I don't understand why any knowledgeable user would want to use a closed-source browser nowadays. Any specific benefit Opera might have over another particular browser would be outweighed by the drawbacks, IMO.
I'm knowledgeable, and I use free software *exclusively*... except I also use Opera.
The alternatives simply suck too much. Firefox still has the look and feel of beta software, and I'd have to go hunt for extensions for the features I need.
The good news is that the story is either missing some important information or just plain wrong. It seems REALLY unlikely Intel would build a complete 3G radio and antenna into the CPU just for that.
It's plain wrong.
Someone commented over at TFA:
Read the Intel White Paper at the above link: The chip can accept an encrypted SMS message IF the computer is equipped with a 3G card. The radio receiver is not in the chip itself, only the ability to accept and act on the encrypted SMS message of an external 3G card receives the message.
Yeah; a real Unix system has a mail daemon; too many things break if it doesn't.
Although *if* I use exim, I let the Debian installer configure it for local mail delivery only. For mail servers which actually have to speak SMTP, I choose postfix (which is one well-supported alternative in Debian).
Personally this is a diplomatic mistake as it points out exactly which countries China has financial influence over, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Ukraine, Cuba and Morocco. Russia is the interesting one, although it is likely they don't care one way or the other about China's opinion and stayed away for their own reasons. As for Iraq and Colombia, hmm, perhaps they are trying to get out from under the US and looking to build relations with China or more likely Russia.
Isn't it obvious?
They are all states which are likely to go "hm, we wouldn't want one of our *own* dissidents to win the prize in 2011".
I don't think chinese money is the main reason.
Poor countries in Africa and South America where China has a huge economical influence are missing from the list.
When we migrated to C++ a while back, my biggest gripe became the number of projects, library, et.al. that weren't documented. I won't name the very popular library, but when I contacted the developers (I was still new with C++ at the time), they told me to "read the headers." Your code is not documentation, no matter how well you comment your functions. There's a subculture out there that I don't get that has the mindset that "it was hard to write, it should be hard to use" (and that's almost a direct quote from a library author). I don't know if it's job security, elitism, nepotism, or what. But, with some projects there's a cold disregard (borderline hostility) towards the people who will actually be using the product.
It's hard to take that seriously when you don't want to name the "very popular library".
I understand that it may be sensitive re: the company you're working for, but
you're asking us to buy into your views and at the same time give up the ability to check your facts...
Pointer typedefs were a bad idea in the 1980s. They're just terrible today.
*Typedefs* in general are terrible.
They have two main uses in my book, and both are specific to generic programming in C++.
Traditional uses IMHO mostly serve to obfuscate the type system (since they're just aliases).
There are two real problems with C++.
- The C++ standard library is a bunch of templates and is just a cludge in general. You either have to write your own (which you do in C or C++ on embedded systems without GNU anyway) or try and use parts of Qt or something similar. [---]
*So what* if it's templates?
What non-template alternative container library do you suggest?
I'm doing C programming at work right now, and the *worst* part is wading through the N different homegrown implementations of linked lists, hashes and balanced search trees with manual memory management, no type safety, and poor performance.
I'd kill for that thing you call a kludge.
[...]And the great thing about the test suite is that I can prove to a certain degree that the software conforms to the spec because the spec itself is executable and actually exercises the software. Specs that you can't prove are accurate are useless anyways, write a good test suite and use testing tools that output human readable results.
Tests cannot prove the absence of bugs. You should know that.
Are you saying non-functional requirements are useless just because they don't fit in your unit test framework?
I am an auditor and you are so wrong!
Process Control is not about checking boxes as much as having control of you processes.[...]
Sorry, this downplay of yours of process control systems is simply unprofessional. I had enough of the "software developers are artists that have no rules" mantra.
I don't see that he says that... Perhaps (parts of) the processes that get controlled at his workplace serve no useful purpose? Surely that's not unheard of.
I absolutely will think twice before taking a job that requires them.
Specifically, Requisite Pro is a joke and
ClearQuest is only semi-usable.
However, one tool that I found to be extremely useful amd totally worth its price is Enterprise Architect. I don't remember if it does requirements
And I'm one of the few who like ClearCase.
Rational bought and rebranded (added phrases like "Clear" or "Rose" to the name) various software over the years, so some may still be decent.
My point was that the instincts of human language has no regards for the finer points of naming. If reverse engineering is a major activity in your life, you're going to get the title reverse engineer.
Doubtful. It sounds kind of... wrong to me, so I would avoid the term. I might use it now and then in Slashdot summaries etc for humorous effect.
But does it work for them? If so, great! Why switch to something else if you have no real need for all those features?
It's not just about features, CVS is deeply broken (tagging/branching, directories, binary files, metadata, etc). Subversion is a drop-in replacement that fixes (most) of the problems and can be used in exactly the same workflow. The two are equivalent and one is less broken - it's kind of a no-brainer.
I have all of my code in CVS and I trust it; I've personally seen it work every day for the past twelve years.
I share some repositories with my brother, who's less inclined to learn a new tool.
Sticking with CVS is a no-brainer for me.
True, Stevens is still the gold standard. However, since he died over a decade ago you're never going to get a description of newer APIs (epoll, dnotify,...)
For epoll, it would be enough with a "see also: epoll(7)" in select(2). And now I see there *is* such a reference.
epoll is nice: one of the few Linux-specific system interfaces which is clearly better than the standard Unix counterpart (select/poll).
Sun shipped with NeWS. NeXT shipped with Display Postscript. SGI shipped with MEX and later 4Sight. I guess none of these were "proper" Unixes in your godlike eyes
I'm old enough to have used NeWS for a few months in 1990... yeah, that was Unix. But every Unix I've used since then (twenty years) has had X and applications like twm, xterm, Emacs...
can you blame people like me for thinking a Unix without these things is a bit... odd?
Problem is currently my choices are half done betaware, and half done betaware.. NOTHING is a complete solution... They both focus on stupid shineys instead of fixing major problems that have existed for a very long time.
What are these major problems?
I make the third choice and ignore both Gnome and KDE. ctwm is my window manager, and I don't really need any of the Windows-ish crap.
I'll chime in too about not having this problem.[...] Now that everyone on Slashdot seems to be having this problem, I can't help but wonder how I managed to be so lucky all these years. WTF is going on?
I tried that dd(1) line. It doesn't make/everything/ else "slow down to a crawl", but everything that does I/O is affected... and as someone remarked things like fancy web browsers and bloated desktops environments do a lot of I/O.
I used to work for Posten AB for a while before being sacked for not showing up for work for a month or two. Once we were sent on a conference trip on a real slow boat to Helsinki town.
Our boss held a pep-talk about efficiency and profitability. I asked if they'd shut down the postal service if we weren't profitable. The boss said "Of course not! The postal service is an institution!"
Posten is an interesting case of a company committing suicide.
And they're still at it. IIRC they made a decent profit last year. When asked what they would do with the money, they replied that they would use it to sack more people...
And they should say who actually has this code/installed/. RDS surely falls in the same category as SCTP -- might be useful in the lab at CERN, but not on any normal server, and certainly not on some random Ubuntu user's desktop.
Because people are using their word processors as typesetters. I actually have to keep two copies of TeXLive installed, because some time in the last two years someone tweaked one of the layout algorithms slightly and the result is that a small number of paragraphs have line breaks in different places. Unfortunately, this means that one of the chapters in my second book gets typeset differently with the '08 and '10 editions. If I want to produce changes for the second printing, I have to minimise the number of pages, and a reflow on chapter 4 with the new editions upsets all of the page numbers for subsequent pages, so I have to use the old version.
I hope that by "someone" you mean "someone at my college/company" because Knuth
really, really hates when someone does such changes (there's a tirade on his homepage about a hacked Computer Modern
where a certain greek letter got slightly wider).
If not, you should file a high-importance bug report with TeXLive.
As for Total Recall, I thought it was a fun diversion, but as for realism I thought it was absolutely stupid and highly inaccurate. "Scientifically accurate depiction of exposure to the Martian atmosphere".... hardly. [...] It is a movie to watch with your brain put into neutral merely to enjoy the film as an action thriller, not for any scientific accuracy if you really know anything about this stuff.
It may come as a surprise to you, but most people don't watch action movies for their scientific accuracy...
It's also worth pointing out that Total Recall stops being based on the PKD story fifteen minutes into the movie or so.
(The rest is still based on a mix of Dick's themes, though. I like it.)
Last time I checked, you need to enter the IP address of the DNS server. 8.8.8.8 (or even the IPs of the DNS of my ISP) is easy to remember, v6 addresses are not.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand why any knowledgeable user would want to use a closed-source browser nowadays. Any specific benefit Opera might have over another particular browser would be outweighed by the drawbacks, IMO.
I'm knowledgeable, and I use free software *exclusively* ... except I also use Opera.
The alternatives simply suck too much. Firefox still has the look and feel of beta software, and I'd have to go hunt for extensions for the features I need.
The good news is that the story is either missing some important information or just plain wrong. It seems REALLY unlikely Intel would build a complete 3G radio and antenna into the CPU just for that.
It's plain wrong. Someone commented over at TFA:
Read the Intel White Paper at the above link: The chip can accept an encrypted SMS message IF the computer is equipped with a 3G card. The radio receiver is not in the chip itself, only the ability to accept and act on the encrypted SMS message of an external 3G card receives the message.
Cron job outputs, for one.
Yeah; a real Unix system has a mail daemon; too many things break if it doesn't. Although *if* I use exim, I let the Debian installer configure it for local mail delivery only. For mail servers which actually have to speak SMTP, I choose postfix (which is one well-supported alternative in Debian).
Personally this is a diplomatic mistake as it points out exactly which countries China has financial influence over, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Ukraine, Cuba and Morocco. Russia is the interesting one, although it is likely they don't care one way or the other about China's opinion and stayed away for their own reasons. As for Iraq and Colombia, hmm, perhaps they are trying to get out from under the US and looking to build relations with China or more likely Russia.
Isn't it obvious? They are all states which are likely to go "hm, we wouldn't want one of our *own* dissidents to win the prize in 2011".
I don't think chinese money is the main reason. Poor countries in Africa and South America where China has a huge economical influence are missing from the list.
When we migrated to C++ a while back, my biggest gripe became the number of projects, library, et.al. that weren't documented. I won't name the very popular library, but when I contacted the developers (I was still new with C++ at the time), they told me to "read the headers." Your code is not documentation, no matter how well you comment your functions. There's a subculture out there that I don't get that has the mindset that "it was hard to write, it should be hard to use" (and that's almost a direct quote from a library author). I don't know if it's job security, elitism, nepotism, or what. But, with some projects there's a cold disregard (borderline hostility) towards the people who will actually be using the product.
It's hard to take that seriously when you don't want to name the "very popular library". I understand that it may be sensitive re: the company you're working for, but you're asking us to buy into your views and at the same time give up the ability to check your facts ...
Pointer typedefs were a bad idea in the 1980s. They're just terrible today.
*Typedefs* in general are terrible. They have two main uses in my book, and both are specific to generic programming in C++. Traditional uses IMHO mostly serve to obfuscate the type system (since they're just aliases).
There are two real problems with C++. - The C++ standard library is a bunch of templates and is just a cludge in general. You either have to write your own (which you do in C or C++ on embedded systems without GNU anyway) or try and use parts of Qt or something similar. [---]
*So what* if it's templates? What non-template alternative container library do you suggest?
I'm doing C programming at work right now, and the *worst* part is wading through the N different homegrown implementations of linked lists, hashes and balanced search trees with manual memory management, no type safety, and poor performance. I'd kill for that thing you call a kludge.
You don't want software freedom, you want free software because you're too cheap to pay for it. OSS and GPL are just the mask you hide behind.
What an odd thing to say to someone who just dismissed a free-as-in-beer offer!
[...]And the great thing about the test suite is that I can prove to a certain degree that the software conforms to the spec because the spec itself is executable and actually exercises the software. Specs that you can't prove are accurate are useless anyways, write a good test suite and use testing tools that output human readable results.
I am an auditor and you are so wrong! Process Control is not about checking boxes as much as having control of you processes.[...] Sorry, this downplay of yours of process control systems is simply unprofessional. I had enough of the "software developers are artists that have no rules" mantra.
I don't see that he says that ... Perhaps (parts of) the processes that get controlled at his workplace serve no useful purpose? Surely that's not unheard of.
rational tools are anything but rational
I absolutely will think twice before taking a job that requires them.
Specifically, Requisite Pro is a joke and ClearQuest is only semi-usable.
However, one tool that I found to be extremely useful amd totally worth its price is Enterprise Architect. I don't remember if it does requirements
And I'm one of the few who like ClearCase. Rational bought and rebranded (added phrases like "Clear" or "Rose" to the name) various software over the years, so some may still be decent.
My point was that the instincts of human language has no regards for the finer points of naming. If reverse engineering is a major activity in your life, you're going to get the title reverse engineer.
Doubtful. It sounds kind of ... wrong to me, so I would avoid the term. I might use it now and then in Slashdot summaries etc for humorous effect.
Perhaps the actual title should be "reenigne".
But does it work for them? If so, great! Why switch to something else if you have no real need for all those features? It's not just about features, CVS is deeply broken (tagging/branching, directories, binary files, metadata, etc). Subversion is a drop-in replacement that fixes (most) of the problems and can be used in exactly the same workflow. The two are equivalent and one is less broken - it's kind of a no-brainer.
I have all of my code in CVS and I trust it; I've personally seen it work every day for the past twelve years. I share some repositories with my brother, who's less inclined to learn a new tool. Sticking with CVS is a no-brainer for me.
True, Stevens is still the gold standard. However, since he died over a decade ago you're never going to get a description of newer APIs (epoll, dnotify, ...)
For epoll, it would be enough with a "see also: epoll(7)" in select(2). And now I see there *is* such a reference.
epoll is nice: one of the few Linux-specific system interfaces which is clearly better than the standard Unix counterpart (select/poll).
I think anyone out there who has Half Life'd will understand.
What about those of us who have only seen "Alien"? (That's an old movie, BTW.)
If a Mac is doing everything your asking a Mac to do, then I can only assume you aren't expecting much.
I run Linux on mine. What /is/ much, according to you? Simulating nuclear explosions? Running Windows-only software?
Sun shipped with NeWS. NeXT shipped with Display Postscript. SGI shipped with MEX and later 4Sight. I guess none of these were "proper" Unixes in your godlike eyes
I'm old enough to have used NeWS for a few months in 1990 ... yeah, that was Unix. But every Unix I've used since then (twenty years) has had X and applications like twm, xterm, Emacs ...
can you blame people like me for thinking a Unix without these things is a bit ... odd?
I'm not paralyzed by choice. I like choice.
Problem is currently my choices are half done betaware, and half done betaware.. NOTHING is a complete solution... They both focus on stupid shineys instead of fixing major problems that have existed for a very long time.
What are these major problems? I make the third choice and ignore both Gnome and KDE. ctwm is my window manager, and I don't really need any of the Windows-ish crap.
I'll chime in too about not having this problem.[...] Now that everyone on Slashdot seems to be having this problem, I can't help but wonder how I managed to be so lucky all these years. WTF is going on?
Put differently, where is the simple test which demonstrates the problem? It may or may not be the one someone linked to: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12309
I tried that dd(1) line. It doesn't make /everything/ else "slow down to a crawl", but everything that does I/O is affected ... and as someone remarked things like fancy web browsers and bloated desktops environments do a lot of I/O.
I used to work for Posten AB for a while before being sacked for not showing up for work for a month or two. Once we were sent on a conference trip on a real slow boat to Helsinki town.
Our boss held a pep-talk about efficiency and profitability. I asked if they'd shut down the postal service if we weren't profitable. The boss said "Of course not! The postal service is an institution!"
Posten is an interesting case of a company committing suicide.
And they're still at it. IIRC they made a decent profit last year. When asked what they would do with the money, they replied that they would use it to sack more people ...
And they should say who actually has this code /installed/. RDS surely falls in the same category as SCTP -- might be useful in the lab at CERN, but not on any normal server, and certainly not on some random Ubuntu user's desktop.
I hope that by "someone" you mean "someone at my college/company" because Knuth really, really hates when someone does such changes (there's a tirade on his homepage about a hacked Computer Modern where a certain greek letter got slightly wider).
If not, you should file a high-importance bug report with TeXLive.
It may come as a surprise to you, but most people don't watch action movies for their scientific accuracy ...
It's also worth pointing out that Total Recall stops being based on the PKD story fifteen minutes into the movie or so. (The rest is still based on a mix of Dick's themes, though. I like it.)
Huh? Care to elaborate? And did you really read it in -62? That would make you ... pretty old by Slashdot standards.
So what? You only enter it *once*.