Any suggestions for a cheap way to get the data off these tapes?
Buy a used SCSI TK50 or TZ30 drive. Probably cost $100 to $300, depending on where you find it.
If my memory serves me correctly, TZ85, TZ86, and specially certified TZ87 drives can also read (but not write) TK50 tapes, but these drives will cost more and (in my experience) are less reliable than an actual TK50 in reading TK50 media.
These drives will allow you to physically read the tapes. *BSD and Linux SCSI tape drivers should have no trouble talking to these drives (though the original TK50 is pre-SCSI-2 and might be a bit flaky if the driver doesn't know about it; YMMV), and you can use dd or standard library calls to talk to the drive.
If you're using Windows, you'll need a driver for the tape drive to use the Windows API read calls (or a port of dd) to talk to the drive. The DLT drives (TZ8x) should work fine with the DLT driver, but I'm not sure about the TK50/TZ30. An alternative would be using SCSI to talk directly to the drive, which is more work but not really that hard if you simply want to read data from a tape.
The next question is, what's the logical structure of the tape? On VMS, I'd expect to see either ANSI-standard labeled tapes or BACKUP save sets. The former is well-documented (Google ANSI X3.27) and fairly easy to deal with, though you'll have to write some (very simple) code to convert VMS record-managed text files to, say, LF-delimited Unix text files (or dig up a utility that does this, I'm sure many exist). Save sets are a bit more complicated, but there was a free Unix utility floating out there several years ago which read them (I think it was called vmsbackup). I'm assuming from how you describe the tapes that the data you're looking for is source code or other text; more exotic data types will obviously require more exotic conversions, and I can't really speak of them without knowing what you intend to do with the data.
Finally, commercial software exists on Windows at least to read both ANSI labeled tapes and VMS BACKUP save sets, if you have more money than time. Most of these packages should have no trouble talking to the DEC SCSI drives mentioned above (but check compatibility lists).
There is no such thing as "judicial estoppel". If he meant collateral estoppel or res judicata, those only apply to rulings by the court, not statements made in court.
judicial estoppel. Estoppel that prevents a party from contradicting previous declarations made during the same or a later proceeding if the change in position would adversely affect the proceeding or constitute a fraud on the court. --- Also termed doctrine of preclusion of inconsistent positions; doctrine of the conclusiveness of the judgment.
1) Roughly what percent of your music collection is unauthorized files from P2P like Kazaa, FTP, etc.?
Less than a percent. I haven't used P2P since Napster.
2) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from sources like iTunes Music Store, eMusic, etc?
Again, less than a percent. I've bought a few songs from ITMS, mostly "exclusive bonus tracks" and songs needed, in a pinch, to complete mix CDs. I tend to want whole albums, like liner notes, dislike DRM, and like supporting independent record stores. Plus, used CDs are frequently cheaper than iTMS album prices.
3) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from shareable sources like Creative Commons-licensed music?
None, but when I get some spare time, I intend to explore.
4) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of your own CDs?
Most of it, probably about 97-99%. That's 500 or so CDs
5) Roughly what percent of your music collection comes from rips of friends' CDs?
The rest, maybe a percent or two. I tend to buy CDs instead of copying them, but I'm not averse to ripping a disc or two when the situation presents itself.
(and what am I missing?)
Mix CDs given by friends (I have a few)(CDs, not friends)(no, I have friends, but I was referring to CDs). Tapes, records, DVD- Audio, and other physical formats. Recordings of radio shows and streaming media sources. Live recordings (allowed and bootleg). Recordings of self and/or one's band. Demo tapes of friends' bands.
Very few languages can be used to compile themselves...
Actually, quite a few languages can be used to compile themselves, or, properly speaking, quite a few compilers (for various languages) can be (and are) used to compile themselves (or, for that matter, other compilers for the same language). And most languages could be used to develop a compiler for the same language (though it may not be worthwhile) -- say, any Turing-complete language with appropriate storage capacity and I/O facilities. After all, what is a compiler, other than a fancy data conversion application? Naturally, you need to bootstrap a compiler for a new language using tools written in other languages (possibly building up to a subset of the target language, but that's still another language), but that's necessarily true for all compiled langauges, as well as assembly.
And I do not belive that Java is one of them...
If I'm not mistaken, javac is implemented in Java. To wit:
jasomill@prospero jasomill $ java com.sun.tools.javac.Main Usage: javac <options> <source files> where possible options include: . . . ..
Of course, the back-end of javac emits Java bytecode, but there's no reason a compiler for Java, written in Java, with a native back-end couldn't be written.
Why? First of all, use of the mark is now optional, at least in the U.S. Second, the mark itself doesn't explain to the child (or anyone else) whether or not a program may be copied (e.g., GPL'd software is copyrighted). The license does. Which leads us to...
I know that the copyright owner gets to decide how many times a software program can be copied. That means I can't copy the software that is running on my home computer unless the license for that program says I can.
So the assumption is that a child young enough to be attracted to the weasel-ferret-whatever mascot will read and understand the license agreements included with his or her software? Perhaps the BSA wants to donate to some sort of fund for early legal education?
I guess the problem I have with all this is, there's currently a lot of controversy surrounding free software, copyright, patents, and other "intellectual property" issues, and if we're not prepared to educate our children about the issues, we shouldn't allow the "voice of the world's commercial software industry" to do it for us, any more than we allow McDonald's to educate our children about nutrition. Oh, wait...
He slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of receipts.
It wasn't insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface.
It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant -- a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
Putting everything in the database sets you up for failure in so many ways... First of all, what happens when the DB Server needs to be upgraded???? YOU NEED TO REGRESSION TEST EVERY SINGLE APPLICATION IN YOUR CORPORATION!!!! That's ridiculous!!
You should have Unit tests for each layer in your software... You just fire of JUnit, NUnit, whatever on your DATA Layer and wait for the results. No need to retest the Business Logic at all..
...until you upgrade the application server, right? And you're sure that your unit testing covers everything that the "business logic" does to the data, right?
If you're saying developers should test more, I agree. Not only at any particular "unit" level, as many subtle and not-so-subtle errors are caused in ways that would make the system fail, even with perfect unit tests (especially when we're talking n-tier distributed applications). I just don't see database server upgrades occurring significantly more frequently than application server upgrades (probably less so). And in my experience, database servers are probably the best tested components of most systems, regression and otherwise. Database vendors seem to do a pretty good job documenting incompatible changes, too. Most regressions I've seen stem from developers' failure to read said documentation, or reliance on undocumented behavior. Hell, sometimes particularly popular undocumented behavior is even preserved (e.g., MS SQL Server used to always sort its data before doing a GROUP BY, and this behavior is preserved if the compatabiilty flag is set to these versions).
Your advice to unit test can hold, no matter where the business logic is located -- test at as many levels as possible, as often as possible, especially after upgrades, and probably before upgrades, too (so you can be sure the upgrade actually caused any regression that occurs. When was the last time the regression test suite was run? Last month? Last year? And you can guarantee nothing has changed since then? What about the size of the database [as some regressions may be performance-related]? What about system and network configurations?). The "database" doesn't have to be treated as some monolithic "unit", untestable except from the outside, any more than the "database+application server" combo does. Just because your testing framework of choice doesn't happen to have "cookbook" support for it doesn't mean you can't (or shouldn't) unit test your triggers, validation rules, internal "private" stored procedures, and whatnot.
I'm certainly not against modularization, that just wasn't the original poster's question. If I have 100 applications (or 10) doing the same thing to my data, of course I want all the applications to use the same bit of code. Whether that code is a stored procedure or a Web service or whatever is an implementation detail that depends on tradeoffs particular to the application and development environment (and "ease of testing" should certainly be involved in this decision). "Business logic" isn't a precise enough term to justify any kind of hard-and-fast rule stating "where it belongs". If anything "sets you up for failure in so many ways", it's replacing analysis of your project with some "thou shalt not" rules you picked up in a magazine somewhere.
That's not bad -- I was in charge of maintaining several QuickBASIC programs. The code was poorly written and uncommented, with the exception of one comment that appeared at the beginning of each source file:
REM If changes are made to this program, it must be recompiled.
It's also interesting to note that GOSUB was used liberally, but RETURN was not used once. Not to mention the fact that temporary files were always created in fixed locations on a shared network drive, so the programs tended to fail in creative ways (to give an example of "creative": the same temp file name was often used for, say, a list of files to view in one program and a list of files to delete in a second) when multiple users were using them...the list goes on.
At the current time, infinity is merely a mathematical amusement, and if we can never find a way to concretly apply the notion of infinity in science, then mathematical infinity might be a concept that doesn't really exist.
Would calculus qualify as "a way to concretely apply the notion of infinity in science?" And if not, why not? And are you implying that existence requires "application to science?" Interesting. What kind of science? How did "science" itself ever come into existence, if its very being presupposed utility to itself?
Also, what do you mean when you say a concept "doesn't really exist"? That it doesn't exist as a concept, or just that it doesn't exist as, say, a unicorn doesn't exist? After all, in all cases I can think of, "infinity", as a noun, is not supposed to represent a physical object, so it is no real surprise that it fails to do so. And if the concept doesn't exist, how can it be a "mathematical amusement?"
The concept of infinity is quite similar to the concept of existence, in a certain sense: they're both useful concepts in cases where the meaning is clear (i.e., "mundane" uses), otherwise they just provoke philosophical muddles.
Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so.
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I have to protest the idea that I'm saying that time doesn't exist because I'm simply ignorant about it. I'm saying that no one, AFAIK, has bothered to look into whether it has any physical reality whatsoever. Yes, it's a useful abstraction. My problem with this abstraction though is that people continually treat like it's something real in the physical sense. My hand is real. This desk is real. Position within space is real. Change of position in space is real. Change of position in space measured relative to the change in position for the hands of a clock is real. But to say that "time" exists in a physical sense because we can say those things is a stretch.
Your hand doesn't "exist" in the same way as "change of position in space" exists. Think about what it would mean to doubt the former, then think of what it would mean to doubt the latter.
If "we" were able to "prove" time is "real", it would be "real" in a different sense than your hand, the color blue, and (perhaps) spatial relations.
Think about it this way: If the physical reality of time isn't real and is nothing more than a useful mathematical abstraction (as is infinity by the way), then how would time travel be possible? Wouldn't traveling through some sort of space be predicated upon finding that space first?!
What does it mean for "reality" to be "real"? Are we talking about time travel or talking about talking about time travel? If "time" didn't exist at least as a concept, "time travel" wouldn't be impossible, it would be meaningless. As to "traveling through some sort of space" being "predicated upon finding that space first" -- I don't understand what you're trying to say. In order to "move through space" in the conventional sense of the phrase, I certainly don't have to understand what space "is", any more than the Earth has to understand the law of gravitation in order to orbit the sun. Are you saying otherwise?
If understanding "understanding" necessarily proceeded understanding, we could never understand. I take Socrates' position in this endless argument, "that is, that we shall be better, braver, and more active men if we believe it right to look for what we don't know than if we believe there is no point in looking because what we don't know we can never discover." (Plato, Meno).
Where time is concerned, we say to ourselves "well it must exist, because there has been a change in the time on the clock".
No, as a matter of fact "we" don't ususally say that, unless "we're" doing philosophy.
But the clock only changes because we made it that way.
Yes, to keep track of time. Not to understand its deeper meaning.
The clock doesn't actually measure anything after all, it's just a contraption who's parts move around in a predetermined way.
An observation, which is conveniently corollated with other observations which happen to be more difficult to directly quantify. Isn't that all we mean by "measurement"?
AFAIK, all of physics is based around such clocks. But, again, these clocks don't measure anything physical.
No, they move in predictable ways. Based on this property, they can be used to measure other things. They certainly don't "do the measuring" themselves...
Yet, the verity of time as a physical property is assumed.
Yet the verity of "verity" is not assumed. We have deeper problems! Somebody call the philosophy police!
You think time physically exists? Give me a thought experiment that would appear to prove its existence.
What do we mean by "time's existence"? What would it mean for time to "not exist"? In short, what are we trying to prove with our "thought experiment" (and i
If businesses think that they can gain a competitive advantage by altering their software to provide reports on other, competing products within an organization, marketing [sic] pressures will eventually force them to do exactly that.
(I assume he means "market", not "marketing" -- if not, his argument makes even less sense; furthermore, I assume he means "if businesses can gain a competitive advantage", not if they "think" they can. They could always be wrong.)
In an essay defending the commercial software development model ("you get what you pay for"), he presents an example of how market forces could compel companies to create spyware? This is good for the customer?
If anything, this seems like an argument for noncommercial, open-source software...
Aside from the issue of whether "clicking accept" forms a contract, the EULA is invalid because no contract (in the United States) is enforceable if it abdicates a recognized right of one of the parties--in this case, unreasonable search and seizure.
I, too, am not a lawyer, however, I don't need to be, as I don't need to rest any legal arguments here, only common sense: if I give you explicit permission to search my house in a particular way, I'd be hard-pressed to then turn around and claim you doing exactly what I've agreed to let you do was "unreasonable" without making the obvious implication that _I_ lacked the faculty of reason. If I were a lawyer, I'd call it estoppel; I'm not, so I'll just call it common sense. If you don't agree to something, don't agree to it. Don't agree to it, then turn around and have the audacity to presume the courts should strike down your assent as "not legally binding" because you failed to exercise your legal right to disagree! You may find the courts rightly hesitant to do so, and (IMHO) not on an obscure technical point of contract law, but at its very foundation as a form of self-government.
As far as what provisions are legal and illegal in contracts, I'm not a lawyer, nor do I have access to Westlaw (the majority of contract rests in case law, certainly not in the Constitution! Yes, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land; it's just not relevent. You certainly don't have a constitutional right to someone else's property, intellectual or otherwise!). My non-legal, common-sense advice is: don't consent to it if you don't agree with it. Don't give a second thought to whether or not it is "legally binding" unless you are already involved in a dispute -- assume it is. Otherwise, IMHO, you're no better off than the barrators -- trying to use the technicalities of the law to "get away with" that which is fundamentally unjust. If this means not using a piece of software, so be it. And "the nature of the beast," when the beast is contract -- the offeror makes the rules, and you accept them (or not). Contract law can by byzantine in its subtleties, but it's pretty simple conceptually.
Scary thing to me is, most people have _no idea_ what constitutes a contract, yet they enter into them every day (again, don't know what's binding, don't care, but it seems every Web site has "terms of use" attached these days). And I should not think the law's recognition of their ignorance of the law as a defense a truly acceptable resolution, especially when the law involved is created as an act of self-governance! Could it be that more and more people in the modern world are moving into the category of the "mentally unfit"?
funny thing about these - I find them immensely useful -- in X -- and more than useless in Windows. What I really want are replacement keycaps with the BSD daemon on them, or maybe the X logo...
If there is a classified (secret or top secret at least) museum, how would _anyone_ get clearance? I thought access to classified information (in the US government scheme of things at least) was on a "need to know" basis; by this standard, who would "need to know" what was in the museum, save for the curators and the beancounters? Hence, no access.
Hey, we can do it in BSD too. From the kernel sources on my FreeBSD 3.4-STABLE machine:
fgrep -ir fuck * alpha/tc/esp.c: * Things are seriously fucked up. boot/alpha/libalpha/elf_freebsd.c: return(EFTYPE);/* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ boot/i386/libi386/aout_freebsd.c: return(EFTYPE);/* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ boot/i386/libi386/elf_freebsd.c: return(EFTYPE);/* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ i386/isa/aic6360.c:/* Things are seriously fucked up. modules/pcic/@/alpha/tc/esp.c: * Things are seriously fucked up. modules/pcic/@/boot/alpha/libalpha/elf_freebsd.c : return(EFTYPE);/* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ modules/pcic/@/boot/i386/libi386/aout_freebsd.c: return(EFTYPE);/* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ modules/pcic/@/boot/i386/libi386/elf_freebsd.c: return(EFTYPE);/* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ modules/pcic/@/i386/isa/aic6360.c:/* Things are seriously fucked up. modules/svr4/@/alpha/tc/esp.c: * Things are seriously fucked up. modules/svr4/@/boot/alpha/libalpha/elf_freebsd.c : return(EFTYPE);/* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ modules/svr4/@/boot/i386/libi386/aout_freebsd.c: return(EFTYPE);/* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ modules/svr4/@/boot/i386/libi386/elf_freebsd.c: return(EFTYPE);/* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ modules/svr4/@/i386/isa/aic6360.c:/* Things are seriously fucked up.
fgrep -ir shit * Binary file compile/ROSENCRANTZ/vfs_cache.o matches Binary file compile/ROSENCRANTZ/kernel matches dev/sym/sym_hipd.c: * brain-deaded stuff that makes shit. i386/i386/math_emu.h: * structure to 12 bytes which breaks things in math_emulate.c. Shit. I kern/vfs_cache.c:static u_long numposhits; STATNODE(CTLFLAG_RD, numposhits, &numposhits); kern/vfs_cache.c: numposhits++; Binary file modules/pcic/@/compile/ROSENCRANTZ/vfs_cache.o matches Binary file modules/pcic/@/compile/ROSENCRANTZ/kernel matches modules/pcic/@/dev/sym/sym_hipd.c: * brain-deaded stuff that makes shit. modules/pcic/@/i386/i386/math_emu.h: * structure to 12 bytes which breaks things in math_emulate.c. Shit. I modules/pcic/@/kern/vfs_cache.c:static u_long numposhits; STATNODE(CTLFLAG_RD, numposhits, &numposhits); modules/pcic/@/kern/vfs_cache.c: numposhits++; Binary file modules/svr4/@/compile/ROSENCRANTZ/vfs_cache.o matches Binary file modules/svr4/@/compile/ROSENCRANTZ/kernel matches modules/svr4/@/dev/sym/sym_hipd.c: * brain-deaded stuff that makes shit. modules/svr4/@/i386/i386/math_emu.h: * structure to 12 bytes which breaks things in math_emulate.c. Shit. I modules/svr4/@/kern/vfs_cache.c:static u_long numposhits; STATNODE(CTLFLAG_RD, numposhits, &numposhits); modules/svr4/@/kern/vfs_cache.c: numposhits++;
For brevity, all references to "Matsushita" have been surgically removed. Even my kernel binary is full of shit (yes, I know that "numposhits" is "number of positive hits").
Also, on an unrelated note, the XOR-exchange of variables is quite a bit slower than using a temp, at least on the x86.
I put a screenshot from my SPARCstation 1 running SunView http://php.indiana.edu/~jasomill/sunview.gif (and yes, I still use the system, incl. SunView; when all you're running is terminal windows, SV is oh, so much faster than the console [which, on the SS1 at least, is so painfully slow as to be virtually unusable] or X, especially on a SS1 with 16MB of RAM). The OS version is SunOS 4.1.4, and the Lisp Screen in the background is running the Copycat AI program (more info see "Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies : Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought" by Doug R. Hofstadter).
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Buy a used SCSI TK50 or TZ30 drive. Probably cost $100 to $300, depending on where you find it.
If my memory serves me correctly, TZ85, TZ86, and specially certified TZ87 drives can also read (but not write) TK50 tapes, but these drives will cost more and (in my experience) are less reliable than an actual TK50 in reading TK50 media.
These drives will allow you to physically read the tapes. *BSD and Linux SCSI tape drivers should have no trouble talking to these drives (though the original TK50 is pre-SCSI-2 and might be a bit flaky if the driver doesn't know about it; YMMV), and you can use dd or standard library calls to talk to the drive.
If you're using Windows, you'll need a driver for the tape drive to use the Windows API read calls (or a port of dd) to talk to the drive. The DLT drives (TZ8x) should work fine with the DLT driver, but I'm not sure about the TK50/TZ30. An alternative would be using SCSI to talk directly to the drive, which is more work but not really that hard if you simply want to read data from a tape.
The next question is, what's the logical structure of the tape? On VMS, I'd expect to see either ANSI-standard labeled tapes or BACKUP save sets. The former is well-documented (Google ANSI X3.27) and fairly easy to deal with, though you'll have to write some (very simple) code to convert VMS record-managed text files to, say, LF-delimited Unix text files (or dig up a utility that does this, I'm sure many exist). Save sets are a bit more complicated, but there was a free Unix utility floating out there several years ago which read them (I think it was called vmsbackup). I'm assuming from how you describe the tapes that the data you're looking for is source code or other text; more exotic data types will obviously require more exotic conversions, and I can't really speak of them without knowing what you intend to do with the data.
Finally, commercial software exists on Windows at least to read both ANSI labeled tapes and VMS BACKUP save sets, if you have more money than time. Most of these packages should have no trouble talking to the DEC SCSI drives mentioned above (but check compatibility lists).
judicial estoppel. Estoppel that prevents a party from contradicting previous declarations made during the same or a later proceeding if the change in position would adversely affect the proceeding or constitute a fraud on the court. --- Also termed doctrine of preclusion of inconsistent positions; doctrine of the conclusiveness of the judgment.
Less than a percent. I haven't used P2P since Napster.
Again, less than a percent. I've bought a few songs from ITMS, mostly "exclusive bonus tracks" and songs needed, in a pinch, to complete mix CDs. I tend to want whole albums, like liner notes, dislike DRM, and like supporting independent record stores. Plus, used CDs are frequently cheaper than iTMS album prices.
None, but when I get some spare time, I intend to explore.
Most of it, probably about 97-99%. That's 500 or so CDs
The rest, maybe a percent or two. I tend to buy CDs instead of copying them, but I'm not averse to ripping a disc or two when the situation presents itself.
Mix CDs given by friends (I have a few)(CDs, not friends)(no, I have friends, but I was referring to CDs). Tapes, records, DVD- Audio, and other physical formats. Recordings of radio shows and streaming media sources. Live recordings (allowed and bootleg). Recordings of self and/or one's band. Demo tapes of friends' bands.
Actually, quite a few languages can be used to compile themselves, or, properly speaking, quite a few compilers (for various languages) can be (and are) used to compile themselves (or, for that matter, other compilers for the same language). And most languages could be used to develop a compiler for the same language (though it may not be worthwhile) -- say, any Turing-complete language with appropriate storage capacity and I/O facilities. After all, what is a compiler, other than a fancy data conversion application? Naturally, you need to bootstrap a compiler for a new language using tools written in other languages (possibly building up to a subset of the target language, but that's still another language), but that's necessarily true for all compiled langauges, as well as assembly.
If I'm not mistaken, javac is implemented in Java. To wit:
Of course, the back-end of javac emits Java bytecode, but there's no reason a compiler for Java, written in Java, with a native back-end couldn't be written.
A Cyber-Ethics Champion Code with items such as
Why? First of all, use of the mark is now optional, at least in the U.S. Second, the mark itself doesn't explain to the child (or anyone else) whether or not a program may be copied (e.g., GPL'd software is copyrighted). The license does. Which leads us to...
So the assumption is that a child young enough to be attracted to the weasel-ferret-whatever mascot will read and understand the license agreements included with his or her software? Perhaps the BSA wants to donate to some sort of fund for early legal education?
I guess the problem I have with all this is, there's currently a lot of controversy surrounding free software, copyright, patents, and other "intellectual property" issues, and if we're not prepared to educate our children about the issues, we shouldn't allow the "voice of the world's commercial software industry" to do it for us, any more than we allow McDonald's to educate our children about nutrition. Oh, wait...
Ha!
He couldn't believe what he'd just found.
He slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of receipts.
It wasn't insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface .
It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant -- a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
...until you upgrade the application server, right? And you're sure that your unit testing covers everything that the "business logic" does to the data, right?
If you're saying developers should test more, I agree. Not only at any particular "unit" level, as many subtle and not-so-subtle errors are caused in ways that would make the system fail, even with perfect unit tests (especially when we're talking n-tier distributed applications). I just don't see database server upgrades occurring significantly more frequently than application server upgrades (probably less so). And in my experience, database servers are probably the best tested components of most systems, regression and otherwise. Database vendors seem to do a pretty good job documenting incompatible changes, too. Most regressions I've seen stem from developers' failure to read said documentation, or reliance on undocumented behavior. Hell, sometimes particularly popular undocumented behavior is even preserved (e.g., MS SQL Server used to always sort its data before doing a GROUP BY, and this behavior is preserved if the compatabiilty flag is set to these versions).
Your advice to unit test can hold, no matter where the business logic is located -- test at as many levels as possible, as often as possible, especially after upgrades, and probably before upgrades, too (so you can be sure the upgrade actually caused any regression that occurs. When was the last time the regression test suite was run? Last month? Last year? And you can guarantee nothing has changed since then? What about the size of the database [as some regressions may be performance-related]? What about system and network configurations?). The "database" doesn't have to be treated as some monolithic "unit", untestable except from the outside, any more than the "database+application server" combo does. Just because your testing framework of choice doesn't happen to have "cookbook" support for it doesn't mean you can't (or shouldn't) unit test your triggers, validation rules, internal "private" stored procedures, and whatnot.
I'm certainly not against modularization, that just wasn't the original poster's question. If I have 100 applications (or 10) doing the same thing to my data, of course I want all the applications to use the same bit of code. Whether that code is a stored procedure or a Web service or whatever is an implementation detail that depends on tradeoffs particular to the application and development environment (and "ease of testing" should certainly be involved in this decision). "Business logic" isn't a precise enough term to justify any kind of hard-and-fast rule stating "where it belongs". If anything "sets you up for failure in so many ways", it's replacing analysis of your project with some "thou shalt not" rules you picked up in a magazine somewhere.
That's not bad -- I was in charge of maintaining several QuickBASIC programs. The code was poorly written and uncommented, with the exception of one comment that appeared at the beginning of each source file:
It's also interesting to note that GOSUB was used liberally, but RETURN was not used once. Not to mention the fact that temporary files were always created in fixed locations on a shared network drive, so the programs tended to fail in creative ways (to give an example of "creative": the same temp file name was often used for, say, a list of files to view in one program and a list of files to delete in a second) when multiple users were using them...the list goes on.
Would calculus qualify as "a way to concretely apply the notion of infinity in science?" And if not, why not? And are you implying that existence requires "application to science?" Interesting. What kind of science? How did "science" itself ever come into existence, if its very being presupposed utility to itself?
Also, what do you mean when you say a concept "doesn't really exist"? That it doesn't exist as a concept, or just that it doesn't exist as, say, a unicorn doesn't exist? After all, in all cases I can think of, "infinity", as a noun, is not supposed to represent a physical object, so it is no real surprise that it fails to do so. And if the concept doesn't exist, how can it be a "mathematical amusement?"
The concept of infinity is quite similar to the concept of existence, in a certain sense: they're both useful concepts in cases where the meaning is clear (i.e., "mundane" uses), otherwise they just provoke philosophical muddles.
-DNA
Your hand doesn't "exist" in the same way as "change of position in space" exists. Think about what it would mean to doubt the former, then think of what it would mean to doubt the latter.
If "we" were able to "prove" time is "real", it would be "real" in a different sense than your hand, the color blue, and (perhaps) spatial relations.
What does it mean for "reality" to be "real"? Are we talking about time travel or talking about talking about time travel? If "time" didn't exist at least as a concept, "time travel" wouldn't be impossible, it would be meaningless. As to "traveling through some sort of space" being "predicated upon finding that space first" -- I don't understand what you're trying to say. In order to "move through space" in the conventional sense of the phrase, I certainly don't have to understand what space "is", any more than the Earth has to understand the law of gravitation in order to orbit the sun. Are you saying otherwise?
If understanding "understanding" necessarily proceeded understanding, we could never understand. I take Socrates' position in this endless argument, "that is, that we shall be better, braver, and more active men if we believe it right to look for what we don't know than if we believe there is no point in looking because what we don't know we can never discover." (Plato, Meno).
No, as a matter of fact "we" don't ususally say that, unless "we're" doing philosophy.
Yes, to keep track of time. Not to understand its deeper meaning.
An observation, which is conveniently corollated with other observations which happen to be more difficult to directly quantify. Isn't that all we mean by "measurement"?
No, they move in predictable ways. Based on this property, they can be used to measure other things. They certainly don't "do the measuring" themselves...
Yet the verity of "verity" is not assumed. We have deeper problems! Somebody call the philosophy police!
What do we mean by "time's existence"? What would it mean for time to "not exist"? In short, what are we trying to prove with our "thought experiment" (and i
If businesses think that they can gain a competitive advantage by altering their software to provide reports on other, competing products within an organization, marketing [sic] pressures will eventually force them to do exactly that.
(I assume he means "market", not "marketing" -- if not, his argument makes even less sense; furthermore, I assume he means "if businesses can gain a competitive advantage", not if they "think" they can. They could always be wrong.)
In an essay defending the commercial software development model ("you get what you pay for"), he presents an example of how market forces could compel companies to create spyware? This is good for the customer?
If anything, this seems like an argument for noncommercial, open-source software...
Aside from the issue of whether "clicking accept" forms a contract, the EULA is invalid because no contract (in the United States) is enforceable if it abdicates a recognized right of one of the parties--in this case, unreasonable search and seizure.
I, too, am not a lawyer, however, I don't need to be, as I don't need to rest any legal arguments here, only common sense: if I give you explicit permission to search my house in a particular way, I'd be hard-pressed to then turn around and claim you doing exactly what I've agreed to let you do was "unreasonable" without making the obvious implication that _I_ lacked the faculty of reason. If I were a lawyer, I'd call it estoppel; I'm not, so I'll just call it common sense. If you don't agree to something, don't agree to it. Don't agree to it, then turn around and have the audacity to presume the courts should strike down your assent as "not legally binding" because you failed to exercise your legal right to disagree! You may find the courts rightly hesitant to do so, and (IMHO) not on an obscure technical point of contract law, but at its very foundation as a form of self-government.
As far as what provisions are legal and illegal in contracts, I'm not a lawyer, nor do I have access to Westlaw (the majority of contract rests in case law, certainly not in the Constitution! Yes, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land; it's just not relevent. You certainly don't have a constitutional right to someone else's property, intellectual or otherwise!). My non-legal, common-sense advice is: don't consent to it if you don't agree with it. Don't give a second thought to whether or not it is "legally binding" unless you are already involved in a dispute -- assume it is. Otherwise, IMHO, you're no better off than the barrators -- trying to use the technicalities of the law to "get away with" that which is fundamentally unjust. If this means not using a piece of software, so be it. And "the nature of the beast," when the beast is contract -- the offeror makes the rules, and you accept them (or not). Contract law can by byzantine in its subtleties, but it's pretty simple conceptually.
Scary thing to me is, most people have _no idea_ what constitutes a contract, yet they enter into them every day (again, don't know what's binding, don't care, but it seems every Web site has "terms of use" attached these days). And I should not think the law's recognition of their ignorance of the law as a defense a truly acceptable resolution, especially when the law involved is created as an act of self-governance! Could it be that more and more people in the modern world are moving into the category of the "mentally unfit"?
> (case in point - the Windows keys)
funny thing about these - I find them immensely useful -- in X -- and more than useless in Windows. What I really want are replacement keycaps with the BSD daemon on them, or maybe the X logo...
If there is a classified (secret or top secret at least) museum, how would _anyone_ get clearance? I thought access to classified information (in the US government scheme of things at least) was on a "need to know" basis; by this standard, who would "need to know" what was in the museum, save for the curators and the beancounters? Hence, no access.
-jtm
TECO users.
fgrep -ir fuck * /* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ /* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ /* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ /* Things are seriously fucked up. c : return(EFTYPE); /* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ : return(EFTYPE); /* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ /* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ /* Things are seriously fucked up. c : return(EFTYPE); /* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ : return(EFTYPE); /* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ /* XXX actually EFUCKUP */ /* Things are seriously fucked up.
alpha/tc/esp.c: * Things are seriously fucked up.
boot/alpha/libalpha/elf_freebsd.c: return(EFTYPE);
boot/i386/libi386/aout_freebsd.c: return(EFTYPE);
boot/i386/libi386/elf_freebsd.c: return(EFTYPE);
i386/isa/aic6360.c:
modules/pcic/@/alpha/tc/esp.c: * Things are seriously fucked up.
modules/pcic/@/boot/alpha/libalpha/elf_freebsd.
modules/pcic/@/boot/i386/libi386/aout_freebsd.c
modules/pcic/@/boot/i386/libi386/elf_freebsd.c: return(EFTYPE);
modules/pcic/@/i386/isa/aic6360.c:
modules/svr4/@/alpha/tc/esp.c: * Things are seriously fucked up.
modules/svr4/@/boot/alpha/libalpha/elf_freebsd.
modules/svr4/@/boot/i386/libi386/aout_freebsd.c
modules/svr4/@/boot/i386/libi386/elf_freebsd.c: return(EFTYPE);
modules/svr4/@/i386/isa/aic6360.c:
fgrep -ir shit *
Binary file compile/ROSENCRANTZ/vfs_cache.o matches
Binary file compile/ROSENCRANTZ/kernel matches
dev/sym/sym_hipd.c: * brain-deaded stuff that makes shit.
i386/i386/math_emu.h: * structure to 12 bytes which breaks things in math_emulate.c. Shit. I
kern/vfs_cache.c:static u_long numposhits; STATNODE(CTLFLAG_RD, numposhits, &numposhits);
kern/vfs_cache.c: numposhits++;
Binary file modules/pcic/@/compile/ROSENCRANTZ/vfs_cache.o matches
Binary file modules/pcic/@/compile/ROSENCRANTZ/kernel matches
modules/pcic/@/dev/sym/sym_hipd.c: * brain-deaded stuff that makes shit.
modules/pcic/@/i386/i386/math_emu.h: * structure to 12 bytes which breaks things in math_emulate.c. Shit. I
modules/pcic/@/kern/vfs_cache.c:static u_long numposhits; STATNODE(CTLFLAG_RD, numposhits, &numposhits);
modules/pcic/@/kern/vfs_cache.c: numposhits++;
Binary file modules/svr4/@/compile/ROSENCRANTZ/vfs_cache.o matches
Binary file modules/svr4/@/compile/ROSENCRANTZ/kernel matches
modules/svr4/@/dev/sym/sym_hipd.c: * brain-deaded stuff that makes shit.
modules/svr4/@/i386/i386/math_emu.h: * structure to 12 bytes which breaks things in math_emulate.c. Shit. I
modules/svr4/@/kern/vfs_cache.c:static u_long numposhits; STATNODE(CTLFLAG_RD, numposhits, &numposhits);
modules/svr4/@/kern/vfs_cache.c: numposhits++;
For brevity, all references to "Matsushita" have been surgically removed. Even my kernel binary is full of shit (yes, I know that "numposhits" is "number of positive hits").
Also, on an unrelated note, the XOR-exchange of variables is quite a bit slower than using a temp, at least on the x86.
-jtm
I put a screenshot from my SPARCstation 1 running SunView
http://php.indiana.edu/~jasomill/sunview.gif
(and yes, I still use the system, incl. SunView; when all you're running is terminal windows, SV is oh, so much faster than the console [which, on the SS1 at least, is so painfully slow as to be virtually unusable] or X, especially on a SS1 with 16MB of RAM). The OS version is SunOS 4.1.4, and the Lisp Screen in the background is running the Copycat AI program (more info see "Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies : Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought" by Doug R. Hofstadter).