You think you're joking, but you haven't lived until you've helped someone deploy their Java-on-AS/400-based webserver (itself a front-end to their RPG-based database).
(And no, AS/400 is not the name of an obscure Linux distro, and RPG does not mean "role playing game" or even "rocket propelled grenade"--it's much worse than that...)
Your agenda notwithstanding, the term "Open Source" has a specific technical meaning that most of us understand. The title is misleading in that regard.
I'm somewhat agnostic on the question of whether or not Open Source is a good thing, but it does us no good to have someone call any license their cat coughs up "Open Source".
So stop whining and complaining and go invent, go create, go design, go and WORK because you to deserve the fruits of your labor.
No thanks. I'll work because I love doing it and because I want to make the world a better place.
The people who invent deserve the fruits of their labor, the people who create great works of art deserver the fruits of their labor, the people who create great software deserve the fruits of their labor. Perhaps so, but if that's your goal, we know that the current patent and copyright laws will not accomplish it. The current system is just a crap shoot, albeit heavily weighted towards those who (a) have a lot of money, (b) want to make a lot of money, and (c) are willing to spend a considerable amount of time gaming the system rather than being creative.
Parent is not a troll--his answer isthe answer to this question.
If you're wanting to know about recovery for security purposes, as in, "how do I destroy this thing so that no one can recover data from it?", that's an interesting and useful question. If you're just wanting to know out of general curiosity, it's also an interesting question.
But if you're thinking about what might be possible as part of disaster recovery, you've completely lost the plot. This thought seems to spring from the same well as the idea that "mirroring" can be used for backups. No, no, a thousand times no.
I wonder if this whole discussion is off the mark. Languages are for the most part trivial. And universal. I wonder whether if you had to write everything in COBOL or VB for the next five years you'd still feel the same way.
The custom, at least in the US, is that IT/programming managers should have a degree (if any) from outside this field and little experience within it...
More Software Safety-Critical than You Think
on
Geekonomics
·
· Score: 1
This sounds good in principle, but a lot of software that we programmers assume has crap correctness is actually being used in critical ways. Excel, for example, is in the pipeline for a lot of engineering and scientific calculations, even though it's riddled with bugs and usability problems. You can say that users should know better, but Microsoft doesn't make clear that Excel is really just a toy, not for use on things that matter.
Although it's nominally a profiler, kcachegrind actually produces a fairly nice call graph, which can be quite helpful in figuring out what's going on. Even works (somewhat) if you don't have the source, as long as the binary isn't stripped...
Dabbling is good--keep it up. It's much harder to find time to do this later.
Play around with at least a couple of high-level languages. Lisp or Scheme are the canonical examples. Haskell looks interesting these days.
I wouldn't worry about writing programs in assembler per se, but it's useful to know conceptually how microprocessor instruction sets work.
Learn other parts of the tool chain: make, bash, gprof, valgrind, strace, regular expressions, wireshark.
When I was coming up, I read every man page on the Unix system I had access to. There's a lot more out there now, but the concept is still useful I think. Read, read, read, read, read.
Non-technical issues turned out to be much more important than I thought they would. I'd suggest reading every Dilbert strip. Quite a lot of those are motivated by things that really happen in the real world.
I think you're actually agreeing with the parent post. To the degree that companies do good, it's because they think it will somehow maximize their (NPV) profit. Ethics has nothing to do with it. If breaking laws and chopping up grandmas will lead to profit, they'll do that, too.
Things that are "outside the realm of science" should not concern us, because we cannot waste our time on things that "may" be true while stating that they are positively unprovable. Hmm. Many of the most important things in my life (e.g., my wife's love) are "outside the realm of science", but I hardly consider their contemplation a waste of time.
As for simulating the quantum mechanical universe, that is a debatable topic, and we definitely will not have the resources to have that kind of simulation on the scale of a universe anytime soon methinks. Who said anything about a quantum mechanical universe? If we're in a simulation right now, then quite possibly there is no such thing. All we need is a convincing simulation, which would apparently be a much, much simpler thing to produce.
Yes. Or to put it another way, if we are inside a simulation, nothing is really testable in the sense that we think it is. Induction is highly over-rated--it's primary redeeming factor seems to be just that we don't have much else to go on.
What you say is (mostly) true enough, but it doesn't follow that Simulism is nonsense. It is non-testable, at least as far as we know from our perspective, and therefore falls outside of the realm of science. But it may nonetheless be true.
Not only that, but it seems like a distinct possibility. Who among us would not set up such a simulation if we had the capability? And who among us, watching the progress of technology over recent decades, seriously doubts that we will soon have the capability to set up such simulations?
At first blush, this seems absurd, but once you think about it, it really isn't very different from what copyright (and IP in general) has become in recent decades. Disney, for example, is voting themselves eternal copyrights over their stuff, much of which is derivative. I think it's only a matter of time before each culture decides to lay claim to their corpus of work, from the beginning of time. It'd be an interesting battle, as arguably the creators of the English language contributed more to The Little Mermaid than Disney did...
In general, Windows programs tend to use threads because starting processes is expensive. On Linux, starting processes is trivial, so it gets used a lot more often. Having lived through it all, my sense is that threading really caught on because Windows used it. The reason for this, in turn was because it simply didn't have modern memory protection. Bizarrely, they managed to paint something that was a serious flaw as if it were a feature. ("Look! My car has a manual choke--it's right here on the dash! I bet *your* car doesn't have one...") Unix vendors even came up with threading libraries to match this feature.
The truth, in my humble experience, is that threading is rarely smart thing to do. There is the occasional rare case, but much more frequently people think they have a rare case when they don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair is fair.
...player and says "Why would I want to buy that?".
(And no, AS/400 is not the name of an obscure Linux distro, and RPG does not mean "role playing game" or even "rocket propelled grenade"--it's much worse than that...)
I'm somewhat agnostic on the question of whether or not Open Source is a good thing, but it does us no good to have someone call any license their cat coughs up "Open Source".
if you write shell scripts in FORTRAN. :-)
So stop whining and complaining and go invent, go create, go design, go and WORK because you to deserve the fruits of your labor.
No thanks. I'll work because I love doing it and because I want to make the world a better place. The people who invent deserve the fruits of their labor, the people who create great works of art deserver the fruits of their labor, the people who create great software deserve the fruits of their labor. Perhaps so, but if that's your goal, we know that the current patent and copyright laws will not accomplish it. The current system is just a crap shoot, albeit heavily weighted towards those who (a) have a lot of money, (b) want to make a lot of money, and (c) are willing to spend a considerable amount of time gaming the system rather than being creative.Just thought that was funny. I have no useful comment.
"Okay, first let's make sure he's really dead."
"Okay."
(silence, then a gunshot)
"Okay." (pause) "Should I double-check the tiger, too?"
If you're wanting to know about recovery for security purposes, as in, "how do I destroy this thing so that no one can recover data from it?", that's an interesting and useful question. If you're just wanting to know out of general curiosity, it's also an interesting question.
But if you're thinking about what might be possible as part of disaster recovery, you've completely lost the plot. This thought seems to spring from the same well as the idea that "mirroring" can be used for backups. No, no, a thousand times no.
The custom, at least in the US, is that IT/programming managers should have a degree (if any) from outside this field and little experience within it...
This sounds good in principle, but a lot of software that we programmers assume has crap correctness is actually being used in critical ways. Excel, for example, is in the pipeline for a lot of engineering and scientific calculations, even though it's riddled with bugs and usability problems. You can say that users should know better, but Microsoft doesn't make clear that Excel is really just a toy, not for use on things that matter.
Although it's nominally a profiler, kcachegrind actually produces a fairly nice call graph, which can be quite helpful in figuring out what's going on. Even works (somewhat) if you don't have the source, as long as the binary isn't stripped...
I think a "reasonable and effective" solution to piracy would be to simply repeal all copyright laws. No more piracy--problem solved.
- Dabbling is good--keep it up. It's much harder to find time to do this later.
- Play around with at least a couple of high-level languages. Lisp or Scheme are the canonical examples. Haskell looks interesting these days.
- I wouldn't worry about writing programs in assembler per se, but it's useful to know conceptually how microprocessor instruction sets work.
- Learn other parts of the tool chain: make, bash, gprof, valgrind, strace, regular expressions, wireshark.
- When I was coming up, I read every man page on the Unix system I had access to. There's a lot more out there now, but the concept is still useful I think. Read, read, read, read, read.
- Non-technical issues turned out to be much more important than I thought they would. I'd suggest reading every Dilbert strip. Quite a lot of those are motivated by things that really happen in the real world.
Good luck.a container ship filled with 9-track tapes... :-)
I think you're actually agreeing with the parent post. To the degree that companies do good, it's because they think it will somehow maximize their (NPV) profit. Ethics has nothing to do with it. If breaking laws and chopping up grandmas will lead to profit, they'll do that, too.
Yes. Or to put it another way, if we are inside a simulation, nothing is really testable in the sense that we think it is. Induction is highly over-rated--it's primary redeeming factor seems to be just that we don't have much else to go on.
Not only that, but it seems like a distinct possibility. Who among us would not set up such a simulation if we had the capability? And who among us, watching the progress of technology over recent decades, seriously doubts that we will soon have the capability to set up such simulations?
Actually, I'm still staying out of the current DVD format, for these reasons...
(I'm just saying.)
(Kidding! Kidding! :-)
At first blush, this seems absurd, but once you think about it, it really isn't very different from what copyright (and IP in general) has become in recent decades. Disney, for example, is voting themselves eternal copyrights over their stuff, much of which is derivative. I think it's only a matter of time before each culture decides to lay claim to their corpus of work, from the beginning of time. It'd be an interesting battle, as arguably the creators of the English language contributed more to The Little Mermaid than Disney did...
The truth, in my humble experience, is that threading is rarely smart thing to do. There is the occasional rare case, but much more frequently people think they have a rare case when they don't.