To set up a pserver (for/etc/passwd authentication), make sure your/etc/services contains: cvspserver 2401/tcp and add this line to your/etc/inetd.conf: cvspserver stream tcp nowait root/usr/bin/cvs cvs --allow-root=/home/cvs/cvsroot pserver
Next, make the directory/home/cvs/cvsroot.
Finally, set your CVSROOT to:pserver:user@host:/home/cvs/cvsroot, and do a cvs login and cvs init.
Ok, a lot of people seem to really hate C++. I think part of this is because Linus rejected for the kernel. This makes sense, though. The kernel is very low-level and you want as much control as possible. C++ is a bigger language, and it does more stuff behind your back. C is very predictable, and thats why C is such a good systems language.
But for a big, non-nuts and bolts project like perl, C++ has a few important advantages.
1. OO. I think this is obvious. Of course you can do OO in C, and C++ doesn't garentee a good object model, etc. But it is less work, "cleaner", and requires fewer dodgey practices like macros to make things work. Additionally, there is far more tool support for doing OO in C++ as opposed to C.
2. Templates/generic programming. Now that there is a cross-platform compiler that does these relatively painlessly (ecgs/gcc3), Open Source C++ programmers should have no qualms about exploiting this feature, as they have in the past. What do templates give you that macros and typecasts don't? Well, first of all, type safe containers. That means you can't add a string to a list of ints. It won't even compile. Compare this to the best C containers, which can only catch it at run-time (with a performance hit). If type safe containers aren't enough, the C++ standard template library gives you iterators. To make a long story short, iterators allow you to write container independant algorithms. Your sort routine will run on a tree, a hash, a list, a vector, etc. Try doing that in C without enough casts and macros to sterilize a rat. And of course, the STL comes with nice implementations of most of the well-known algorithms you are likely to need.
3. Exceptions. Exceptions are simply a more elegant way to program, as any Java programmer will tell you. It nicely solves the ever-recurring problem, "How do I return both an error code and a result?". No more if (foo() == -1) return -1; everywhere and wondering if returning TRUE means success or failure.
In summary, C++ isn't for everyone or every project. But it has some nice features that make it nice for large projects.
The race condition can also be fixed by timestamping each page. For example, the page could have an "input type=hidden" tag containing the time the server generated it. Hidden tags are submitted like text boxes so this data gets send back when you click moderate.
Then the server could invalidate any moderation done if someone else has moderated the same comment between the "served" time and the moderation "submission" time. Slashdot could then say something like "comment +0: comment rating changed since last reload" or something.
This kind of thing comes up a lot with web apps; keeping the state in the web page itself usually does the trick.
I've looked hard at porting applications to Linux from Microsoft platforms, mostly VB apps. It's a bitch. There's no VB equivalent for Linux (I know there's some activity on this front), and I'm not aware of an easy porting path (if anyone knows one, comment, please).
That is the price you pay for developing with a platform specific tool like VB. Unfortunately, no good cross-platform VB-like RAD tool has acheived wide use. Delphi has potential if Borland/Inprise ports it. I'd also recommend looking at Visual TCL.
How about a user preference to allow those humorless hackers amongst us to ignore posts flaged as funny? Perhaps something that just ignores any points assigned to a comment under the catagory of "funny".
It seems like one of the top posts is always a joke of some kind. While they might be relevent and even amusing sometimes, I hate consistantly seeing them among the very top posts.
Taking that idea one step further, why not allow us to select the adjustment in points for each catagory? e.g. Offtopic: -1, Flamebait: -2, Insightful: +2, Funny: 0, Informative: +1, etc.
I noticed there are many improvements to the xterm program provided with X. This is good news; the terminal emulation provided by most X terminal programs is pretty poor. Unfortunately, all this effort will have to be duplicated for the terminal emulators in the Gnome and KDE desktop environments. I wonder if most of the emulation details couldn't be put into a toolkit independant library and shared between these projects.
If you are using one of the 2.0.XX series of kernels, get the loose-udp patch from this page. It makes a big difference in performance of multiplayer games and the extra auto port forwarding is unneccessary.
Another library worth looking into is OpenStep; specifically the ApplicationKit. This toolkit is what NextStep has evolved into. Even though it is quite old as far as X11 toolkits go, it is surpisingly well designed, OO from the core up and very MVC.
Warning though, the default bindings are in Objective C, an OO C derived language distinct from C++; ObjC has a distinctly Smalltalk flavor about it.
GNUstep is a GPLed clone. I haven't tried it so I can't comment on the quality.
Somewhat off-topic, the OpenStep Enterprise Object Framework is the best toolset/framework for working with databases I've seen.
I wonder if this is a prelude to dumping the Alpha completely.
After all, it's speed advantages are rapidly shrinking. The pace of x86 evolution is fueled by AMD vs Intel. Cheap Intel SMP is here, too. Why would anybody want an Alpha if a Pentium/K chip is almost as fast, cheaper and better supported?
If W2k ships without Alpha support, Alpha/NT sales will die rapidly. Anybody know what percent of sales that makes up? I'd guess its fairly big.
X has its problems. Here are some of the ones I've seen:
1. Network Model One of the prime strengths/weaknesses of X is its network model. That is, X is a client/server system. The server controls the display and the client talks to it using the X protocol, giving it messages like "draw line here" or "draw pixel there".
This is a strength, because the X protocol allows the server and client to be on two distinct machines. Thus you can have "thin" X terminals that only run an X server and display applications run on centralized servers. You can also run graphical admin tools to do remote administration.
It is also a weakness because of the extra work converting "draw line" to the X protocol, sending it though a socket (even if the client and server are on the same machine), and finally, converting the X protocol command back and actually displaying it. There are some workarounds, like the MIT shared memory extention that lets the client and server avoid the serialize-transfer-unserialize stuff, but it added programming complexity.
2. Low-level Nature of X Protocol X is somewhat inefficient, because it converts the drawing requests into very low-level commands. Instead of saying "draw button here", it has to say "draw line, draw line, draw line,..., select font, draw word".
This is unavoidable, given the design constraints of X (provide a general purpose solution and don't enforce any policy). This is why so many toolkits exist on top of X.
Note that these are both design decisions that trade off performance for utility or generality.
I downloaded Turbo Pascal 3.0 for old time sake -- it was the first programming language I used.
Amazing how ^K^B, ^K^K, ^K^V, ^K^C all came back even though I haven't used an editor with those key combos in years. Couldn't for the life of me remember how to exit the editor and compile though, so I had to kill it:)
It seems like Amiga is jumping on just about every band wagon it can. Linux, transmeta, QNX, Enlightenment, etc. It all this for real, or are they just trying to capitalize on the hype of other technologies?
And, from what I understand, the new Amiga is going to based on the PPC. The OS software will be the Linux kernel, with Enlightenment/X as the GUI. Just how is this new machine related to the original Amiga? Not the OS or the main CPU. Maybe the graphics/FX/sound chips? An Amiga software layer over Linux and X? Or maybe the developers the same? Or does the new Amiga just try to capture the "spirit" of the old Amiga?
Or are they just trying to capitalize on the Amiga name too?
Stock options and employee stock purchase plans are two different things. An option means you have the option (imagine that!) of buying shares sometime in the future for a given price. For example, if you have 1000 options for $0.01, and the stock price goes to $2.00, when you excercise it you pay $10 and receive $2000 in one transaction.
When you just get a special price on your shares, thats known as a employee stock purchase plan. Quite different. If that is what you have, make sure you check out any restrictions on the shares, particularly if the company is not publicly traded. For example, they might sipulate that if you quit, the company can buy them back at $0.01, or whatever. Lots of companys do this to encourage loyalty.
Incidentally, options are usually better. There is zero risk, because you have the choice of not excercising. With any other stock purchase, the price could go down. Also, it doesn't require the upfront capital, which can be hard to come by, as you point out.
Buying at the open and selling at the close is not what "daytrading" is about. Daytrading is about buying and selling during the course of the day, taking advantage of small (or not so small) fluctations in price.
For example, day trader T notices stock RHAT is on an upward trend, so he buys. Some time later, when the trend is no longer upward, he dumps RHAT. Similarly, if stock BEOS is on a downward trend, he sells, and picks it up later when the price bottoms out. Doing this a few ticks (price levels) at a time is known as scalping. Note that T doesn't have to own BEOS to sell it -- this is known as a short sell. Things are a bit more complicated in real-life, because of weird trading rules like no shorts on a down tick.
So the long and short (heh) of it is this: daytraders probably had a ball (and made a killing) on MP3.com because there was huge volatility. More likely, the unsophisticated traders without real-time market information and execution systems got killed. But that is how the stock market works.
How about a petition to to port Warcraft II Battle.Net Edition to Linux?
A bit of background: Warcraft II was an immensely entertaining real-time strategy game. It came out several years ago (1994?) and was written (as most games were at the time) for the DOS platform. For me it was the first multiplayer, non-first person shooter game that was truely enjoyable.
At any rate, the game is such a classic that Blizzard, the game publisher, is porting it to Win32 and adding support for it's multiplayer gaming service, Battle.Net.
IMHO, it would be the perfect test bed for porting their software to Linux. But unforunately, they have expressed no interest in Linux ports for their other games in the past. Maybe a petition would change that...
This is only one piece of evidence in Caldera's case (IMHO the most damning). The rest deals with pre-announcing products strategically to hurt DR-DOS, and other FUD spreading.
Oops, there is also the per-processor licencing stuff, too.
I would seriously like an explanation on how making a product incompatible with a competing product is a monopolistic practice. Or is it only OK for the smaller company to do to the larger company.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
The incompatibility could qualify as restraint of trade. I think the argument is whether it is reasonable restraint of trade. In particular, do the incompatibilities have a valid and reasonable purpose above and beyond providing DR-DOS users with a bogus error message.
Perhaps they do; namely to provide a consistant test platform for the beta test. On the other hand, why did MS obfuscate and protect with so much anti-debugging code this test?
This is only one piece of evidence in Caldera's case (IMHO the most damning). The rest deals with pre-announcing products strategically to hurt DR-DOS, and other FUD spreading.
This is not a frivolous case. Bristol's suit, on the other hand, might be described like that.
Slashdot Mirror
To set up a pserver (for /etc/passwd authentication), make sure your /etc/services contains: /etc/inetd.conf: /usr/bin/cvs cvs --allow-root=/home/cvs/cvsroot pserver
/home/cvs/cvsroot.
:pserver:user@host:/home/cvs/cvsroot, and do a cvs login and cvs init.
cvspserver 2401/tcp
and add this line to your
cvspserver stream tcp nowait root
Next, make the directory
Finally, set your CVSROOT to
Ok, a lot of people seem to really hate C++. I think part of this is because Linus rejected for the kernel. This makes sense, though. The kernel is very low-level and you want as much control as possible. C++ is a bigger language, and it does more stuff behind your back. C is very predictable, and thats why C is such a good systems language.
But for a big, non-nuts and bolts project like perl, C++ has a few important advantages.
1. OO. I think this is obvious. Of course you can do OO in C, and C++ doesn't garentee a good object model, etc. But it is less work, "cleaner", and requires fewer dodgey practices like macros to make things work. Additionally, there is far more tool support for doing OO in C++ as opposed to C.
2. Templates/generic programming. Now that there is a cross-platform compiler that does these relatively painlessly (ecgs/gcc3), Open Source C++ programmers should have no qualms about exploiting this feature, as they have in the past. What do templates give you that macros and typecasts don't? Well, first of all, type safe containers. That means you can't add a string to a list of ints. It won't even compile. Compare this to the best C containers, which can only catch it at run-time (with a performance hit). If type safe containers aren't enough, the C++ standard template library gives you iterators. To make a long story short, iterators allow you to write container independant algorithms. Your sort routine will run on a tree, a hash, a list, a vector, etc. Try doing that in C without enough casts and macros to sterilize a rat. And of course, the STL comes with nice implementations of most of the well-known algorithms you are likely to need.
3. Exceptions. Exceptions are simply a more elegant way to program, as any Java programmer will tell you. It nicely solves the ever-recurring problem, "How do I return both an error code and a result?". No more if (foo() == -1) return -1; everywhere and wondering if returning TRUE means success or failure.
In summary, C++ isn't for everyone or every project. But it has some nice features that make it nice for large projects.
The race condition can also be fixed by timestamping each page. For example, the page could have an "input type=hidden" tag containing the time the server generated it. Hidden tags are submitted like text boxes so this data gets send back when you click moderate.
Then the server could invalidate any moderation done if someone else has moderated the same comment between the "served" time and the moderation "submission" time. Slashdot could then say something like "comment +0: comment rating changed since last reload" or something.
This kind of thing comes up a lot with web apps; keeping the state in the web page itself usually does the trick.
I think the Palm 3's have 4 bit greyscale
I think it is actually 2 bit grayscale, i.e. four levels of gray.
Or Webwasher (if you use Windows).
I've looked hard at porting applications to Linux from Microsoft platforms, mostly VB apps. It's a bitch. There's no VB equivalent for Linux (I know there's some activity on this front), and I'm not aware of an easy porting path (if anyone knows one, comment, please).
That is the price you pay for developing with a platform specific tool like VB. Unfortunately, no good cross-platform VB-like RAD tool has acheived wide use. Delphi has potential if Borland/Inprise ports it. I'd also recommend looking at Visual TCL.
How about a user preference to allow those humorless hackers amongst us to ignore posts flaged as funny? Perhaps something that just ignores any points assigned to a comment under the catagory of "funny".
It seems like one of the top posts is always a joke of some kind. While they might be relevent and even amusing sometimes, I hate consistantly seeing them among the very top posts.
Taking that idea one step further, why not allow us to select the adjustment in points for each catagory? e.g. Offtopic: -1, Flamebait: -2, Insightful: +2, Funny: 0, Informative: +1, etc.
I noticed there are many improvements to the xterm program provided with X. This is good news; the terminal emulation provided by most X terminal programs is pretty poor. Unfortunately, all this effort will have to be duplicated for the terminal emulators in the Gnome and KDE desktop environments. I wonder if most of the emulation details couldn't be put into a toolkit independant library and shared between these projects.
Apple/Next has written a layer that allows a seamless Java interface. Under the hood, its still ObjC, but you can safely ignore it.
If you are using one of the 2.0.XX series of kernels, get the loose-udp patch from this page. It makes a big difference in performance of multiplayer games and the extra auto port forwarding is unneccessary.
Andrew
Another library worth looking into is OpenStep; specifically the ApplicationKit. This toolkit is what NextStep has evolved into. Even though it is quite old as far as X11 toolkits go, it is surpisingly well designed, OO from the core up and very MVC.
Warning though, the default bindings are in Objective C, an OO C derived language distinct from C++; ObjC has a distinctly Smalltalk flavor about it.
GNUstep is a GPLed clone. I haven't tried it so I can't comment on the quality.
Somewhat off-topic, the OpenStep Enterprise Object Framework is the best toolset/framework for working with databases I've seen.
I wonder if this is a prelude to dumping the Alpha completely.
After all, it's speed advantages are rapidly shrinking. The pace of x86 evolution is fueled by AMD vs Intel. Cheap Intel SMP is here, too. Why would anybody want an Alpha if a Pentium/K chip is almost as fast, cheaper and better supported?
If W2k ships without Alpha support, Alpha/NT sales will die rapidly. Anybody know what percent of sales that makes up? I'd guess its fairly big.
X has its problems. Here are some of the ones I've seen:
..., select font, draw word".
1. Network Model
One of the prime strengths/weaknesses of X is its network model. That is, X is a client/server system. The server controls the display and the client talks to it using the X protocol, giving it messages like "draw line here" or "draw pixel there".
This is a strength, because the X protocol allows the server and client to be on two distinct machines. Thus you can have "thin" X terminals that only run an X server and display applications run on centralized servers. You can also run graphical admin tools to do remote administration.
It is also a weakness because of the extra work converting "draw line" to the X protocol, sending it though a socket (even if the client and server are on the same machine), and finally, converting the X protocol command back and actually displaying it. There are some workarounds, like the MIT shared memory extention that lets the client and server avoid the serialize-transfer-unserialize stuff, but it added programming complexity.
2. Low-level Nature of X Protocol
X is somewhat inefficient, because it converts the drawing requests into very low-level commands. Instead of saying "draw button here", it has to say "draw line, draw line, draw line,
This is unavoidable, given the design constraints of X (provide a general purpose solution and don't enforce any policy). This is why so many toolkits exist on top of X.
Note that these are both design decisions that trade off performance for utility or generality.
I downloaded Turbo Pascal 3.0 for old time sake -- it was the first programming language I used.
:)
Amazing how ^K^B, ^K^K, ^K^V, ^K^C all came back even though I haven't used an editor with those key combos in years. Couldn't for the life of me remember how to exit the editor and compile though, so I had to kill it
It seems like Amiga is jumping on just about every band wagon it can. Linux, transmeta, QNX, Enlightenment, etc. It all this for real, or are they just trying to capitalize on the hype of other technologies?
And, from what I understand, the new Amiga is going to based on the PPC. The OS software will be the Linux kernel, with Enlightenment/X as the GUI. Just how is this new machine related to the original Amiga? Not the OS or the main CPU. Maybe the graphics/FX/sound chips? An Amiga software layer over Linux and X? Or maybe the developers the same? Or does the new Amiga just try to capture the "spirit" of the old Amiga?
Or are they just trying to capitalize on the Amiga name too?
Are you sure they really are options?
Stock options and employee stock purchase plans are two different things. An option means you have the option (imagine that!) of buying shares sometime in the future for a given price. For example, if you have 1000 options for $0.01, and the stock price goes to $2.00, when you excercise it you pay $10 and receive $2000 in one transaction.
When you just get a special price on your shares, thats known as a employee stock purchase plan. Quite different. If that is what you have, make sure you check out any restrictions on the shares, particularly if the company is not publicly traded. For example, they might sipulate that if you quit, the company can buy them back at $0.01, or whatever. Lots of companys do this to encourage loyalty.
Incidentally, options are usually better. There is zero risk, because you have the choice of not excercising. With any other stock purchase, the price could go down. Also, it doesn't require the upfront capital, which can be hard to come by, as you point out.
Buying at the open and selling at the close is not what "daytrading" is about. Daytrading is about buying and selling during the course of the day, taking advantage of small (or not so small) fluctations in price.
For example, day trader T notices stock RHAT is on an upward trend, so he buys. Some time later, when the trend is no longer upward, he dumps RHAT. Similarly, if stock BEOS is on a downward trend, he sells, and picks it up later when the price bottoms out. Doing this a few ticks (price levels) at a time is known as scalping. Note that T doesn't have to own BEOS to sell it -- this is known as a short sell. Things are a bit more complicated in real-life, because of weird trading rules like no shorts on a down tick.
So the long and short (heh) of it is this: daytraders probably had a ball (and made a killing) on MP3.com because there was huge volatility. More likely, the unsophisticated traders without real-time market information and execution systems got killed. But that is how the stock market works.
How about a petition to to port Warcraft II Battle.Net Edition to Linux?
A bit of background: Warcraft II was an immensely entertaining real-time strategy game. It came out several years ago (1994?) and was written (as most games were at the time) for the DOS platform. For me it was the first multiplayer, non-first person shooter game that was truely enjoyable.
At any rate, the game is such a classic that Blizzard, the game publisher, is porting it to Win32 and adding support for it's multiplayer gaming service, Battle.Net.
IMHO, it would be the perfect test bed for porting their software to Linux. But unforunately, they have expressed no interest in Linux ports for their other games in the past. Maybe a petition would change that...
I was suprised to see that many applications have IPv6 patches. Is the IPv6 API different from the regular IPv4 sockets API?
Or are the changes just to deal with incompatibilities like the colon seperater in IPv6 addresses conflicting with URLs?
It is 128 bits of address space. I think the format is FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210, i.e. 8 blocks of 16 bits each.
PNG is supported natively by
- no transparency or gamma
- broken transparency, gamma is supported
- transparency (1 bit only) and gamma support
You can test your browser here, and more information is available at the PNG home page.
The original compaq licensed IBM's bios.
I'm pretty sure Compaq also did a clean room reimplementation. IBM didn't license their BIOS to anyone, at least in the early days.
Phoenix was the first to sell the BIOS as their primary business.
This is only one piece of evidence in Caldera's case (IMHO the most damning). The rest deals with pre-announcing products strategically to hurt DR-DOS, and other FUD spreading.
Oops, there is also the per-processor licencing stuff, too.
I would seriously like an explanation on how making a product incompatible with a competing product is a monopolistic practice. Or is it only OK for the smaller company to do to the larger company.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
The incompatibility could qualify as restraint of trade. I think the argument is whether it is reasonable restraint of trade. In particular, do the incompatibilities have a valid and reasonable purpose above and beyond providing DR-DOS users with a bogus error message.
Perhaps they do; namely to provide a consistant test platform for the beta test. On the other hand, why did MS obfuscate and protect with so much anti-debugging code this test?
This is only one piece of evidence in Caldera's case (IMHO the most damning). The rest deals with pre-announcing products strategically to hurt DR-DOS, and other FUD spreading.
This is not a frivolous case. Bristol's suit, on the other hand, might be described like that.