I'm frying my hat in butter and a little garlic as we speak. Soon, in little strips and maybe tossed into a salid it shall be headed down my gullet because something I never thought would happen obviously has.
Europe, as a whole, as an administrative behemoth designed primarily to redistribute wealth towards French farmers, has got it. It has understood the whole concept of control of information systems to an almost Microsoft level of conception... and it doesn't like what it sees.
GPS gives us stuff we *need* right now. It navigates our aircraft, ships, even satellite launches themselves and control of the GPS system equates to control of these increasingly critical resources. If George Dubbya, or indeed any future US president decides that the war against terrorism suddenly includes Europe he'll be able to shut the place down with the single click of a (probably Microsoft) mouse. Let's face it, it's not that unlikely. With the whole Afghanistan thing the US has proven it is quite willing to act unilaterally in kicking anyone's arse it damn well feels like.
Europe's take on the situation? Fuck that, we'll build our own. And using $2.2bn that was otherwise vital for Monsieur Marcaud to sit on his butt and watch Canal+ we suddenly have Europe taking control over it's own future. "if the EU went ahead with its own satellite positioning system its radio signals might interfere with US military operations based on GPS. " - I imagine it says that somewhere on the requirements document too.
Strike one for disarming the warmongering lunatics, thank god for that.
Insightful, complete and yet concise. I'd email you to congratulate, but we have a distinct lack of even an obfuscated email address so I can't.
Java/J2EE has finished.NET's lunch, cleared the table, and taken a nap, and Microsoft doesn't even know it yet.
I know, I've been a Java hater for a good long time and only now am I starting to realise how wrong I was. Yes, it pisses all over C++'s parade. And yes, it does attract lamers like flies to horseshit. But look how entrenched it is... Look how it does at least attempt to support standards... Look how much developers like it... That's one hell of a lot of mindshare Microsoft have lost - go Java.
Netscape had a code-base that reputed to be the worst example of speghetti-code ever to exist
Had you been around when it was released (97?), and working in an a productivity challenged envrionment such as I was, you too could've spent a day getting it to compile. Fsck, it was hysterical, and when the sodding thing finally built it had an uptime hovering around the five minutes mark. If you didn't use it much.
Netscape lost the hunger, started producing crap, didn't refactor, and hired losers - according to Mr Zawinksy that is: "you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company. Netscape's early success and rapid growth caused us to stop getting the former and start getting the latter."
Or even "Netscape was shipping garbage".
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
Anyway, we all know who lost, and I can't remember why we're now rehashing it three years after it happened.
No mod points, but +1 Informative and absolutely true. There was no need to nuke Japan, history is written by the winners.
I sometimes wander what we'd be talking about if Germany had won? I imagine that by now it would still be accepted that the holocaust was entirely unnecessary, maybe even the war itself, but that it was a good job 'we' won otherwise those terrible "allies" would have unleashed nuclear weapons on the world - then where would we be?
kcalc has the biggest footprint I've ever seen for a calculator
I have a suspicion this is to do with the C++ linker problem. In a nutshell, GCC"s handling of relocating libraries when they address collide sucks. It's slow. Really slow. The KDE team have been attempting to get over this by creating one process that loads most of the libraries - kdeinit, then forking the process to be the individual applications. The long and the short of this is the libraries remain loaded at the same address, don't have to reload and relocate, and all the processes can share the same code pages since they're copy on write.
Don't worry, they know it's a hack too.
There's a lot of work going into making it such that the GCC linker can build libraries to different default virtual memory addresses, hence stopping the loader from having to relocate libraries. When this happens the individual distros can be built with non colliding libraries, the kdeinit hack can go away and all will be at peace in KDE land. Personally, I'd delay 3.0 until the situation is sorted, but it's not my project.
Dave
Re:NetBSD stopped being useful once I forked OpenB
on
NetBSD 1.5ZB
·
· Score: 2
While a fine beginners troll, you missed some finer points. Theo DeRaadt isn't this polite, for one. Secondly, the real Mr DeRaadt would probably PGP sign even a slashdot post. And thirdly, since OpenBSD also lacks SMP support, I really don't think he'd be attracting attention to the fact.
But, I mean, not bad - and I eagerly await future works.
Yeah, whatever but right now network bandwidth is fscking expensive. OTOH I'm not sure that an appreciable quantity of the bandwidth from a website is actually text.
FWIW these guys use php's ob_gzhander function and appear to get quite good results.
Seconded. Mind you, I think it may be an attempt at divide and conquer rather than anything else. What they don't appear to realise is that FreeBSD and Linux are not mutually exclusive - they can both exist and there will not be a winner - indeed, the existence of FreeBSD helps keep Linux 'honest' in terms of portability. A bit, anyway.
Bizaarely I am starting to see adverts for PHP developers. There is C++ too, although it was never suited to web development.
and it should be our job as supposed experts to investigate all the options
Sure, but you need people to maintain the code afterwards, and that basically means make CS graduates want to code in it. The other approaches *have* been marginalized:(
Actually, this is a bit of a disappointment. While the general idea of setting a goal of getting to 1.0 is all good - witness what happened to the quality of Mozilla when they stopped feature creeping - I can't help but feel the Open Office crew are letting the side down a bit by admitting that their 1.0 release will really be about an 0.8.5 level release and will still contain bugs. It's all a bit, well, Microsofty.
Still, I can see some interesting projects about to kick off - The Open Office wordprocessor as a KPart, for example:)
The only time I've been in a similar situation I was lucky because I could hand over a piece of hardware and say "go on then, assess this". But software? Source? Training and documentation? You're about to be raped, buddy.
I can see you're in a bad place - really wanting to make this deal happen, but you have to look at the risks. Three suggestions:
1, Turn the deal on its' head, get them to bring their software, source, docco and people to your place. Work to integrate the two and see if the execs like the end result. 2, Get them to define what it is they are hoping to achieve and have a third party consultancy assess your code to see if it fits the requirements. 3, Stay with the original gig but get them to sign a really viscious NDA preventing them from producing some derivative work or entering into the same market for 'n' years. They probably won't go for it, but hey.
Way back when I developed ActiveX's the requirement to be able to call them out of process was, basically, the root of all evil. In order to be able to call something out of process it is necessary to state which parameters are going [in] and [out], and marshalling code needed to be written to be able to pass pointed to structures over the process boundary. Needless to say it was a bit of a shitfight. To hear KParts is going this way is *not* music to my ears.
Solution? Don't allow people to pass pointers over process boundaries. Use something light and yummy for the inter process stuff and something designed for the job (corba) out of process.
That's a stupid conclusion. It's not like he can not have insurance if he thinks it's too expensive.
But he can always shop around and find a different insurer. Or flog his dented 911 and buy a honda civic. The basic principles of the free market remain the same: This is what it costs, pay yes/no?
Actually about your.sig - something about lottery players not picking 1,2,3,4,5,6. Aparrently they do, and since the jackpot would be shared amongst the large number of people - all of which thought this was an original idea - each would get fuck all.
The tactics are supposed to be to avoid anything logical, and avoid numbers less than thirty (people's birthdays). Neither make it more likely that you win, but they do lower the number of people that share the jackpot.
It appears to me that we've evolved to have the organisms in our mouth that we do have for a reason. Whatever that reason may be. Maybe sometimes we should just *not* fuck with nature?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm frying my hat in butter and a little garlic as we speak. Soon, in little strips and maybe tossed into a salid it shall be headed down my gullet because something I never thought would happen obviously has.
... and it doesn't like what it sees.
Europe, as a whole, as an administrative behemoth designed primarily to redistribute wealth towards French farmers, has got it. It has understood the whole concept of control of information systems to an almost Microsoft level of conception
GPS gives us stuff we *need* right now. It navigates our aircraft, ships, even satellite launches themselves and control of the GPS system equates to control of these increasingly critical resources. If George Dubbya, or indeed any future US president decides that the war against terrorism suddenly includes Europe he'll be able to shut the place down with the single click of a (probably Microsoft) mouse. Let's face it, it's not that unlikely. With the whole Afghanistan thing the US has proven it is quite willing to act unilaterally in kicking anyone's arse it damn well feels like.
Europe's take on the situation? Fuck that, we'll build our own. And using $2.2bn that was otherwise vital for Monsieur Marcaud to sit on his butt and watch Canal+ we suddenly have Europe taking control over it's own future. "if the EU went ahead with its own satellite positioning system its radio signals might interfere with US military operations based on GPS. " - I imagine it says that somewhere on the requirements document too.
Strike one for disarming the warmongering lunatics, thank god for that.
Dave
Insightful, complete and yet concise. I'd email you to congratulate, but we have a distinct lack of even an obfuscated email address so I can't.
.NET's lunch, cleared the table, and taken a nap, and Microsoft doesn't even know it yet.
Java/J2EE has finished
I know, I've been a Java hater for a good long time and only now am I starting to realise how wrong I was. Yes, it pisses all over C++'s parade. And yes, it does attract lamers like flies to horseshit. But look how entrenched it is... Look how it does at least attempt to support standards... Look how much developers like it... That's one hell of a lot of mindshare Microsoft have lost - go Java.
Dave
Netscape had a code-base that reputed to be the worst example of speghetti-code ever to exist
Had you been around when it was released (97?), and working in an a productivity challenged envrionment such as I was, you too could've spent a day getting it to compile. Fsck, it was hysterical, and when the sodding thing finally built it had an uptime hovering around the five minutes mark. If you didn't use it much.
Netscape lost the hunger, started producing crap, didn't refactor, and hired losers - according to Mr Zawinksy that is: "you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company. Netscape's early success and rapid growth caused us to stop getting the former and start getting the latter."
Or even "Netscape was shipping garbage".
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
Anyway, we all know who lost, and I can't remember why we're now rehashing it three years after it happened.
Dave
No mod points, but +1 Informative and absolutely true. There was no need to nuke Japan, history is written by the winners.
I sometimes wander what we'd be talking about if Germany had won? I imagine that by now it would still be accepted that the holocaust was entirely unnecessary, maybe even the war itself, but that it was a good job 'we' won otherwise those terrible "allies" would have unleashed nuclear weapons on the world - then where would we be?
Dave
kcalc has the biggest footprint I've ever seen for a calculator
I have a suspicion this is to do with the C++ linker problem. In a nutshell, GCC"s handling of relocating libraries when they address collide sucks. It's slow. Really slow. The KDE team have been attempting to get over this by creating one process that loads most of the libraries - kdeinit, then forking the process to be the individual applications. The long and the short of this is the libraries remain loaded at the same address, don't have to reload and relocate, and all the processes can share the same code pages since they're copy on write.
Don't worry, they know it's a hack too.
There's a lot of work going into making it such that the GCC linker can build libraries to different default virtual memory addresses, hence stopping the loader from having to relocate libraries. When this happens the individual distros can be built with non colliding libraries, the kdeinit hack can go away and all will be at peace in KDE land. Personally, I'd delay 3.0 until the situation is sorted, but it's not my project.
Dave
While a fine beginners troll, you missed some finer points. Theo DeRaadt isn't this polite, for one. Secondly, the real Mr DeRaadt would probably PGP sign even a slashdot post. And thirdly, since OpenBSD also lacks SMP support, I really don't think he'd be attracting attention to the fact.
But, I mean, not bad - and I eagerly await future works.
Dave
God, maybe someone standing behind me can see what's on my CRT too?
Dave
Yeah, whatever but right now network bandwidth is fscking expensive. OTOH I'm not sure that an appreciable quantity of the bandwidth from a website is actually text.
FWIW these guys use php's ob_gzhander function and appear to get quite good results.
Dave
Seconded. Mind you, I think it may be an attempt at divide and conquer rather than anything else. What they don't appear to realise is that FreeBSD and Linux are not mutually exclusive - they can both exist and there will not be a winner - indeed, the existence of FreeBSD helps keep Linux 'honest' in terms of portability. A bit, anyway.
Dave
"Ballmer complained that it would be too expensive to build a version of the Java programming language to package with Windows"
:)
"S'OK Mate!", chirps Scott McNealy, "we've got one here you can have for nothing".
Dave
Oh, um, yeah. Not good, eh?
Dave
Pair this thing with ... a top-notch audio system
Remembering to make the case itself a subwoofer?
Dave
No, that would be funny as.
Take off.... climb for twenty minutes then "paff! SHIT!" from business class.
Larf larf larf.
Dave
Yipee! They published their wire protocol:
"All data is encoded as little-endian."
Oh, god. Look, since the start of time itself binary data on the net has been big endian. No, you do not know better.
Head->table: Bang! Bang! Bang!
Dave
Bizaarely I am starting to see adverts for PHP developers. There is C++ too, although it was never suited to web development.
:(
and it should be our job as supposed experts to investigate all the options
Sure, but you need people to maintain the code afterwards, and that basically means make CS graduates want to code in it. The other approaches *have* been marginalized
Dave
I work for Sun, and submitted this story more than a month ago when we received internal email about the plans to charge for StarOffice.
;)
You mean you used to work for Sun until you submitted this story when you received an internal email?
Dave
Actually, this is a bit of a disappointment. While the general idea of setting a goal of getting to 1.0 is all good - witness what happened to the quality of Mozilla when they stopped feature creeping - I can't help but feel the Open Office crew are letting the side down a bit by admitting that their 1.0 release will really be about an 0.8.5 level release and will still contain bugs. It's all a bit, well, Microsofty.
:)
Still, I can see some interesting projects about to kick off - The Open Office wordprocessor as a KPart, for example
Dave
The only time I've been in a similar situation I was lucky because I could hand over a piece of hardware and say "go on then, assess this". But software? Source? Training and documentation? You're about to be raped, buddy.
I can see you're in a bad place - really wanting to make this deal happen, but you have to look at the risks. Three suggestions:
1, Turn the deal on its' head, get them to bring their software, source, docco and people to your place. Work to integrate the two and see if the execs like the end result.
2, Get them to define what it is they are hoping to achieve and have a third party consultancy assess your code to see if it fits the requirements.
3, Stay with the original gig but get them to sign a really viscious NDA preventing them from producing some derivative work or entering into the same market for 'n' years. They probably won't go for it, but hey.
Good luck, sounds like exciting times.
Dave
Oh god, not again...
Way back when I developed ActiveX's the requirement to be able to call them out of process was, basically, the root of all evil. In order to be able to call something out of process it is necessary to state which parameters are going [in] and [out], and marshalling code needed to be written to be able to pass pointed to structures over the process boundary. Needless to say it was a bit of a shitfight. To hear KParts is going this way is *not* music to my ears.
Solution? Don't allow people to pass pointers over process boundaries. Use something light and yummy for the inter process stuff and something designed for the job (corba) out of process.
Dave
That's a stupid conclusion. It's not like he can not have insurance if he thinks it's too expensive.
But he can always shop around and find a different insurer. Or flog his dented 911 and buy a honda civic. The basic principles of the free market remain the same: This is what it costs, pay yes/no?
Dave
So they charge you $200 more if you get a speeding ticket. Do you pay it? Well, there you are, they charge more because they can.
Dave
...by putting things that have already happened as potential domesday scenarios. For instance, page 22 has:
"Computer/Chip/Operating System Maker Blackmails Country or World - year 2000"
Ahhh, hello?
Dave
Actually about your .sig - something about lottery players not picking 1,2,3,4,5,6. Aparrently they do, and since the jackpot would be shared amongst the large number of people - all of which thought this was an original idea - each would get fuck all.
The tactics are supposed to be to avoid anything logical, and avoid numbers less than thirty (people's birthdays). Neither make it more likely that you win, but they do lower the number of people that share the jackpot.
Dave
It appears to me that we've evolved to have the organisms in our mouth that we do have for a reason. Whatever that reason may be. Maybe sometimes we should just *not* fuck with nature?
Dave
Should that be U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the patron saint of Microsoft bashers?
Dave