Yes, I have thought about this. At one point SouthAfrica was looking quite interesting, however their Telkom monopoly on communications will render your chance of good connectivity asunder. South African/government/ is still also suffering a lot of anti-white sentiment from the Aparthaide era, so that threatens to polarize things.
Brazil is another option - they seem to be interested in moving ahead independently.
That might be the case in the major cities. As soon as you move outside of the capitals (and major regionals) you cop a hefty price premium; naturally you never see it being advertised. A 512/128ADSL costs ~$100/mth where I am, with a more usable 1500/256 costing ~$200/mth.
I'm a small software development company, a one person one in fact. While I don't have any concerns (yet) about the DMCA, I do worry about patent implications.
Given the spate of trivial patents that are granted, it's somewhat inevitable that any piece of software more complex than perhaps "Hello world" is bount to infringe on something, somewhere.
I'm seriously considering moving my operations base overseas. NewZealand would be nice but it's a tad too close, especially since I've heard that there's plans for greater unification between Au and NZ.
I've contacted my state and local representitives about this matter, strangely all of them see to forsee it as something which "will" happen as apposed to something that the people of Australia even have the slightest choice in. Seems to me that "democratic" governments are far from being such anymore.
Actually, you might be meaning "strlcpy". strncpy is just as bad almost as strcpy.
The key issue is (quoted from the man page)
"The strncpy() function is similar, except that not more than n bytes of src are copied. Thus, if there is no null byte among the first n bytes of src, the result will not be null-terminated."
Which basically means that you still stand the risk of having strings which aren't terminated correctly (not quite a buffer overflow at the strncpy point, but will create interesting problems later).
I dunno about going to Finland, but I'm now considering moving my business operations to either NewZealand (who's a bit better than Aus at saying "Piss off!") or try make inroads back into SouthAfrica. South Africa has to be one of the most dangerous 'civilized' societies around but damn, at least my business will have a fighting chance there.
Although not quite specifically what you asked for, I can attest that using valgrind definately helps find many bad errors which invariably would send your coders insane.
I run a small open/commercial hybrid development company here - valgrind has been one of the most impressive bug prevention tools we've ever added to our arsenal.
One very important area of testing/QA is regression testing. Always make sure you have a record of what worked in the/previous/ versions so that when you make a new version you can validate the results against the old. What this does is to make sure that you at least are as reliable as your last version.
We run an automated testing setup (custom scripts) which checks the new software against about 45,000 testcases; the worst part is that it takes about 8 hours with valgrind to get through this (time to buy a bigger server!).
One last thing, if you're compiling C code, turn on -Werror, although some warnings may seem annoying/benign at the time - it's best to fix them all up lest they turn out to be your intermittent, confusing as hell bug later.
Yes, we've tried Cachegrind as well - it was faster still. Though we prefer to use distcc generally for reasons of consistancy of the compile. I'm not saying that cachegrind is broken, rather I'm saying that we prefer the extra security of rebuilding the modules each time from scratch (in the past, we've been badly bitten by a bug).
I came across distcc by chance about 4 months ago, and I must say, it has utterly improved things around here.
We reguarly develop/compile/debug a moderate-small sized software package, typically taking about 1 minute per compile. Now, while 1 minute doesn't sound like a long time, it starts adding up when you find yourself recompiling 100+ times a day.
With the inclusion of distcc into the whole situation, we're able to reduce that 1 minute compile down to a little less than 20 seconds; highly appreciated (although now we have less excuses to go get a coffee:-( ).
Distcc is a great package which can be extremely useful.
Yes, the 'm[uo]m test'. I only wish I had finished my coffee before writing, would have saved my lengthy explaining.
Certainly the viruses/trojans/popups/etc are a key driving factor in people's migration from IE, not to mention that imho FireFox actually/looks/ nicer than IE. I didn't realise how clunky the Windows GUI looked until recently, though XP does seem to have polished things a little bit.
Now, I'm reading a lot in a lot of archives that FireFox will never win over IE and there's a possibility this might be true (ie, it might never claim 90%+ of the market as such). However, what I am noticing a lot more is that people are installing FireFox onto their families, friends or workmates computers and these people are happy to/continue/ using FireFox (over IE). The key difference here over other Linux/non-MS install attempts is the/continue to use/ bit. Previously people would try something for a few days and revert back to IE, now they're staying with FireFox.
This sort of behaviour pattern is similar to what happened back in the early-mid 90's when MS Office started to errode the dominance of WordPerfect and Lotus (and also Netscape).
Already my aging father has gone forth and converted at least a dozen of his own friends from IE to FireFox... and thus the chain reaction starts
Sounds pretty exciting, the gamble of the uplifting herbal-viagra. Can't be too much worse than when my blood boils over when I get spam complaings because someone is pretending to be me:-# *grr*
I've lost track - who are we pointing fingers at again? The spammers or the people who allow them to spam / relay-agents?
As for the people being in Asia, that would mean they'd have to be lying about getting those drugs to you overnight! Damn, looks like my Monday night date is going to be a flop:-P
Gee, I know it's a funny comment - but dang, I rarely see China up there in the top-3 spammer countries. Well over half of the spam I see comes from the good ole US of A. China and most of Asia actually seems to have culled a lot of their bad servers...or did some public-spammer executions |-X * _.->-
You make it sound like no one ever uses their own corporate mail servers?
Not everyone uses yahoo, hotmail, gmail etc. A lot of local businesses will have localised mail servers, these people will now feel the crunch... I can imagine export type companies would really be wailing.
It's not like they all have time on their hands to start phoning up and complaning, let alone even KNOWING who to complain to (imagine if they're a few tiers down from the top ISP). How many of those business would know why their email all of a sudden wasn't being responded to.
Clients love getting email from joe@hotmail.com, very professional looking:-\
While this may actually induce something to happen, I still feel the cost on the innocents is just too high.
I whole-heartedly agree. Acelleration of things like RMX would help things. I've also recently started looking into scanning the emails for particular destination IP's to block those (after all, the scammers/spammers tend to congregate somewhere/consistant/ no matter what the apparent source of the email).
Ag, blacklists have always irritated me - not so much for the fact that they block so many people but because it's so easy and so out of your direct control for something to go wrong (as you said).
This is crazy, blocking an entire country because of spam - while I can appreciate the 'irritation' of receiving spam, the dis-service imposed by this massive block will greatly outweigh the 'service' it's supposed to perform.
It's like back in school, when the entire class would be put into detention because of the actions of one person, it was a pathetic method then and it's a pathetic method now. Ultimately, it comes down to the teacher/blocker being lazy and hoping that such drastic measures will induce the 'masses' to seek out and obliterate the offending party. I never saw such 'action' succeed at school, I doubt we'll see much happen from this either (apart from iritate a lot of people).
*disclaimer: school was more than half a lifetime ago - so perhaps my brain is rusty by now.
Come on guys, I know/. is sometimes a little slow, or repetitive, but 6 MONTHS overdue!? Too late now, Summer is over, it's becoming winter here, sheesh, talk about LAG.
I swear, you'd think that the northern hemisphere thinks that it's the only hemisphere.
It's the tone. To be fair, I have no lack of well formed requests, much like what you offered as an example. It could be said perhaps that the tone of the request is highly indicative of the person whom wrote it. One could simply put it all down to social/diplomatic skills - something which seem to be lacking a lot in the IT world, perhaps people are spending too many of their skill points on their apparent l33+n3ss.
I appreciate well formed requests. I do not appreciate demands. Demands come at a price, a price which must be paid for one way or another. No doubt I could rant on for hours on this topic.
I have to agree with your sentiment. As a developer of a couple of OpenSource projects (BSD licenced though), it drives me insane that I get emails with comments like "Hi, I like your program but it sucks because it doesn't do precisely what I want - please FIX your program". Wonderful.
Incidently, I don't want to start a war here but one thing I have noticed is that/commercial/ people, ie people incorportating my software into their commercial software tend to be far more useful, friendly and courtious, perhaps because, ironically, they see the real value of the software - as apposed to thinking it's some right of theirs to have it.
I probably should wake up a bit more before I click [SUBMIT]
I'm not so much seeing the heat in the roof as an enemy, just rather a quantity of energy which I don't need coming into my rooms;-)
As for the underground pipe idea - yes, that was tossed around, though there were some technical issues (rockbed etc) to deal with, not to mention that there's really no such thing as 'frost' around here too (daily avg temp is well into the 20'C for winter and high 30's low 40's for summer). What it does remind me of is the people who live in a place called Cooperpedi (sp?) who basically live underground.
For now, the insulating method is going to be the one I'm attacking with the most vigor. I'm planning on added the gap+plaster vapor insulation into most of the rooms as soon as I get around to them (ie, lay up plaster board with a 20mm gap from the block wall).
Amen to that - I live a short-stop from the coast on the way to Mt Isa... you may have heard of it, Charters Towers *ugh*. We just put in 3 x 7000btu, 2 x 9000btu and 2 x 12000btu aircon units - because the damn evap unit can't do squat during summer and we don't need it in Winter (when it is actually dry!). Our electricity bill sucks though:-|
These days I'm busy adding reflective insulating foil to every nook 'n crany I can as well as sealing up every gap in each room (so the cold air won't escape). Last summer, despite the AC units, we still all cooked, simply because the radiant heat coming from the roof (infra-red) kept us boiling - hence all the relective foil insulation installations.
Last time I was in Mt.Isa it was cooking at a 'plesant' 42'C (locals were wearing jumpers;-) on my way out to Tick Hill - even hotter and more desolate... but the gold was nice *grin*.
I for one find TheSims with every expansion pack installed and every darn extra downloaded from the internet awfully slow to load up - but okay once running. However, my wife, whom is the Sims fan is now in a pool of tears since TheSims2 is delayed in its release. She's addicted... badly. I just hope that TheSims2 will cope okay on a Radeon 9200SE.
Now, when is TheSims2/really/ coming out! (Please hurry, the drugs could wear off at any time and my wife will commence her programmer-killing spree ---- I'll probably be her first victim, as I'm also a programmer and tried to explain to her why software often slips in release date... HURRY!)
Not a bad idea - I too would like to see them forced to use RW CD's. I've had to produce CDR's of my source code on a routine basis (once a week) to forfill a legal obligation, already there's just too many CD's wasted around this place. Only option I have is to get a shredder for CD's (oh joy, another $170) else my source-code will become accidently public-domain:-P.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the coffee plantations! :-D
We could work non-stop.
Yes, I have thought about this. At one point SouthAfrica was looking quite interesting, however their Telkom monopoly on communications will render your chance of good connectivity asunder. South African /government/ is still also suffering a lot of anti-white sentiment from the Aparthaide era, so that threatens to polarize things.
Brazil is another option - they seem to be interested in moving ahead independently.
PLD.
That might be the case in the major cities. As soon as you move outside of the capitals (and major regionals) you cop a hefty price premium; naturally you never see it being advertised. A 512/128ADSL costs ~$100/mth where I am, with a more usable 1500/256 costing ~$200/mth.
PLD.
I'm a small software development company, a one person one in fact. While I don't have any concerns (yet) about the DMCA, I do worry about patent implications.
Given the spate of trivial patents that are granted, it's somewhat inevitable that any piece of software more complex than perhaps "Hello world" is bount to infringe on something, somewhere.
I'm seriously considering moving my operations base overseas. NewZealand would be nice but it's a tad too close, especially since I've heard that there's plans for greater unification between Au and NZ.
I've contacted my state and local representitives about this matter, strangely all of them see to forsee it as something which "will" happen as apposed to something that the people of Australia even have the slightest choice in. Seems to me that "democratic" governments are far from being such anymore.
PLD.
Actually, you might be meaning "strlcpy". strncpy is just as bad almost as strcpy.
The key issue is (quoted from the man page)
"The strncpy() function is similar, except that not more than n bytes of src are copied. Thus, if there is no null byte among the first n bytes of src, the result will not be null-terminated."
Which basically means that you still stand the risk of having strings which aren't terminated correctly (not quite a buffer overflow at the strncpy point, but will create interesting problems later).
Either use strlcpy or snprintf.
PLD.
I dunno about going to Finland, but I'm now considering moving my business operations to either NewZealand (who's a bit better than Aus at saying "Piss off!") or try make inroads back into SouthAfrica. South Africa has to be one of the most dangerous 'civilized' societies around but damn, at least my business will have a fighting chance there.
Paul.
Although not quite specifically what you asked for, I can attest that using valgrind definately helps find many bad errors which invariably would send your coders insane.
/previous/ versions so that when you make a new version you can validate the results against the old. What this does is to make sure that you at least are as reliable as your last version.
I run a small open/commercial hybrid development company here - valgrind has been one of the most impressive bug prevention tools we've ever added to our arsenal.
One very important area of testing/QA is regression testing. Always make sure you have a record of what worked in the
We run an automated testing setup (custom scripts) which checks the new software against about 45,000 testcases; the worst part is that it takes about 8 hours with valgrind to get through this (time to buy a bigger server!).
One last thing, if you're compiling C code, turn on -Werror, although some warnings may seem annoying/benign at the time - it's best to fix them all up lest they turn out to be your intermittent, confusing as hell bug later.
PLD.
Yes, we've tried Cachegrind as well - it was faster still. Though we prefer to use distcc generally for reasons of consistancy of the compile. I'm not saying that cachegrind is broken, rather I'm saying that we prefer the extra security of rebuilding the modules each time from scratch (in the past, we've been badly bitten by a bug).
Paul.
I came across distcc by chance about 4 months ago, and I must say, it has utterly improved things around here.
:-( ).
We reguarly develop/compile/debug a moderate-small sized software package, typically taking about 1 minute per compile. Now, while 1 minute doesn't sound like a long time, it starts adding up when you find yourself recompiling 100+ times a day.
With the inclusion of distcc into the whole situation, we're able to reduce that 1 minute compile down to a little less than 20 seconds; highly appreciated (although now we have less excuses to go get a coffee
Distcc is a great package which can be extremely useful.
PLD.
Yes, the 'm[uo]m test'. I only wish I had finished my coffee before writing, would have saved my lengthy explaining.
Certainly the viruses/trojans/popups/etc are a key driving factor in people's migration from IE, not to mention that imho FireFox actually /looks/ nicer than IE. I didn't realise how clunky the Windows GUI looked until recently, though XP does seem to have polished things a little bit.
This sort of behaviour pattern is similar to what happened back in the early-mid 90's when MS Office started to errode the dominance of WordPerfect and Lotus (and also Netscape).
Already my aging father has gone forth and converted at least a dozen of his own friends from IE to FireFox... and thus the chain reaction starts
Is it just me - or does it look like this woman has two left arms? If I'm right, her thumb in the reflection should be on the /other/ side.
Yes, quite right.
:-# *grr*
Sounds pretty exciting, the gamble of the uplifting herbal-viagra. Can't be too much worse than when my blood boils over when I get spam complaings because someone is pretending to be me
I've lost track - who are we pointing fingers at again? The spammers or the people who allow them to spam / relay-agents?
:-P
As for the people being in Asia, that would mean they'd have to be lying about getting those drugs to you overnight! Damn, looks like my Monday night date is going to be a flop
Gee, I know it's a funny comment - but dang, I rarely see China up there in the top-3 spammer countries. Well over half of the spam I see comes from the good ole US of A. China and most of Asia actually seems to have culled a lot of their bad servers...or did some public-spammer executions |-X * _.->-
You make it sound like no one ever uses their own corporate mail servers?
:-\
Not everyone uses yahoo, hotmail, gmail etc. A lot of local businesses will have localised mail servers, these people will now feel the crunch... I can imagine export type companies would really be wailing.
It's not like they all have time on their hands to start phoning up and complaning, let alone even KNOWING who to complain to (imagine if they're a few tiers down from the top ISP). How many of those business would know why their email all of a sudden wasn't being responded to.
Clients love getting email from joe@hotmail.com, very professional looking
While this may actually induce something to happen, I still feel the cost on the innocents is just too high.
PLD.
I whole-heartedly agree. Acelleration of things like RMX would help things. I've also recently started looking into scanning the emails for particular destination IP's to block those (after all, the scammers/spammers tend to congregate somewhere /consistant/ no matter what the apparent source of the email).
Ag, blacklists have always irritated me - not so much for the fact that they block so many people but because it's so easy and so out of your direct control for something to go wrong (as you said).
PLD.
This is crazy, blocking an entire country because of spam - while I can appreciate the 'irritation' of receiving spam, the dis-service imposed by this massive block will greatly outweigh the 'service' it's supposed to perform.
It's like back in school, when the entire class would be put into detention because of the actions of one person, it was a pathetic method then and it's a pathetic method now. Ultimately, it comes down to the teacher/blocker being lazy and hoping that such drastic measures will induce the 'masses' to seek out and obliterate the offending party. I never saw such 'action' succeed at school, I doubt we'll see much happen from this either (apart from iritate a lot of people).
*disclaimer: school was more than half a lifetime ago - so perhaps my brain is rusty by now.
Come on guys, I know /. is sometimes a little slow, or repetitive, but 6 MONTHS overdue!? Too late now, Summer is over, it's becoming winter here, sheesh, talk about LAG.
I swear, you'd think that the northern hemisphere thinks that it's the only hemisphere.
It's the tone. To be fair, I have no lack of well formed requests, much like what you offered as an example. It could be said perhaps that the tone of the request is highly indicative of the person whom wrote it. One could simply put it all down to social/diplomatic skills - something which seem to be lacking a lot in the IT world, perhaps people are spending too many of their skill points on their apparent l33+n3ss.
I appreciate well formed requests. I do not appreciate demands. Demands come at a price, a price which must be paid for one way or another. No doubt I could rant on for hours on this topic.
Regards.
I have to agree with your sentiment. As a developer of a couple of OpenSource projects (BSD licenced though), it drives me insane that I get emails with comments like "Hi, I like your program but it sucks because it doesn't do precisely what I want - please FIX your program". Wonderful.
Incidently, I don't want to start a war here but one thing I have noticed is that /commercial/ people, ie people incorportating my software into their commercial software tend to be far more useful, friendly and courtious, perhaps because, ironically, they see the real value of the software - as apposed to thinking it's some right of theirs to have it.
I probably should wake up a bit more before I click [SUBMIT]
I'm not so much seeing the heat in the roof as an enemy, just rather a quantity of energy which I don't need coming into my rooms ;-)
As for the underground pipe idea - yes, that was tossed around, though there were some technical issues (rockbed etc) to deal with, not to mention that there's really no such thing as 'frost' around here too (daily avg temp is well into the 20'C for winter and high 30's low 40's for summer). What it does remind me of is the people who live in a place called Cooperpedi (sp?) who basically live underground.
For now, the insulating method is going to be the one I'm attacking with the most vigor. I'm planning on added the gap+plaster vapor insulation into most of the rooms as soon as I get around to them (ie, lay up plaster board with a 20mm gap from the block wall).
Thanks for the hints and advice.
Paul.
Amen to that - I live a short-stop from the coast on the way to Mt Isa... you may have heard of it, Charters Towers *ugh*. We just put in 3 x 7000btu, 2 x 9000btu and 2 x 12000btu aircon units - because the damn evap unit can't do squat during summer and we don't need it in Winter (when it is actually dry!). Our electricity bill sucks though :-|
;-) on my way out to Tick Hill - even hotter and more desolate ... but the gold was nice *grin*.
These days I'm busy adding reflective insulating foil to every nook 'n crany I can as well as sealing up every gap in each room (so the cold air won't escape). Last summer, despite the AC units, we still all cooked, simply because the radiant heat coming from the roof (infra-red) kept us boiling - hence all the relective foil insulation installations.
Last time I was in Mt.Isa it was cooking at a 'plesant' 42'C (locals were wearing jumpers
Cya.
I for one find TheSims with every expansion pack installed and every darn extra downloaded from the internet awfully slow to load up - but okay once running. However, my wife, whom is the Sims fan is now in a pool of tears since TheSims2 is delayed in its release. She's addicted... badly. I just hope that TheSims2 will cope okay on a Radeon 9200SE.
/really/ coming out! (Please hurry, the drugs could wear off at any time and my wife will commence her programmer-killing spree ---- I'll probably be her first victim, as I'm also a programmer and tried to explain to her why software often slips in release date... HURRY!)
Now, when is TheSims2
Not a bad idea - I too would like to see them forced to use RW CD's. I've had to produce CDR's of my source code on a routine basis (once a week) to forfill a legal obligation, already there's just too many CD's wasted around this place. Only option I have is to get a shredder for CD's (oh joy, another $170) else my source-code will become accidently public-domain :-P.
/own/ backups I use CDRW.
For my