You can't significantly improve the car supporting infrastructure of London without some major structural work i.e. knocking down large numbers of buildings to make way for new roads. If you do that, the volume of traffic will increase until you are back where you started.
The public transport system in London is probably the most widely used in the UK because for many people, driving in London is a nightmare they'd rather not think about. If it became easier, everybody would jump straight back in the cars and hit town, particularly as the public transport system is mostly in a poor state of repair.
While I think there are serious problems with the proposed scheme, the answer is definitely not "build more roads"
OSS is phenominally successful compared with any of its proprietary competition
Tell me again which OS runs on 90% of desktop PCs around the World.
As my company has avoided these measures, it has produced a superior product for a very low development cost.
Is it even 1/100th of the size and complexity of Win2K or any Linux distro?
Code review is a power trip and best, and a drain on morale at worst
You weren't doing it properly. If the coder is less than perfect, it will help to improve both the coder and the code. If the coder is perfect, it'll help improve the coding of the reviewers (who naturally are programmers themselves, not management types).
And that's one of the reasons why Linux development is progressing so much faster than Windows
On what evidence do you base the assertion that Linux development is progressing faster than Windows? Actually, we should talk about open source, not just Linux - Mozilla is not part of the Linux development effort although Linux is one Mozilla platform. Incidentally, Mozilla has taken four years to get to release 1.0. In that time, M$ has released at least two major versions of IE.
If you analysed the open source development effort, I think you'd find that it is almost unbelievably inefficient in comparison to any commercial software vendor. It's only saving grace is that much of the time and effort put in is for free. There are huge amounts of duplication of effort.
Take the desktop situation as an example. There is KDE and Gnome, both of which are relatively usable but nowhere near as slick as the current Windows desktop interface. Imagine if all the effort put into Gnome and KDE had been concetrated on just one desktop product.
Take the desktop PC experience which is M$'s strongest area (only strong area?). Put the M$ state of the art against the open source state of the art in front of the average non-technical computer use. The M$ product looks better, is better integrated, is slicker, is easier to install, is easier to add new hardware to, is easier to use.
M$, an organisation which is probably much smaller than open source in terms of headcount and which has to pay its programmers has kept ahead of OS in at least one area and it does this by being a managed organisation.
BTW development at M$ is probably done to standardised interfaces, it's just that they don't publish them all to the outside World.
If you read the history of Sealand (which, by the way, probably has a slight propaganda bias), you'll see that the court - a provincial English one - merely declared that it (i.e. that particular court) was not competent to try that one particular case. The issue of whether Sealand is a sovereign nation has never been properly tested in a court. It would probably come down to "can a man made structure be described as land?"
In any case, it looks like the British authorities have decided to take the easy option and let things be. I imagine that every time a foreign nation approaches the British officials with some problem about Sealand and they redirect them to Sealand itself, they (the officials) must be pissing themselves with laughter. It's nice to see that our civil service still has some capacity for a sense of humour and doesn't just go in and step on Sealand.
There are some inconsistencies in Sealand's story. The incident with the German and Dutch businessmen does not constitute an act of war. If they had done the same thing in Britain to a member of our Royal Family they would have been arrested by the police and tried as criminals for unlawful imprisonment. We wouldn't have taken it as a declaration of war by the German/Dutch state.
If on the other hand the Prince of Sealand had shot and killed a British citizen, we could probably treat it as a criminal act or as an act of war. In either case a helicopter full of squaddies would be enough to end it.
BTW i doubt if the extension of our territorial waters had anything to do with Sealand - much more likely to be a European political thing.
i saw the CD trick done on a televsion programme once. The presenter warned people not to do it at at home because the fumes given off were highly toxic (some compound of cyanide apparently).
Secondly, it is a myth that people work better with music playing. People often say "I work better with music playing" but what they really mean is "subjectively, it feels like I work better with music playing." My science teacher once did an experiment with the class that seemed to show that music is actually a distraction for a task that requires a high level of mental activity. When you think about it, that has to be the case: if you're listening to music you must be diverting some of your concentration towards it and away from the task in hand.
Actually you can learn a lot from reading e-mail envelopes and headers. It's called traffic analysis and was used very effectively (on radio communications) during the last war.
Gatso cameras are the wrong type to do surveillance with. They are really there to provide a source of income to the treasury and a pretence that the government is doing something about road safety.
I haven't looked at the code, but it seems to me that the patcher thought that bufsize is of type int i.e. 32 bit signed value and that for large values of bufsize the comparison would break. The questions that form in my mind are:
Is bufsiz an int? If I had been writing the code I would have used size_t. If that is the case, the patch has no effect on any platform with a reasonable definition of size_t which is usually defined as unsigned something.
Is r->remaining an int? If so, the patch should cast r->remaining too (or instead). If the signedness of the two quantities conflicted, it should have been obvious because the compiler would have generated a warning.
On a 32 bit machine, for the patch to change the behaviour of the comparison, bufsiz has to be in the range 80000000 to FFFFFFFF (in hex). I ask myself if it is reasonable to have a buffer whose size is apparently somewhere between 2 and 4 gigabytes.
I concur. In fact in some ways the NT security model is superior to the *nix model. For example, on any Unix box, if you want to start a server listening on any TCP port below 1024, you have to run as root at least for a short period of time.
The argument about services on NT is a red herring. A service is merely the same thing as what *nix users would call a daemon. They only look special because NT provides a (graphical) user interface to manage them with which includes btw a way to specify a user to run as.
I agree the DoS attack is less bad than a total compromise, but it can be bad enough. How would the people at Amazon feel if all their web servers went off-line simultaneously for a couple of days?
He may even know that. The point wasn't that Mozilla has fewer features than IE but that they are implemented differently such that you couldn't sit a n average IE user in front Mozilla and not have them complain about how everything is so different (or vice versa). There's always a learning curve (however slight) involved in moving from one software package to another. Ergo software is hard to commoditize.
The Commodore Pet. Just as every movie ever made to day has an apple of some flavor in it, the Commodore Pet used to be the favorite choice of movie makers when they needed to show a microcomputer somewhere. It's very distinctive looks made it instantly recognizable -- but its lackuster performance and monochrome character-based graphics was a disappointment
Nah, it had exactly the same performance as the Apple II because it had exactly the same processor in it. In the days when the Apple II and Pet were state of the art, it was normal for computers to have a monochrome screen which, incidentally, you got for free with the Pet.
The Apple had better and colour graphics, but the Pet had the ability to display lower case characters which was more important then for a business PC.
My first real job in the late 80s was on the Burroughs B5900 and A10 series which were modern (for the time) implementations of the same architecture. If Unisys still builds mainframes, they probably still use that architecture.
The machine was optimised for Algol and used a stack based architecture meaning that your arithmetic ops etc were done on the top elements of the stack rather than numbers in registers. There was hardware support for creating an Algol stack frame. I'm not 100% sure but I think there was a set of registers to keep track of the scope levels (C has only two levels of scope: local and global. Algol like Pascal can define procedures that contain other procedures recursively which complicates the scoping somewhat).
The programmer only actually saw 48 bits of the 49 bit word. For real numbers, each word was divided into a mantissa and an exponent + 2 bits for the sign of each of those. An integer was merely a real number with a zero exponent. I'm a bit hazy, but I think it used ones complement i.e. (assuming the mantissa sign bit is bit 47, -1 is represented as 800000000001 in hex, not FFFFFFFFFFFF, so you could negate a number merely by flipping bit 47.
If your program crashed, a crash dump would be produced on the line printer. Usually it would take about half a box of fanfold paper which you'd then have to wade through in conjunction with the program listing matching stack frames and variables to the correct names. I remember how we rejoiced after one MCP upgrade when the lines of the crash dumps suddenly started coming out with variable names printed next to them.
He also doesn't say "more performance". If I had an application where four Linux boxes (well three, because if you need all four, you don't have any redundancy and the expected number of failures with four boxes is four times the expected number of failures with one box of the same type) I would consider a zSeries as probably being massive overkill except where the application is CPU intensive.
The analogy doesn't work. Firstly, it's questionable whether Linux is the BMW of the operating system world and defamatory to suggest a modern AS400 is an old rusty Lada.
Secondly, while some "hackers" break in to systems for the fun of it, the ones you need to worry about are the the ones who want to steal the data. Nobody breaks into a Lada to joy ride in it, but leave a stack of dollar bills on the passenger seat and see how long they last.
Fact is, there is a lot of valuable data stored on AS400 systems and not many recorded break ins.
There must be something seriously wrong with that formula. It states that for small values of height the density is extremely large. At zero altitude, there is a sigularity. Having been at sea level several times, I can safely say that density is not infinite there.
The developers wrote it, it's their intellectual property. I think they should be allowed to impose whatever conditions they like on people who wish to take advantage of their hard work.
If you want to make money out of this, I'll point out that for the average Windows user it is a long way from having the source code to having a compiled and running binary. Just obtaining a working dev environment for Windows is not cheap.
Code is not art. Code is more like engineering in that you do it to perform a practical job. As a bi-product, it might have certain aesthetic qualities in much the same way that a well designed bridge is beautiful to look at.
When I'm programming for myself (not following somebody else's programming standards) I sometimes add a suffix to give me a clue about the name e.g _t for a type as opposed to a variable or _p as an abbreviation e.g. instead of "PointerToSomeData" I'll use "SomeData_p".
OTOH I think Hungarian notation sucks. The main reason being that it is at the front of the variable name. I'm a firm believer in putting the important stuff at the front, which is what the variable is for. The M$ dev environment has a class browser and there is nothing more irritating than to see a nicely alphabetical list corrupted by the fact that everything begins with lpsz or m_.
There's a third thing the maintainer needs to know which is "what it's *supposed* to do. Comments are invaluable for that. Consider the following C code fragment:
for (i = 1 ; i ARRAY_SIZE ; ++i) {
do_something_to (array [i]); }
Why isn't it doing something with element 0? Now look at these two fragments
/* Do something to all elements in array */
for (i = 1 ; i ARRAY_SIZE ; ++i) {
do_something_to (array [i]); }
and
/* Do something to all elements in array except */ /* the first one because... */
for (i = 1 ; i ARRAY_SIZE ; ++i) {
do_something_to (array [i]); }
Just by adding a one line comment, a bug has been exposed, or the maintainer has been prevented from inserting a bug in the second instance.
As a maintainer, I'd want to be able to see what the code does (well set out, good structure, descriptive names etc) and what the programmer meant it to do, i.e. good comments.
Anybody who puts jokey unhelpful comments in their code should be aware that these will inspire feelings of hatred and extreme violence towards them in the maintainer who has two hours to fixe the air traffic control system before the 747s start falling out of the sky.
Typically, they charge the shipping agent who then claims it back off the receiver. I imagine that (say) Fedex ships loads of stuff over in an aeroplane with a manifest itemising everything on the plane and pays a bulk charge to UK Customs and Excise. The Customs men problably only check the occasional shipment to make sure that the shipping agent stays honest.
Making a false claim as to the value of goods you are importing in order to evade the various taxes you would otherwise incur probably constitutes smuggling. If you get found out, you probably go to gaol.
Did you point out to her that individual human beings are created by a mechanical process called reproduction instigated by two other people and therefore technically none of us are created by God (even if God invented the process). Further, if some scientists ever do create artificial intelligence, there is no evidence that God either approves or disapproves and it was God that gave humans the tools (viz intelligence) to be able to create this AI. So God probably approves on balance and the AI will be part of God's creation.
Re:Letting users do things that are otherwise ille
on
GPL's Strength
·
· Score: 1
The software as a book analogy simply doesn't work. Software and books are used in completely different ways. To make use of a book you just have to pick it up and read it. To make use of software, you have to first copy it to your hard disk and then into the memory of your computer. Here in the UK, both of those acts are illegal under copyright law. The licence gives you permission to perform them in order to run the program. In that sense it is the opposite of restrictive.
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You can't significantly improve the car supporting infrastructure of London without some major structural work i.e. knocking down large numbers of buildings to make way for new roads. If you do that, the volume of traffic will increase until you are back where you started.
The public transport system in London is probably the most widely used in the UK because for many people, driving in London is a nightmare they'd rather not think about. If it became easier, everybody would jump straight back in the cars and hit town, particularly as the public transport system is mostly in a poor state of repair.
While I think there are serious problems with the proposed scheme, the answer is definitely not "build more roads"
OSS is phenominally successful compared with any of its proprietary competition
Tell me again which OS runs on 90% of desktop PCs around the World.
As my company has avoided these measures, it has produced a superior product for a very low development cost.
Is it even 1/100th of the size and complexity of Win2K or any Linux distro?
Code review is a power trip and best, and a drain on morale at worst
You weren't doing it properly. If the coder is less than perfect, it will help to improve both the coder and the code. If the coder is perfect, it'll help improve the coding of the reviewers (who naturally are programmers themselves, not management types).
And that's one of the reasons why Linux development is progressing so much faster than Windows
On what evidence do you base the assertion that Linux development is progressing faster than Windows? Actually, we should talk about open source, not just Linux - Mozilla is not part of the Linux development effort although Linux is one Mozilla platform. Incidentally, Mozilla has taken four years to get to release 1.0. In that time, M$ has released at least two major versions of IE.
If you analysed the open source development effort, I think you'd find that it is almost unbelievably inefficient in comparison to any commercial software vendor. It's only saving grace is that much of the time and effort put in is for free. There are huge amounts of duplication of effort.
Take the desktop situation as an example. There is KDE and Gnome, both of which are relatively usable but nowhere near as slick as the current Windows desktop interface. Imagine if all the effort put into Gnome and KDE had been concetrated on just one desktop product.
Take the desktop PC experience which is M$'s strongest area (only strong area?). Put the M$ state of the art against the open source state of the art in front of the average non-technical computer use. The M$ product looks better, is better integrated, is slicker, is easier to install, is easier to add new hardware to, is easier to use.
M$, an organisation which is probably much smaller than open source in terms of headcount and which has to pay its programmers has kept ahead of OS in at least one area and it does this by being a managed organisation.
BTW development at M$ is probably done to standardised interfaces, it's just that they don't publish them all to the outside World.
If you read the history of Sealand (which, by the way, probably has a slight propaganda bias), you'll see that the court - a provincial English one - merely declared that it (i.e. that particular court) was not competent to try that one particular case. The issue of whether Sealand is a sovereign nation has never been properly tested in a court. It would probably come down to "can a man made structure be described as land?"
In any case, it looks like the British authorities have decided to take the easy option and let things be. I imagine that every time a foreign nation approaches the British officials with some problem about Sealand and they redirect them to Sealand itself, they (the officials) must be pissing themselves with laughter. It's nice to see that our civil service still has some capacity for a sense of humour and doesn't just go in and step on Sealand.
There are some inconsistencies in Sealand's story. The incident with the German and Dutch businessmen does not constitute an act of war. If they had done the same thing in Britain to a member of our Royal Family they would have been arrested by the police and tried as criminals for unlawful imprisonment. We wouldn't have taken it as a declaration of war by the German/Dutch state.
If on the other hand the Prince of Sealand had shot and killed a British citizen, we could probably treat it as a criminal act or as an act of war. In either case a helicopter full of squaddies would be enough to end it.
BTW i doubt if the extension of our territorial waters had anything to do with Sealand - much more likely to be a European political thing.
i saw the CD trick done on a televsion programme once. The presenter warned people not to do it at at home because the fumes given off were highly toxic (some compound of cyanide apparently).
Firstly, it's illegal.
Secondly, it is a myth that people work better with music playing. People often say "I work better with music playing" but what they really mean is "subjectively, it feels like I work better with music playing." My science teacher once did an experiment with the class that seemed to show that music is actually a distraction for a task that requires a high level of mental activity. When you think about it, that has to be the case: if you're listening to music you must be diverting some of your concentration towards it and away from the task in hand.
Actually you can learn a lot from reading e-mail envelopes and headers. It's called traffic analysis and was used very effectively (on radio communications) during the last war.
Gatso cameras are the wrong type to do surveillance with. They are really there to provide a source of income to the treasury and a pretence that the government is doing something about road safety.
I haven't looked at the code, but it seems to me that the patcher thought that bufsize is of type int i.e. 32 bit signed value and that for large values of bufsize the comparison would break. The questions that form in my mind are:
Is bufsiz an int? If I had been writing the code I would have used size_t. If that is the case, the patch has no effect on any platform with a reasonable definition of size_t which is usually defined as unsigned something.
Is r->remaining an int? If so, the patch should cast r->remaining too (or instead). If the signedness of the two quantities conflicted, it should have been obvious because the compiler would have generated a warning.
On a 32 bit machine, for the patch to change the behaviour of the comparison, bufsiz has to be in the range 80000000 to FFFFFFFF (in hex). I ask myself if it is reasonable to have a buffer whose size is apparently somewhere between 2 and 4 gigabytes.
I concur. In fact in some ways the NT security model is superior to the *nix model. For example, on any Unix box, if you want to start a server listening on any TCP port below 1024, you have to run as root at least for a short period of time.
The argument about services on NT is a red herring. A service is merely the same thing as what *nix users would call a daemon. They only look special because NT provides a (graphical) user interface to manage them with which includes btw a way to specify a user to run as.
I agree the DoS attack is less bad than a total compromise, but it can be bad enough. How would the people at Amazon feel if all their web servers went off-line simultaneously for a couple of days?
He may even know that. The point wasn't that Mozilla has fewer features than IE but that they are implemented differently such that you couldn't sit a n average IE user in front Mozilla and not have them complain about how everything is so different (or vice versa). There's always a learning curve (however slight) involved in moving from one software package to another. Ergo software is hard to commoditize.
The Commodore Pet. Just as every movie ever made to day has an apple of some flavor in it, the Commodore Pet used to be the favorite choice of movie makers when they needed to show a microcomputer somewhere. It's very distinctive looks made it instantly recognizable -- but its lackuster performance and monochrome character-based graphics was a disappointment
Nah, it had exactly the same performance as the Apple II because it had exactly the same processor in it. In the days when the Apple II and Pet were state of the art, it was normal for computers to have a monochrome screen which, incidentally, you got for free with the Pet.
The Apple had better and colour graphics, but the Pet had the ability to display lower case characters which was more important then for a business PC.
My first real job in the late 80s was on the Burroughs B5900 and A10 series which were modern (for the time) implementations of the same architecture. If Unisys still builds mainframes, they probably still use that architecture.
The machine was optimised for Algol and used a stack based architecture meaning that your arithmetic ops etc were done on the top elements of the stack rather than numbers in registers. There was hardware support for creating an Algol stack frame. I'm not 100% sure but I think there was a set of registers to keep track of the scope levels (C has only two levels of scope: local and global. Algol like Pascal can define procedures that contain other procedures recursively which complicates the scoping somewhat).
The programmer only actually saw 48 bits of the 49 bit word. For real numbers, each word was divided into a mantissa and an exponent + 2 bits for the sign of each of those. An integer was merely a real number with a zero exponent. I'm a bit hazy, but I think it used ones complement i.e. (assuming the mantissa sign bit is bit 47, -1 is represented as 800000000001 in hex, not FFFFFFFFFFFF, so you could negate a number merely by flipping bit 47.
If your program crashed, a crash dump would be produced on the line printer. Usually it would take about half a box of fanfold paper which you'd then have to wade through in conjunction with the program listing matching stack frames and variables to the correct names. I remember how we rejoiced after one MCP upgrade when the lines of the crash dumps suddenly started coming out with variable names printed next to them.
He also doesn't say "more performance". If I had an application where four Linux boxes (well three, because if you need all four, you don't have any redundancy and the expected number of failures with four boxes is four times the expected number of failures with one box of the same type) I would consider a zSeries as probably being massive overkill except where the application is CPU intensive.
The analogy doesn't work. Firstly, it's questionable whether Linux is the BMW of the operating system world and defamatory to suggest a modern AS400 is an old rusty Lada.
Secondly, while some "hackers" break in to systems for the fun of it, the ones you need to worry about are the the ones who want to steal the data. Nobody breaks into a Lada to joy ride in it, but leave a stack of dollar bills on the passenger seat and see how long they last.
Fact is, there is a lot of valuable data stored on AS400 systems and not many recorded break ins.
There must be something seriously wrong with that formula. It states that for small values of height the density is extremely large. At zero altitude, there is a sigularity. Having been at sea level several times, I can safely say that density is not infinite there.
The developers wrote it, it's their intellectual property. I think they should be allowed to impose whatever conditions they like on people who wish to take advantage of their hard work.
If you want to make money out of this, I'll point out that for the average Windows user it is a long way from having the source code to having a compiled and running binary. Just obtaining a working dev environment for Windows is not cheap.
Noooooooooo!
Code is not art. Code is more like engineering in that you do it to perform a practical job. As a bi-product, it might have certain aesthetic qualities in much the same way that a well designed bridge is beautiful to look at.
//TODO: what needs to be done
has a more neutral sound. It doesn't imply that there is a bug needing to be fixed that the coder couldn't be bothered with.
When I'm programming for myself (not following somebody else's programming standards) I sometimes add a suffix to give me a clue about the name e.g _t for a type as opposed to a variable or _p as an abbreviation e.g. instead of "PointerToSomeData" I'll use "SomeData_p".
OTOH I think Hungarian notation sucks. The main reason being that it is at the front of the variable name. I'm a firm believer in putting the important stuff at the front, which is what the variable is for. The M$ dev environment has a class browser and there is nothing more irritating than to see a nicely alphabetical list corrupted by the fact that everything begins with lpsz or m_.
There's a third thing the maintainer needs to know which is "what it's *supposed* to do. Comments are invaluable for that. Consider the following C code fragment:
;
;
;
for (i = 1 ; i ARRAY_SIZE ; ++i)
{
do_something_to (array [i])
}
Why isn't it doing something with element 0?
Now look at these two fragments
/* Do something to all elements in array */
for (i = 1 ; i ARRAY_SIZE ; ++i)
{
do_something_to (array [i])
}
and
/* Do something to all elements in array except */
/* the first one because... */
for (i = 1 ; i ARRAY_SIZE ; ++i)
{
do_something_to (array [i])
}
Just by adding a one line comment, a bug has been exposed, or the maintainer has been prevented from inserting a bug in the second instance.
As a maintainer, I'd want to be able to see what the code does (well set out, good structure, descriptive names etc) and what the programmer meant it to do, i.e. good comments.
Anybody who puts jokey unhelpful comments in their code should be aware that these will inspire feelings of hatred and extreme violence towards them in the maintainer who has two hours to fixe the air traffic control system before the 747s start falling out of the sky.
Typically, they charge the shipping agent who then claims it back off the receiver. I imagine that (say) Fedex ships loads of stuff over in an aeroplane with a manifest itemising everything on the plane and pays a bulk charge to UK Customs and Excise. The Customs men problably only check the occasional shipment to make sure that the shipping agent stays honest.
Making a false claim as to the value of goods you are importing in order to evade the various taxes you would otherwise incur probably constitutes smuggling. If you get found out, you probably go to gaol.
Did you point out to her that individual human beings are created by a mechanical process called reproduction instigated by two other people and therefore technically none of us are created by God (even if God invented the process). Further, if some scientists ever do create artificial intelligence, there is no evidence that God either approves or disapproves and it was God that gave humans the tools (viz intelligence) to be able to create this AI. So God probably approves on balance and the AI will be part of God's creation.
The software as a book analogy simply doesn't work. Software and books are used in completely different ways. To make use of a book you just have to pick it up and read it. To make use of software, you have to first copy it to your hard disk and then into the memory of your computer. Here in the UK, both of those acts are illegal under copyright law. The licence gives you permission to perform them in order to run the program. In that sense it is the opposite of restrictive.