omething akin to writing 'machine code' directly for a Java VM to optimize your application instead of just writing the darn thing in C, compiling it to the three platforms it's going to run on, and getting a 300% speed boost.
Can you provide any evidence for the quoted 300% speed boost? I code Java for a living, and ignoring the JVM startup hit (how often do you start and stop the sort of app you'd write in Java anyway?), it's anything but slow.
Language neutral? Perhaps I'm just skimming your linked-to article too quickly, but this is what leapt out of the page at me:
"Parrot is strongly related to Perl 6... Perl 6 plans to separate the design of the compiler and the interpreter. This is why we've come up with a subproject, which we've called Parrot that has a certain, limited amount of independence from Perl 6." [emphasis added]
That certainly doesn't sound like it's been designed with language neutrality in mind. For what it's worth, MS's IL was designed with at least four languages in mind - VB.NET, C#, managed C++ and J#, and a couple of dozen others have been or are being ported to it, including Fortran, Cobol, Haskel, and (iirc) even perl.
As you say, the article is over two years old, so maybe they've changed their goals since then - but that article at least gives a very strong impression that Parrot is tied intimately in with Perl.
Funny; a friend of mine and I actually use the phrase "going codal" to describe just such a situation, although I don't remember ever hearing about that. We generally use it in a "much more of this crap, and I'll go codal!!" sense.
Perhaps I'd get tired of it, but offended? No; I have much more pressing things to get offended about, personally, like strangers swearing at me in the street for the way I'm dressed (all black, boots, long coat - "hey, no, no-one else has ever shouted 'Hey, Neo!' or 'Fucking wanker!!!' at me, how clever of you to think of that")
Hell, there's a chance I'd use it to my advantage - "You'd better be nice to me, and stop making such unreasonable demands; you know how.. twitchy... us programmers can get...!"
Well, if that'sall you're worried about, then what's the problem? As long as you're driving within the law the insurance company can't have any cause for complaint.
I've provided search engine functionality to a few sites using Verity's K2 product, which provides a similar piece of functionality. If you (programmatically) ask it to return a summary of each hit, what you get is what it considers to be representative of the document as a whole, not merely the first few lines, or a paragraph, or whatever. It actually works pretty well, but then it should, as (a couple of years ago) it cost almost as much as my house...
It'd kill an awful lot of corporate, business to business mail too. A lot of companies run Exchange for the calendaring features, and do not wish to maintain a separate mail server, don't see the point, whatever.
Besides which, it'd only be a temporary fix at best. Cut off one avenue like that, and the spammers and their tame "l33t hax0rz" would just turn their attentions to other platforms. If you make it worth their while, they *will* find ways to compromise Unix-based machines. Also, it's just as easy to (mis)configure a Linux-based SMTP server to be an open relay.
What would you suggest when the majority of spam is coming from non-Windows machines? Drop their connections too?
I see a few replies along the lines of "But that won't help, all the spammers will do is use a cluster of zombies to send their spam out".
I don't think you get it. I don't think this is meant to be a panacea, just another weapon to use against the spammers. Saying that is almost like saying "what's the point of using a firewall, when there are so many email-borne viruses that you're bound to get one of them? Why bother protecting against worms and remote exploits, when no-one uses them anyway?" The point is that you use this, and your filtering, whitelists, etc. It's just another tool in the hands of the end users who want to cut down on the amount of crap that gets to their inboxes. Besides, this will slow them down - they'll now need a damn sight more zombies to maintain the same rate of mailing. Meanwhile, others can work to help users secure their machines, making those zombies ever harder to obtain.
Someone brought up mailing lists - now that is a good point. But in that case, you (the end user) can whitelist the mailing list's address, as you've probably done anyway (if your system allows you to). If you start getting spam from the list, complain to the list owner, as they're not doing their job properly (imho, part of their job is to keep the list as spam-free as possible).
I don't think this is sufficient to kill spam, but I do think it'll help make life harder for spammers, and that has to be a good thing.
Black and White has that sort of thing for time-based stuff - iirc, your advisers pop up and tell you if there's a full moon, ask you if you're tired if you're playing late, etc.
Dungeon Keeper 2 has two that I remember - "Surely even Dungeon Keepers have a lair to retire to?" if you're playing late, and "It's the witching hour..." if you're playing at midnight.
Oh, and I was playing UT on some server or other a couple of days ago, and they had applied a mod that made each flag a Christmas tree, and showed snow falling over the score board, between maps, etc.
Let's continue on that line of reasoning, assuming that all the while, Linux is getting easier to use and closer and closer to Windows in terms of the features that the average end user wants.
So, we have MS charging money of anyone who wants to write software that interoperates with their stuff. Gradually, it gets more and more expensive to write stuff for Windows. Companies can pass some of these costs on to the consumer, but raise prices too much and profits will be hit.
Meanwhile, Linux is edging slowly but surely onto the desktop. No such charges apply to writing software for Linux, so companies start to look seriously at supporting it. Gradually, more software, drivers, etc is written for Linux, helping increase its adoption even further, and feeding back into the process.
MS has some real competition at last in OSX and Linux, and while neither is a Windows killer yet, for various reasons, that doesn't mean that MS can just act willy-nilly to try to "kill" their competition by making it more expensive to develop for Windows. If they push too hard, they'll push people to alternatives.
Hell, one thing keeping Windows as my primary OS and Linux as my secondary is lack of availability of games. Anything that speeds the adoption of Linux on the desktop is a good thing. I like Windows XP, and I'm hoping for good things from Longhorn, but free is a very convincing price:-)
Well, if I were to subscribe to that sort of conspiracy theory, I'd just point out that starting an investigation you don't want carried out is the best way to make sure that the outcome is favourable.
And it's even more in the vendor's best interest to get security holes patched as quickly as they can, as too much negative press about such things will lose them sales to competing products.
Re:source code escrow not very useful
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But those problems are yours, not the developer's. You're going to have to come up with a much, much better argument if you want to convince companies to GPL their stuff. "So we can develop it further and maintain it if you go bust!" isn't going to cut it, I'm afraid.
Re:source code escrow not very useful
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Microsoft source code isn't their crown jewels, as they always claim: even if people got access to it, they couldn't develop and maintain it anyway.
So you're saying that there is no other company on earth capable of maintaining and developing the Windows source if given the chance? Not IBM, not Sun, not some new, "thrown together just for this" division of one of the huge multinationals? Not when it would open up an entire new market, with the potential to reach some 95% of all desktop PCs?
If that's true, then what you're effectively saying is that there's something very special about MS's Windows dev team, that no other company can hope to copy.
Don't get me wrong, I've had to take over code developed by third parties before, and it's not necessarily easy - unfamiliar codingh style and conventions, poor/incomplete/missing documentation, obscure build requirements, etc, all add up. But given enough people and enough time, I don't think it would be impossible to take over development of Windows.
So far, so good. Seriously, there's no reason why a properly designed site that's meant to take heavy traffic shouldn't be able to cope with being linked to from slashdot's front page.
It might even have been better to not make the attempt.
Don't lose sight of the point of this mission - which is to gather data from the sruface of Mars. I understand what you're saying, but if you don't even make the attempt, then you've definitely failed to accomplish your primary goal. At least by trying, even with such serious defects, you stand some chance.
Also, don't forget the way in which government funding works sometimes, ie use it or lose it. This may have been a one-off chance, use the money now, or don't, and have no guarantee of getting any more in the future.
I was at university when a rocket exploded shortly after lift off, destroying a European probe a few years ago (this would've been mid-90s). Our department's astro group had designed and created one of the experiments that was on board, and our then head of department was also the head of that group. It happened the day before a department meeting at which he was supposed to give a speech; he was too upset to attend. My point being that the scientists have a hell of a lot invested in this sort of thing; they wouldn't go ahead with something if they didn't think that they had at least a fighting chance of it working.
If you prefer, look at it this way - perhaps MS realise how much of a mess they've made of implementing certain things in the past, and so recognise that if they can mess it up, so can anyone else. That may be part of the reason why - acknowledging that they're nothing special when it comes to writing software.
Hell, recently there was a problem with LG not implementing the "cache flush" instruction on some of their CD drives, instead using it for "update firmware". That's a monumentally stupid thing to do when implementing an accepted standard. Given that that happened, don't you think it possible that some large manufacturer could mess up their FAT implementation?
MS are charging companies that use their implementation of the technology in order to ship pre-formatted media. They are not going after anyone who's implemented their own FAT-compatible system.
Similar to your example, I could write a FAT driver too, and not pay MS a penny.
I have the sneaky feeling the terms of those licenses preclude GPL products from using protocols or file formats covered by them
Quite possibly, and that's their right. Don't like it, come up with your own formats and protocols, in the same way that someone who doesn't like the GPL can "write their own damn code" (as I've often heard here).
That's your choice - either comply with the originator's licence (be it the GPL for code, MS's licence for their stuff, or whatever), or create your own version. It works both ways.
Yeah, I've heard similar stories - one of the honeynet machines was compromised within 15 minutes of being connected, iirc.
That's why I said "for what it's worth" - just because I've been left alone, doesn't mean that everyone else is. Hell, maybe it's a geographical thing - I'm in the UK. Perhaps most of the script kiddies are in the US, scanning US networks. Or maybe I really have just been lucky - after all, on a site with this many users, there's bound to be a number of people who've never seen any activity, through to a number of people whose machines are rooted regularly... and a number of people doing the rooting, too.
I'd imagine that your GBA has had about the same number of worms as my PC during the 6 years I've had it - precisely zero. Oh, they exist, and they hit people all the time, just not me, because I know how to secure my PC and keep it up to date.
As for spending $500 and breaking old games, can't say I've ever had the problem - I have games from 5 years ago that I can still play, despite having upgraded from a PR166 to a P4 2.4GHz and from Win95 to XP Pro in that time. I have not once upgraded any hardware and broken compatibility with old games. Perhaps that's because I've stuck with NVidia for my graphics cards, perhaps not. I also don't go for the latest and greatest - UT2k3 runs just fine at high detail levels on my GeForce 3 Ti200. Sure, it'll probably struggle with Doom 3, but that's not due out for a year, by which time my card'll have been replaced, being 3 generations old.
Well, I can't be bothered to check, but I sincerely hope not. As I understand it, division by zero is (by definition) undefined - the result most certainly is not infinity. NaN or the equivalent would be a more appropriate result.
Okay, I've had a change of heart and checked it. Division by constant zero is a compile-time error. Division by an int set to 0 throws a runtime exception - System.DivideByZeroException.
Now I can't be bothered to check for other cases, such as Int32, Int64, long, etc, but so far it's acting as I'd expect/hope.
Slashdot Mirror
omething akin to writing 'machine code' directly for a Java VM to optimize your application instead of just writing the darn thing in C, compiling it to the three platforms it's going to run on, and getting a 300% speed boost.
Can you provide any evidence for the quoted 300% speed boost? I code Java for a living, and ignoring the JVM startup hit (how often do you start and stop the sort of app you'd write in Java anyway?), it's anything but slow.
Language neutral? Perhaps I'm just skimming your linked-to article too quickly, but this is what leapt out of the page at me:
"Parrot is strongly related to Perl 6... Perl 6 plans to separate the design of the compiler and the interpreter. This is why we've come up with a subproject, which we've called Parrot that has a certain, limited amount of independence from Perl 6." [emphasis added]
That certainly doesn't sound like it's been designed with language neutrality in mind. For what it's worth, MS's IL was designed with at least four languages in mind - VB.NET, C#, managed C++ and J#, and a couple of dozen others have been or are being ported to it, including Fortran, Cobol, Haskel, and (iirc) even perl.
As you say, the article is over two years old, so maybe they've changed their goals since then - but that article at least gives a very strong impression that Parrot is tied intimately in with Perl.
No, being egg troll makes him a troll. Hell, he's so famous (for a troll) that even I've heard of him.
Funny; a friend of mine and I actually use the phrase "going codal" to describe just such a situation, although I don't remember ever hearing about that. We generally use it in a "much more of this crap, and I'll go codal!!" sense.
Perhaps I'd get tired of it, but offended? No; I have much more pressing things to get offended about, personally, like strangers swearing at me in the street for the way I'm dressed (all black, boots, long coat - "hey, no, no-one else has ever shouted 'Hey, Neo!' or 'Fucking wanker!!!' at me, how clever of you to think of that")
Hell, there's a chance I'd use it to my advantage - "You'd better be nice to me, and stop making such unreasonable demands; you know how.. twitchy... us programmers can get...!"
Well, if that'sall you're worried about, then what's the problem? As long as you're driving within the law the insurance company can't have any cause for complaint.
I've provided search engine functionality to a few sites using Verity's K2 product, which provides a similar piece of functionality. If you (programmatically) ask it to return a summary of each hit, what you get is what it considers to be representative of the document as a whole, not merely the first few lines, or a paragraph, or whatever. It actually works pretty well, but then it should, as (a couple of years ago) it cost almost as much as my house...
It'd kill an awful lot of corporate, business to business mail too. A lot of companies run Exchange for the calendaring features, and do not wish to maintain a separate mail server, don't see the point, whatever.
Besides which, it'd only be a temporary fix at best. Cut off one avenue like that, and the spammers and their tame "l33t hax0rz" would just turn their attentions to other platforms. If you make it worth their while, they *will* find ways to compromise Unix-based machines. Also, it's just as easy to (mis)configure a Linux-based SMTP server to be an open relay.
What would you suggest when the majority of spam is coming from non-Windows machines? Drop their connections too?
I see a few replies along the lines of "But that won't help, all the spammers will do is use a cluster of zombies to send their spam out".
I don't think you get it. I don't think this is meant to be a panacea, just another weapon to use against the spammers. Saying that is almost like saying "what's the point of using a firewall, when there are so many email-borne viruses that you're bound to get one of them? Why bother protecting against worms and remote exploits, when no-one uses them anyway?" The point is that you use this, and your filtering, whitelists, etc. It's just another tool in the hands of the end users who want to cut down on the amount of crap that gets to their inboxes. Besides, this will slow them down - they'll now need a damn sight more zombies to maintain the same rate of mailing. Meanwhile, others can work to help users secure their machines, making those zombies ever harder to obtain.
Someone brought up mailing lists - now that is a good point. But in that case, you (the end user) can whitelist the mailing list's address, as you've probably done anyway (if your system allows you to). If you start getting spam from the list, complain to the list owner, as they're not doing their job properly (imho, part of their job is to keep the list as spam-free as possible).
I don't think this is sufficient to kill spam, but I do think it'll help make life harder for spammers, and that has to be a good thing.
Black and White has that sort of thing for time-based stuff - iirc, your advisers pop up and tell you if there's a full moon, ask you if you're tired if you're playing late, etc.
Dungeon Keeper 2 has two that I remember - "Surely even Dungeon Keepers have a lair to retire to?" if you're playing late, and "It's the witching hour..." if you're playing at midnight.
Oh, and I was playing UT on some server or other a couple of days ago, and they had applied a mod that made each flag a Christmas tree, and showed snow falling over the score board, between maps, etc.
The court ruled against them, not for them - they lost.
As a programmer at a web agency, I see that as a *good* thing; lots of people needing new websites... ;-)
Let's continue on that line of reasoning, assuming that all the while, Linux is getting easier to use and closer and closer to Windows in terms of the features that the average end user wants.
:-)
So, we have MS charging money of anyone who wants to write software that interoperates with their stuff. Gradually, it gets more and more expensive to write stuff for Windows. Companies can pass some of these costs on to the consumer, but raise prices too much and profits will be hit.
Meanwhile, Linux is edging slowly but surely onto the desktop. No such charges apply to writing software for Linux, so companies start to look seriously at supporting it. Gradually, more software, drivers, etc is written for Linux, helping increase its adoption even further, and feeding back into the process.
MS has some real competition at last in OSX and Linux, and while neither is a Windows killer yet, for various reasons, that doesn't mean that MS can just act willy-nilly to try to "kill" their competition by making it more expensive to develop for Windows. If they push too hard, they'll push people to alternatives.
Hell, one thing keeping Windows as my primary OS and Linux as my secondary is lack of availability of games. Anything that speeds the adoption of Linux on the desktop is a good thing. I like Windows XP, and I'm hoping for good things from Longhorn, but free is a very convincing price
Well, if I were to subscribe to that sort of conspiracy theory, I'd just point out that starting an investigation you don't want carried out is the best way to make sure that the outcome is favourable.
And it's even more in the vendor's best interest to get security holes patched as quickly as they can, as too much negative press about such things will lose them sales to competing products.
But those problems are yours, not the developer's. You're going to have to come up with a much, much better argument if you want to convince companies to GPL their stuff. "So we can develop it further and maintain it if you go bust!" isn't going to cut it, I'm afraid.
Microsoft source code isn't their crown jewels, as they always claim: even if people got access to it, they couldn't develop and maintain it anyway.
So you're saying that there is no other company on earth capable of maintaining and developing the Windows source if given the chance? Not IBM, not Sun, not some new, "thrown together just for this" division of one of the huge multinationals? Not when it would open up an entire new market, with the potential to reach some 95% of all desktop PCs?
If that's true, then what you're effectively saying is that there's something very special about MS's Windows dev team, that no other company can hope to copy.
Don't get me wrong, I've had to take over code developed by third parties before, and it's not necessarily easy - unfamiliar codingh style and conventions, poor/incomplete/missing documentation, obscure build requirements, etc, all add up. But given enough people and enough time, I don't think it would be impossible to take over development of Windows.
So far, so good. Seriously, there's no reason why a properly designed site that's meant to take heavy traffic shouldn't be able to cope with being linked to from slashdot's front page.
After all, slashdot can handle the traffic.
It might even have been better to not make the attempt.
Don't lose sight of the point of this mission - which is to gather data from the sruface of Mars. I understand what you're saying, but if you don't even make the attempt, then you've definitely failed to accomplish your primary goal. At least by trying, even with such serious defects, you stand some chance.
Also, don't forget the way in which government funding works sometimes, ie use it or lose it. This may have been a one-off chance, use the money now, or don't, and have no guarantee of getting any more in the future.
I was at university when a rocket exploded shortly after lift off, destroying a European probe a few years ago (this would've been mid-90s). Our department's astro group had designed and created one of the experiments that was on board, and our then head of department was also the head of that group. It happened the day before a department meeting at which he was supposed to give a speech; he was too upset to attend. My point being that the scientists have a hell of a lot invested in this sort of thing; they wouldn't go ahead with something if they didn't think that they had at least a fighting chance of it working.
If you prefer, look at it this way - perhaps MS realise how much of a mess they've made of implementing certain things in the past, and so recognise that if they can mess it up, so can anyone else. That may be part of the reason why - acknowledging that they're nothing special when it comes to writing software.
Hell, recently there was a problem with LG not implementing the "cache flush" instruction on some of their CD drives, instead using it for "update firmware". That's a monumentally stupid thing to do when implementing an accepted standard. Given that that happened, don't you think it possible that some large manufacturer could mess up their FAT implementation?
MS are charging companies that use their implementation of the technology in order to ship pre-formatted media. They are not going after anyone who's implemented their own FAT-compatible system.
Similar to your example, I could write a FAT driver too, and not pay MS a penny.
wouldn't you tear the probes apart with rage
Probably. I'd probably also let them know what was happening and why; at the very least, I'd make it apparent that their attentions were not wanted.
Otherwise, there's no guarantee that those pesky, inquisitive monkeys won't just keep on and on sending ever-larger and tougher probes.
I have the sneaky feeling the terms of those licenses preclude GPL products from using protocols or file formats covered by them
Quite possibly, and that's their right. Don't like it, come up with your own formats and protocols, in the same way that someone who doesn't like the GPL can "write their own damn code" (as I've often heard here).
That's your choice - either comply with the originator's licence (be it the GPL for code, MS's licence for their stuff, or whatever), or create your own version. It works both ways.
Yeah, I've heard similar stories - one of the honeynet machines was compromised within 15 minutes of being connected, iirc.
That's why I said "for what it's worth" - just because I've been left alone, doesn't mean that everyone else is. Hell, maybe it's a geographical thing - I'm in the UK. Perhaps most of the script kiddies are in the US, scanning US networks. Or maybe I really have just been lucky - after all, on a site with this many users, there's bound to be a number of people who've never seen any activity, through to a number of people whose machines are rooted regularly... and a number of people doing the rooting, too.
I'd imagine that your GBA has had about the same number of worms as my PC during the 6 years I've had it - precisely zero. Oh, they exist, and they hit people all the time, just not me, because I know how to secure my PC and keep it up to date.
As for spending $500 and breaking old games, can't say I've ever had the problem - I have games from 5 years ago that I can still play, despite having upgraded from a PR166 to a P4 2.4GHz and from Win95 to XP Pro in that time. I have not once upgraded any hardware and broken compatibility with old games. Perhaps that's because I've stuck with NVidia for my graphics cards, perhaps not. I also don't go for the latest and greatest - UT2k3 runs just fine at high detail levels on my GeForce 3 Ti200. Sure, it'll probably struggle with Doom 3, but that's not due out for a year, by which time my card'll have been replaced, being 3 generations old.
Well, I can't be bothered to check, but I sincerely hope not. As I understand it, division by zero is (by definition) undefined - the result most certainly is not infinity. NaN or the equivalent would be a more appropriate result.
Okay, I've had a change of heart and checked it. Division by constant zero is a compile-time error. Division by an int set to 0 throws a runtime exception - System.DivideByZeroException.
Now I can't be bothered to check for other cases, such as Int32, Int64, long, etc, but so far it's acting as I'd expect/hope.