Git would still be much faster for almost every operation than Subversion.
My main problem with git (as a non-expert user who tried it for about an hour, once, so I'll readily admit I could be wrong about this) is that it seems that it changes sharing my changes with other developers from a two-step process (dev1$ svn commit; dev2$ svn update) to a three step process (either dev1$ git commit; manually inform dev2 that they need to pull changes from dev1; dev2$ git pull dev1, or dev1$ git commit; dev1$ git push; dev2$ git pull centralserver). While this may not sound so bad in a situation with just 2 developers, it seems to get linearly more complicated with each developer added.
Now, if you have somebody whose role in the project is to review other developer's changesets and then decide whether or not to include them (i.e. the situation of most open source projects, and what git was specifically designed to be good at) this problem disappears; everyone simply submits their changes and pulls from a single source and there's no issue, but that isn't how most professional development teams work. We trust each other to make changes. We automatically incorporate each others' changes without oversight. We don't want to have to manually pull in all the other developers' work all the time. We just want to perform a single merge of all the recent changes before we perform a final run of the tests and then commit.
Now, I might be wrong, git might support a good way of doing this. But I don't see it mentioned in any of the tutorials I read, and it isn't obvious from the manual pages, or anything like that.
Yes, I'll happily accept that each individual operation is faster than using svn. And if I could find a sensible way of working with it that didn't involve more developer work (even if it is just clicking a sequence of GUI buttons where once I only had to click one of them), and hence wasted more of my time than it saves, I'd love to switch. But it seems to be more complicated to use, and therefore not worth the effort (at least for my team here).
With SVN, this is: svn switch file:///arcane/long/path/to/svn/tags/gold ; work ; svn switch file:///arcane/long/path/to/svn/trunk ; svn ci -m "Why are SVN tags so long?"
The usual approach is to not use svn switch at all, but to check out your tags or branches into a separate directory, which works just fine. Alternatively, you could use (as another poster suggested) an environment variable to specify your repository basem or one of the many GUIs that make using switch easier. Most development environments have such an integration. Even emacs has one, although I've never tried it.
With CVS, if I check in with an outdated tag on the trunk, it'll fail and tell me. With SVN, it will blindly alter the contents of the tag.
The normal approach to solving this problem is to install a pre-commit.sh script on the server that rejects any operations other than copy in the tags directory.
And another point: "the age of distributed version control"?
I work in an office. I have a gigabit network between my workstation and the version control server, which runs on a RAID array significantly faster than the disks under my desk. The connection is always on, always works, and is so fast I don't notice it. In what way could I possibly benefit from a distributed system? And why would I use a distributed system when every one I've ever tried requires a two-step approach to sending my changes to the other developers (synchronize my working copy with the local version control, push changes from local to the rest of the team) rather than just one (commit changes)?
ACTA isn't a copyright-specific treaty. It concerns enforcement of copyright, patents, and trademarks. By IP, therefore, I meant all of these, not just any one of them.
It cuts both ways. If a Muslim cleric calls for stoning unbelievers and we arrest him, we have to be equally heavy handed with non-Muslims making similar statements.
No, we don't. The law allows us to account for the accused's *intent*, which is clearly different in this case, as any reasonable observer would almost certainly agree.
Can you propose how to distinguish between a "rhetorical" threat against a person's life, and an actual threat against a person's life? I've tried to think of a few ways, and for all of them this would fall on the "actual" side.
Perhaps asking whether the person who made the supposed threat actually intended it as one? That is, after all, what the law in question requires.
There is a certain irony in the fact that it's basically the exact thing she campaigns against. OK, that doesn't make it _particularly_ funny, but it does elevate it from "random bizarre comment" to "joke" in my mind.
Other than Apple who is not using the micro USB interface these days?
Of course, the fact that the EU have been threatening legislation on this issue for several years now has nothing to do with the fact that standardisation has suddenly and recently happened, right?
Unencrypted access points already use a standard password
No, they don't. Unencrypted access points don't use a password at all. The password in WPA et al is used to generate a key; unencrypted networks don't have a key.
The Sony Reader, Nook, Kobo and Kindle all use the exact same display and therefore provide the same quality
Sorry, this just isn't true. My housemates have between them a Sony PRS300 and a Kindle 3, and the quality of the Kindle's display is markedly superior.
Actually not, as serious investors would avoid the robot dominated exchanges like hell.
No, they wouldn't. You use the exchange that the stocks you want to invest in are listed on. Companies usually choose to list themselves on exchanges that have high volumes in other companies like themselves, because otherwise they run the risk of having low volumes which decreases their ability to raise funds by selling their own stock. High volumes only happen on exchanges that hedge funds work on. Hedge funds are the largest users of automated trading. If the hedge funds abandon an exchange, everyone else will follow.
However, he fails to mention that they are already "reviewing" the UK copyright laws under the veil of ACTA and in secret.
As far as I can tell from all the available information, the UK government has not actively participated in the ACTA negotiations to date. Also, note ACTA is an enforcement agreement, and doesn't really touch basic definitions of what constitutes an IP infringement, which is what they're talking about here.
Fair dealing isn't really similar. It's limited to a very specific set of situations that mean that most people are not able to take advantage of it. As an example, parody is not considered fair dealing.
I don't have much good to say about PHP, but didn't someone recently roll out a compiler for it? I can't imagine PHP performance is a significant bottleneck, especially as people run successful websites written in everything from Java to Ruby.
The main performance issue with PHP never was its interpreter, which was always reasonably fast. The issue that a lot of people have with it is that if you use one of its most important features, i.e. its automatic session management, it uses a locking system that basically means only request per client can be processed at a time. You can work around it, but you have to know what you're doing, and many people are unaware that they need to. Hence, if you have content like images being served by PHP, unless its author understood the language much better than the average PHP developer does, the result will be unnecessarily slow.
If you ignore IE, browser compatibilities aren't so bad. Even if you include IE, are they significantly worse than OS incompatibilities if you decided to go native?
You can't ignore IE. Like it or loathe it (the former only happens if you aren't actually a web developer), IE still has a significant market share. Not supporting it on any site with a commercial goal is practically suicide.
And, yes, IE's compatibility issues are significantly worse than native development issues. I can pick a framework to develop with, say Java+SWT, and have the results work on every common target platform with almost no platform-specific work required. If I target web browsers, I have never been able to produce a non-trivial application without spending significant time debugging IE-specific issues (e.g. browser crashing on unloading plugins in hidden divs, an issue which struck my last major web project and delayed it by about two days as I figured out a workaround).
I live in the UK, and I am aware of this. It's shaky ground as far as the licensing goes - they are technically in breach and could be challenged.
Yes, but the point is: all of the major manufacturers do it. Therefore, the licensing body would be on the shaky ground if they attempted to enforce their licences: there'd suddenly be nobody manufacturing DVD drives for the UK market.
As I understand it, binding arbitration is not legally permissible in the UK. It is considered a fundamental right to have any legal dispute settled by a court of law. If you go through an arbitration process and disagree with the result, you can still take it to court.
Here in the UK it's possible to prosecute a criminal action without the involvement of the crown prosecution service; AIUI you approach a judge, provide evidence that a crime was committed and show that you have enough evidence to secure a conviction, and the judge will commence the prosecution if he is satisfied with your evidence. Is this not possible in the US?
Re:Good way to get your laptop attacked
on
USB 'Dead Drops'
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· Score: 1
Windows XP, Vista, Seven. Also Windows 98 and ME, but those two only if the external medium is a CD.
Federal law also has the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. 1030 et al) which makes it similarly illegal to access a computer without authorization.
I've only scanned this law briefly, but it appears to me to only apply to computers which are owned by the federal government or certain financial institutions, or other computers that have government-classified information on them. Did I miss something?
But the main point is that if there is a law that prevents access without authorization, and you need to accept the terms of the contract to get that authorization, you can't just say you don't accept the contract and access anyway. If accessing were not an offence of any kind, then there that would be an option, but as it is, it isn't.
Of course, the big problem in both a contract and computer fraud action is claiming damages. In both cases, civil actions are limited to economic damages, which will be hard to argue for mere access to a website.
This is true. The choice isn't pay up on the contract or be sued; the choice is pay up on the contract or be potentially prosecuted for unlawful access, and probably get a slap on the wrist nominal fine, none of which goes to the operator of the computer, who can't show any actual damages and therefore can't actually sue you for anything useful.
There are a few minor differences but the names are exact. This is troubling unless the specifications list or name them. However, the variable declarations may not be protected elements.
The names of fields, even private ones, are effectively part of the public API and are required to be kept the same for complete compatibility. You can get access to those private fields from your own code by using the reflection API. This capability may be used by serialization and deserialization code, so it is important to maintain such compatibility.
The method names are exact.
This isn't surprising if the both pieces of code are trying to do the same thing.
Not only are they trying to do the same thing; they're a public API that has been reimplemented. If they were not exact duplicates, it wouldn't work.
The method parameters are not exact.
The types are the same but the names are not exact.
Obviously the types must be the same for the same reason the names must be the same. Parameter names are not part of the public API; there's no way to determine what they are in a given implementation (even using reflection).
The structure is similar but not exact.
There are slight differences mostly due to style of the programmer which is to be expected in clean room implementations.. Android versions sometimes squeezed code into one line where Oracle's version spread it to multiple lines. Android's if statements sometimes used braces {} even if it was not required whereas the Oracle version did not. Android did not always use the same structure (i.e. while instead of do while and for iterator instead of while {iterator.hasNext()}
Yes; plus the Android version avoids field initializers in favour of initializing in the constructor. These aren't substantial changes, but then the class presented is an extremely simple one in which there is little if any room for innovation. The most damning thing is the order of initializations in the constructor being the same, but then other than the "isImmutable" flag both versions initialize the fields in order of declaration, and that order is copied into the output class file and could therefore reasonably be considered part of the public API of the class.
Except the private variables in the beginning, I would lean towards clean room implementation. There is a lot of line by line exactness however they do not appear to be nontrivial parts of the code and there is enough slight differences to where it could be explained by clean room implementations.
As I say, the private fields are actually part of the public API. They must keep the same names for serialization to work correctly. One can imagine similar situations where they must also keep the same order.
(And, for reference, I speak as somebody who has in the past implemented a Java subset in a clean room environment. The private field name thing bit me quite hard, and I had to go back and make a lot of changes to get stuff to work that I hadn't expected to depend on what is a supposedly private implementation detail.)
Slashdot Mirror
Git would still be much faster for almost every operation than Subversion.
My main problem with git (as a non-expert user who tried it for about an hour, once, so I'll readily admit I could be wrong about this) is that it seems that it changes sharing my changes with other developers from a two-step process (dev1$ svn commit; dev2$ svn update) to a three step process (either dev1$ git commit; manually inform dev2 that they need to pull changes from dev1; dev2$ git pull dev1, or dev1$ git commit; dev1$ git push; dev2$ git pull centralserver). While this may not sound so bad in a situation with just 2 developers, it seems to get linearly more complicated with each developer added.
Now, if you have somebody whose role in the project is to review other developer's changesets and then decide whether or not to include them (i.e. the situation of most open source projects, and what git was specifically designed to be good at) this problem disappears; everyone simply submits their changes and pulls from a single source and there's no issue, but that isn't how most professional development teams work. We trust each other to make changes. We automatically incorporate each others' changes without oversight. We don't want to have to manually pull in all the other developers' work all the time. We just want to perform a single merge of all the recent changes before we perform a final run of the tests and then commit.
Now, I might be wrong, git might support a good way of doing this. But I don't see it mentioned in any of the tutorials I read, and it isn't obvious from the manual pages, or anything like that.
Yes, I'll happily accept that each individual operation is faster than using svn. And if I could find a sensible way of working with it that didn't involve more developer work (even if it is just clicking a sequence of GUI buttons where once I only had to click one of them), and hence wasted more of my time than it saves, I'd love to switch. But it seems to be more complicated to use, and therefore not worth the effort (at least for my team here).
With SVN, this is: svn switch file:///arcane/long/path/to/svn/tags/gold ; work ; svn switch file:///arcane/long/path/to/svn/trunk ; svn ci -m "Why are SVN tags so long?"
The usual approach is to not use svn switch at all, but to check out your tags or branches into a separate directory, which works just fine. Alternatively, you could use (as another poster suggested) an environment variable to specify your repository basem or one of the many GUIs that make using switch easier. Most development environments have such an integration. Even emacs has one, although I've never tried it.
With CVS, if I check in with an outdated tag on the trunk, it'll fail and tell me. With SVN, it will blindly alter the contents of the tag.
The normal approach to solving this problem is to install a pre-commit.sh script on the server that rejects any operations other than copy in the tags directory.
And another point: "the age of distributed version control"?
I work in an office. I have a gigabit network between my workstation and the version control server, which runs on a RAID array significantly faster than the disks under my desk. The connection is always on, always works, and is so fast I don't notice it. In what way could I possibly benefit from a distributed system? And why would I use a distributed system when every one I've ever tried requires a two-step approach to sending my changes to the other developers (synchronize my working copy with the local version control, push changes from local to the rest of the team) rather than just one (commit changes)?
Or, you know, a *real* Sudoku. A Sudoku puzzle has 81 squares, not 16.
Question 18: What early example of an Internet viral video phenom was used in the "Ally McBeal" TV series in 1998?
Correct Answer: What is "TV"?
Something you download from the pirate bay. Like this.
Yep. And there are alternatives to using Visual Studio if you don't want to pay for it, e.g. #develop.
Please don't say "IP" when you mean copyright.
ACTA isn't a copyright-specific treaty. It concerns enforcement of copyright, patents, and trademarks. By IP, therefore, I meant all of these, not just any one of them.
It cuts both ways. If a Muslim cleric calls for stoning unbelievers and we arrest him, we have to be equally heavy handed with non-Muslims making similar statements.
No, we don't. The law allows us to account for the accused's *intent*, which is clearly different in this case, as any reasonable observer would almost certainly agree.
Can you propose how to distinguish between a "rhetorical" threat against a person's life, and an actual threat against a person's life? I've tried to think of a few ways, and for all of them this would fall on the "actual" side.
Perhaps asking whether the person who made the supposed threat actually intended it as one? That is, after all, what the law in question requires.
There is a certain irony in the fact that it's basically the exact thing she campaigns against. OK, that doesn't make it _particularly_ funny, but it does elevate it from "random bizarre comment" to "joke" in my mind.
Other than Apple who is not using the micro USB interface these days?
Of course, the fact that the EU have been threatening legislation on this issue for several years now has nothing to do with the fact that standardisation has suddenly and recently happened, right?
Unencrypted access points already use a standard password
No, they don't. Unencrypted access points don't use a password at all. The password in WPA et al is used to generate a key; unencrypted networks don't have a key.
The Sony Reader, Nook, Kobo and Kindle all use the exact same display and therefore provide the same quality
Sorry, this just isn't true. My housemates have between them a Sony PRS300 and a Kindle 3, and the quality of the Kindle's display is markedly superior.
Mayhaps it was mayhaps it wasn't; but one thing I do know: This article is a joke.
The site's a joke, too. Try browsing it with javascript off.
Actually not, as serious investors would avoid the robot dominated exchanges like hell.
No, they wouldn't. You use the exchange that the stocks you want to invest in are listed on. Companies usually choose to list themselves on exchanges that have high volumes in other companies like themselves, because otherwise they run the risk of having low volumes which decreases their ability to raise funds by selling their own stock. High volumes only happen on exchanges that hedge funds work on. Hedge funds are the largest users of automated trading. If the hedge funds abandon an exchange, everyone else will follow.
However, he fails to mention that they are already "reviewing" the UK copyright laws under the veil of ACTA and in secret.
As far as I can tell from all the available information, the UK government has not actively participated in the ACTA negotiations to date. Also, note ACTA is an enforcement agreement, and doesn't really touch basic definitions of what constitutes an IP infringement, which is what they're talking about here.
Fair dealing isn't really similar. It's limited to a very specific set of situations that mean that most people are not able to take advantage of it. As an example, parody is not considered fair dealing.
I don't have much good to say about PHP, but didn't someone recently roll out a compiler for it? I can't imagine PHP performance is a significant bottleneck, especially as people run successful websites written in everything from Java to Ruby.
The main performance issue with PHP never was its interpreter, which was always reasonably fast. The issue that a lot of people have with it is that if you use one of its most important features, i.e. its automatic session management, it uses a locking system that basically means only request per client can be processed at a time. You can work around it, but you have to know what you're doing, and many people are unaware that they need to. Hence, if you have content like images being served by PHP, unless its author understood the language much better than the average PHP developer does, the result will be unnecessarily slow.
If you ignore IE, browser compatibilities aren't so bad. Even if you include IE, are they significantly worse than OS incompatibilities if you decided to go native?
You can't ignore IE. Like it or loathe it (the former only happens if you aren't actually a web developer), IE still has a significant market share. Not supporting it on any site with a commercial goal is practically suicide.
And, yes, IE's compatibility issues are significantly worse than native development issues. I can pick a framework to develop with, say Java+SWT, and have the results work on every common target platform with almost no platform-specific work required. If I target web browsers, I have never been able to produce a non-trivial application without spending significant time debugging IE-specific issues (e.g. browser crashing on unloading plugins in hidden divs, an issue which struck my last major web project and delayed it by about two days as I figured out a workaround).
I live in the UK, and I am aware of this. It's shaky ground as far as the licensing goes - they are technically in breach and could be challenged.
Yes, but the point is: all of the major manufacturers do it. Therefore, the licensing body would be on the shaky ground if they attempted to enforce their licences: there'd suddenly be nobody manufacturing DVD drives for the UK market.
You mean sort of like binding arbitration?
As I understand it, binding arbitration is not legally permissible in the UK. It is considered a fundamental right to have any legal dispute settled by a court of law. If you go through an arbitration process and disagree with the result, you can still take it to court.
I get the impression it was supposed to be a step below those options, a cheaper alternative
So, something like a complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office, then?
Here in the UK it's possible to prosecute a criminal action without the involvement of the crown prosecution service; AIUI you approach a judge, provide evidence that a crime was committed and show that you have enough evidence to secure a conviction, and the judge will commence the prosecution if he is satisfied with your evidence. Is this not possible in the US?
Windows XP, Vista, Seven. Also Windows 98 and ME, but those two only if the external medium is a CD.
Windows 7 is not susceptible to this problem.
Federal law also has the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. 1030 et al) which makes it similarly illegal to access a computer without authorization.
I've only scanned this law briefly, but it appears to me to only apply to computers which are owned by the federal government or certain financial institutions, or other computers that have government-classified information on them. Did I miss something?
But the main point is that if there is a law that prevents access without authorization, and you need to accept the terms of the contract to get that authorization, you can't just say you don't accept the contract and access anyway. If accessing were not an offence of any kind, then there that would be an option, but as it is, it isn't.
Of course, the big problem in both a contract and computer fraud action is claiming damages. In both cases, civil actions are limited to economic damages, which will be hard to argue for mere access to a website.
This is true. The choice isn't pay up on the contract or be sued; the choice is pay up on the contract or be potentially prosecuted for unlawful access, and probably get a slap on the wrist nominal fine, none of which goes to the operator of the computer, who can't show any actual damages and therefore can't actually sue you for anything useful.
From my non-expert analysis.
There are a few minor differences but the names are exact. This is troubling unless the specifications list or name them. However, the variable declarations may not be protected elements.
The names of fields, even private ones, are effectively part of the public API and are required to be kept the same for complete compatibility. You can get access to those private fields from your own code by using the reflection API. This capability may be used by serialization and deserialization code, so it is important to maintain such compatibility.
The method names are exact.
This isn't surprising if the both pieces of code are trying to do the same thing.
Not only are they trying to do the same thing; they're a public API that has been reimplemented. If they were not exact duplicates, it wouldn't work.
The method parameters are not exact.
The types are the same but the names are not exact.
Obviously the types must be the same for the same reason the names must be the same. Parameter names are not part of the public API; there's no way to determine what they are in a given implementation (even using reflection).
The structure is similar but not exact.
There are slight differences mostly due to style of the programmer which is to be expected in clean room implementations.. Android versions sometimes squeezed code into one line where Oracle's version spread it to multiple lines. Android's if statements sometimes used braces {} even if it was not required whereas the Oracle version did not. Android did not always use the same structure (i.e. while instead of do while and for iterator instead of while {iterator.hasNext()}
Yes; plus the Android version avoids field initializers in favour of initializing in the constructor. These aren't substantial changes, but then the class presented is an extremely simple one in which there is little if any room for innovation. The most damning thing is the order of initializations in the constructor being the same, but then other than the "isImmutable" flag both versions initialize the fields in order of declaration, and that order is copied into the output class file and could therefore reasonably be considered part of the public API of the class.
Except the private variables in the beginning, I would lean towards clean room implementation. There is a lot of line by line exactness however they do not appear to be nontrivial parts of the code and there is enough slight differences to where it could be explained by clean room implementations.
As I say, the private fields are actually part of the public API. They must keep the same names for serialization to work correctly. One can imagine similar situations where they must also keep the same order.
(And, for reference, I speak as somebody who has in the past implemented a Java subset in a clean room environment. The private field name thing bit me quite hard, and I had to go back and make a lot of changes to get stuff to work that I hadn't expected to depend on what is a supposedly private implementation detail.)