Just 0, or "nullptr" or whatever the new C++0x keyword is.
I suppose 0L might be guaranteed to translate down to 0, but using it instead of 0 has no
benefit; it just looks funny.
Also, there were architectures way back where memory address 0 wasn't a guaranteed segfault. It had a different value there.
I think you are mixing up two different things.
The real, MC680x0, Commodore-Amiga had a writable address 0, and yet NULL was that address.
The C language never guaranteed a crash when you dereferenced a NULL pointer.
Yeah. And also: you don't normally even *notice* a 20% speed increase.
If you have to wait 5 seconds or 4 seconds doesn't really matter -- you're annoyed in either case.
When the industry as a whole moved from C and C++ to Java in the late 1990s
Uh, speak for yourself, or define "the industry".
I've used C, C++, Perl, Python, Tcl (yuck) and shell script over the years,
but only once, briefly, have I had to touch Java code.
Apps that would've taken us a year to develop using C++ could be finished in a couple of months using Java. We could also develop much more complex software than we could using C++.
I find that hard to believe (unless of course all of you know Java well and C++ badly).
No, it is not 'fairly similar' to the other Unix-like systems, though. Actually, it is the furthest away from those systems.
Citation needed.
Linux was (it seems to me) modeled on Solaris; the BSDs are... well, the BSDs,
and AIX is famous for being weird. What other Unixes are alive today -- HP-UX?
HP have hundreds of servers in our labs, and they all run Linux.
But no real authentication systems that accomplish the goals you lay out. Even PGP (if you can convince people to use it and educate people on how it works) only accomplishes signing. It will not track these documents in the manner you describe.
And PGP has significant problems. People understand what passwords are. They do not have a clue what a 'private key' is, or what it means to use one. This requires significant education effort.
But the OP's people want the thing they get from a piece of paper with a signature on it --
surely they would be willing to spend some money on it, too?
You cannot expect to switch to new procedures without anyone having to learn anything.
And unfortunately the user interfaces surrounding products that use PGP do little to help this educational process. Most of them seem to be designed by crypto-geeks who assume that everybody already knows these things and just wants a convenient way to manage them.
The most confusing part IMHO is the web of trust stuff among people who don't know each other.
In a closed organization, I'd expect you to generate a key at the same time you get physical access.
A secretary would sign the key on behalf of the org, and everybody would be told how to set up PGP
to trust the org key.
There'd be an org-wide key server, or they'd simply use the public ones.
There'd be key escrow too I suppose; an unlocked copy of every key kept in a safe.
That's pretty much what's needed, I think.
You have variables name like "s" and "c" and you declare and init a variable inside a while loop, and assign it the incremented value of a dereferenced pointer!?
I'm assuming s and c are part of the idiom in this code.
And it's good practice to declare variables in the smallest possible scope, and init them
at the same time.
It sounds like you think it's inefficient, but any decent compiler will optimize away
'c'; it's only there for readability.
I'm more worried by the mention of "patterns". And by the C++-style comments,
which prevents the code from being compiled as good old ANSI C. Hopefully they
use the *useful* C99 features too.
Also it's unclear whether the webpage problems were due to bugs/limitations in Opera, or because of poorly written webpages that are only written for IE and Firefox.
As a web developer, when my pages are 100% valid XHTML and CSS, work properly on IE 7+8, Safari 2-4, Chrome, and Firefox 2-3.6, and they still break on Opera (which has a visitor rate of less than 1%) I'm not going to do much to support Opera. At that point, the ball is in their court to fix.
I don't care if you get 100 on the Acid3 test if your browsers still chokes on things when surfing real sites.
I'm an Opera user, and I very rarely have problems with real sites.
So I'd tend to think your problems say more about your code than about Opera...
Did you report these bugs to Opera, by the way?
Pascal has a is very simple and clear syntax and semantics. It has strong and static typing, making many errors very easy to catch at compile time.
It's also useless in the real world. I haven't seen Pascal since 1996 (VaxPascal, which my C code was to replace).
C is terrible to teach, they'll have to deal with pointers all the time. Reading something from input? Pointers. Passing by reference? Pointers. Strings? Pointers.
Yes, it's pointers. But correctly taught they aren't too hard to understand.
I don't believe C is a good beginner language, but the concept of pointers is not the reason
Same for C++.
That makes me think you haven't seen C++ since about the time I saw VaxPascal.
You can get a long way without pointers, if you stay away from the C compatibility parts.
FTS: She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it.
Shouldn't come as a surprise. C has a runtime, like most other languages.
-- But really, this was a good article.
Looking under the hood and finding the few things that are there is very instructive.
And that was a big part of it, the stability of the platforms during that era. A C64 was exactly the same as every other one, a Tandy Coco was identical to the million others of it's kind. Later models tended to retain as close to 100% backward compatibility as possible so knowledge and software tools retained value.
And because those computers insisted on remaining frozen in time is why vanished - because they became irrelevant as the world moved on and they didn't.
That's either a truism, or a really strange thing to say. I don't know which.
Would anyone want a faster C64 today, with a 1TB hard disk?
If not, does that somehow negate the fact that the C64 was a kick-ass machine in its day?
If yes, what would make it a C64 -- a chickenhead label on the keyboard?
Sure it gets bashed on Slashdot for not being open source but so what?
The practical results range from extra trouble (doesn't come prepackaged with my OS)
to showstoppers (have a 64-bit CPU? Sorry, we don't support that.)
The only application good enough to make up for that kind of trouble is Opera.
Actually, *all* of them seemed valid to me. Except maybe the Facebook one, but that's
based on the silly journal name "Cyberpsychology and Behavior".
Mocking them because they mention illegal drugs, curses and cock-sucking seems... childish.
Is picking a worse random number generation function (the default one in C and JS) really fucking up?
The default rand(3) in C doesn't have to suck -- it doesn't on Linux or the BSDs.
I see no evidence that it does in *any* major
systems today, though apparently it did back in the 1980s when it got that reputation.
Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that anyone can edit - in my ass.
[---]
I am convinced that the current state of affairs is a conscious choice. The way to maximise 'insider power' and minimize 'outsider power' is to make editing as hard as possible, and the rules and traditions needed not to be revoked as many as possible.
Yes. That was also the main driving force behind RUNOFF, troff, TeX, LaTeX, HTML and all other
non-WYSIWYG systems back into the 1960s. It's a conspiracy.
Seriously: no. It's just that it's the easiest system to work with, unless you are too lazy to
learn a little bit of syntax.
The HP text you quoted looks bad because (a) they didn't use line breaks to make the code readable
and (b) OK, the system with citations inline in the text sucks.
We used to laud those benevolent spirits who contributed to the public good with no thought of remuneration. Now it seems we try to outlaw them. There might be a movie idea here.... The Police unions get together and sue Batman for doing pro bono work..
Don't know about the movie, but there idea is taken already by four books:
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
And here's an interesting point: DHS already uses Apache for dhs.gov, and I'm sure plenty of other government programs use and work on open source platforms, even if their main desktop deployments are Windows.
Bind, the name server, is a more obvious example.
Or the BSD IP stack.
You cannot get much useful work done without using free software in some form,
no matter how hard you try,
Sun lost the desktop wars years ago, but never admitted defeat. It challenged Windows with SunView, NeWS, OpenWindows, CDE, JavaOS, and finally Java Desktop, and failed each time.
Surely SunView wasn't a challenge against Microsoft Windows.
SunView was old stuff when I used it in 1990, and PCs at that time generally ran MS-DOS and Norton Commander.
I suspect NeWS and OpenWindows ignored the toy computers too, but am too lazy to check the timeline.
I *do* feel that the Solaris desktops got worse and worse over time, though.
Plain X11 with twm as a window manager is OK.
OpenWindows was odd but tolerable.
Motif sucked.
CDE looks and feels like a toy, with that silly control panel at the bottom center.
if you have to ask this question on/. you'd better not start [lots of snipping]
Every single Ask Slashdot story gets a response like this, and it's always a jackass thing to say. The whole reason Ask Slashdot exists is to allow technically competent people to share their expertise, and help others get up to speed. "RTFM n00b" responses like this are a major contributor to the negative geek stereotypes we all claim to hate, and in this specific case, a major barrier to Linux use. If you like seeing yourself as a member of a small, impenetrable elite possessed of special and arcane knowledge, go right ahead, but don't expect the rest of us to play along.
You are overreacting to a very sensible posting,
What *are* you supposed to respond with if you believe the OP is heading towards a disaster,
involving him and his relation with family and friends?
I've set my brother up with Linux.
He's extremely bright, has never used Windows at home and is an ex-Amiga user.
Not even that has been problem-free.
Now, the poster is aiming for several "Grandma" users, and is willing to choose a distribution he has
never configured or administered before.
Not *necessarily* a disaster, but IMHO it's a high-risk project.
(The problem is not even Linux-specific. Offering help a friend with any computer (including Windows) means you
either commit to spend a lot of time and patience, or let a friend down.)
Opera was originally a Norwegian company, right? They should have went with the Norwegian word for Dragonfly: "Øyenstikker." Which literally means "Eye Poker." Well, okay, maybe not...
Yes, I see. In order to use an open source tool securely, I have to force all my clients to use the Windows tool TortoiseSVN, because the default tool for UNIX and Linux is so badly written.
Or you could just RTFM. CVS has worked tunneled over ssh(1) for more than a decade, and it has known *nothing* about the authentication phase. It hasn't even known what ssh *was*, other than a funny command it can fork and exec and use to contact the repository. It's such an obvious, safe and convenient design that I refuse to believe that even the SVN developers can get it wrong.
I agree writing password to the disk is bad, but have you ever used CVS/SVN/etc. without stored passwords? You end up typing your password a thousand times a day, which is simply unusable.
I don't get why CVS/SVN/etc even should deal with security. They're source control/management systems. [...] For situations where security, is required, set up SSH access, or some other secure access (and use an ssh keyagent if you don't like typing your password in heaps).
Which is how I've used CVS for the last ten years. CVS isn't even aware that the transport is ssh.
I don't use SVN, but I hear they too have managed to implement that in recent years.
Slashdot Mirror
Just 0, or "nullptr" or whatever the new C++0x keyword is. I suppose 0L might be guaranteed to translate down to 0, but using it instead of 0 has no benefit; it just looks funny.
I think you are mixing up two different things. The real, MC680x0, Commodore-Amiga had a writable address 0, and yet NULL was that address. The C language never guaranteed a crash when you dereferenced a NULL pointer.
Yeah. And also: you don't normally even *notice* a 20% speed increase. If you have to wait 5 seconds or 4 seconds doesn't really matter -- you're annoyed in either case.
Uh, speak for yourself, or define "the industry". I've used C, C++, Perl, Python, Tcl (yuck) and shell script over the years, but only once, briefly, have I had to touch Java code.
I find that hard to believe (unless of course all of you know Java well and C++ badly).
Citation needed. Linux was (it seems to me) modeled on Solaris; the BSDs are ... well, the BSDs,
and AIX is famous for being weird. What other Unixes are alive today -- HP-UX?
HP have hundreds of servers in our labs, and they all run Linux.
Since the dawn of typewriters, too. I had endless fun with my mom's Facit portable back in the days.
I haven't read TFA, but quoted like that it looks pretty daft.
But the OP's people want the thing they get from a piece of paper with a signature on it -- surely they would be willing to spend some money on it, too? You cannot expect to switch to new procedures without anyone having to learn anything.
The most confusing part IMHO is the web of trust stuff among people who don't know each other. In a closed organization, I'd expect you to generate a key at the same time you get physical access. A secretary would sign the key on behalf of the org, and everybody would be told how to set up PGP to trust the org key. There'd be an org-wide key server, or they'd simply use the public ones. There'd be key escrow too I suppose; an unlocked copy of every key kept in a safe. That's pretty much what's needed, I think.
I'm assuming s and c are part of the idiom in this code. And it's good practice to declare variables in the smallest possible scope, and init them at the same time. It sounds like you think it's inefficient, but any decent compiler will optimize away 'c'; it's only there for readability.
I'm more worried by the mention of "patterns". And by the C++-style comments, which prevents the code from being compiled as good old ANSI C. Hopefully they use the *useful* C99 features too.
I'm an Opera user, and I very rarely have problems with real sites. So I'd tend to think your problems say more about your code than about Opera ...
Did you report these bugs to Opera, by the way?
It's also useless in the real world. I haven't seen Pascal since 1996 (VaxPascal, which my C code was to replace).
Yes, it's pointers. But correctly taught they aren't too hard to understand. I don't believe C is a good beginner language, but the concept of pointers is not the reason
That makes me think you haven't seen C++ since about the time I saw VaxPascal. You can get a long way without pointers, if you stay away from the C compatibility parts.
FTS: She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it.
Shouldn't come as a surprise. C has a runtime, like most other languages. -- But really, this was a good article. Looking under the hood and finding the few things that are there is very instructive.
That's either a truism, or a really strange thing to say. I don't know which. Would anyone want a faster C64 today, with a 1TB hard disk? If not, does that somehow negate the fact that the C64 was a kick-ass machine in its day? If yes, what would make it a C64 -- a chickenhead label on the keyboard?
The practical results range from extra trouble (doesn't come prepackaged with my OS) to showstoppers (have a 64-bit CPU? Sorry, we don't support that.) The only application good enough to make up for that kind of trouble is Opera.
Well, we already *had* the original ssh, but it was being weakened by the original author's effort to build a company around it. OpenSSH saved it,
Actually, *all* of them seemed valid to me. Except maybe the Facebook one, but that's based on the silly journal name "Cyberpsychology and Behavior". Mocking them because they mention illegal drugs, curses and cock-sucking seems ... childish.
The default rand(3) in C doesn't have to suck -- it doesn't on Linux or the BSDs. I see no evidence that it does in *any* major systems today, though apparently it did back in the 1980s when it got that reputation.
Yes. That was also the main driving force behind RUNOFF, troff, TeX, LaTeX, HTML and all other non-WYSIWYG systems back into the 1960s. It's a conspiracy.
Seriously: no. It's just that it's the easiest system to work with, unless you are too lazy to learn a little bit of syntax. The HP text you quoted looks bad because (a) they didn't use line breaks to make the code readable and (b) OK, the system with citations inline in the text sucks.
AOL. The unwashed masses can call them "hackers" all they want, but the word shouldn't have that meaning here.
Don't know about the movie, but there idea is taken already by four books: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Bind, the name server, is a more obvious example. Or the BSD IP stack. You cannot get much useful work done without using free software in some form, no matter how hard you try,
Surely SunView wasn't a challenge against Microsoft Windows. SunView was old stuff when I used it in 1990, and PCs at that time generally ran MS-DOS and Norton Commander. I suspect NeWS and OpenWindows ignored the toy computers too, but am too lazy to check the timeline.
I *do* feel that the Solaris desktops got worse and worse over time, though. Plain X11 with twm as a window manager is OK. OpenWindows was odd but tolerable. Motif sucked. CDE looks and feels like a toy, with that silly control panel at the bottom center.
You are overreacting to a very sensible posting, What *are* you supposed to respond with if you believe the OP is heading towards a disaster, involving him and his relation with family and friends?
I've set my brother up with Linux. He's extremely bright, has never used Windows at home and is an ex-Amiga user. Not even that has been problem-free. Now, the poster is aiming for several "Grandma" users, and is willing to choose a distribution he has never configured or administered before. Not *necessarily* a disaster, but IMHO it's a high-risk project.
(The problem is not even Linux-specific. Offering help a friend with any computer (including Windows) means you either commit to spend a lot of time and patience, or let a friend down.)
Yeah, dragonfiles were not well-liked in N Europe in the past. I particularly like "troll's spindle" and "Satan's little horse".
Or you could just RTFM. CVS has worked tunneled over ssh(1) for more than a decade, and it has known *nothing* about the authentication phase. It hasn't even known what ssh *was*, other than a funny command it can fork and exec and use to contact the repository. It's such an obvious, safe and convenient design that I refuse to believe that even the SVN developers can get it wrong.
Which is how I've used CVS for the last ten years. CVS isn't even aware that the transport is ssh. I don't use SVN, but I hear they too have managed to implement that in recent years.