We have however noticed that both lbxproxy and ssh require more CPU in order to perform compression and buffering which *can* be a problem on a shared server if the number of concurrent sessions it can support drops by 20%.
It can't possibly be... We all know we have more CPU power that we can possibly use... and it *must* be true, as I've been hearing it for the last 20 years.
The cost/benefit of a change is hard to measure and the more code it breaks the harder it is to justify.
Actually this is incorrect in two ways:
(1) there is no reason why a fix in a language should break old code if done well. For example, latex had a radical redesign when it went to latex2e without breaking a single line of old code. How? easy, by having the first line indicate the version being used.
(2) the amount of code already written is tiny compared to the code that will be written in the future. So we can afford to incovenience present users, because of the savings to future users.
There is a very simple way to have the RIAA put a stop to all this: stop buying records from them. Zero, zilch, nada.
If all p2p users were to do that, the RIAA would backtrack in an instant. I think there are enough readers in/. that even if only us were to boycott, its impact would be felt by the RIAA...
My neighbor had a cold fusion plant working like a charm, but he hasn't done much with it since the time he decided to connect to the electricity grid and give all his fellow Ohians free juice.
I agree. I don't think the "/" was a particularly bad mistake when C got introduced the early 70s. However it should have been fixed later on.
Novices often think it's impossible to fix mistakes in a language. This is not so. Do you know that sqrt(2) was similarly bug inducing, but got fixed in the first ANSI version and now it does what one would expect?
C is not a language for Joe Blow. C is a language for Real Programmers (when the're two lazy to just use a sector editor and hack in the raw binary). You probably can't even keep lose and loose straight.
Such a typical response from the *nix community: its the user's fault.
Sorry if I seem cynical, but democracy only works if more than half the population makes intelligent decisions.
Actually, democracy seems to work because the majority of the people are unlikely to make extremly dumb decisions. Tyrants and dictators, on the other hand, sooner or later make really stupid mistakes, and there is no one to hold them responsible for them.
I used to regularly buy classic CDs and the odd popular album as a student. I stopped buying them when year after year prices kept on going up.
I refuse to pay, on general principle, $20 bucks for something that could be sold at a hefty profit for $10. Same reason I've never bought a diamond...
Talking to programmers I've heard two types of responses. People who were doing Y2K "dilligence" simply for legal CYA purposes, and companies that truly had Y2K issues. Couple of friends of mine were working in large banks at the time and they worked 24x7 in 1999 to fix software that was otherwise broken.
Walking up to your bank on January 2, 2000 and not be able to withdraw money would have been a major catastrophe. On the other hand, at a small company that I know of, tech support was all worried that PCs might not starting on January 2, even though such an unlikely scenario should have been more economically adressed as a FoF.
Lastly, a friend who works in standard DB applications for small-to-medim size companies (payroll, warehouse control, customer DB) spent all of January 2000 fixing small failures here and there. Nothing life critical, though. These failures were never made public as it would have embarrased the companies.
IMHO one of the earliest people who raised the Y2K warning got it right (Yardeni?), when he announced in early 1999 that the back of the problem had been broken and the worst case scenarios clearly averted.
Actually it is funny how people just don't get it, as they are so used to C's twisted arithmetic rules.
Operations like = and / have well defined meanings in basic arithmetic that we all learn from elementary school onwards. This creates a very natural expectation of what are they supposed to work. C breaks this expectation gratuitously, in a bug inducing manner.
Say, suppose someone labels a lever "fire alarm, pull here" and then connect it to a gasoline dousing device. One day, a fire breaks out, and Joe Blow pulls the lever. As is is expected the fire gains in intensity. Would you say that Joe is a fool or would you rather blame the person who labeled the gasoline lever "fire alarm, pull here" instead of "gasoline activation device"?
When C chose to label integer division "/" instead of div or someother thing that cannot be confused with real division, they did exactly that.
I already own a home with 0% house. My home is generally called "an apartment in a high rise", for your future reference.
I see that you like being lied to. Good for you, you are in the right country for that. Let's celebrate that with some of that 0% lemon lemonade that you seem so willing to drink.
"Product A is better than product B" is an opinion. By definition, opinions cannot be false.
Funny, as the internal employees if company had no problem ascertaining that the "opinion" was false.
I have no problem giving more latitude to an subjective statement where it might be harder to determine truthness, but I draw the line when even the employees of company A agree that it is not true.
By the way, that was just one example. Another example of companies liying and being allowed to get away with it, is that you can purchase "lemonade" in many states that contain 0% lemon.
If you agree to that then I have a home to sell you that happens to contain 0% house.
Ads that make subjective claims or claims that consumers can judge for themselves (for example, "ABC Cola tastes great") receive less attention from the FTC.
It has been has ruled that the statement "ABC widgets are better than XYZ brand" is protected under free speech even when company ABC knows for a fact, as acknowledge in internal communications, that this is false.
In Germany they have this weird concept that a seller liying in an advertisement is fraud, as the seller is misrepresenting the product.
In the USA, we are more enlightened than that, and judges have ruled that is quite Ok to lie (even when the company *knows* its lying) in an add as this constitutes free speech.
I'm not very well informed and I can't be bothered to read even the previous/. posts let alone the large body of literature on the matter.
Speak for yourself. I was researching into software patents way likely before you even touched a computer.
You claim I chose the "weakest arguments" yet fail to provide any alternative ones. We can now add your posting to the already long list of pro-patent postings that have no arguments outside of those I outlined.
Actually I've never seen a good explanation why software patents shouldn't be allowed. They usually boil to one of three arguments:
(1) there are stupid patents out there (2) 17 years is too long (3) I don't want to search for patents when I code
Let's go over each one of them. For (1), the fix is to not issue stupid patents. Stupid patents are not a software specific issue, although admittedly, we have more than our fair share of them due to the inexperience of USPTO reviewers with software.
(2) is debatable, but for the sake of the argument let's say it is. The the solution is to reduce, not eliminate, the length of coverage of the patent.
(3) is not much of an argument. Laws incovenience people. You will have to pay for that TV instead of being able to steal it without consequences. That is not an argument against break and enter laws.
At the same time, anti-patent rants rarely address the imbalance between inventing some clever device that uses gears which is patentable and some equally clever device that uses a computer to run on which according to anti-patent advocates should not be patentable. In other words, the mechanical engineer gets a patent, the computer engineer doesn't.
There is no reason why should two equally creative, similar, useful discoveries, should be granted fundamentally different protection under the law.
Except that Microsoft wasn't first at anything, except Basic for a PC. They weren't even the first choice for OS for the forthcoming IBM PC.
Visicalc was first with the spreadsheet, Apple was first to the PC mass market. Wordstar was first at the PC wordprocessor market. Netscape was the first web browser. And on and on.
Slashdot Mirror
We have however noticed that both lbxproxy and ssh require more CPU in order to perform compression and buffering which *can* be a problem on a shared server if the number of concurrent sessions it can support drops by 20%.
It can't possibly be... We all know we have more CPU power that we can possibly use... and it *must* be true, as I've been hearing it for the last 20 years.
I didn't think there was anybody left who still read Wired!
The cost/benefit of a change is hard to measure and the more code it breaks the harder it is to justify.
Actually this is incorrect in two ways:
(1) there is no reason why a fix in a language should break old code if done well. For example, latex had a radical redesign when it went to latex2e without breaking a single line of old code. How? easy, by having the first line indicate the version being used.
(2) the amount of code already written is tiny compared to the code that will be written in the future. So we can afford to incovenience present users, because of the savings to future users.
There is a very simple way to have the RIAA put a stop to all this: stop buying records from them. Zero, zilch, nada.
/. that even if only us were to boycott, its impact would be felt by the RIAA...
If all p2p users were to do that, the RIAA would backtrack in an instant. I think there are enough readers in
My neighbor had a cold fusion plant working like a charm, but he hasn't done much with it since the time he decided to connect to the electricity grid and give all his fellow Ohians free juice.
I agree. I don't think the "/" was a particularly bad mistake when C got introduced the early 70s. However it should have been fixed later on.
Novices often think it's impossible to fix mistakes in a language. This is not so. Do you know that sqrt(2) was similarly bug inducing, but got fixed in the first ANSI version and now it does what one would expect?
C is not a language for Joe Blow. C is a language for Real Programmers (when the're two lazy to just use a sector editor and hack in the raw binary). You probably can't even keep lose and loose straight.
Such a typical response from the *nix community: its the user's fault.
Sorry if I seem cynical, but democracy only works if more than half the population makes intelligent decisions.
Actually, democracy seems to work because the majority of the people are unlikely to make extremly dumb decisions. Tyrants and dictators, on the other hand, sooner or later make really stupid mistakes, and there is no one to hold them responsible for them.
The world's shortest biography.
3) CD's are overpriced.
I used to regularly buy classic CDs and the odd popular album as a student. I stopped buying them when year after year prices kept on going up.
I refuse to pay, on general principle, $20 bucks for something that could be sold at a hefty profit for $10. Same reason I've never bought a diamond...
Talking to programmers I've heard two types of responses. People who were doing Y2K "dilligence" simply for legal CYA purposes, and companies that truly had Y2K issues. Couple of friends of mine were working in large banks at the time and they worked 24x7 in 1999 to fix software that was otherwise broken.
Walking up to your bank on January 2, 2000 and not be able to withdraw money would have been a major catastrophe. On the other hand, at a small company that I know of, tech support was all worried that PCs might not starting on January 2, even though such an unlikely scenario should have been more economically adressed as a FoF.
Lastly, a friend who works in standard DB applications for small-to-medim size companies (payroll, warehouse control, customer DB) spent all of January 2000 fixing small failures here and there. Nothing life critical, though. These failures were never made public as it would have embarrased the companies.
IMHO one of the earliest people who raised the Y2K warning got it right (Yardeni?), when he announced in early 1999 that the back of the problem had been broken and the worst case scenarios clearly averted.
Actually it is funny how people just don't get it, as they are so used to C's twisted arithmetic rules.
Operations like = and / have well defined meanings in basic arithmetic that we all learn from elementary school onwards. This creates a very natural expectation of what are they supposed to work. C breaks this expectation gratuitously, in a bug inducing manner.
Say, suppose someone labels a lever "fire alarm, pull here" and then connect it to a gasoline dousing device. One day, a fire breaks out, and Joe Blow pulls the lever. As is is expected the fire gains in intensity. Would you say that Joe is a fool or would you rather blame the person who labeled the gasoline lever "fire alarm, pull here" instead of "gasoline activation device"?
When C chose to label integer division "/" instead of div or someother thing that cannot be confused with real division, they did exactly that.
I already own a home with 0% house. My home is generally called "an apartment in a high rise", for your future reference.
I see that you like being lied to. Good for you, you are in the right country for that. Let's celebrate that with some of that 0% lemon lemonade that you seem so willing to drink.
"Product A is better than product B" is an opinion. By definition, opinions cannot be false.
Funny, as the internal employees if company had no problem ascertaining that the "opinion" was false.
I have no problem giving more latitude to an subjective statement where it might be harder to determine truthness, but I draw the line when even the employees of company A agree that it is not true.
By the way, that was just one example. Another example of companies liying and being allowed to get away with it, is that you can purchase "lemonade" in many states that contain 0% lemon.
If you agree to that then I have a home to sell you that happens to contain 0% house.
From the FTC web site:
Ads that make subjective claims or claims that consumers can judge for themselves (for example, "ABC Cola tastes great") receive less attention from the FTC.
It has been has ruled that the statement "ABC widgets are better than XYZ brand" is protected under free speech even when company ABC knows for a fact, as acknowledge in internal communications, that this is false.
In Germany they have this weird concept that a seller liying in an advertisement is fraud, as the seller is misrepresenting the product.
In the USA, we are more enlightened than that, and judges have ruled that is quite Ok to lie (even when the company *knows* its lying) in an add as this constitutes free speech.
I'm out. I still don't think the question was rethorical. Do we have an official rules web site?
Huh? What is your definition of rhetorical point?
Don't you agree it was worth a try?
Are you familiar with word tennis from "Guildernstern and Rosencrantz are dead" by Tom Stoppard?
p.s or was it "Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are dead?
I'm not very well informed and I can't be bothered to read even the previous /. posts let alone the large body of literature on the matter.
Speak for yourself. I was researching into software patents way likely before you even touched a computer.
You claim I chose the "weakest arguments" yet fail to provide any alternative ones. We can now add your posting to the already long list of pro-patent postings that have no arguments outside of those I outlined.
This is one of the best explanations I've seen.
Actually I've never seen a good explanation why software patents shouldn't be allowed. They usually boil to one of three arguments:
(1) there are stupid patents out there
(2) 17 years is too long
(3) I don't want to search for patents when I code
Let's go over each one of them. For (1), the fix is to not issue stupid patents. Stupid patents are not a software specific issue, although admittedly, we have more than our fair share of them due to the inexperience of USPTO reviewers with software.
(2) is debatable, but for the sake of the argument let's say it is. The the solution is to reduce, not eliminate, the length of coverage of the patent.
(3) is not much of an argument. Laws incovenience people. You will have to pay for that TV instead of being able to steal it without consequences. That is not an argument against break and enter laws.
At the same time, anti-patent rants rarely address the imbalance between inventing some clever device that uses gears which is patentable and some equally clever device that uses a computer to run on which according to anti-patent advocates should not be patentable. In other words, the mechanical engineer gets a patent, the computer engineer doesn't.
There is no reason why should two equally creative, similar, useful discoveries, should be granted fundamentally different protection under the law.
Except that Microsoft wasn't first at anything, except Basic for a PC. They weren't even the first choice for OS for the forthcoming IBM PC.
Visicalc was first with the spreadsheet, Apple was first to the PC mass market. Wordstar was first at the PC wordprocessor market. Netscape was the first web browser. And on and on.
Prison (supposedly) has two purposes (1) to teach the criminal not to do it again and (2) to deter those thinking about doing it from doing it again.
Most prisons have failed at (1), gang rape or not. All we are left is (2), so he should get to spend a few years in jail....