I have also heard of docomo being lengthened into "Do Comunications" as another poster mentioned but I am quite sure this was a marketing slogan and not the origin of the word.
Actually, it's "DoCommunications over the Mobile Network", though I don't doubt that "DoCoMo" came first.
[Running an open relay is] like being ticketed for driving your car down the wrong side of the road at 90 miles per hour and then being pissed off that the cop did not provide you with free driving lessons and give you 10-15 days to stop driving like that.
Nice analogy, except that it doesn't work. If you're driving at 90 miles an hour on the wrong side of the road, then (1) your speedometer will tell you that you're driving at 90 miles an hour and (2) looking ahead will show you which side of the street you're on, which you can tell is the wrong side because of what you had to know to pass the test to get your driver's license.
With mail servers, however, there isn't, at least yet, any widespread tool that will tell you if you have an open relay (and given how such tools work, they'll probably be banned as "hacker tools" at the rate things are going these days). In fact, I found out recently that I'd been placed on a blacklist for having an open relay, which took me by surprise because I'd been careful to avoid having anything like that happen; it turned out that I had missed one of the potential avenues of abuse (specifically, using error bounces to spam people).
So until running a (secure!) mail server becomes as simple as driving a car and people need licenses to run servers, your analogy is inappropriate.
Do you happen to know what TV tuner cards are known to work in Linux, or where a list of such can be found? I've been thinking about building myself a PVR-type system lately, but TV tuner cards cost a bit, and I sure don't want to make a $100+ mistake buying a card that I end up not being able to use.
The kernel . . . is writen in C with a ton of GNU extentions. So the kernel is really tied to gcc. (which actually makes it more protable because gcc runs on a ton of machines)
Um, no. Using compiler-specific extensions does not make code more portable by any possible interpretation of the word. If it didn't use any extensions, then not only could GCC compile it, so could Intel's compiler, Sun's compiler, etc. That would be portable.
While we're on the subject, though, it would be nice to see at least some of the GCC extensions make it into other compilers. I try to write code without them as much as possible, but in particular I've found the typeof() construct useful, as well as the ability to initialize arbitrary members of a union (yes, I know I could just turn them into structs, but that's a waste of memory). Does anyone know alternate ways of doing things like this in standard C, or whether the GCC folks are doing anything to try and get their extensions included in the standard?
New York, Chicago, and a couple of west coast cities isn't really nationwide, is it?
Sure it is. New York is on the east coast, Chicago is in the middle, and a couple of west coast cities are on the west coast, so the release area is "as wide as the nation"; therefore, "nationwide".
Not that much, and certainly not so much that a 2-year-old child couldn't break it (not that I have children, but I remember enough of when my siblings were that age). I've snapped coasters quite a bit--great stress reliever, though a bit messier than floppies--and all it really takes is silencing the little voice in your head that says "if you break this you're going to get little flecks of blue stuff all over the floor and the desk and your clothes and you'll never be able to clean it all up!"
I'm in Japan, so snail mail is at this point out of the question, but I've already sent in via E-mail. (At least, I sent one yesterday; I might have sent one when it was first announced, too, but I don't recall. I hope they don't ignore you if you send in two opinions...)
There was a pinball construction set, IIRC, for the C-64, maybe someone's done like for the PC? With the speed of processors this should be a piece of cake, these days.
Pinball Construction Set was released for the PC, way back around 1985 or so. I think I still have it sitting around, but unfortunately it was designed back in the days when there was only one processor speed, and so it doesn't work on modern CPUs... well, it does, but you can't tell because by the time the next vertical blank comes around your game is over.;) I had oh-so-much fun with PCS, though, and I'd love to see another program like it.
As for what happened to WMS, they just dropped the pinball business, IIRC. I don't recall the exact reason, but I assume it was just that they weren't making money on it. It may just be that my experience is limited, but particularly since '97 or so I've rarely come across a machine that's even decently maintained, save privately owned ones, and that's obviously going to drive players away. I suppose the operators just got too spoiled by video games that just don't need maintenance...
... at the CEATEC Japan exhibition last Fall, and it was frankly incredible. For all that it's sitting an inch in front of your eye it looks like it's a couple of feet away, and it's very easy to read; they had an automated demo running, showing things like maps and train schedules. The pointer is controlled by a pressure-sensitive controller you operate with your thumb, sort of ilke the "knobs" in some laptop computers. While it was admittedly a bit disorienting to have the display in one eye while seeing the rest of the world from the other, I'd imagine that's something you could get used to without too much difficulty, though I'd be concerned about the loss of depth vision.
At any rate, it's a fascinating little gizmo... but I think I'll wait for the price to come down before I look into it.;)
If so, this sounds just like the stupid idea a year or two ago of mapping peoples' phone numbers to DNS. (It's exactly the opposite of what you want to do. If you want to find a particular person's website, why not make use of the new.name TLD and use the person's full name?)
How about because two different people can have the same name, while no two people can have the same phone number? If you use names then you're just asking for domain wars all over again. This is, I think, one of the biggest failings of the Domain Name System with respect to the modern Internet: no two people or organizations can have the same name, at least and get equal recognition. Especially now that we have Google, I don't really see much of a problem with switching back to a numbered system (maybe not IP addresses, since you can't move those around, but some similar system with arbitrarily assigned numbers). After all, telephone books served us quite well back in the day...
To be fair, I think it's more of a lone editor on a power trip than a big conspiracy, but I agree that given how big Slashdot has become, CmdrTaco and crew ought to take a little more responsibility.
Oh, and I found this amusing (from your user page):
As an aside, I bought a game ages ago that must have been written for a 386/486 and ran it on my P233 (as it was at the time). The game was unplayable because of the speed. I dread to think how it would run on my Athlon 1800+XP... *shudder*
Ever hear of Night Mission Pinball? One of my favorite games when I was younger, but it was written for an IBM PC with an 8086 processor. You know, the old 3.whatever MHz things. Well, I came across it a few years ago while going back through old floppies, and after locating a 5-1/4" floppy drive, booted it on my 200MHz Pentium.
Let's just say that the "ball launch" button turned into the "ball drain" button...
So how exactly does consulting with a fellow student (or co-worker) result in both parties having identical code?
I have to say that this is the most ignorant... well, you get the idea:
John: Hey, Bob, you got a sec? I'm trying to get this stupid utility done and it's not working right...
Bob: Yeah, sure... hmm... hey, I wrote something just like this a while back. Hang on, lemme go look for it.
(a few ls's, cp's, and cc's later)
John: Cool, thanks!
Granted, school and work have different goals (learning vs. getting things done) and this argument doesn't apply to students, so I agree with the point that students shouldn't be copying without actually thinking about the assignment, but for the same reason it's absurd to say that co-workers shouldn't just copy code either.
My body (and simiconcious mind) hate waking up so much that i can turn off an alarm (even my winamp alarm) without ever becoming completely lucid.
I have to deal with the same thing myself, which is exacerbated by my being on a 5:30am wakeup schedule (I'm a night person by nature, but my company requires me to be at work by 10am and leave by 10pm, and since everyone else comes in at 10am and stays late, the only time I can get a quiet environment to work in is early morning). I often have trouble getting to sleep before 10:30-11pm unless I'm really exhausted, so I end up using an alarm clock to get myself up, but like you, I keep turning them off in my sleep.
Then I had a clever idea: I wrote a little program that played a sound--and ignored all terminal signals, so the only way to get rid of it was kill -9 from a different terminal--and locked the terminal before going to sleep, so I'd have to enter my password in order to turn the alarm off. (Incidentally, at this particular point in time I was living in a one-room apartment with a loft, so I had to climb down a ladder to get to the computer.)
Well, when I woke up the next day, there was no alarm going off, and plenty of sunlight streaming in the window. This was not a good sign, I thought, so I climbed down the ladder and looked at the screen. The terminal was unlocked, and "killall -9 alarm" was displayed on the console. Obviously, I must have been at least semi-conscious at the time, but I don't remember any of it.
I've also on several occasions had dreams where the alarm manifests itself as something inside the dream; unfortunately, I can never recognize it for what it is. One time, I was trying to fix a radio that would only put out intermittent weak static, no matter what station I tuned it to; it turned out that my alarm sound (which consists of a series of beeps followed by about 2 seconds' worth of/vmlinux) had shaken the speaker on my notebook so much that its connection to the mainboard had gone bad. Maybe I should try an alarm that says "Wake up, idiot!"
Well, that was a lot of offtopic rambling, but I guess I'm just pretty amazed at what one's brain can do while asleep...
I have practically no background in quantum physics, but:
Couldn't you, say, devise a system where each "bit" of information was transmitted for a certain length of time? After all, this is basically a serial communication system, so as long as you know the time for a bit, you wouldn't have to know the polarization of every single photon passing through--you could just catch the 0-degree (or 90-degree, either way) photons, and assume that when you weren't getting photons then they were all polarized the other way, giving you a bit of the opposite value.
Or so it seems to my simple mind, anyway... is there a reason this wouldn't work?
In answer to your question, while certain logical constructs are best expressed in code, overall concepts are usually just as easy if not easier to express in a natural language.
This is more or less what I was trying to get across (not all that effectively, I guess); comments are most helpful when they give the reader more information than they can easily get from reading the code, and code that's easy enough to understand without comments shouldn't be commented "on principle". I guess it's just that my idea of "easy" is a bit different from that of other people. <shrug>
At any rate, I do comment and document my code (or at least, I'm trying to do better than I have in the past), and I agree with the point you make with your Indianapolis and Sydney analogy. I guess I'm just cranky today, too...
I covered most of these in another response, but two minor points:
our example seems obvious to you because you're used to concepts like memory (de)allocation and you're used to the C language. Someone without the same background won't immediately recognise that you're deallocating memory because they won't know that free() deallocates memory.
Then why are they trying to use C in the first place? When I stop to think about it, I find it truly odd that software companies have no qualms bringing in someone with little or no experience to work on critical projects.
Well, you need to write to your audience.
Well, that example looks like it was a bad choice, because it's getting misinterpreted all over the place; the professor in this case was talking about general programming style.
(Oh, and I'm not usually the trolling bastard I probably sound like; I just got up on the wrong side of the bed, I guess.)
to make a long reply short, I don't write code for non-programmers, especially when dealing with personal projects. I think it's reasonable to expect a certain level of skill out of anyone who intends to work on my code (or any code, for that matter), and I design and code with that in mind. You can call it laziness if you like; I call it "efficient use of limited time". I write documentation for non-programmers.
And yes, when I'm doing something at work I put in more comments than usual--among other reasons, because the other folks in my group don't have that much programming skill--but I also don't consider comments a substitute for documentation, as you (and the original poster) seem to. Documentation is absolutely good; just let me push it aside when I've got a handle on it and want to work on the code.
Oh, and here's a little question... I've been speaking English for 24 years, and Japanese for only a little over 5; why is it, then, that I have trouble expressing some concepts in English that I have no trouble with in Japanese? Hm? Maybe it's because some languages are better at expressing certain concepts than others.
You're right, to some extent. Generally, my comments aren't explaining _what_ the code does, but _why_ it does it, and include a brief description of any peculiarities.
Thanks, that's basically what I was trying to say. On the other hand, I've also seen code that was, as the original poster said, "English with C++ sprinkled in between" (well, plain C in my case), and it was surprisingly hard to maintain--just because what would normally be a 20-to-30-line block of code had expanded to several screenfuls worth, and it was taking more time to wade through all the comments than it would have taken to just glance at the code and say "oh, this is doing XYZ".
If you don't believe comments are important, find code that you haven't touched in 2 or more years. Now try to add some significant features.
I've had to do this, as it happens, and this is why I also comment a lot more than I used to. (Which unfortunately doesn't help the older code, but I guess I'll just have to fix it as I go along.)
Slashdot Mirror
I have also heard of docomo being lengthened into "Do Comunications" as another poster mentioned but I am quite sure this was a marketing slogan and not the origin of the word.
Actually, it's "Do Communications over the Mobile Network", though I don't doubt that "DoCoMo" came first.
[Running an open relay is] like being ticketed for driving your car down the wrong side of the road at 90 miles per hour and then being pissed off that the cop did not provide you with free driving lessons and give you 10-15 days to stop driving like that.
Nice analogy, except that it doesn't work. If you're driving at 90 miles an hour on the wrong side of the road, then (1) your speedometer will tell you that you're driving at 90 miles an hour and (2) looking ahead will show you which side of the street you're on, which you can tell is the wrong side because of what you had to know to pass the test to get your driver's license.
With mail servers, however, there isn't, at least yet, any widespread tool that will tell you if you have an open relay (and given how such tools work, they'll probably be banned as "hacker tools" at the rate things are going these days). In fact, I found out recently that I'd been placed on a blacklist for having an open relay, which took me by surprise because I'd been careful to avoid having anything like that happen; it turned out that I had missed one of the potential avenues of abuse (specifically, using error bounces to spam people).
So until running a (secure!) mail server becomes as simple as driving a car and people need licenses to run servers, your analogy is inappropriate.
Do you happen to know what TV tuner cards are known to work in Linux, or where a list of such can be found? I've been thinking about building myself a PVR-type system lately, but TV tuner cards cost a bit, and I sure don't want to make a $100+ mistake buying a card that I end up not being able to use.
No, don't think rm -rf / . . . oh shit, excuse me while I kill -9 -1 real qui
The kernel . . . is writen in C with a ton of GNU extentions. So the kernel is really tied to gcc. (which actually makes it more protable because gcc runs on a ton of machines)
Um, no. Using compiler-specific extensions does not make code more portable by any possible interpretation of the word. If it didn't use any extensions, then not only could GCC compile it, so could Intel's compiler, Sun's compiler, etc. That would be portable.
While we're on the subject, though, it would be nice to see at least some of the GCC extensions make it into other compilers. I try to write code without them as much as possible, but in particular I've found the typeof() construct useful, as well as the ability to initialize arbitrary members of a union (yes, I know I could just turn them into structs, but that's a waste of memory). Does anyone know alternate ways of doing things like this in standard C, or whether the GCC folks are doing anything to try and get their extensions included in the standard?
New York, Chicago, and a couple of west coast cities isn't really nationwide, is it?
Sure it is. New York is on the east coast, Chicago is in the middle, and a couple of west coast cities are on the west coast, so the release area is "as wide as the nation"; therefore, "nationwide".
Then again, maybe not.
Snapping a CD/CDR takes a fair amount of force...
Not that much, and certainly not so much that a 2-year-old child couldn't break it (not that I have children, but I remember enough of when my siblings were that age). I've snapped coasters quite a bit--great stress reliever, though a bit messier than floppies--and all it really takes is silencing the little voice in your head that says "if you break this you're going to get little flecks of blue stuff all over the floor and the desk and your clothes and you'll never be able to clean it all up!"
I'm in Japan, so snail mail is at this point out of the question, but I've already sent in via E-mail. (At least, I sent one yesterday; I might have sent one when it was first announced, too, but I don't recall. I hope they don't ignore you if you send in two opinions...)
There was a pinball construction set, IIRC, for the C-64, maybe someone's done like for the PC? With the speed of processors this should be a piece of cake, these days.
Pinball Construction Set was released for the PC, way back around 1985 or so. I think I still have it sitting around, but unfortunately it was designed back in the days when there was only one processor speed, and so it doesn't work on modern CPUs... well, it does, but you can't tell because by the time the next vertical blank comes around your game is over. ;) I had oh-so-much fun with PCS, though, and I'd love to see another program like it.
As for what happened to WMS, they just dropped the pinball business, IIRC. I don't recall the exact reason, but I assume it was just that they weren't making money on it. It may just be that my experience is limited, but particularly since '97 or so I've rarely come across a machine that's even decently maintained, save privately owned ones, and that's obviously going to drive players away. I suppose the operators just got too spoiled by video games that just don't need maintenance...
At any rate, it's a fascinating little gizmo... but I think I'll wait for the price to come down before I look into it. ;)
If so, this sounds just like the stupid idea a year or two ago of mapping peoples' phone numbers to DNS. (It's exactly the opposite of what you want to do. If you want to find a particular person's website, why not make use of the new .name TLD and use the person's full name?)
How about because two different people can have the same name, while no two people can have the same phone number? If you use names then you're just asking for domain wars all over again. This is, I think, one of the biggest failings of the Domain Name System with respect to the modern Internet: no two people or organizations can have the same name, at least and get equal recognition. Especially now that we have Google, I don't really see much of a problem with switching back to a numbered system (maybe not IP addresses, since you can't move those around, but some similar system with arbitrarily assigned numbers). After all, telephone books served us quite well back in the day...
To be fair, I think it's more of a lone editor on a power trip than a big conspiracy, but I agree that given how big Slashdot has become, CmdrTaco and crew ought to take a little more responsibility.
Oh, and I found this amusing (from your user page):
GigsVT has posted 666 comments. [...]
Bah, I didn't need that 49 karma anyway...
Do I care if it takes 29 seconds to recompile vs 30 seconds?
You do if you're holding a lungful of air in the total vacuum of space.
As an aside, I bought a game ages ago that must have been written for a 386/486 and ran it on my P233 (as it was at the time). The game was unplayable because of the speed. I dread to think how it would run on my Athlon 1800+XP... *shudder*
Ever hear of Night Mission Pinball? One of my favorite games when I was younger, but it was written for an IBM PC with an 8086 processor. You know, the old 3.whatever MHz things. Well, I came across it a few years ago while going back through old floppies, and after locating a 5-1/4" floppy drive, booted it on my 200MHz Pentium.
Let's just say that the "ball launch" button turned into the "ball drain" button...
... that the universe is, after all, just a big computer simulation.
So how exactly does consulting with a fellow student (or co-worker) result in both parties having identical code?
I have to say that this is the most ignorant ... well, you get the idea:
John: Hey, Bob, you got a sec? I'm trying to get this stupid utility done and it's not working right ...
Bob: Yeah, sure ... hmm ... hey, I wrote something just like this a while back. Hang on, lemme go look for it.
(a few ls's, cp's, and cc's later)
John: Cool, thanks!
Granted, school and work have different goals (learning vs. getting things done) and this argument doesn't apply to students, so I agree with the point that students shouldn't be copying without actually thinking about the assignment, but for the same reason it's absurd to say that co-workers shouldn't just copy code either.
My body (and simiconcious mind) hate waking up so much that i can turn off an alarm (even my winamp alarm) without ever becoming completely lucid.
I have to deal with the same thing myself, which is exacerbated by my being on a 5:30am wakeup schedule (I'm a night person by nature, but my company requires me to be at work by 10am and leave by 10pm, and since everyone else comes in at 10am and stays late, the only time I can get a quiet environment to work in is early morning). I often have trouble getting to sleep before 10:30-11pm unless I'm really exhausted, so I end up using an alarm clock to get myself up, but like you, I keep turning them off in my sleep.
Then I had a clever idea: I wrote a little program that played a sound--and ignored all terminal signals, so the only way to get rid of it was kill -9 from a different terminal--and locked the terminal before going to sleep, so I'd have to enter my password in order to turn the alarm off. (Incidentally, at this particular point in time I was living in a one-room apartment with a loft, so I had to climb down a ladder to get to the computer.)
Well, when I woke up the next day, there was no alarm going off, and plenty of sunlight streaming in the window. This was not a good sign, I thought, so I climbed down the ladder and looked at the screen. The terminal was unlocked, and "killall -9 alarm" was displayed on the console. Obviously, I must have been at least semi-conscious at the time, but I don't remember any of it.
I've also on several occasions had dreams where the alarm manifests itself as something inside the dream; unfortunately, I can never recognize it for what it is. One time, I was trying to fix a radio that would only put out intermittent weak static, no matter what station I tuned it to; it turned out that my alarm sound (which consists of a series of beeps followed by about 2 seconds' worth of /vmlinux) had shaken the speaker on my notebook so much that its connection to the mainboard had gone bad. Maybe I should try an alarm that says "Wake up, idiot!"
Well, that was a lot of offtopic rambling, but I guess I'm just pretty amazed at what one's brain can do while asleep...
It's there, all right (not 0.02, but 0.01, 0.11, 0.12, and many 0.9x releases, in various subdirectories): http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/
I have practically no background in quantum physics, but:
Couldn't you, say, devise a system where each "bit" of information was transmitted for a certain length of time? After all, this is basically a serial communication system, so as long as you know the time for a bit, you wouldn't have to know the polarization of every single photon passing through--you could just catch the 0-degree (or 90-degree, either way) photons, and assume that when you weren't getting photons then they were all polarized the other way, giving you a bit of the opposite value.
Or so it seems to my simple mind, anyway... is there a reason this wouldn't work?
In answer to your question, while certain logical constructs are best expressed in code, overall concepts are usually just as easy if not easier to express in a natural language.
This is more or less what I was trying to get across (not all that effectively, I guess); comments are most helpful when they give the reader more information than they can easily get from reading the code, and code that's easy enough to understand without comments shouldn't be commented "on principle". I guess it's just that my idea of "easy" is a bit different from that of other people. <shrug>
At any rate, I do comment and document my code (or at least, I'm trying to do better than I have in the past), and I agree with the point you make with your Indianapolis and Sydney analogy. I guess I'm just cranky today, too...
I covered most of these in another response, but two minor points:
our example seems obvious to you because you're used to concepts like memory (de)allocation and you're used to the C language. Someone without the same background won't immediately recognise that you're deallocating memory because they won't know that free() deallocates memory.
Then why are they trying to use C in the first place? When I stop to think about it, I find it truly odd that software companies have no qualms bringing in someone with little or no experience to work on critical projects.
Well, you need to write to your audience.
Well, that example looks like it was a bad choice, because it's getting misinterpreted all over the place; the professor in this case was talking about general programming style.
(Oh, and I'm not usually the trolling bastard I probably sound like; I just got up on the wrong side of the bed, I guess.)
to make a long reply short, I don't write code for non-programmers, especially when dealing with personal projects. I think it's reasonable to expect a certain level of skill out of anyone who intends to work on my code (or any code, for that matter), and I design and code with that in mind. You can call it laziness if you like; I call it "efficient use of limited time". I write documentation for non-programmers.
And yes, when I'm doing something at work I put in more comments than usual--among other reasons, because the other folks in my group don't have that much programming skill--but I also don't consider comments a substitute for documentation, as you (and the original poster) seem to. Documentation is absolutely good; just let me push it aside when I've got a handle on it and want to work on the code.
Oh, and here's a little question... I've been speaking English for 24 years, and Japanese for only a little over 5; why is it, then, that I have trouble expressing some concepts in English that I have no trouble with in Japanese? Hm? Maybe it's because some languages are better at expressing certain concepts than others.
You're right, to some extent. Generally, my comments aren't explaining _what_ the code does, but _why_ it does it, and include a brief description of any peculiarities.
Thanks, that's basically what I was trying to say. On the other hand, I've also seen code that was, as the original poster said, "English with C++ sprinkled in between" (well, plain C in my case), and it was surprisingly hard to maintain--just because what would normally be a 20-to-30-line block of code had expanded to several screenfuls worth, and it was taking more time to wade through all the comments than it would have taken to just glance at the code and say "oh, this is doing XYZ".
If you don't believe comments are important, find code that you haven't touched in 2 or more years. Now try to add some significant features.
I've had to do this, as it happens, and this is why I also comment a lot more than I used to. (Which unfortunately doesn't help the older code, but I guess I'll just have to fix it as I go along.)