I thought I would put my $.01 cents into the pool here - having recently been through something like this.
Background: I am the author of some fairly unique software tools that allow you to communicate with industrial Programmable Logic Controllers. I consider the tools I write to be libraries with some example code showing how to use the library. It's all fairly simple stuff but one of my packages does a crapload of mallocs as it reads objects from the controller - basically it mallocs a data struct for every object, and then it also mallocs the data store for each object based on the data type (byte size) and how many items there are (3 dimensional array). In other words, a huge number of mallocs with no associated free statements.
So one day I get an email from a guy who was interested in using my software but wanted to know when I was going to remove all the memory leaks from my code. He was kind enough to include a valgrind report that showed a huge number of memory allocations that were never freed. It took me forever to explain to the guy that while I could "eliminate those memory leaks", it would also destroy the value of the library as it would in effect delete all the data read out of the controller.
Moral of the story: bug reports (including things like these code checkers and memory analysis programs like valgrind) are nice, but they need to be properly applied to be useful. Otherwise, these reports can be a significant distraction.
While I am not Canadian, I feel I have a bit of understanding of the law - at least here in the States (and no, IANAL).
I think you will find that the "contract" that Telus holds with you to be valid under the concept of "partial performance". Here is how it works...
Say you have a "verbal" (or virtual) contract with someone to provide you with widgets. Say that the first year of the contract, the widgets are $5.00 a piece and the second year and beyond, the widgets are $20.00 a piece. The contract term is for 4 years. You verbally (or virtually) agree to the contract and start taking delivery of the widgets happily paying $5.00 a piece for them. At the second year of the contract, you are shocked to find that the price increased to $20.00 a widget. Since there is no physical contract to refer to, you sue to get the price returned to $5.00 (the bit you don't mention is how you didn't remember the price increase after the first year). The court throws your case out because they find that while there is no writing, your ordering of and receipt of widgets, and your paying of those widgets amounts agreeing to the terms of the contract (or agreement as some would call it). Since there is nothing to contradict the bit about the price increasing, that term is valid. If you didn't like that term, you shouldn't have induced "performance" of the contract on it's terms.
You are essentially in the same position here. You can't just walk away from a contract - even a verbal/virtual one - once you start executing it without penality.
How about making this a touch simpler... Basing the liability limit as a multiplication factor of the purchase price of the software - something like 10x purchase price. If you paid $0 for the software, then 10 x $0.00 is still $0.00. Now, if you paid $139 for an oem license of WinXP, then the liability would be $1,390. Seems fair to me...
These idiots are intentionally merging the definitions of "data" and "program".
Last I checked, you can't run an mp3 file anymore than you can run an avi file.
You need software to interpret the data. The data is what people are buying.
Let's face it: these greedy little bastards want a cut of the action EVERY TIME money changes hands. They want a cut when you buy something from a store, from an individual (eBay, Rummage Sales, Classified Ads, etc), whatever. Everytime we find a way around the law, they will find a way to "reinterpret" the law to include that which was missed in the previous interpretation.
If you looked through the list of donations on Theo's donations page, it's quite curious that some of the larger commercial interests in the Linux World (RedHat, Novell, etc...) are NOT in there.
Of course, they may have requested no publicity.
This is Slashdot, I'll let you draw your own conclusions here...:)
I guess this depends on what you qualify as "good"...
VB is good if you want to write apps for Windows
VB is good if you don't care about other platforms
VB is good if you don't care much about stability
VB is good if you want to learn the "wrong way" to code (who needs type enforcement)
VB is good if you want code that you can read but not understand
I'm sure there are other reasons to consider VB to be a "good" language. Since I don't do VB anymore (thank God), I have lost track of those reasons. I think I'll stick with C and PHP, this way when I get a customer that wants something that'll work on Solaris or QNX or AIX or HP/UX, I have half a chance of success!
Am I reading this "benchmark" correctly? Did he base his results on a sample size of 1?
At the very least, you run multiple times and average the results to give statistically meaningful numbers. I can't think of ANY time where a sample size of 1 was meaningful for anything.
What would be really interesting is to come up with a reasonable UCL and LCL for each test, and then calculate out a cpK for each test. It's one thing to say "I got these results one time", it's something much more impressive to say "I can achieve this result +-10%".
Of course, if a particular benchmark can't even hit a cpK of 1, then maybe there is room for improvement in the coding of the driver.
For those of you who haven't done much with statistics, cpK is a measure of "capability" in a machine or process. It shows how repeatable the measured process is. A higher number indicates that you have a highly targeted, low deviation process whereas a low number (1 or less) indicates that your process is incapable of repeatability and/or accuracy.
If nothing else, you can always get yourself a Canopy backhaul rig and do your co-op, probably for less than the cost of 1 month of a T1 in that sort of area.
The trick at that point is to find a community that is served well enough that you can feed the one end of the system. Of course, finding a fairly clear LOS between both ends can be fun. At least the equipment is a one-time cost as opposed to an ongoing cost
I tried to contribute to the OOo project on the marketing team. It was incredibly difficult to be taken seriously when your "product" moniker could not be distinguished from a web site.
I tried to contribute to the OOo project by submitting valid and repeatable bug reports but I was told that getting label and envelope printing working CORRECTLY was a feature request, not a bug, and would not be addressed in the upcoming release.
I tried to contribute to the OOo project but could not because the software build system REQUIRES PAM so I could not build the current tree (Slackware user). I WAS going to work on a stand alone viewer for Impress.
I would love to contribute to OOo, but the OOo team seems to want to make things as difficult as possible for outsiders to come in. Why on Earth would an Office Suite need PAM???
Is it just me, or did this review stink for lack of proper testing and comparison...
If I were comparing this product and it's performance, I certainly would not be benchmarking a SATA based RAID setup against a single Parallel ATA drive. Something in this arrangement just doesn't seem... well, logical.
If you were really going to try to impress me with it's performance, then you would have to show me how it compares to "non-RAID" optimized drives of near simular characteristics. Show me how this drive performs against, say, Hitachi SATA 320 gig drives using an identical test rig. Also show me how this drive compares to 320 gig SCSI drives. Show me the results as JBOD, RAID-0, RAID-1 and RAID-5. You know, like the real world.
While the graphs are pretty, I'm afraid that this "review" it fairly content-free.
You know, I don't know what universe these folk are living in, but this "python-twisted" package or whatever it is called is absolutely NOT included in every Linux distribution.
Slackware - oldest living Linux distribution - does NOT have this twisted thing in it.
You would think that the developers would use a standard programming language - like C - for something like this...(gr&d)
Um... wouldn't this work against the Linux Kernel as well?
As we have seen in the past, there are probably some 200+ patented technologies embedded within the Linux Kernel. One we know about is RCU(Read/Copy/Update). There are no doubt others...
Since the kernel contains patented technology, does this mean that the kernel can not be covered under the GPL? Hmm... maybe Stallman *IS* trying to do us a favor...:)
I remember reading once some time ago (I don't recall where) that the price of admission to a movie went straight to the movie studio. The theatre only made money on the concession stand.
If nothing else, this explains the cost of the consession stand - it's the only way the theatre itself makes money, the rest goes to the studio.
When you try to do something even mildly advanced in OOo (like using Avery Labels in Landscape instead of Portrait mode) or even something as simple as printing a #10 envelope, OOo often falls down, badly.
When these issues are brought up to the developers (via their bug reporting system), the report is either ignored outright (in the case of the envelope printing) or the report is dismissed as a "feature enhancement" request and not a bug.
Come on people, you can't ask people to submit bug reports only to ignore or dismiss those reports.
I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that this agency indeed had submitted bug reports and were summarily ignored and/or dismissed. Hint time folks: this tends to piss people off, especially decision makers!
After reading the comments about the "3 hours to compile the system in ramdrive" or whatever it was, I am thinking to myself: that would be nice!
Try installing Gentoo on a SunFire V100. More importantly, try installing PHP on said SunFire V100. After 3 DAYS of compiling just about every unnecessary package available (including the entire X Windows tree - the SunFire 100 is a headless box), it finally finished the install of PHP - or at least it thought it finished. It basically didn't work correctly.
I ended up trashing the Gentoo install and installing Debian Sparc on it. At least THAT worked.
I can't believe how many of you folks are missing the point of this compiler problem...
The point isn't about people who compile their own code (like us *nix folk), but the point is about people who use icc to compile binaries for wide distribution.
An example of binaries for wide distribution: MySQL has a precompiled binary that was built using icc. There are no-doubt other software packages that are compiled using icc - no doubt without a word about it in public.
Take a program like AutoCAD as a hypothetical. If AutoCAD were compiled using icc (instead of VC++), then it would scream on Intel chips yet would absolutely suck on AMD chips (if it ran at all). In this realistic case, Intel's code-path decisions are absolutely hurting the end user (and quite probably hurting AutoDesk as well).
So this can prove to be a very big problem indeed...
Slashdot Mirror
I thought I would put my $.01 cents into the pool here - having recently been through something like this.
Background: I am the author of some fairly unique software tools that allow you to communicate with industrial Programmable Logic Controllers. I consider the tools I write to be libraries with some example code showing how to use the library. It's all fairly simple stuff but one of my packages does a crapload of mallocs as it reads objects from the controller - basically it mallocs a data struct for every object, and then it also mallocs the data store for each object based on the data type (byte size) and how many items there are (3 dimensional array). In other words, a huge number of mallocs with no associated free statements.
So one day I get an email from a guy who was interested in using my software but wanted to know when I was going to remove all the memory leaks from my code. He was kind enough to include a valgrind report that showed a huge number of memory allocations that were never freed. It took me forever to explain to the guy that while I could "eliminate those memory leaks", it would also destroy the value of the library as it would in effect delete all the data read out of the controller.
Moral of the story: bug reports (including things like these code checkers and memory analysis programs like valgrind) are nice, but they need to be properly applied to be useful. Otherwise, these reports can be a significant distraction.
I've some bad news for you, I fear...
While I am not Canadian, I feel I have a bit of understanding of the law - at least here in the States (and no, IANAL).
I think you will find that the "contract" that Telus holds with you to be valid under the concept of "partial performance". Here is how it works...
Say you have a "verbal" (or virtual) contract with someone to provide you with widgets. Say that the first year of the contract, the widgets are $5.00 a piece and the second year and beyond, the widgets are $20.00 a piece. The contract term is for 4 years. You verbally (or virtually) agree to the contract and start taking delivery of the widgets happily paying $5.00 a piece for them. At the second year of the contract, you are shocked to find that the price increased to $20.00 a widget. Since there is no physical contract to refer to, you sue to get the price returned to $5.00 (the bit you don't mention is how you didn't remember the price increase after the first year). The court throws your case out because they find that while there is no writing, your ordering of and receipt of widgets, and your paying of those widgets amounts agreeing to the terms of the contract (or agreement as some would call it). Since there is nothing to contradict the bit about the price increasing, that term is valid. If you didn't like that term, you shouldn't have induced "performance" of the contract on it's terms.
You are essentially in the same position here. You can't just walk away from a contract - even a verbal/virtual one - once you start executing it without penality.
...or Brent Hatch, as his coworkers and family refer to him..
hookt ahn fonix reely werkd fer me
How about making this a touch simpler... Basing the liability limit as a multiplication factor of the purchase price of the software - something like 10x purchase price. If you paid $0 for the software, then 10 x $0.00 is still $0.00. Now, if you paid $139 for an oem license of WinXP, then the liability would be $1,390. Seems fair to me...
These idiots are intentionally merging the definitions of "data" and "program".
Last I checked, you can't run an mp3 file anymore than you can run an avi file.
You need software to interpret the data. The data is what people are buying.
Let's face it: these greedy little bastards want a cut of the action EVERY TIME money changes hands. They want a cut when you buy something from a store, from an individual (eBay, Rummage Sales, Classified Ads, etc), whatever. Everytime we find a way around the law, they will find a way to "reinterpret" the law to include that which was missed in the previous interpretation.
If you looked through the list of donations on Theo's donations page, it's quite curious that some of the larger commercial interests in the Linux World (RedHat, Novell, etc...) are NOT in there.
Of course, they may have requested no publicity.
This is Slashdot, I'll let you draw your own conclusions here... :)
Probably not 10, but here are my top tools (linux based)...
Knoppix
Ethereal
NTOP
Nagios
nmap
joe
gcc
make
gdb
I guess this depends on what you qualify as "good"...
I'm sure there are other reasons to consider VB to be a "good" language. Since I don't do VB anymore (thank God), I have lost track of those reasons. I think I'll stick with C and PHP, this way when I get a customer that wants something that'll work on Solaris or QNX or AIX or HP/UX, I have half a chance of success!
Does it run on Linux?
Am I reading this "benchmark" correctly? Did he base his results on a sample size of 1?
At the very least, you run multiple times and average the results to give statistically meaningful numbers. I can't think of ANY time where a sample size of 1 was meaningful for anything.
What would be really interesting is to come up with a reasonable UCL and LCL for each test, and then calculate out a cpK for each test. It's one thing to say "I got these results one time", it's something much more impressive to say "I can achieve this result +-10%".
Of course, if a particular benchmark can't even hit a cpK of 1, then maybe there is room for improvement in the coding of the driver.
For those of you who haven't done much with statistics, cpK is a measure of "capability" in a machine or process. It shows how repeatable the measured process is. A higher number indicates that you have a highly targeted, low deviation process whereas a low number (1 or less) indicates that your process is incapable of repeatability and/or accuracy.
If nothing else, you can always get yourself a Canopy backhaul rig and do your co-op, probably for less than the cost of 1 month of a T1 in that sort of area.
The trick at that point is to find a community that is served well enough that you can feed the one end of the system. Of course, finding a fairly clear LOS between both ends can be fun. At least the equipment is a one-time cost as opposed to an ongoing cost
29 - 1 = 30
Prove it.
Can someone please explain to me exactly WHEN the FCC became a law-creation body?
I can't honestly believe that Congress would outsource THAT
I tried to contribute to the OOo project on the marketing team. It was incredibly difficult to be taken seriously when your "product" moniker could not be distinguished from a web site.
I tried to contribute to the OOo project by submitting valid and repeatable bug reports but I was told that getting label and envelope printing working CORRECTLY was a feature request, not a bug, and would not be addressed in the upcoming release.
I tried to contribute to the OOo project but could not because the software build system REQUIRES PAM so I could not build the current tree (Slackware user). I WAS going to work on a stand alone viewer for Impress.
I would love to contribute to OOo, but the OOo team seems to want to make things as difficult as possible for outsiders to come in. Why on Earth would an Office Suite need PAM???
Is it just me, or did this review stink for lack of proper testing and comparison...
If I were comparing this product and it's performance, I certainly would not be benchmarking a SATA based RAID setup against a single Parallel ATA drive. Something in this arrangement just doesn't seem... well, logical.
If you were really going to try to impress me with it's performance, then you would have to show me how it compares to "non-RAID" optimized drives of near simular characteristics. Show me how this drive performs against, say, Hitachi SATA 320 gig drives using an identical test rig. Also show me how this drive compares to 320 gig SCSI drives. Show me the results as JBOD, RAID-0, RAID-1 and RAID-5. You know, like the real world.
While the graphs are pretty, I'm afraid that this "review" it fairly content-free.
You know, I don't know what universe these folk are living in, but this "python-twisted" package or whatever it is called is absolutely NOT included in every Linux distribution.
Slackware - oldest living Linux distribution - does NOT have this twisted thing in it.
You would think that the developers would use a standard programming language - like C - for something like this...(gr&d)
Um... wouldn't this work against the Linux Kernel as well?
As we have seen in the past, there are probably some 200+ patented technologies embedded within the Linux Kernel. One we know about is RCU(Read/Copy/Update). There are no doubt others...
Since the kernel contains patented technology, does this mean that the kernel can not be covered under the GPL? Hmm... maybe Stallman *IS* trying to do us a favor...:)
I remember reading once some time ago (I don't recall where) that the price of admission to a movie went straight to the movie studio. The theatre only made money on the concession stand.
If nothing else, this explains the cost of the consession stand - it's the only way the theatre itself makes money, the rest goes to the studio.
When you try to do something even mildly advanced in OOo (like using Avery Labels in Landscape instead of Portrait mode) or even something as simple as printing a #10 envelope, OOo often falls down, badly.
When these issues are brought up to the developers (via their bug reporting system), the report is either ignored outright (in the case of the envelope printing) or the report is dismissed as a "feature enhancement" request and not a bug.
Come on people, you can't ask people to submit bug reports only to ignore or dismiss those reports.
I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that this agency indeed had submitted bug reports and were summarily ignored and/or dismissed. Hint time folks: this tends to piss people off, especially decision makers!
After reading the comments about the "3 hours to compile the system in ramdrive" or whatever it was, I am thinking to myself: that would be nice!
Try installing Gentoo on a SunFire V100. More importantly, try installing PHP on said SunFire V100. After 3 DAYS of compiling just about every unnecessary package available (including the entire X Windows tree - the SunFire 100 is a headless box), it finally finished the install of PHP - or at least it thought it finished. It basically didn't work correctly.
I ended up trashing the Gentoo install and installing Debian Sparc on it. At least THAT worked.
I for one would welcome such a bill. I have always preferred kmail to evolution....
I can't believe how many of you folks are missing the point of this compiler problem...
The point isn't about people who compile their own code (like us *nix folk), but the point is about people who use icc to compile binaries for wide distribution.
An example of binaries for wide distribution: MySQL has a precompiled binary that was built using icc. There are no-doubt other software packages that are compiled using icc - no doubt without a word about it in public.
Take a program like AutoCAD as a hypothetical. If AutoCAD were compiled using icc (instead of VC++), then it would scream on Intel chips yet would absolutely suck on AMD chips (if it ran at all). In this realistic case, Intel's code-path decisions are absolutely hurting the end user (and quite probably hurting AutoDesk as well).
So this can prove to be a very big problem indeed...
Hookt ahn fonix reely werkt fer mee!
Sounds like the elusive "analog computer".
"Shades of grey" sounds like working with analog values (i.e. 0-255) instead of binary levels (on/off) or even trianary values (on/maybe/off).