Static analysis tools are by no means new. DEC, for instance, had DEC Source Code Analyzer (SCA) on the market in the mid-1980s. Logically, it was implemented as an add-on option to the DEC Language-Sensitive Editor (LSE). That way, SCA could assume all of LSE's functionality, and concentrate on adding extra features. Moreover, the arrangement ensured absolute consistency between the two products.
Of course static analysis cannot find all the problems in a piece of code. But when used in conjunction with compilers, editors, profilers, coverage analyzers, and automated test systems, it adds another piece to the jigsaw. And it's obviously better to detect errors sooner rather than later, thus shortening the code-test loop.
In any competition, loss of integrity is the norm... What a sad reflection on what we call "sport" nowadays. Increasingly, it's just another octopus arm of the vast entertainment industry. Or, to put it another way, our modern equivalent of the "circuses" in the Roman empire's prescription of "bread and circuses" to keep the masses docile.
Odd as it may seem to you, I remember a time and place when integrity was the very heart and soul of sport. Indeed, in a sense it was its main purpose.
Yeah, you ate a lot of corn there. The point is that most of the animals we eat, eat corn.
It's Stone Age animist thinking to believe that, when you eat an animal that ate corn, you thereby eat corn yourself.
Take it a stage further! You ate the cow; the cow ate corn; the corn was fertilised with manure. Ergo, you ate manure.
Except, of course, that you obviously didn't. The "transitive" argument works when calculating the energy cost of food, but not when thinking of its ingedients.
I'm sorry if this is too hard for you to understand, but it's a *shade* more complicated.
He has BOTH a considerable handicap AND an unfair advantage. And after all, doesn't the poor dear deserve the benefit of the doubt?
Woolly-minded emotional people think they "probably more or less" cancel out.
Those with the ability to think clearly can see that, if one disabled person is allowed to compete using artificial aids, an arbitrary number of others will in future. Among them, there may well be some world-class athletes who, with prosthetics, will easily beat all "normally abled" athletes. And that will be the end of the Olympics as a fair sporting competition.
Well, if you really wanted too you could et your legs chopped off and attach a pair of cheetas instead. I've seen a lot people making that suggestion in the various discussions of this issue. It's very disingenuous, because even for the most fanatical competitor there is a lot more to life than sport. Nobody would make such an extreme sacrifice (voluntarily, at least) just to win a gold medal or set a world record. The obvious pain, suffering, and disadvantages of being legless far outweigh any possible sporting advantage.
But this suggestion goes right to the heart of the controversy. The implication, it seems to me, is that Pistorius has suffered terribly (right), and is at a great disadvantage (right); moreover, he has struggled nobly (right). Therefore, some people argue, he deserves to get whatever he wants; and if that is to run in the Olympics, so be it.
I suspect that people who argue this way don't take the Olympics very seriously. After all, it's just a lot of people playing silly games, isn't it? Besides, many of us nowadays disapprove morally of competition, because most of the competitors must lose. It's often urged how unfair this is, which is why school events are often arranged so that everyone gets prizes. After all, aren't we all very special?
This is a very clear instance of the legal dictum that "hard cases make bad law". Pistorius is extremely admirable, and what's more we would very much like to do something to help him. Letting him into the Olympics is quick, and easy, and makes us glow with moral righteousness. The only downside is that it pretty much destroys the integrity of the Olympic Games.
Whatever may be true of swimming or cycling, in the case of running technology has made relatively small differences. Spiked shoes actually give very little advantage, as witness the fact that a few world-class runners have always run barefoot. Spikes give a slight edge, of course, which is why they are so popular.
In the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, Bob Hayes won the 100 metres in 10.06 on a soaking wet cinder track with actual holes in it, running in very heavy primitive spiked shoes. To this day, the Olympic record is 9.84 by Donovan Bailey in 1996, running on a vastly superior modern synthetic track. The difference between these two times is about six feet - not a huge improvement, even allowing for the distinct possibility that Hayes was a faster sprinter than Bailey.
At the other extreme, Abebe Bikila won the Olympic marathon in both 1960 and 1964. The first time he ran barefoot; the second time he wore shoes. Admittedly he ran three minutes faster in 1964, but that may reflect his own improvement, stronger competition, and a faster (flatter) course. Today the top marathon runners cover the 26.2 miles 8 minutes faster than Bikila in 1964, but I don't think you could find any expert to agree that technology has anything to do with that.
I object to the characterisation "troll". My analogy is a perfectly clear and simple one.
Linux is, as others have pointed out, a kernel and nothing else. People began by referring to "a Linux distribution" and gradually this became eroded into plain "Linux". But in fact, as we all know quite well, there is a vast gulf between Linux and typical Linux distros such as Ubuntu, SuSE, Red Hat, etc.
I was replying to the contention that, since many people use the name Linux improperly, their use of it has thereby become the correct usage. That's obviously wrong technically, legally, and any other way. To help demonstrate how ridiculous it is to confuse Linux the kernel with a Linux distro, I transferred the domain to Microsoft's products resulting in the ironic and deliberately ludicrous claim that, having paid for the OS alone, I should be entitled to all the other products.
Oh goodie! So by analogy the term "Windows", which pedants at Microsoft narrowly define as a mere operating system, also includes VSTS, Office Ultimate, SQL Server, Biztalk Server, and all Microsoft's other products.
Having paid good money for my Windows license, I can therefore download all those other products free of charge! Whoopee.
Thank goodness for progressive linguists. It turns out that words *can* change reality.
If it's the depiction of violence that is to be outlawed, the movie and video industries are in deep trouble. Just imagine where they'd be without sex, violence, and sex-and-violence.
Of course, killing people is considered good clean fun just as long as there's none of that vile, godless S-E-X.
I take your point about the lack of choice in elections, and agree wholeheartedly. If anything, it's even worse in the UK. Nevertheless, that is the implementation of democracy that we seem to have, and moreover the one our leaders are keen to go to war to impose on others.
As for your final remark, I strongly disagree. "Elitist" is rather an emotionally weighted term, and one that usually adds more heat than light. The more so as my whole point was that the whole population - or the great majority of it - would have to be educated, rational, mature, and objective. That is certainly what the thinkers of the Enlightenment, including many of the US Founding Fathers, expected to happen in the course of time.
I find it singular and very distressing that you believe these characteristics can apply only to an elite. Does that mean that you believe the majority are forever doomed to be uneducated, irrational, immature, and subjective? Because that would be a truly elitist view.
There's a fundamental question lying at the bottom of all this controversy. Those of us who live in democracies and hear constantly about how wonderful our "free media" are expect to get objective news reporting. Maybe not from any single outlet, but from the aggregate of the media. Some will lean left, others right, some are hawks, others doves, etc. So far, so good.
Then our government declares a state of war or "war". The first question is which you think it is: war or "war". If it's a real war, Churchill's dictum that "truth must be accompanied by an escort of lies" comes into play. We all know that "loose lips sink ships", and no one wants to be responsible for getting our brave boys killed, or even for harming civilian morale by revealing that, yes, one of our battleships was sunk with the loss of 4,000 sailors.
Trouble is, how do we know if it's a real war or a "war" arbitrarily declared by the government? As Orwell's 1984 pointed out, it is trivially easy for any government to proclaim a continuous state of war, thereby giving itself an excuse to suspend all civil liberties "for the duration" - i.e. indefinitely.
And this is where public patriotism comes in. In some countries more than others, a large fraction of the people readily snap into a patriotic, somewhat militaristic, unquestioning frame of mind as soon as they perceive any threat. In such a climate of opinion, the media would be insane to take an anti-government line or question the war. It's not necessarily a matter of prejudice, or vested interests, or black helicopters; it's just that they will lose their audience if they don't tell it what it wants to hear.
Just as we get the government we deserve (because we vote it in), we also get the media we deserve (because we buy it selectively). Only with a truly educated, rational, mature, objective citizenship can excellent media thrive.
"...US government's plan to reduce the roughly 4,000 active internet connections used by its civilian agencies to a mere 50 highly secure gateways".
Yes, about par for the course. From memory DEC (my employer at that time) took a similar decision back around 1985 or so. The plan entailed channelling all connections from the company's tens of thousands of computers, linked worldwide by DECnet, through one or at most two gateways to the ARPAnet. The security logic was unassailable even then.
22 years for public officials to follow best commercial practice... looks about right. Fairly quick, actually. It took the best part of a century for politicians to start echoing Frederick Winslow Taylor's ideas about "scientific management". (Although of course, even then they didn't understand them).
My mistake, I see. I made the incorrect assumption that if a law deals with crimes and imposes criminal penalties, it is a criminal law. But, as you say, the Sherman Act is both criminal and civil. That's not confusing at all.
"...please show me a criminal conviction by Microsoft in any court..."
Assuming you mean "a criminal conviction of Microsoft", in the first case I cited Microsoft was found guilty of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. That is a criminal offence. If still in doubt, check paragraph 3 of this page http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Antitrust or any other source of legal information.
Don't be silly. The parent was implicitly restricting his statement to the domain of choosing software products. You are attempting to introduce the meta-domain of choice policies, in an utterly unsuccessful attempt to muddy the water.
"In my country, MS holds the government in its palm: its lobby includes former prime minister and other influential people. Heck, even Bill Gates came to visit this country to sign a deal with Prime Minister on software procurement."
"If the EU was so righteous, they wouldn't be doing business with China."
That's downright funny, coming from a citizen of a nation that owes $9 trillion - much of it to China. Who do you think is financing the current round of wars? It isn't US taxpayers, that's for sure.
1. The parent asked "when has *the government ever presented*...?" The US government, not a foreign government.
2. After Pearl Harbor the USA was at war with Japan. (If the Japanese hadn't got their timing wrong, the declaration of war would have taken place a few minutes before the strike, rather than after it). Just to be quite clear about it, there was never any decision by Americans to "confront Japan" any more than there was a decision to "confront Hitler". Both Japan and Germany declared war on the USA, and that is the only reason the USA found itself at war.
For the canonical worst-case scenario, try Michael Crichton's 2002 novel "Prey". Good time to buy - they're being remaindered. It's actually a pretty good book if you like that sort of thing.
I couldn't agree more. My study and all the adjacent rooms are piled high with stacks of books - many of which I have never read. I just love shopping for them, buying them, opening them and browsing through them, and just... well, it sounds crazy, but *having their company*! Kind of like a primitive version of Charlie Stross' "exobrain" (see his novel "Accelerando").
One of the big lessons we all need to learn is this: People are different!
Some get addicted to drugs; others don't. Some have their health ruined by alcohol; others drink like fish yet remain fairly healthy. Some get sick when they eat certain foods; others thrive on them. Some lose weight by exercising; others don't (true; look it up). And some will never give up paper books, while others will be happy to do so.
It makes life more complicated, but also more fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Static analysis tools are by no means new. DEC, for instance, had DEC Source Code Analyzer (SCA) on the market in the mid-1980s. Logically, it was implemented as an add-on option to the DEC Language-Sensitive Editor (LSE). That way, SCA could assume all of LSE's functionality, and concentrate on adding extra features. Moreover, the arrangement ensured absolute consistency between the two products.
Of course static analysis cannot find all the problems in a piece of code. But when used in conjunction with compilers, editors, profilers, coverage analyzers, and automated test systems, it adds another piece to the jigsaw. And it's obviously better to detect errors sooner rather than later, thus shortening the code-test loop.
Odd as it may seem to you, I remember a time and place when integrity was the very heart and soul of sport. Indeed, in a sense it was its main purpose.
Yeah, you ate a lot of corn there. The point is that most of the animals we eat, eat corn.
It's Stone Age animist thinking to believe that, when you eat an animal that ate corn, you thereby eat corn yourself.Take it a stage further! You ate the cow; the cow ate corn; the corn was fertilised with manure. Ergo, you ate manure.
Except, of course, that you obviously didn't. The "transitive" argument works when calculating the energy cost of food, but not when thinking of its ingedients.
I'm sorry if this is too hard for you to understand, but it's a *shade* more complicated.
He has BOTH a considerable handicap AND an unfair advantage. And after all, doesn't the poor dear deserve the benefit of the doubt?
Woolly-minded emotional people think they "probably more or less" cancel out.
Those with the ability to think clearly can see that, if one disabled person is allowed to compete using artificial aids, an arbitrary number of others will in future. Among them, there may well be some world-class athletes who, with prosthetics, will easily beat all "normally abled" athletes. And that will be the end of the Olympics as a fair sporting competition.
But this suggestion goes right to the heart of the controversy. The implication, it seems to me, is that Pistorius has suffered terribly (right), and is at a great disadvantage (right); moreover, he has struggled nobly (right). Therefore, some people argue, he deserves to get whatever he wants; and if that is to run in the Olympics, so be it.
I suspect that people who argue this way don't take the Olympics very seriously. After all, it's just a lot of people playing silly games, isn't it? Besides, many of us nowadays disapprove morally of competition, because most of the competitors must lose. It's often urged how unfair this is, which is why school events are often arranged so that everyone gets prizes. After all, aren't we all very special?
This is a very clear instance of the legal dictum that "hard cases make bad law". Pistorius is extremely admirable, and what's more we would very much like to do something to help him. Letting him into the Olympics is quick, and easy, and makes us glow with moral righteousness. The only downside is that it pretty much destroys the integrity of the Olympic Games.
Whatever may be true of swimming or cycling, in the case of running technology has made relatively small differences. Spiked shoes actually give very little advantage, as witness the fact that a few world-class runners have always run barefoot. Spikes give a slight edge, of course, which is why they are so popular.
In the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, Bob Hayes won the 100 metres in 10.06 on a soaking wet cinder track with actual holes in it, running in very heavy primitive spiked shoes. To this day, the Olympic record is 9.84 by Donovan Bailey in 1996, running on a vastly superior modern synthetic track. The difference between these two times is about six feet - not a huge improvement, even allowing for the distinct possibility that Hayes was a faster sprinter than Bailey.
At the other extreme, Abebe Bikila won the Olympic marathon in both 1960 and 1964. The first time he ran barefoot; the second time he wore shoes. Admittedly he ran three minutes faster in 1964, but that may reflect his own improvement, stronger competition, and a faster (flatter) course. Today the top marathon runners cover the 26.2 miles 8 minutes faster than Bikila in 1964, but I don't think you could find any expert to agree that technology has anything to do with that.
"Sounds to me more like a WHOLE SHIT LOAD of incompetent employees!"
What part of "government" don't you understand?
I object to the characterisation "troll". My analogy is a perfectly clear and simple one.
Linux is, as others have pointed out, a kernel and nothing else. People began by referring to "a Linux distribution" and gradually this became eroded into plain "Linux". But in fact, as we all know quite well, there is a vast gulf between Linux and typical Linux distros such as Ubuntu, SuSE, Red Hat, etc.
I was replying to the contention that, since many people use the name Linux improperly, their use of it has thereby become the correct usage. That's obviously wrong technically, legally, and any other way. To help demonstrate how ridiculous it is to confuse Linux the kernel with a Linux distro, I transferred the domain to Microsoft's products resulting in the ironic and deliberately ludicrous claim that, having paid for the OS alone, I should be entitled to all the other products.
Oh goodie! So by analogy the term "Windows", which pedants at Microsoft narrowly define as a mere operating system, also includes VSTS, Office Ultimate, SQL Server, Biztalk Server, and all Microsoft's other products.
Having paid good money for my Windows license, I can therefore download all those other products free of charge! Whoopee.
Thank goodness for progressive linguists. It turns out that words *can* change reality.
If it's the depiction of violence that is to be outlawed, the movie and video industries are in deep trouble. Just imagine where they'd be without sex, violence, and sex-and-violence.
Of course, killing people is considered good clean fun just as long as there's none of that vile, godless S-E-X.
I take your point about the lack of choice in elections, and agree wholeheartedly. If anything, it's even worse in the UK. Nevertheless, that is the implementation of democracy that we seem to have, and moreover the one our leaders are keen to go to war to impose on others.
As for your final remark, I strongly disagree. "Elitist" is rather an emotionally weighted term, and one that usually adds more heat than light. The more so as my whole point was that the whole population - or the great majority of it - would have to be educated, rational, mature, and objective. That is certainly what the thinkers of the Enlightenment, including many of the US Founding Fathers, expected to happen in the course of time.
I find it singular and very distressing that you believe these characteristics can apply only to an elite. Does that mean that you believe the majority are forever doomed to be uneducated, irrational, immature, and subjective? Because that would be a truly elitist view.
Maybe it's just me, but your juxtaposition of "ideas" and "perversions" seems a bit worrying.
There's a fundamental question lying at the bottom of all this controversy. Those of us who live in democracies and hear constantly about how wonderful our "free media" are expect to get objective news reporting. Maybe not from any single outlet, but from the aggregate of the media. Some will lean left, others right, some are hawks, others doves, etc. So far, so good.
Then our government declares a state of war or "war". The first question is which you think it is: war or "war". If it's a real war, Churchill's dictum that "truth must be accompanied by an escort of lies" comes into play. We all know that "loose lips sink ships", and no one wants to be responsible for getting our brave boys killed, or even for harming civilian morale by revealing that, yes, one of our battleships was sunk with the loss of 4,000 sailors.
Trouble is, how do we know if it's a real war or a "war" arbitrarily declared by the government? As Orwell's 1984 pointed out, it is trivially easy for any government to proclaim a continuous state of war, thereby giving itself an excuse to suspend all civil liberties "for the duration" - i.e. indefinitely.
And this is where public patriotism comes in. In some countries more than others, a large fraction of the people readily snap into a patriotic, somewhat militaristic, unquestioning frame of mind as soon as they perceive any threat. In such a climate of opinion, the media would be insane to take an anti-government line or question the war. It's not necessarily a matter of prejudice, or vested interests, or black helicopters; it's just that they will lose their audience if they don't tell it what it wants to hear.
Just as we get the government we deserve (because we vote it in), we also get the media we deserve (because we buy it selectively). Only with a truly educated, rational, mature, objective citizenship can excellent media thrive.
"...US government's plan to reduce the roughly 4,000 active internet connections used by its civilian agencies to a mere 50 highly secure gateways".
Yes, about par for the course. From memory DEC (my employer at that time) took a similar decision back around 1985 or so. The plan entailed channelling all connections from the company's tens of thousands of computers, linked worldwide by DECnet, through one or at most two gateways to the ARPAnet. The security logic was unassailable even then.
22 years for public officials to follow best commercial practice... looks about right. Fairly quick, actually. It took the best part of a century for politicians to start echoing Frederick Winslow Taylor's ideas about "scientific management". (Although of course, even then they didn't understand them).
My mistake, I see. I made the incorrect assumption that if a law deals with crimes and imposes criminal penalties, it is a criminal law. But, as you say, the Sherman Act is both criminal and civil. That's not confusing at all.
"...please show me a criminal conviction by Microsoft in any court..."
Assuming you mean "a criminal conviction of Microsoft", in the first case I cited Microsoft was found guilty of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. That is a criminal offence. If still in doubt, check paragraph 3 of this page http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Antitrust
or any other source of legal information.
Don't be silly. The parent was implicitly restricting his statement to the domain of choosing software products. You are attempting to introduce the meta-domain of choice policies, in an utterly unsuccessful attempt to muddy the water.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/business/2000/microsoft/700702.stm
And, as an amusing dessert, try some of this:
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2118681/microsoft-convicted-software-piracy
"Mostly it's the dream of effeminate leftist non-bathing chain-smoking snaggle-toothed Eurotrash looking to take the big guy out."
A very convincing logical argument. I don't see how anyone could resist the power of your reasoning.
No wonder you post as "Anonymous Coward". Personal abuse has no place in a forum like Slashdot. (Well, not unless it's funny).
"In my country, MS holds the government in its palm: its lobby includes former prime minister and other influential people. Heck, even Bill Gates came to visit this country to sign a deal with Prime Minister on software procurement."
Ah, Britain, eh?
"If the EU was so righteous, they wouldn't be doing business with China."
That's downright funny, coming from a citizen of a nation that owes $9 trillion - much of it to China. Who do you think is financing the current round of wars? It isn't US taxpayers, that's for sure.
1. The parent asked "when has *the government ever presented*...?" The US government, not a foreign government.
2. After Pearl Harbor the USA was at war with Japan. (If the Japanese hadn't got their timing wrong, the declaration of war would have taken place a few minutes before the strike, rather than after it). Just to be quite clear about it, there was never any decision by Americans to "confront Japan" any more than there was a decision to "confront Hitler". Both Japan and Germany declared war on the USA, and that is the only reason the USA found itself at war.
For the canonical worst-case scenario, try Michael Crichton's 2002 novel "Prey". Good time to buy - they're being remaindered. It's actually a pretty good book if you like that sort of thing.
http://tinyurl.com/2baemk
I couldn't agree more. My study and all the adjacent rooms are piled high with stacks of books - many of which I have never read. I just love shopping for them, buying them, opening them and browsing through them, and just... well, it sounds crazy, but *having their company*! Kind of like a primitive version of Charlie Stross' "exobrain" (see his novel "Accelerando").
One of the big lessons we all need to learn is this: People are different!
Some get addicted to drugs; others don't.
Some have their health ruined by alcohol; others drink like fish yet remain fairly healthy.
Some get sick when they eat certain foods; others thrive on them.
Some lose weight by exercising; others don't (true; look it up).
And some will never give up paper books, while others will be happy to do so.
It makes life more complicated, but also more fun.