Actually, LLVM is (or was, I'm not sure what the current status is) a candidate for a new middle/backend for GCC.
Re:EGCS link also unclear
on
GCC 4.2.1 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
Mostly EGCS happened because Richard Kenner, while widely recognized as an excellent compiler engineer, wasn't that good a maintainer. In particular, the Cygnus people felt that their changes to the C++ front-end was too long to get in to the mainline tree. The egcs branch tried to "modernize" the development process with open mailing lists and anonymous cvs access, as opposed to the traditional ("Cathedral") approach.
Officially the egcs was an experimental branch of gcc, and there was never a feud between the Cygnus guys between egcs, and the FSF. The FSF could thus make egcs the official gcc branch without losing face, the experiment had simply been a success.
The "link" to egcs is simply because the submitter is a troll. That gcc would change to GPL3 has been known and accepted since the whole GPL3 process started, and those developers who cared have responded by getting involved in the GPL3 process. The rare protests have been from non-developers only, and have seem more motivated by misguided Linus worship than by anything else.
1), 2) and the first 3) are really compiler problems, and not associated with the code as such. Kind of like when the FSF decided to target platforms with 32 bit flat address space, at a time where 16-bit segments were the norm. It made their code prettier and easier to read, but in the short run less useful. I have no problems with that.
The second 3) is the real issue, template meta-programming tend to divide the user community into library users, and library writers. As losing as the users stay users, everything is fine, but in case of a bug in the library, users are suddenly writers.
According to a Alexandria School of Business survey released 4000 years ago, the boom in papyrus that store reams of business listings has created a generation incapable of memorizing simple things. In effect, the study argues, these devices have replaced our long-term memory capabilities. 'As many as a third of those surveyed under the age of 30 were unable to recall the amount of items in their store without resorting to their papyrus scrolls. When it came to remembering important dates such as the birthdays of business associates, 87 per cent of those over the age of 50 could remember the details, compared with 40 per cent of those under the age of 30.'
(Our brains adapt to make the most efficient use of our tools. Who would have thought?)
> Sure, the GPL is viral. I don't think anyone really denies that.
I do. The "GPL is viral" meme was invented by GPL-haters as a replacement for real arguments, and spread by trolls and useful idiots.
The GPL encourages people to volunteer their own software under similar terms, by offering them something valuable in return. A virus (biological or computer) is extremely poor analogy for that, except for the strong negative connotations. Which is the only reason it was invented.
Well, given that he is the maintainer, Ingo Molnar's code is presumably more maintainable. It happens all the time in free software projects, someone submits a patch, the idea in the patch is good, but the section of the code is important enough that the maintainer must be certain he understands it. Rewriting it is a good way to gain such understanding.
Back when I was a maintainer, I guess I rewrote half the patches I got. Most submitters are just happy to see the functionality in there, but there was a few people with fragile egos take it as a personal insult That happens, life goes on, and usually the fragile egos grow more robust with time, and learn that developing what amounts to a prototype of the final code is also a valuable contribution.
> You're "joke" is pretty flawed. Linux does not have the ability to replicate itself without human > intervention; therefore, it does not have the ability to evolve.
You confuse the general concept of evolution with the biological concept of evolution. The former does not require self-replication.
And, although poorly stated, it is not really "just" a joke. One reason the "intelligent design" arguments are crap to me, is that my experience as a programmer tells me that the more complex a program is, the more "evolution" dominates over "design" in its creation. A program designed from scratch tend to be simple and elegant. As time goes by, and the program has to adapt to an ever changing environment, the more complex it becomes. And that change happens by many small steps, which is what the word "evolution" in general means.
Uh, geeks were also working late night in my time as a young geek (the 80's), and the older geeks told similar stories of their all-nighters from the 60's and 70's. But cola, not coffee, was the preferred medium for Caffeine.
Geeks don't work late because of any dot-com bubble, but because we like the quiet and because the work is too exciting to leave.
It is not hypothetical. Here is a testimony of one such person.
As long as the people are paid to improve the quality per Wikipedia standards, rather than to promote a particular POV, I consider such "hired editors" for a contribution.
I not an American either, but I lived two years in New Jersey. It is not Hell, it is just... boring. One huge suburb. They call themselves "The Garden State", and their national pride is the color of the leaves in the autumn. I can understand why young people are eager to leave, and badmouth it. They will come back when they get kids themselves.
Famring = converting sunlight into food
on
Vertical Farming
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· Score: 1
Apart from nuclear and geothermal power, all our energy comes from the Sun. Building vertically isn't going to give us more light. Even if the rays doesn't come directly from above, they will just overshadow land behind it. And artificial lightening requires power.
Mushrooms gets their energy from decomposing materials build from sunlight, so that won't contribute anything new, but may help make more efficient use of the light.
Instead of building vertically, find a way to utilize the light wasted on deserts and the oceans. That will matter.
The FSF has used the syscall interface as a guideline to determine whether something is a derived work or not. It is a guideline, not a hard rule though, and I suspect they would consider user-space ZFS for a derived work using a technical trick to avoid being linked into the kernel. I.e. infringing. However, since the FSF doesn't own the kernel, their opinion on the subject doesn't matter.
> Following your logic - which is indeed a possibility - isn't it OK to assume that the USA will do > the same with software made by US corporations and sold to Venezuela?
He said GOVERNMENT computers. The US computers are made by PRIVATE companies. And we all know that private companies are lead by people with strong moral principles, which they would never sell out of to the government.
> So the most useful tool in the house for protecting ones self from a criminal is also > forbidden by law from being used?
No, you are allowed to run or call the authorities for help, so the two most useful tools are both allowed.
But I suppose you was intending to refer to the use of guns for self defense, and got carried away by some politically motivated reality warp. So here is the answer to the intended question: Even if you can't own a gun for that purpose, you can still, in theory, use your sports/hunting/collectible gun for it. However, the courts (in Denmark) interpret this provision very strictly. If you any other options, such as running away, you will still be be convicted of assault. And if you kill a living person in order to protect a dead thing, you will go in for murder for sure.
The police monopoly on legal violence has very few exceptions around here.
> With little risk of facing deadly force, why wouldn't a crook raid a house over a business > where alarms are nearly ubiquitous and police response more prompt?
They may risk hurting the occupants, which would for sure mean that the police would investigate the case, rather than just file it as a statistics (as for normal break ins). Even just a break in where the occupants are (and stays) asleep attracts media coverage, and thus vastly increased police effort.
Why bother when there are plenty of empty houses to choose from? It is just bad business.
I don't see Swiss regulation much different from the rest of Europe. You are allowed to own weapons for hunting, sport and collection. Same in Denmark. And the "home guard" (part of the military) store military owned weapons at home. Same in Denmark.
There are strict regulation for how the weapons are stored, the weapons needs to be safely locked aways, and the ammunitions needs to be stored separately from the guns. This makes them inefficient for self defense, which anyway isn't a legal reason to own weapons. Like in Denmark.
So the only real difference seems to be that the army (and home guard) is larger in Switzerland. Otherwise, Switzerland is much more similar to the rest of EU than to US with regard to weapon regulation.
Of course, I might be misinformed about Swiss weapon laws.
LEGO is producing for a global audience, Danish moral is irrelevant.
I very much doubt "safe" refers to either graphic violence or sex, but mostly to pedophiles making real world contact with the children. The buddy system where you can only interact meaningfully with real world friends (who have told you their buddy code) should work well. Communication with strangers should be much more restricted than the GP suggest, only a limited number (15 - 20) of fixed phrases allowed.
> Remember how VI couldn't handle the arrow keys before? It's come a long way, hasn't it?
Actually, no. When I first suffered vi back in the 80's, it already handled arrow keys. It relied on timing though (to distinguish the escape sequences generated by the arrow keys from a stand alone mode switching ESC), so it didn't always worked reliable when connecting over a slow line.
Emacs only got out-of-the-box support for arrow keys later (still in the 80', but later), at least on termcap terminals. I believe the X10 (and later X11) drivers supported arrow keys from the beginning. A real framework for supporting special keys on termcap terminals had to wait for Emacs 19, that is, the 90's).
ISTM that this would be unenforcible anyway, as parties like Google aren't actually distributing anything. The only way to do it would be to turn the GPL into a form of EULA, which most open-source people tend to loathe.
You are probably right. I remember it being on the original list of things to fix in the next version.
IMNSHO, this is why GCC and related development tools should be BSD or MIT licensed, like TCP/IP or X11. What's the point of using the GPL if you have to make exception after exception?
You have to put in a single exception for the runtime part. I don't see that as any reason to reduce the protection for the rest of the tool. Especially since GCC is RMS's favorite success story for the copyleft, where both the C++ and Objective-C front ends were made free only after the involved companies had given up on finding a way around the license. NeXT allegedly first proposed to distribute the Objective-C front end as.o files, to be linked to the rest of GCC by the user.
I prefer to see the grandparent post as satire rather than FUD, but to each his own.
Slashdot Mirror
The Britannica article has nothing negative to say about circumcision either:
u mcision
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9082690/circ
Actually, LLVM is (or was, I'm not sure what the current status is) a candidate for a new middle/backend for GCC.
Mostly EGCS happened because Richard Kenner, while widely recognized as an excellent compiler engineer, wasn't that good a maintainer. In particular, the Cygnus people felt that their changes to the C++ front-end was too long to get in to the mainline tree. The egcs branch tried to "modernize" the development process with open mailing lists and anonymous cvs access, as opposed to the traditional ("Cathedral") approach.
Officially the egcs was an experimental branch of gcc, and there was never a feud between the Cygnus guys between egcs, and the FSF. The FSF could thus make egcs the official gcc branch without losing face, the experiment had simply been a success.
The "link" to egcs is simply because the submitter is a troll. That gcc would change to GPL3 has been known and accepted since the whole GPL3 process started, and those developers who cared have responded by getting involved in the GPL3 process. The rare protests have been from non-developers only, and have seem more motivated by misguided Linus worship than by anything else.
1), 2) and the first 3) are really compiler problems, and not associated with the code as such. Kind of like when the FSF decided to target platforms with 32 bit flat address space, at a time where 16-bit segments were the norm. It made their code prettier and easier to read, but in the short run less useful. I have no problems with that.
The second 3) is the real issue, template meta-programming tend to divide the user community into library users, and library writers. As losing as the users stay users, everything is fine, but in case of a bug in the library, users are suddenly writers.
According to a Alexandria School of Business survey released 4000 years ago, the boom in papyrus that store reams of business listings has created a generation incapable of memorizing simple things. In effect, the study argues, these devices have replaced our long-term memory capabilities. 'As many as a third of those surveyed under the age of 30 were unable to recall the amount of items in their store without resorting to their papyrus scrolls. When it came to remembering important dates such as the birthdays of business associates, 87 per cent of those over the age of 50 could remember the details, compared with 40 per cent of those under the age of 30.'
(Our brains adapt to make the most efficient use of our tools. Who would have thought?)
> Sure, the GPL is viral. I don't think anyone really denies that.
I do. The "GPL is viral" meme was invented by GPL-haters as a replacement for real arguments, and spread by trolls and useful idiots.
The GPL encourages people to volunteer their own software under similar terms, by offering them something valuable in return. A virus (biological or computer) is extremely poor analogy for that, except for the strong negative connotations. Which is the only reason it was invented.
Well, given that he is the maintainer, Ingo Molnar's code is presumably more maintainable. It happens all the time in free software projects, someone submits a patch, the idea in the patch is good, but the section of the code is important enough that the maintainer must be certain he understands it. Rewriting it is a good way to gain such understanding.
Back when I was a maintainer, I guess I rewrote half the patches I got. Most submitters are just happy to see the functionality in there, but there was a few people with fragile egos take it as a personal insult That happens, life goes on, and usually the fragile egos grow more robust with time, and learn that developing what amounts to a prototype of the final code is also a valuable contribution.
> You're "joke" is pretty flawed. Linux does not have the ability to replicate itself without human
> intervention; therefore, it does not have the ability to evolve.
You confuse the general concept of evolution with the biological concept of evolution. The former does not require self-replication.
And, although poorly stated, it is not really "just" a joke. One reason the "intelligent design" arguments are crap to me, is that my experience as a programmer tells me that the more complex a program is, the more "evolution" dominates over "design" in its creation. A program designed from scratch tend to be simple and elegant. As time goes by, and the program has to adapt to an ever changing environment, the more complex it becomes. And that change happens by many small steps, which is what the word "evolution" in general means.
Uh, geeks were also working late night in my time as a young geek (the 80's), and the older geeks told similar stories of their all-nighters from the 60's and 70's. But cola, not coffee, was the preferred medium for Caffeine.
Geeks don't work late because of any dot-com bubble, but because we like the quiet and because the work is too exciting to leave.
It is not hypothetical. Here is a testimony of one such person.
As long as the people are paid to improve the quality per Wikipedia standards, rather than to promote a particular POV, I consider such "hired editors" for a contribution.
I not an American either, but I lived two years in New Jersey. It is not Hell, it is just ... boring. One huge suburb. They call themselves "The Garden State", and their national pride is the color of the leaves in the autumn. I can understand why young people are eager to leave, and badmouth it. They will come back when they get kids themselves.
Apart from nuclear and geothermal power, all our energy comes from the Sun. Building vertically isn't going to give us more light. Even if the rays doesn't come directly from above, they will just overshadow land behind it. And artificial lightening requires power.
Mushrooms gets their energy from decomposing materials build from sunlight, so that won't contribute anything new, but may help make more efficient use of the light.
Instead of building vertically, find a way to utilize the light wasted on deserts and the oceans. That will matter.
The FSF has used the syscall interface as a guideline to determine whether something is a derived work or not. It is a guideline, not a hard rule though, and I suspect they would consider user-space ZFS for a derived work using a technical trick to avoid being linked into the kernel. I.e. infringing. However, since the FSF doesn't own the kernel, their opinion on the subject doesn't matter.
> Following your logic - which is indeed a possibility - isn't it OK to assume that the USA will do
> the same with software made by US corporations and sold to Venezuela?
He said GOVERNMENT computers. The US computers are made by PRIVATE companies. And we all know that private companies are lead by people with strong moral principles, which they would never sell out of to the government.
> So the most useful tool in the house for protecting ones self from a criminal is also
> forbidden by law from being used?
No, you are allowed to run or call the authorities for help, so the two most useful tools are both allowed.
But I suppose you was intending to refer to the use of guns for self defense, and got carried away by some politically motivated reality warp. So here is the answer to the intended question: Even if you can't own a gun for that purpose, you can still, in theory, use your sports/hunting/collectible gun for it. However, the courts (in Denmark) interpret this provision very strictly. If you any other options, such as running away, you will still be be convicted of assault. And if you kill a living person in order to protect a dead thing, you will go in for murder for sure.
The police monopoly on legal violence has very few exceptions around here.
> With little risk of facing deadly force, why wouldn't a crook raid a house over a business
> where alarms are nearly ubiquitous and police response more prompt?
They may risk hurting the occupants, which would for sure mean that the police would investigate the case, rather than just file it as a statistics (as for normal break ins). Even just a break in where the occupants are (and stays) asleep attracts media coverage, and thus vastly increased police effort.
Why bother when there are plenty of empty houses to choose from? It is just bad business.
I don't see Swiss regulation much different from the rest of Europe. You are allowed to own weapons for hunting, sport and collection. Same in Denmark. And the "home guard" (part of the military) store military owned weapons at home. Same in Denmark.
There are strict regulation for how the weapons are stored, the weapons needs to be safely locked aways, and the ammunitions needs to be stored separately from the guns. This makes them inefficient for self defense, which anyway isn't a legal reason to own weapons. Like in Denmark.
So the only real difference seems to be that the army (and home guard) is larger in Switzerland. Otherwise, Switzerland is much more similar to the rest of EU than to US with regard to weapon regulation.
Of course, I might be misinformed about Swiss weapon laws.
Now we just need to convince the rulers to do away with the little detail of actually of actually waging the war.
"Statistically, all your base are belong to us. So you might as well just hand it over."
LEGO is producing for a global audience, Danish moral is irrelevant.
I very much doubt "safe" refers to either graphic violence or sex, but mostly to pedophiles making real world contact with the children. The buddy system where you can only interact meaningfully with real world friends (who have told you their buddy code) should work well. Communication with strangers should be much more restricted than the GP suggest, only a limited number (15 - 20) of fixed phrases allowed.
> Remember how VI couldn't handle the arrow keys before? It's come a long way, hasn't it?
Actually, no. When I first suffered vi back in the 80's, it already handled arrow keys. It relied on timing though (to distinguish the escape sequences generated by the arrow keys from a stand alone mode switching ESC), so it didn't always worked reliable when connecting over a slow line.
Emacs only got out-of-the-box support for arrow keys later (still in the 80', but later), at least on termcap terminals. I believe the X10 (and later X11) drivers supported arrow keys from the beginning. A real framework for supporting special keys on termcap terminals had to wait for Emacs 19, that is, the 90's).
> Well... it's got a vi mode.
Here is vi-mode for emacs (with apologies to Erik Naggum):
(defun vi-mode ()
(interactive)
(use-global-map (make-keymap))
Whatever you do, it will just beep annoyingly at you.
This is from Emacs 21:
M-x name-last-kbd-macro
to give the macro a name
M-x insert-kbd-macro
to insert it as Lisp code in the current buffer.
> The writer is aware of
You misspelled invented an. Only the first step has any relationship to reality.
> I still remain suspicious.
Not just suspicious, you feel both fear, uncertainty and doubt about the future of the GPL, which was exactly the intention behind the satire.
>> I prefer to see the grandparent post as satire rather than FUD, but to each his own.
> Well, none of the moderators thought it funny...
Thinking about it, it was obviously both satire and FUD. The two often go hand in hand.
You are probably right. I remember it being on the original list of things to fix in the next version.
You have to put in a single exception for the runtime part. I don't see that as any reason to reduce the protection for the rest of the tool. Especially since GCC is RMS's favorite success story for the copyleft, where both the C++ and Objective-C front ends were made free only after the involved companies had given up on finding a way around the license. NeXT allegedly first proposed to distribute the Objective-C front end as
Well, none of the moderators thought it funny...