Well, consider this: How many Windows Admins does Cisco employ? At least a department of 50, as he's migrated 2000 desktops already. So now he needs 5 (as 400 to 1 ratio is normal for Linux, obviously) Does Cisco *really* emply such a large team of nothing-but Windows admins? At my work, we have about 200 Windows PCs... and Wayne, the admin.
My old boss wanted us to write everything in Java once upon a time, and came up with all kinds of bullshit arguments to support his view. In the end, it didn't matter whether Java was appropriate, only that he was right and that he could show his boss how right he always was.
The Cisco manager is doing the same political game - showing everyone how clever he is, and how he's the one who knows how to improve processes, costs and generally just be greatest. His bosses will look differently upon him and when its time for more reponsibility, or a place on the board.... he'll be considered. His poor admins who now have to support linux with inadequate training (sorry, we have no budget 'cos that'll make me look bad), or too few staff (after those redundancies) will be the ones who end up taking the flak. After all, it can't be the boss who cocked it all up - no, its because the staff aren't good enough.
So that's why he'll fudge the data, not to make a case to himself, but to show the people he's talked to in the past that he really is right, and was right all along. I bet he doesn't give a shit about Linux at all.
It won't be Firefox's fault, but it will be the FF community's fault.
Read some of the other posts on this thread, they're all going on about how FF can't be affected because it was 'designed from the ground up to be more secure', and 'there is inbuilt protection from viruses', and 'the developers would release a patch way quicker than microsoft'.
The advert telling people to get FF claimed it was more secure. So when people (deliberatly)install their IM smiley-banner-weather-forecast-search-toolbar extension for FF, and start seeing popup adverts... they'll say 'but you told me FF was more secure and this couldn't happen' and think 'FF is just as bad as IE'.
The answer - get some mature, sensible, reasoned information out there, and not the F/OSS fanboy rubbish spouted off by those karma whores who havn't even read the article.
well, my experience is with massively scalable systems - the kind that run tens of thousands of users, and not embedded 5Mhz processors. I can understand where you're coming from in that case with limited resource programming, but that is a specialised area of expertise.
In general programming, the techniques you're describing are poor, and for large scale systems, doubly so. In those systems the cost of using bitshift for multiplication is not worth the effort to optimise and the problems in maintenance - instead I'd be figuring out how to get that data to manipulate quicker as that's where 99% of the time is spent, compared to the 1% actually processing it.
I'm sure mathematical algorith programmers have different optimisations to the ones you've described too, eg. smaller data cache lines are the best way to increase speed, and not bitshift optimisation. So to think that he's the be-all and end-all of program optimisation is completely wrong. I wouldn't hire him for my type of work any day.
Organising your variables on machine boundaries.. in my compiler (the microsoft one!) you'll see that all variables are padded out to machine boundaries anyway, so ordering your variables by type is just a waste of your time. Spend it more profitably. (this is one reason people look at programs now and say 'what bloat!' its mostly wasted space, just like using utf-16 will 'bloat' your program size up)
Compilers now optimise your low-level code way more efficiently that you can ever do it, so instead try to make your program look neat, clean and ordered so that maintenance isn't a complete nightmare (and all for a few microsoeconds performance improvement!).
What your friend is probably doing, in amongst all this wasted micro-optimisation, is refactoring the entire program. An example: login times with the product I code for used to take 8 minutes, until someone realised the login sequence would read a list of units from the DB, and then.. for each unit, read a set of property data from the DB. Putting the looped sub-query inside the main one..dropped login time to 2 minutes. Those are the optimisations you need to worry about, the odd byte alignment - forget it. The compiler is probably re-ordering them for you anyway to help with cache coherency.
that comment was inflammatory and highly biased, and these comments just show up the partisan nature of the/. crowd nowadays - a crowd that is persuaded into thinking a certain way by the editors in the items they choose to accept, and the way they present them.
If Fox news (say) comes out with something equally as biased (eg. some company didn't get good support with open source, well what do you expect from a bunch of commie hippies who make it in their spare time) then/. would attack them. If/. says the opposite, but equally poor reporting, then its acceptable.
The/. editors may be editors and not journalists, but they force the direction this site goes in, and as we see, there are too many kiddies and 'me too' posters that give the usual knee-jerk posts in a way that is cozy, safe and un-thinking in the knowledge that they'll get karma points (read: accolation from their peers) and the sense of community from similarly mindless readers here.
That's a bad place to be - like an isolated community who only respects each other, and their shared, insular values. If you want this site to be respected by others, especially people from the real world who might just use OSS for real business purposes, then you want to give a more thoughtful, even-handed feel to the posts here. Where accuracy of posts (and especially articles) are more important than simply knocking anything that isn't free or open, especially snide comments like Michael's (who is, after all, a 'leader' here and thus expected to show better qualities in his comments)
Anyway, that rant was brought to you by the words fairness and open-mindedness, and not bloody-minded arrogant knee-jerk post about a post that someone else posted that I disagreed with.;)
Your pathetic distribution doesn't even support my obscure feature of choice without a course of action so complex that it's madness to even contemplate it.
Remember the PHP issues of last month? If you were running a large phpBB site, and it got hacked.. you wouldn't be sitting there saying 'well the algorithms are good', you'd want to know who didn't keep up to date with the security patches, and why was it so difficult to install them, and why wasn't backups made more often... in other words, it *is* all about responsibilty.
Even the best code has bugs in it, they're found almost daily even in Linux systems. The point is not to pretened they're not there, but to accept that they are, that more will be found, and to manage that responsibly.
So, these people were just walking by, minding their own business, when bad cops with helmets just descended on them with batons and started beating them? Is that the story?
no, of course not. There is always more to these stories. Its because they happened to be black.
OK, I'm being facetious, but there's the grain of truth there to say that, yes sometimes these kinds of attacks do occur through no fault of the victim.
I think you need to see this: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=136 703&cid=11420540 (don't forget to read the text, you might want to choose a different design:) )
and try to reevaluate your opinion of CSS in general, and expand it to all the things that work in all browsers and not just text formatting. (CSS1?)
Actually, I like the hidden menus - its a nice usability feature that keeps the unused things hidden. I think you just need to get used to it and then you love it.
The only disadvantage is that the menu items change around until its fully trained which items you do and don't use.
speak for yourself. Whislst you may not have changed, I have evolved a distended belly, widely spread rear, pale skin, poor eyesight and arm muscles specially suited for resting on a desk.
I doubt the advantage of JPEG is that it creates lossy images. After all, if it could create lossless images of the same size, then people would use that instead. The fact that lossy compression allowed the images to be compressed even further was the advantage.
Reading the comments about speed, I doubt this will be used for much besides archival - and there I'm thinking more about very large image files, or scanned documents where the size really can mount up - in other words, compressed TIFF images as you mentioned.
absolutely right! Rational-sourced products were the worst I had the misfortune to be forced to work with. (I say that because the tools they bought from real development houses - Purify, Quantify, Clearcase) are the best.
What's really galling is that the company that makes software to improve software quality is guilty of the worst quality control. You'd think they could use their own tools... but then, thinking about the hell that is UML, they probably do.
According to MS, the LP64 model - where a long is 64bits, makes it more difficult to have a single codebase that compiles cleanly on both 32bit and 64 bit architectures, whereas the LLP64 model (whcih MS has adopted) makes it easier, and easier to have code that still works after porting.
New Data Types
The 64-bit version of Windows uses the LLP64 data model. What this means is that the standard C types int and long remain 32-bit integers. The data type size_t is mapped to the processor's word size (32-bits for IA32 and 64-bits for IA64), and __int64 is a 64-bit integer. This was done to assist in porting 32-bit code. The significance is that you can have the same code base for both the 32-bit and 64-bit version of your application.
There is another data model called LP64, which maps the standard C type long to a 64-bit integer; and int remains a 32-bit integer. This data model is common on Unix platforms, but can make it harder to create both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of your application from a single code base. You might notice a common theme here. The idea of a 32-bit versus a 64-bit platform is that you should be able to build both versions of your application from a single code base. If you can't do that, then you may want to revisit your design. Having a single code base is a huge win, especially if you plan to ship both versions.
So I think MS took the view that everyone will have to release both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of their code for the foreseable future. That might have made sense last year, but today it does look like 64-bit CPUs will dominate (mainly because they're much cheaper than anticipated)
just the way things are. All those 32-bit longs suddenly become 64-bit longs, etc etc. The reason they'd have done that is probably due to performance - as data types aligned on the bus (ie 32 bits aligned at 32 bit boundaries) were faster on x86 processors.
However, this is what I think, not what I know - so please tell me otherwise if there's other reasons.
Perhaps someone should offer a job to those guys so they can audit parts of the kernel better
Yeah, lol. Microsoft.
Oh sorry, I though you meant, 'someone should offer these guys a job so they can audit the kernel better to find *more* exploits, allowing MS to publicise all these anti-linux holes';)
# they told you there was a problem as soon as it is was pointed out Yikes. I'd hope they waited until there was a patch available, and practically everybody and his dog had run their up2date, yum, yast, or whatever update program.
# Linus didn't try to sue the person/s that found out there was a problem Good for him. I don't think Bill Gates ever sued anyone for bugs either. Microsoft the corporation, however... I suppose RedHat hasn't (yet) sued anyone for trying to hack 'their' distro, or IBM, or Novell. Perhaps it'd take a bug to be disclised, then used against a high-profile site (imagine Munich getting hacked. Will IBM's lawyers think once, let alone twice, in suing the reporter for not acting more 'responsibly' by letting them know so they can get a fix in place first?)
# You can track down the bug in the source yourself and fix it Yah.. right. what if you got it wrong? A badly written fix could be as bad as the original exploit, or worse! You're going to test it too? You're a C-coding security expert? Like the guys who've made the current patch, who were the ones who accidentally let the bug slip through in the first place. No-one's perfect all the time remember.
So, yes, I still really need to get the picture.
Linux isn't a magic bullet against security flaws. Windows isn't an open invitation for hackers. Get the picture yourself? That all this ignorant 'my OS is better than yours, cos it is' posturing is just adolescent bull.
erm.. forgive me here, but isn't the Arctic totally landless? Antarctica is a continent, but the Arctic is simply frozen water. No land. At all.
(and yes, I read the article, but it was a bit boring really. Why can't Russia control it as it has all those nuclear subs hanging around the place, or Canada that sort-of owns all the cold bits anyway. Denmark.... good luck guys:) )
So, to discover a few ideas about design, as opposed to tying it to content, look at what people have done with the exact same site. It should be a bit of an eye-opener as to what you can do with a bit of imagination, instead of thinking that certain content has to appear in certain ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, consider this: How many Windows Admins does Cisco employ? At least a department of 50, as he's migrated 2000 desktops already. So now he needs 5 (as 400 to 1 ratio is normal for Linux, obviously)
Does Cisco *really* emply such a large team of nothing-but Windows admins? At my work, we have about 200 Windows PCs... and Wayne, the admin.
My old boss wanted us to write everything in Java once upon a time, and came up with all kinds of bullshit arguments to support his view. In the end, it didn't matter whether Java was appropriate, only that he was right and that he could show his boss how right he always was.
The Cisco manager is doing the same political game - showing everyone how clever he is, and how he's the one who knows how to improve processes, costs and generally just be greatest. His bosses will look differently upon him and when its time for more reponsibility, or a place on the board.... he'll be considered. His poor admins who now have to support linux with inadequate training (sorry, we have no budget 'cos that'll make me look bad), or too few staff (after those redundancies) will be the ones who end up taking the flak. After all, it can't be the boss who cocked it all up - no, its because the staff aren't good enough.
So that's why he'll fudge the data, not to make a case to himself, but to show the people he's talked to in the past that he really is right, and was right all along. I bet he doesn't give a shit about Linux at all.
It won't be Firefox's fault, but it will be the FF community's fault.
Read some of the other posts on this thread, they're all going on about how FF can't be affected because it was 'designed from the ground up to be more secure', and 'there is inbuilt protection from viruses', and 'the developers would release a patch way quicker than microsoft'.
The advert telling people to get FF claimed it was more secure. So when people (deliberatly)install their IM smiley-banner-weather-forecast-search-toolbar extension for FF, and start seeing popup adverts... they'll say 'but you told me FF was more secure and this couldn't happen' and think 'FF is just as bad as IE'.
The answer - get some mature, sensible, reasoned information out there, and not the F/OSS fanboy rubbish spouted off by those karma whores who havn't even read the article.
well, my experience is with massively scalable systems - the kind that run tens of thousands of users, and not embedded 5Mhz processors. I can understand where you're coming from in that case with limited resource programming, but that is a specialised area of expertise.
In general programming, the techniques you're describing are poor, and for large scale systems, doubly so. In those systems the cost of using bitshift for multiplication is not worth the effort to optimise and the problems in maintenance - instead I'd be figuring out how to get that data to manipulate quicker as that's where 99% of the time is spent, compared to the 1% actually processing it.
I'm sure mathematical algorith programmers have different optimisations to the ones you've described too, eg. smaller data cache lines are the best way to increase speed, and not bitshift optimisation. So to think that he's the be-all and end-all of program optimisation is completely wrong. I wouldn't hire him for my type of work any day.
puh-lease!
Organising your variables on machine boundaries.. in my compiler (the microsoft one!) you'll see that all variables are padded out to machine boundaries anyway, so ordering your variables by type is just a waste of your time. Spend it more profitably. (this is one reason people look at programs now and say 'what bloat!' its mostly wasted space, just like using utf-16 will 'bloat' your program size up)
Compilers now optimise your low-level code way more efficiently that you can ever do it, so instead try to make your program look neat, clean and ordered so that maintenance isn't a complete nightmare (and all for a few microsoeconds performance improvement!).
What your friend is probably doing, in amongst all this wasted micro-optimisation, is refactoring the entire program. An example: login times with the product I code for used to take 8 minutes, until someone realised the login sequence would read a list of units from the DB, and then.. for each unit, read a set of property data from the DB. Putting the looped sub-query inside the main one..dropped login time to 2 minutes.
Those are the optimisations you need to worry about, the odd byte alignment - forget it. The compiler is probably re-ordering them for you anyway to help with cache coherency.
why stop there?
"If there are patent-encumbered parts in the program/derivative, we allow distribution ONLY if the patent is available royalty-free for ALL programs."
I strongly recommend you read 'East of Ealing' by Robert Rankin.
that comment was inflammatory and highly biased, and these comments just show up the partisan nature of the /. crowd nowadays - a crowd that is persuaded into thinking a certain way by the editors in the items they choose to accept, and the way they present them.
/. would attack them. If /. says the opposite, but equally poor reporting, then its acceptable.
/. editors may be editors and not journalists, but they force the direction this site goes in, and as we see, there are too many kiddies and 'me too' posters that give the usual knee-jerk posts in a way that is cozy, safe and un-thinking in the knowledge that they'll get karma points (read: accolation from their peers) and the sense of community from similarly mindless readers here.
;)
If Fox news (say) comes out with something equally as biased (eg. some company didn't get good support with open source, well what do you expect from a bunch of commie hippies who make it in their spare time) then
The
That's a bad place to be - like an isolated community who only respects each other, and their shared, insular values. If you want this site to be respected by others, especially people from the real world who might just use OSS for real business purposes, then you want to give a more thoughtful, even-handed feel to the posts here. Where accuracy of posts (and especially articles) are more important than simply knocking anything that isn't free or open, especially snide comments like Michael's (who is, after all, a 'leader' here and thus expected to show better qualities in his comments)
Anyway, that rant was brought to you by the words fairness and open-mindedness, and not bloody-minded arrogant knee-jerk post about a post that someone else posted that I disagreed with.
Your pathetic distribution doesn't even support my obscure feature of choice without a course of action so complex that it's madness to even contemplate it.
*sigh*. OK, WindowsXP it is then.
Crappy code hmm..
Remember the PHP issues of last month? If you were running a large phpBB site, and it got hacked.. you wouldn't be sitting there saying 'well the algorithms are good', you'd want to know who didn't keep up to date with the security patches, and why was it so difficult to install them, and why wasn't backups made more often... in other words, it *is* all about responsibilty.
Even the best code has bugs in it, they're found almost daily even in Linux systems. The point is not to pretened they're not there, but to accept that they are, that more will be found, and to manage that responsibly.
So, these people were just walking by, minding their own business, when bad cops with helmets just descended on them with batons and started beating them? Is that the story?
no, of course not. There is always more to these stories. Its because they happened to be black.
OK, I'm being facetious, but there's the grain of truth there to say that, yes sometimes these kinds of attacks do occur through no fault of the victim.
I think you need to see this: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=136 703&cid=11420540 :) )
(don't forget to read the text, you might want to choose a different design
and try to reevaluate your opinion of CSS in general, and expand it to all the things that work in all browsers and not just text formatting. (CSS1?)
Actually, I like the hidden menus - its a nice usability feature that keeps the unused things hidden. I think you just need to get used to it and then you love it.
The only disadvantage is that the menu items change around until its fully trained which items you do and don't use.
speak for yourself. Whislst you may not have changed, I have evolved a distended belly, widely spread rear, pale skin, poor eyesight and arm muscles specially suited for resting on a desk.
I'd say its more about people - the guidelines are still relevant because the human side of the equation is still exactly the same as it ever was.
"No networked computers on my ship," says Adama in the new Galactica series
"Sir! the network floppy has been broken and there aren't any replacements."
"Damn. Better start typing the data in by hand, Ensign."
It couldn't be this could it?
Actually, re-reading the last bit - Cisco bought it, I doubt it is, but is it something similar?
I doubt the advantage of JPEG is that it creates lossy images. After all, if it could create lossless images of the same size, then people would use that instead. The fact that lossy compression allowed the images to be compressed even further was the advantage.
Reading the comments about speed, I doubt this will be used for much besides archival - and there I'm thinking more about very large image files, or scanned documents where the size really can mount up - in other words, compressed TIFF images as you mentioned.
absolutely right! Rational-sourced products were the worst I had the misfortune to be forced to work with. (I say that because the tools they bought from real development houses - Purify, Quantify, Clearcase) are the best.
What's really galling is that the company that makes software to improve software quality is guilty of the worst quality control. You'd think they could use their own tools... but then, thinking about the hell that is UML, they probably do.
According to MS, the LP64 model - where a long is 64bits, makes it more difficult to have a single codebase that compiles cleanly on both 32bit and 64 bit architectures, whereas the LLP64 model (whcih MS has adopted) makes it easier, and easier to have code that still works after porting.
New Data Types
The 64-bit version of Windows uses the LLP64 data model. What this means is that the standard C types int and long remain 32-bit integers. The data type size_t is mapped to the processor's word size (32-bits for IA32 and 64-bits for IA64), and __int64 is a 64-bit integer. This was done to assist in porting 32-bit code. The significance is that you can have the same code base for both the 32-bit and 64-bit version of your application.
There is another data model called LP64, which maps the standard C type long to a 64-bit integer; and int remains a 32-bit integer. This data model is common on Unix platforms, but can make it harder to create both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of your application from a single code base. You might notice a common theme here. The idea of a 32-bit versus a 64-bit platform is that you should be able to build both versions of your application from a single code base. If you can't do that, then you may want to revisit your design. Having a single code base is a huge win, especially if you plan to ship both versions.
So I think MS took the view that everyone will have to release both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of their code for the foreseable future. That might have made sense last year, but today it does look like 64-bit CPUs will dominate (mainly because they're much cheaper than anticipated)
just the way things are. All those 32-bit longs suddenly become 64-bit longs, etc etc. The reason they'd have done that is probably due to performance - as data types aligned on the bus (ie 32 bits aligned at 32 bit boundaries) were faster on x86 processors.
However, this is what I think, not what I know - so please tell me otherwise if there's other reasons.
Perhaps someone should offer a job to those guys so they can audit parts of the kernel better
;)
Yeah, lol. Microsoft.
Oh sorry, I though you meant, 'someone should offer these guys a job so they can audit the kernel better to find *more* exploits, allowing MS to publicise all these anti-linux holes'
# they told you there was a problem as soon as it is was pointed out
Yikes. I'd hope they waited until there was a patch available, and practically everybody and his dog had run their up2date, yum, yast, or whatever update program.
# Linus didn't try to sue the person/s that found out there was a problem
Good for him. I don't think Bill Gates ever sued anyone for bugs either. Microsoft the corporation, however... I suppose RedHat hasn't (yet) sued anyone for trying to hack 'their' distro, or IBM, or Novell. Perhaps it'd take a bug to be disclised, then used against a high-profile site (imagine Munich getting hacked. Will IBM's lawyers think once, let alone twice, in suing the reporter for not acting more 'responsibly' by letting them know so they can get a fix in place first?)
# You can track down the bug in the source yourself and fix it
Yah.. right. what if you got it wrong? A badly written fix could be as bad as the original exploit, or worse! You're going to test it too? You're a C-coding security expert? Like the guys who've made the current patch, who were the ones who accidentally let the bug slip through in the first place. No-one's perfect all the time remember.
So, yes, I still really need to get the picture.
Linux isn't a magic bullet against security flaws. Windows isn't an open invitation for hackers. Get the picture yourself? That all this ignorant 'my OS is better than yours, cos it is' posturing is just adolescent bull.
erm.. forgive me here, but isn't the Arctic totally landless? Antarctica is a continent, but the Arctic is simply frozen water. No land. At all.
:) )
(and yes, I read the article, but it was a bit boring really. Why can't Russia control it as it has all those nuclear subs hanging around the place, or Canada that sort-of owns all the cold bits anyway. Denmark.... good luck guys
I think you missed the point - its a site that has 1 set of content, and as many 'themes' as you can shake a stick at.
Didn't like the gray on white style? No problem - click the side links and try some others. Note: the links simply change the CSS stylesheet.
try Black on parchment
or orange and black on light grey
or plain black and white-ish
So, to discover a few ideas about design, as opposed to tying it to content, look at what people have done with the exact same site. It should be a bit of an eye-opener as to what you can do with a bit of imagination, instead of thinking that certain content has to appear in certain ways.
and if you want to make yourself stand out somewhat, go look at CSS Zen Garden for something a bit fancy.