He took an off the shelf microprocessor and put into a board, connected with other off-the-shelf hardware.
Note that at the time this happened, significant advances in computing had already been long made: computers existed with pipelines, caches, virtual memory, and so on. Microprocessors already existed at the time and so did DRAM chips. The technology in the Apple I and II computers paled compared to what had already been achieved.
It's true that Woz *created* the Apple II, and that it was a significant achievement. But to call it an invention is not accurate; an invention is something original, not merely putting together existing components in a way they are actually meant to be put together.
But then considering who instituted this ridiculous Hall of Fame, where is the surprise? If you could fart out the tune of ``Camp Town Races'' with your armpit, they would give you a patent on the technique.
These scientific dudes, like, found this rock from space that is like very old because it has like this isotope of iodine and stuff. And every dude and his dog knows that water is made up of iodine. So like fer sure the water MUST be as old as the iodine which is as old as the rock! Holy fsck! Gadzillion years. Way before like the Earth even existed, not to mention the righteous dudes that trod upon it.
What totally blows everyone's mind is that this water stayed in the rock for billions of years. Even when exposed to the scorching sun, and the awesome blazing heat of entry into the Earth's atmosphere---but it's true!
There is no frickin' way that water could have gotten into the rock from the surrounding air while it sat in storage for two years waiting for these dudes to crack it open. Rocks are, like, totally water-proof, man. Don't listen to these bullshitting lame-asses who say otherwise.
And--doh--even if Earth water did get in, it wouldn't have the right iodine in its molecules! These dudes with like microscopes and shit can tell the new stuff from the old!
There is a reason why the GPL is put in as an exhibit. The Lucent license itself says that EXHIBIT A applies to some fonts. It does not apply to Plan 9 itself.
The license resembles the GPL in many ways, but contains some disturbing text.
``You agree to provide the Original Contributor [Lucent], at its request, with a copy of the complete Source Code version, Object Code version and related documentation for Modifications created or contributed to by You if used for any purpose.''
This requirement is puzzling. Note that the GNU license does not require anything like this; you must reveal your source to everyone only if you redistribute, not if you merely use the software for any purpose. You can, for instance, make ``in house'' changes to GNU software.
What does this really mean? What does ``if used for any purpose'' mean? Used by whom?
Nude ones! He said I have killer legs. And that he wanted to photograph them. Waaaah!
Slut! Slut! Slut! Slut! Slut!...
:)
More thoughts on population dynamics: prediction.
on
Too Old To Code?
·
· Score: 3
I think that the trend we are going to see is that boom of young programmers from the past decade is going to continue to work until they are in wheelchairs. Their longevity is going to make it harder for large, inexperienced saplings to get into the industry, unless the industry contiues to grow wildly to accomodate the new blood. I predict that as the growth tapers off, there won't be as many opportunities for new programmers. Programming will once again be the profession of bearded old farts.;)
In other words, in the computing industry, there will be a repeat of what has been recently happening in other industries. The ``internet boomers'' will be prosperous, and have stupid ``Generation-Z'' kids who can't get the good jobs that their parents have.
Hey Zoid; don't forget that C++ was born around 1980. You were only 10 then. So you can't think of it as this new stuff that is phasing out C, and giving C programming 30 year olds a run for the money.:)
And anyway, many C++ programmers don't know jack about writing good C or maintaining C programs. They don't understand how to do polymorphism or generic programming unless it's provided by their language. Smart C hackers have been doing this without language support, and thus better understand how it works, and have better intuition about the performance impact of certain C++ language features.
Don't worry, be happy. And consider demographics!
on
Too Old To Code?
·
· Score: 2
Programmers who are now in their 50's were in their 20's thirty years ago. Now think, how big was the computing industry then? How many people did it employ?
Look at it this way: suppose all the software developers who were working 30 years ago, then in their early 20's, still have software development jobs today. In this scenario, it still looks like the developers in this age bracket are in the ``vast minority'' simply because they are a small group of people.
What may be true is that computing is hard to get into past a certain age, or that people are otherwise unlikely to get into it for whatever reasons: having other careers, or believing nonsense about software being a field for young people (supported by phony statistics that fail to take into account the population dynamics).
In other words, the 55 year old developer you are likely to meet today is probably in that small minority of people that started programming a good twenty or thirty years ago, rather than, say, five years ago.
But that is not the problem being discussed; what is being discussed is starting young and *staying* in the job that you love. I think there are no worries there.
It means that the system can respond to some event within a guaranteed time. This requires a combination of the right hardware and software.
The two processors pitted against each other rely heavily on caching to achieve their performance. Caching makes it difficult to make real time predictions, unless you stick to the worst case analysis: i.e. ensure that the deadlines can be met even with all caching disabled.
As for the software, you need a real time operating system. Not a workstation OS like Linux that can disable interrupts on a processor for eons of processor time, and cannot be preempted while running kernel code.
I think you may be talking here about quasi-real time or soft real time: which means ``fast enough to draw pretty pictures on my screen at a decent refresh rate when my system is not too bogged down''.
Other foods taste good cold as well, such as certain kinds of cooked meats: beef steak, grilled or fried chicken, etc. Some kinds of cooked meats are purposely served cold: think roast beef or turkey breasts in your sandwich, or chicken salad.
I think that one cause is that your sense of smell plays a big role in enhancing your sense of taste. Heating food causes it to have much more flavor, which can actually be objectionable.
Cold food is more bland; objectionable taste elements are suppressed. So it tastes better simply by way of being free of bold smells.
Another factor may be that the food has better texture because the fatty elements are solidified and a lot of the moisture has evaporated. The food is just more cohesive making for a good bite. In the case of pizza, your toppings are less likely to slide off.
Finally, it could also be that certain chemical changes set in which improve the flavor. There is probably some oxidation that goes on, as well as the very beginning of decomposition. It's also possible, even likely, that certain reactions only complete when the food is chilled; e.g. primarily exothermic ones which are suppressed at high temperatures.
There are many chemical processes in food preparations which require heating followed by chilling. For example, when you make certain kinds of pudding, you must first cook and then refrigerate to form the gelatin.
This type of process is not restricted to the food industry; certain kinds of plastic resins are formed in a similar way: a cooking stage followed by necessary cooling which actually forms the product.
Yes, producing an intellectual or expressive work has a cost. Copyright says that the creator can derive an *unbounded* profit from a *fixed* amount of labor, for only the ongoing tiny cost of making copies. (And that particular cost is not one that is incurred if the users make their own copies; the copyright argument is based only one the cost of creation.)
I have a small ethical problem when someone derives unlimited control and profit for doing a small, fixed amount of work---or worse, having someone else do the work and then claiming ownership of it.
Copyright infringement is merely illegal. It is not unethical. At one point in U.S. history, it was illegal for a slave to run away. That didn't make it immoral. Copyright is the new form of slavery: intellectual slavery.
Copyright has an even lesser ethical basis than slavery, which already has zero. When a slave runs away, it can be argued that there is an economic loss. When an ``unauthorized'' copy is made, there is no loss to the original. The entire economic expenditure is suffered by the ``pirate'', who comes up with the target media and the machinery for reproduction. There is no backward effect to the master copies owned by the creator.
Copyright is not capitalism; it is a government enforced monopoly that was designed to promote science and the arts. Not to line the pockets of greedy culture merchants and giant, rich software companies.
Copyright needs to be reduced to only one or two rights; the attribution right to have your name carried with your creation, and the right not to have your name associated with a twisted version of your work.
These rights are really just common sense; someone who receives a copy of something should be given honest, correct information as to the true origin of that something.
Formally speaking, what makes a UNIX system is adhering to the spec which defines UNIX.
A draft of this is available online and makes a handy reference.
The Single UNIX Specification covers not only the library and system call interfaces, but also the shell commands and utilities, including the command language formerly known as Bourne.;)
Of course, what we actually understand as UNIX is deeper; one cannot understand what UNIX is outside of the surrounding computing culture.
Doh, of course religion has a bigger impact. That's because of religious fanatics who push their outlandish ideas onto everyone in sight, and this practice has been going on worldwide for millennia.
When was the last time you were visited by a door-to-door astrophysicist insisting that you take a copy of his papers and attend some lectures so that you could be converted to his view of cosmology?
If I open up a grocery store called Apple Produce, I'm not infriniging on Apple Computer Inc's trademark. But if I call it Apple Computer Supplies, then I may land in hot water.
``Apple'' is a common dictionary word, so unconditional trademark protection cannot reasonably be applied to it. Such is the case with ``coke'' as well.` Coke is a product derived from coal, which, I believe, is useful because it burns at higher temperatures than coal. More recently, the word is also slang for cocaine.
I think that these crooked corporations are simply going too far when they oppress people for using common words in a way that is unrelated to their industry.
Something strikes me when talking to the two communities. C++ guys will talk about features of the "language" and will wax poetic on STL. Java guys will consider STL as "just another library" and in java's case java.util.Collection.*
That's because the C++ language has an international standard, a component of which is the C++ library which includes the STL. So, effectively, the library is part of the language. Java isn't a standardized language; it's still at the stage where programmer are used to thinking of it in terms of specific tools and libraries.
I just want to say that I use MI much more often than single inheritance. I most often use inheritance to say that ``this object provides this protocol/interface/behavior'', and often have objects that provide more than one.
I've also done this kind of multiple inheritance in C. I believe it's the most useful form of inheritance, and also the least kludgy and most genuine and elegant form of OO.
Beyond being able to express interfaces, and dynamically bind interfaces to objects is the essence of object orientation. The ability to create a ``new kind of'' class with extra members, or overriden base members is just a handy kludge that sometimes saves work.
Without MI, I would find the usefulness of C++ to be vastly diminshed to the point where I might as well be programming in C.
TO answer your question: most operating systems implement their own C library because they are proprietary. The developers of one OS do not cooperate with those of another OS.
The GNU Libc does support operating systems other than Linux; it is compilable across multiple architectures.
There is a lot of stuff other than standard C that is implemented; a library for a UNIX-like system must implement the POSIX interfaces as well as The Single UNIX Specification.
A C library is typically written using the C language, but with platform-specific extensions and tricks. Obviously, the system call mechanism that is used to interface with the system can't be written in C. Certain assumptions about the hardware are made here and there. (Consider implementing stuff like , or printf conversions, etc).
C libraries are not fully debugged after years of development because they are large, and the standards are moving targets. In the case of glibc, it's actually not that old. From what I understand, glibc2 is a rewrite of glibc1.
I suspect that proprietary libc's are more stable because they have been around longer. But they acquire new bugs when they implement new UNIX features.
The quality of a library implementation is critical to system stability, and in some cases performance as well. Obviously, those library funtions that are basically thin wrappers around operating system calls don't impact performance much. On the other hand, there are areas where optimizations can make a huge difference: things that come to mind are DNS resolver functions, the stuff in .
I don't disagree with the idea of free software developers acquiring software patents. But they should allow other free software developers to use these patents without royalties---regardless of the operating system platform.
That is to say, if someone creates free software under a GPL-like license which prohibits proprietization, then let them use the patented idea!
On the other hand, I don't see a problem with makers of proprietary software being made to pay royalties. After all, they don't like freely sharing their ideas with others, so why freely share with them?
I hope Yodaiken takes on a more enlightened attitude, and users the power inherent in his patent to do good. The main purpose should be to prevent a hostile organization from acquiring the patent, not to act as a hostile organization.
I have a feeling that Yodaiken will probably grant use of his idea to anyone developing GNU style free software. but they shouldn't have to ask, know what I mean?
It only worked because Ted was not aware of it.
on
Author Unknown
·
· Score: 3
What will happen is that people who want to remain anonymous will simply wisen up to the emerging analytic techniques and learn to vary all of the relevant elements of their writing style.
I have already been doing this for years. If I post something to the net under an invented identity, I change the sentence structure, spelling, style, tone, various lexical elements---you name it. I'm also careful not to make any cultural or intellectual references similar to ones that I might otherwise make.
I can easily write something that could not possible be attributed to me. The reason for this is obvious: writing is, or at least can be, deliberate, subject to endless revision and clever disguise. It only acts as a fingerprint when it's poured out without deliberation.
Only in real-time performance activities is it difficult to mask one's traits: speaking, walking, playing music and so forth. The low level elements of these activities are beyond conscious control, unlike writing, whose every element can be controlled by the writer.
The discussions in the newsletter are hardly scholarly studies. I maintain that on the net, nobody knows that you are a dog (unless you want them to---and even then they may not believe you). To debunk something requires more than merely saying the equivalent of ``it's not true, so there''.
I found most of that newsletter to be just the same old starchy, pseudo-intellectual feminist clap-trap. Though the one about vibrators was interesting and funny.
Disguising your identity on Usenet is as easy as setting up your variables any way you want. I can invent an identity that is only traceable to my news server and posting machine. That identity could have an arbitrary reply-to address, full name and organization field.
Anyway, it's the young males that are often the *targets* of the said roasting, due to being boastful, stubborn and ignorant. If anything, they should be hiding their identities, for they make big asses of themselves.
At worst, the hostility may at times create an atmosphere that is perhaps discouraging to the lurkers---who are themselves not the target of the hostility. Very little is known about these lurkers, unfortunately.
In the technical newsgroups I frequent, I haven very rarely seen evidence of hostility that is specifically aimed at women or non-whites. When it did happen, I recall everyone reacted by roasting the originator.
Of course, newsgroups are very diverse. There is no comparison between comp.unix.programmer and, say, alt.tasteless.jokes.
There is all kinds of crud in all kinds of groups. Depending on what you look at, you may get a completely different impression.
I find that in some Usenet communities, roasting newcomers is sort of an initiation rite. For example, newcomers to the newsgroup comp.lang.c are rated on the maturity level of their response to being roasted, which indicates whether they fit in or not.
Participating in this process or observing can be highly entertaining.
Note that by newcomers I don't mean newbies asking questions, but those who want to participate in discussions and provide answers. Also, the roasting tends to be in reasonable proportion to arrogance or ignorance; it starts as polite correction, but escalates if the subject proves to be stubborn, or have a childish reaction.
Once you are in the group of ``regulars'' then you don't get the flaming anymore, unless for some reason you turn into a complete ass.
In technical newsgroups, particularly the programming language related ones, what is most valued is correctness and general enlightenment (by which I don't mean that cheesy, overblown window manager).
People who yap without having a clue get trashed. This cleanses the newsgroup of misinformation, protecting impressionable newbies from confusion. It's the newbies we ultimately care about; they are the future of the programming species.
What is highly valued is an apology from someone who posts incorrect information, and a willigness to improve. Once you have a track record of giving correct answers, and making reasonable contributions to discusssion, you then fit in. That's how it works. If you have a clue to begin with, then you can skip the roasting ritual. It has nothing to do with being a young white male (for God's sake, Katz!) Remember, on the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog!
There is a kind of intolerance of difference, but it's well founded. Being different by way of being deliberatly, stubbornly ignorant is not a meaningful way of being different.
Certain newcomer attitudes particularly irritate the regulars, like people who barge in and start giving advice based on the assumption that every computer has an 80x86 processor, or that certain DOS, Windows or UNIX library functions are standard everywhere and so on.
Example: newbie asks (without specifying their compiler, OS or anything) how to discard unread bytes from standard input. Then some lurking idiot invariably jumps in ``I know, use fflush(stdin)!'' which is an incorrect answer (the construct invokes undefined behavior). How can that be anything but irritating, particularly if you have seen it umpteen times? Never mind that this topic it's thoroughly treated in the FAQ. It's somewhat forgivable that the newbie asking the question hasn't read the FAQ, but it's not tolerable that someone who wants to give *answers* has not read it! Hostility is more than justifiable in cases like this.
Rather, it's a standard that was adopted by Linux. It alone doesn't provide the ability to run binaries; for that to work you need to supply dynamic libraries that look like what the executable expects. That's assuming the executable is dynamic. A static executable needs system call emulation. That has even less to do with the executable format.
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He took an off the shelf microprocessor and put into a board, connected with other off-the-shelf hardware.
Note that at the time this happened, significant advances in computing had already been long made: computers existed with pipelines, caches, virtual memory, and so on. Microprocessors already existed at the time and so did DRAM chips. The technology in the Apple I and II computers paled compared to what had already been achieved.
It's true that Woz *created* the Apple II, and that it was a significant achievement. But to call it an invention is not accurate; an invention is something original, not merely putting together existing components in a way they are actually meant to be put together.
But then considering who instituted this ridiculous Hall of Fame, where is the surprise? If you could fart out the tune of ``Camp Town Races'' with your armpit, they would give you a patent on the technique.
They forgot things like hash tables, binary trees, and so on. Of these, they only mention quicksort.
As in everyday algorithms used all the time that actually make commonplace software work well.
I'm surprised that data compression hasn't been mentioned, nor public key cryptography.
What about the algorithms used in networking? Surely TCP/IP has a greater impact than some obscure matrix multiplication.
These scientific dudes, like, found this rock from space that is like very old because it has like this isotope of iodine and stuff. And every dude and his dog knows that water is made up of iodine. So like fer sure the water MUST be as old as the iodine which is as old as the rock! Holy fsck! Gadzillion years. Way before like the Earth even existed, not to mention the righteous dudes that trod upon it.
What totally blows everyone's mind is that this water stayed in the rock for billions of years. Even when exposed to the scorching sun, and the
awesome blazing heat of entry into the Earth's
atmosphere---but it's true!
There is no frickin' way that water could have gotten into the rock from the surrounding air while it sat in storage for two years waiting for these dudes to crack it open. Rocks are, like, totally water-proof, man. Don't listen to these bullshitting lame-asses who say otherwise.
And--doh--even if Earth water did get in, it wouldn't have the right iodine in its molecules! These dudes with like microscopes and shit can tell the new stuff from the old!
There is a reason why the GPL is put in as an exhibit. The Lucent license itself says that EXHIBIT A applies to some fonts. It does not apply to Plan 9 itself.
The license resembles the GPL in many ways, but contains some disturbing text.
``You agree to provide the Original Contributor [Lucent], at its request, with a copy of the complete Source Code version, Object Code version and related documentation for Modifications created or contributed to by You if used for any purpose.''
This requirement is puzzling. Note that the GNU license does not require anything like this; you must reveal your source to everyone only if you redistribute, not if you merely use the software for any purpose. You can, for instance, make ``in house'' changes to GNU software.
What does this really mean? What does ``if used for any purpose'' mean? Used by whom?
Nude ones! He said I have killer legs. And that he wanted to photograph them. Waaaah!
...
Slut! Slut! Slut! Slut! Slut!
:)
I think that the trend we are going to see is that boom of young programmers from the past decade is going to continue to work until they are in wheelchairs. Their longevity is going to make it harder for large, inexperienced saplings to get into the industry, unless the industry contiues to grow wildly to accomodate the new blood. ;)
I predict that as the growth tapers off, there won't be as many opportunities for new programmers. Programming will once again be the profession of bearded old farts.
In other words, in the computing industry, there will be a repeat of what has been recently happening in other industries. The ``internet boomers'' will be prosperous, and have stupid ``Generation-Z'' kids who can't get the good jobs that their parents have.
What do you think?
Hey Zoid; don't forget that C++ was born around 1980. You were only 10 then. So you can't think of it as this new stuff that is phasing out C, and giving C programming 30 year olds a run for the money. :)
And anyway, many C++ programmers don't know jack about writing good C or maintaining C programs. They don't understand how to do polymorphism or generic programming unless it's provided by their language. Smart C hackers have been doing this without language support, and thus better understand how it works, and have better intuition about the performance impact of certain C++ language features.
Programmers who are now in their 50's were in their 20's thirty years ago. Now think, how big was the computing industry then? How many people did it employ?
Look at it this way: suppose all the software developers who were working 30 years ago, then in their early 20's, still have software development jobs today. In this scenario, it still looks like the developers in this age bracket are in the ``vast minority'' simply because they are a small group of people.
What may be true is that computing is hard to get into past a certain age, or that people are otherwise unlikely to get into it for whatever reasons: having other careers, or believing nonsense about software being a field for young people (supported by phony statistics that fail to take into account the population dynamics).
In other words, the 55 year old developer you are likely to meet today is probably in that small minority of people that started programming a good twenty or thirty years ago, rather than, say, five years ago.
But that is not the problem being discussed; what is being discussed is starting young and *staying* in the job that you love. I think there are no worries there.
It means that the system can respond to some event within a guaranteed time. This requires a combination of the right hardware and software.
The two processors pitted against each other rely heavily on caching to achieve their performance. Caching makes it difficult to make real time predictions, unless you stick to the worst case analysis: i.e. ensure that the deadlines can be met even with all caching disabled.
As for the software, you need a real time operating system. Not a workstation OS like Linux that can disable interrupts on a processor for eons of processor time, and cannot be preempted while running kernel code.
I think you may be talking here about quasi-real time or soft real time: which means ``fast enough to draw pretty pictures on my screen at a decent refresh rate when my system is not too bogged down''.
Other foods taste good cold as well, such as certain kinds of cooked meats: beef steak, grilled or fried chicken, etc. Some kinds of cooked meats are purposely served cold: think roast beef or turkey breasts in your sandwich, or chicken salad.
I think that one cause is that your sense of smell plays a big role in enhancing your sense of taste.
Heating food causes it to have much more flavor, which can actually be objectionable.
Cold food is more bland; objectionable taste elements are suppressed. So it tastes better simply by way of being free of bold smells.
Another factor may be that the food has better texture because the fatty elements are solidified and a lot of the moisture has evaporated.
The food is just more cohesive making for a good bite. In the case of pizza, your toppings are less likely to slide off.
Finally, it could also be that certain chemical changes set in which improve the flavor. There is probably some oxidation that goes on, as well as the very beginning of decomposition. It's also possible, even likely, that certain reactions only complete when the food is chilled; e.g. primarily exothermic ones which are suppressed at high temperatures.
There are many chemical processes in food preparations which require heating followed by chilling. For example, when you make certain kinds of pudding, you must first cook and then refrigerate to form the gelatin.
This type of process is not restricted to the food industry; certain kinds of plastic resins are formed in a similar way: a cooking stage followed by necessary cooling which actually forms the product.
Yes, producing an intellectual or expressive work has a cost. Copyright says that the creator can derive an *unbounded* profit from a *fixed* amount of labor, for only the ongoing tiny cost of making copies. (And that particular cost is not one that is incurred if the users make their own copies; the copyright argument is based only one the cost of creation.)
I have a small ethical problem when someone derives unlimited control and profit for doing a small, fixed amount of work---or worse, having someone else do the work and then claiming ownership of it.
Copyright infringement is merely illegal. It is not unethical. At one point in U.S. history, it was illegal for a slave to run away. That didn't make it immoral. Copyright is the new form of slavery: intellectual slavery.
Copyright has an even lesser ethical basis than slavery, which already has zero. When a slave runs away, it can be argued that there is an economic loss. When an ``unauthorized'' copy is made, there is no loss to the original. The entire economic expenditure is suffered by the ``pirate'', who comes up with the target media and the machinery for reproduction. There is no backward effect to the master copies owned by the creator.
Copyright is not capitalism; it is a government enforced monopoly that was designed to promote science and the arts. Not to line the pockets of greedy culture merchants and giant, rich software companies.
Copyright needs to be reduced to only one or two rights; the attribution right to have your name carried with your creation, and the right not to have your name associated with a twisted version of your work.
These rights are really just common sense; someone who receives a copy of something should be given honest, correct information as to the true origin of that something.
Formally speaking, what makes a UNIX system is adhering to the spec which defines UNIX.
;)
A draft of this is available online and makes a handy reference.
The Single UNIX Specification covers not only the library and system call interfaces, but also the shell commands and utilities, including the command language formerly known as Bourne.
Of course, what we actually understand as UNIX is deeper; one cannot understand what UNIX is outside of the surrounding computing culture.
Doh, of course religion has a bigger impact. That's because of religious fanatics who push their outlandish ideas onto everyone in sight, and this practice has been going on worldwide for millennia.
When was the last time you were visited by a door-to-door astrophysicist insisting that you take a copy of his papers and attend some lectures so that you could be converted to his view of cosmology?
;)
If I open up a grocery store called Apple Produce, I'm not infriniging on Apple Computer Inc's trademark. But if I call it Apple Computer Supplies, then I may land in hot water.
``Apple'' is a common dictionary word, so unconditional trademark protection cannot reasonably be applied to it. Such is the case with ``coke'' as well.` Coke is a product derived from coal, which, I believe, is useful because it burns at higher temperatures than coal. More recently, the word is also slang for cocaine.
I think that these crooked corporations are simply going too far when they oppress people for using common words in a way that is unrelated to their industry.
That's because the C++ language has an international standard, a component of which is the C++ library which includes the STL. So, effectively, the library is part of the language. Java isn't a standardized language; it's still at the stage where programmer are used to thinking of it in terms of specific tools and libraries.
I just want to say that I use MI much more often than single inheritance. I most often use inheritance to say that ``this object provides this protocol/interface/behavior'', and often have objects that provide more than one.
I've also done this kind of multiple inheritance in C. I believe it's the most useful form of inheritance, and also the least kludgy and most genuine and elegant form of OO.
Beyond being able to express interfaces, and dynamically bind interfaces to objects is the essence of object orientation. The ability to create a ``new kind of'' class with extra members, or overriden base members is just a handy kludge that sometimes saves work.
Without MI, I would find the usefulness of C++ to be vastly diminshed to the point where I might as well be programming in C.
TO answer your question: most operating systems implement their own C library because they are proprietary. The developers of one OS do not cooperate with those of another OS.
The GNU Libc does support operating systems other than Linux; it is compilable across multiple architectures.
There is a lot of stuff other than standard C that is implemented; a library for a UNIX-like system must implement the POSIX interfaces as well as The Single UNIX Specification.
A C library is typically written using the C language, but with platform-specific extensions and tricks. Obviously, the system call mechanism that is used to interface with the system can't be written in C. Certain assumptions about the hardware are made here and there. (Consider implementing stuff like , or printf conversions, etc).
C libraries are not fully debugged after years of development because they are large, and the standards are moving targets. In the case of glibc, it's actually not that old. From what I understand, glibc2 is a rewrite of glibc1.
I suspect that proprietary libc's are more stable because they have been around longer. But they acquire new bugs when they implement new UNIX features.
The quality of a library implementation is critical to system stability, and in some cases performance as well. Obviously, those library funtions that are basically thin wrappers around operating system calls don't impact performance much. On the other hand, there are areas where optimizations can make a huge difference: things that come to mind are DNS resolver functions, the stuff in .
Atipa immediately used the $30M to settle a debt with the company that invented the name ``Atipa''.
;)
I don't disagree with the idea of free software developers acquiring software patents. But they should allow other free software developers to use these patents without royalties---regardless of the operating system platform.
That is to say, if someone creates free software under a GPL-like license which prohibits proprietization, then let them use the patented idea!
On the other hand, I don't see a problem with makers of proprietary software being made to pay royalties. After all, they don't like freely sharing their ideas with others, so why freely share with them?
I hope Yodaiken takes on a more enlightened attitude, and users the power inherent in his patent to do good. The main purpose should be to prevent a hostile organization from acquiring the patent, not to act as a hostile organization.
I have a feeling that Yodaiken will probably grant use of his idea to anyone developing GNU style free software. but they shouldn't have to ask, know what I mean?
What will happen is that people who want to remain anonymous will simply wisen up to the emerging analytic techniques and learn to vary all of the relevant elements of their writing style.
I have already been doing this for years. If I post something to the net under an invented identity, I change the sentence structure, spelling, style, tone, various lexical elements---you name it. I'm also careful not to make any cultural or intellectual references similar to ones that I might otherwise make.
I can easily write something that could not possible be attributed to me. The reason for this is obvious: writing is, or at least can be, deliberate, subject to endless revision and clever disguise. It only acts as a fingerprint when it's poured out without deliberation.
Only in real-time performance activities is it difficult to mask one's traits: speaking, walking, playing music and so forth. The low level elements of these activities are beyond conscious control, unlike writing, whose every element can be controlled by the writer.
The discussions in the newsletter are hardly scholarly studies. I maintain that on the net, nobody knows that you are a dog (unless you want them to---and even then they may not believe you). To debunk something requires more than merely saying the equivalent of ``it's not true, so there''.
I found most of that newsletter to be just the same old starchy, pseudo-intellectual feminist clap-trap. Though the one about vibrators was interesting and funny.
Disguising your identity on Usenet is as easy as setting up your variables any way you want. I can invent an identity that is only traceable to my news server and posting machine. That identity could have an arbitrary reply-to address, full name and organization field.
Anyway, it's the young males that are often the *targets* of the said roasting, due to being boastful, stubborn and ignorant. If anything, they should be hiding their identities, for they make big asses of themselves.
At worst, the hostility may at times create an atmosphere that is perhaps discouraging to the lurkers---who are themselves not the target of the hostility. Very little is known about these lurkers, unfortunately.
In the technical newsgroups I frequent, I haven very rarely seen evidence of hostility that is specifically aimed at women or non-whites. When it did happen, I recall everyone reacted by roasting the originator.
Of course, newsgroups are very diverse. There is no comparison between comp.unix.programmer and, say, alt.tasteless.jokes.
There is all kinds of crud in all kinds of groups. Depending on what you look at, you may get a completely different impression.
I find that in some Usenet communities, roasting newcomers is sort of an initiation rite. For example, newcomers to the newsgroup comp.lang.c are rated on the maturity level of their response to being roasted, which indicates whether they fit in or not.
Participating in this process or observing can be highly entertaining.
Note that by newcomers I don't mean newbies asking questions, but those who want to participate in discussions and provide answers. Also, the roasting tends to be in reasonable proportion to arrogance or ignorance; it starts as polite correction, but escalates if the subject proves to be stubborn, or have a childish reaction.
Once you are in the group of ``regulars'' then you don't get the flaming anymore, unless for some reason you turn into a complete ass.
In technical newsgroups, particularly the programming language related ones, what is most valued is correctness and general enlightenment (by which I don't mean that cheesy, overblown window manager).
People who yap without having a clue get trashed. This cleanses the newsgroup of misinformation, protecting impressionable newbies from confusion. It's the newbies we ultimately care about; they are the future of the programming species.
What is highly valued is an apology from someone who posts incorrect information, and a willigness to improve. Once you have a track record of giving correct answers, and making reasonable contributions to discusssion, you then fit in. That's how it works. If you have a clue to begin with, then you can skip the roasting ritual. It has nothing to do with being a young white male (for God's sake, Katz!) Remember, on the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog!
There is a kind of intolerance of difference, but it's well founded. Being different by way of being deliberatly, stubbornly ignorant is not a meaningful way of being different.
Certain newcomer attitudes particularly irritate the regulars, like people who barge in and start giving advice based on the assumption that every computer has an 80x86 processor, or that certain DOS, Windows or UNIX library functions are standard everywhere and so on.
Example: newbie asks (without specifying their compiler, OS or anything) how to discard unread bytes from standard input. Then some lurking idiot invariably jumps in ``I know, use fflush(stdin)!'' which is an incorrect answer (the construct invokes undefined behavior). How can that be anything but irritating, particularly if you have seen it umpteen times? Never mind that this topic it's thoroughly treated in the FAQ. It's somewhat forgivable that the newbie asking the question hasn't read the FAQ, but it's not tolerable that someone who wants to give *answers* has not read it! Hostility is more than justifiable in cases like this.
Rather, it's a standard that was adopted by Linux. It alone doesn't provide the ability to run binaries; for that to work you need to supply dynamic libraries that look like what the executable expects. That's assuming the executable is dynamic. A static executable needs system call emulation. That has even less to do with the executable format.
It has a long way to go before reaching a plateau. You haven't seen anything yet.