[~/new/usr/src/games]% gcc -O2 -o wump wump.c
(syntax errors like =|, =&, and the rand() API changed)
[~/new/usr/src/games]% gcc -O2 -o wump wump.c
[~/new/usr/src/games]% wump
Instructions? (y-n) n
You are in room 8
I smell a wumpus
There are tunnels to 10 6 18
Move or shoot (m-s) m
which room? 10
You are in room 10
I smell a wumpus
There are tunnels to 19 8 1
Move or shoot (m-s) s
Give list of rooms terminated by 0
8 6 0
You slew the wumpus
Another game? (y-n)
I'm running 2.4.17 and it works great on a DP264.
I followed the whole 2.4 series and there were some rough spots in the first dozen or so but it's good to go now.
They use Lisp (with a little bit of C++), and they find that some of their customers can't program very well in Lisp. Typical Lisp education teaches inefficient techniques. Furthermore:
"Of course, with things like STL and Java, I think programmers of other languages are also becoming pretty ignorant."
Next time you release a software product, delete that "NO WARRANTY" clause from the license. State that you will fix any bugs that are found for one full year from when the user downloaded the program. You may even be confident enough of your code to offer a money-back guarantee (if it's shareware, for example). See how adding lines like that to your tarball affects how you code and debug.
Dare Microsoft to even think about this. Their worst fear is a world where people choose software based on quality.
Seriously, we don't need to whine about what some legislators are doing about the big bad wolf's coding practices. What we need to do is start setting the example. Say "I write good code!" and stand behind those words. Somebody who knows how should create a version of the GPL that includes appropriate warrantees for Free Software. The "Quality GPL" (GQL?). You don't have to use it, if you think your code is buggy or is a development version. Right now we just click on "Stable Branch" and that sends a message to those in the know, but how much better if you go visit a software repository and find piles of code that are stamped with a license that guarantees that the product is free from defects in workmanship (modifying the source code voids the original warranty, of course, and people who re-release modified code are under obligation to change the license to reflect that).
We want people to get the idea that software that claims to be stable yet comes with the phrase "NO WARRANTY" is probably a steaming turd. Especially if they paid good money for it.
Naturally, you can't predict how some people will use your product. "No, sir, the VCR does not function under water." Your code might not work on an SGI, either, if you developed it under HPUX. Using the product in a manner not intended will void the warranty. Sometimes it's not a bug, it really is a feature (or the lack of one). But if somebody finds a bug, you WILL fix it, won't you?
Why not put that in writing? Even offer a monetary reward to the first finder (how about $2.56?) of every bug.
Note that agreeing to fix bugs, or claiming that your product is bug free, is completely different from assuming liability if the user uses your program to kill himself. That's a completely different story.
Time slot? Who cares? I almost never watch a show "live" these days. Who has the time to schedule their lives around network broadcasts? I have two VCRs and they are both programmed to the hilt. (Why do VCRs only have 8 program slots? A salescritter I asked said "most people don't use them at all." He's probably right.) I watch shows when *I* want to. And I fast forward through the commercials. Phthbppppt!
This version of the Space Elevator doesn't go all the way to the ground. That's why it can be built with existing materials. You still need a (hydrogen fueled) rocket to get to the dock at the lower end of the tether, which is about 250 km up. However the dock is moving significantly slower than orbital velocity, which increases payload and allows cheaper (more reliable & maintainable) rockets.
I cancelled my local newspaper subscription when I started seeing stories in there that I had read on Yahoo the previous day... They were just printing the stuff that came off the AP newswire.
That's true, but the Alpha was *also* the fastest
thing around when it came out. It has more memory bandwidth so you can address many gig, sure, but 64 bits also enables long instructions, and a bigger pipeline. Quad issue (executing 4 instructions simultaneously) wouldn't be possible without the ability to fetch all those instructions in one go. So 64 bit machines CAN be inherently faster than 32 bit machines, through that microparallelism.
This is more like "nano armor," but you have to
start someplace. Next we'll have nano +2 two-handed swords. (Anybody read "Bug Park" by Hogan? Excellent.)
This is good news for Diabetes sufferers.
Any EE will tell you that analog electronics is basically black magic. Any idiot can do digital electronics but it takes real skill and understanding to do anything analog. Furthermore analog is far more powerful than digital -- in terms of speed and complexity of the computations possible (if not accuracy). But it's harder to control and more difficult to understand. Analog synth is an amazing area and this guy's a real wizard. Some of the posters here will complain that this guy's site is lame because they have NO IDEA what's involved. This is a true melding of Art and Science, not simple hackery.
And before any strong AI freaks slap the Church-Turing hypothesis in my face remember that analog circuits (through non-linearities) have sensitive dependence on initial conditions and are basically computationally irreducible. Sure, you can simulate digitally to any desired degree of accuracy blah blah, but while your simulation is clunking out two milliseconds worth of output the analog synth has been going in real time for an hour. I call that *effective*.
Good science fiction is usually logical and consistent, beyond violating a few physical laws here and there. But Star Trek is "SciFi". Star Trek has *always* been inconsistent. But people like it anyway, because it's shiny.
Agent systems are interesting, and there is something to be said about the trend from simple server/client systems to server/agent/client systems. Agents can be very helpful in brokering transactions locally that involve sensitive information, or information that needs to be accessed repetitively.
However, agents can be complex to install and configure, and can potentially decrease security. The agent knows all your secrets, after all. Especially, using non-local agents is highly inadvisable.
It is also worth pointing out that agents can be used with password based systems as well. Unfortunately, SSH implementations are only using
agents for key management. It is possible, and highly desirable when a chain of hosts is involved, for the remote side to contact your local agent to manage a remote passphrase-based authentication, using a protocol such as SRP that doesn't leak. An SRP agent would live on your desktop, present a familiar interface that is unambiguous, and provide secure authentications network wide, even chained. You never enter or store any security information on any host other than your own local client (this also solves all traffic analysis attacks based on password length).
A well designed agent needs to be a library, with pluggable user interfaces that are adapted for all the different GUI/CLI systems out there. Agent interfaces need to be familiar and distinct. There is a huge risk in communicating with an agent over a CLI, for example, when you can't distinguish the agent's prompts from the server's prompts. Ideally, agents should be started and configured automatically on the client machine by the client software. Sensitive information should time out.
You also don't want your agent to become a huge database of fluff with things like addresses and phone numbers. Use a database for that, and equip your database with an agent, and your agents with protocols that let them perform client/agent/agent/server transactions (with only LOCAL agents of course).
MS's Passport, for example, violates all these rules. It's non-local, it's full of tons of information that's irrelevent to most transactions, and the interface is variable and confusing.
It would be great if projects like OpenSSH develop (or use) full-blown agents and agent protocols that allowed these features. I for one would be interested in hearing about general purpose client/agent/server architectures and protocols that have already been developed for use in Free Software projects, and/or TLS-based protocols that use agents. Any ideas?
It's an open source project that hasn't released any code
yet. Looks like DNS (which is already being 'evolved' to handle public keys and other such sign-on info). Do a DNS lookup on "your name" and get your email address & phone number. Thus, ONENAME is the ROOT SERVER.
ONENAME have patented the web-agent technology that automates the exchange, linking, and synchronization of information between publishers and subscribers over digital networks (using XML).
They have granted an exclusive royalty free license to XNSORG, and XNSORG is allowed to sublicense under an Open Source License. It looks to me like this is one of the good kind of patents -- it's also irrevocable. So it looks like they patented the technology as a defensive move to prevent the big nasty corps. from using it outside the open source license terms.
I mean, hey, it's not as if they don't have amazing constructions made of lego -- Legoland in Windsor only has millions of bricks worth of famous attractions, cars, trains, boats, and LOCKS that really work, pumping water up and down and everything.
English engineers should be inspired by Legoland, which is just outside London...
This would make real DNA Fingerprinting a reality.
Get arrested, give a blood sample. It'll only take a few hours to verify who you are. None of this "probably" stuff, they'll have YOUR sequence on file, and there won't be any doubt (unless you have an identical twin).
i notice that the release of 2.1 isn't signed or even checksummed. what will you do in the future to ensure that mirror sites don't supply versions infected with macro viruses or changes to the core? nobody has time to audit a 4 meg download, and everybody runs "configure" right away (downloading an executable and running it -- idiotic, eh?).
Excellent! Now I can finally replace my gold metal speaker wires with liquid nitrogen cooled, silver encased, bisco ribbon cables! Then I'll finally be able to sleep at night. Well, as long as I have the cryo, can I replace my tubes with Josephson junction? Thermal noise begone!
The plastic in question is pentacene, and it has also been used to make Efficient Plastic Solar Cells. Efficiency is only aroud 2%, a far cry from silicon's 15%, but if they made all the plastic food containers out of it, maybe they could use it as a supplemental supply in California.:-)
what are the best open source OCR efforts that you are aware of? G* and K* compatible scanner/OCR/packaging systems should be pushed to help get the most material online in the shortest time, using modern formats like SGML.
When I download something, the first thing I look for is comments. No matter how clever or elegant the code is, nothing 10,000 lines long can ever be so self-evident that you don't need comments.
Especially if the algorithm is particularly clever, it can be relying on some subtlety that will be entirely missed without a good long comment. Modifying such code is dangerous.
One of the reasons people like Knuth's approach so much is that he puts the comments first, conceptually. The code is essentially embedded in a great long comment that describes everything that's happening. The code is just there to distill the essence of the algorithm into a form a stupid machine can understand. If the machines were a bit smarter, they would be able to run the program by reading the comments and executing them!
Code with no comments is not a sign that the author understands his code so well that he doesn't need them. It is a sign that the programmer is lazy, sloppy, and doesn't care whether or not his code is maintainable.
I just can't emphasize this point enough: for Open Source projects commenting is even more important than code. A large faceless company can get away with releasing products built on hundreds of thousands of lines of uncommented code, because they have external documentation, and can afford to spend thousands of dollars training new programmers. But if you want other people to even look at your code, you have to help them understand it. People making patches to code they don't fully grok are just going to make a mess.
Good commenting style is as difficult to develop as good coding practices (the two really go hand in hand). Mental discipline (did you ever say to yourself "I'll go back and comment it later"? Did you?), clear exposition of an algorithm (no, the code is not a clear exposition -- remember code is CODE, it's meant for a stupid machine, not an intelligent human), maintainability, etc. Comments should be written in complete sentences wherever possible. Don't comment like this:
/*
* this comment
* is pretty
* but hard to format again
* when you change it
*/
Rather, write them like this:
/* This comment is a paragraph. Any text editor
can reformat this comment after you change it. */
Not everybody uses the same tools you do. Comments should be as easy to change as possible. If they aren't, people won't do it, and the comments can get out of synch with the code, which is even worse than no comment at all.
Languages without block quotes are very irritating in this respect.
So don't look for beautiful CODE, look for well written prose comments. THAT program will be more stable, easier to use, more functional, and a joy to work on.
We've had HDTV in Japan for a long time (it was invented here, after all, and only politics has kept it that way). It isn't so great. They want you to BUY it, sure, just like they try to convince you that every little technical innovation must be instantly bought before it becomes obsolete. But let's face it, it's still TV we're talking about here. Do you think TV programming will improve if you buy a more expensive receiver? Think again. Also, think about stretch mode which is what happens to your regular TV signal when you try to display it on the HDTV screen. Sure, it's an option. An option that renders the people you're watching just a little bit fatter. If you don't like that, then enjoy the big blank spaces on the sides, which will no doubt be full of banner ads once there's a market base of HDTV viewers.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why it's cool:
[~/new/usr/src/games]% gcc -O2 -o wump wump.c
(syntax errors like =|, =&, and the rand() API changed)
[~/new/usr/src/games]% gcc -O2 -o wump wump.c
[~/new/usr/src/games]% wump
Instructions? (y-n) n
You are in room 8
I smell a wumpus
There are tunnels to 10 6 18
Move or shoot (m-s) m
which room? 10
You are in room 10
I smell a wumpus
There are tunnels to 19 8 1
Move or shoot (m-s) s
Give list of rooms terminated by 0
8 6 0
You slew the wumpus
Another game? (y-n)
has no non-zero integer solutions
for x, y, and z when n > 2.
"I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this,
but my train is coming."
Seen written on a wall in a Boston subway station.
I'm running 2.4.17 and it works great on a DP264. I followed the whole 2.4 series and there were some rough spots in the first dozen or so but it's good to go now.
"Of course, with things like STL and Java, I think programmers of other languages are also becoming pretty ignorant."
Dare Microsoft to even think about this. Their worst fear is a world where people choose software based on quality.
Seriously, we don't need to whine about what some legislators are doing about the big bad wolf's coding practices. What we need to do is start setting the example. Say "I write good code!" and stand behind those words. Somebody who knows how should create a version of the GPL that includes appropriate warrantees for Free Software. The "Quality GPL" (GQL?). You don't have to use it, if you think your code is buggy or is a development version. Right now we just click on "Stable Branch" and that sends a message to those in the know, but how much better if you go visit a software repository and find piles of code that are stamped with a license that guarantees that the product is free from defects in workmanship (modifying the source code voids the original warranty, of course, and people who re-release modified code are under obligation to change the license to reflect that).
We want people to get the idea that software that claims to be stable yet comes with the phrase "NO WARRANTY" is probably a steaming turd. Especially if they paid good money for it.
Naturally, you can't predict how some people will use your product. "No, sir, the VCR does not function under water." Your code might not work on an SGI, either, if you developed it under HPUX. Using the product in a manner not intended will void the warranty. Sometimes it's not a bug, it really is a feature (or the lack of one). But if somebody finds a bug, you WILL fix it, won't you? Why not put that in writing? Even offer a monetary reward to the first finder (how about $2.56?) of every bug.
Note that agreeing to fix bugs, or claiming that your product is bug free, is completely different from assuming liability if the user uses your program to kill himself. That's a completely different story.
Time slot? Who cares? I almost never watch a show "live" these days. Who has the time to schedule their lives around network broadcasts? I have two VCRs and they are both programmed to the hilt. (Why do VCRs only have 8 program slots? A salescritter I asked said "most people don't use them at all." He's probably right.) I watch shows when *I* want to. And I fast forward through the commercials. Phthbppppt!
http://freshmeat.net/projects/its4/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/r.a.t.s./
http://freshmeat.net/projects/qaudit/
Check this out, too:
Hasas
It's for sonar, but the beamforming technique is applicable to phased arrays.
This version of the Space Elevator doesn't go all the way to the ground. That's why it can be built with existing materials. You still need a (hydrogen fueled) rocket to get to the dock at the lower end of the tether, which is about 250 km up. However the dock is moving significantly slower than orbital velocity, which increases payload and allows cheaper (more reliable & maintainable) rockets.
I cancelled my local newspaper subscription when I started seeing stories in there that I had read on Yahoo the previous day... They were just printing the stuff that came off the AP newswire.
That's true, but the Alpha was *also* the fastest
thing around when it came out. It has more memory bandwidth so you can address many gig, sure, but 64 bits also enables long instructions, and a bigger pipeline. Quad issue (executing 4 instructions simultaneously) wouldn't be possible without the ability to fetch all those instructions in one go. So 64 bit machines CAN be inherently faster than 32 bit machines, through that microparallelism.
This is more like "nano armor," but you have to start someplace. Next we'll have nano +2 two-handed swords. (Anybody read "Bug Park" by Hogan? Excellent.) This is good news for Diabetes sufferers.
Any EE will tell you that analog electronics is basically black magic. Any idiot can do digital electronics but it takes real skill and understanding to do anything analog. Furthermore analog is far more powerful than digital -- in terms of speed and complexity of the computations possible (if not accuracy). But it's harder to control and more difficult to understand. Analog synth is an amazing area and this guy's a real wizard. Some of the posters here will complain that this guy's site is lame because they have NO IDEA what's involved. This is a true melding of Art and Science, not simple hackery.
And before any strong AI freaks slap the Church-Turing hypothesis in my face remember that analog circuits (through non-linearities) have sensitive dependence on initial conditions and are basically computationally irreducible. Sure, you can simulate digitally to any desired degree of accuracy blah blah, but while your simulation is clunking out two milliseconds worth of output the analog synth has been going in real time for an hour. I call that *effective*.
Good science fiction is usually logical and consistent, beyond violating a few physical laws here and there. But Star Trek is "SciFi". Star Trek has *always* been inconsistent. But people like it anyway, because it's shiny.
However, agents can be complex to install and configure, and can potentially decrease security. The agent knows all your secrets, after all. Especially, using non-local agents is highly inadvisable.
It is also worth pointing out that agents can be used with password based systems as well. Unfortunately, SSH implementations are only using agents for key management. It is possible, and highly desirable when a chain of hosts is involved, for the remote side to contact your local agent to manage a remote passphrase-based authentication, using a protocol such as SRP that doesn't leak. An SRP agent would live on your desktop, present a familiar interface that is unambiguous, and provide secure authentications network wide, even chained. You never enter or store any security information on any host other than your own local client (this also solves all traffic analysis attacks based on password length).
A well designed agent needs to be a library, with pluggable user interfaces that are adapted for all the different GUI/CLI systems out there. Agent interfaces need to be familiar and distinct. There is a huge risk in communicating with an agent over a CLI, for example, when you can't distinguish the agent's prompts from the server's prompts. Ideally, agents should be started and configured automatically on the client machine by the client software. Sensitive information should time out.
You also don't want your agent to become a huge database of fluff with things like addresses and phone numbers. Use a database for that, and equip your database with an agent, and your agents with protocols that let them perform client/agent/agent/server transactions (with only LOCAL agents of course).
MS's Passport, for example, violates all these rules. It's non-local, it's full of tons of information that's irrelevent to most transactions, and the interface is variable and confusing.
It would be great if projects like OpenSSH develop (or use) full-blown agents and agent protocols that allowed these features. I for one would be interested in hearing about general purpose client/agent/server architectures and protocols that have already been developed for use in Free Software projects, and/or TLS-based protocols that use agents. Any ideas?
It's an open source project that hasn't released any code
yet. Looks like DNS (which is already being 'evolved' to handle public keys and other such sign-on info). Do a DNS lookup on "your name" and get your email address & phone number. Thus, ONENAME is the ROOT SERVER.
ONENAME have patented the web-agent technology that automates the exchange, linking, and synchronization of information between publishers and subscribers over digital networks (using XML).
They have granted an exclusive royalty free license to XNSORG, and XNSORG is allowed to sublicense under an Open Source License. It looks to me like this is one of the good kind of patents -- it's also irrevocable. So it looks like they patented the technology as a defensive move to prevent the big nasty corps. from using it outside the open source license terms.
I mean, hey, it's not as if they don't have amazing constructions made of lego -- Legoland in Windsor only has millions of bricks worth of famous attractions, cars, trains, boats, and LOCKS that really work, pumping water up and down and everything. English engineers should be inspired by Legoland, which is just outside London...
This would make real DNA Fingerprinting a reality.
Get arrested, give a blood sample. It'll only take a few hours to verify who you are. None of this "probably" stuff, they'll have YOUR sequence on file, and there won't be any doubt (unless you have an identical twin).
i notice that the release of 2.1 isn't signed or even checksummed. what will you do in the future to ensure that mirror sites don't supply versions infected with macro viruses or changes to the core? nobody has time to audit a 4 meg download, and everybody runs "configure" right away (downloading an executable and running it -- idiotic, eh?).
tell your vendor to link it static (using .a libraries instead of .so).
also remind them that a "Linux" version is
meaningless, they should say "Linux/x86" or
"Linux/Alpha" or whatever.
I hate it when a vendor supplies a "Linux" version
that won't work on my hardware, and I can't tell until *after* I've downloaded it.
Excellent! Now I can finally replace my gold metal speaker wires with liquid nitrogen cooled, silver encased, bisco ribbon cables! Then I'll finally be able to sleep at night. Well, as long as I have the cryo, can I replace my tubes with Josephson junction? Thermal noise begone!
The plastic in question is pentacene, and it has also been used to make Efficient Plastic Solar Cells. Efficiency is only aroud 2%, a far cry from silicon's 15%, but if they made all the plastic food containers out of it, maybe they could use it as a supplemental supply in California. :-)
what are the best open source OCR efforts that you are aware of? G* and K* compatible scanner/OCR/packaging systems should be pushed to help get the most material online in the shortest time, using modern formats like SGML.
Especially if the algorithm is particularly clever, it can be relying on some subtlety that will be entirely missed without a good long comment. Modifying such code is dangerous.
One of the reasons people like Knuth's approach so much is that he puts the comments first, conceptually. The code is essentially embedded in a great long comment that describes everything that's happening. The code is just there to distill the essence of the algorithm into a form a stupid machine can understand. If the machines were a bit smarter, they would be able to run the program by reading the comments and executing them!
Code with no comments is not a sign that the author understands his code so well that he doesn't need them. It is a sign that the programmer is lazy, sloppy, and doesn't care whether or not his code is maintainable. I just can't emphasize this point enough: for Open Source projects commenting is even more important than code. A large faceless company can get away with releasing products built on hundreds of thousands of lines of uncommented code, because they have external documentation, and can afford to spend thousands of dollars training new programmers. But if you want other people to even look at your code, you have to help them understand it. People making patches to code they don't fully grok are just going to make a mess.
Good commenting style is as difficult to develop as good coding practices (the two really go hand in hand). Mental discipline (did you ever say to yourself "I'll go back and comment it later"? Did you?), clear exposition of an algorithm (no, the code is not a clear exposition -- remember code is CODE, it's meant for a stupid machine, not an intelligent human), maintainability, etc. Comments should be written in complete sentences wherever possible. Don't comment like this:
Rather, write them like this:Not everybody uses the same tools you do. Comments should be as easy to change as possible. If they aren't, people won't do it, and the comments can get out of synch with the code, which is even worse than no comment at all.
Languages without block quotes are very irritating in this respect.
So don't look for beautiful CODE, look for well written prose comments. THAT program will be more stable, easier to use, more functional, and a joy to work on.
We've had HDTV in Japan for a long time (it was invented here, after all, and only politics has kept it that way). It isn't so great. They want you to BUY it, sure, just like they try to convince you that every little technical innovation must be instantly bought before it becomes obsolete. But let's face it, it's still TV we're talking about here. Do you think TV programming will improve if you buy a more expensive receiver? Think again. Also, think about stretch mode which is what happens to your regular TV signal when you try to display it on the HDTV screen. Sure, it's an option. An option that renders the people you're watching just a little bit fatter. If you don't like that, then enjoy the big blank spaces on the sides, which will no doubt be full of banner ads once there's a market base of HDTV viewers.