Oops... forgot Celebrity. Haven't seen that one, though, so perhaps soemone else can fill me in...? I know the film itself didn't do all that well financially, but howabout critically? And more important, howabout the actors in it (a.k.a. Leo)? -- - Sean
I can think of 6 movies that I know Leo has been in. Tally 'em up:
What's Eating Gilbert Grape?........ Brilliant The Basketball Diaries.............. Good Romeo and Juliet.................... Good Titanic............................. Bad The Man in the Iron Mask............ Terrible The Beach........................... Jury's Out
Well... so far, as far as I'm concerned, he hasn't done all that badly... Although granted, the direction appears to be headed inexorably downward. But I'll wait until I hear about The Beach, at least, before I make any further judgement. -- - Sean
"couldn't get tickets for opening day and see little point in standing in lines now"... huh?
Man, where you be livin'? Around here, I can just walk straight in at the last minute and see the movie in a half-empty theater. I should know -- I've done it 3 times already:-)
Anyway... I'll get to my point.
You brought up a good point (Leo's performanice in Gilbert Grape)... what I keep seeing when I think of him as Annakin is sort of a cross between Mark Hamill when he's all pissed off in ROTJ ("Espscially... Sister. So, you have a twin sister. Obi-Wan was wise to hide her from me... now his failure is complete."), an equally-pissed-off Leo from Romeo and Juliet, and a confused Leo from near the end of Gilbert Grape (the part just after Johnny Depp hits him).
Call me deranged, but I think it would work.... -- - Sean
> If this isn't a publicity stunt, and the reels were really stolen, it would almost have to be an inside job.
> And my memory may be failing me, but a seven-reel film loaded into cans weighs closer to sixty or seventy pounds.
...which is why, had you bothered to read the article, you would have noticed that it reads: "The size and weight of the film have police thinking more than one person stole the movie. There were no signs of forced entry, police said.".
Ta-da! Inside job, with enough people to distribute the weight. -- - Sean
Now. As to your assertions that many word processors contain functions that nobody needs, I have to disagree. The example you posed is a very good one. I, for one, use the VBA Macros in Microsoft Word daily. As do the 10-thousand-odd other people who work at the same company I do.
Internally, we have a very extensive set of Word templates, Excel spreadsheets and Access Databases all linked together using VBA macros to synchronize and co-ordinate data over the network.
What does this mean? Let me give you an example. I just went on business trip last week. When I returned yesterday, I entered the time spent into a Word Template, Alt-Tabbed to Excel to input an expense report (again into a template), and switched again to MS-Project, where I checked off against a couple of Project milestones that I had completed. Back to Word, where I clicked on a single button, and a whole bunch of macros fired up in the background that automatically correlated that data into a timesheet for the week which it sent through to payroll (money is nice), printed out a copy for my records, and input that data into the Employee database. Oh yeah. It also brought up Outlook so I could reschedule a telephone appointment that I missed (although that was sort of an ancilliary function).
That's an example of the sort of use these features have. Maybe you don't use the VBA macros. That is certainly your prerogative. It just so happens that I, as well as many other people, do. I not only use them, I pretty much need them.
If Linux is to have any sort of enterprise-level support (on desktops, not just servers), it needs to have the sort of integrated suites, complete with macros and so on, that can perform this type of feature. If that means what you call "bloat," well, that's the way it is. One man's meat being another's poison, and all that.
Maybe all you ever wanted was something graphical with spell- and grammar-checking. I want more.
Just don't use Shift-Insert, and Netscape 4.07 (I think... 4.0-something, anyway) works fine for me (RedHat 5.2 with a 2.2.2 kernel). I've only had it crash once in the last 2 months or so.
Unfortunately, shift-insert (to paste text) locks it up, and you have to kill -9 it, but I've managed to wean myself (after a number of very painful lock-ups) off that windows-ism, and use M-v instead. -- - Sean
I had the identical thing happen... I wandered into EB, since I was just passing by, and was wondering if they carried it.
- Dumb looks.
- "L... l... leeenecks? Uh... whut's that again?"
- Uncomfortable silence after I explained.
- "Ummm... nope. But here's out mail-order number. Maybe you can ask them... they might have heard of the game.
Except that the number is a US number, you have to pay by credit card, and pay the X-border charges (I'm in Canada). If I wanted to do it that way, I'd have ordered over the net (I even have a sneaking suspicion that EB's mail-order branch won't have any clue either). Dammit... why do I keep going in there?? -- - Sean
But will AOL run under regular non-priv userid? Or will it *require* root access to run, thus defeating all of the security gained from Linux?
Somehow, I doubt security would be a big issue. IMHO, for most of the people who would be using this, a simple password to logon would be enough; balls to the rest.
Hell... looking at how many people don't even bother supplying a logon password to their windows boxen (yes, I know it's easy to bypass, but still...), I doubt even a password would be much of a concern.
I figger that it would most likely run under any userid, but even if not, no biggie. -- - Sean
"President Quayle this morning declared the Sonoma server a Federal Disaster Area, and allocated $5.2 million from the Federal Disaster Relief fund to kick-start a rebuilding of the economy after the had drive crash at approximately 10:15 PM last night. Details are still sketchy, but we believe approximately 4 thousand characters were online at the time and suffered irretrievable non-material losses, which would add up to much, much more than the president was willing to re-imburse. There are many horrifying stories of people who lost absolutely everything when their monitors suddenly went blank. Our correspondant, Bob Smith, is talking to a user who was in Shame Level 3 when the crash hit. Bob? Over to you." -- - Sean
To me, the idea of having a thumbprint/retinal scanner hooked up to a home PC just sounds like one big invitation to someone with enough perseverance to crack it && reprogram it. I can't see that idea going anywhere useful.
I admit, it'd be cool... but if I were OSI (Origin Systems International, not Open Source Initiative -- lol), I wouldn't use such technology to guarantee/any/thing. -- - Sean
In that case, if I were Origin, I'd create a few more valuable objects (black armor? etc.), and sell them for real cash.. It's like having your own mint.:^)
Right. And what happens when you have your own mint?
1) We're not talking certification, we're talking licensing. I agree 100% on your points about "our favourite monopoly" going around, certifying all their programmers, and not changing a damn thing. Whaddaya think the MSCE is? But a license, that is controlled by an outside entity, is something else completely. Normally, I am in favour of the government keeping its nose out of where it don't belong. In this one case, however, I'm not so sure. If the programmers were accountable to someone outside their organization, they might change the way they do things. Which brings me to point...
2) But coders don't neccisarily call the shots on what they have to work with. EXACTLY! And this would put that power into their hands. I know it would in my case. I work for another large microsoft-ish corporation, and though being a programmer, I answer directly to my boss, who is a marketroid (works in sales). I leave the resultant tug-of-war as an exercise to the reader. Every single day, I am constantly having to struggle to get things done The Right Way (TM). And I don't have a hell of a lot of ammo. Any leverage I can get would be very welcome. A license, from an outside party (aka: the gov't) which includes a code of ethics or something that I can wave in his face would be very powerful.
3) So really, a certification just proves that someone has the minimal knowledge of a particular subject. Again, we're talking licensing, not certification. Something that is standardized across-the-board, where people can be satisfied that to get that license, someone has to have more than just "the minimal knowledge."
4) You either have the ethics to check all your code, and do the best job you can, or you don't. There's no certification in the world that will guarantee that. I agree. There is no certification (or license, for that matter:-) that will guarantee that. BUT. What it will do is make people accountable. It will mean that if they are found to have made a shoddy product, or to have violated the code of ethics in any way, they can have their license revoked, and be unable to program. Just like that. A bit of an incentive... that's how licensing works. The point is not that they have to undergo training to get their license, but that their license can be revoked at any time for "bad behaviour." That's the fundemental difference between a license and a certificate. A certificate is permanent. A license is constantly checked on.
It's harsh, I agree, but if that makes for better software; software that can be "proven" to be correct, rather than just assumed (to the best of the programmer's knowledge) to be "sufficiently correct," then as far as I'm concerned, it's worth it. -- - Sean
Actually, its not bull at all. In all the other engineering fields you can take a design and, through the correct application of mathematics, prove that it is correct. In a vast majority of cases, thats simply not possible in computer science.
...And this is precisely what we need to change!
The question we gotta ask ourselves, is why it's not possible to "prove" that a given program is correct. As a sibling comment to this one points out, all programs are built on the foundation and functions of other programs, which themselves are built on top of other programs, and so on... all the way down to the processor firmware (excuse any usage of incorrect terms; I'm strictly a s/w programmer:-).
If there are any problems, it should be possible to trace them to the exact procedure (or combination of procedures) that caused them.
doesn't work, then we can check for errors in my_print(). If none exist, then we can check to see if the printf() function is working properly. In this case, it shouldn't be (since there is nothing else to cause the error (unless I've screwed up... I'm extremely tired at the moment, and have been using another language recently)). Likewise, if printf() doesn't work, we (or the person who wrote printf() ) can check for errors in printf() itself. Again, if none exist, then they can check any functions (C/Assembly/whatever) that printf() calls.
The process iterates down into the operating system, and eventually (as I said) into the processor code. If no errors are found, the process can be repeated, starting with the compiler. Somewhere, eventually, we can (in theory) find the error.
Now, in the real world, it's not that simple, I agree. But we have to look at why not. Don't give ourselves the cop-out of being able to say, "it's too complex to be able to find the exact problem."
Finding a problem in a piece of code should be a hell of a lot easier than finding a problem in a law of nature.
Yet we are intolerant of faults in brick-and-mortar. Structural/electrical/etc design. But if we find one in software, we are far more likely to shrug our shoulders and say, "oh well."
Ok, I'm exaggerating. A half-decent programmer will do their best to catch all the errors. But that's the crux of the matter. The process is too long, the number of distinct parts (each with a seperate author) too large from the end-user program, down through the language design, the compiler, the shared libraries, the OS API, the OS kernel, the processor API, the microcode (or whatever it's called -- the firmware) that shifts all those little electrical pulses around in the chips.
And a bug anywhere in that chain can easily cause unforseen problems to crop up at a higher level, in some code-that-relies-on-code-that-relies-on-code-that- relies-on-code that relies on the code that happens to have the bug.
It's not enough to say or think, "I am a good programmer; I will make sure my code has no bugs," if you can't be sure that every single piece of code that you are depending on is similarly bug-free.
Which is the problem we need to solve and that licensing has the potential to solve.
I've seen the argument that a little game or something doesn't need to be fault-tolerant, that a bug there doesn't matter.
Perhaps not. But what about all the code that it sits on. What about some code that relies on the same low-level function that is essential?
Or even -- and this is especially an issue in the free software/open source (I'm not getting into that argument!:-) world -- if someone is looking for an algorithm (say, something such as a search algorithm) for use in a more-important program. They happen to see something that will do the job in a game. What the hell -- they just grab it, and with a few minor contextual tweaks, transplant it. Hey, it seems to work, no problems yet.
And then something such as Y2K comes along. Maybe not Y2K, but something with a similar effect, and it turns out that this particular algorithm is affected. Oops!
You can see the problem. It stems from the fact that many different pieces of software are inter-connected and all rely on each other -- a bug somewhere in the process can easily propogate through to other pieces, and become harder and harder to track down -- especially when combined with any other bugs.
The Y2K program has highlighted this beautifully. That a particular application won't properly recognize the date is not the problem. The problem is when 2 functions/programs/processes interact which happen to recognize it in different ways.
And all of a sudden, programs that were thought to be "unimportant", definitely non-mission-critical, and basically not worth the time to get every single little bug out, have the potential to cause major problems.
It's the attitude, not the programs themselves.
And the best way to change that attitude (and the resultant potential for hard-to-find bugs somewhere in the system that the "good" programmer can't easily get at) is to have some sort of licensing thing in place.
That way, I can be guaranteed that my programs will work ok, as long as they themselves do not contain any bugs, since I know that the entire foundation that they are built on is ok; built by licensed engineers.
Lemme repeat the previous post, and re-answer it in the context of the above discussion:
Actually, its not bull at all. In all the other engineering fields you can take a design and, through the correct application of mathematics, prove that it is correct. In a vast majority of cases, thats simply not possible in computer science.
The only reason there is a difference, is because programmers are not licensed, or verified in some way that they are competent and will do their utmost best to rid their programs as bug-free as possible. Once (if) such a verification process is in place, it will become a lot easier to "prove" that a program is correct. -- - Sean
You can charge nothing, a penny, a dollar, or a billion dollars. It's up to you, and the marketplace, so don't complain to us if nobody wants to pay a billion dollars for a copy.
The one exception is in the case where binaries are distributed without the corresponding complete source code. Those who do this are required by the GNU GPL to provide source code on subsequent request. Without a limit on the fee for the source code, they would be able set a fee too large for anyone to pay--such as, a billion dollars--and thus pretend to release source code while in truth concealing it. So in this case we have to limit the fee for source, to ensure the user's freedom. In ordinary situations, however, there is no such justification for limiting distribution fees, so we do not limit them.
This is manifested in the GPL in section 3, Subsection (b):
Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party,
for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;
The strips could have been completely redrawn with different characters, as an original strip, and it wouldn't have changed the work.
I disagree. If they had just been any old characters, it would have been a pointless excercise in swearing and homophobia.
As it is, I don't think it was. I didn't find it perticularly funny, per sé, but I think it was a reasonable parody. It was making fun of the corporate culture, which places employees in subservient, demeaning positions. This is exactly what (the original) Dilbert does. But in a slightly different way. Dilbert (for the most part), focuses on ignorant bosses with stupid corporate policies that end up hurting the employees.
This comic focused more on petty hostilities between employees (which are just as much a part of the corporate culture, IMHO), and people being deliberately ill-mannered to each other (the emphasis on the deliberateness). In the "real world", this is usually done subtly, and within the confines of the workplace rules, but is still destructive. This comic was an attempt to bring it out into the open.
Granted, it was in poor taste, but nonetheless, I think it was trying to make a valid point. The Dilbert connection was an attempt to garner recognition of the objective. With "just any old characters", I would probably not have "got" it. (As it is, I suspect that a lot of people here still didn't "get" it, but that's a separate issue.) Since the Dilbert world is already well-entrenched in most people's minds as representing a parody of corporate culture, using the same characters here instantly garners (or tries to) that same recognition.
Thus, it tries to be a parody of Dilbert in unmasking those behaviours which still go on "behind the scenes", but which never get explicitly examined in Dilbert.
Very much like "the shadow knows" type of approach (for those who don't know, it's a comic/picture depicting 2 people interacting "normally", with their shadows (in the background) acting out their true feelings toward each other. For a good example, check out the promotional poster/box cover from the movie "What About Bob?").
Now, the copyright issue, dealing with the fact that the author just lifted the Dilbert images directly, and didn't bother to draw his own, is something else. I'm not sure where I stand on that. I think the Dilbert lawyers probably would have a case there.
It was a Simpson's take-off. Abner Simpson (or whoever -- Homer's dad) believes that the Metric System is the tool of the devil (or claims to believe such, anyway). -- - Sean
Slashdot Mirror
Oops... forgot Celebrity. Haven't seen that one, though, so perhaps soemone else can fill me in...? I know the film itself didn't do all that well financially, but howabout critically? And more important, howabout the actors in it (a.k.a. Leo)?
--
- Sean
I can think of 6 movies that I know Leo has been in. Tally 'em up:
........ Brilliant .............. Good .................... Good ............................. Bad ............ Terrible ........................... Jury's Out
What's Eating Gilbert Grape?
The Basketball Diaries
Romeo and Juliet
Titanic
The Man in the Iron Mask
The Beach
Well... so far, as far as I'm concerned, he hasn't done all that badly... Although granted, the direction appears to be headed inexorably downward. But I'll wait until I hear about The Beach, at least, before I make any further judgement.
--
- Sean
"couldn't get tickets for opening day and see little point in standing in lines now"... huh?
:-)
Man, where you be livin'? Around here, I can just walk straight in at the last minute and see the movie in a half-empty theater. I should know -- I've done it 3 times already
Anyway... I'll get to my point.
You brought up a good point (Leo's performanice in Gilbert Grape)... what I keep seeing when I think of him as Annakin is sort of a cross between Mark Hamill when he's all pissed off in ROTJ ("Espscially... Sister. So, you have a twin sister. Obi-Wan was wise to hide her from me... now his failure is complete."), an equally-pissed-off Leo from Romeo and Juliet, and a confused Leo from near the end of Gilbert Grape (the part just after Johnny Depp hits him).
Call me deranged, but I think it would work....
--
- Sean
Ok... go ahead and demote this if you want... it just happens to be my opinion.
(Granted... DS9 and Voyager suck just as much, if not worse.)
Why? 3 words. What's the point?
--
- Sean
But as the person you were responding to pointed out, "Wearing sports clothes show your support for the team."...
When you wear a Star Trek uniform, what -- or who -- are you showing support for? The cast of the Enterprise?
Sorry... that is a bit loony...
--
- Sean
And for exactly the same reason!
Thank you!
--
- Sean
Ah yes, but a history book does not ever need to be replaced.
--
- Sean
> And why do people keep saying things like "if Linux is to have any sort of enterprise-level support?"
Simple. Because I don't want to have to use Windows every day at work.
--
- Sean
Yeah... 'cept I only have 2 mouse buttons. But as a recent convert from Windows, I'm getting the hang of clicking both buttons at once...
--
- Sean
> If this isn't a publicity stunt, and the reels were really stolen, it would almost have to be an inside job.
...which is why, had you bothered to read the article, you would have noticed that it reads: "The size and weight of the film have police thinking more than one person stole the movie. There were no signs of forced entry, police said.".
> And my memory may be failing me, but a seven-reel film loaded into cans weighs closer to sixty or seventy pounds.
Ta-da! Inside job, with enough people to distribute the weight.
--
- Sean
First of all, please don't shout.
:-)
Thank you.
Now. As to your assertions that many word processors contain functions that nobody needs, I have to disagree. The example you posed is a very good one. I, for one, use the VBA Macros in Microsoft Word daily. As do the 10-thousand-odd other people who work at the same company I do.
Internally, we have a very extensive set of Word templates, Excel spreadsheets and Access Databases all linked together using VBA macros to synchronize and co-ordinate data over the network.
What does this mean? Let me give you an example. I just went on business trip last week. When I returned yesterday, I entered the time spent into a Word Template, Alt-Tabbed to Excel to input an expense report (again into a template), and switched again to MS-Project, where I checked off against a couple of Project milestones that I had completed. Back to Word, where I clicked on a single button, and a whole bunch of macros fired up in the background that automatically correlated that data into a timesheet for the week which it sent through to payroll (money is nice), printed out a copy for my records, and input that data into the Employee database. Oh yeah. It also brought up Outlook so I could reschedule a telephone appointment that I missed (although that was sort of an ancilliary function).
That's an example of the sort of use these features have. Maybe you don't use the VBA macros. That is certainly your prerogative. It just so happens that I, as well as many other people, do. I not only use them, I pretty much need them.
If Linux is to have any sort of enterprise-level support (on desktops, not just servers), it needs to have the sort of integrated suites, complete with macros and so on, that can perform this type of feature. If that means what you call "bloat," well, that's the way it is. One man's meat being another's poison, and all that.
Maybe all you ever wanted was something graphical with spell- and grammar-checking. I want more.
Thanks for your time
--
- Sean
Just don't use Shift-Insert, and Netscape 4.07 (I think... 4.0-something, anyway) works fine for me (RedHat 5.2 with a 2.2.2 kernel). I've only had it crash once in the last 2 months or so.
Unfortunately, shift-insert (to paste text) locks it up, and you have to kill -9 it, but I've managed to wean myself (after a number of very painful lock-ups) off that windows-ism, and use M-v instead.
--
- Sean
Oh yeah, me 3. I keep running back to the Project Magic site almost daily, trying to see if any progress has been announced.
On a slightly related topic, has anyone had any success with getting Opera to work under WINE?
--
- Sean
Huh... no shit.
I had the identical thing happen... I wandered into EB, since I was just passing by, and was wondering if they carried it.
- Dumb looks.
- "L... l... leeenecks? Uh... whut's that again?"
- Uncomfortable silence after I explained.
- "Ummm... nope. But here's out mail-order number. Maybe you can ask them... they might have heard of the game.
Except that the number is a US number, you have to pay by credit card, and pay the X-border charges (I'm in Canada). If I wanted to do it that way, I'd have ordered over the net (I even have a sneaking suspicion that EB's mail-order branch won't have any clue either). Dammit... why do I keep going in there??
--
- Sean
But will AOL run under regular non-priv userid?
Or will it *require* root access to run, thus defeating all of the security gained from Linux?
Somehow, I doubt security would be a big issue. IMHO, for most of the people who would be using this, a simple password to logon would be enough; balls to the rest.
Hell... looking at how many people don't even bother supplying a logon password to their windows boxen (yes, I know it's easy to bypass, but still...), I doubt even a password would be much of a concern.
I figger that it would most likely run under any userid, but even if not, no biggie.
--
- Sean
Hmmm...
"President Quayle this morning declared the Sonoma server a Federal Disaster Area, and allocated $5.2 million from the Federal Disaster Relief fund to kick-start a rebuilding of the economy after the had drive crash at approximately 10:15 PM last night. Details are still sketchy, but we believe approximately 4 thousand characters were online at the time and suffered irretrievable non-material losses, which would add up to much, much more than the president was willing to re-imburse. There are many horrifying stories of people who lost absolutely everything when their monitors suddenly went blank. Our correspondant, Bob Smith, is talking to a user who was in Shame Level 3 when the crash hit. Bob? Over to you."
--
- Sean
To me, the idea of having a thumbprint/retinal scanner hooked up to a home PC just sounds like one big invitation to someone with enough perseverance to crack it && reprogram it. I can't see that idea going anywhere useful.
/any/thing.
I admit, it'd be cool... but if I were OSI (Origin Systems International, not Open Source Initiative -- lol), I wouldn't use such technology to guarantee
--
- Sean
In that case, if I were Origin, I'd create a few more valuable objects (black armor? etc.), and sell them for real cash.. It's like having your own mint. :^)
Right. And what happens when you have your own mint?
One word: inflation.
--
- Sean
Ok, a coupla things.
:-) that will guarantee that. BUT. What it will do is make people accountable. It will mean that if they are found to have made a shoddy product, or to have violated the code of ethics in any way, they can have their license revoked, and be unable to program. Just like that. A bit of an incentive... that's how licensing works. The point is not that they have to undergo training to get their license, but that their license can be revoked at any time for "bad behaviour." That's the fundemental difference between a license and a certificate. A certificate is permanent. A license is constantly checked on.
1) We're not talking certification, we're talking licensing. I agree 100% on your points about "our favourite monopoly" going around, certifying all their programmers, and not changing a damn thing. Whaddaya think the MSCE is? But a license, that is controlled by an outside entity, is something else completely. Normally, I am in favour of the government keeping its nose out of where it don't belong. In this one case, however, I'm not so sure. If the programmers were accountable to someone outside their organization, they might change the way they do things. Which brings me to point...
2) But coders don't neccisarily call the shots on what they have to work with. EXACTLY! And this would put that power into their hands. I know it would in my case. I work for another large microsoft-ish corporation, and though being a programmer, I answer directly to my boss, who is a marketroid (works in sales). I leave the resultant tug-of-war as an exercise to the reader. Every single day, I am constantly having to struggle to get things done The Right Way (TM). And I don't have a hell of a lot of ammo. Any leverage I can get would be very welcome. A license, from an outside party (aka: the gov't) which includes a code of ethics or something that I can wave in his face would be very powerful.
3) So really, a certification just proves that someone has the minimal knowledge of a particular subject. Again, we're talking licensing, not certification. Something that is standardized across-the-board, where people can be satisfied that to get that license, someone has to have more than just "the minimal knowledge."
4) You either have the ethics to check all your code, and do the best job you can, or you don't. There's no certification in the world that will guarantee that. I agree. There is no certification (or license, for that matter
It's harsh, I agree, but if that makes for better software; software that can be "proven" to be correct, rather than just assumed (to the best of the programmer's knowledge) to be "sufficiently correct," then as far as I'm concerned, it's worth it.
--
- Sean
Actually, its not bull at all. In all the other engineering fields you can take a design and, through the correct application of mathematics, prove that it is correct. In a vast majority of cases, thats simply not possible in computer science.
...And this is precisely what we need to change!
:-).
- relies-on-code that relies on the code that happens to have the bug.
:-) world -- if someone is looking for an algorithm (say, something such as a search algorithm) for use in a more-important program. They happen to see something that will do the job in a game. What the hell -- they just grab it, and with a few minor contextual tweaks, transplant it. Hey, it seems to work, no problems yet.
The question we gotta ask ourselves, is why it's not possible to "prove" that a given program is correct. As a sibling comment to this one points out, all programs are built on the foundation and functions of other programs, which themselves are built on top of other programs, and so on... all the way down to the processor firmware (excuse any usage of incorrect terms; I'm strictly a s/w programmer
If there are any problems, it should be possible to trace them to the exact procedure (or combination of procedures) that caused them.
If, for example, a call to my_print(), where:
void my_print( char *my_string[] ) {
____printf( "[Output: %s]", my_string );
}
doesn't work, then we can check for errors in my_print(). If none exist, then we can check to see if the printf() function is working properly. In this case, it shouldn't be (since there is nothing else to cause the error (unless I've screwed up... I'm extremely tired at the moment, and have been using another language recently)). Likewise, if printf() doesn't work, we (or the person who wrote printf() ) can check for errors in printf() itself. Again, if none exist, then they can check any functions (C/Assembly/whatever) that printf() calls.
The process iterates down into the operating system, and eventually (as I said) into the processor code. If no errors are found, the process can be repeated, starting with the compiler. Somewhere, eventually, we can (in theory) find the error.
Now, in the real world, it's not that simple, I agree. But we have to look at why not. Don't give ourselves the cop-out of being able to say, "it's too complex to be able to find the exact problem."
Finding a problem in a piece of code should be a hell of a lot easier than finding a problem in a law of nature.
Yet we are intolerant of faults in brick-and-mortar. Structural/electrical/etc design. But if we find one in software, we are far more likely to shrug our shoulders and say, "oh well."
Ok, I'm exaggerating. A half-decent programmer will do their best to catch all the errors. But that's the crux of the matter. The process is too long, the number of distinct parts (each with a seperate author) too large from the end-user program, down through the language design, the compiler, the shared libraries, the OS API, the OS kernel, the processor API, the microcode (or whatever it's called -- the firmware) that shifts all those little electrical pulses around in the chips.
And a bug anywhere in that chain can easily cause unforseen problems to crop up at a higher level, in some code-that-relies-on-code-that-relies-on-code-that
It's not enough to say or think, "I am a good programmer; I will make sure my code has no bugs," if you can't be sure that every single piece of code that you are depending on is similarly bug-free.
Which is the problem we need to solve and that licensing has the potential to solve.
I've seen the argument that a little game or something doesn't need to be fault-tolerant, that a bug there doesn't matter.
Perhaps not. But what about all the code that it sits on. What about some code that relies on the same low-level function that is essential?
Or even -- and this is especially an issue in the free software/open source (I'm not getting into that argument!
And then something such as Y2K comes along. Maybe not Y2K, but something with a similar effect, and it turns out that this particular algorithm is affected. Oops!
You can see the problem. It stems from the fact that many different pieces of software are inter-connected and all rely on each other -- a bug somewhere in the process can easily propogate through to other pieces, and become harder and harder to track down -- especially when combined with any other bugs.
The Y2K program has highlighted this beautifully. That a particular application won't properly recognize the date is not the problem. The problem is when 2 functions/programs/processes interact which happen to recognize it in different ways.
And all of a sudden, programs that were thought to be "unimportant", definitely non-mission-critical, and basically not worth the time to get every single little bug out, have the potential to cause major problems.
It's the attitude, not the programs themselves.
And the best way to change that attitude (and the resultant potential for hard-to-find bugs somewhere in the system that the "good" programmer can't easily get at) is to have some sort of licensing thing in place.
That way, I can be guaranteed that my programs will work ok, as long as they themselves do not contain any bugs, since I know that the entire foundation that they are built on is ok; built by licensed engineers.
Lemme repeat the previous post, and re-answer it in the context of the above discussion:
Actually, its not bull at all. In all the other engineering fields you can take a design and, through the correct application of mathematics, prove that it is correct. In a vast majority of cases, thats simply not possible in computer science.
The only reason there is a difference, is because programmers are not licensed, or verified in some way that they are competent and will do their utmost best to rid their programs as bug-free as possible. Once (if) such a verification process is in place, it will become a lot easier to "prove" that a program is correct.
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- Sean
What is all this??
/real/ hacker only has the Three True Tools:
You don't need any of these things!!!
The
- Editor
- Compiler
- Linker
Beyond those, all else is superfluous.
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- Sean
> I must have missed that part of the GPL. Could you point it out for me?
First read Selling Free Software by RMS: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.ht ml.
In it, he mentions:
This is manifested in the GPL in section 3, Subsection (b):
It's right there in the GPL!
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- Sean
The strips could have been completely redrawn with different characters, as an original strip, and it wouldn't have changed the work.
I disagree. If they had just been any old characters, it would have been a pointless excercise in swearing and homophobia.
As it is, I don't think it was. I didn't find it perticularly funny, per sé, but I think it was a reasonable parody. It was making fun of the corporate culture, which places employees in subservient, demeaning positions. This is exactly what (the original) Dilbert does. But in a slightly different way. Dilbert (for the most part), focuses on ignorant bosses with stupid corporate policies that end up hurting the employees.
This comic focused more on petty hostilities between employees (which are just as much a part of the corporate culture, IMHO), and people being deliberately ill-mannered to each other (the emphasis on the deliberateness). In the "real world", this is usually done subtly, and within the confines of the workplace rules, but is still destructive. This comic was an attempt to bring it out into the open.
Granted, it was in poor taste, but nonetheless, I think it was trying to make a valid point. The Dilbert connection was an attempt to garner recognition of the objective. With "just any old characters", I would probably not have "got" it. (As it is, I suspect that a lot of people here still didn't "get" it, but that's a separate issue.) Since the Dilbert world is already well-entrenched in most people's minds as representing a parody of corporate culture, using the same characters here instantly garners (or tries to) that same recognition.
Thus, it tries to be a parody of Dilbert in unmasking those behaviours which still go on "behind the scenes", but which never get explicitly examined in Dilbert.
Very much like "the shadow knows" type of approach (for those who don't know, it's a comic/picture depicting 2 people interacting "normally", with their shadows (in the background) acting out their true feelings toward each other. For a good example, check out the promotional poster/box cover from the movie "What About Bob?").
Now, the copyright issue, dealing with the fact that the author just lifted the Dilbert images directly, and didn't bother to draw his own, is something else. I'm not sure where I stand on that. I think the Dilbert lawyers probably would have a case there.
But, of course, IANAL.
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- Sean
Already there.
http://www.linuxsucks.com/
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- Sean
It was a Simpson's take-off. Abner Simpson (or whoever -- Homer's dad) believes that the Metric System is the tool of the devil (or claims to believe such, anyway).
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- Sean