I once worked for a company that was selling an Open Source product (an e-mail MTA beginning with "S", if you want a clue). Most of the sales and marketing people came from a world of of Powerpoint and Word and were used to sending sales documents out in MS Word.
Ironic, since Eric A. was one of the guys driving document creation and typesetting
on Unix in the 1980s; he wrote the troff -mm macros, IIRC.
Maybe I'm old or something,
but it saddens me to see how much effort is spent on WYSIWYG word processors and non-human-readable file formats.
You may be able to write a good, free MS Word clone,
but it will never be free from the problems that are inherent a WYSIWYG word processing.
There is more than one possible approach to word processing...
There seems to be a lot of sun bashing on slashdot, but I've got to say I have no understanding of why.
The plagues called Java and C# are their fault,
but I don't think that's the reason.
I haven't used solaris yet, but everything I've heard about what they're doing with it has been good.
Regarding Unix, Sun was Unix in the 1980s to the mid-1990s,
at least for many of us.
High-resolution, diskless workstations, networking,
all the cool free software available...
And Bill Joy in management!
I feel personally indebted to SunOS and Solaris --
I might have been running Windows right now, if we didn't
have such a great Solaris environment at University and my first few jobs!
The source code is only available with subversion, a CVS replacement.
I was going to download it (as a gesture; my only Mac runs Linux)
but no way I'm going to install SVN just for that!
Odd decision, not even providing weekly builds...
And they'll encounter any variety of things in the corporate world, not just Office. If their skills are good, they'll adjust to whatever they've got put in front of them.
Which will most likely be built on the foundation of MS Office. Search Google for "MS Office integration" and you'll get 80 million hits. Still unconvinced? Open the "Help Wanted" section in your metro Sunday paper.
This is getting ridiculous.
People very rarely use MS Word beyond the functionality
that Wordpad offers. And they very rarely use MS Excel as anything but
a way to arrange text in columns and rows.
So, not only will these students be able to use different tools;
they will also learn very little from it.
And when they get jobs in the future,
noone will expect them to have learned anything
-- because everyone treats MS Word as if it was Wordpad.
It's a mystery why so many organizations are fixated on Microsoft software.
But it's a bigger mystery why, when they have that software,
they don't use more than a tiny fraction of its capabilities --
less than they ought to in order to use it efficiently!
Huh? As a graybeard I remember those horrible days where we got our OS from our hardware vendor, along with the "opportunity" to buy their crappy, proprietary, $10,000/seat applications.
Microsoft didn't kill that hateful environment.
Unix (and I suppose some others) did.
Remember the term "Open systems" from the early 1980s?
It was the reaction to the situation you describe.
Further, as an application developer, I remember those dark, pre-Windows days when I had to test my software on reams of different hardware; it was not a good use of my time, but without a ubiquitous layer between my application and the hardware (any vendor's hardware), I had no choice.
That too, wasn't Microsoft, but Unix and others.
Heck, even the microcomputers of the mid-1980s had serious operating systems
like AmigaDOS, RiscOS, Unix dialects...
Is your beard really gray?
How cool is it that after all of the concerts, the world tours, the money, that he completes a life project like this?
How many people that attain the level that Queen rose to, would just spend their time spending the money?
Or worse, re-form Queen with some twit replacing Freddie...
Read The Mythical Man-Month. One of the most cogent things Brooks has to say is about project coherency, best exemplified in the desktop world by Apple. What Macs give you above all, their primary value proposition, is coherency of design.
Coherency tends to be one of the weakest suits for many or most Open Source projects, especially those without a central entity to define the direction. The exceptions tend to be server or kernel-side: Apache, Linux Kernel, databases, etc, and I'd claim this is because there's a well-defined set of CS problems being solved there.
I disagree. It depends on where you look.
If you look at the Windows-y GUI projects, you are probably right (I only use the Gimp from that category).
These are high-profile, but a minority.
Pick just about any command-line toolset,
and you'll find it's plenty coherent, and fits well into its environment.
As a side note, commercial software is often not very coherent.
The more features you cram in, the more you sell.
I have made it a habit to set a pointer to NULL after I free the pointer's data. If I had code that allocates a FOO structure, I would make a function to free the FOO structure; in C, my FreeFoo() function would not take a pointer to a FOO, but a pointer to a pointer to a FOO, and after freeing the FOO it would set the pointer to NULL.
It's something people often suggest, and I don't like it at all.
It doesn't catch the serious case, where you have more than one
pointer to the memory. Who is going to null those pointers?
A clear design which explicitly takes object lifetimes into account
is a much better solution.
(I also don't like the PFOO typedef in your example.
Pointers are important in C; hiding the fact that something is
a pointer will only lead to more bugs, at least if someone other
than yourself will maintain the code.
It will also make it impractical to say "pointer to const FOO",
thus hurting type safety.)
Presumably what they have here is a dangling pointer to a function, which they can get IIS to then call.
I doubt it. How the heck do you get a dangling function pointer
in C or C++? You never malloc() or operator new() functions, unless
you fancy self-modifying code.
They state that this used to be a "denial of service" attack - meaning that if IIS attempted the call before, it would execute garbage and cause a runtime fault. Now, however, they can change the value of the dangling pointer and when IIS does the jump this time, it executes their exploit code instead.
"Changing the value of the dangling pointer" doesn't make sense --
the whole point of using the name "dangling pointer" is to imply
that the program (a) has a pointer to freed memory (heap or stack)
and (b) is buggy, i.e. can be tricked into dereferencing it.
If the pointer can be changed by the attacker, it doesn't have to
be dangling to be vulnerable.
One good guess is they're talking about C++ and dangling pointers to
objects with vtables -- if you can overwrite that memory with something
interesting, you own the program counter.
That's odd because I've got Opera 9 running on quite a few low-end computers and it works fine. And according to speed tests, Opera 9 is actually faster than Opera 6.
Ok, I should have added an "IMHO".
It depends on configuration, OS (did I mention I run it only on Linux?),
what kinds of sites you visit...
It's also subjective: a speed test does not catch things like
jerky scrolling, slight delays in menu or keyboard handling,
refresh glitches... and some people are probably less/more sensitive to those things.
I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure that at some point in Opera's history,
that "subjective speed" dropped for me.
(On the other hand, they added features I want.)
Several comments in that blog already point out the obvious: Opera already does this. It runs perfectly even on old hardware, and you won't even have to sacrifice any functionality.
Actually, Opera 9.2x is noticeably slow on yesteryear's computers,
like my brother's Pentium-something-500MHz-or-so running Debian.
(I just installed it for him, and expect complaints when he discoveres this.)
I believe this performance drop started after the Opera 7 and/or 8 series.
But I find Firefox is even slower.
I hate those sub-second delays each time you access a menu, or something.
Well, my impression is that the OP is probably still very inexperienced, based on how they phrased the question
That wasn't my impression; the question was well put.
It's a valid question from any programmer, I think.
It seems to me that by now, a more experienced coder would have found a hobby project that gives them the freedom to write code as cleanly as they want
From the question, you can't really say if the OP does this or not.
But is it relevant to the question?
I have hobby projects which have elegance as a primary goal
(I am proud of some of them, others suck).
But that doesn't answer the question if it's possible for
groups of people, working for money, in a large project
to end up with really good code.
and/or realized that C's error handling isn't all that bad.
Personal opinion: it's good enough for C,
but you can't write really good C++ code without exceptions.
Excel is really well designed such that almost all the commands are easily accessible from keyboard shortcuts and power users quickly come up to speed on the commands. The interface for excel is extremely well thought out making it easy for beginners to be guided through the options and power users to be able to blaze through. Excel is perhaps one of the best designed and most usable programs ever.
As much as I hate Excel, I can actually believe that part.
Excel is one reason that Open Office is unlikely to succeed in corporate environments.
I have rarely seen Excel used for its real purpose.
95% of the Excel sheets I see are just text arranged in rows and columns,
with hideous color schemes
(or actually 95/3, since people invariably keep two extra, empty sheets in their documents).
For that kind of use, you might as well replace Excel with
a capable text editor, like Emacs.
So I think that even if Excel is superior, that's not why it will survive.
It will win by inertia.
Error handling isn't optional. Error handling isn't something that gets added into a system. It should be an integral part of the system's design. Furthermore, with exceptions, error handling is painless.
I wouldn't use the word "painless".
Error handling will always be painful in the general case.
It's like going to the dentist. It's painful, but if you don't do it,
you can predict endless, total pain later on.
But I think you knew that.
Also, another harbinger of doom: "I don't need to use version control. I'm the only one working on the system."
A haha haha haha. That's just great.
But I suspect your real problem is that noone replied:
"Good for you. Now go on and use version control, or the guards will see you out".
You're describing a situation where critical systems are written by people
with an unprofessional attitude to their work (not using the tools they should know they need),
and noone (except for an AC on Slashdot) appears to check their work.
I hate micro-management as much as the next guy,
but somehow it's more attractive than no management at all.
Apparently Phil Dick had a change of heart between 1966 and 1980, eh?
Or he thought Heinlein's ideas sucked, but was at the same time impressed by his willingness to help
people who thought his ideas sucked. Just like Dick wrote in the text you quoted.
In Radio Free Albemuth (written in 1976),
he still dissed Heinlein's writing.
The U.S. government intends to use the name of
Phil Dick, a well-known SF writer, to publish fascist propaganda
as a pulp SF novel called The Mind-Screwers.
"Clark Ashton Smith [...] mixed up with Heinlein's politics".
(Someone should really write that book, and the sequels
The Underground City of the Mind-Screwers
and
Return to the Underground City of the Mind-Screwers.)
My main desktop has a 30" display, but I run my browser at 1024 width rather than a full 2560. Why? Because I don't want to sprain my neck playing tennis-spectator with every web page I'm looking at. Confined to 1024, I can read most content without having to move my head or eyes a great distance and I can absorb information faster.
Same here. Most of my windows are maximized top--bottom,
and none of them are maximized left--right.
That goes for browsers, terminals and Emacs.
But apparently many people are either (a) wired differently,
or (b) don't care enough to configure their work environment so they can work efficiently.
Most of my co-workers full-screen their windows (on Windows).
I find it odd and awkward -- how can you read a mail efficiently
in MS Outlook when the lines are 300 characters wide?
For programming, all the people I've seen working in IDEs like VS or Eclipse
run their IDE full-screen.
Ok, toolbars and stuff take up some horizontal space,
but there's still plenty of room for overly long lines...
Then, they have an article about a guy who almost certainly makes anyone's top-5 list of best sci-fi authors 1950-present, and they feel like they have to explain it.
Let's see:
>>> 'Clarke' in ['Sturgeon', 'Cordwainer Smith', 'Leiber', 'P. K. Dick', 'Simak', 'Stephenson'] False
Yes. A couple of classes for handling metres, kilograms and seconds
is the killer application for Java.
All other languages/operating environments will disappear overnight.
The migration of developers away from personal computers toward "nontraditional client devices" worries me a bit. The best thing about the rise of the PC was that it gave people access to a machine that could be configured to do a lot of different things, including "learn about making your own applications". I wonder whether all the "embedded devices" will also provide a coming generation with a platform from which to recreate their world the way PCs did for us.
I see what you mean, and I agree.
A computer should be programmable by its users.
One correction though: it wasn't the PC that turned kids into programmers.
It was (a) Unix systems at universities and
(b) the cheap home computers of the 1980s,
with a BASIC interpreter and a demo scene, like the Commodore 64.
It is particularly disappointing because I, like the majority on this forum, agree with his goals. I'd like to take him seriously and support him, but it is difficult to do so when he seems completely clueless about how people are going to respond.
You cannot take him seriously because he misjudged something completely
unrelated to the thing you actually want to support him for?
Why?
It's not as if he asks you to accept him as your Personal Company Politics Savior.
Do any other slashdotters feel, like myself, that this device is a bit of a damp squib given that FTP is somewhat obsolete ?
Yes, if that is indeed what it is (didn't RTFA).
HTTP provides upload as well as download capabilities, and in any tests I've done I get the same download speed as with FTP. Since it doesn't have a stupid protocol I can easily tunnel it as required.
It's not FTP that is stupid; it's the things that force you to use tunnels.
NAT, firewalls... in a real Internet, anyone can open TCP connections to anyone.
Still, for the non-anonymous use that these people seem to envision,
something like rsync (or rsync-over-ssh) seems much more sane. That
or sftp and similar ssh-based protocols.
I wonder how those protocols behave over long fat pipes; will CPU be the
bottleneck, perhaps?
TCP Vegas sounds like quite a fancy name itself. FastTCP is far more appropriate IMHO, so if it is merely a name change, it is for the better.
"TCP Vegas" is better, because it clearly indicates that this is
a TCP implementation and can talk to other TCPs,
rather than some protocol vaguely similar to,
but different from, TCP.
In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel
I've been on the verge of buying that album since I first saw it
in a tiny record store a few years back.
I can't see how it can be better than the Olivia Tremor Control releases,
but a lot of people praise it, so... if I see it in the store today,
I'll buy it. If I don't, it's already in my Amazon shopping cart.
That kind of proves a point.
You need input like this to be really excited about music.
If your friends never talk about music, and the media just obsesses over
Britney Spear's hair, it's easy to belive you have already heard
all the good music, and that it's downhill from here.
If, on the other hand, you listen to good advice, or read reviews by journalists who
actually like music, you realize that very exciting things
still happen...
Slashdot Mirror
Ironic, since Eric A. was one of the guys driving document creation and typesetting on Unix in the 1980s; he wrote the troff -mm macros, IIRC.
Maybe I'm old or something, but it saddens me to see how much effort is spent on WYSIWYG word processors and non-human-readable file formats. You may be able to write a good, free MS Word clone, but it will never be free from the problems that are inherent a WYSIWYG word processing. There is more than one possible approach to word processing ...
The plagues called Java and C# are their fault, but I don't think that's the reason.
Regarding Unix, Sun was Unix in the 1980s to the mid-1990s, at least for many of us. High-resolution, diskless workstations, networking, all the cool free software availableI feel personally indebted to SunOS and Solaris -- I might have been running Windows right now, if we didn't have such a great Solaris environment at University and my first few jobs!
Possibly Norway; they're not part of the EU. Here in .se, we lose freedom all the time ...
although perhaps not as quickly as e.g. the british.
From the project FAQ:
The source code is only available with subversion, a CVS replacement.I was going to download it (as a gesture; my only Mac runs Linux) but no way I'm going to install SVN just for that! Odd decision, not even providing weekly builds ...
This is getting ridiculous.
People very rarely use MS Word beyond the functionality that Wordpad offers. And they very rarely use MS Excel as anything but a way to arrange text in columns and rows.
So, not only will these students be able to use different tools; they will also learn very little from it. And when they get jobs in the future, noone will expect them to have learned anything -- because everyone treats MS Word as if it was Wordpad.
It's a mystery why so many organizations are fixated on Microsoft software. But it's a bigger mystery why, when they have that software, they don't use more than a tiny fraction of its capabilities -- less than they ought to in order to use it efficiently!
Microsoft didn't kill that hateful environment. Unix (and I suppose some others) did. Remember the term "Open systems" from the early 1980s? It was the reaction to the situation you describe.
That too, wasn't Microsoft, but Unix and others. Heck, even the microcomputers of the mid-1980s had serious operating systems like AmigaDOS, RiscOS, Unix dialects ...
Is your beard really gray?
Or worse, re-form Queen with some twit replacing Freddie ...
I disagree. It depends on where you look. If you look at the Windows-y GUI projects, you are probably right (I only use the Gimp from that category). These are high-profile, but a minority. Pick just about any command-line toolset, and you'll find it's plenty coherent, and fits well into its environment.
As a side note, commercial software is often not very coherent. The more features you cram in, the more you sell.
It's something people often suggest, and I don't like it at all. It doesn't catch the serious case, where you have more than one pointer to the memory. Who is going to null those pointers? A clear design which explicitly takes object lifetimes into account is a much better solution.
(I also don't like the PFOO typedef in your example. Pointers are important in C; hiding the fact that something is a pointer will only lead to more bugs, at least if someone other than yourself will maintain the code. It will also make it impractical to say "pointer to const FOO", thus hurting type safety.)
I doubt it. How the heck do you get a dangling function pointer in C or C++? You never malloc() or operator new() functions, unless you fancy self-modifying code.
"Changing the value of the dangling pointer" doesn't make sense -- the whole point of using the name "dangling pointer" is to imply that the program (a) has a pointer to freed memory (heap or stack) and (b) is buggy, i.e. can be tricked into dereferencing it. If the pointer can be changed by the attacker, it doesn't have to be dangling to be vulnerable.
One good guess is they're talking about C++ and dangling pointers to objects with vtables -- if you can overwrite that memory with something interesting, you own the program counter.
Ok, I should have added an "IMHO". It depends on configuration, OS (did I mention I run it only on Linux?), what kinds of sites you visit ...
It's also subjective: a speed test does not catch things like
jerky scrolling, slight delays in menu or keyboard handling,
refresh glitches ... and some people are probably less/more sensitive to those things.
I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure that at some point in Opera's history, that "subjective speed" dropped for me. (On the other hand, they added features I want.)
Actually, Opera 9.2x is noticeably slow on yesteryear's computers, like my brother's Pentium-something-500MHz-or-so running Debian. (I just installed it for him, and expect complaints when he discoveres this.) I believe this performance drop started after the Opera 7 and/or 8 series.
But I find Firefox is even slower. I hate those sub-second delays each time you access a menu, or something.
That wasn't my impression; the question was well put. It's a valid question from any programmer, I think.
From the question, you can't really say if the OP does this or not. But is it relevant to the question? I have hobby projects which have elegance as a primary goal (I am proud of some of them, others suck). But that doesn't answer the question if it's possible for groups of people, working for money, in a large project to end up with really good code.
Personal opinion: it's good enough for C, but you can't write really good C++ code without exceptions.
As much as I hate Excel, I can actually believe that part.
I have rarely seen Excel used for its real purpose. 95% of the Excel sheets I see are just text arranged in rows and columns, with hideous color schemes (or actually 95/3, since people invariably keep two extra, empty sheets in their documents). For that kind of use, you might as well replace Excel with a capable text editor, like Emacs.
So I think that even if Excel is superior, that's not why it will survive. It will win by inertia.
I wouldn't use the word "painless". Error handling will always be painful in the general case. It's like going to the dentist. It's painful, but if you don't do it, you can predict endless, total pain later on. But I think you knew that.
A haha haha haha. That's just great.
But I suspect your real problem is that noone replied: "Good for you. Now go on and use version control, or the guards will see you out". You're describing a situation where critical systems are written by people with an unprofessional attitude to their work (not using the tools they should know they need), and noone (except for an AC on Slashdot) appears to check their work.
I hate micro-management as much as the next guy, but somehow it's more attractive than no management at all.
Yes, it's good.
More on topic, it features a Turing-complete computer made of cogwheels and chains. I bet that greek guy's rope wasn't Turing-complete ...
Or he thought Heinlein's ideas sucked, but was at the same time impressed by his willingness to help people who thought his ideas sucked. Just like Dick wrote in the text you quoted.
In Radio Free Albemuth (written in 1976), he still dissed Heinlein's writing. The U.S. government intends to use the name of Phil Dick, a well-known SF writer, to publish fascist propaganda as a pulp SF novel called The Mind-Screwers. "Clark Ashton Smith [...] mixed up with Heinlein's politics".
(Someone should really write that book, and the sequels The Underground City of the Mind-Screwers and Return to the Underground City of the Mind-Screwers.)
Same here. Most of my windows are maximized top--bottom, and none of them are maximized left--right. That goes for browsers, terminals and Emacs.
But apparently many people are either (a) wired differently, or (b) don't care enough to configure their work environment so they can work efficiently.
Most of my co-workers full-screen their windows (on Windows). I find it odd and awkward -- how can you read a mail efficiently in MS Outlook when the lines are 300 characters wide? For programming, all the people I've seen working in IDEs like VS or Eclipse run their IDE full-screen. Ok, toolbars and stuff take up some horizontal space, but there's still plenty of room for overly long lines ...
Let's see:
Not for me. (But I see your point.)Yes. A couple of classes for handling metres, kilograms and seconds is the killer application for Java. All other languages/operating environments will disappear overnight.
I see what you mean, and I agree. A computer should be programmable by its users.
One correction though: it wasn't the PC that turned kids into programmers. It was (a) Unix systems at universities and (b) the cheap home computers of the 1980s, with a BASIC interpreter and a demo scene, like the Commodore 64.
You cannot take him seriously because he misjudged something completely unrelated to the thing you actually want to support him for? Why? It's not as if he asks you to accept him as your Personal Company Politics Savior.
Yes, if that is indeed what it is (didn't RTFA).
It's not FTP that is stupid; it's the things that force you to use tunnels. NAT, firewalls ... in a real Internet, anyone can open TCP connections to anyone.
Still, for the non-anonymous use that these people seem to envision, something like rsync (or rsync-over-ssh) seems much more sane. That or sftp and similar ssh-based protocols.
I wonder how those protocols behave over long fat pipes; will CPU be the bottleneck, perhaps?
"TCP Vegas" is better, because it clearly indicates that this is a TCP implementation and can talk to other TCPs, rather than some protocol vaguely similar to, but different from, TCP.
I've been on the verge of buying that album since I first saw it in a tiny record store a few years back. I can't see how it can be better than the Olivia Tremor Control releases, but a lot of people praise it, so ... if I see it in the store today,
I'll buy it. If I don't, it's already in my Amazon shopping cart.
That kind of proves a point. You need input like this to be really excited about music. If your friends never talk about music, and the media just obsesses over Britney Spear's hair, it's easy to belive you have already heard all the good music, and that it's downhill from here. If, on the other hand, you listen to good advice, or read reviews by journalists who actually like music, you realize that very exciting things still happen ...
Random recommendation: Handwriting by Khonnor.