the first generation of computer programmers are either in or nearing their fifties
Er, sonny (g), a bit older than that. My *mother* was a computer programmer at one time, and she's in her seventies. Remember, the first electronic computers were built in the 1940s, and were being bought up by businesses in the 1950s. COBOL and FORTRAN date back that far.
I don't know that my Mom would have any interesting in putting her own box together these days, but my father-in-law, also in his 70s, and never a professional programmer (though he's tinkered with them nearly forever - he's the guy that coined the word "bionics") certainly could.
The phrasing is usually "Microsoft hires the best talent they can find". The phrase "they can find" carries the implication "that are willing to work for them for what Microsoft is offering".
Well, doesn't every company do that? ("Best" being a somewhat subjective measure here.) Anyone know of any companies that set out to hire the second best talent they can find, or the worst talent?
People do read the code and find GPL or BSD code in there
Don't need to read the source code to prove that. Just take "ftp.exe" from Win95 for example:
%strings ftp.exe [...] GetModuleHandleA KERNEL32.DLL @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. ascii script name = %s [...]
Obviously from BSD code, but there's nothing in the BSD license that prohibits this.
yaaay!! my favorite dish is in the jargon file!!
on
Jargon File v4.1.0
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· Score: 2
Hey, I discovered kung pao chicken because of this entry in the jargon file. Decided to try it next time I had chinese food after reading that, and it's been a favorite of mine ever since. Bascially my default chinese order.
(Then there was the time I went to a chinese restaurant with a bunch of biology grad students. "Okay, everybody order from a different phylum".)
A language should give the programmer as much power and flexibility as possible, and a programmer should know when not to use it.
In theory I agree, and that's fine for personal projects. In practise, however, I've seen (and occasionally had to maintain) far too much crappy C++ code (and other languages, certainly) written by programmers who weren't enough above average (and remember, 50% of programmers are below average) to use such features appropriately. On anything that needs to be reused, or maintained, its just not worth it. (The ultimate example of this is perhaps APL -- powerful, expressive language, wonderful for writing quick personal and powerful apps (I've even seen an email system written in APL), no fun to maintain.)
Having a programming language enforce what it considers good programming practice results in disasters like Ada, Pascal and Java.
Those "disasters" have proven spectacularly successful in the domain of large project development (well, Pascal less so, but it was designed as a teaching language) precisely because of that enforcement.
If the thing is mounted and not flying, it's unlikely a V1 (more specifically, a pulse-jet engine) unless they've got some way of feeding pressurized air into it.
The original V1s were launched from a catapult-like launcher (may have used solid rocket jatos) to get up to operating speed. The movement through the air forces air into the forward end of the engine, fuel is sprayed in, lighted, BOOM! - shutters (flutter valves) at the front end close and the hot gases push out the back, internal pressure drops, ram air forces open the shutters and enters the engine. Repeat until fuel == 0.
I like to make the comparison between making money on free software and making money selling air.
Everybody has free access to air (obvious special cases aside). Yet there are plenty of companies that make some or all of their money selling it. None of them have a monopoly, anyone is free to go into the selling air business. None of it denies anybody free access to air. Some people have air filters or purifiers to make the air (eg in their homes) cleaner. That obviously improves the quality of air overall, but does it matter that that gives some air-selling company a slightly better product?
(Examples of companies that make money selling air: Air Liquide, a multinational company that sells liquid air and liquified gases extracted from air; dive stores etc, that charge for refilling SCUBA tanks; gas stations with the coin-operated tire inflators, etc.)
Of course, if you've got your own special air purifier that makes a high grade air that you don't want anyone bottling up without paying you, you're free to seal up your house and not let any of it out.
Actually you can get around the GPL with dynamic linking, provided you can distribute with the non-GPL'd software a non-GPL'd dynamic library with the same API (however crappy the implementation might be).
That way, you're distributing a set of non GPL'd code that happens to run better if the user swaps out the crappy library for the GPL'd good one.
Probably not worth the trouble in most cases, but it doesn't violate the letter of the GPL.
Unless you're writing the code under some contract which states otherwise, the library you're developing for your employer on you employer's time is what's known in copyright law as a "work for hire", in which case your employer, not you, is legally considered the author and copyright holder. In which case, releasing it under the GPL can only be done by your employer. If the library is useful, you've deprived your employer of potential revenue he might have gained (which would have paid your salary) by selling/licensing the code.
Consider what Disney's reaction would be if one of their animators released the cels that he drew.
(Of course, if you developed the lib on your own time, with your own resources, that's a different issue.)
Geez, CU really are a bunch of wimps, aren't they. First they get upset over a mere 157 dB, and now this.
I was culturing bacteria in my basement lab when I was in high school. Bought prepared, disposable petri dishes from a hospital supply dealer, the Mr. Wizard stuff not being on the market yet.
Anyway, the really nasty germs need something like blood agar or an anaeroboic environment...
(Now, who has a schematic for the sonic cannon?:)
Has Java Progressed wrt Generic Programming?
on
Java for EGCS
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· Score: 2
I think Bjarne's confused on this issue, if you're quoting him correctly.
Any language that supports inheritance supports generic programming, if you do it right. You don't need templates for it, either.
I started using C++ back in cfront 1.1 days, before templates or multiple inheritance were part of the language. We just created a bunch of basic classes to inherit from.
With Linux already chewing at the Windows NT market on the server end, this is going to start nibbling away at the WinCE market at the embedded/palm top end.
Cool.
(I'm going to get me some of these. (Too bad the Ethernet is 10bT and not 10b2 -- the hub is going to be just as big as the rest of the cluster. Wearable supercomputer, anyone?:) Now, how about a small cam interface...)
Java has Multiple Inheritance
on
Java for EGCS
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· Score: 2
Aren't all web sites open source? I mean, right there on the top row of my browser window, I've got this "View->Document Source" pulldown.
I guess it never did anything before?
(And yes, I know that's not what "Open Source" really means. But that button has probably been responsible for more self-taught HTML programmers than any single book.)
The downside to LCDs is viewing angle and latency, which may smear the image where there's a lot of action. Or not - I don't know how well the latest LCDs handle this.
But hell, HDTV on a 17" CRT computer monitor would be fine - just sit closer to the damn screen.
I'd like to see a HDTV tuner with an SVGA output...
That it (Beta) was only Sony was part of the problem. The main reason VHS won out over Beta (in home machines) was that VHS tapes had a longer recording time -- long enough to contain a full feature length movie, which Beta couldn't (except at lower resolution).
That rapidly led to more software being available for VHS than for Beta.
Heh - nice play on US foreign policy
on
Linux on Dilbert
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· Score: 1
So, how many nuclear wars have we had since building the Peacekeeper missiles?
My guess (coming from 30+ years of using keyboards since learning on a mechanical typewriter, plus a couple of anatomy courses) is that almost everything else about a keyboard design except the key layout is going to play a greater role in causing/reducing such injuries than key layout.
This includes things like keyboard angle, 'step height' between key rows, key sizes, key travel resistance (and resistance profile, ie resistance as the key is pressed), where the users wrists/elbows are relative to the keyboard, etc, etc. This could be tested since key layout can be easily remapped through software, holding all the mechanical variables constant. I'm not aware of any such research, however.
(BTW, was carpal-tunnel syndrome an occupational hazard of typists in the old mechanical typewriter days? If not, it suggests that better attention was payed to keyboarding ergonomics in those days.
The reason Dvorak keyboards seem to help RSI sufferers is that the pattern of repetition changes, which is almost as good as just resting. (Further and more, once RSI is recognized, paying attention to the keyboard layout is just part of paying attention to the whole keyboard/wrist/desktop/etc layout so other contributing factors are likely eliminated at the same time as going to Dvorak.)
Because Dvorak use is such a small percentage of the population, RSI injuries due to long-term Dvorak use are, as a total, lower. However, someone with a Dvorak-induced RSI may gain from using a QWERTY keyboard.
(One exception -- folks who don't have their kb's angled properly/at the right height/etc may be more susceptible with a QWERTY keyboard because of the need to move to the upper row more often.)
Mind, all these studies were based on typing English text. C coders are going to have a different pattern of key usage (probaly going for the very top row a lot more often).
Uh, 109575000 (109,575,000) is only about 110 million dollars, not billion.
However, you're probably low on the 1000 copies/day guess -- that's only 365,000 copies a year, and the figure is probably a few million a year. The liability may not be 110 billion, but it may well be in the billions.
Look at it another way. Assume Microsoft revenues are 50% OS sales (approximately correct). Ten percent market share (DR-DOS) over ten years would be a year's worth of Microsoft revenues, times 50%, times 3 for tripled damages. Or a year and a half of Microsoft revenues (average revenue over the last 10 years). Which is probably in the $10 billion ballpark. (Don't have MS's current annual revenue figures handy.)
Even if Caldera's chances of winning the suit are only 10% (and they may well be higher, given some of the evidence), that's (10% x $10 billion) a billion dollars of liability.
What to do with the silo space?
on
Nerd Dream Home?
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· Score: 1
Heck, I need almost that much room for all my books.
And if my twin boys grow up to be anything like I was when a teenager, the ability to withstand a nuclear hit may be no bad thing...
I'm surprised at you. Here you go calling yourself a bleeding heart liberal, and endorsing government funding of roads, police, fire, defense, and education (all of which, by the way, (possibly except defense) have been successfully performed through free market funding at some time or another), and you don't advocate taxpayer support of something as critical to our information infrastructure and civilization-as-we-know-it as software!?
Even (especially?) Libertarians will argue that the government has a role in keeping the market free, as for example by punishing those using (attempting to use) force or fraud in the marketplace.
Libertarians would certainly be decidedly against the practise by some gov't departments of requiring that certain documents, applications, etc be submitted as MS Word files. (Of course, the Libertarian view would probably be to not have those particular government organizations in the first place.)
Slashdot Mirror
the first generation of computer programmers are either in or nearing their fifties
Er, sonny (g), a bit older than that. My *mother* was a computer programmer at one time, and she's in her seventies. Remember, the first electronic computers were built in the 1940s, and were being bought up by businesses in the 1950s. COBOL and FORTRAN date back that far.
I don't know that my Mom would have any interesting in putting her own box together these days, but my father-in-law, also in his 70s, and never a professional programmer (though he's tinkered with them nearly forever - he's the guy that coined the word "bionics") certainly could.
The phrasing is usually "Microsoft hires the best talent they can find". The phrase "they can find" carries the implication "that are willing to work for them for what Microsoft is offering".
Well, doesn't every company do that? ("Best" being a somewhat subjective measure here.) Anyone know of any companies that set out to hire the second best talent they can find, or the worst talent?
It's just more of MS is best at: marketspeak.
People do read the code and find GPL or BSD code in there
Don't need to read the source code to prove that. Just take "ftp.exe" from Win95 for example:
%strings ftp.exe
[...]
GetModuleHandleA
KERNEL32.DLL
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved.
ascii
script name = %s
[...]
Obviously from BSD code, but there's nothing in the BSD license that prohibits this.
Hey, I discovered kung pao chicken because of this entry in the jargon file. Decided to try it next time I had chinese food after reading that, and it's been a favorite of mine ever since.
Bascially my default chinese order.
(Then there was the time I went to a chinese restaurant with a bunch of biology grad students. "Okay, everybody order from a different phylum".)
A language should give the programmer as much power and flexibility as possible, and a programmer should know when not to use it.
In theory I agree, and that's fine for personal projects. In practise, however, I've seen (and occasionally had to maintain) far too much crappy C++ code (and other languages, certainly) written by programmers who weren't enough above average (and remember, 50% of programmers are below average) to use such features appropriately. On anything that needs to be reused, or maintained, its just not worth it. (The ultimate example of this is perhaps APL -- powerful, expressive language, wonderful for writing quick personal and powerful apps (I've even seen an email system written in APL), no fun to maintain.)
Having a programming language enforce what it considers good programming practice results in disasters like Ada, Pascal and Java.
Those "disasters" have proven spectacularly successful in the domain of large project development (well, Pascal less so, but it was designed as a teaching language) precisely because of that enforcement.
If the thing is mounted and not flying, it's unlikely a V1 (more specifically, a pulse-jet engine) unless they've got some way of feeding pressurized air into it.
The original V1s were launched from a catapult-like launcher (may have used solid rocket jatos) to get up to operating speed. The movement through the air forces air into the forward end of the engine, fuel is sprayed in, lighted, BOOM! - shutters (flutter valves) at the front end close and the hot gases push out the back, internal pressure drops, ram air forces open the shutters and enters the engine. Repeat until fuel == 0.
I like to make the comparison between making money on free software and making money selling air.
Everybody has free access to air (obvious special cases aside). Yet there are plenty of companies that make some or all of their money selling it. None of them have a monopoly, anyone is free to go into the selling air business. None of it denies anybody free access to air. Some people have air filters or purifiers to make the air (eg in their homes) cleaner. That obviously improves the quality of air overall, but does it matter that that gives some air-selling company a slightly better product?
(Examples of companies that make money selling air: Air Liquide, a multinational company that sells liquid air and liquified gases extracted from air; dive stores etc, that charge for refilling SCUBA tanks; gas stations with the coin-operated tire inflators, etc.)
Of course, if you've got your own special air purifier that makes a high grade air that you don't want anyone bottling up without paying you, you're free to seal up your house and not let any of it out.
Actually you can get around the GPL with dynamic linking, provided you can distribute with the non-GPL'd software a non-GPL'd dynamic library with the same API (however crappy the implementation might be).
That way, you're distributing a set of non GPL'd code that happens to run better if the user swaps out the crappy library for the GPL'd good one.
Probably not worth the trouble in most cases, but it doesn't violate the letter of the GPL.
Unless you're writing the code under some contract which states otherwise, the library you're developing for your employer on you employer's time is what's known in copyright law as a "work for hire", in which case your employer, not you, is legally considered the author and copyright holder. In which case, releasing it under the GPL can only be done by your employer.
If the library is useful, you've deprived your employer of potential revenue he might have gained (which would have paid your salary) by selling/licensing the code.
Consider what Disney's reaction would be if one of their animators released the cels that he drew.
(Of course, if you developed the lib on your own time, with your own resources, that's a different issue.)
Geez, CU really are a bunch of wimps, aren't they. First they get upset over a mere 157 dB, and now this.
:)
I was culturing bacteria in my basement lab when I was in high school. Bought prepared, disposable petri dishes from a hospital supply dealer, the Mr. Wizard stuff not being on the market yet.
Anyway, the really nasty germs need something like blood agar or an anaeroboic environment...
(Now, who has a schematic for the sonic cannon?
I think Bjarne's confused on this issue, if you're quoting him correctly.
Any language that supports inheritance supports generic programming, if you do it right. You don't need templates for it, either.
I started using C++ back in cfront 1.1 days, before templates or multiple inheritance were part of the language. We just created a bunch of basic classes to inherit from.
Getting [rid] of pointers renders Java fairly useless as a systems programming language.
ROTFL.
The operating systems for Burroughs large systems (B6700, etc), now Unisys A-series, are written in a variant of ALGOL utterly devoid of pointers.
(It does, however, have a predefined array called MEMORY. If you really need that level of access for your systems programming, add that to your JVM.)
With Linux already chewing at the Windows NT market on the server end, this is going to start nibbling away at the WinCE market at the embedded/palm top end.
:) Now, how about a small cam interface...)
Cool.
(I'm going to get me some of these. (Too bad the Ethernet is 10bT and not 10b2 -- the hub is going to be just as big as the rest of the cluster. Wearable supercomputer, anyone?
Of interface.
:)
What else do you need?
(C++, the PL/I of the 90s
Aren't all web sites open source? I mean, right there on the top row of my browser window, I've got this "View->Document Source" pulldown.
I guess it never did anything before?
(And yes, I know that's not what "Open Source" really means. But that button has probably been responsible for more self-taught HTML programmers than any single book.)
The downside to LCDs is viewing angle and latency, which may smear the image where there's a lot of action. Or not - I don't know how well the latest LCDs handle this.
But hell, HDTV on a 17" CRT computer monitor would be fine - just sit closer to the damn screen.
I'd like to see a HDTV tuner with an SVGA output...
That it (Beta) was only Sony was part of the problem. The main reason VHS won out over Beta (in home machines) was that VHS tapes had a longer recording time -- long enough to contain a full feature length movie, which Beta couldn't (except at lower resolution).
That rapidly led to more software being available for VHS than for Beta.
So, how many nuclear wars have we had since building the Peacekeeper missiles?
Hmm, I guess they worked.
My guess (coming from 30+ years of using keyboards since learning on a mechanical typewriter, plus a couple of anatomy courses) is that almost everything else about a keyboard design except the key layout is going to play a greater role in causing/reducing such injuries than key layout.
This includes things like keyboard angle, 'step height' between key rows, key sizes, key travel resistance (and resistance profile, ie resistance as the key is pressed), where the users wrists/elbows are relative to the keyboard, etc, etc. This could be tested since key layout can be easily remapped through software, holding all the mechanical variables constant. I'm not aware of any such research, however.
(BTW, was carpal-tunnel syndrome an occupational hazard of typists in the old mechanical typewriter days? If not, it suggests that better attention was payed to keyboarding ergonomics in those days.
The reason Dvorak keyboards seem to help RSI sufferers is that the pattern of repetition changes, which is almost as good as just resting. (Further and more, once RSI is recognized, paying attention to the keyboard layout is just part of paying attention to the whole keyboard/wrist/desktop/etc layout so other contributing factors are likely eliminated at the same time as going to Dvorak.)
Because Dvorak use is such a small percentage of the population, RSI injuries due to long-term Dvorak use are, as a total, lower. However, someone with a Dvorak-induced RSI may gain from using a QWERTY keyboard.
(One exception -- folks who don't have their kb's angled properly/at the right height/etc may be more susceptible with a QWERTY keyboard because of the need to move to the upper row more often.)
Mind, all these studies were based on typing English text. C coders are going to have a different pattern of key usage (probaly going for the very top row a lot more often).
April Fools' Day was yesterday.
Enough already.
Uh, 109575000 (109,575,000) is only about 110 million dollars, not billion.
However, you're probably low on the 1000 copies/day guess -- that's only 365,000 copies a year, and the figure is probably a few million a year. The liability may not be 110 billion, but it may well be in the billions.
Look at it another way. Assume Microsoft revenues are 50% OS sales (approximately correct). Ten percent market share (DR-DOS) over ten years would be a year's worth of Microsoft revenues, times 50%, times 3 for tripled damages. Or a year and a half of Microsoft revenues (average revenue over the last 10 years).
Which is probably in the $10 billion ballpark. (Don't have MS's current annual revenue figures handy.)
Even if Caldera's chances of winning the suit are only 10% (and they may well be higher, given some of the evidence), that's (10% x $10 billion)
a billion dollars of liability.
Heck, I need almost that much room for all my books.
And if my twin boys grow up to be anything like I was when a teenager, the ability to withstand a nuclear hit may be no bad thing...
I'm surprised at you. Here you go calling yourself a bleeding heart liberal, and endorsing government funding of roads, police, fire, defense, and education (all of which, by the way, (possibly except defense) have been successfully performed through free market funding at some time or another), and you don't advocate taxpayer support of something as critical to our information infrastructure and civilization-as-we-know-it as software!?
Are you sure you're not a crypto-libertarian?
Even (especially?) Libertarians will argue that the government has a role in keeping the market free, as for example by punishing those using (attempting to use) force or fraud in the marketplace.
Libertarians would certainly be decidedly against the practise by some gov't departments of requiring that certain documents, applications, etc be submitted as MS Word files.
(Of course, the Libertarian view would probably be to not have those particular government organizations in the first place.)