I verified this with Netscape 4.07: "If you wish to visit MSN.com, please select the appropriate download link below." There's no access to MSN.
"'All of our development work for the new MSN.com is... W3C standard,' said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for Web technologies. 'For browsers that we know don't support those standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the standards.'... 'We do identify the string from the browser, and the only issue that we have is that the Opera browser doesn't support the latest XHTML standard," said Visse. "So we do suggest to those users that they go download a browser that does support the latest standards.'"
Suggest? Only Microsoft could say, "We're not going to let you use our Web site unless you use our software (or pretend to)," and call it a suggestion!
Rosenberg claims it's hard to change registered file types, then explains how to do it in twenty one words. Like many of you, I'm not all that impressed. (Some Windows programs, such as the wonderful IrfanView, offer to grab or give up the registered file type for various types, at installation or whenever.)
The real problem is, not all interesting associations can be set via Windows Explorer. Programs can tell Windows, "I want to open up a Web page" or "I want to start sending an e-mail message"; what programs do they use?
Setting "the default browser" is more than just setting the.HTM association! If you've told all your browsers to fight over the default like a pack of starving pit bulls, they'll offer to change it back and forth all too often. Otherwise, you can edit a dozen or so obscure registry entries. There's a commercial (but cheap) utility, BrowserSwitch, that doesn't do anything but this.
How do you change the default mail program? I honestly have no idea. Heaven help someone with both Outlook and Eudora installed, who would prefer to use the latter.
Various movie formats can be handled by Windows Media Player, and RealPlayer, and QuickTime. Assuming Microsoft hasn't banned the latter two, how can you tell your browser which one you want?
Any solution would need to be at least partially technical. It's not clear how much of a legal solution is necessary; I'd like to hear arguments on both sides.
I agree with Rosenberg in one way: Windows users would be better off if they could make such choices more easily.
Even if Codeplay was to use the Edison Design Group C++ front end -- highly likely, as it's famous throughout the industry as an extraordinarily compliant, high quality front end, and seemingly a perfect match to the existing VectorC back end -- I'm highly skeptical this schedule could be met.
On the other hand, a lot of performance-minded projects stick with plain C. (I'm not commenting on whether or not that's the right decision; I'm observing what decisions are made in the industry.)
(From elsewhere on the page: IA-64 Linux support is more likely?)
I don't know what a vanilla Unix Purify license goes for (my employer has a negotiated lower rate), but it's less than $10K US. It is several thousand dollars per user, floating across hosts (and maybe Unix platforms) but not floating across users; expensive.
Secretary Ashcroft has been complaining about the existing U.S. wiretap laws.
On the one hand, he says a phone tap warrant applies to a phone, not a caller. If I'm the subject of a legal wiretap, I can buy a disposable phone from the 7-11, and no one can listen in on the new phone without a new warrant. Do that every day, and legal wiretaps are obsolete. Expanding the scope from the phone to the party sounds fair. Are there hidden traps? (Would the FBI now be authorized to listen in on my next door neighbor's phone, just in case I dropped by to use it?)
On the other hand, when he's not talking to the press, Mr. Ashcroft may be asking for a lot more. What's the spread between the public and private faces in this action?
Some U.S. congressman said recently that we shouldn't consider outselves to have any expectation of privacy regarding the e-mail address and URLs we use. Does he realize the implications of this, and does precedence back him up?
The example people are citing is "LUDs"; the ability for police officers to get a list, without a warrant, of all the phone numbers of people I've called or who've called me. Any legal theories on which is closer, sites or URLs?
This whole thing strikes me as fairly bizarre. I think there are legal precedents about my expectations of privacy for the videotapes I rent, or the books I borrow from the public library. I don't know how accessible they are to law enforcement, but no one can publish such a list in the newspaper. (Right?)
Whatever happened to our good friends Ponds and Fleishman who said they had discovered a methodology for managing cold fusion over a decade ago?
(Pons and Fleischmann)
First, it became instantly clear that, whatever was, it probably wasn't fusion. (Fusion would yield energy and other stuff; the other stuff wasn't there.)
Second, the effect wasn't reproducable at will. This is a death knell for both scientific research (since research needs to be confirmed by others reproducing the original work) and practical applications.
There's a great "Ask The Experts" discussion at the Scientific American site here (Google cache).
... we'd like to pass through packets for our two server machines, and use NAT/DHCP on a third address for the rest of the LAN. Nearly all the boxes advertise that they can do NAT routing, but many don't support NAT and static-IP routing simultaneously.
(1) If you have two servers providing the same service (listening on the same port), you'll need two or three IP addresses, a hub (connected to the DSL or cable "modem"), and either a NAT router or a way for one of your servers to do NAT.
(2) If you have different services on the different servers (e.g., HTTP, e-mail, Q3), you can have one IP address, and configure the NAT to pass the appropriate ports through to the appropriate servers...
... if the protocols you want to support are NAT friendly. If the protocols specify, "Further communications will happen on such-and-such a port at such-and-such an IP address," it won't work. You're not only doing NAT (Network Address Translation), you're also doing PAT (Port Address Translation), and the "such-and-such a port" message needs to be translated.
For example, FTP clients wouldn't work well over NAT (in passive mode, I think), except that every NAT router supports client FTP. I don't know if they support server FTP. Voice-over-IP protocols (H.323 and SIP) are notorious for not working over NAT; the respective standards organizations are trying to find solutions.
If you need to support a NAT-unfriendly protocol, go back to (1).
See also this article (cached): "Network Address Translation: Not A Panacea".
--
With grief, with determination, and with hope.
The only reason that so much code is ugly is that most people do not know about and adopt XP.
Extreme Programming (still abbreviated XP, despite Microsoft's attempt to dilute the abbreviation) may have a lot to offer many software development projects. But Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham and Ron Jeffries were capable of writing beautiful software before XP was codified, and programmers in XP projects are capable of writing ugly software.
Refactoring backed by unit tests (two XP practices) can help reduce software entropy, and keep software from becoming ugly; granted. But XP extremism helps no one.
Excerpts: "there are programs we can look at and about which we say, 'no way I'm maintaining that kluge'... and there are other programs about which we can say, 'wow, who wrote this!'" He suggests how you can recognize software with The Quality: "every part of the code is transparently clear -- there are no sections that are obscure to gain effciency; everything about it seems familiar; I can imagine changing it, adding some functionality; I am not afraid of it, I will remember it." There are even suggestions, not how to make more beautiful software, but how to learn to do so.
Gabriel helped start the "patterns movement" in the object-oriented community. Aside from the Design Patterns book, patterns (and especially generative pattern languages) have yet to make a significant inpact on software development. Maybe someday, maybe not.
I still want the Star Wars MMORPG to rock my world tho.
The official Star Wars MMORPG FAQ is updated from time to time. (I like this FAQ: "2.13 Will I cast twin shadows on Tatooine?" "We are remaining true to the continuity of the movies, so only one shadow is cast on Tatooine.")
They're saying "second half of 2002"; patient, a Jedi must be.
At the inaugural Internet Security and Privacy event, Philip Zimmermann, the creator of the world's most popular email encryption software, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), spoke to a standing-room-only audience in San Francisco. A decade ago, the Federal government accused Phil of violating the Arms Export Control Act for munitions trafficking. The government claimed that U.S. national security was jeopardized when PGP was spread around the world as free encryption software. The investigation of Phil Zimmermann continued for three years. The feds eventually dropped their case.
Phil spoke about the current Dmitry Sklyarov case. Dmitry is a Russian programmer who was thrown in jail by the federal government at the behest of Adobe. Adobe claims that software Dmitry created for his employer in Russia violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After meetings with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Adobe had a change of heart and asked the feds to drop criminal charges against Dmitry. Phil characterized criminal law as a "blunt instrument" when used to enforce encryption software policies. Phil also related to the terror of having the federal government threaten you with incarceration for writing a piece of code.
Phil went on to discuss another current criminal case, that against Nicodemo S. Scarfo, in which the FBI used electronic eavesdropping to access data which Mr. Scarfo had reportedly encrypted with PGP. While the FBI had a search warrant, Phil believes law enforcement should be held to the higher wire-tap standards before permitting on-going electronic surveillance.
Phil also had a number of stories to tell about the development of PGP and his efforts to get permission to export that software. Only one episode involved the brandishing of automatic weapons in a bank building, however.
I use the "lite" look. Right under the Slashdot logo, I see links for faq, code, osdn, etc.; but no link for meta-moderation.
(Later:) I used the link in my history (http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl), and it appears to work. (I tried it again, and it offered again to let me MM; but when I hit refresh, it said "not eligible," as it should. IE 5, @Home; I don't remember needing to refresh around the cache like that before.)
I've met Richard Gabriel. I've read Richard Gabriel. Friends, I'm no Dick Gabriel. I'm not worthy to close his open parentheses.
I agree with much of what he says in "Mob Software," but I think I'm ultimately dissatisfied with the essay, and I don't think it's my lack of understanding.
I can summarize the key points as follows (though everyone should read the actual essay, not just the Slashdot discussion, not even mine), with which I violently agree:
No one knows how to reliably produce quality software on schedule. We've learned a few things that work pretty often, and more things that work sometimes; but our efforts are failures more often than those of bridge builders two thousand years ago, or a roulette player any time. We don't get it.
Sometimes "mob software development" works. (Examples cited.)
Sure; but sometimes, anything works. There is no method, no process, no trick so lame it can prevent any and all projects from succeeding. Some projects using UML as a Holy Grail and succeed; some follow "code, you're done," and get to their destination; some change toolbelts every six months and yet, two years later, have something that works.
Dr. Grabriel, please don't tell me what sometimes works. Tell me what often helps in general; tell me what makes a difference for the better for various particular kinds of projects.
Couple of other complaints: He talks about Jini in the past tense as if it's been a wonderous success; I agree it's promising, but nothing more, yet. He also talks about the horror of modules and the wonder of (what everyone else calls) components; I wish he'd distinguished the two (and their respective weaknesses and strengths) better. (Okay, maybe that last is my weakness and not his.)
(I did not intend to use so many parentheses when writing about a Lisp uber-meister-hacker (but it's kind of appropriate (now that I think about it)).)
Bounded pointers, etc.
on
Memory Leaks
·
· Score: 5, Informative
For the other kinds of stuff Purify does (aside from memory leaks), look at Greg McGary's bounded pointer work.
Bad news: You'll have to build your own gcc (Greg's changes haven't yet been accepted in to the gcc trunk), and all your libraries (just as Purify re-writes all your libraries).
Good news: The resulting code is much faster than Purify'ed code, and finds some problems Purify doesn't. I know of a major software development effort (hundreds of developers, millions of lines of code; sorry, can't give details) that uses bounded pointers to great advantage.
Other tools: GNU Checker, dbmalloc, Bruce Perens' Electric Fence, MemProf, mpatrol, and Mprof; Google searches will turn them all up.
Among the voice-over-IP (VoIP) protocols out in the world are H.323 (an ITU-T spec that makes heavy use of ASN.1) and SIP (RFC 2543 et. al.)
H.323 interoperability is tough. Some problems are due to differences in how one entity encodes a piece of data and another decodes it. Many H.323 implementations, um, do not fail gracefully under such circumstances.
SIP call signalling looks like HTTP. There have been complaints that it's too verbose, and needs to be replaced with something binary. One proposal suggests using a binary encoding. It uses LZW compression and shared "codebooks" (schemas?)
That's just for call signalling. Both these VoIP protocols (and others) use RTP ("Real Time Protocol") for voice, video, etc.; that's encoded and compressed pretty darned seriously.
(I'm not speaking for my employer, I'm just speaking my mind.)
They know that if they can roll out XP and.NET before the district court can stop them it will be too late.
So it's completely predictable that they would have taken this step (and others) to try to delay the courts.
What I hadn't heard predicted, though, is that they also may ship XP next month! "Microsoft could send PC makers the final--or gold--code for Windows XP as early as Aug. 15... [and] would allow PC makers to sell systems with Windows XP installed in September."
Congratuations on the release of version 3.0 of the GNU Compiler Collection. This is the cumulation of a lot of work by contributors to the GNU project from all over the world.
What do you see as the GNU project's next big release? Mono and DotGNU? Bayonne? Something else?
I agree. If I'm programming by myself, I might interrupt myself to check my e-mail; if I'm programming with someone else, no way.
In addition, a pair of programmers working busily together look busy. If I'm at my computer, either typing furiously or staring at the ceiling (deep in design or debugging thoughts), I look interruptable.
Slashdot Mirror
What hardware do you think will need additional support in the 2.4 branch? Big (>150G) hard disks? KT266A and/or nForce chipset motherboards? USB 2.0?
Sometimes they seemed remote control, sometimes they seemed computer generated.
I verified this with Netscape 4.07: "If you wish to visit MSN.com, please select the appropriate download link below." There's no access to MSN.
... W3C standard,' said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for Web technologies. 'For browsers that we know don't support those standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the standards.' ... 'We do identify the string from the browser, and the only issue that we have is that the Opera browser doesn't support the latest XHTML standard," said Visse. "So we do suggest to those users that they go download a browser that does support the latest standards.'"
"'All of our development work for the new MSN.com is
Suggest? Only Microsoft could say, "We're not going to let you use our Web site unless you use our software (or pretend to)," and call it a suggestion!
Rosenberg claims it's hard to change registered file types, then explains how to do it in twenty one words. Like many of you, I'm not all that impressed. (Some Windows programs, such as the wonderful IrfanView, offer to grab or give up the registered file type for various types, at installation or whenever.)
.HTM association! If you've told all your browsers to fight over the default like a pack of starving pit bulls, they'll offer to change it back and forth all too often. Otherwise, you can edit a dozen or so obscure registry entries. There's a commercial (but cheap) utility, BrowserSwitch, that doesn't do anything but this.
The real problem is, not all interesting associations can be set via Windows Explorer. Programs can tell Windows, "I want to open up a Web page" or "I want to start sending an e-mail message"; what programs do they use?
Setting "the default browser" is more than just setting the
How do you change the default mail program? I honestly have no idea. Heaven help someone with both Outlook and Eudora installed, who would prefer to use the latter.
Various movie formats can be handled by Windows Media Player, and RealPlayer, and QuickTime. Assuming Microsoft hasn't banned the latter two, how can you tell your browser which one you want?
Any solution would need to be at least partially technical. It's not clear how much of a legal solution is necessary; I'd like to hear arguments on both sides.
I agree with Rosenberg in one way: Windows users would be better off if they could make such choices more easily.
"An interim release of VectorC with preliminary C++ support is due in Q4 2001. VectorC 2.0 with full C++ compliancy is scheduled for release in Q1 2002."
Even if Codeplay was to use the Edison Design Group C++ front end -- highly likely, as it's famous throughout the industry as an extraordinarily compliant, high quality front end, and seemingly a perfect match to the existing VectorC back end -- I'm highly skeptical this schedule could be met.
On the other hand, a lot of performance-minded projects stick with plain C. (I'm not commenting on whether or not that's the right decision; I'm observing what decisions are made in the industry.)
"At this time, Rational has not declared any plans regarding Purify, PureCoverage or Quantify support for Linux on 32-bit/64-bit Intel platforms."
(From elsewhere on the page: IA-64 Linux support is more likely?)
I don't know what a vanilla Unix Purify license goes for (my employer has a negotiated lower rate), but it's less than $10K US. It is several thousand dollars per user, floating across hosts (and maybe Unix platforms) but not floating across users; expensive.
Purify alternatives were recently discussed here.
Secretary Ashcroft has been complaining about the existing U.S. wiretap laws.
On the one hand, he says a phone tap warrant applies to a phone, not a caller. If I'm the subject of a legal wiretap, I can buy a disposable phone from the 7-11, and no one can listen in on the new phone without a new warrant. Do that every day, and legal wiretaps are obsolete. Expanding the scope from the phone to the party sounds fair. Are there hidden traps? (Would the FBI now be authorized to listen in on my next door neighbor's phone, just in case I dropped by to use it?)
On the other hand, when he's not talking to the press, Mr. Ashcroft may be asking for a lot more. What's the spread between the public and private faces in this action?
Some U.S. congressman said recently that we shouldn't consider outselves to have any expectation of privacy regarding the e-mail address and URLs we use. Does he realize the implications of this, and does precedence back him up?
k nowledge_pulls_the_mask_off_1.html (to pick fairly benign examples in both cases).
He was probably thinking of sites, rather than URLs. It's one thing to worry about whether I visit dailynews.yahoo.com; it's another to worry about logging something as specific as http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/zd/20011004/tc/zero-
The example people are citing is "LUDs"; the ability for police officers to get a list, without a warrant, of all the phone numbers of people I've called or who've called me. Any legal theories on which is closer, sites or URLs?
This whole thing strikes me as fairly bizarre. I think there are legal precedents about my expectations of privacy for the videotapes I rent, or the books I borrow from the public library. I don't know how accessible they are to law enforcement, but no one can publish such a list in the newspaper. (Right?)
Whatever happened to our good friends Ponds and Fleishman who said they had discovered a methodology for managing cold fusion over a decade ago?
(Pons and Fleischmann)
First, it became instantly clear that, whatever was, it probably wasn't fusion. (Fusion would yield energy and other stuff; the other stuff wasn't there.)
Second, the effect wasn't reproducable at will. This is a death knell for both scientific research (since research needs to be confirmed by others reproducing the original work) and practical applications.
There's a great "Ask The Experts" discussion at the Scientific American site here (Google cache).
Anyone making life easier for a "hacker" (cracker) could be sentenced to life without parole?
Bill Gates had better pack his bags now! ("... the most cigarettes.")
The TechTV article was posted Tuesday. It's late Wednesday. Has that Red Cross office gotten everything they need?
More to the point, does anyone know of other organizations (managing this crisis) that need tech equipment or services?
... we'd like to pass through packets for our two server machines, and use NAT/DHCP on a third address for the rest of the LAN. Nearly all the boxes advertise that they can do NAT routing, but many don't support NAT and static-IP routing simultaneously.
...
(1) If you have two servers providing the same service (listening on the same port), you'll need two or three IP addresses, a hub (connected to the DSL or cable "modem"), and either a NAT router or a way for one of your servers to do NAT.
(2) If you have different services on the different servers (e.g., HTTP, e-mail, Q3), you can have one IP address, and configure the NAT to pass the appropriate ports through to the appropriate servers
... if the protocols you want to support are NAT friendly. If the protocols specify, "Further communications will happen on such-and-such a port at such-and-such an IP address," it won't work. You're not only doing NAT (Network Address Translation), you're also doing PAT (Port Address Translation), and the "such-and-such a port" message needs to be translated.
For example, FTP clients wouldn't work well over NAT (in passive mode, I think), except that every NAT router supports client FTP. I don't know if they support server FTP. Voice-over-IP protocols (H.323 and SIP) are notorious for not working over NAT; the respective standards organizations are trying to find solutions.
If you need to support a NAT-unfriendly protocol, go back to (1).
See also this article (cached): "Network Address Translation: Not A Panacea".
--
With grief, with determination, and with hope.
The only reason that so much code is ugly is that most people do not know about and adopt XP.
Extreme Programming (still abbreviated XP, despite Microsoft's attempt to dilute the abbreviation) may have a lot to offer many software development projects. But Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham and Ron Jeffries were capable of writing beautiful software before XP was codified, and programmers in XP projects are capable of writing ugly software.
Refactoring backed by unit tests (two XP practices) can help reduce software entropy, and keep software from becoming ugly; granted. But XP extremism helps no one.
The cited article doesn't say anything profound. (I got particularly worried when he said, "global variables and GOTO statements ... may be exactly what the software needs to marry form with function," and when his example of beautiful software turned out to be a fragment of Visual Basic. "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." --said, tongue at most partly in cheek, by Edsger W. Dijkstra, in "How do we tell truths that might hurt?")
... and there are other programs about which we can say, 'wow, who wrote this!'" He suggests how you can recognize software with The Quality: "every part of the code is transparently clear -- there are no sections that are obscure to gain effciency; everything about it seems familiar; I can imagine changing it, adding some functionality; I am not afraid of it, I will remember it." There are even suggestions, not how to make more beautiful software, but how to learn to do so.
Richard P. Gabriel (whose essay on "Mob Programming" was recently discussed on Slashdot) has a far more profound take on the subject. He has a summary of Christopher Alexander's work on architecture and "The Quality Without A Name," and how it relates to software; you can read the PDF version on his Web site, or Google's cached text version.
Excerpts: "there are programs we can look at and about which we say, 'no way I'm maintaining that kluge'
Gabriel helped start the "patterns movement" in the object-oriented community. Aside from the Design Patterns book, patterns (and especially generative pattern languages) have yet to make a significant inpact on software development. Maybe someday, maybe not.
I still want the Star Wars MMORPG to rock my world tho.
The official Star Wars MMORPG FAQ is updated from time to time. (I like this FAQ: "2.13 Will I cast twin shadows on Tatooine?" "We are remaining true to the continuity of the movies, so only one shadow is cast on Tatooine.")
They're saying "second half of 2002"; patient, a Jedi must be.
... why don't they try searching for it?-)
(I'd love to see JMS's preproduction Netnews postings about Babylon 5, myself.)
(Grabbed before the inevitable Slashdot effect.)
At the inaugural Internet Security and Privacy event, Philip Zimmermann, the creator of the world's most popular email encryption software, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), spoke to a standing-room-only audience in San Francisco. A decade ago, the Federal government accused Phil of violating the Arms Export Control Act for munitions trafficking. The government claimed that U.S. national security was jeopardized when PGP was spread around the world as free encryption software. The investigation of Phil Zimmermann continued for three years. The feds eventually dropped their case.
Phil spoke about the current Dmitry Sklyarov case. Dmitry is a Russian programmer who was thrown in jail by the federal government at the behest of Adobe. Adobe claims that software Dmitry created for his employer in Russia violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After meetings with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Adobe had a change of heart and asked the feds to drop criminal charges against Dmitry. Phil characterized criminal law as a "blunt instrument" when used to enforce encryption software policies. Phil also related to the terror of having the federal government threaten you with incarceration for writing a piece of code.
Phil went on to discuss another current criminal case, that against Nicodemo S. Scarfo, in which the FBI used electronic eavesdropping to access data which Mr. Scarfo had reportedly encrypted with PGP. While the FBI had a search warrant, Phil believes law enforcement should be held to the higher wire-tap standards before permitting on-going electronic surveillance.
Phil also had a number of stories to tell about the development of PGP and his efforts to get permission to export that software. Only one episode involved the brandishing of automatic weapons in a bank building, however.
I use the "lite" look. Right under the Slashdot logo, I see links for faq, code, osdn, etc.; but no link for meta-moderation.
(Later:) I used the link in my history (http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl), and it appears to work. (I tried it again, and it offered again to let me MM; but when I hit refresh, it said "not eligible," as it should. IE 5, @Home; I don't remember needing to refresh around the cache like that before.)
I agree with much of what he says in "Mob Software," but I think I'm ultimately dissatisfied with the essay, and I don't think it's my lack of understanding.
I can summarize the key points as follows (though everyone should read the actual essay, not just the Slashdot discussion, not even mine), with which I violently agree:
- No one knows how to reliably produce quality software on schedule. We've learned a few things that work pretty often, and more things that work sometimes; but our efforts are failures more often than those of bridge builders two thousand years ago, or a roulette player any time. We don't get it.
- Sometimes "mob software development" works. (Examples cited.)
Sure; but sometimes, anything works. There is no method, no process, no trick so lame it can prevent any and all projects from succeeding. Some projects using UML as a Holy Grail and succeed; some follow "code, you're done," and get to their destination; some change toolbelts every six months and yet, two years later, have something that works.Dr. Grabriel, please don't tell me what sometimes works. Tell me what often helps in general; tell me what makes a difference for the better for various particular kinds of projects.
Couple of other complaints: He talks about Jini in the past tense as if it's been a wonderous success; I agree it's promising, but nothing more, yet. He also talks about the horror of modules and the wonder of (what everyone else calls) components; I wish he'd distinguished the two (and their respective weaknesses and strengths) better. (Okay, maybe that last is my weakness and not his.)
(I did not intend to use so many parentheses when writing about a Lisp uber-meister-hacker (but it's kind of appropriate (now that I think about it)).)
... here. (Boy, that was slashdotted fast.)
For the other kinds of stuff Purify does (aside from memory leaks), look at Greg McGary's bounded pointer work.
Bad news: You'll have to build your own gcc (Greg's changes haven't yet been accepted in to the gcc trunk), and all your libraries (just as Purify re-writes all your libraries).
Good news: The resulting code is much faster than Purify'ed code, and finds some problems Purify doesn't. I know of a major software development effort (hundreds of developers, millions of lines of code; sorry, can't give details) that uses bounded pointers to great advantage.
Other tools: GNU Checker, dbmalloc, Bruce Perens' Electric Fence, MemProf, mpatrol, and Mprof; Google searches will turn them all up.
Among the voice-over-IP (VoIP) protocols out in the world are H.323 (an ITU-T spec that makes heavy use of ASN.1) and SIP (RFC 2543 et. al.)
H.323 interoperability is tough. Some problems are due to differences in how one entity encodes a piece of data and another decodes it. Many H.323 implementations, um, do not fail gracefully under such circumstances.
SIP call signalling looks like HTTP. There have been complaints that it's too verbose, and needs to be replaced with something binary. One proposal suggests using a binary encoding. It uses LZW compression and shared "codebooks" (schemas?)
That's just for call signalling. Both these VoIP protocols (and others) use RTP ("Real Time Protocol") for voice, video, etc.; that's encoded and compressed pretty darned seriously.
(I'm not speaking for my employer, I'm just speaking my mind.)
They know that if they can roll out XP and .NET before the district court can stop them it will be too late.
... [and] would allow PC makers to sell systems with Windows XP installed in September."
So it's completely predictable that they would have taken this step (and others) to try to delay the courts.
What I hadn't heard predicted, though, is that they also may ship XP next month! "Microsoft could send PC makers the final--or gold--code for Windows XP as early as Aug. 15
Anything to beat the clock and dodge the bullet.
Congratuations on the release of version 3.0 of the GNU Compiler Collection. This is the cumulation of a lot of work by contributors to the GNU project from all over the world.
What do you see as the GNU project's next big release? Mono and DotGNU? Bayonne? Something else?
I agree. If I'm programming by myself, I might interrupt myself to check my e-mail; if I'm programming with someone else, no way.
In addition, a pair of programmers working busily together look busy. If I'm at my computer, either typing furiously or staring at the ceiling (deep in design or debugging thoughts), I look interruptable.