If you're hash-validating mail to fix the problems of envelope-reversed spam, why not just hash-validate mail in the first place?
Because I don't want to impose any additional technical requirements. I want the SMTP protocol to work as is.
If I get a spammer that sends me email, his spam won't make it to my inbox. If it's a mailing list I didn't subscribe to, I don't care about it. If it's a legitimate unsolicited email and the sender hasn't been white listed yet then he probably won't mind having to respond to one time CAPTCHA.
On the other, if my mail server starts receiving a lot of requests for authentication then I can provide a way to easily filter spam. Since this type of email always comes from servers that provide authentication, I can safely let the mail through.
If I want to spam you, I can just send spam to someone using your proposed envelope reversal as you.
You can't spam me. You could spam someone else if the mail server of the forged "FROM" address doesn't check for the signature but what would be the point. The only message you'd spam with is a message with some text such as "I believe I have received an email from you. You address has not been white listed. To prove that this is not spam, please click here..."
The way to stop that is to require validated senders, but the server admin on the sending server gets to decide who's a valid sender. A spammer can afford a Linux box running an MTA, so unless you can force others to swear in court or something that their authenticated and authorized senders aren't sending spam, then you're still SOL.
If an authenticated server is sending spam, then that server will get a lot of reverse mail to ask for mail validation. That authentication only says that some mail came from that server. That mail is not trusted. It's considered spam until the sender is approved.
Here's a scenario:
Spammer sends email with forged from.
My mail server looks at to address, and it's not one of the personalized email addresses so it won't automatically accept.
My mail server checks from address and compares to my white list; It's not there so it accepts email and puts it in possible spam folder then sends a request for self authorization;
Since the FROM address was faked, there are a few possibilities.
The from server I sent the request to ignores my request and treats it as spam so the spam email eventually gets deleted.
The from server authenticates itself. My server sees that this is invalid and stops deleting the spam message.
The from server doesn't authenticate itself but the inbox my server attempts to send to email to doesn't exist. It eventually receives a bounce. My server might try again depending on configuration.
The from server doesn't authenticate itself and the inbox my server attempts to send to exists. The human recipient deletes the email and marks it as spam.
The worst that can happen is that some human recipient that got spammed is white listed because he chose to respond to the CAPTCHA or my mail server gets black listed on that particular server. If Google Mail or any other big source of email starts using this system, this would be very unlikely.
You can't have the system automatically reply to all spam like that. Go ahead and try it to see what happens. Your mail server will be buried with undeliverable forged headers
If you get enough SPAM that replying to them is that big a problem, shouldn't that be a bigger incentive to reducing the SPAM issue once and for all. Undeliverable is not an issue since it doesn't end up in someone's email box; Just delete it. A mechanism to stop circular replies would be needed though.
*and* you'll be sending out envelope-reversed spam.
The envelope-reversed spam may be an issue. But this is the type of issue that has other technical solutions. An authentication scheme could easily be implemented to reduce this. For example, email coming from example.com could be signed with a hash. Simply connecting to the an example.com SMTP server could provide enough information to validate the hash. On the other hand, validation replies would be relatively easy to detect so mail server that are receiving those could try to match the recipients with sent email addresses. This would make it possible to simply delete inappropriate requests.
I admit I haven't thought of every possible issue but I think it could be a good starting point.
First, I make a distinction between science and culture. When teaching culture, and I consider literature to be a part of it, then it makes sense to teach some aspects of Christianity and other religious belief. In science classes, there's no reason to do so. If there are laws that say you can't mention Christianity in an English literature class, I don't believe there are, then that's wrong.
I'd like to add that I'm not American so I can only judge the school system there from what I read and hear from others.
Second, about the Bible. You can't be serious. Just look here and explain some of these inconsistencies.
I'm a Christian. Let me be one of the first Christians in this thread to say that Creationism (or its hideous offshoot Intelligent Design) should not be taught in science class. The teachers do have too much to do to get bogged down in debates.
That's a good start.
There are a couple of conditions though.
Clearly identify evolution as a theory of scientists that explains the facts as they see it.
Why? Should that be done every time a broadly accepted theory is discussed or only where there are religious opinions that claim different?
When I was in school, I don't remember the teachers making a pause after each theory to say that this was the best theory so far. Should it be different for the theory of evolution or do you want this to be explained for electricity and cooking classes as well?
In the literature classes where the "world's major creation myths" as you put it are described, be sure to include Christianity. You see, one of the reasons Christians get so fed up with the school system is any world religion can be discussed with the exception of Christianity. You can talk about American Indians and their beliefs in grade school. You can talk about Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and their beliefs in the middle grades studying geography or cultural studies. You can study Greek, Roman, and Egyptian creation myths and the whole pantheon of their gods and goddesses in various literature classes. More than that, you have to memorize the facts about them and regurgitate them for a grade. But you can't discuss Christianity or some atheist will be up in arms suing the school district.
I'm not American so I don't know what is taught in the US literature classes. I agree with you on that one. Christianity should not be ignored or take a back seat.
... Just don't let the mind of any kid who isn't fortunate enough to go to Sunday School get his or her mind broadened to include Christianity. That would be a violation of church and state, for heaven's sake.
Yes it is. If you do it to expose children to your religious beliefs then school is not the place.
And before you lump me in with the crowd who says the earth was created a few thousand years ago, I would go on record that you won't find that anywhere in the Bible. I've argued the subject recently and won't repeat myself here.
The problem with the Bible is that you'll use it to support your claims when it's convenient. Sometimes it's what the preacher said, sometimes the Pope or some other authority. In my opinion, saying that the Bible says "such and such is true" to support your faith cannot be considered serious unless you are willing to defend the whole of it.
I want to agree with you. Your points make some sense. The problem I have is when I try to extrapolate from your arguments.
You see, I was brought up in the Catholic faith so these belief don't seem that weird to me. Well, maybe they seem weird but I've grown used to them. But what about other religions? Should we teach about Eloims, Buddha, Flat Earth, Greek Gods? Maybe, but not in a science class.
By the way, not wanting to listen to the same unsupported evidence doesn't make someone ignorant. It's more of a selective usage of one's personal time.
I guess the "intelligent designer" had to design dinosaurs before trying his hand at more "evolved" species or maybe it was just to hide his influence in the evolution process.
In the former case, this would imply that the designer is not perfect which opens the possibility that he might have been killed by an insect himself.
In the latter case, this would imply that the designer doesn't want his presence known. Maybe we should respect his position and pretend he's not there?
You seem to have a very black & white view of things. I believe that their are shades of grey. For example, I wouldn't consider leaving a company because a team lead is not stepping up.
I've worked for a few companies, from startups to very large (40K employees) companies and some in between. I tend to want to leave when the job is no longer interesting. A managerial team that rates people using metrics won't make me lose interest in the job but it doesn't help. Again, I'm not saying that metrics don't have their uses; I'm just saying that I believe there are sometimes better ways of evaluating performance. For example, in a 100m race, metrics is a very good indicator of performance whereas for a painting, it might not be.
how is "deliverables" a stupid metric. Either you deliver a working solution/program on time or you don't. Thats the deliverable.
Let's see, what is the deliverable again? a working solution? What about maintainability? flexibility? What if the person had to mentor others when trying to deliver the product? What about managing priorities? providing useful and easy to maintain unit tests? documentation? What about team work and consensus in trying to achieve that working solution? What about raising issues early?
What ever the metric you use, it might be a fine tool to measure progress of the project. Just don't use it to measure productivity of individuals or you'll end up with programmers that meet their objectives and only their objectives.
That audit log is good... for an audit:) But, you do also want to prevent them from violating licensing terms as much as possible.
The problem with that approach is that you punish your customers and reduce the visibility of your product.
Just telling customers they violated licensing after the fact isn't enabling them to follow their own policies.
You are not restricted to providing the information after the fact. You can provide a small application that parses the log regularly and sends an email if a problem appears. A customer could receive an email such as "in the past week, you have used up to 90% of the licenses on 3 occasions."
On the application side, a note could indicate that the number of licenses is exceeded or that it can't communicate with the "license server" but still start the application.
I think the main thing to address for those kinds of customers is that if they absolutely have to do something without being licensed, then you have to give them some way to do it. You don't want to bring them completely to a halt because a hardware key broke or something. As long as that's the case, then a licensing bug shouldn't be fatal for the customers productivity.
I agree and that's what I'm proposing. Work on the honor system but provide tools to your customers so that they can tell if they are not true to their engagements. With the ability to audit, you provide an additional incentive to do so.
However, if you have no licensing enforcement mechanism, how do your customers even know if they are in violation? As you said, these big companies want to be in compliance of licensing terms, but they can't be expected to consult their legal department every time some software is run to ensure they are in compliance. So, in that sense, that hardware dongle is an easy way for customer to know that they are operating within the terms of the software license. It might suck for the guy actually using the software, but it's probably good for the company he is working for.
Why not use log files. You log when someone uses the application, when they are idle and when they exit the application. This gives you enough information to know if you are conforming to the license and you can have a contract that let's the seller audit the log files in some circumstances.
Benefits:
The licensee can look at the log file to make sure they are in compliance.
The application can keep working if the log server is down.
The licensor can verify that a company is in compliance.
No dongle or other hardware required.
Bugs in the license server code won't bring down your organization.
"... some jobs have gone to outsourcers, while other jobs are simply going away, either due to cost-oriented automation efforts or due to increasing the remaining staff's workload." (emphasis mine)
How do you automate the job of someone who's job is to automate?
A politician and a renown scientist die and arrive in heaven at the same time.
Everyone there wants to talk to the politician and ignore the scientist so the scientist goes to see St-Peter and asks him what's going on.
St-Peter says: You led a good life and were really appreciated but you have to understand, we already have a few scientist in heaven, this is our first politician.
1. Administrator of the board was sued despite not being involved in any trolling. There was no justifiable reason -- good or bad -- to sue him.
I don't know why you bring this up. Making the mistake of suing the owner of the board doesn't make their other lawsuits - the one about threats of rape and sodomy - frivolous. Are you trying to setup a straw man or did you simply not understand my position?
2. Anonymous postings on the Internet have no credibility unless they mention verifiable facts -- and then the facts matter, not the postings. In this case there was absolutely no reason to expect that flamewar on the board in any way translated to a credible threat. The matter was trivial, not worth a lawsuit, not worth trouble and expenses inflicted on those people.
That's your opinion and I mostly agree that the threat was not credible. Still, there's no way for the "victims" to know for sure until they investigate.
3. The only thing this did to the reputation of the original "victim" is to confirm that she is in fact what is commonly described as a bitch. What apparently didn't affect her career in any negative way considering that she got a well-paid job at a law firm.
And all I'm suggesting is that if you start threatening people with violence that you should face the consequences. Anonymity doesn't make it less of a threat. If I dressed in white and wore a hood so that I couldn't be recognized, would that make my threats less credible?
And the message is "You can be sued for ANYTHING". I guess, it may discourage some people from living.
I don't see how not being allowed to threaten to rape somebody is discouraging you from living but maybe that's just me.
I do realize that there are just too many frivolous lawsuits. I live in Quebec and there are far less, I think, than in the USA but let's consider the alternatives.
No more speeding tickets because people may go to court to fight it;
No more zonage regulation to avoid litigation;
No more anti-monopoly regulation
No more laws that are considered benign to reduce lawsuits.
Passing a message doesn't mean "send the culprits to jail for 6 months." It just means make a quick judgment of guilty (it shouldn't take years), make them pay the court costs plus some additional penalty for defamation and threats plus maybe 1 or 2 day community service cleaning up graffiti.
... I think if there was more credibility to the accusations of herpes or more of an indication of a real threat, I would sympathize more with this case. Instead, from what is written in TFA...
You say you RTFA.
Did you read the part about raping and sodomizing?
I'm not sure how this is not a threat.
Otherwise you will waste your entire life fighting with assholes.
Sometimes creating a precedent stops the assholes before they get a chance to harm. If the court sent a clear message, this could reduce the number of cases to a manageable amount. Not only would this avoid fighting with the assholes it would silence most of them.
That's a problem with your make program, not with your text editor. Get a make program that determines whether a file has changed by looking intelligently at its contents, not its timestamp.
(It's trivial in principle: all you need is a normalisation routine for each file format, then you store a list of digests. Omake does something like this, though I can't remember offhand whether it normalises files before calculating digests.)
From what I remember of OMake, the program looks at the command line to execute along with the environment. If none of the files used have changed and the environment is the same, it skips the build. As far as I know, it doesn't normalize and will still rebuild if a comment is updated.
I do agree that the editor shouldn't have to deal with this but the source control tool could reduce the workload of the make application.
Clearmake (and OMake too - I think) does something similar. It remembers the command line used and the environment, creates a hash and compares that when asked to do a build. CCache is probably better because changing a comment in a file will not force a re-compile however, you need to parse the files all the time.
I think the idea is that it would strip all the indentation along with the comments, and then apply rigorous auto-indent (or, possible, indents stored with the sets of comments) of the nature you want.
Pretty much. All you need is to normalize the code, do a diff -e between the normalized code and the formatted code and store the result. Now anyone that extracts the code can retrieve the normalize code and apply their own formatting or apply the diff'd output. The source control tool could do this automatically. When building, only use the normalized code.
Either way, I think any advantages of this idea are canceled out by the fact that A)No one would use it, since it complicates producing source code by several factors if you want to make it useful,
If done as above, it would have no impact on the coders that choose to checkout w/o applying their own rules since by default, you'd get the file with the last formatting applied. The source control tool would take care of that.
and B)It complicates the process of getting the functional source + comments mix to start working.
Can you elaborate on this?
I do see how being able to support multilanguage comments would be nice, though. The problem is, they're such ephemeral objects (non-programmatic sense) that the effort of constantly re-translating them when they change would be pretty constant and pointless-feeling.
OK. Let's ignore the multilingual comments for now. I still think that separating the code from its layout and comments would be relatively easy and would have more benefits than drawbacks.
Slightly off-topic but one feature I used to want from a text editor was to be able to split comments and formatting from the actual code.
It would be nice if source control tools would do that. This way, I wouldn't have to rebuild an application because someone added a comment or changed the formatting in types.h. It would allow every programmer to work with files using their own preferences for indenting and usage of curly-braces.
An additional benefit of such a feature would be to make it possible to place comments in several spoken-languages and only look at the ones you're interested in.
Slashdot Mirror
It's ironic that the article would claim cognive dissonance as a fact.
I'm not sure it's not but some guy (John Tierney) does a pretty good job of playing Devil's advocate:
Go Ahead, Rationalize. Monkeys Do It, Too.
And Behind Door No. 1, a Fatal Flaw
If you're hash-validating mail to fix the problems of envelope-reversed spam, why not just hash-validate mail in the first place?
Because I don't want to impose any additional technical requirements. I want the SMTP protocol to work as is.
If I get a spammer that sends me email, his spam won't make it to my inbox. If it's a mailing list I didn't subscribe to, I don't care about it. If it's a legitimate unsolicited email and the sender hasn't been white listed yet then he probably won't mind having to respond to one time CAPTCHA.
On the other, if my mail server starts receiving a lot of requests for authentication then I can provide a way to easily filter spam. Since this type of email always comes from servers that provide authentication, I can safely let the mail through.
If I want to spam you, I can just send spam to someone using your proposed envelope reversal as you.
You can't spam me. You could spam someone else if the mail server of the forged "FROM" address doesn't check for the signature but what would be the point. The only message you'd spam with is a message with some text such as "I believe I have received an email from you. You address has not been white listed. To prove that this is not spam, please click here..."
The way to stop that is to require validated senders, but the server admin on the sending server gets to decide who's a valid sender. A spammer can afford a Linux box running an MTA, so unless you can force others to swear in court or something that their authenticated and authorized senders aren't sending spam, then you're still SOL.
If an authenticated server is sending spam, then that server will get a lot of reverse mail to ask for mail validation. That authentication only says that some mail came from that server. That mail is not trusted. It's considered spam until the sender is approved.
Here's a scenario:
The worst that can happen is that some human recipient that got spammed is white listed because he chose to respond to the CAPTCHA or my mail server gets black listed on that particular server. If Google Mail or any other big source of email starts using this system, this would be very unlikely.
You can't have the system automatically reply to all spam like that. Go ahead and try it to see what happens. Your mail server will be buried with undeliverable forged headers
If you get enough SPAM that replying to them is that big a problem, shouldn't that be a bigger incentive to reducing the SPAM issue once and for all. Undeliverable is not an issue since it doesn't end up in someone's email box; Just delete it. A mechanism to stop circular replies would be needed though.
*and* you'll be sending out envelope-reversed spam.
The envelope-reversed spam may be an issue. But this is the type of issue that has other technical solutions. An authentication scheme could easily be implemented to reduce this. For example, email coming from example.com could be signed with a hash. Simply connecting to the an example.com SMTP server could provide enough information to validate the hash. On the other hand, validation replies would be relatively easy to detect so mail server that are receiving those could try to match the recipients with sent email addresses. This would make it possible to simply delete inappropriate requests.
I admit I haven't thought of every possible issue but I think it could be a good starting point.
Well how about this solution: http://slashdot.org/~agbinfo/journal/208701
First, I make a distinction between science and culture. When teaching culture, and I consider literature to be a part of it, then it makes sense to teach some aspects of Christianity and other religious belief. In science classes, there's no reason to do so. If there are laws that say you can't mention Christianity in an English literature class, I don't believe there are, then that's wrong.
I'd like to add that I'm not American so I can only judge the school system there from what I read and hear from others.
Second, about the Bible. You can't be serious. Just look here and explain some of these inconsistencies.
I'm a Christian. Let me be one of the first Christians in this thread to say that Creationism (or its hideous offshoot Intelligent Design) should not be taught in science class. The teachers do have too much to do to get bogged down in debates.
That's a good start.
There are a couple of conditions though.
Why? Should that be done every time a broadly accepted theory is discussed or only where there are religious opinions that claim different?
When I was in school, I don't remember the teachers making a pause after each theory to say that this was the best theory so far. Should it be different for the theory of evolution or do you want this to be explained for electricity and cooking classes as well?
I'm not American so I don't know what is taught in the US literature classes. I agree with you on that one. Christianity should not be ignored or take a back seat.
... Just don't let the mind of any kid who isn't fortunate enough to go to Sunday School get his or her mind broadened to include Christianity. That would be a violation of church and state, for heaven's sake.
Yes it is. If you do it to expose children to your religious beliefs then school is not the place.
And before you lump me in with the crowd who says the earth was created a few thousand years ago, I would go on record that you won't find that anywhere in the Bible. I've argued the subject recently and won't repeat myself here.
The problem with the Bible is that you'll use it to support your claims when it's convenient. Sometimes it's what the preacher said, sometimes the Pope or some other authority. In my opinion, saying that the Bible says "such and such is true" to support your faith cannot be considered serious unless you are willing to defend the whole of it.
I want to agree with you. Your points make some sense. The problem I have is when I try to extrapolate from your arguments.
You see, I was brought up in the Catholic faith so these belief don't seem that weird to me. Well, maybe they seem weird but I've grown used to them. But what about other religions? Should we teach about Eloims, Buddha, Flat Earth, Greek Gods? Maybe, but not in a science class.
By the way, not wanting to listen to the same unsupported evidence doesn't make someone ignorant. It's more of a selective usage of one's personal time.
The result which occurs with the constant confusion of popular metaphorical phrases
They are going like Wildcakes (A pericombobulation of 'wild-fire' and 'hot-cakes')
In Quebec, we call these perronismes
I guess the "intelligent designer" had to design dinosaurs before trying his hand at more "evolved" species or maybe it was just to hide his influence in the evolution process.
In the former case, this would imply that the designer is not perfect which opens the possibility that he might have been killed by an insect himself.
In the latter case, this would imply that the designer doesn't want his presence known. Maybe we should respect his position and pretend he's not there?
You seem to have a very black & white view of things. I believe that their are shades of grey. For example, I wouldn't consider leaving a company because a team lead is not stepping up.
I've worked for a few companies, from startups to very large (40K employees) companies and some in between. I tend to want to leave when the job is no longer interesting. A managerial team that rates people using metrics won't make me lose interest in the job but it doesn't help. Again, I'm not saying that metrics don't have their uses; I'm just saying that I believe there are sometimes better ways of evaluating performance. For example, in a 100m race, metrics is a very good indicator of performance whereas for a painting, it might not be.
Anarchy does not work in business, though you seem to be arguing that it does.
No I'm not.
how is "deliverables" a stupid metric. Either you deliver a working solution/program on time or you don't. Thats the deliverable.
Let's see, what is the deliverable again? a working solution? What about maintainability? flexibility? What if the person had to mentor others when trying to deliver the product? What about managing priorities? providing useful and easy to maintain unit tests? documentation? What about team work and consensus in trying to achieve that working solution? What about raising issues early?
What ever the metric you use, it might be a fine tool to measure progress of the project. Just don't use it to measure productivity of individuals or you'll end up with programmers that meet their objectives and only their objectives.
n/t
That audit log is good... for an audit :) But, you do also want to prevent them from violating licensing terms as much as possible.
The problem with that approach is that you punish your customers and reduce the visibility of your product.
Just telling customers they violated licensing after the fact isn't enabling them to follow their own policies.
You are not restricted to providing the information after the fact. You can provide a small application that parses the log regularly and sends an email if a problem appears. A customer could receive an email such as "in the past week, you have used up to 90% of the licenses on 3 occasions."
On the application side, a note could indicate that the number of licenses is exceeded or that it can't communicate with the "license server" but still start the application.
I think the main thing to address for those kinds of customers is that if they absolutely have to do something without being licensed, then you have to give them some way to do it. You don't want to bring them completely to a halt because a hardware key broke or something. As long as that's the case, then a licensing bug shouldn't be fatal for the customers productivity.
I agree and that's what I'm proposing. Work on the honor system but provide tools to your customers so that they can tell if they are not true to their engagements. With the ability to audit, you provide an additional incentive to do so.
However, if you have no licensing enforcement mechanism, how do your customers even know if they are in violation? As you said, these big companies want to be in compliance of licensing terms, but they can't be expected to consult their legal department every time some software is run to ensure they are in compliance. So, in that sense, that hardware dongle is an easy way for customer to know that they are operating within the terms of the software license. It might suck for the guy actually using the software, but it's probably good for the company he is working for.
Why not use log files. You log when someone uses the application, when they are idle and when they exit the application. This gives you enough information to know if you are conforming to the license and you can have a contract that let's the seller audit the log files in some circumstances.
Benefits:
"... some jobs have gone to outsourcers, while other jobs are simply going away, either due to cost-oriented automation efforts or due to increasing the remaining staff's workload." (emphasis mine)
How do you automate the job of someone who's job is to automate?
Where do I apply?
Reminds me of a joke.
A politician and a renown scientist die and arrive in heaven at the same time.
Everyone there wants to talk to the politician and ignore the scientist so the scientist goes to see St-Peter and asks him what's going on.
St-Peter says: You led a good life and were really appreciated but you have to understand, we already have a few scientist in heaven, this is our first politician.
1. Administrator of the board was sued despite not being involved in any trolling. There was no justifiable reason -- good or bad -- to sue him.
I don't know why you bring this up. Making the mistake of suing the owner of the board doesn't make their other lawsuits - the one about threats of rape and sodomy - frivolous. Are you trying to setup a straw man or did you simply not understand my position?
2. Anonymous postings on the Internet have no credibility unless they mention verifiable facts -- and then the facts matter, not the postings. In this case there was absolutely no reason to expect that flamewar on the board in any way translated to a credible threat. The matter was trivial, not worth a lawsuit, not worth trouble and expenses inflicted on those people.
That's your opinion and I mostly agree that the threat was not credible. Still, there's no way for the "victims" to know for sure until they investigate.
3. The only thing this did to the reputation of the original "victim" is to confirm that she is in fact what is commonly described as a bitch. What apparently didn't affect her career in any negative way considering that she got a well-paid job at a law firm.
And all I'm suggesting is that if you start threatening people with violence that you should face the consequences. Anonymity doesn't make it less of a threat. If I dressed in white and wore a hood so that I couldn't be recognized, would that make my threats less credible?
And the message is "You can be sued for ANYTHING". I guess, it may discourage some people from living.
I don't see how not being allowed to threaten to rape somebody is discouraging you from living but maybe that's just me.
I do realize that there are just too many frivolous lawsuits. I live in Quebec and there are far less, I think, than in the USA but let's consider the alternatives.
Passing a message doesn't mean "send the culprits to jail for 6 months." It just means make a quick judgment of guilty (it shouldn't take years), make them pay the court costs plus some additional penalty for defamation and threats plus maybe 1 or 2 day community service cleaning up graffiti.
... I think if there was more credibility to the accusations of herpes or more of an indication of a real threat, I would sympathize more with this case. Instead, from what is written in TFA ...
You say you RTFA. Did you read the part about raping and sodomizing? I'm not sure how this is not a threat.
Otherwise you will waste your entire life fighting with assholes.
Sometimes creating a precedent stops the assholes before they get a chance to harm. If the court sent a clear message, this could reduce the number of cases to a manageable amount. Not only would this avoid fighting with the assholes it would silence most of them.
That's a problem with your make program, not with your text editor. Get a make program that determines whether a file has changed by looking intelligently at its contents, not its timestamp.
(It's trivial in principle: all you need is a normalisation routine for each file format, then you store a list of digests. Omake does something like this, though I can't remember offhand whether it normalises files before calculating digests.)
From what I remember of OMake, the program looks at the command line to execute along with the environment. If none of the files used have changed and the environment is the same, it skips the build. As far as I know, it doesn't normalize and will still rebuild if a comment is updated.
I do agree that the editor shouldn't have to deal with this but the source control tool could reduce the workload of the make application.
Thanks.
Clearmake (and OMake too - I think) does something similar. It remembers the command line used and the environment, creates a hash and compares that when asked to do a build. CCache is probably better because changing a comment in a file will not force a re-compile however, you need to parse the files all the time.
I think the idea is that it would strip all the indentation along with the comments, and then apply rigorous auto-indent (or, possible, indents stored with the sets of comments) of the nature you want.
Pretty much. All you need is to normalize the code, do a diff -e between the normalized code and the formatted code and store the result. Now anyone that extracts the code can retrieve the normalize code and apply their own formatting or apply the diff'd output. The source control tool could do this automatically. When building, only use the normalized code.
Either way, I think any advantages of this idea are canceled out by the fact that A)No one would use it, since it complicates producing source code by several factors if you want to make it useful,
If done as above, it would have no impact on the coders that choose to checkout w/o applying their own rules since by default, you'd get the file with the last formatting applied. The source control tool would take care of that.
and B)It complicates the process of getting the functional source + comments mix to start working.
Can you elaborate on this?
I do see how being able to support multilanguage comments would be nice, though. The problem is, they're such ephemeral objects (non-programmatic sense) that the effort of constantly re-translating them when they change would be pretty constant and pointless-feeling.
OK. Let's ignore the multilingual comments for now. I still think that separating the code from its layout and comments would be relatively easy and would have more benefits than drawbacks.
Slightly off-topic but one feature I used to want from a text editor was to be able to split comments and formatting from the actual code. It would be nice if source control tools would do that. This way, I wouldn't have to rebuild an application because someone added a comment or changed the formatting in types.h. It would allow every programmer to work with files using their own preferences for indenting and usage of curly-braces. An additional benefit of such a feature would be to make it possible to place comments in several spoken-languages and only look at the ones you're interested in.