IANAL. Since the computer doesn't work, you should be covered under the implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. Send it back, deny the charges for the credit card, and don't accept any return shipments.
The articles linked to in this story are totally different articles. The only thing they share in common is the general topic of modularizing windows in the anti-trust case, and they both mention the Microsoft expert witness.
The original one is about the floundering of the Microsoft witness on the stand, with some footnotes on the case - no reference is made to RealNetworks.
The current one is about how RealNetworks figures into the Microsoft case with some footnotes of support from the Microsoft expert witness.
This isn't the question of a "minor edit" or "correction" It is a totally different story. If you ran diff on the two articles, you'd get basically entire copies of both articles as a result.
The current article would make a good followup to the original article. I'm more inclined to guess that it replaced the original article on accident rather intentionally because the articles are so different.
OTOH, replacing the original article with the current article nets a huge positive change in PR for Microsoft. While this in itself isn't proof of anything, it certainly merits asking questions given Microsoft's track record of strong-arm tactics.
Good thing the saying isn't he who is without sin cast the second stone.
You (and article): and a solid majority (60 percent) agreed with the statement "some people possess psychic powers or ESP."
Me (you're agreeing with me but arguing with me): I could see some 60 percent believing in ESP, for instance, like the article states...
Headline poster: US. Sixty percent of those surveyed believe in ESP, psychic power, and alien abduction.
I will put it in bold for those reading-comprehension impaired. The part of the statistic in dispute is the alien abduction portion of the claim. Disputing this claim I wrote: I could see some 60 percent believing in ESP, for instance, like the article states, but not 60 percent believing in both alien abduction and ESP.
At the same time I can and can't believe it.:) Chalk up two failing grades on reading comprehension. NSF, please do a study! Slashdot posters, please learn to read!
ObOnTopic: I wonder how much of the misunderstanding of science is not really due to the subject matter being science, but a simple lack of basic reading (and watching/listening) comprehension skills? Does anyone have any comparable links for other topics such as perhaps history?
Grover Cleveland is: A) a muppet B) 22nd president of the united states C) a mascot for a Cleveland, OH sports team
It would be interesting to correlate Americans' incompetence on history with Americans' incompetence on science.
US. Sixty percent of those surveyed believe in ESP, psychic power, and alien abduction.
Okay, I'm sorry, but learn to read. I simply couldn't believe this statistic, so I read the article several times looking for this statistic, and even did searches on 60. Guess what, it's not in there. In fact, the article says:
30 percent of NSF survey respondents agreed that "some of the unidentified flying objects that have been reported are really space vehicles from other civilizations"
30 != 60. And this is just belief in alien craft, not abduction.
I could see some 60 percent believing in ESP, for instance, like the article states, but not 60 percent believing in both alien abduction and ESP.
I'd like to see a similar study done on reading comprehension, starting with slashdot headline contributors.
This is probably the greatest user interface advance for developers I can think of. To have the power of vim for editing, plus being able to ebug in vim, setting breakpoints, stepping through code, etc. I drool at the thought.
Okay, I think 90% of the people responding are missing the heart of the question. The original question was about parallel development, not just working on small changes in the same source tree and then synchronizing in the changes.
The best way to solve this problem is by better design of the software. If your software is well-designed, you the only time you really need to do parallel development is when you're maintaining multiple versions of the software. (i.e. service pack 1 and 2 to windows 95, while you work on windows 98 elsewhere).
The way we solve the problems above is by using a task-based change management solution. We use a commercial product Continuus/CM (now Telelogic/CM) to handle both the parallel release maintenance problem, and the manangement-didn't-enforce-good-design problem. This problem can be exacerbated by having almost random changes in the requirements combined with very tight deadlines. Fortunately, having a task-based CM tool lets you roll with the punches.
In task based change management, groups of file changes are grouped into a task. This task is one unit of work, something like "change product name string from a character string to a unicode string" which may involve touching several files. These file changes are brought in (or excluded) as a whole - the whole being a "task". Integration test approves "tasks", and if a developer wants a task before it has been integration tested, s/he can bring it in manually, and get all the updates.
This allows a group to work in parallel with the main effort, by including groups of tasks themselves that haven't gone through integration test (perhaps because they don't work yet, other developers' tasks are needed, or it's just a large change requiring more people to work on it before it can be tested).
Merging is done when needed, this way. One thing you can do in this program is "show conflicts", to show you what merges need to be done - on your parallel development effort, not the rest of the tree.
The merges never really get confused if you use a decent merge tool (we use tkdiff). The only time you would have problems is if everyone is rewriting the file to be merged from scratch every time... And in that case, the sofware design problems are so bad you really can't do anything about it.
The Continuus/CM software, however, is very costly. I think BitKeepr does some of the same things, but unless your company is one which doesn't mind its company secrets being posted to the web, you will have to pay for that too.
aegis is another free tool you might look into. It doesn't have a GUI, though.
Way back in the day before amazon bought the DVD
purchase service from them, they had an awesome plan. You could rent a single DVD like you would from blockbuster (not a subscription), for a fairly high rate, like $7, including postage. That was so-so, but what was good about it was, if you liked the movie, you could pay the difference to the retail price and they'd let you keep it! I used this quite a bit to buy movies I thought I'd want to own but wasn't sure because I hadn't seen the movie, or didn't know how the DVD content was. That's gone now though, I wish someone would pick that business model back up, though!
If you'd read the analysis articles at all, you'd note that the trick ATI is trying to pull is NOT driver (good)optimization for quake 3, but instead is intentionally degrading image quality to improve benchmarks. Quake3 looks like total crap with the ATI drivers, that's why it's fast.
It's essentially of forcing any game with the name quake3 to run at below the minimum detail levels, regardless of what the user has selected, just in order to manipulate benchmarks.
You can debate whether optimizing for a certain game is good or not, but that is a totally different question from what ATI is actually doing, which is intentionally manipulating benchmarks.
I know it's hard to keep track of all the news, but before saying that some driver changes are "good optimizations", you should really check out the facts first. You can look through the comments for this article and see that most of the slashdot readers only read the headlines and initial blurb. Because of this, a lot of people are misinformed about what is really going on.
What a complete pile of bullshit. It is remotely possible that you're running 2000 on a complete POS
PC in which case perhaps it's possible that either faulty hardware or crap drivers (for example ATI
still hasn't figured out how to make stable video drivers), however BSOD's are incredibly rare on
2000, and on any variant of NT 4 as of SP4.
I got a BSOD on my Dell poweredge running 2000 on the first day, with only the software that I got from Dell on it. It was a different blue screen from the one NT often serves up, but it still was there. Later I installed Mandrake 7.2 on it and it hasn't crashed since.
I will say one thing for it though, now when explorer crashes (all the time) it at least usually restarts it and not much harm is done. Finally MS has an OS that is actually usable, if not quality.
since the US is now sucking up to China it looks like there isn't going to be the proposed World War III
I think this is far from a fargone conclusion.
I can't find the link I want with more specific information on this topic, so this weak one will have to do, unforuntately.
It is only because both sides have nuclear weapons as a deterrent that people like you and me haven't been nuked on the whim of a politician.
thanks to the Randite social policies of the US,
The US doesn't have Randite social policies, if it did, it would be hard to find a starving person on the streets.
On the other hand, if the US government had socialist social policies, they'd be trillions of dollars in debt... (hey wait a minute)
...despite what their Constitution supposedly guarantees.
Learn to read. The US Constitution doesn't guarantee free food or free (as in beer) services of any kind. It guarantees free (as in libre) speech and press and things like that (which unfortunately current US leadership doesn't guarantee either).
OBOnTopic: as far as the use for this computer, I'll take a simulation of anything fission-related rather than have the actual reaction any closer than 8 light minutes or so away.
Opening the source code would reduce the costs of reverse engineering all of Microsoft's proprietary protocols, lowering barriers to competition. That's why they will never do it. They make much more money in a monopoly.
fast, reliable, and cheap, (sounds like some oxymoron) [...] available soon,
Grouping fast, reliable together as "good", as the old saying goes: pick 2 of the 3. You can't have cheap, good, and quickly delivered all at the same time. So yes, it is an oxymoron. 8')
I guess you have to wait for it to trickle down. In getting you to the internet backbone, there is kind of this fat tree tructure, with fat being bandwidth. The backbone is the fattest part (okay, the LAN is the fattest part, but I am talking about the WAN here). If the branches can get fatter (i.e. from the cable company, the local phone provider, or the ISP to the net) then you have a chance of speeding up that bottleneck. And likewise, it can trickle further down to the network that gets the signal from your home to the ISP. The can run high-speed lines to those big green boxes outside your house. If there is enough bandwidth to those (and to the above internet), you won't notice any "sharing effect"
There is also the matter of physical cables. Once companies have the right-of-way, they can wire you whatever they want. Once fiber is cheaper, they can run that to the homes if the part on the tree above can support it. But that is a lot of cable...
Then comes the business part... How do they totally rewire to every home on the the planet with fiber at a reasonable cost?
There is only so much channel capacity on the phone switches and cable networks until they upgrade them... So that is another option. There is still a lot of bandwidth to be had in copper, but you need a lot of electronics to keep it going (repeaters, amplifiers, etc)
It's kind of funny that, after you go to all this hassle, the site you want to download the Diablo 2 movie caps you at a 10kB/sec download speed. 8') Oh well.
Streaming video. Streaming TV. A good idea I think, but when you get people who start to stream movies, that will naturally piss off the MPAA.
Not if they are for pay. You can get movies via digital cable, why not have the functionality of a digital cable decoder in your PC? It certainly can be done, but the question is, can it be video "on demand".
It's all converging now anyway. In some areas, you can not only get cable and internet through your cable TV company's wire, but also phone service (like a plain-old dumb phone with a keypad and handset, not iphone, etc)... The question is, will the local phone companies die out because they are so slow to get decent bandwidth to the homes? Try to get them to put in ISDN or DSL in your home if you are more than N yards away from the office if you don't know what I'm talking about...
And yeah, there are some QoS concerns that IP can't address wrt "internet phones", but... It's happening.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL.
Since the computer doesn't work, you should be covered under the implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose.
Send it back, deny the charges for the credit card, and don't accept any return shipments.
0.5x I mean. OCR messed up that character or something.
If he works for Lexmark, his boss must be really cheap. Kentucky wages are only like 1.5x India developers. All that effort and risk for a measly 0.5%
The articles linked to in this story are totally different articles. The only thing they share in common is the general topic of modularizing windows in the anti-trust case, and they both mention the Microsoft expert witness.
The original one is about the floundering of the Microsoft witness on the stand, with some footnotes on the case - no reference is made to RealNetworks.
The current one is about how RealNetworks figures into the Microsoft case with some footnotes of support from the Microsoft expert witness.
This isn't the question of a "minor edit" or "correction" It is a totally different story. If you ran diff on the two articles, you'd get basically entire copies of both articles as a result.
The current article would make a good followup to the original article. I'm more inclined to guess that it replaced the original article on accident rather intentionally because the articles are so different.
OTOH, replacing the original article with the current article nets a huge positive change in PR for Microsoft. While this in itself isn't proof of anything, it certainly merits asking questions given Microsoft's track record of strong-arm tactics.
Good thing the saying isn't he who is without sin cast the second stone.
.
:) Chalk up two failing grades on reading comprehension. NSF, please do a study! Slashdot posters, please learn to read!
You (and article):
and a solid majority (60 percent) agreed with the statement "some people possess psychic powers or ESP."
Me (you're agreeing with me but arguing with me):
I could see some 60 percent believing in ESP, for instance, like the article states...
Headline poster:
US. Sixty percent of those surveyed believe in ESP, psychic power, and alien abduction
I will put it in bold for those reading-comprehension impaired. The part of the statistic in dispute is the alien abduction portion of the claim. Disputing this claim I wrote:
I could see some 60 percent believing in ESP, for instance, like the article states, but not 60 percent believing in both alien abduction and ESP.
At the same time I can and can't believe it.
ObOnTopic: I wonder how much of the misunderstanding of science is not really due to the subject matter being science, but a simple lack of basic reading (and watching/listening) comprehension skills? Does anyone have any comparable links for other topics such as perhaps history?
Grover Cleveland is:
A) a muppet
B) 22nd president of the united states
C) a mascot for a Cleveland, OH sports team
It would be interesting to correlate Americans' incompetence on history with Americans' incompetence on science.
Okay, I'm sorry, but learn to read. I simply couldn't believe this statistic, so I read the article several times looking for this statistic, and even did searches on 60. Guess what, it's not in there. In fact, the article says:
30 percent of NSF survey respondents agreed that "some of the unidentified flying objects that have been reported are really space vehicles from other civilizations"
30 != 60. And this is just belief in alien craft, not abduction.
I could see some 60 percent believing in ESP, for instance, like the article states, but not 60 percent believing in both alien abduction and ESP.
I'd like to see a similar study done on reading comprehension, starting with slashdot headline contributors.
You have all of their information from the registration process. Why ask us? Call them and find out.
This is probably the greatest user interface advance for developers I can think of. To have the power of vim for editing, plus being able to ebug in vim, setting breakpoints, stepping through code, etc. I drool at the thought.
What a coup.
Next, Microsoft will be suing Skin-so-soft skin lotion and bug repellent.
Okay, I think 90% of the people responding are missing the heart of the question. The original question was about parallel development, not just working on small changes in the same source tree and then synchronizing in the changes.
The best way to solve this problem is by better design of the software. If your software is well-designed, you the only time you really need to do parallel development is when you're maintaining multiple versions of the software. (i.e. service pack 1 and 2 to windows 95, while you work on windows 98 elsewhere).
The way we solve the problems above is by using a task-based change management solution. We use a commercial product Continuus/CM (now Telelogic/CM) to handle both the parallel release maintenance problem, and the manangement-didn't-enforce-good-design problem. This problem can be exacerbated by having almost random changes in the requirements combined with very tight deadlines. Fortunately, having a task-based CM tool lets you roll with the punches.
In task based change management, groups of file changes are grouped into a task. This task is one unit of work, something like "change product name string from a character string to a unicode string" which may involve touching several files. These file changes are brought in (or excluded) as a whole - the whole being a "task". Integration test approves "tasks", and if a developer wants a task before it has been integration tested, s/he can bring it in manually, and get all the updates.
This allows a group to work in parallel with the main effort, by including groups of tasks themselves that haven't gone through integration test (perhaps because they don't work yet, other developers' tasks are needed, or it's just a large change requiring more people to work on it before it can be tested).
Merging is done when needed, this way. One thing you can do in this program is "show conflicts", to show you what merges need to be done - on your parallel development effort, not the rest of the tree.
The merges never really get confused if you use a decent merge tool (we use tkdiff). The only time you would have problems is if everyone is rewriting the file to be merged from scratch every time... And in that case, the sofware design problems are so bad you really can't do anything about it.
The Continuus/CM software, however, is very costly. I think BitKeepr does some of the same things, but unless your company is one which doesn't mind its company secrets being posted to the web, you will have to pay for that too.
aegis is another free tool you might look into. It doesn't have a GUI, though.
Hey, congrats to both of you!
What a great way to propose!
Many years of happiness to you!
Way back in the day before amazon bought the DVD
purchase service from them, they had an awesome plan. You could rent a single DVD like you would from blockbuster (not a subscription), for a fairly high rate, like $7, including postage. That was so-so, but what was good about it was, if you liked the movie, you could pay the difference to the retail price and they'd let you keep it! I used this quite a bit to buy movies I thought I'd want to own but wasn't sure because I hadn't seen the movie, or didn't know how the DVD content was. That's gone now though, I wish someone would pick that business model back up, though!
If you'd read the analysis articles at all, you'd note that the trick ATI is trying to pull is NOT driver (good)optimization for quake 3, but instead is intentionally degrading image quality to improve benchmarks. Quake3 looks like total crap with the ATI drivers, that's why it's fast.
It's essentially of forcing any game with the name quake3 to run at below the minimum detail levels, regardless of what the user has selected, just in order to manipulate benchmarks.
You can debate whether optimizing for a certain game is good or not, but that is a totally different question from what ATI is actually doing, which is intentionally manipulating benchmarks.
I know it's hard to keep track of all the news, but before saying that some driver changes are "good optimizations", you should really check out the facts first. You can look through the comments for this article and see that most of the slashdot readers only read the headlines and initial blurb. Because of this, a lot of people are misinformed about what is really going on.
To exercise your communication skills... Explain this to your boss on tuesday. 8')
I got a BSOD on my Dell poweredge running 2000 on the first day, with only the software that I got from Dell on it. It was a different blue screen from the one NT often serves up, but it still was there. Later I installed Mandrake 7.2 on it and it hasn't crashed since.
I will say one thing for it though, now when explorer crashes (all the time) it at least usually restarts it and not much harm is done. Finally MS has an OS that is actually usable, if not quality.
I hope gore wins so he can get blamed for the impending recession (minor depression if he gets any of his campaign economic items passed...)
I predict the X-Box will have a "no hacking" EULA.
since the US is now sucking up to China it looks like there isn't going to be the proposed World War III
I think this is far from a fargone conclusion.
I can't find the link I want with more specific information on this topic, so this weak one will have to do, unforuntately.
It is only because both sides have nuclear weapons as a deterrent that people like you and me haven't been nuked on the whim of a politician.
thanks to the Randite social policies of the US,
The US doesn't have Randite social policies, if it did, it would be hard to find a starving person on the streets.
On the other hand, if the US government had socialist social policies, they'd be trillions of dollars in debt... (hey wait a minute)
Learn to read. The US Constitution doesn't guarantee free food or free (as in beer) services of any kind. It guarantees free (as in libre) speech and press and things like that (which unfortunately current US leadership doesn't guarantee either).
OBOnTopic: as far as the use for this computer, I'll take a simulation of anything fission-related rather than have the actual reaction any closer than 8 light minutes or so away.
Multiple desktops out of the box. 'nuff said.
Opening the source code would reduce the costs of reverse engineering all of Microsoft's proprietary protocols, lowering barriers to competition. That's why they will never do it. They make much more money in a monopoly.
It's reminiscent of LPC, the language found in the popular line of mud known as LP. I would not be surprised if it was based on LPC.
This is really bad news for all those liberal arts majors out there.
He has the appropriate appearance of the Unix Guru (also shared by Alan Cox) with the long, full beard (universal symbol for wisdom and so forth).
Grouping fast, reliable together as "good", as the old saying goes: pick 2 of the 3. You can't have cheap, good, and quickly delivered all at the same time. So yes, it is an oxymoron. 8')
I guess you have to wait for it to trickle down. In getting you to the internet backbone, there is kind of this fat tree tructure, with fat being bandwidth. The backbone is the fattest part (okay, the LAN is the fattest part, but I am talking about the WAN here). If the branches can get fatter (i.e. from the cable company, the local phone provider, or the ISP to the net) then you have a chance of speeding up that bottleneck. And likewise, it can trickle further down to the network that gets the signal from your home to the ISP. The can run high-speed lines to those big green boxes outside your house. If there is enough bandwidth to those (and to the above internet), you won't notice any "sharing effect"
There is also the matter of physical cables. Once companies have the right-of-way, they can wire you whatever they want. Once fiber is cheaper, they can run that to the homes if the part on the tree above can support it. But that is a lot of cable...
Then comes the business part... How do they totally rewire to every home on the the planet with fiber at a reasonable cost?
There is only so much channel capacity on the phone switches and cable networks until they upgrade them... So that is another option. There is still a lot of bandwidth to be had in copper, but you need a lot of electronics to keep it going (repeaters, amplifiers, etc)
It's kind of funny that, after you go to all this hassle, the site you want to download the Diablo 2 movie caps you at a 10kB/sec download speed. 8') Oh well.
Streaming video. Streaming TV. A good idea I think, but when you get people who start to stream movies, that will naturally piss off the MPAA.
Not if they are for pay. You can get movies via digital cable, why not have the functionality of a digital cable decoder in your PC? It certainly can be done, but the question is, can it be video "on demand".
It's all converging now anyway. In some areas, you can not only get cable and internet through your cable TV company's wire, but also phone service (like a plain-old dumb phone with a keypad and handset, not iphone, etc)... The question is, will the local phone companies die out because they are so slow to get decent bandwidth to the homes? Try to get them to put in ISDN or DSL in your home if you are more than N yards away from the office if you don't know what I'm talking about...
And yeah, there are some QoS concerns that IP can't address wrt "internet phones", but... It's happening.