it allows displaying code the way you want. Pascal users can see BEGIN and END, BASIC users can see THEN / END IF, C* programmers can see their curly brackets, and so on.
But they won't be able to talk to each other, because all of them use a different language. They cannot quote code snippets in their mail conversations, and they can't write books on the language. This would be a horrible idea, IMHO.
I consider "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" to be science fiction.
Me too. But I went to a lecture last month, and one of the guys who spoke (John-Henri Holmberg?) argued that it wasn't -- because it was illogical that the memory removal machine should be used merely to erase unhappy memories. This lack of technological and political logic made the movie non-SF, according to him.
That view is kind of pointless IMHO, since lots of great SF (as in: written by SF authors, published in SF magazines and loved by the fans) fails on those same criteria.
They use this for airline crew scheduling and all sorts of other stuff.
I once worked for a company that did exactly this: sold airline crew scheduling software and support. It is not trivial -- that workplace was crowded with maths and CS PhDs, the algorithms were very advanced, and they always had the latest and greatest Unix servers so that the schedule calculations took hours rather than days.
I suppose it's worth it if you can find a schedule which saves a few empty flights a year...
Also don't forget Theodore Sturgeon's 1958 short story The Comedian's Children
which starts with a failed manned mission to Iapetus itself in 2034:
Captain Swope's mission was to accomplish the twelfth off-earth
touchdown, and the body on which he touched was Iapetus, the
remarkable eighth satellite of Saturn. All Saturn's satellites are
remarkable, each for a different reason. Iapetus' claim to fame is
his fluctuating brilliance; he always swings brightly around the
eastern limb of the ringed planet, and dwindles dimly behind the
western edge. Obviously this little moon is half bright and half
dark, and keeps one face turned always to its parent; but why should a
moon be half bright and half dark?
It was an intriguing mystery, and it had become the fashion to affect
all sorts of decorations which mimicked the fluctuatings of the
inconstant moonlet: cufflinks and tunic clasps which dimmed and
brightened, bread-wrappers and bookjackets in dichotomous motley. [---]
Also, ClearCase LT != Rational. Just because you had a bad experience with one of their tools doesn't mean they all suck.
IMHO, ClearCase is The Rational Tool Which Does Not Suck. And Purify, of course! Rose, Requisite Pro and ClearQuest, on the other hand... just thinking of them makes me mad.
Ah, but that's the nice thing about Windows, you don't even have to install a telnet server (or some other remote execution server) to be able to run processes remotely -- have a look at psexec.
Oh, yes, that's what the link claims. But of course there's a remote execution server involved. Just like on any other OS, something must be sitting around waiting for the client and letting it in.
The thing that is special for Window in this case seems to be that it isn't ssh, and I'm not sure that's something to be pleased with.
If it doesn't execute, automatically, it won't be kept up to date. --- My man pages, Python docstrings and doxygen comments aren't executable. (Anything beyond that, such as an API guide as a Word document, I don't trust.)
none of this "np_doSCRTtrd" crap, give me "mainWindow" or something... even in C++ where this is strongly counterculture
--- That crap isn't C++. C++ on Windows, more likely.
Tried Rational "training". It didn't help. I use UML
When they force me to. That has always, for me, ended up in a boring activity that wasted everybody's time without contributing very much to anything but the growth of Rational's bank account.
When I'm trying to understand source code. I draw rough sketches of class diagrams in my notebook, and focus on relationships and multiplicity (one-to-one, one-or-none etc). I don't bother with member names and stereotypes and all the thousands of esoteric details.
I imagine I could find use cases useful now and then, but only as a set of named textual descriptions of things that could happen, not sequence diagrams and all that pointless crap.
Yes, but you don't want to install the current debian stable on new servers. It's just too old. Stable lacks the hardware support for modern servers (does Stable ship with a kernel which supports dual xeon machines with 2 GB ram? AMD Opteron? Modern chipsets? SCSI controllers?).
Debian Woody ships with a 2.4 kernel and it's trivial (modulo initrd I guess) to upgrade to the latest 2.4 kernel. That should be enough for many, or most, modern Intel-based servers.
Hmm... I need to copy this data to my USB keyfob $mount/dev/sda
You know, you can have a partition table on a USB memory - even Windows understands that. Actually, I didn't know Windows understood USB memories without one.
Probably wouldn't have helped in this case, since/dev/sda1 wasn't mounted anywhere, either. You would have blown away at least one partition on your system.
The reason I can't make the switch to Firefox is that it feels so much more sluggish than Opera
Funny, I (long-time Opera user) installed Firefox this morning CET to try it out, and it was unbearably sluggish. Granted, this is on my trusted old 450MHz AMD box, but a bloody web browser shouldn't need that many cycles!
(To be fair, Opera is just slightly more than bearable on that box. They could use an optimization round.)
Note that the silly "it's hard to cound words in Word" argument was the reviewer's, and not as you were led to think a quote from "In the beginning...". Neal Stephenson had more subtle things to say about why it's good to have small filters like wc(1).
Using container libraries costs extra time and effort
WTF??! Using C strings and arrays, plain pointers to things, homegrown linked lists, etc is what costs extra time and effort in C++. And that's also what causes memory leaks, buffer overflows, exception unsafety and all kinds of nastiness.
We need better tools to help people avoid it, and plain C/C++ apparently isn't enough for real-world programmers not to make these mistakes.
Please don't confuse C with C++. I don't think we have seen enough real C++ in security-critical use to say for sure how sensitive it is.
In addition to the obvious environmental problems caused by using a "broad-spectrum" herbicide on entire regions, the surfactant in the RoundUp formulation (polyoxyethylene amine, POEA) might affect a whole gamut of animals, plants, and microorganisms to varying degrees.
Yes. It's extremely toxic to fish and smaller aquatic organisms, for example. Plus, some of the stuff in RoundUp has been shown to stay in the ground long after use - and that's always a Bad Sign.
Just a little clarification for the sake of readers who don't know anything about unix file unlinking.
Your basic facts are correct, but your example is flawed. A text editor rarely keeps files open; if the original inode is still there when it's time to save to disk, then it's used. If not, the editor just saves a new file with the same name. Try this with vi and see the inode number change.
The "hidden files with a random name" is a feature of the text editor, and irrelevant in this case.
A better example would be to start playing metallica.mp3 and then rm the file. You see the drive light flash so the player hasn't cached the whole file in memory first. And noone but this player process can access the data. If the file system is small enough (or metallica.mp3 big enough) you should see df(1) report an increase in free disk space when the player exits, not when you rm the file.
I've been a professional programmer for 11 years, most of that doing C AND C++. Yes thats using both languages or a mixture of the 2 depending on what project I've worked on.
Yeah, but would you really lump them together in an interview situation? Would you keep doing that when the interviewer tried to go down on a more detailed level? I have the same feeling as the grandparent -- the phrase "C/C++" is a buzzword the PHBs use because just "C" sounds old-fashioned. Of course that doesn't mean that people who use it must be ignorant, and of course it doesn't mean that using one language well prevents you from using the other one well.
Re:Oh Debian, I don't know what to think
on
Updates From Debian
·
· Score: 1
Debian's idealism might end up side-lining it in the Linux world.
On the other hand (in case noone has mentioned it yet) that's one of the things about Debian that's so attractive. Debian will never try to fuck me over to "maximise shareholder value" or whatever the proper phrase is...
The tab is useful. The fact that they display differently in various terminals/editors is a FEATURE!
Please name an editor or terminal which doesn't treat TAB in the way God intended. Unless the user selects the option "I want my text files to be incompatible with all other tools in the known world". Which, granted, a surprising number of people do...
I laugh myself sick thinking how much time my C++ developer friends waste on stuff that takes days in ATL/MFC/C++ that I can do in a few seconds in Delphi.
Uh, that has more to do with MFC than the C++ language, I would think. I have never heard anything but bad things about MFC, and I've only heard praise for whatever GUI/frameworkish thingy Delphi has...
It takes a lot of time to understand the benefits. It isn't just "about objects" it's about a completely different design philosophy. Not "objects", but "object orientation" which contains a lot of different facets. I was the same way until I had a class in Object Oriented Design and saw how the structure of a properly designed object oriented program reduced rigidty and fragility in a design.
Have you worked with it in real life though? You'll see numerous examples of OO becoming wanking excercises, producing huge blobs of overdesigned, underperforming hard-to-understand code. There's a backlash in there somewhere, and it's been going on for something like ten years...
I like expressing things in OO, but I no longer try to apply it mindlessly to everything I see. Reading Strostrup and learing perl helped, and I'm sure reading Pike would have helped, too.
programs need to standardize their exchange mechanisms, and if you're saying that the solution is for "everything to be just text" (or more precisely, octet streams) then you're just moving the problem somewhere else. Ultimate, at some point that text/those octets need to become something else.
Moving the problem somewhere else is often a very useful technique. In this case, it has worked reasonably well for thirty years.
Slashdot Mirror
But they won't be able to talk to each other, because all of them use a different language. They cannot quote code snippets in their mail conversations, and they can't write books on the language. This would be a horrible idea, IMHO.
Me too. But I went to a lecture last month, and one of the guys who spoke (John-Henri Holmberg?) argued that it wasn't -- because it was illogical that the memory removal machine should be used merely to erase unhappy memories. This lack of technological and political logic made the movie non-SF, according to him.
That view is kind of pointless IMHO, since lots of great SF (as in: written by SF authors, published in SF magazines and loved by the fans) fails on those same criteria.
I once worked for a company that did exactly this: sold airline crew scheduling software and support. It is not trivial -- that workplace was crowded with maths and CS PhDs, the algorithms were very advanced, and they always had the latest and greatest Unix servers so that the schedule calculations took hours rather than days.
I suppose it's worth it if you can find a schedule which saves a few empty flights a year ...
And the cheapest and safest way by far to accomplish that is to use real simplicity. KISS.
IMHO, ClearCase is The Rational Tool Which Does Not Suck. And Purify, of course! Rose, Requisite Pro and ClearQuest, on the other hand ... just thinking of them makes me mad.
Oh, yes, that's what the link claims. But of course there's a remote execution server involved. Just like on any other OS, something must be sitting around waiting for the client and letting it in.
The thing that is special for Window in this case seems to be that it isn't ssh, and I'm not sure that's something to be pleased with.
If it doesn't execute, automatically, it won't be kept up to date. --- My man pages, Python docstrings and doxygen comments aren't executable. (Anything beyond that, such as an API guide as a Word document, I don't trust.)
none of this "np_doSCRTtrd" crap, give me "mainWindow" or something... even in C++ where this is strongly counterculture --- That crap isn't C++. C++ on Windows, more likely.
Debian Woody ships with a 2.4 kernel and it's trivial (modulo initrd I guess) to upgrade to the latest 2.4 kernel. That should be enough for many, or most, modern Intel-based servers.
You know, you can have a partition table on a USB memory - even Windows understands that. Actually, I didn't know Windows understood USB memories without one.
Probably wouldn't have helped in this case, since /dev/sda1 wasn't mounted anywhere, either. You would have blown away at least one partition on your system.
Funny, I (long-time Opera user) installed Firefox this morning CET to try it out, and it was unbearably sluggish. Granted, this is on my trusted old 450MHz AMD box, but a bloody web browser shouldn't need that many cycles!
(To be fair, Opera is just slightly more than bearable on that box. They could use an optimization round.)
Note that the silly "it's hard to cound words in Word" argument was the reviewer's, and not as you were led to think a quote from "In the beginning ...". Neal Stephenson had more subtle things to say about why it's good to have small filters like wc(1).
WTF??! Using C strings and arrays, plain pointers to things, homegrown linked lists, etc is what costs extra time and effort in C++. And that's also what causes memory leaks, buffer overflows, exception unsafety and all kinds of nastiness.
We need better tools to help people avoid it, and plain C/C++ apparently isn't enough for real-world programmers not to make these mistakes.
Please don't confuse C with C++. I don't think we have seen enough real C++ in security-critical use to say for sure how sensitive it is.
Yes. It's extremely toxic to fish and smaller aquatic organisms, for example. Plus, some of the stuff in RoundUp has been shown to stay in the ground long after use - and that's always a Bad Sign.
Your basic facts are correct, but your example is flawed. A text editor rarely keeps files open; if the original inode is still there when it's time to save to disk, then it's used. If not, the editor just saves a new file with the same name. Try this with vi and see the inode number change.
The "hidden files with a random name" is a feature of the text editor, and irrelevant in this case.
A better example would be to start playing metallica.mp3 and then rm the file. You see the drive light flash so the player hasn't cached the whole file in memory first. And noone but this player process can access the data. If the file system is small enough (or metallica.mp3 big enough) you should see df(1) report an increase in free disk space when the player exits, not when you rm the file.
Yeah, but would you really lump them together in an interview situation? Would you keep doing that when the interviewer tried to go down on a more detailed level? I have the same feeling as the grandparent -- the phrase "C/C++" is a buzzword the PHBs use because just "C" sounds old-fashioned. Of course that doesn't mean that people who use it must be ignorant, and of course it doesn't mean that using one language well prevents you from using the other one well.
On the other hand (in case noone has mentioned it yet) that's one of the things about Debian that's so attractive. Debian will never try to fuck me over to "maximise shareholder value" or whatever the proper phrase is ...
Please name an editor or terminal which doesn't treat TAB in the way God intended. Unless the user selects the option "I want my text files to be incompatible with all other tools in the known world". Which, granted, a surprising number of people do ...
Uh, that has more to do with MFC than the C++ language, I would think. I have never heard anything but bad things about MFC, and I've only heard praise for whatever GUI/frameworkish thingy Delphi has ...
Have you worked with it in real life though? You'll see numerous examples of OO becoming wanking excercises, producing huge blobs of overdesigned, underperforming hard-to-understand code. There's a backlash in there somewhere, and it's been going on for something like ten years ...
I like expressing things in OO, but I no longer try to apply it mindlessly to everything I see. Reading Strostrup and learing perl helped, and I'm sure reading Pike would have helped, too.
No. If we get past level 50, that means we should start looking for the vibrating square.
Also on HP's logic analyzers, at least before they started coming with Windows95 built in ... the wheel was great; both fast and precise.
Moving the problem somewhere else is often a very useful technique. In this case, it has worked reasonably well for thirty years.