Personally I think it jumped the shark about two months ago.
I rarely look at it.
I've filtered out about half my "friends" because if I wanted to know what they had on their toast this morning I'd sign up for twitter and follow their stupid tweets.
If we add this to the blood test that many states require for a marriage license maybe we could eliminate all those husband and wife pairs who cancel out each others' votes.
You would be shocked at how much software will fail to compile with -Werror.
I've been developing software professionally for almost 30 years -- I'm not shocked at how much software fails to compile with -Werror, or even without -Werror sometimes.
And for extra thrills I occasionally compile the stuff I work on with Intel's compiler, just to see what it finds. And it's been a while since I last checked, I should see what the status is of C++ in CLANG these days.
There is nothing anywhere that says __TIME_T_TYPE couldn't have been 'long long int' on 32-bit iron.
I don't know why you want to debate the inheritance of ISO C via POSIX, they have nothing to do with the original choice of a 32-bit type for time_t in the 32-bit Linux kernels. In fact, it's quite the opposite: the spec deliberately does not define a size, allowing kernel and libc implementers the choice to make them whatever size they wanted.
(This isn't theoretical -- I once spun a one-off FreeBSD that used 64-bit time_t on 32-bit iron. I could do it precisely because I didn't have thousands of existing binary apps to break. And I could compile correctly written third party apps without change.)
But you can't change it in Linux now, not without breaking the ABI.
Got a citation? No? I didn't think so. Actually POSIX inherits from ISO C [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time] and---
ISO C (ISO/IEC 9899:TC2, Committee Draft dated May 6, 2005, [because that's the copy I happen to have as a PDF]) in section 7.23.1 Components of time, paragraph 3:
The types declared are size_t[,] clock_t[,] and time_t which are arithmetic types capable of representing times;...
Nothing there about them having any particular bit-size, regardless of the native bit size of the underlying hardware.
ABI nothing. That new OS needed to have software ported to it and a lot of Unix like software expects time_t and int to be interchangeable so changing it would involve fixing a lot of software.
If they expect time_t and int to be interchangeable -- even on 64-bit iron -- then there's still some fixing that's needed.
Yes, actually I was alive then, and for quite a few years before that.
I was. Remember that was a time when being able to buy a video & watch it at home was an alien concept (pre-VCR).
Not true. I was shooting video on 1" cartridges in my HS film classes in 1976, and believe it or not, there was a movie sale and rental industry then. It was small, by mail order, and expensive, but it did exist.
If you had said to someone, "Someday you'll be able to sit on a bus and watch a video from 10,000 miles away," they'd probably lock you in a loony bin. Or just say, "You're a nutty nerd - let's give you a wedgie."
I think those reactions had more to do with the goofy grin, flood pants, and the bad haircut you had than anything else.:-P
Computers in 1976 were the size of small rooms,
I think you're a little confused about the whats and whens.
I lusted over SWTP 6809s and various Z/80 systems written up in Popular Electronics throughout the 70s -- too expensive for my paper route level of income. Apple 1s were around by '76, and the first Apple ][s shipped in 1977. Circa 1976 HP donated an old mini to the HS I went to -- it was the size of a four drawer filing cabinet. Apart from that, most of those were smaller than a Selectric typewriter.
Yeah, the Burroughs mainframe at my dad's office years earlier filled up the whole room, but actually, if you knew what you were looking at, you knew most of it was tape drives, line printers, and other stuff.
and they were just beginning to be shrunk to PC size, but they were hard-to-use (no keyboards or screens; they used esoteric switches).
Esoteric? Like the switch on the wall that you turn the light on with? Actually you could get a SWTP terminal with a full QUERTY keyboard and a 40×25 CRT to go with your 6809. Apples -- 1 and ][ -- had real keyboards.
Nobody at the time thought common people (read: uneducated boobs) would have computers with self-assigned addresses. Nobody thought there'd be more than one computer per home, much less 2-3 per person. Most envisioned computers as being like Star Trek - a single unit running the whole house. The number of homes was only 900 million, so having ~4000 million addresses was plenty.
The 1970 Census put the US population at 200M. By 1980 it was 226M. I don't know what the typical household was, say family of four. I think that'd make for a lot fewer homes, but really, what does that have to do with anything?
Again, there were people -- with imagination -- who were anticipating the computer revolution. Not unsurprisingly, they were right.
It was pre-home computer revolution and nobody thought computers would shrink to the size of everybody's pockets (cellphones). Nobody thought we'd be using machines will a billion bits (or more) or memory. Back than ~4000 was considered a lot (it was the hardcoded limit for the Atari console). Everything was smaller in scale, and Mr. Cerf is not to blame for not predicting the invention of the Web Browser (killer app) and how it would reach into every facet of our lives.
Only those with no imagination---
I can say with a great deal of confidence that plenty of us knew what was coming.
Now who do we blame for 32-bit time_t on 32-bit iron? There's a relatively new OS that lots of people use today that didn't have any ABI concerns when it was in its infancy, yet its creator didn't have the vision to see beyond doing pretty much what everyone else had done before him. (And I won't name him because then I'll just get modded a troll. But I bet you can guess who it is.)
At the risk of repeating myself, er, uh, wait.... I'm about to repeat myself
Apple might have something clever in there...
Is GCD world changing? Would an Oracle JVM that didn't use GCD still work just fine? Got any hard numbers about just how much faster using GCD makes their JVM? Probably not because it's doubtful that Apple would release the non-GCD version into the wild. (But we could guess that they must benchmark both approaches as part of their development process.)
And there's nothing to say that Oracle couldn't build their hypothetical JVM for OS X using GCD too.
Threading? Memory Management? Why exactly? OS X is, after all, just Unix. Yeah, Apple might have some something clever in there, but I honestly doubt there's anything world changing.
The GUI though--- That's a whole 'nuther ball of wax.
Screw with it? It's not like it's particularly good or anything.
My daughter attended a Canadian university. For three years she (we) had to pay extra for the university health plan because she (obviously) wasn't on the provincial health plan. This was despite the fact that she was covered by my US-based health insurance -- my insurance that covers her anywhere in the world. (And if, by some chance there was something that couldn't/wouldn't be covered in Canada, she was only a few hours away by car and could be brought home for treatment.)
Why? Because my plan doesn't have unlimited mental health coverage. A college student? For three years? Needs unlimited mental heath? She'd never had a need for mental health treatment before that. And who reviewed the appeal? The (Canadian) insurance company! Do you think they had a vested interest in anything except ensuring that they continued to collect their $800 premium every year.
And any time she actually needed health care, getting to see a doctor was a three-plus hour ordeal. No appointments -- walk-in only. When she could have been in class, needed to be in class, instead she was growing old waiting to see a doctor. Good thing nothing serious ever happened to her.
That was C$2400 flushed down the toilet as far as I'm concerned.
Oh, and the stories her friends told a general shortages of doctors because every Canadian that earns an MD leaves. I used to laugh at the billboards on the I81 leading to Canada advertising (begging) for MDs to come work in Canada.
If 2% == 3M, which doesn't seem unreasonable, then 98% == 147M.
I know a VC or two. They aren't investing in companies producing software that has a target market of 3M customers when they could be investing in companies who are writing for those other 147M.
Just look at how long it took Apple to gain traction, and they still have what, 10% of the market? At least what Apple had going for it was a superior user experience over the next best thing at the time. Gnome and KDE have come a long way and they're pretty decent now, but they're not "killer app" better experiences than what you get on Mac and Windows these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I think it jumped the shark about two months ago.
I rarely look at it.
I've filtered out about half my "friends" because if I wanted to know what they had on their toast this morning I'd sign up for twitter and follow their stupid tweets.
answers.com says it took Polo four years to get to China -- even with getting stuck in Moscow traffic the vans win.
Didn't read the article eh? Or even the summary?
Electric vans.
If we add this to the blood test that many states require for a marriage license maybe we could eliminate all those husband and wife pairs who cancel out each others' votes.
Didn't even notice that when I c-and-p'ed it.
Just goes to show what a crutch spell-check is.
What amazes me though is how they look at another bee and visualize it traveling to a set patch of flowers, by looking at its dance.
Are we discussing bumble bees or honey bees? The summary says bumble bees.
http://www.earthlife.net/insects/socbees.html states that bumble bees "...have not evolved any means of communicating information reguarding utilisable resources."
Further proof of what I've suspected all along---
Linux is, in fact, a religion.
Since when have they used SSL/HTTPS as the default for anything, let along signing on?
I still have to manually change http to https in the URL every time they decide to sign me off.
You would be shocked at how much software will fail to compile with -Werror.
I've been developing software professionally for almost 30 years -- I'm not shocked at how much software fails to compile with -Werror, or even without -Werror sometimes.
And for extra thrills I occasionally compile the stuff I work on with Intel's compiler, just to see what it finds. And it's been a while since I last checked, I should see what the status is of C++ in CLANG these days.
There is nothing anywhere that says __TIME_T_TYPE couldn't have been 'long long int' on 32-bit iron.
I don't know why you want to debate the inheritance of ISO C via POSIX, they have nothing to do with the original choice of a 32-bit type for time_t in the 32-bit Linux kernels. In fact, it's quite the opposite: the spec deliberately does not define a size, allowing kernel and libc implementers the choice to make them whatever size they wanted.
(This isn't theoretical -- I once spun a one-off FreeBSD that used 64-bit time_t on 32-bit iron. I could do it precisely because I didn't have thousands of existing binary apps to break. And I could compile correctly written third party apps without change.)
But you can't change it in Linux now, not without breaking the ABI.
Uh, Linux inherits time_t from POSIX.
Got a citation? No? I didn't think so. Actually POSIX inherits from ISO C [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time] and---
ISO C (ISO/IEC 9899:TC2, Committee Draft dated May 6, 2005, [because that's the copy I happen to have as a PDF]) in section 7.23.1 Components of time, paragraph 3:
The types declared are size_t[,] clock_t[,] and time_t which are arithmetic types capable of representing times; ...
Nothing there about them having any particular bit-size, regardless of the native bit size of the underlying hardware.
ABI nothing. That new OS needed to have software ported to it and a lot of Unix like software expects time_t and int to be interchangeable so changing it would involve fixing a lot of software.
If they expect time_t and int to be interchangeable -- even on 64-bit iron -- then there's still some fixing that's needed.
>>>Only those with no imagination---
Were you even alive then - 1976?
Yes, actually I was alive then, and for quite a few years before that.
I was. Remember that was a time when being able to buy a video & watch it at home was an alien concept (pre-VCR).
Not true. I was shooting video on 1" cartridges in my HS film classes in 1976, and believe it or not, there was a movie sale and rental industry then. It was small, by mail order, and expensive, but it did exist.
If you had said to someone, "Someday you'll be able to sit on a bus and watch a video from 10,000 miles away," they'd probably lock you in a loony bin. Or just say, "You're a nutty nerd - let's give you a wedgie."
I think those reactions had more to do with the goofy grin, flood pants, and the bad haircut you had than anything else. :-P
Computers in 1976 were the size of small rooms,
I think you're a little confused about the whats and whens.
I lusted over SWTP 6809s and various Z/80 systems written up in Popular Electronics throughout the 70s -- too expensive for my paper route level of income. Apple 1s were around by '76, and the first Apple ][s shipped in 1977. Circa 1976 HP donated an old mini to the HS I went to -- it was the size of a four drawer filing cabinet. Apart from that, most of those were smaller than a Selectric typewriter.
Yeah, the Burroughs mainframe at my dad's office years earlier filled up the whole room, but actually, if you knew what you were looking at, you knew most of it was tape drives, line printers, and other stuff.
and they were just beginning to be shrunk to PC size, but they were hard-to-use (no keyboards or screens; they used esoteric switches).
Esoteric? Like the switch on the wall that you turn the light on with? Actually you could get a SWTP terminal with a full QUERTY keyboard and a 40×25 CRT to go with your 6809. Apples -- 1 and ][ -- had real keyboards.
Nobody at the time thought common people (read: uneducated boobs) would have computers with self-assigned addresses. Nobody thought there'd be more than one computer per home, much less 2-3 per person. Most envisioned computers as being like Star Trek - a single unit running the whole house. The number of homes was only 900 million, so having ~4000 million addresses was plenty.
The 1970 Census put the US population at 200M. By 1980 it was 226M. I don't know what the typical household was, say family of four. I think that'd make for a lot fewer homes, but really, what does that have to do with anything?
Again, there were people -- with imagination -- who were anticipating the computer revolution. Not unsurprisingly, they were right.
We need a Nike (s)whoosh icon.
Oh wait, this isn't The Register. Never mind.
It was pre-home computer revolution and nobody thought computers would shrink to the size of everybody's pockets (cellphones). Nobody thought we'd be using machines will a billion bits (or more) or memory. Back than ~4000 was considered a lot (it was the hardcoded limit for the Atari console). Everything was smaller in scale, and Mr. Cerf is not to blame for not predicting the invention of the Web Browser (killer app) and how it would reach into every facet of our lives.
Only those with no imagination---
I can say with a great deal of confidence that plenty of us knew what was coming.
Now who do we blame for 32-bit time_t on 32-bit iron? There's a relatively new OS that lots of people use today that didn't have any ABI concerns when it was in its infancy, yet its creator didn't have the vision to see beyond doing pretty much what everyone else had done before him. (And I won't name him because then I'll just get modded a troll. But I bet you can guess who it is.)
Than the Harley Davidson or King Ranch editions of Ford pickups?
I wouldn't buy one of those either, but there are obviously lots of people who do.
So why the hate?
"We can get a very large amount of software revenue and still keep the company not dramatically larger"
Translation: more money for me.
At the risk of repeating myself, er, uh, wait.... I'm about to repeat myself
Apple might have something clever in there...
Is GCD world changing? Would an Oracle JVM that didn't use GCD still work just fine? Got any hard numbers about just how much faster using GCD makes their JVM? Probably not because it's doubtful that Apple would release the non-GCD version into the wild. (But we could guess that they must benchmark both approaches as part of their development process.)
And there's nothing to say that Oracle couldn't build their hypothetical JVM for OS X using GCD too.
And all along I thought it was because it just wasn't ready for production use.
The BSDs are still working on getting ZFS good enough to use. Everyone I knew that tried it on OS X said it was shit.
Threading? Memory Management? Why exactly? OS X is, after all, just Unix. Yeah, Apple might have some something clever in there, but I honestly doubt there's anything world changing.
The GUI though--- That's a whole 'nuther ball of wax.
oh yeah, I'm really so stupid that I'd be posting from her account.
Obviously this is my girlfriend's account.
I've noticed that my wife also doesn't hold a charge as long as she used to.
If she knew I was posting comments about here like this she'd probably get charged up pretty quick though.
Screw with it? It's not like it's particularly good or anything.
My daughter attended a Canadian university. For three years she (we) had to pay extra for the university health plan because she (obviously) wasn't on the provincial health plan. This was despite the fact that she was covered by my US-based health insurance -- my insurance that covers her anywhere in the world. (And if, by some chance there was something that couldn't/wouldn't be covered in Canada, she was only a few hours away by car and could be brought home for treatment.)
Why? Because my plan doesn't have unlimited mental health coverage. A college student? For three years? Needs unlimited mental heath? She'd never had a need for mental health treatment before that. And who reviewed the appeal? The (Canadian) insurance company! Do you think they had a vested interest in anything except ensuring that they continued to collect their $800 premium every year.
And any time she actually needed health care, getting to see a doctor was a three-plus hour ordeal. No appointments -- walk-in only. When she could have been in class, needed to be in class, instead she was growing old waiting to see a doctor. Good thing nothing serious ever happened to her.
That was C$2400 flushed down the toilet as far as I'm concerned.
Oh, and the stories her friends told a general shortages of doctors because every Canadian that earns an MD leaves. I used to laugh at the billboards on the I81 leading to Canada advertising (begging) for MDs to come work in Canada.
Next step: government outlaws scientists fighting back!
If 2% == 3M, which doesn't seem unreasonable, then 98% == 147M.
I know a VC or two. They aren't investing in companies producing software that has a target market of 3M customers when they could be investing in companies who are writing for those other 147M.
Just look at how long it took Apple to gain traction, and they still have what, 10% of the market? At least what Apple had going for it was a superior user experience over the next best thing at the time. Gnome and KDE have come a long way and they're pretty decent now, but they're not "killer app" better experiences than what you get on Mac and Windows these days.