not a significant factor on the scale of a cpu. When the walls are the width of an electron, maybe...
Even if an electron or two was heading south of the border, components are not triggered by one electron yet. Maybe in 50 years this will be a problem.
Mod me down for being harsh if you want, I'll still be right and I've got karma to burn.
(plus they're super cheap on eBay. A sparc classic is maybe USD 50 or so, not that this is a serious suggestion per se.) --
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
I mean, what proto-geek kid wouldn't get a kick out of that? Hell, I'd get a kick out of it and I'm 23.:-) Run some power back there, put in some grain alcohol dispensers, you'd be the pimpin' cosmonaught on the block, that's for sure...:-)
I mean, if you duct-tape a Sparc Classic to the side of whatever, you've got the ethernet and serial ports (I think they have or can easily be made to have a 422 as well), and you can run sparc linux on it.:-) So I know that's not really embedded, but what the heck, maybe your controlled device is really big (like a huge pump or valve) and something the size of a lunch box could work...
Personally, I think that proprietary extensions would not be used so often if the standard were to keep up with the times,
accomodating the needs of the community in a uniform and non-propriety fashion.
While you may be right, what's the use of a "standard" that changes every (short enough time period to track the state of the art)? In an ideal world, the point of standards is that they change very slowly so that all applications can adhere to the baseline features and behaviors delineated in the standard.
The politics surrounding standards processes now is bad enough. Imagine what it would be like with a new standard coming down the pipe every 6 months? A new standard that, if your corporation can influence it to use YourThing2000's features instead of TheirThing2000's features, will let you bash the competitor's products for the next release cycle...
Yeah, I thought of that about 10 seconds after I hit submit.:-) You're absolutely right, my remarks make sense only when applied to production systems. Most of the places I've worked for did not have a significant budget for test systems/networks, so to an extent I've been conditioned to go the slow and cautious way by default.
I run into this in the sysadmin field (it's one of the things I can do and have done to bay the bills). By nature I like to always be trying out new stuff and be tweaking things. This is a really bad trait to give into as a sysadmin, where stability, caution, and slow-moving perfectionism are the ways to excel.
Being a programmer gives me more freedom to cut loose (although not as much as I am with my own code, fast-and-loose is no way to run a project somebody is paying for).
Good advice. Here's a few specific recommendations I've heard: csoft.net for good and inexpensive web/email/ftp hosting, and register.com (if you want to switch registrars for your domains or make new ones) as they provide free primary and secondary DNS. The ZoneEdit place sounds cool too if have pre-extant domains through NSI.
Take a gander doxygen (http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/) or doc++ (http://www.zib.de/Visual/software/doc++/).
They're both like JavaDoc for other languages such as C/C++ supporting HTML, LaTeX, etc. as output formats. Good docs (esp. for OO projects) are important, and these two tools let you make them pretty easily. Yeah, more time consuming than// or/*... */ but you get more for your effort too...
Yeah, becuase it splits evenly into two 16-bit values. This was good for LISP (which was along with Fortran pretty much the only game in town as far as high level languages go at the time (we're talking PDP's here) from what I've heard), as the "low moby" (is that the right term? the "low" half of the 36-bit byte) could hold 16 bits of data, and the "high moby" could hold a 16 bit pointer to the rest of a list structure. The two correspond to car and cdr respectively, I think. I don't hack LISP, so please forgive me if I've gotten that backwards. --
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
Minor sidenote: png support in Netscape 4.x is pretty spotty at best. YMMV. But still, you'd only be pissing off ~15% of your traffic (unless _all_ of your visitors are using non-IE platforms).
arsDigita, not arstechnica. aD was actually quite profitable from my understanding (well, certaintly not an IBM or GM or MSFT in terms of absolute dollars but fairly impressive for a small design shop nonetheless).
I think the numbers mentioned by PG were 10K in initial investment, building into a company with annual revenues in the $millions. I don't know what their profit margin was but it was probably pretty good (the customer is buying all the bandwidth and machinery, all you have to pay are salaries, and maybe the occasional Ferrari;-).
I wish I knew more about the case. It's still a shame to see this happen to PG and Co. though, I think a lot of people have learned very cool things becuase of their efforts to disseminate what they've learned.
Dude, call or email CmdrTaco or somebody at slashdot and have them make this a front page story. Definitely news for nerds and stuff that matters. Plus you'll probably get about 90 bajillion donations that way.:-) (I'd donate right now but I'm a poor college student (really, I have $3.41 in my bank account right now). When I get a job in a few weeks I will though.)
I'd hate to see Slackware take it on the chin. It was the first linux distro I tried (Slack96! w00w00!), and the one I keep coming back to (every now and again I've dallied with debian and redhat, but I miss the simplicity and purity of design that seems to be the characteristic of Slack).
If Slackware doesn't have it's own category/icon, a picture of Bob would be cool...;-)
I sometimes think BeOS is the perfect counterpart to free Unixen. I mean, it's polished, performs great on the desktop, easy to use (by non-gearhead users), and interoperates very well in a standards-compliant manner. And it runs on cheap hardware. And it's stable. And it costs way less than Win9x or NT-W/2k-Pro.
I don't know much about office productivity on BeOS, but I heard nice things about Gobe Productive.
I think in my ideal office, in an ideal world, I'd have all the non-techies running BeOS on their desktops with network infrastructure running on things like Linux or a *BSD.
What version of Oracle? 8.1.x seems to be a bit hungrier than that (like 192 or higher just to run the damn java installer). Or else you've discovered a way to tame it, in which case I'd love to hear about it.:-)
I am so not a C++ guru, but I'll try to respond with what I know. (I last used C++ for a class a year ago, of which the major focus was data structures, both the old skool way and with newer features. But I tried to blot out any inadvertantly aquired knowledge after the semester ended with heavy drinking...;-)
Ok, so you have a data structure that uses a Node inner class (or whatever it's called in C++).
If you template that, would not all be well? So like Tree has a private inner class Node that only Tree's member functions can manipulate. Since presumably Tree would only have one data type per instance (an Int tree or Float tree or Foo Tree:), Tree's constructor can make the Nodes be the right type. getNode and setNode and addNode in Tree would also be template based so they return and accept the right thing(type T; removeNode would probably just be bool anyway). What I'm getting at is that you may not need to make an inheritance chain, just one templated Tree class[1]. This is the point of templates as I recall them (I recall reading an interesting interview with the guy whose name I can't recall at the moment who initiated the STL, wherein he said that he very much does not like traditional "OO" programming in favor of generic, paramerterized/templated, almost functional programming).
So anyway take all this with a huge grain of salt.:-) I'm far from being an expert (perl and C and Java are more my thing). And thanks for your reply, it made me stretch my head to think about this stuff again, and brain stretching is always cool.
[1] like the whole Tree class is templated on type T. Then the Node inner class and all the accessor/mutator functions use the same type. So each Tree instance is of a given type. If you wanted a Tree that could hold more than one thing (is that still a tree in the classical sense?), it would get wierd.
I never said the governemt didn't fund stupid ideas (actually I implicitly said the converse by mentioning the Helium Fund). Just because some government spending is idiotic is no reason to deny funding to good projects (just give 'em the dang money and axe something stupid, like Social Security).
The idea of public funding for slack is not a troll, but formulated as it was by the original poster it probably was.
Relying on uptime measurements as the sole determinant of how stable some OS is is a fallacy.
I notice that not one of those high uptime sites seemed to be a place that I'd ever heard of. Not one. Far more interesing would be the uptimes of very popular and loaded sites.
Also, I think uptime is a bit over-rated in any operating system. Sure, having it not crash is nice, but there are reasons to reboot machines.
(This is not to say BSD is bad, I like Open quite a lot. I just that that finding out that Y version of BSD can stay up for X days on some J. Random's machine is trivia at best.)
Still, the basic idea striped of trollness and hyperbole does have merit. Linux is something a lot of agencies and schools and whatnot feeling a budget pinch could use (not with the students or teachers directly perhaps but certainly to replace expensive NT or Novell servers, expensive both as software cost and because you aren't going to get the dusty 486 in the corner to run NT). Furthering the development of linux (say Slack for the sake of the arguement, Mr. Volkerding is an American and Slack is a good baseline "serverish" linux distro that any Unix oldschooler that a school district or agency had would feel comfy with) would be extremely cheap compared to most of the things our government does. Arbitrarily setting the "Slack Development" budget at $1,000,000 a year, that's 1/16th what we pay for the helium fund (I think the helium fund was 16million/year. May be 30 mil.)
Heck, triple that and pay folks to develop software on linux to meet agency needs, like educational software perhaps, or tools for a farm agency, or a slick admin interface that's really foolproof so even an elementary school teacher could admin a Slack box powering the classroom network most of the time without having to call the school admin. And since the OS and the developed apps are open source, every agency could benefit (unlike buying commercial ware for one agency in need at time X). 3million equates to less than a penny per person in the US per year.
It's an interpreter-based language. You can tweak all you want but there is a finite limit to how fast it will ever be. In any case for most of the problems it is meant to solve it is fast enough (i.e. you'll need C (or Fortran) extensions to do fast numerical code, like if you have a 512K by 512K matrix to do a transform on, and this has been done with NumPython; you'd probably never write a device driver in Python; but for writing a network client or GUI it's plenty fast (eons of time are spent waiting for a byte from the wire or an action from the user)). These same factors apply to Perl/Java/etc. just as much.
The Right Way to implement this is to make an abstract class for the tree node, write the tree manipulation methods to work with the abstract class, and make derived classes that store different types of data, with appropriate constructors
that initialize the data fields. Anything that doesn't have to care about the data type can just manipulate the objects as the original abstract class.
This sounds like a perfect place to use the STL and/or C++'s templating mechanism. Trust me, I'm not a huge C++ fan, but the container classes in the STL kick ass (I imagine something like what you describe is already there). Even if the STL don't give you no lovin', templates (and references) make it really easy to write a storage class that works over an arbitrary range of types.
This is just my 2 cent's worth. I'm mainly a C guy too, but the STL was the single biggest thing tempting me to switch to C++.
There is good coverage of all this in Bruce Eckel's Thinking in C++ (and other such as the C++ Primer by Lajoie et al.) I mention Bruce Eckel's books because they're available to peruse online, his site is mindview.net which unfortunately seems to be down right now (maybe it's hosted in california;-). I found a mirror of his C++ books in PDF form here and a mirror of all his books in HTML form here. If you're like me you'll read the book(s)
online and end up liking them so much you want to own a paper copy (and here I make my standard reference to bookpool for discount tech books).
Slashdot Mirror
Repeat after me: Puuuuubbbbblllliiiicccc Ddddddoooooommmmaaaaiiiiinnnn wherein just about any use is fair use. So I can play my Beethoven's fifth reproduction all I want... (note that in this instance a specific performance of music that is effectively public domain is still unique and copyrightable, so you make up your own, as DTMF ain't that hard, burning copies of a recording by $orchestra is still piracy).
--
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Yeah, like they have alt.solaris.x86 but not alt.solaris. ??? (I know, comp.unix.solaris or whatever, but still...)
--
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No, Intel just fucked up. Purely human error in designing the lookup tables for floating point division.
Uhhh... yeah. Last I checked AMD made some pretty damn good parts and always has. AMD's chips haven't always been performance leaders, but to my knowledge they haven't had quite the cavalcade of errors intel has (F00F anyone?).
Oh, and the part where you're rabbiting on about quantum tunneling, well, this is not a significant factor on the scale of a cpu. When the walls are the width of an electron, maybe... Even if an electron or two was heading south of the border, components are not triggered by one electron yet. Maybe in 50 years this will be a problem.
Mod me down for being harsh if you want, I'll still be right and I've got karma to burn.
--
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(plus they're super cheap on eBay. A sparc classic is maybe USD 50 or so, not that this is a serious suggestion per se.)
--
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I mean, what proto-geek kid wouldn't get a kick out of that? Hell, I'd get a kick out of it and I'm 23. :-) Run some power back there, put in some grain alcohol dispensers, you'd be the pimpin' cosmonaught on the block, that's for sure... :-)
--
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I mean, if you duct-tape a Sparc Classic to the side of whatever, you've got the ethernet and serial ports (I think they have or can easily be made to have a 422 as well), and you can run sparc linux on it. :-) So I know that's not really embedded, but what the heck, maybe your controlled device is really big (like a huge pump or valve) and something the size of a lunch box could work...
--
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While you may be right, what's the use of a "standard" that changes every (short enough time period to track the state of the art)? In an ideal world, the point of standards is that they change very slowly so that all applications can adhere to the baseline features and behaviors delineated in the standard.
The politics surrounding standards processes now is bad enough. Imagine what it would be like with a new standard coming down the pipe every 6 months? A new standard that, if your corporation can influence it to use YourThing2000's features instead of TheirThing2000's features, will let you bash the competitor's products for the next release cycle...
--
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Yeah, I thought of that about 10 seconds after I hit submit. :-) You're absolutely right, my remarks make sense only when applied to production systems. Most of the places I've worked for did not have a significant budget for test systems/networks, so to an extent I've been conditioned to go the slow and cautious way by default.
--
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I run into this in the sysadmin field (it's one of the things I can do and have done to bay the bills). By nature I like to always be trying out new stuff and be tweaking things. This is a really bad trait to give into as a sysadmin, where stability, caution, and slow-moving perfectionism are the ways to excel. Being a programmer gives me more freedom to cut loose (although not as much as I am with my own code, fast-and-loose is no way to run a project somebody is paying for).
--
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Good advice. Here's a few specific recommendations I've heard: csoft.net for good and inexpensive web/email/ftp hosting, and register.com (if you want to switch registrars for your domains or make new ones) as they provide free primary and secondary DNS. The ZoneEdit place sounds cool too if have pre-extant domains through NSI.
--
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Take a gander doxygen (http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/) or doc++ (http://www.zib.de/Visual/software/doc++/).
They're both like JavaDoc for other languages such as C/C++ supporting HTML, LaTeX, etc. as output formats. Good docs (esp. for OO projects) are important, and these two tools let you make them pretty easily. Yeah, more time consuming than // or /* ... */ but you get more for your effort too...
--
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Yeah, becuase it splits evenly into two 16-bit values. This was good for LISP (which was along with Fortran pretty much the only game in town as far as high level languages go at the time (we're talking PDP's here) from what I've heard), as the "low moby" (is that the right term? the "low" half of the 36-bit byte) could hold 16 bits of data, and the "high moby" could hold a 16 bit pointer to the rest of a list structure. The two correspond to car and cdr respectively, I think. I don't hack LISP, so please forgive me if I've gotten that backwards.
--
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Minor sidenote: png support in Netscape 4.x is pretty spotty at best. YMMV. But still, you'd only be pissing off ~15% of your traffic (unless _all_ of your visitors are using non-IE platforms).
--
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You never know, he could be doing a network install ... from Pluto.
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arsDigita, not arstechnica. aD was actually quite profitable from my understanding (well, certaintly not an IBM or GM or MSFT in terms of absolute dollars but fairly impressive for a small design shop nonetheless).
I think the numbers mentioned by PG were 10K in initial investment, building into a company with annual revenues in the $millions. I don't know what their profit margin was but it was probably pretty good (the customer is buying all the bandwidth and machinery, all you have to pay are salaries, and maybe the occasional Ferrari ;-).
I wish I knew more about the case. It's still a shame to see this happen to PG and Co. though, I think a lot of people have learned very cool things becuase of their efforts to disseminate what they've learned.
--
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Well, exploding when dropped would be a security feature for those really paranoid clients. "Don't make me drop this thing!" :-)
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Dude, call or email CmdrTaco or somebody at slashdot and have them make this a front page story. Definitely news for nerds and stuff that matters. Plus you'll probably get about 90 bajillion donations that way. :-) (I'd donate right now but I'm a poor college student (really, I have $3.41 in my bank account right now). When I get a job in a few weeks I will though.)
I'd hate to see Slackware take it on the chin. It was the first linux distro I tried (Slack96! w00w00!), and the one I keep coming back to (every now and again I've dallied with debian and redhat, but I miss the simplicity and purity of design that seems to be the characteristic of Slack).
If Slackware doesn't have it's own category/icon, a picture of Bob would be cool... ;-)
--
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I sometimes think BeOS is the perfect counterpart to free Unixen. I mean, it's polished, performs great on the desktop, easy to use (by non-gearhead users), and interoperates very well in a standards-compliant manner. And it runs on cheap hardware. And it's stable. And it costs way less than Win9x or NT-W/2k-Pro.
I don't know much about office productivity on BeOS, but I heard nice things about Gobe Productive.
I think in my ideal office, in an ideal world, I'd have all the non-techies running BeOS on their desktops with network infrastructure running on things like Linux or a *BSD.
--
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What version of Oracle? 8.1.x seems to be a bit hungrier than that (like 192 or higher just to run the damn java installer). Or else you've discovered a way to tame it, in which case I'd love to hear about it. :-)
--
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I am so not a C++ guru, but I'll try to respond with what I know. (I last used C++ for a class a year ago, of which the major focus was data structures, both the old skool way and with newer features. But I tried to blot out any inadvertantly aquired knowledge after the semester ended with heavy drinking... ;-)
Ok, so you have a data structure that uses a Node inner class (or whatever it's called in C++). If you template that, would not all be well? So like Tree has a private inner class Node that only Tree's member functions can manipulate. Since presumably Tree would only have one data type per instance (an Int tree or Float tree or Foo Tree :), Tree's constructor can make the Nodes be the right type. getNode and setNode and addNode in Tree would also be template based so they return and accept the right thing(type T; removeNode would probably just be bool anyway). What I'm getting at is that you may not need to make an inheritance chain, just one templated Tree class[1]. This is the point of templates as I recall them (I recall reading an interesting interview with the guy whose name I can't recall at the moment who initiated the STL, wherein he said that he very much does not like traditional "OO" programming in favor of generic, paramerterized/templated, almost functional programming).
So anyway take all this with a huge grain of salt. :-) I'm far from being an expert (perl and C and Java are more my thing). And thanks for your reply, it made me stretch my head to think about this stuff again, and brain stretching is always cool.
[1] like the whole Tree class is templated on type T. Then the Node inner class and all the accessor/mutator functions use the same type. So each Tree instance is of a given type. If you wanted a Tree that could hold more than one thing (is that still a tree in the classical sense?), it would get wierd.
--
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I never said the governemt didn't fund stupid ideas (actually I implicitly said the converse by mentioning the Helium Fund). Just because some government spending is idiotic is no reason to deny funding to good projects (just give 'em the dang money and axe something stupid, like Social Security).
The idea of public funding for slack is not a troll, but formulated as it was by the original poster it probably was.
--
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Relying on uptime measurements as the sole determinant of how stable some OS is is a fallacy. I notice that not one of those high uptime sites seemed to be a place that I'd ever heard of. Not one. Far more interesing would be the uptimes of very popular and loaded sites.
Also, I think uptime is a bit over-rated in any operating system. Sure, having it not crash is nice, but there are reasons to reboot machines.
(This is not to say BSD is bad, I like Open quite a lot. I just that that finding out that Y version of BSD can stay up for X days on some J. Random's machine is trivia at best.)
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yes, or somebody trying to be funny
Still, the basic idea striped of trollness and hyperbole does have merit. Linux is something a lot of agencies and schools and whatnot feeling a budget pinch could use (not with the students or teachers directly perhaps but certainly to replace expensive NT or Novell servers, expensive both as software cost and because you aren't going to get the dusty 486 in the corner to run NT). Furthering the development of linux (say Slack for the sake of the arguement, Mr. Volkerding is an American and Slack is a good baseline "serverish" linux distro that any Unix oldschooler that a school district or agency had would feel comfy with) would be extremely cheap compared to most of the things our government does. Arbitrarily setting the "Slack Development" budget at $1,000,000 a year, that's 1/16th what we pay for the helium fund (I think the helium fund was 16million/year. May be 30 mil.)
Heck, triple that and pay folks to develop software on linux to meet agency needs, like educational software perhaps, or tools for a farm agency, or a slick admin interface that's really foolproof so even an elementary school teacher could admin a Slack box powering the classroom network most of the time without having to call the school admin. And since the OS and the developed apps are open source, every agency could benefit (unlike buying commercial ware for one agency in need at time X). 3million equates to less than a penny per person in the US per year.
--
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It's an interpreter-based language. You can tweak all you want but there is a finite limit to how fast it will ever be. In any case for most of the problems it is meant to solve it is fast enough (i.e. you'll need C (or Fortran) extensions to do fast numerical code, like if you have a 512K by 512K matrix to do a transform on, and this has been done with NumPython; you'd probably never write a device driver in Python; but for writing a network client or GUI it's plenty fast (eons of time are spent waiting for a byte from the wire or an action from the user)). These same factors apply to Perl/Java/etc. just as much.
--
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This sounds like a perfect place to use the STL and/or C++'s templating mechanism. Trust me, I'm not a huge C++ fan, but the container classes in the STL kick ass (I imagine something like what you describe is already there). Even if the STL don't give you no lovin', templates (and references) make it really easy to write a storage class that works over an arbitrary range of types.
This is just my 2 cent's worth. I'm mainly a C guy too, but the STL was the single biggest thing tempting me to switch to C++.
There is good coverage of all this in Bruce Eckel's Thinking in C++ (and other such as the C++ Primer by Lajoie et al.) I mention Bruce Eckel's books because they're available to peruse online, his site is mindview.net which unfortunately seems to be down right now (maybe it's hosted in california ;-). I found a mirror of his C++ books in PDF form here and a mirror of all his books in HTML form here. If you're like me you'll read the book(s)
online and end up liking them so much you want to own a paper copy (and here I make my standard reference to bookpool for discount tech books).
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