Most likely it was cancelled not because of any
new, objectively good reason, but rather as retribution against some senator or representative for failure to toe the administration line. (That's not to say there weren't objectively good reasons to kill it, just no new ones.) They decided which military bases to close the same way, back when there was supposed to be a "peace dividend". (Remember that?)
I just finished the worst book I have read in years -- "Chindi" by Jack McDermitt. It's awful from the very first line: "The Benjamin... was at the extreme limit of its survey territory..." Each chapter is worse than the last, each deft touch reveals it as the more tawdry. Chapters start with quotes from great but somehow sophomoric works of the 23rd century. The ship's captain is gorgeous but unfulfilled. Every character is bored with his or her life and life's work, desperate to relieve the tedium. Reading it was like watching a train wreck. Recommended, sort of.
The bacteria from bugs were, in fact, extracted from the crops of bees embedded in amber. The bacteria are of a type that is symbiotic with the bee.
My wife's cousin Sid was on the team analyzing the heritage of these bacteria (actually, I think, their mitochondria). They were able to demonstrate that the strain extracted was ancestral to those found in various species of modern bees.
Normally, when you publish stuff like this, everyone insists that the bacteria you have must have come from contamination on your equipment, and didn't really come out of the bee at all. To prove them wrong you have to show that the bacteria are quantifiably different from any modern strain.
I didn't say Free Software was irrelevant to Java.
Without Free Software, Java (like Fearless Fly without his glasses) would be Helpless. What I said was that Java is irrelevant to Free Software. In other words, Free Software doesn't need Java.
There is no important Free Software written in
Java, aside from what Java coders (and only Java
coders) use themselves.
Once Sun fades out of the picture, IBM will no
longer see any need for a Java presence. Java
is an insular world that will fade away unnoticed
and unmissed, like the PL/1, Pascal, and Ada
worlds before it, leaving barely a trace. Free Software will be the better off for it.
The Open Source world is in pretty sad shape when it finds itself pleading with some rapacious corporation to free a stupidly-designed language created, in the first place, just to attack some other even-more rapacious corporation. Sun is free (and welcome) to make itself irrelevant to Free Software, and the world at large. It would already be forgotten if not for its multi-billion dollar bank account, which (incidentally) feeds OpenOffice and SCO alike. Java is already irrelevant to Free Software. As Sun fades from our minds, so will Java, and good riddance.
It makes me feel better to think that Free Software is not in similarly sad shape. Then I look at the Mono and dotGNU projects. They're not begging anybody, exactly. One might say, rather, that they're asking for it. I'm not sure which is worse. I guess this is what mainstream is like: fools make themselves irrelevant, the rest of us (or "them", maybe) go about our business, and it all comes out OK, because we're not in the middle of an apocalyptic struggle any more (silly SCO sideshow notwithstanding).
He should have changed the name to LinDOS. MS can't claim that is too similar to their trademark without reminding everyone that Windows is really WinDOS itself.
Of course anything already done will be easy to copy. Anything interesting, by definition, demands serious thought. Actually coding it might not be very hard, once you figure out what, precisely, it should do, but that's the hard part. The question, then, is how natural it is to express. If the program does the Right Thing, the code to express it should be beautiful, if the language is any good. People inspired to look will see that.
It's silly to code another clock, because it won't matter how beautiful the code is, nobody will read it. Nobody needs another damned clock. Write something useful and meaningful. If you can't think of anything useful and meaningful, and you write a damned clock instead, all you're demonstrating is that you can't think of anything. What does that say about you, as a representative of the fledgling user community for your obscure language?
It's a shame they didn't get submissions that would have suggested relevance for the language -- i.e., programs that demonstrate the language used to do something actually useful. As it is, they were obliged to award (1) a platform port, (2) an adapter to call code in some other language, and (3) something for playing games. All are (no doubt) fine efforts, but none of them would make anyone not already committed to Eiffel feel a need to look into it.
The unison program written in OCaml does a job not done by any other program I know of, does it well, and has inspired many to look into the language. Freenet inspired me to install a JVM to try it out. (I deleted both based on the experience, but that doesn't detract from the lesson -- I did try it.) The number of really useful programs written in Perl far exceeds the merits of the language itself, but continues to inspire new users. Python came from behind, but the deep value of many of the programs written in it ensured its enduring success.
To demonstrate the value of an obscure language, don't write yet-another text editor, IRC client, or RSS aggregator. We don't need any more, and we will feel no desire to try yours. Write something useful that's hard to write in other languages, or (better) hard to write in any language. The obscure language will get some (much-needed) reflected credit from the effort, and if it really helps, that will become evident (only!) when people are inspired to read the code.
Many languages have failed honorably -- Eiffel, Dylan, Oberon, Icon, Prolog, CLP(R), C+@, Oak, PL/1, Bliss, Algol-68, Pascal -- some more honorably, some less, but far too many to list, or indeed to count. Others struggle vainly along, confined forever to subsidized niches -- Erlang, Common LISP, REXX, Objective-C, Delphi, Ada. Only a handful retain a vigorous population of programmers using them, industrially, for their original purpose; we need not list them.
Java survived teething only by dint of billions of dollars of promotion. Every promise made in its infancy has proved a lie. Designed and implemented in such frantic haste that a semblance of quality was the first criterion jettisoned, it could not but grow into such a monstrosity as we face today. Today its use in applications where it was, supposedly, intended -- cellphones, browsers, rings -- amounts to little more than nasty, brutish parodies.
It is no crime for a language to fail. What is a crime is for its failure to blight the careers of the myriad* young, impressionable, and naive who fell for its blandishments. What is a crime is the forests felled, pulped, and printed upon, only to be discarded unread and obsolete. What is a crime is the thousands of good ideas, and the companies started to develop them, stabbed in the back by an inadequate implementation language. What is a crime is the gigawatt-hours of energy dissipated operating wasteful JVMs on huge servers performing jobs that a hamster could do on its bathroom break.
Java is far more than a failure, far more than an annoyance, far more than the laughingstock of many industries, far more even than the evil sire of C#. It is a bona fide crime against humanity. Capital punishment would be too good for it; that is to say, it does not deserve execution.
Only one fate can be ignominious enough to expiate Java's wrongs. Java must be consigned to use as an undergraduate teaching language.
You've gotta be kidding. An iPodJr?
What kind of sucker pays over $200 for a
glorified Walkman?
(Evidently
Apple has found plenty of them, but Apple's not
selling music players, they're selling status
symbol/fashion accessories. In a status symbol,
the higher the price, the better it sells.
There's no need to actually load any music on
an iPod, you can just wear it for show.)
All I want is a player with no disk drive,
no built-in flash, just a Compact Flash slot.
It doesn't need USB, Firewire, FM transceiver,
microphone, or x-ray laser. It could be light
and cheap. Why doesn't it exist?
Worth noting again... this result bears on the Andrew Bunner trade-secret case in California. That court found that since the trade secret was (supposedly) illegally obtained, Andrew Bunner and several hundred "John Does" had acted improperly in posting DeCSS, and ordered them not to post it.
That order applied to states in the 2nd Circuit,
including several western states, but also would
have carried weight as precedent in other areas.
At the hearing the question came up whether in fact the reverse engineering involved was legal under Norwegian law. The judge called for opinions from Norwegian lawyers. The plaintiff trotted out a tame Norwegian lawyer who asserted (without support of any kind) that it was not legal. The defendant's lawyer said nothing in Norwegian law or case law supported any opinion one way or the other. The judge took that to mean that in fact it wasn't legal. That meant that the MPAA still had a valid trade secret in CSS.
Now that it's established that in fact the reverse engineering was legal, Bunner et al. should be able to have the decision vacated. (Shame on that judge for his bias.) This should mean that the DVD-CCA's trade secret protection on CSS cannot
any longer be enforced.
Is there any word on whether the EFF will act on this?
Nobody needs an iPod. Yes, Rio, but iRiver has
some very nice hardware (iHP120, particularly),
too, but like the vanilla iPod, it's pretty
expensive. The world is still waiting for a good
Ogg player under $100.
I guess if we want Ogg on the iPodJr (pronounced
"hip podger") we'll have to hack it ourselves.
The great thing about a hacked iPod is that you
can copy music between yours to others'.
Unfortunately, if yours only has Oggs on it,
they can't listen to them; but you can
listen to theirs.:-)
Hint to manufacturers: you could leave out the
firewire, USB, disk, and flash memory, and
replace it all with a Compact Flash slot.
We don't really need a mic, or a radio.
Battery life, a slot, and an efficient UI
are what matter.
There's no reason not to expect a meltdown
followed hard upon by an ice age.
The weather has been demonstrated conclusively
to be a chaotic system.
One feature common in chaotic systems, easily
seen in the Lorenz simulation (e.g. in your
screen saver) is that when the system's
oscillations get increasingly large (a little
moreso each cycle), this is prelude to a
change in mode to a different attractor,
where all recent history has no predictive
value at all.
Imagine what would happen if the Gulf Stream
decided to flow on a different path, e.g.
because of the massive salinity decrease
around the north pole. The end of agriculture
in northwestern Europe is just a beginning.
Anybody who thinks that ocean currents can
only flow the way they do now is very silly
indeed.
Funny, lots of shipping company executives are
excited about the prospect of driving across
the north pole.
Just like all the other brilliant "solutions"
that require the sender to authenticate himself,
this assumes that the MTA delivering the spam is
not a legitimate agent.
In fact, spammers hijack legitimate hosts and use them to deliver the spam. The computational
resources required to send the spam are provided
by the hijacking victim. The DNS entry of the
sending MTA will have all the assurances built in.
Since it is no harder to hijack 10,000 victim
hosts than to hijack one, it takes little more
time to send the millions of spams.
This also makes it impossible for ISPs to provide
MTA service for hosts on their subnet. While
your average Windows box isn't doing anything
else useful for the ten seconds, it's not the
host being asked to authenticate. Who is? The
ISP's MTA. But if end users' MTAs contact
receiver MTAs directly, they hit blackhole lists.
Furthermore, it makes legitimate mailing lists
impossible to operate.
Of course we've heard of this idea before, but
it was shot down immediately, for the reasons
given above. Few would give it another
moment's thought if MS weren't promoting it.
Where the law is concerned there are no
guarantees of any kind.
Nonetheless,
the Bunner case hinges entirely on whether,
in fact, the trade secret was legitimately
reverse-engineered -- under Norwegian law --
before Bunner posted it. This is a case
where Norwegian court events do matter.
Do you know anybody who works at Ironport?
Write and say, "I heard you're a filthy spammer now!
If you don't get a cut from the 419 scams, you're
selling out too low.".
I just found out that somebody I used to work with
is there now, and that's what I'm going to do.
I see, it doesn't depend on environment variables
as such, but environment-variable-like definitions
in another namespace entirely, already known to
the kernel. That's probably for the best.
Where is this documented? A google search
suggests
that it uses "${var}" bracket notation, not
"$(var)" notation as I had written.
Variant symlinks as found in Domain OS (nee
Domainix, nee Apollo Aegis) are symlinks that
refer to environment variables, e.g.
ln -s '/etc-$(HOSTNAME)'/etc
to help enable sharing the root file system.
(I don't know the variable-reference syntax
used in Dragonfly). This was one of the
really cool things about Aegis, which was
based on Multics, not Unix. Unix/Linux/BSD
have still not caught up to the networking
capabilities of Aegis, and what they do have
is usually clunkier than the way it
was done in Aegis.
I thought about implementing variant
symlinks on Linux. Probably it would need
a new system call to tell the kernel where the process keeps its environment variables, to be
run at each program startup, and a new process
table entry field.
To me, the most interesting facts about the various
optimization options are which ones introduce bugs
into my code. Sometimes -O2 introduces
code-generation bugs that -O3 doesn't. Sometimes
-O3 yields warnings that lead to fixing bugs
somebody put in the source code, but which don't
show up in testing.
Of course, buggy code is more likely actually
to fail under aggressive optimization. I've
certainly had to maintain lots of buggy code,
although of course I never write any of it myself. (Did you know that
union { char c[8]; double d; } u;
u.d = 1.0;
char c = u.c[1];
yields undefined results? The compiler is
allowed (and under -O3, encouraged) to generate
code that will erase your disk and impregnate
your sister.)
I wonder if Mr. Ladd checked the results of the
programs he ran.
he's also a Libertarian... No wonder he got screwed over by his bosses
That's funny. If Libertarianism is about anything,
it's about giving corporations unlimited power.
He did sign a contract, didn't he? California
law makes many non-compete clauses invalid
and unenforceable. Libertarianism repudiates
such law as an intrusion on contractual
"liberty".
Why get excited about this? He didn't release it
as Free Software. He's moonlighting, for profit,
in his employers's own line of work. If he'd
released it as Free Software, he could have done
it anonymously, and Apple would be none the wiser.
Let's save our outrage for when Free Software is
threatened.
VMS being the only reason Alpha lasted as long as it did
Clue... Alpha lasted as long as it did because
its major market was the Feds, notably the NSA.
They run Tru64 on it. Football-field-size rooms
full of racks of them run DSP algorithms, scanning
telephone conversations for keywords. That is
also why Itanium had to have fast floating point,
and why the Virginia Tech G5 supercomputer will
turn out to be such a problem for Intel. If G5s
can do DSP faster, the NSA will happily port to
G5 instead of Itanium. (Unix is Unix.) Opteron
is out of the running, there; its floating point
is only fast enough for normal customers.
Without the Feds' patronage, there's nothing to
support the Itanium's price premium.
"given the enormous investment HP is making in Itanium"
Exactly. HP will be the last major manufacturer
to announce Opteron servers. They will only do
it when market pressure grows too great not to.
Recall that HP just spent enormous capital
(of all kinds) absorbing Compaq. They don't
have much of a cushion to ride out the Itanium
failure. Therefore, they may well be forced to
field Opterons despite their misgivings. When
that happens, that will be the final imprimatur
for Opteron.
By then, maybe Alpha will have been revived,
and maybe G5 or G6 will be making a good
showing. As Linux moves up the food chain,
the artificial concentration on a single
architecture, as enforced under MS's hegemony,
will begin to melt. When only habit, and not
market forces, make you choose x86, then price,
performance, and secondary criteria like
reliability, power management, and responsiveness to market demand start to matter more.
Slashdot Mirror
Whose ox was gored, this time?
I just finished the worst book I have read in years -- "Chindi" by Jack McDermitt. It's awful from the very first line: "The Benjamin ... was at the extreme limit of its survey territory ..." Each chapter is worse than the last, each deft touch reveals it as the more tawdry. Chapters start with quotes from great but somehow sophomoric works of the 23rd century. The ship's captain is gorgeous but unfulfilled. Every character is bored with his or her life and life's work, desperate to relieve the tedium. Reading it was like watching a train wreck. Recommended, sort of.
My wife's cousin Sid was on the team analyzing the heritage of these bacteria (actually, I think, their mitochondria). They were able to demonstrate that the strain extracted was ancestral to those found in various species of modern bees.
Normally, when you publish stuff like this, everyone insists that the bacteria you have must have come from contamination on your equipment, and didn't really come out of the bee at all. To prove them wrong you have to show that the bacteria are quantifiably different from any modern strain.
Once Sun fades out of the picture, IBM will no longer see any need for a Java presence. Java is an insular world that will fade away unnoticed and unmissed, like the PL/1, Pascal, and Ada worlds before it, leaving barely a trace. Free Software will be the better off for it.
He should have changed the name to LinDOS. MS can't claim that is too similar to their trademark without reminding everyone that Windows is really WinDOS itself.
It's silly to code another clock, because it won't matter how beautiful the code is, nobody will read it. Nobody needs another damned clock. Write something useful and meaningful. If you can't think of anything useful and meaningful, and you write a damned clock instead, all you're demonstrating is that you can't think of anything. What does that say about you, as a representative of the fledgling user community for your obscure language?
The unison program written in OCaml does a job not done by any other program I know of, does it well, and has inspired many to look into the language. Freenet inspired me to install a JVM to try it out. (I deleted both based on the experience, but that doesn't detract from the lesson -- I did try it.) The number of really useful programs written in Perl far exceeds the merits of the language itself, but continues to inspire new users. Python came from behind, but the deep value of many of the programs written in it ensured its enduring success.
To demonstrate the value of an obscure language, don't write yet-another text editor, IRC client, or RSS aggregator. We don't need any more, and we will feel no desire to try yours. Write something useful that's hard to write in other languages, or (better) hard to write in any language. The obscure language will get some (much-needed) reflected credit from the effort, and if it really helps, that will become evident (only!) when people are inspired to read the code.
Many languages have failed honorably -- Eiffel, Dylan, Oberon, Icon, Prolog, CLP(R), C+@, Oak, PL/1, Bliss, Algol-68, Pascal -- some more honorably, some less, but far too many to list, or indeed to count. Others struggle vainly along, confined forever to subsidized niches -- Erlang, Common LISP, REXX, Objective-C, Delphi, Ada. Only a handful retain a vigorous population of programmers using them, industrially, for their original purpose; we need not list them.
Java survived teething only by dint of billions of dollars of promotion. Every promise made in its infancy has proved a lie. Designed and implemented in such frantic haste that a semblance of quality was the first criterion jettisoned, it could not but grow into such a monstrosity as we face today. Today its use in applications where it was, supposedly, intended -- cellphones, browsers, rings -- amounts to little more than nasty, brutish parodies.
It is no crime for a language to fail. What is a crime is for its failure to blight the careers of the myriad* young, impressionable, and naive who fell for its blandishments. What is a crime is the forests felled, pulped, and printed upon, only to be discarded unread and obsolete. What is a crime is the thousands of good ideas, and the companies started to develop them, stabbed in the back by an inadequate implementation language. What is a crime is the gigawatt-hours of energy dissipated operating wasteful JVMs on huge servers performing jobs that a hamster could do on its bathroom break.
Java is far more than a failure, far more than an annoyance, far more than the laughingstock of many industries, far more even than the evil sire of C#. It is a bona fide crime against humanity. Capital punishment would be too good for it; that is to say, it does not deserve execution.
Only one fate can be ignominious enough to expiate Java's wrongs. Java must be consigned to use as an undergraduate teaching language.
* [lit.: numerous as the stars in the sky]
(Evidently Apple has found plenty of them, but Apple's not selling music players, they're selling status symbol/fashion accessories. In a status symbol, the higher the price, the better it sells. There's no need to actually load any music on an iPod, you can just wear it for show.)
Me, I'm holding out for an under-$100 unit.
Of course it would be stupid to buy before they actually deliver; somebody else might get there first, and Frontier might never come through.
Of course it needs to support Ogg...
At the hearing the question came up whether in fact the reverse engineering involved was legal under Norwegian law. The judge called for opinions from Norwegian lawyers. The plaintiff trotted out a tame Norwegian lawyer who asserted (without support of any kind) that it was not legal. The defendant's lawyer said nothing in Norwegian law or case law supported any opinion one way or the other. The judge took that to mean that in fact it wasn't legal. That meant that the MPAA still had a valid trade secret in CSS.
Now that it's established that in fact the reverse engineering was legal, Bunner et al. should be able to have the decision vacated. (Shame on that judge for his bias.) This should mean that the DVD-CCA's trade secret protection on CSS cannot any longer be enforced.
Is there any word on whether the EFF will act on this?
I guess if we want Ogg on the iPodJr (pronounced "hip podger") we'll have to hack it ourselves. The great thing about a hacked iPod is that you can copy music between yours to others'. Unfortunately, if yours only has Oggs on it, they can't listen to them; but you can listen to theirs. :-)
Hint to manufacturers: you could leave out the firewire, USB, disk, and flash memory, and replace it all with a Compact Flash slot. We don't really need a mic, or a radio. Battery life, a slot, and an efficient UI are what matter.
The weather has been demonstrated conclusively to be a chaotic system. One feature common in chaotic systems, easily seen in the Lorenz simulation (e.g. in your screen saver) is that when the system's oscillations get increasingly large (a little moreso each cycle), this is prelude to a change in mode to a different attractor, where all recent history has no predictive value at all.
Imagine what would happen if the Gulf Stream decided to flow on a different path, e.g. because of the massive salinity decrease around the north pole. The end of agriculture in northwestern Europe is just a beginning. Anybody who thinks that ocean currents can only flow the way they do now is very silly indeed.
Funny, lots of shipping company executives are excited about the prospect of driving across the north pole.
In fact, spammers hijack legitimate hosts and use them to deliver the spam. The computational resources required to send the spam are provided by the hijacking victim. The DNS entry of the sending MTA will have all the assurances built in. Since it is no harder to hijack 10,000 victim hosts than to hijack one, it takes little more time to send the millions of spams.
This also makes it impossible for ISPs to provide MTA service for hosts on their subnet. While your average Windows box isn't doing anything else useful for the ten seconds, it's not the host being asked to authenticate. Who is? The ISP's MTA. But if end users' MTAs contact receiver MTAs directly, they hit blackhole lists.
Furthermore, it makes legitimate mailing lists impossible to operate.
Of course we've heard of this idea before, but it was shot down immediately, for the reasons given above. Few would give it another moment's thought if MS weren't promoting it.
Nonetheless, the Bunner case hinges entirely on whether, in fact, the trade secret was legitimately reverse-engineered -- under Norwegian law -- before Bunner posted it. This is a case where Norwegian court events do matter.
I just found out that somebody I used to work with is there now, and that's what I'm going to do.
(Yes, I do still have friends.)
Where is this documented? A google search suggests that it uses "${var}" bracket notation, not "$(var)" notation as I had written.
I thought about implementing variant symlinks on Linux. Probably it would need a new system call to tell the kernel where the process keeps its environment variables, to be run at each program startup, and a new process table entry field.
Of course, buggy code is more likely actually to fail under aggressive optimization. I've certainly had to maintain lots of buggy code, although of course I never write any of it myself. (Did you know that
yields undefined results? The compiler is allowed (and under -O3, encouraged) to generate code that will erase your disk and impregnate your sister.)I wonder if Mr. Ladd checked the results of the programs he ran.
That's funny. If Libertarianism is about anything, it's about giving corporations unlimited power. He did sign a contract, didn't he? California law makes many non-compete clauses invalid and unenforceable. Libertarianism repudiates such law as an intrusion on contractual "liberty".
Let's save our outrage for when Free Software is threatened.
Clue... Alpha lasted as long as it did because its major market was the Feds, notably the NSA. They run Tru64 on it. Football-field-size rooms full of racks of them run DSP algorithms, scanning telephone conversations for keywords. That is also why Itanium had to have fast floating point, and why the Virginia Tech G5 supercomputer will turn out to be such a problem for Intel. If G5s can do DSP faster, the NSA will happily port to G5 instead of Itanium. (Unix is Unix.) Opteron is out of the running, there; its floating point is only fast enough for normal customers.
Without the Feds' patronage, there's nothing to support the Itanium's price premium.
Exactly. HP will be the last major manufacturer to announce Opteron servers. They will only do it when market pressure grows too great not to.
Recall that HP just spent enormous capital (of all kinds) absorbing Compaq. They don't have much of a cushion to ride out the Itanium failure. Therefore, they may well be forced to field Opterons despite their misgivings. When that happens, that will be the final imprimatur for Opteron.
By then, maybe Alpha will have been revived, and maybe G5 or G6 will be making a good showing. As Linux moves up the food chain, the artificial concentration on a single architecture, as enforced under MS's hegemony, will begin to melt. When only habit, and not market forces, make you choose x86, then price, performance, and secondary criteria like reliability, power management, and responsiveness to market demand start to matter more.