Has anyone here ever experienced a cold-boot time of less than 1 minute and 12 seconds in a "commercial grade" operating system?
Who said anything about cold boots? The article is clearly talking about suspend-to-memory style sleep modes, rather than switching machines completely off, because it advocates the use of wake on LAN, which only really works under such conditions.
Sites like Blackle suggest that a black screen saves energy. May have been true for CRT displays, but modern TFT Displays always have the backlight on, even on a black screen.
In fact, I believe a white screen will consume less energy, as a small continuous current is required to hold the pixels in their darkened state.
Waiting 5 minutes for your PC to boot at the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour has a cost of around 55 cents to the company.
On the other hand, my PC boots perfectly adequately in the ~2 minutes it takes me to check my diary and go and get my first coffee of the day, jobs which I'd do anyway, so the time costs my company nothing.
Not only that, but "watts per hour" doesn't actually make any sense at all. Unless we're talking about something that is gradually consuming more and more power as time passes.
I'm pretty sure dynamic dispatch is the key element. I'd say a Scheme that had been extended in the manner you describe is an object-oriented Scheme. (This is the great thing about LISPs in general: you can implement almost any paradigm you want in them, as long as you don't mind using peculiar syntax for it).
Certainly, dynamic dispatch seems to have been central in Alan Kay's mind when he invented the term.
If you are not "notable" enough, and you don't have enough "significant" coverage from "reliable sources" you can be "salted", "A7"d, "prod"ed, "AFD"d, and also added to Wikipedia's own blacklist.
This is to say that Wikipedia's hands aren't exactly clean when it comes to censorship issues, and remember that Wikipedia is a top 8 website acording to multiple sources, and frequently is the number one on Google. This makes it that wether you are on Wikipedia or not makes a huge difference.
Remember when you donate, to remind them to combat deletionists, who do like to censor things in the name of "notabillity"
I didn't realise wikipedia were stopping other people from accessing your independent web site. That must be terrible.
The image was NOT child abuse, but WAS probably against UK law
Probably not, no. The UK law requires a "sexual context" to the image before it becomes pornography, with acknowledged contexts including "erotic poses". I don't think there's anything erotic or sexual about the image in question.
Which is probably pretty shocking to all of those censor-happy prudes in government, considering the subject matter and the fact that they themselves are probably not interested in such sex acts
I think you have a different government to me.
I think the motivator is more likely that they're too embarassed to admit they like it.
The girl on the cover of Virgin Killer consented to being photographed; exactly what is the harm caused?
The consent of a 10 year old can't really be considered consent, in the true word. She almost certainly didn't understand, when the picture was taken, the true implications of it. OTOH, at least according to the hearsay quoted in the wikipedia article, it appears she has stated she doesn't mind the existence of the picture, so I'd generally agree with the "no harm done" philosophy on that one.
Hear's an idea: taking nude pictures of kids, no problem. As long as they're not actually being sexually abused I see no harm in that. Publication should require consent, though, and consent shouldn't be able to be granted by anyone under 18. So, if somebody wanted to publish this album cover, they'd have had to take the photo and wait for ~8 years before asking the model for consent to do it.
This event was a slip up, we were not supposed to know about the censorship and filtering going on
The ISPs involved have generally been very honest and upfront about their relationship to IWF. To anyone paying attention, this shouldn't have come as a surprise. See, e.g. this article from 2000 about IWF's activities, or this parliamentary comment. Just because you're not aware of something doesn't mean it's a secret.
New bit of law just rolling out (Jan '09) outlaws 'extreme porn' in the UK. Complete and utter knee-jerk, poorly thought out crap we've come to expect from my government - for example, a clear definition of 'extreme' might have been thought be some to be a pre-requisite to such a law. We've now got some wooly f'in mess where a sizable chunk of the internet could be considered 'extreme'.
Actually, I'd say the definition is very clear. Something must:
* appear to have been produced primarily for the purpose of sexual arousal, and include an act that: (a) appears to be likely to kill the subject, (b) appears to be likely to result in serious injury to the subject's anus, breasts or genitals, (c) involves a sexual act on a human corpse, or (d) involves a sexual act on an animal.
This is a very precise definition that I don't see any real difficulty at all in policing. The only likely issue is in the purpose of production, and in 99% of cases that will be very clear.
The first programming course should be about how to write good unit tests.
It's suprising that so few programmers leave university and even progress in careers as software developers for years without this basic, essential skill. More emphasis on testing at an educational level would solve a lot of the problems we have with writing good software these days.
(So says somebody who didn't learn how to write a good unit test until ten years after graduation)
They implement polymorphism (either runtime via vtables or compile time via generics/templates). Think about that for a second, how do you teach polymorphism to someone who doesn't know what a loop is? You don't. That stuff comes later.
"This is an object. An object is like a small program running inside the computer that can send and receive messages to other objects. When it receives a message, it performs a sequence of actions that have been associated with that message. Different objects can have different actions associated with the same message."
Very simple. The heart of OOP and polymorphism, encapsulated in four sentences that almost anyone capable of learning to program can understand.
Polymorphism can be confusing. But only to those of us approaching it from a procedural programming standpoint and asking "how the hell does that work?". When Alan Kay invented smalltalk, he used it to teach programming to kids. Most of them grokked the idea of objects and polymorphism very quickly. It was simply a case of presenting it the right way.
"Object-oriented" means that your values (often structured values) know exactly what operations can be performed upon them that don't just see the object as an abstract token, that they encapsulate that notion, and that the language is written in "subject verb" form, not "verb subject". (That last point is just syntactic, but important.) Those two are entirely orthogonal properties.
Disagree. Ada95 is clearly an object-oriented language, but is verb-subject. In fact, I'd say it's more object-oriented than most (e.g. Java) because of the fact that it supports dispatching a method call to an appropriate function based on the run-time type of more than a single argument.
But you can still do several in a first programming course. That's exactly what my intro CS course did. We worked with a functional language, an object-oriented language, a low-level assembly language, a logic programming language, and also theoretical constructs like finite automata.
That's a lot of topics to cover in a single course. How many hours of lectures did you do on this course? What proportion of the assessment for the year was based on it?
There's no need to wrap a closure in a "function class" in Python.
No. The compiler does it for you. The only difference is that the syntax is *much* more pleasant in Python. What's actually going on is little different, though.
And I don't have to cast everything down to Object every so often.
The lack of static type checking in Python would render this moot. Effectively, everything is always cast down to Object. Besides, it's been a very long time since I had to do this in Java. Java generics may be a hack, but they're one that works for 99% of everyday situations.
So while, theoretically, you can do functional programming in both Java and Python, in practice it is much easier in Python.
Yes, but I'd say there are really only two points of Python that make it easier, and you haven't really touched on them: * Generator functions * The fact that closures can refer to any variable, not only 'final' ones like in Java (because Java's equivalent to closures, i.e. anonymous classes, are a nasty hack).
If you'd picked C# rather than Java, you wouldn't even have these two major differences to worry about. And C# is just Java with the language design flaws worked out, when you look at it. If only I didn't despise its standard library, it'd be the clear choice...
Interestingly, Virgin Media (well, the part that used to be NTL) simplifies this for themselves by hijacking DNS requests; by which I mean it doesn't matter what you set your DNS to (such as OpenDNS) - all DNS requests go to the ISP DNS servers.
I ran into this a few years back when I was using NTL, which I now do not.
Interesting. And deeply annoying, because it means you can't bypass their cache (e.g. to check if an update has taken place directly with the primary server), meaning anyone trying to manage DNS via the service is going to tear their hair out.
I wonder how many other ISPs do this kind of thing. The only one I was aware of previously was Freeserve (aka Orange Broadband), who transparently redirect all traffic on tcp port 25 to their own outbound email servers. I actually had to set up a VPN to our office's server in order to send mail without it being rejected by sender address verification.
This should prompt more web server operators to enable SSL for all content (but it won't).
No. Because it's too technically difficult:
- Requires shelling out cash for an SSL certificate - Requires the server to have its own unique IP address (about 95% of active web sites don't have a unique IP, IIRC) - Requires the server to be able to cope with about 2-10x CPU usage of current levels (depending on whether the site is primarily dynamic or static)
It is clearly false that all images of an unclothed person under the age of consent (16 in the UK) is automatically child porn and illegal.
Just an FYI, the definition of child porn was changed by the Sexual Offences Act 2002 (or maybe it was '03... can't quite remember now). These days, the age of consent (still 16) has nothing to do with it, because the limit for being legally included in pornography (now 18) is separate.
A number of readers have correctly noted the poor logic in George Reese's article. Additionally there is some question as to his motives.
George Reese runs an early stage start-up called enStratus that doesn't offer auto-scaling capabilities. His competitors such as Right Scale offer auto-scaling as part of their applications.
I can certainly understand why someone whose company is missing a major feature, relative to the competition, would argue that the missing feature is not important.
It's also very understandable why someone who believes a feature is unimportant might not include it in their product.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone here ever experienced a cold-boot time of less than 1 minute and 12 seconds in a "commercial grade" operating system?
Who said anything about cold boots? The article is clearly talking about suspend-to-memory style sleep modes, rather than switching machines completely off, because it advocates the use of wake on LAN, which only really works under such conditions.
Sites like Blackle suggest that a black screen saves energy. May have been true for CRT displays, but modern TFT Displays always have the backlight on, even on a black screen.
In fact, I believe a white screen will consume less energy, as a small continuous current is required to hold the pixels in their darkened state.
With all the reboots required, that means I am limited to three Vista reinstalls?
You'd be lucky to get microsoft to agree to that, anyway.
Waiting 5 minutes for your PC to boot at the federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour has a cost of around 55 cents to the company.
On the other hand, my PC boots perfectly adequately in the ~2 minutes it takes me to check my diary and go and get my first coffee of the day, jobs which I'd do anyway, so the time costs my company nothing.
Not only that, but "watts per hour" doesn't actually make any sense at all. Unless we're talking about something that is gradually consuming more and more power as time passes.
I'm pretty sure dynamic dispatch is the key element. I'd say a Scheme that had been extended in the manner you describe is an object-oriented Scheme. (This is the great thing about LISPs in general: you can implement almost any paradigm you want in them, as long as you don't mind using peculiar syntax for it).
Certainly, dynamic dispatch seems to have been central in Alan Kay's mind when he invented the term.
I didn't realise wikipedia were stopping other people from accessing your independent web site. That must be terrible.
The image was NOT child abuse, but WAS probably against UK law
Probably not, no. The UK law requires a "sexual context" to the image before it becomes pornography, with acknowledged contexts including "erotic poses". I don't think there's anything erotic or sexual about the image in question.
Which is probably pretty shocking to all of those censor-happy prudes in government, considering the subject matter and the fact that they themselves are probably not interested in such sex acts
I think you have a different government to me.
I think the motivator is more likely that they're too embarassed to admit they like it.
The girl on the cover of Virgin Killer consented to being photographed; exactly what is the harm caused?
The consent of a 10 year old can't really be considered consent, in the true word. She almost certainly didn't understand, when the picture was taken, the true implications of it. OTOH, at least according to the hearsay quoted in the wikipedia article, it appears she has stated she doesn't mind the existence of the picture, so I'd generally agree with the "no harm done" philosophy on that one.
Hear's an idea: taking nude pictures of kids, no problem. As long as they're not actually being sexually abused I see no harm in that. Publication should require consent, though, and consent shouldn't be able to be granted by anyone under 18. So, if somebody wanted to publish this album cover, they'd have had to take the photo and wait for ~8 years before asking the model for consent to do it.
This event was a slip up, we were not supposed to know about the censorship and filtering going on
The ISPs involved have generally been very honest and upfront about their relationship to IWF. To anyone paying attention, this shouldn't have come as a surprise. See, e.g. this article from 2000 about IWF's activities, or this parliamentary comment. Just because you're not aware of something doesn't mean it's a secret.
New bit of law just rolling out (Jan '09) outlaws 'extreme porn' in the UK. Complete and utter knee-jerk, poorly thought out crap we've come to expect from my government - for example, a clear definition of 'extreme' might have been thought be some to be a pre-requisite to such a law. We've now got some wooly f'in mess where a sizable chunk of the internet could be considered 'extreme'.
Actually, I'd say the definition is very clear. Something must:
* appear to have been produced primarily for the purpose of sexual arousal, and include an act that:
(a) appears to be likely to kill the subject,
(b) appears to be likely to result in serious injury to the subject's anus, breasts or genitals,
(c) involves a sexual act on a human corpse, or
(d) involves a sexual act on an animal.
This is a very precise definition that I don't see any real difficulty at all in policing. The only likely issue is in the purpose of production, and in 99% of cases that will be very clear.
The first programming course should be about how to write good unit tests.
It's suprising that so few programmers leave university and even progress in careers as software developers for years without this basic, essential skill. More emphasis on testing at an educational level would solve a lot of the problems we have with writing good software these days.
(So says somebody who didn't learn how to write a good unit test until ten years after graduation)
perl [...] the world's first "write only" programming language.
Actually, that honour goes to APL.
They implement polymorphism (either runtime via vtables or compile time via generics/templates). Think about that for a second, how do you teach polymorphism to someone who doesn't know what a loop is? You don't. That stuff comes later.
"This is an object. An object is like a small program running inside the computer that can send and receive messages to other objects. When it receives a message, it performs a sequence of actions that have been associated with that message. Different objects can have different actions associated with the same message."
Very simple. The heart of OOP and polymorphism, encapsulated in four sentences that almost anyone capable of learning to program can understand.
Polymorphism can be confusing. But only to those of us approaching it from a procedural programming standpoint and asking "how the hell does that work?". When Alan Kay invented smalltalk, he used it to teach programming to kids. Most of them grokked the idea of objects and polymorphism very quickly. It was simply a case of presenting it the right way.
"Object-oriented" means that your values (often structured values) know exactly what operations can be performed upon them that don't just see the object as an abstract token, that they encapsulate that notion, and that the language is written in "subject verb" form, not "verb subject". (That last point is just syntactic, but important.) Those two are entirely orthogonal properties.
Disagree. Ada95 is clearly an object-oriented language, but is verb-subject. In fact, I'd say it's more object-oriented than most (e.g. Java) because of the fact that it supports dispatching a method call to an appropriate function based on the run-time type of more than a single argument.
But you can still do several in a first programming course. That's exactly what my intro CS course did. We worked with a functional language, an object-oriented language, a low-level assembly language, a logic programming language, and also theoretical constructs like finite automata.
That's a lot of topics to cover in a single course. How many hours of lectures did you do on this course? What proportion of the assessment for the year was based on it?
There's no need to wrap a closure in a "function class" in Python.
No. The compiler does it for you. The only difference is that the syntax is *much* more pleasant in Python. What's actually going on is little different, though.
And I don't have to cast everything down to Object every so often.
The lack of static type checking in Python would render this moot. Effectively, everything is always cast down to Object. Besides, it's been a very long time since I had to do this in Java. Java generics may be a hack, but they're one that works for 99% of everyday situations.
So while, theoretically, you can do functional programming in both Java and Python, in practice it is much easier in Python.
Yes, but I'd say there are really only two points of Python that make it easier, and you haven't really touched on them:
* Generator functions
* The fact that closures can refer to any variable, not only 'final' ones like in Java (because Java's equivalent to closures, i.e. anonymous classes, are a nasty hack).
If you'd picked C# rather than Java, you wouldn't even have these two major differences to worry about. And C# is just Java with the language design flaws worked out, when you look at it. If only I didn't despise its standard library, it'd be the clear choice...
So when you spend money in-game does Sony pay tax on that?
Tax would be paid at point of conversion, same as if you buy gift vouchers.
Interestingly, Virgin Media (well, the part that used to be NTL) simplifies this for themselves by hijacking DNS requests; by which I mean it doesn't matter what you set your DNS to (such as OpenDNS) - all DNS requests go to the ISP DNS servers.
I ran into this a few years back when I was using NTL, which I now do not.
Interesting. And deeply annoying, because it means you can't bypass their cache (e.g. to check if an update has taken place directly with the primary server), meaning anyone trying to manage DNS via the service is going to tear their hair out.
I wonder how many other ISPs do this kind of thing. The only one I was aware of previously was Freeserve (aka Orange Broadband), who transparently redirect all traffic on tcp port 25 to their own outbound email servers. I actually had to set up a VPN to our office's server in order to send mail without it being rejected by sender address verification.
I wrote:
Requires the server to have its own unique IP address (about 95% of active web sites don't have a unique IP, IIRC)
Make that:
Requires the server to have its own unique IP address per domain name (about 95% of active web sites don't have a unique IP, IIRC)
This should prompt more web server operators to enable SSL for all content (but it won't).
No. Because it's too technically difficult:
- Requires shelling out cash for an SSL certificate
- Requires the server to have its own unique IP address (about 95% of active web sites don't have a unique IP, IIRC)
- Requires the server to be able to cope with about 2-10x CPU usage of current levels (depending on whether the site is primarily dynamic or static)
According to an article by German computer magazine c't, the image itself has not been blocked, only the article referencing it.
The article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer
The image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Virgin_Killer.jpg
I'm coming at this from PlusNet, one of the ISPs involved according to the Register story, but both article and image seem to work just fine for me.
It is clearly false that all images of an unclothed person under the age of consent (16 in the UK) is automatically child porn and illegal.
Just an FYI, the definition of child porn was changed by the Sexual Offences Act 2002 (or maybe it was '03... can't quite remember now). These days, the age of consent (still 16) has nothing to do with it, because the limit for being legally included in pornography (now 18) is separate.
And yes, this is blatantly ridiculous.
A number of readers have correctly noted the poor logic in George Reese's article. Additionally there is some question as to his motives.
George Reese runs an early stage start-up called enStratus that doesn't offer auto-scaling capabilities. His competitors such as Right Scale offer auto-scaling as part of their applications.
I can certainly understand why someone whose company is missing a major feature, relative to the competition, would argue that the missing feature is not important.
It's also very understandable why someone who believes a feature is unimportant might not include it in their product.