I suppose that if you do a search on the MS knowlege base, those words will turn up that page.
Obviously, Microsoft knows that Barney owners can't spell.
I suppose that makes sense, sort of... imagine a child trying to figure out why his/her Barney is playing peekaboo by itself. But... how the heck does the aforementioned child find his/her way to the knowlege base in the first place???
Unfortunately, their OpenGL drivers for Linux are not completely free software, but they are very fast.
3dfx is the "other company". They came late to the open source revolution, but have jumped on board pretty well. Unfortunately their hardware is not as good, and neither are their drivers, even the open source ones.
BTW, I have talked to Michael Abrash a couple of times. He is more than just a programmer (or even a very skilled programmer.)
His job at Microsoft is to MANAGE the X-Box program. He Knows What Is Going On, as far as the Xbox is concerned.
For early development and testing, they (Microsoft) are using GeForce2's, which have a similar feature set, but aren't as fast or flexible as the XBox will be, of course.
Actually, you are wrong. Did you read the article?
Obviously the box will be running a Microsoft OS. Do you really care if you can run Linux on it? The essential question is, will it be easy to write portable apps that work on both the XBox and other platforms?
Abrash clearly stated that NVidia will be providing an OpenGL API (with extensions for the new graphics features of the hardware) for those who prefer that API. It is a pretty safe assumption that those same OpenGL extensions will be available for the PC version of that version of NVidia's hardware which will be out in the same timeframe.
So if you code for that, you will not be stuck on a dead-end platform, and it should be as easy to port from that OpenGL interface to Linux as it is (or was) to port Quake III and other OpenGL apps to Linux.
And as far as DirectX goes... everyone knows it totally sucked up to version 6 or 7. But, IIRC, I just read an interview with John Carmack where he states that DirectX is finally getting good enough to be usable... although he plans to stick with OpenGL for several good reasons.
I don't like microsoft much either, but your ignorant MS-bashing (claiming that the machine will not run OpenGL!) just makes fans of open source API's look dumb.
Well, it's not that simple. You may recall a few months back, after Quake was GPL'ed, people started cheating by customizing clients. (Well, the problem was around before then, but after the source was opened it got really bad.)
Now those customized clients couldn't just get away with making the player twice as powerful, or twice as fast, or whatever. The server set the rules for that.
What the clients could do was: - add aim-bots that gave players perfect (easily detected by the server) or just better aim. Some players just have really, really good aim, and it's not easy for the server to tell the difference between that and a subtle, well-written aim bot. - Presumably, any other advantage that is possible within the game physics/rules - automatically dodging rockets, detecting (beeping?) whenever anyone has you in their crosshairs, or whatever. - Plus, see through walls, see in the dark, make all the other players look like big red targets, and other visual hacks.
A solution was developed, however. I don't remember the details, but I believe it uses a small closed-source component which does cryptographic signing and checking of the open-source clients.
Depending on the type of game, cheating can be a major or minor problem. For quake-style games (client-server, with prediction on the client) it's in-between. Everyone has to follow the rules of the server, but hacked clients can allow cheating as described.
For on-line games like chess, checkers, and cards, cheating isn't an issue because the game is really just a communications medium.
For big role-playing games, it seems to me that an open source approach could work. Since the frame rate isn't so critical, some of the cheating problems of quake can be eliminated by making more things "synchronous". For example, even if clients are hacked to make it possible to see through walls, if the server only sends information to the clients that are supposed to see it, seeing through walls doesn't get you much. This isn't done in quake because it would cause either a loss in framerate, or things "popping" into view right in front of you when the server finally gets around to sending you that information.
Anyway...
I would really like to see an on-line role playing game as much like Tolkien's Middle Earth as possible.
I think the problem with on-line role playing games isn't so much the technology, (Free/OpenSource or not) but the sociology of it. How do you deal with all the losers who don't stay in character, and just run around swearing at people or killing them?
Bad idea. Order online, sure, but then have the cd's shipped to you - just like CheapBytes does - really fast, in cheap cardboard liners. Very little packaging there!
You don't want to download because many software titles are huge. Thief II, for example, is two (2) CD's. Corel Draw comes with at least 3 CDs. So do many other apps. Now, I have ADSL, but I still wouldn't be enthusiastic about downloading 1.5 GB of data (and then having to burn it onto CD's anyway for backup).
The company I work for is currently using MySQL and Apache on BSD, but is switching to Oracle on Solaris (but keeping Apache). Why?
Well, the killer feature for us is actually the Oracle support for database synchronization. We need automatic, reliable, and highly configurable ways to keep some tables in many large databases synchronized, over the internet. (Actually, a virtual private network.) Oracle's transaction support is nice, but not actually that important for our application.
Fortunately, PHP works well with Oracle, so our smaller back-end tools won't need to be extensively rewritten. I do hope that MySQL gets good distributed database support soon - I'm sure it will happen eventually.
Another random thought just occurred to me: Would there be any use in creating a MySQL module for Apache? Or an integrated PHP/MySQL module? Perhaps for large websites using the common Apache+PHP+MySQL architecture there could be a speed improvement.
Memory compression (and disk compression too) are useless to me, with one exception: texture compression on video cards.
Think about this. I have 256 MB of ram and 50 GB of disk space on my main machine. Why not, it's cheap! What I want is lower latency storage. Right now, that is expensive or unavailable, but would make a difference to the performance-sensitive apps I run.
Furthermore, the large files that I would like to compress are already compressed: video (MPEG), sound (MP3), and image files (JPG). On my 40GB server, I have 17 GB of MP3s, 1 GB of other files, and the rest is empty space! Why bother compressing that 1 GB just to get half a gig back?
From what I hear, even people who do non-linear video editing are editing compressed MPEG directly these days, rather than using uncompressed AVI or other formats.
So... What applications could actually benefit from this?
Maybe web servers with thousands of text files in RAM? Maybe people working with extremely high resolution bitmaps or uncompressed video?
What this reminded me of most was parts of "Selected Ambient Works Volume II" by Aphex Twin. Tape loops and noises that sort of come together, much more than the sum of the parts, and induce a trance-like state... mmmm.
I downloaded these and listened to them a few days ago.
Unfortunately, the MP3's on the web site seem to be just short excerpts of the the whole symphony.
Now, I listen to a lot of music, from classical to rock to various electronica. I was impressed by this - I had expected it to be kind of a gimmick, or kind of a joke. But what I heard actually sounded musically interesting. Better than a lot of modern music, anyway. If I saw the whole thing available on CD I would buy it.
Yeah, you would think so. But companies do funny things.
The last place I worked, they were leasing Dell desktops. By the time the machines had reached the end of their useful life, they had been paid for many times over. It would have been far, far cheaper to just buy them up front. And everyone knew it!
But due to "cash flow" and other accounting BS, they were leased anyway.
So there is no _economic_ reason that Microsoft could not successfully lease software. Companies will do it to avoid the budget hit of purchasing 1000 copies of Office 2000 at the same time. Remember, you will have to upgrade everyone at once, or document version incompatibility issues will kill you.
Or... companies will say "fsck this" and switch to free software. Linux should be pretty good for desktop machines by the end of the year, what with Mozilla, the new Gnome, new KDE, new office apps, the 2.4 kernel, and XFree86 4.0.
(And don't bother to tell me it's good now... yes, I run it now, but I wouldn't make my parents use it just yet. This Christmas I will probably switch them over.)
If you are using Microsoft Dev Studio, download and install the service packs! There are at least two for Dev Studio 6, IIRC, and you really need them.
Even with them, I used to crash the IDE every now and then. Sometimes when the IDE would crash it would leave processes hung in the background with files open, so make sure you kill those.
More often though, I would just partly corrupt the project. The fix for that was to shut down the IDE and delete the.ncb,.clw, and other non-source code files in the project directory. (But not the.dsp and.dsw).
Then restart, open class wizard, and rebuild the class library.
(You know, I'm glad I don't have to deal with that anymore. Just minutes ago I got the very latest Gnome + Enlightenment running on my FreeBSD development box, and now I'm going to learn how to customize the heck out of emacs... and I program in PHP and Java now. Whee!)
Hmmm. Well, I didn't know about TAGS. It sounds like the hard part (equivalent to the first stage of the compiler) is done by TAGS. So maybe with TAGS it would be easy.
Where can I find out more about TAGS? Does it support Java? (My employer's language of choice) Do TAGS automatically update whenever you add or modify members or methods in a class?
The other thing that is missing (or, maybe not?) from emacs is the good integrated debugger that DevStudio has. Can you do an edit and continue on a running C++ or Java program from inside emacs?
I hope the answer is yes, but I suspect no. But I was wrong before...
I suppose I will just have to take the plunge, get a good emacs book, and go from being an emacs user to an emacs expert. Then I'll be able to fix the keyboard commands too. (Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V should be cut, copy, paste, dammit! And Ctrl-Z for undo!)
No you could not add this to emacs as a "trivial hack". No way.
Why? Well, the compiler and the IDE talk to each other in DevStudio. The only way you could really get the same level of functionality in Emacs would be to build the first few stages of the C++ compiler pipeline into it.
If you type:
"pMyDoc->m_pWindo[tab]" it fills in the rest of the member variable. When you get the m_pWindowList you can type "->Head(" and the little tip window pops up and shows you what the arguments are for the Head method of pMyDoc->m_pWindowList.
Now, to do that in Emacs you would have to build code to:
1. Keep track of all temporary variables, their scope, and their type or class
2. Build tables of all classes and their methods and members, with the class or type of each.
The problem is, that's essentially the first stage of a compiler. It is NOT a trivial hack. You can't just do it by piping together a bunch of text parsing functions: you have to keep all this stuff in memory for decent performance - and even DevStudio 6 is pretty slow sometimes for this stuff.
On the other hand, under Windows you have to put up with MFC which has some good stuff but a lot of problems. You have to put up with all the different versions of Windows, which behave in different (undocumented!) ways and have different bugs. There are at least three occasions where I lost a night of sleep trying to fix things that worked perfectly under NT and blew up under Windows 95. (Microsoft fans who doubt me can get all the gory details by asking.) Without the source you often feel like you are working blindfolded.
My background: One month ago I started my cool new job using OpenBSD, Java, PHP, and Apache. I have used Linux at home for years, but haven't done serious development under it until now. I use Emacs because it's better than vi, but I don't think emacs is very good either. I want an editor that uses Alt- keys, not "Ctrl-X Ctrl-that Meta-x foo" for everything.
Simply put: I want Dev Studio 6 capabilities under a free operating system. That would be bliss. And if the IDE and compiler are all free software too.... ooohhh yeah baby.
The problem is, I believe that most free software developers just put in the huge effort to get good at vi or emacs (which are very powerful) but then don't have any incentive to create something better. And it could be better.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Re:Is it legal to convert PostScript to PDF?
on
From Paper To PDF?
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· Score: 3
The patent on gif is not the gif file format per se, but the compression algorithm.
*cough*. Obviously, there should just be single, large "easteregg.lib.so" that people could install or not when they set up the system.
Any app that wanted to do an easter egg could just dynamically link to the lib. This would have several advantages:
- reduce code bloat in apps, yet provide a very large library of cool easter eggs.
- Easter eggs could be themeable under Gnome and KDE.
- It would be possible to upgrade easter eggs without modifying applications
- Make it possible to abstract the easter egg functionality - for example, on a machine with X, a fancy graphical easter egg could be displayed, but on a console, a simple message could be printed like "If you had X, you would see the really cool easter egg here... Congratulations".
- Debian users could just "apt_get eastereggs", and RPM people could "rpm -i eastereggs" for maximum convenience.
- A useful set of files to know: /usr/doc/HOWTO/HOWTO-EasterEgg /etc/easteregg.conf /var/log/easteregg/found
- Each Linux distribution could customize the easter eggs without modifying the source of all the included apps.
- Other advantages are left as an exercise to the reader.
If you have a hub between the ADSL modem and the firewall box, instead of cutting wires in a perfectly good network cable, just attach a cheap old pentium machine to the hub. Set its NIC to promiscuous mode and sniff everything that goes by, but set up its own packet filtering to drop EVERYTHING.
Then it's like that box just doesn't exist to the rest of the network, but it sees everything, and can log it any way you want... It's like a shadow of the firewall - it can run any kind of security software, to set off alarms or whatever.
Disclaimer: I am not a security expert. If there are problems with my idea I would like to know about it (because I am using this idea on my own firewall setup).
Another idea I had but have not implemented is to modify the login software on my machines: If anyone logs in, they would have to run a specific "secret" program in 15 seconds or less. If not, a timer expires and shuts off the UPS powering the box.
Heh heh heh. Not suitable for systems that need to keep running, but nice for home machines that you want to keep secure.
A less extreme approach would just use ifconfig to turn off the network card, instead of having the UPS kill the power.
"...refusing to allow the developers who wrote software and released it under the GPL (as the GPL is non-revokable) to compile their programs for use with Motif."
This is baloney. A programmer who writes software can do whatever they want with it. If they release it under the GPL, that only changes what other people can do with it. The original programmer can give it away under other licenses, sell it to Microsoft, or link it with anything they like.
"That is precisely why I will use proprietary licenses and avoid the GPL; I simply cannot entrust my code to Stallman."
This cracks me up. I guess there must be some hidden clause in the GPL that only shows up when you dip the paper in lemon juice. It says "Despite anything else you read here, actually, RMS makes all the rules. You Must Trust Him".
If I release software under the GPL, that just means I understand the license and want those terms for my software, not necessarily that I trust RMS.
And I think it's great that he's uncompromising. Too many people in the world today are far to willing to compromise their ethics just for some short term benefit. I try to be just as uncompromising with my ethics.
You are trying to draw a line by saying that you should not be allowed to discriminate based on what someone couldn't choose (like their race) but should be allowed to discriminate based on something they couuld (like their religion).
But what you have forgotton is that on-line, no one can tell anything about you unless you say so. So it is your free will, if you say you are black, or if you say you are a jew, or whatever.
Obviously, I think that there is no difference - people should be protected from discrimination either way.
What if you are black in America, and you make some postings about being black in America. Then a bunch of skinheads DOS'es you. And then your ISP terminates you to protect themselves.
Don't you see that's almost the same as what happened here? I guess then you will say: "Well, the black guy made those postings of HIS OWN FREE WILL, so tough luck for him getting DOS'ed, and tough luck for him losing his account. There's nothing wrong with that..."
By your argument, it would be ok for ISP's to deny service to anyone who says online that they are black, or jewish, or gay, or whatever, because it is their own free will to say so or not.
Wake up! Stand up for people's rights, or there will be nobody left to stand up for you when your turn comes.
Yeah, well... but ICE, as Gibson defined it, stands for Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. Gibson describes it in more detail in Count Zero than he did in Neuromancer. And, in Gibson's book, only Black ICE, (which was illegal), had the capability to strike back and trash the attacker's nervous system.
Interestingly, there is a software program called Black ICE that a friend of mine runs on his cable-modem connected NT 4 box. He sees a LOT of portscans and similar low grade attacks. As far as I know, BlackICE doesn't do any counter-attacks though!
Yeah, there were at least two things in DOOM that scared me more than any other game so far.
1: The first time you meet one of the "invisible" versions of the pink demons. I freaked - shooting the shotgun off at random all over the place, thinking Sh*t sh*t it's invisible!!! ARRGH!
2: The first time you meet the CyberDemon. You start in this little room in the middle of the level, and you hear this roaring and stomping of an enemy you haven't met before... it was hard to go out and face him.
Ahh. Memories.
Too bad about the political infighting at ID though. You have to wonder what it's going to be like working there for John, Adrian, and Kevin, now that they've had such a nasty, public disagreement.
I honestly wonder if the company will stick together long enough to finish the game. It would not surprise me if the bad feelings escalate - after all, I bet Adrian and Kevin didn't expect John to post all the details of Paul Steed's firing in his plan.
Oh well. I suppose John, Graeme, Paul, and the rest could just leave and form a new company.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose that if you do a search on the MS knowlege base, those words will turn up that page.
Obviously, Microsoft knows that Barney owners can't spell.
I suppose that makes sense, sort of... imagine a child trying to figure out why his/her Barney is playing peekaboo by itself. But... how the heck does the aforementioned child find his/her way to the knowlege base in the first place???
One of the many mysteries of the MS KB. Hmmmm.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
This was moderated insightful? It's obviously a joke...
Oh, I get it... the moderator is attempting to be humorous too!
Ha! Good one!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
These days, NVidia is pretty good with OpenGL.
Unfortunately, their OpenGL drivers for Linux are not completely free software, but they are very fast.
3dfx is the "other company". They came late to the open source revolution, but have jumped on board pretty well. Unfortunately their hardware is not as good, and neither are their drivers, even the open source ones.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I agree.
BTW, I have talked to Michael Abrash a couple of times. He is more than just a programmer (or even a very skilled programmer.)
His job at Microsoft is to MANAGE the X-Box program. He Knows What Is Going On, as far as the Xbox is concerned.
For early development and testing, they (Microsoft) are using GeForce2's, which have a similar feature set, but aren't as fast or flexible as the XBox will be, of course.
(It must suck to be 3dfx!)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Actually, you are wrong. Did you read the article?
Obviously the box will be running a Microsoft OS. Do you really care if you can run Linux on it? The essential question is, will it be easy to write portable apps that work on both the XBox and other platforms?
Abrash clearly stated that NVidia will be providing an OpenGL API (with extensions for the new graphics features of the hardware) for those who prefer that API. It is a pretty safe assumption that those same OpenGL extensions will be available for the PC version of that version of NVidia's hardware which will be out in the same timeframe.
So if you code for that, you will not be stuck on a dead-end platform, and it should be as easy to port from that OpenGL interface to Linux as it is (or was) to port Quake III and other OpenGL apps to Linux.
And as far as DirectX goes... everyone knows it totally sucked up to version 6 or 7. But, IIRC, I just read an interview with John Carmack where he states that DirectX is finally getting good enough to be usable... although he plans to stick with OpenGL for several good reasons.
I don't like microsoft much either, but your ignorant MS-bashing (claiming that the machine will not run OpenGL!) just makes fans of open source API's look dumb.
Read the article next time!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Well, it's not that simple. You may recall a few months back, after Quake was GPL'ed, people started cheating by customizing clients. (Well, the problem was around before then, but after the source was opened it got really bad.)
Now those customized clients couldn't just get away with making the player twice as powerful, or twice as fast, or whatever. The server set the rules for that.
What the clients could do was:
- add aim-bots that gave players perfect (easily detected by the server) or just better aim. Some players just have really, really good aim, and it's not easy for the server to tell the difference between that and a subtle, well-written aim bot.
- Presumably, any other advantage that is possible within the game physics/rules - automatically dodging rockets, detecting (beeping?) whenever anyone has you in their crosshairs, or whatever.
- Plus, see through walls, see in the dark, make all the other players look like big red targets, and other visual hacks.
A solution was developed, however. I don't remember the details, but I believe it uses a small closed-source component which does cryptographic signing and checking of the open-source clients.
Depending on the type of game, cheating can be a major or minor problem. For quake-style games (client-server, with prediction on the client) it's in-between. Everyone has to follow the rules of the server, but hacked clients can allow cheating as described.
For on-line games like chess, checkers, and cards, cheating isn't an issue because the game is really just a communications medium.
For big role-playing games, it seems to me that an open source approach could work. Since the frame rate isn't so critical, some of the cheating problems of quake can be eliminated by making more things "synchronous". For example, even if clients are hacked to make it possible to see through walls, if the server only sends information to the clients that are supposed to see it, seeing through walls doesn't get you much. This isn't done in quake because it would cause either a loss in framerate, or things "popping" into view right in front of you when the server finally gets around to sending you that information.
Anyway...
I would really like to see an on-line role playing game as much like Tolkien's Middle Earth as possible.
I think the problem with on-line role playing games isn't so much the technology, (Free/OpenSource or not) but the sociology of it. How do you deal with all the losers who don't stay in character, and just run around swearing at people or killing them?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Bad idea. Order online, sure, but then have the cd's shipped to you - just like CheapBytes does - really fast, in cheap cardboard liners. Very little packaging there!
You don't want to download because many software titles are huge. Thief II, for example, is two (2) CD's. Corel Draw comes with at least 3 CDs. So do many other apps. Now, I have ADSL, but I still wouldn't be enthusiastic about downloading 1.5 GB of data (and then having to burn it onto CD's anyway for backup).
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
The company I work for is currently using MySQL and Apache on BSD, but is switching to Oracle on Solaris (but keeping Apache). Why?
Well, the killer feature for us is actually the Oracle support for database synchronization. We need automatic, reliable, and highly configurable ways to keep some tables in many large databases synchronized, over the internet. (Actually, a virtual private network.) Oracle's transaction support is nice, but not actually that important for our application.
Fortunately, PHP works well with Oracle, so our smaller back-end tools won't need to be extensively rewritten. I do hope that MySQL gets good distributed database support soon - I'm sure it will happen eventually.
Another random thought just occurred to me: Would there be any use in creating a MySQL module for Apache? Or an integrated PHP/MySQL module? Perhaps for large websites using the common Apache+PHP+MySQL architecture there could be a speed improvement.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Yeah, and it is the primary cause of soil erosion.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Memory compression (and disk compression too) are useless to me, with one exception: texture compression on video cards.
Think about this. I have 256 MB of ram and 50 GB of disk space on my main machine. Why not, it's cheap! What I want is lower latency storage. Right now, that is expensive or unavailable, but would make a difference to the performance-sensitive apps I run.
Furthermore, the large files that I would like to compress are already compressed: video (MPEG), sound (MP3), and image files (JPG). On my 40GB server, I have 17 GB of MP3s, 1 GB of other files, and the rest is empty space! Why bother compressing that 1 GB just to get half a gig back?
From what I hear, even people who do non-linear video editing are editing compressed MPEG directly these days, rather than using uncompressed AVI or other formats.
So... What applications could actually benefit from this?
Maybe web servers with thousands of text files in RAM? Maybe people working with extremely high resolution bitmaps or uncompressed video?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Another note:
What this reminded me of most was parts of "Selected Ambient Works Volume II" by Aphex Twin. Tape loops and noises that sort of come together, much more than the sum of the parts, and induce a trance-like state... mmmm.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I downloaded these and listened to them a few days ago.
Unfortunately, the MP3's on the web site seem to be just short excerpts of the the whole symphony.
Now, I listen to a lot of music, from classical to rock to various electronica. I was impressed by this - I had expected it to be kind of a gimmick, or kind of a joke. But what I heard actually sounded musically interesting. Better than a lot of modern music, anyway. If I saw the whole thing available on CD I would buy it.
Your opinion, of course, may vary.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Yeah, you would think so. But companies do funny things.
The last place I worked, they were leasing Dell desktops. By the time the machines had reached the end of their useful life, they had been paid for many times over. It would have been far, far cheaper to just buy them up front. And everyone knew it!
But due to "cash flow" and other accounting BS, they were leased anyway.
So there is no _economic_ reason that Microsoft could not successfully lease software. Companies will do it to avoid the budget hit of purchasing 1000 copies of Office 2000 at the same time. Remember, you will have to upgrade everyone at once, or document version incompatibility issues will kill you.
Or... companies will say "fsck this" and switch to free software. Linux should be pretty good for desktop machines by the end of the year, what with Mozilla, the new Gnome, new KDE, new office apps, the 2.4 kernel, and XFree86 4.0.
(And don't bother to tell me it's good now... yes, I run it now, but I wouldn't make my parents use it just yet. This Christmas I will probably switch them over.)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
If you are using Microsoft Dev Studio, download and install the service packs! There are at least two for Dev Studio 6, IIRC, and you really need them.
.ncb, .clw, and other non-source code files in the project directory. (But not the .dsp and .dsw).
Even with them, I used to crash the IDE every now and then. Sometimes when the IDE would crash it would leave processes hung in the background with files open, so make sure you kill those.
More often though, I would just partly corrupt the project. The fix for that was to shut down the IDE and delete the
Then restart, open class wizard, and rebuild the class library.
(You know, I'm glad I don't have to deal with that anymore. Just minutes ago I got the very latest Gnome + Enlightenment running on my FreeBSD development box, and now I'm going to learn how to customize the heck out of emacs... and I program in PHP and Java now. Whee!)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Hmmm. Well, I didn't know about TAGS. It sounds like the hard part (equivalent to the first stage of the compiler) is done by TAGS. So maybe with TAGS it would be easy.
Where can I find out more about TAGS? Does it support Java? (My employer's language of choice)
Do TAGS automatically update whenever you add or modify members or methods in a class?
The other thing that is missing (or, maybe not?) from emacs is the good integrated debugger that DevStudio has. Can you do an edit and continue on a running C++ or Java program from inside emacs?
I hope the answer is yes, but I suspect no. But I was wrong before...
I suppose I will just have to take the plunge, get a good emacs book, and go from being an emacs user to an emacs expert. Then I'll be able to fix the keyboard commands too. (Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V should be cut, copy, paste, dammit! And Ctrl-Z for undo!)
Anyway, thanks for the info.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
No you could not add this to emacs as a "trivial hack". No way.
Why? Well, the compiler and the IDE talk to each other in DevStudio. The only way you could really get the same level of functionality in Emacs would be to build the first few stages of the C++ compiler pipeline into it.
If you type:
"pMyDoc->m_pWindo[tab]" it fills in the rest of the member variable. When you get the m_pWindowList you can type "->Head(" and the little tip window pops up and shows you what the arguments are for the Head method of pMyDoc->m_pWindowList.
Now, to do that in Emacs you would have to build code to:
1. Keep track of all temporary variables, their scope, and their type or class
2. Build tables of all classes and their methods and members, with the class or type of each.
The problem is, that's essentially the first stage of a compiler. It is NOT a trivial hack. You can't just do it by piping together a bunch of text parsing functions: you have to keep all this stuff in memory for decent performance - and even DevStudio 6 is pretty slow sometimes for this stuff.
On the other hand, under Windows you have to put up with MFC which has some good stuff but a lot of problems. You have to put up with all the different versions of Windows, which behave in different (undocumented!) ways and have different bugs. There are at least three occasions where I lost a night of sleep trying to fix things that worked perfectly under NT and blew up under Windows 95. (Microsoft fans who doubt me can get all the gory details by asking.) Without the source you often feel like you are working blindfolded.
My background: One month ago I started my cool new job using OpenBSD, Java, PHP, and Apache. I have used Linux at home for years, but haven't done serious development under it until now. I use Emacs because it's better than vi, but I don't think emacs is very good either. I want an editor that uses Alt- keys, not "Ctrl-X Ctrl-that Meta-x foo" for everything.
Simply put: I want Dev Studio 6 capabilities under a free operating system. That would be bliss. And if the IDE and compiler are all free software too.... ooohhh yeah baby.
The problem is, I believe that most free software developers just put in the huge effort to get good at vi or emacs (which are very powerful) but then don't have any incentive to create something better. And it could be better.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
The patent on gif is not the gif file format per se, but the compression algorithm.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Heh.
/usr/doc/HOWTO/HOWTO-EasterEgg
/etc/easteregg.conf
/var/log/easteregg/found
*cough*. Obviously, there should just be single, large "easteregg.lib.so" that people could install or not when they set up the system.
Any app that wanted to do an easter egg could just dynamically link to the lib. This would have several advantages:
- reduce code bloat in apps, yet provide a very large library of cool easter eggs.
- Easter eggs could be themeable under Gnome and KDE.
- It would be possible to upgrade easter eggs without modifying applications
- Make it possible to abstract the easter egg functionality - for example, on a machine with X, a fancy graphical easter egg could be displayed, but on a console, a simple message could be printed like "If you had X, you would see the really cool easter egg here... Congratulations".
- Debian users could just "apt_get eastereggs", and RPM people could "rpm -i eastereggs" for maximum convenience.
- A useful set of files to know:
- Each Linux distribution could customize the easter eggs without modifying the source of all the included apps.
- Other advantages are left as an exercise to the reader.
(Just kidding. Sort of.)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
If you have a hub between the ADSL modem and the firewall box, instead of cutting wires in a perfectly good network cable, just attach a cheap old pentium machine to the hub. Set its NIC to promiscuous mode and sniff everything that goes by, but set up its own packet filtering to drop EVERYTHING.
Then it's like that box just doesn't exist to the rest of the network, but it sees everything, and can log it any way you want... It's like a shadow of the firewall - it can run any kind of security software, to set off alarms or whatever.
Disclaimer: I am not a security expert. If there are problems with my idea I would like to know about it (because I am using this idea on my own firewall setup).
Another idea I had but have not implemented is to modify the login software on my machines: If anyone logs in, they would have to run a specific "secret" program in 15 seconds or less. If not, a timer expires and shuts off the UPS powering the box.
Heh heh heh. Not suitable for systems that need to keep running, but nice for home machines that you want to keep secure.
A less extreme approach would just use ifconfig to turn off the network card, instead of having the UPS kill the power.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
The ISP I have signed up with for my DSL does not oversubscribe their service at all, or so they claim.
In fact, my hookup is on hold for the moment while they wait for their upstream provider to set up another DS3 (== T3).
Surprisingly, they are not much more expensive than other ISP's I could have chosen.
Anyway, I won't feel bad for using 100% of my assigned bandwidth any time of the day or night that I feel like it. That's what I'm paying for!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Five Seven Five! Whence came
your inspiration? Perhaps
Cryptonomicon?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Your post doesn't make sense.
"...refusing to allow the developers who wrote software and released it under the GPL (as the GPL is non-revokable) to compile their programs for use with Motif."
This is baloney. A programmer who writes software can do whatever they want with it. If they release it under the GPL, that only changes what other people can do with it. The original programmer can give it away under other licenses, sell it to Microsoft, or link it with anything they like.
"That is precisely why I will use proprietary licenses and avoid the GPL; I simply cannot entrust my code to Stallman."
This cracks me up. I guess there must be some hidden clause in the GPL that only shows up when you dip the paper in lemon juice. It says "Despite anything else you read here, actually, RMS makes all the rules. You Must Trust Him".
If I release software under the GPL, that just means I understand the license and want those terms for my software, not necessarily that I trust RMS.
And I think it's great that he's uncompromising. Too many people in the world today are far to willing to compromise their ethics just for some short term benefit. I try to be just as uncompromising with my ethics.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I have some big problems with your post.
You are trying to draw a line by saying that you should not be allowed to discriminate based on what someone couldn't choose (like their race) but should be allowed to discriminate based on something they couuld (like their religion).
But what you have forgotton is that on-line, no one can tell anything about you unless you say so. So it is your free will, if you say you are black, or if you say you are a jew, or whatever.
Obviously, I think that there is no difference - people should be protected from discrimination either way.
What if you are black in America, and you make some postings about being black in America. Then a bunch of skinheads DOS'es you. And then your ISP terminates you to protect themselves.
Don't you see that's almost the same as what happened here? I guess then you will say: "Well, the black guy made those postings of HIS OWN FREE WILL, so tough luck for him getting DOS'ed, and tough luck for him losing his account. There's nothing wrong with that..."
By your argument, it would be ok for ISP's to deny service to anyone who says online that they are black, or jewish, or gay, or whatever, because it is their own free will to say so or not.
Wake up! Stand up for people's rights, or there will be nobody left to stand up for you when your turn comes.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Yeah, well... but ICE, as Gibson defined it, stands for Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. Gibson describes it in more detail in Count Zero than he did in Neuromancer. And, in Gibson's book, only Black ICE, (which was illegal), had the capability to strike back and trash the attacker's nervous system.
Interestingly, there is a software program called Black ICE that a friend of mine runs on his cable-modem connected NT 4 box. He sees a LOT of portscans and similar low grade attacks. As far as I know, BlackICE doesn't do any counter-attacks though!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Yeah, there were at least two things in DOOM that scared me more than any other game so far.
1: The first time you meet one of the "invisible" versions of the pink demons. I freaked - shooting the shotgun off at random all over the place, thinking Sh*t sh*t it's invisible!!! ARRGH!
2: The first time you meet the CyberDemon. You start in this little room in the middle of the level, and you hear this roaring and stomping of an enemy you haven't met before... it was hard to go out and face him.
Ahh. Memories.
Too bad about the political infighting at ID though. You have to wonder what it's going to be like working there for John, Adrian, and Kevin, now that they've had such a nasty, public disagreement.
I honestly wonder if the company will stick together long enough to finish the game. It would not surprise me if the bad feelings escalate - after all, I bet Adrian and Kevin didn't expect John to post all the details of Paul Steed's firing in his plan.
Oh well. I suppose John, Graeme, Paul, and the rest could just leave and form a new company.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)