This is a sneaky bit of double speak. While it is true that books cannot be copied verbatim (regardless of whether they are for commercial use or not) the knowledge contained in them most certainly can. If I read a maths book, I am entitled to use what I learned in any way I choose and do not owe the author anything other than perhaps a thank you.
It is also the case that a lot of authors explicitly grant you the right to use the example code in any way you like without attribution. I thought this was kind of funny the first time I ran across this type of notice, I think in a Michael Abrash book, but I've learned to see the real wisdom in it as copyrights slip out of the hands of authors and into the hands of greedy parties who don't understand or care about the programmer community. I also always attribute the algorithm even if I'm not required to, both to give credit where due and to let myself or others know where to look for the rights to use it.
Actually, as someone pointed out on LWN I believe, the license used was a four-clause BSD with advertising clause, which is incompatible with the GPL. So, copying the code into a GPLed work violates the advertising clause.
Gerv
BSD and AT&T claimed copyright over malloc pretty slopily by today's standards. The code was already in the public domain. What Parens was noting is that whoever reviewed the code at SGI probably only knew the code was in modern BSD and so ok for Linux, so s/he should have found inserted the original copyright notice. But the programmer may have known it was public domain and if so should have posted a notice. I've actually been preparing an application for open source release and am putting a "public domain, from XYZ" header in there instead of the traditional practice of just sticking your own copyright notice because we made minor changes to PD code. I think open source is really making for better IP practices in the industry, and SCO, even though it seems they have no case themselves, may help make others practice more due diligence with borrowed code and stop trusting their business to assure the cleaness of the closed source code their business has decided to open along with the code you wrote.
And, always append copyright notices on code you significantly modified, even if the donator doesn't want you to (i.e. when they bought the corp who had the original code), it helps track down why you had rights to release it after you have crossed through the pearly gates... Do this even with closed source, in due time it will be open source and whoever does the release will thank you for it, at least anonymously.
It was the press that was saying the Iraq invasion would be easy, not the administration.
I believe it was Ken Adelman, Rumsfeld's old assistant that wrote the cakewalk quote in February. Rumsfeld said some similar things in his press briefings. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle also wrote things along the same lines. Google for the details. I think you are right in that Bush Jr. himself never said anything like that -- but he never says much -- and I myself enjoy Rumsfeld's over the top nature and know he is not always 100% on message. At other times, Rumsfeld also said war was never easy.
Can you point to any evidence that the above actually happened in any significant numbers or was any sort of coordinated effort? I know there were many rumors and accusations at the time of the election but I havn't seen any reliable followup or actual evidence.
Oh geez yes, but there is really so much proof it's better to just get Greg Palast's book and follow up on some of the references. I myself was one of those people teasing my Democrat friends about the whole butterfly ballot and hanging chad thing. I thought the election was essentially a tie, one dumbass being no better than the other after all, until I read about all the funny business going on in Florida. Greg is not exactly a an unbiased source but the facts are pretty convincing, and you can look up the official election investigation report that came out about 8 months afterward, I think there is a Washington Post article on it around that time. What is most disturbing is the lazyness of the American media apparent in reporting on this. After reading the story in the British press, CBS called the governor and asked him if he had fixed the election, when he said no, as you might expect, they dropped the story instead of say calling some election officials and seeing if any of them might rat him out.
I don't think our foreign policy would be any better under that other guy, I don't think a lot of policies would be any better, some would be worse, and I'm glad he's not running again, but I think our economy would be in better shape, it looks like we will have a operating deficit well over half a trillion dollars this year and over a trillion dollars if you include accumulating social security obligations. Foreign lenders are already seriously considering shifting their bond investments out of US Bonds, which would raise interest rates significantly and could lead serious cuts in government services and to taxes double what they are now or more. It would have been better if the election result were trashed and the election thrown into the House with the same result but at least reaffirm some of legitimacy to our democratic process used to enjoy.
Hey, I have nothing against ditching the CIA (as it currently exists), but what would you replace it with...what should that kind of agency actually *do* day-to-day?
Replace the biggest function of the CIA, informatio analysis, with a translation service. Publish the translated news articles web with translated ads, the ads give you a better idea than the news articles from some sources. You could either do this under fair use only for articles not translated by the news organization itself to placate WIPO, or pass a compulsory licensing law for news. The latter might require us to pay Castro for translating his newspapers though. This turns the millions of people who read the news into analysts that work for free. You would need more organization in Congresspersons' offices and in the Administration for filtering information from the citizens, but it will cost much less to hire a few more interns to read the mail than the CIA, and that function of the NSA, costs. The analysts in these organizations are like financial analysts, nearly completely useless because they work for pay. They see it is easier to reaffirm yesterday's view of the world, and not try to guess at the state of it today.
The dirty tricks and murder arm of the CIA has no place in a country that tries to be a democracy. I have no interest in considering a replacement for that.
Any secret communication from foreign sources can be handled by the state department or police depending on it's nature. Force all documents to be published, minus personal details, within five years; allow documents to be withheld only if the president has read it aloud to the intelligence committees in congress, this should both keep this practice of secret documents down while providing us with full accountability in the hands of the people present when it is read aloud. The president should be allowed caugh drops and tea should his voice falter, but no drugs which might let him say he couldn't understand what he was reading. Provide a free AT&T like translation service to all police departments so a cop in Paris is more likely call a cop in New York to tell him about a suspect that he thinks just got on the plane to JFK. Whenever someone calls the top, some PHB in the chain of command will fuck up before it reaches someone who will do something even if 95% of the organization including the people at the top are competent.
Your assumption is wrong, that the American people ignored the actions of the CIA. Many people in the US objected to the CIA sponsored coups. The events in Chile along other CIA sponsored coups were the primary reason that the American people forced the government to put the CIA on a leash. So did the American people recognize that something wrong was being committed in their names? Yes. Did they act to stop it? Yes.
There were hearings, the Republican administration withheld information from the Congress that showed how personally involved Nixon was in the murders. The sickness of the CIA was obvious enough that it was still put on a leash, but it continued to exist. Fast forward to today...
Condaliza welcomes the CIA's new dictators in Venezuela hours after the coup. Democratically elected leader was lucky enough to be forewarned due to one Constitution loving patriot in the US government who leaked the sad plot days earlier. The military regiment he left in the basement of the presidential palace arrests the Venezuelan 'leaders' of the coup. Bush team lucky enough that some New Yorkers are killed, providing enough confusion that a majority of American's still don't realize the other oil rich country we decided to implement regime change in was Al Qaeda biggest enemy. America supports the dictator of Pakistan, Al Qaeda's biggest friend, rinse, repeat.
It is such a strange thing that as citizens we overwhelmingly want democracy to spread but so many of us vote for a neo-con puppet, the same people who write about establishing a Pax Americana and consolitating power with pretty lies. Anyone remember "Iraq will be a cakewalk", want to compare today's, "We knew Iraq would not be easy"...
Things are not helped by crappy papers like the NYT, whose international pages seem to be about as accurate as the "Voice of America" propaganda machine. Remember the protest in Venezuela? They showed a picture and story about the anti-government protest, but said nothing of the pro-democracy rally that had many many times the number of participants. Enough to remind me of the hundreds of thousands of protestors in New York last March which were not mentioned on the nightly news in New York, but a pro-Iraq rally consisting of 20 people the next week got a 3 minute segment. But I have to assume even those who vote for the likes of the current administration do read an international paper on the internet once in a while, and so have noticed what crap we are fed by our papers and TV news outlets.
While the Bush's may have stolen the last election, I'm more ashamed that it was so easy for him to actually win support of 48% of eligible voters who showed up at the polls, than less than half a million Democrats his brother illegaly removed from the rolls and a few hundred voting machines he rigged to swallow bad ballots in black districts and to spit out for revote in conservative white districts.
Until the CIA is dissolved and amnesty is given to lesser functionaries to provide evidence against the worst criminals in the agency, I won't believe we've taken Chile to heart. If the government needs better data on what's happening in the world let them subsidise the news media to cover foreign news properly.
Why is attack detection not given more attention than making users remember noisy passwords?
Because no one tries to login to crack a password anymore, the login programs have for a long time had a 1 second or longer pause after an incorrect password so that this type of attack just doesn't work. What one does is break into an insecure system and downloads the shadow password file, then one cracks that at one's leasure at 1,000,000 attempts per second. After you have a collection of these passwords you try them on other more secure systems where the same people have access. This way you only need need to break into a Windows machine to get access to the servers. This is probably the most important reason why users should not be allowed to use the same password on a Windows machine and the rest of the network. If the encoded password is cached locally, as is the default, the attacker just has to find one PHB who hasn't applied the latest patches or has no Admin password for easy access to the servers. This is especially terrifying if that PHB has just installed Windows 2000 or less out of the box and hence is still using MD-4 passwords, crackable in less than 10 seconds...
It is much better to make sure the PHB's have acceptible admin passwords taped to their laptops than to try to require them to memorize something. They won't, they will simply change it after you have left the room to "". The disk isn't encrypted anyway, if they lose their laptop you will hear about it within a few days and can then issue new passwords and look for security compromises.
VMS has never run on Sun hardware. OpenVMS runs on the DEC VAX and Alpha series. Just wanted to point that out.;)
I think you're right, I never checked! The school let me and a friend of mine scour an old server they were trashing for useful electronics after the conversion to OSF/1. It was some kind of Sun in a 2+ meter high cabinet with a whooping 8 megs of RAM. But that must have been an old SunOS system being retired because they had all those new OSF/1 servers for the unix fans, not one of the VMS systems my first real internet e-mail was on. My roommate also got a Sparc 1 which he used as a terminal until the end of the year when we did the "what kind of crunching sound do you think this will make" drop test of surplus computer equipment. I used the old Sun server's motherboard as a room decoration and the 8 sticks of 1 Megabyte of SIMMs were sold to an interested party for a few months worth of pizza money. An I never got the "Girls vs. Boys" CD I lent that guy back, so I just consider that part of the transaction.
Science by press release is almost never ever good science.
Yes, but sometimes it is. I remember a molecular biologist friend of mine say that he thought Dolly would turn out to be another "cold fusion" experiment. I asked him when we would know, "five weeks, the mice are already pregnant." You know how that one turned out. He had tried a slightly different experiment himself as a graduate student and it had failed, but tiny differences in the experiment had made all the difference.
Overall, I help stop another hundred thousand or so Win32 users from pounding the net to death. I don't see how anyone could see this as a bad thing. (welcome input)
I would like my ISP to provide firewall services, but not in such an automated manner. Or, rather there should be a web interface like my ISP has for reverse-dns. There should be a checkbox for unfiltered, for autofiltering by ISP with or without notification of filter rule changes, and some way to block/unblock common things yourself by name with autofiltering on or off. This way if I have a locked down machine I can select unfiltered and not worry about strange IP failures, I can select autofilter for my windows machines with holes poked for what I use, and I can select autofilter with additional things like Kazaa blocked for my Wifi... And, of course, this should be on a per IP basis.
By default the ISP could check 'autofilter without notification' for Mom & Pop, and tell anyone that asks about the "customer satisfaction" interface on your web page. I can certainly setup filtering myself, but I would prefer it was done for me so I don't have to have a machine on all the time and so that I don't personally have to block the latest Windows worm. Right now I have some filter rules in the DSL router, but the interface is a PITA, and it doesn't have the ability to block Kazaa but not something useful like passive FTP, like a more sophisticated stateful filter at the ISP could.
I tried an nfs mounted swapfile with only minimal success. It'd get further but it would go into some heavy swapping flooding the network, durring which time the access point was very unresponsive; just not practical for actual use.
Was the NFS mount over the wireless or the ethernet port? Is the ethernet port 10Base-T or 100Base-T? It seems like this should work... What were your nfs params? Maybe the linux network file system would work better? I'm actually interested in doing this for the playstation 2, it should be faster than a disk swapfile assuming your server can keep all the pages in RAM...
Have you tried anything else to cool it? I just got one hand as a hand me down when nVidia sent us a better one for one of the shared workstation. It was loud out on the lab floor, but is overwhelmingly loud on my desk...
[On Topic] I have a great deal of respect for Maddog Hall and felt good hearing he only tried Linux in 1994.. I was a big fan of the brand new pre-release Windows 95 that year but my music major roommate convinced me to try Linux as a dual boot option and my slow conversion began... That same year my university also switched me over from VMS on Sun hardware to OSF/1 on DEC, which was so much better, and soon being able to run the same programs on my home computer and the SGI's at the lab became a plus. As someone who had always tried to improve on the MS-DOS cli by using DR-DOS or the 4dos interpreter the tcsh default on Slackware was such a godsend that I begged the admins at the university to install it and switch me over. Before long Linux+GNU was a better unix than UNIX, irregardless of being cheaper. I even got excited by the Linux kernel by 1.3x... The GNU license didn't seem world changing at the time, but just a good hobbyist license. Able to inspire more development than BSD, because you didn't feel your ideas would be taken without compensation. It's amazing how this little thing has grown from something we had to convince the admins to allow us to use on the network in 1994 to something they use to run the network in 2003, and you don't need to make 23 uncorrupted floppies to install it anymore. For some reason the 18th or 19th floopy was always corrupted sending you back to download it and start over from #1...;)
not very many people can tell the difference between a 25 fps framerate and a 100 fps framerate.
This is undoubtedly true, but anyone is capable of telling the difference between 25 and 100 fps with a little training. And would suffer from 25 fps in a video game without knowing why. Then again I consider myself pretty good at eyeing it, yet I'm sometimes off on my guess of the framerate by 60%. You need to be able to move an object fast enough for the motion to break down to get a good estimate of the framerate. You can also fool most viewers into thinking you have a great framerate at 15 fps, just by animating something properly for that framerate and not giving the viewer interactive control.
I don't even play video games and I know the reason you need high FPS has nothing to do with the framerate at which you meld seperate frames into motion. It's all about response time. When the game can render at 500 fps it means you have to wait 1/76+1/500+'AI time' seconds for a response to something you do on the controler. This assumes your refresh rate is 76 hz. The 1/76 is fixed by your refresh rate because unless you can do the entire redraw in the vertical retrace period and have dual ported RAM on the video card you need to double buffer. Some rendering engines, not designed for games, are actually triple buffered for better throughput. Video games are all about response time, and here you you will sacrifice 1000 fps for that 500 fps to avoid adding an extra 1/76 to that timing sum. There of course is a certain point at which that number is high enough that you don't need to double buffer, in reality those nv FX-2000's and ATI 98xx's are way to slow to approach that kind of framerate with the visual quality people want.
TV has an effective framerate of 60fps*, movies are 24 and cartoons are usually 12 fps. Those can all show motion just fine as long as you don't move things too fast for the medium. The average PC monitor has a refresh rate under 90hz, not really much better than the 60hz of television, so you still can't let an object move as quickly from one side of the screen to the other as we can perceive it in real life. As someone mentioned setting the refresh rate ate 72 or 80 or whatever doesn't make your eyes hurt has nothing to do with our motion perception. In normal office use you want to set this as low as possible while still avoiding flicker so that you don't waste cycles on displaying that one character you just typed into emacs a few ms faster. If you are playing a game you want to set it as high as your monitor will take it (up to 120hz at decent resolution on some monitors), while still keeping this number below the number of frames the game can render per second so that it doesn't have to show the some frames twice and mess up the motion.
Film in a projector does not flicker like a monitor running at 24 hz. The reason a monitor flickers is because the phosphor brightess decays. A film screen is fully lit while the film is in front of the light. It flickers simply because it the time it takes to change frames is not zero, doubling the frames to 48 frames per second would increase the time the screen was dark between frames.
*yes TV has 30 'frames' but this is just how many times you redraw the phosphors, as far as motion is concerned you have 60 seperate images representing 60 different snapshots in time (assuming this is really shot as TV and not an up-converted film). Your eyes don't care that the samples are offset, it is not like you ever see one moment with the same receptors as the next, they need a regeneration time before they can sample again. And they are not synchronized at an specific FPS so the flicker explanation was all wacky. The reason you see those nasty line artifacts when watching TV on your computer without a decent TV application like 'tvtime' is because simple TV apps like XawTV are showing two fields sampled at different times at the same time. Often for a variable 2-3 frames if your refresh rate is between 61 and 89 hz. If you show those in the standard 60 hz interlaced with a TV compatible resolution you won't see those artifacts outside a freeze frame, though you will get more flicker than a regular TV because the phosphors in monitors decay faster to avoid ghosting at the higher frequency and contrast they deal with.
Again, CRT flicker has nothing to do with frames rendered per second(fps), and everything to do with how long lasting the phosphors are with respect to the screen refresh rate. Film projector's flicker is a completely different beast. Heck LCD flicker is completely unrelated to refresh rate and has everything to do with your backlight's balast(flourescent) or temperature(halogen). FPS above about 50-60 fps is all about res
Regarding electronic voting, sure, use a machine, but make the machine generate a voter-verifiable paper ballot. Insist that ballots be counted at the polling station *immediately* at the close of the polls, confirming the electronic result.
I think this is what all people who don't plan to fix votes are for. I've yet to meet a single person who didn't think it is workable to stick a couple printers in the voting machine in case one breaks down. Not that this is strictly needed, since you could have each machine switchable so if a polling station lost 3 of their 20 machines, some could be switched to a different precinct combo per person entering the machine. The old mechanical computers used in places like New York are at a disadvantage here as it takes a couple experts a few hours to reprogram one. Their advantage is that they are completely transparent, and verifiable on the spot. But with a printout the electronic voting machine is just as verifiable.
One thing that people miss is that a paper vote can be bought. It's easy to take a small camera into the booth and take a picture of yourself holding the ballot. But this can be overcome as well. Simply let the person vote on as many paper ballots as she wants to without poll worker assistance. Here you have an advantage over even paper balloting as you can print a unique randomized serial number on each person's ballots and throw out the votes of someone that voted several times. The 'randomized' number can be pseudorandom based on a seed the poll workers enter in the morning by coin tosses and can the 'random' numbers can be verified with that knowledge, but would need to be leaked to print fake votes (and now we're back to ballot stuffing being local, or requiring many co-conspiritors, and hence difficult.) You can publish the random numbers and time of vote after the fact so voters can verify that their vote was counted, or falsely overcounted if you see your vote on the list of stuffed ballots. As long as you don't publish the person's vote, and don't let it leave the polling station, only the local poll workers or voting software company can be involved in vote buying. Even the software company can be eliminated by using open source and a checklist of MD-5 signatures of verified code when the poll workers compile and install the software, with a verified compiler and system. I'd even make the ROMs verifiable prior to the election, it's not so hard to have poll workers from different parties load the ROM with their personal laptop and then have the others verify the ROM also in a random order, with a roll of dice for whether to do each additional verification after each party member has had a go at it, so the last person to verify doesn't load a pirate ROM instead. They don't know if they are going to be last.
I probably missed some procedure, so it would of course be best to publish the whole set of procedures along with the code, bios, etc, for public review a few years ahead of time so all the bugs can be worked out and there is no single point of failure. (The randomized serial number keeps down the ballot stuffing problem with paper ballots. This, for instance, would be supplimented by a poll worker observing you didn't put a bunch of ballots in the clear acrylic box.)
I hasten to add I think implementing this before the 2006 elections, considering how few of these common sense thoughts have been talked of, would be very pre-mature, and could only be an indication of intent to perpetrate continued election fraud on the part of any politician pushing for such adoption.
Or the softcore stuff you can find in your average record store (explicit Hip-Hop, softcore cover art, the scantily clad goth employee...).
What now I have to wear a parental warning label when I walk down the street too?
Why can't these anti-porn fundamentalists just establish a community like the Amish have done and leave the rest of us out of their sick schemes. No electricity, no TV, no Internet, no art, as long as they don't force anyone to live there they can ban sex or women or thought completely for all I care.
I don't agree about C# being an inferior Java clone. First things that come to my mind is that Java doesn't support properties, indexers, enums, attributes and multi-dimensional arrays.
Also, C# way of handling events is just so much simpler and powerful ! Listeners are a pain in the ass IMHO.
Except for multi-dimentional arrays I think of all of those as liabilities. Java has conventions for them that fit within a simple "everything is a class" paradigm. If you want a powerful OOP language that does everything you have C++. But then if you let any novices touch the code it seems to entropy insanely quickly; with Java you can let them go for weeks unsupervised. C# isn't as bad as C++ here, but I've seen a novice crash bluescreen the machine repeatably with a just a few well chosen errors in his most frequently called C# routine. Java just doesn't let you do that. I saw some bluescreens in the Java early days, but they were JRE implementation bugs, not spec bugs. The few spec bugs only crashed the app, sometimes holding some precious resources hostage until you killed the JRE, ahem thread.suspend().
About defining a UI in XML, it will be part of Longhorn release whatever when that be. Microsoft developped their own XML definition and named it XAML. Read more on Devx here.
Cool, this is good news. I wish Moroney had known about Qt though, using a GUI like Qt designer sure is easier for Q&D stuff than straight Mozilla XUL. It is probably what MSFT's Visual Studio support will be like too. Sounds like MSFT is trying to give Trolltech a run for their money on defining the future Windows platform for developers. (They of course own the user view, but it wasn't so very long ago that they grabbed the developers from Borland, and Qt beats the pants of ATL/MFC; and still seems to have significant advantages over.NET for C++ applications. Qt's achilies heel, of course, is that it is not VB and that came first...)
The people they interviewed all seem to be those VB scripters only refered to as "programmers" by the PHBs. I actually think the.NET classes are an acceptible wrapper around the ugliness of the Windows API.
I don't really like C# because it just seems to be an inferior Java clone. But.NET as a replacement for ATL/MFC is not so bad. I haven't tried C++.NET bindings yet but if I have to implement a Windows version of some serious program, and can't use Qt, I want to look into it.
Are there any programmers here that have given C++.NET a try that also know the joy of Qt? I'd like to hear about the advantages/disadvantages... The only thing that really seems missing from.NET when compared to Qt is the XML definition of UI's. This keeps down the level of that ugly generated code. If you want, you can even ship the XML instead of having it parsed into C++ and compiled (this gives you flexibility at the expense of keeping track of resources outside the binary, I haven't used it except experimentally, but I can imagine some enterprise applications where you might want to be able add a form to by just sticking some XML in your database instead of deploying a new binary to 10,000 desks.) I don't like having to run the Qt preprocessor though, but I don't know if C++.NET has some of that uglyness too or if it is pure C++. The big downside of the preprocessor is that it makes it harder to write a crossplatform GUI class, like say one that used either a MFC or a Qt or a OpenGL or a Carbon implementation depending on what was available.
If I have to try an alpha kernel to get what MacOS X has provided for over a year now, I see no point in trying it.
The point is MacOS X doesn't provide it, but you can get it in Linux with 5-10 minutes of work. If you just want to use the MacOS X hack just do "renice -10 xmmsPID" you could even put create a stupid little SUID script for it and make your xmms icon point to that instead of the binary. But I haven't encountered any skips with xmms since long before MacOS X was shipped.
I do now want to be a QA tester. I want to use software which works, and so do most users.
Troll. Troll. Troll. The TCP/IP stack is still not working in MacOS X! They took an old buggy FreeBSD stack and didn't patch for the known bugs before releaseing MaxOS X. And they still haven't, even though they've been sent patches. It has an off by one error in the MTU calculation that slows everything down and generates excessive network traffic when the host on the other end never gets the ACK it was supposed to and retries after the timeout. I lost days of my life dealing with this mostly because I couldn't believe such a serious bug existed in a TCP/IP stack in any software in this day and age. You may not be a "QA tester" but that seems to be mostly because you are oblivious to serious bugs in the software you use.
Project Pink. Now everone say it with me: HAHAHahahAHAhahAHAHAHA! Get real. This has about as much chance to fly as an airplane made out of gauze, popsicle sticks, and chewing gum.
It flew once, hundreds of inches above the water. So there.;)
I say Linux is dated for the DESKTOP due largely to both X Windows as well as the fact that it is based on many old ideas which have been changed and improved in newer systems. Think of it in terms of Apache 1.3 vs Apache 2.0. The new model does threading and can chain many handlers together to create a response. These features were not easily added to Apache 1.3 so they started with a new model.
MacOS X made certain adjustments to allow it to work well for a desktop. For example, I want to play mp3 music while I read email without the music cutting out due to lack of processor priority, so it has been given a high priority and it never cuts out.
I think you should give 2.6.0-testX a try. This version is in large part a complete rewrite of some major pieces of the OS. One of these is the scheduler. It can play that mp3 music file without any skipping while you are compiling mozilla, playing a video game and recording the Sopranos in the the background. And it can do all this without nasty hacks like the one where Windows XP starves everything but the thread running the foreground task's windowing code, or something like just running your mp3 player at a higher priority. (It's very interesting reading how it does this, it basically figures out what a task is doing and schedules it based on this. It also just has more time slices, and borrows the reentrability of drivers that Windows NT tries for.)
Though on second thought you must be a troll because every OS from Solaris to BeOS to MacOS X is severely dated when compared to Linux. Though I hear Windows 2006 has borrowed some Linux ideas, maybe it will compare favorably to 2.6.0...
Most contries are signatories to the WTO treaty. This gives all business located in any WTO country the same standing in court. A US corporation has all the rights of citizenship except for the vote (they are actually allowed to give more money to politicians than people are allowed to), so if you just file the papers to establish a corporation in your country you can sue anyone in the USA.
I deal with tough NYC gang members every day. That's right, I work at an elementary school. A polar bear wouldn't last 2 seconds in Harlem.
A friend of mine is teaching this fall in the Bronx through one of those industry to school programs, she was just telling me about how busy she's been this week. She has not been drawing up her lesson plans, she has been drawing up her discipline plan.
Still I think if you have ever run across a polar bear, outside of an enclosure, you might change your opinion. They could pretty much kill you just out of curiosity. Much like an eight year old might want to see what happens when one splits a worm in two.
...or mechanical engineers we'd face certain realities: you have to look for a job; employers want experience before they'll hire you; sometimes you can't find a job in your area--so you may have to consider moving...
I think the option of just moving to one of these "third world" countries is a severely underrated option. Civil and Mechanical Engineers have been finding good paying jobs overseas for ages. As you pointed out elsewhere in your post a lot of jobs won't move overseas because communications lags and language barriers can really interfere with a software project. Custom programming, which is and is likely to remain where most programmers spend their days, is for the most part going to stay near it's customers. I think application programming, where you need a large coordinated team spec-ing and producing the code will find the Miguel de Icaza's of the world to coalese around them in lower cost markets. I'd rather do application programming than custom stuff so I'm looking at the options. There are still plenty of jobs here for someone like me, but maybe not the most satisfying ones. (Neither IBM nor Microsoft look fun after you've spent a week in some of their labs. I'm thinking Sun, nVidia, etc don't either, Alias, ATI, etc would be a big move anyway (Canada is like another country).)
If you are one of those people and you are not tied down by school age children why not go? I've been looking at Peru for instance, you can live very nicely on a middle class salary there. It's in the same time zone as New York and there are many talented workers to be had for a song compared to american payscales, but nice salaries compared to the cost of living. Lima is a bit polluted, but there are already programming shops in cleaner middle class districts like Miraflores, near the sea. There are plenty of international schools nearby if you want to keep your children speaking English, French, etc. They are a WTO country so you can incorporate a business where you like and send your employees, such as yourself, there on a business visa ($10 per month, $30 minimum, convertable to workers visa) A glass of freshly squeezed orange juice is about 30 cents, but I recommend the pineapple juice it's about a $1 but it's so much better from the canned stuff you get from Dole, or even the freshly made stuff outside of Hawaii. Of course, the ceviche is just amazing; try the Peruvian Sea Bass ceviche with a side of warm Inca Cola and a cold beer, breakfast of champions. While the culture is not as late night oriented as Brazil, lunch is served 2-4 pm, dinner seems to be sometime after 10 pm. And there are enough 24 hour cafes and the like to keep the schedule some of us enjoy.
Most of the children of engineers I know had at least some of their childhood overseas and seem none the worse for it. Programming is not just an art but also a skill that is needed in other countries, and they sometimes pay better when the supply is shorter there. At this point our economy is in the crapper and we have an oversupply. India and Russia may have enough talented programmers, but other regions aren't that fortunate. I have an Indian-American friend that spends a few months a year in India doing very well compensated contract work so I'm not so sure even they have enough. A good programmer is still 10-20 times as productive as a less talented one. In the US he might get twice what the others do, in the more competitive global market the differential is much bigger.
Aside from the market reasons for moving, the legal climate for software just seems to be getting worse by the minute in the USA. It might be better to protest the DMCA by establishing a business that flies in the face of it outside the US's borders, and grow it to the point where the local government won't think to sell you down the river with another TRIPS like treaty. Europe seems set to go down that same road as the USA... it might take decades for these idiotic laws to be repealed, why suffer under them when you have a brain that will travel? You
For example, if someone made a video driver, refused to release it open source because of contractual problems, but made it relatively easy to pick apart a bit at a time, it would give them plausable deniability, but still help out the OSS community.
You mean like not stripping the binary and leaving full debug info in there?
It happens, I can't say it's intentional but it happens.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a sneaky bit of double speak. While it is true that books cannot be copied verbatim (regardless of whether they are for commercial use or not) the knowledge contained in them most certainly can. If I read a maths book, I am entitled to use what I learned in any way I choose and do not owe the author anything other than perhaps a thank you.
It is also the case that a lot of authors explicitly grant you the right to use the example code in any way you like without attribution. I thought this was kind of funny the first time I ran across this type of notice, I think in a Michael Abrash book, but I've learned to see the real wisdom in it as copyrights slip out of the hands of authors and into the hands of greedy parties who don't understand or care about the programmer community. I also always attribute the algorithm even if I'm not required to, both to give credit where due and to let myself or others know where to look for the rights to use it.
Actually, as someone pointed out on LWN I believe, the license used was a four-clause BSD with advertising clause, which is incompatible with the GPL. So, copying the code into a GPLed work violates the advertising clause.
Gerv
BSD and AT&T claimed copyright over malloc pretty slopily by today's standards. The code was already in the public domain. What Parens was noting is that whoever reviewed the code at SGI probably only knew the code was in modern BSD and so ok for Linux, so s/he should have found inserted the original copyright notice. But the programmer may have known it was public domain and if so should have posted a notice. I've actually been preparing an application for open source release and am putting a "public domain, from XYZ" header in there instead of the traditional practice of just sticking your own copyright notice because we made minor changes to PD code. I think open source is really making for better IP practices in the industry, and SCO, even though it seems they have no case themselves, may help make others practice more due diligence with borrowed code and stop trusting their business to assure the cleaness of the closed source code their business has decided to open along with the code you wrote.
And, always append copyright notices on code you significantly modified, even if the donator doesn't want you to (i.e. when they bought the corp who had the original code), it helps track down why you had rights to release it after you have crossed through the pearly gates... Do this even with closed source, in due time it will be open source and whoever does the release will thank you for it, at least anonymously.
It was the press that was saying the Iraq invasion would be easy, not the administration.
I believe it was Ken Adelman, Rumsfeld's old assistant that wrote the cakewalk quote in February. Rumsfeld said some similar things in his press briefings. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle also wrote things along the same lines. Google for the details. I think you are right in that Bush Jr. himself never said anything like that -- but he never says much -- and I myself enjoy Rumsfeld's over the top nature and know he is not always 100% on message. At other times, Rumsfeld also said war was never easy.
Can you point to any evidence that the above actually happened in any significant numbers or was any sort of coordinated effort? I know there were many rumors and accusations at the time of the election but I havn't seen any reliable followup or actual evidence.
Oh geez yes, but there is really so much proof it's better to just get Greg Palast's book and follow up on some of the references. I myself was one of those people teasing my Democrat friends about the whole butterfly ballot and hanging chad thing. I thought the election was essentially a tie, one dumbass being no better than the other after all, until I read about all the funny business going on in Florida. Greg is not exactly a an unbiased source but the facts are pretty convincing, and you can look up the official election investigation report that came out about 8 months afterward, I think there is a Washington Post article on it around that time. What is most disturbing is the lazyness of the American media apparent in reporting on this. After reading the story in the British press, CBS called the governor and asked him if he had fixed the election, when he said no, as you might expect, they dropped the story instead of say calling some election officials and seeing if any of them might rat him out.
I don't think our foreign policy would be any better under that other guy, I don't think a lot of policies would be any better, some would be worse, and I'm glad he's not running again, but I think our economy would be in better shape, it looks like we will have a operating deficit well over half a trillion dollars this year and over a trillion dollars if you include accumulating social security obligations. Foreign lenders are already seriously considering shifting their bond investments out of US Bonds, which would raise interest rates significantly and could lead serious cuts in government services and to taxes double what they are now or more. It would have been better if the election result were trashed and the election thrown into the House with the same result but at least reaffirm some of legitimacy to our democratic process used to enjoy.
Hey, I have nothing against ditching the CIA (as it currently exists), but what would you replace it with...what should that kind of agency actually *do* day-to-day?
Replace the biggest function of the CIA, informatio analysis, with a translation service. Publish the translated news articles web with translated ads, the ads give you a better idea than the news articles from some sources. You could either do this under fair use only for articles not translated by the news organization itself to placate WIPO, or pass a compulsory licensing law for news. The latter might require us to pay Castro for translating his newspapers though. This turns the millions of people who read the news into analysts that work for free. You would need more organization in Congresspersons' offices and in the Administration for filtering information from the citizens, but it will cost much less to hire a few more interns to read the mail than the CIA, and that function of the NSA, costs. The analysts in these organizations are like financial analysts, nearly completely useless because they work for pay. They see it is easier to reaffirm yesterday's view of the world, and not try to guess at the state of it today.
The dirty tricks and murder arm of the CIA has no place in a country that tries to be a democracy. I have no interest in considering a replacement for that.
Any secret communication from foreign sources can be handled by the state department or police depending on it's nature. Force all documents to be published, minus personal details, within five years; allow documents to be withheld only if the president has read it aloud to the intelligence committees in congress, this should both keep this practice of secret documents down while providing us with full accountability in the hands of the people present when it is read aloud. The president should be allowed caugh drops and tea should his voice falter, but no drugs which might let him say he couldn't understand what he was reading. Provide a free AT&T like translation service to all police departments so a cop in Paris is more likely call a cop in New York to tell him about a suspect that he thinks just got on the plane to JFK. Whenever someone calls the top, some PHB in the chain of command will fuck up before it reaches someone who will do something even if 95% of the organization including the people at the top are competent.
Your assumption is wrong, that the American people ignored the actions of the CIA. Many people in the US objected to the CIA sponsored coups. The events in Chile along other CIA sponsored coups were the primary reason that the American people forced the government to put the CIA on a leash. So did the American people recognize that something wrong was being committed in their names? Yes. Did they act to stop it? Yes.
There were hearings, the Republican administration withheld information from the Congress that showed how personally involved Nixon was in the murders. The sickness of the CIA was obvious enough that it was still put on a leash, but it continued to exist. Fast forward to today...
Condaliza welcomes the CIA's new dictators in Venezuela hours after the coup. Democratically elected leader was lucky enough to be forewarned due to one Constitution loving patriot in the US government who leaked the sad plot days earlier. The military regiment he left in the basement of the presidential palace arrests the Venezuelan 'leaders' of the coup. Bush team lucky enough that some New Yorkers are killed, providing enough confusion that a majority of American's still don't realize the other oil rich country we decided to implement regime change in was Al Qaeda biggest enemy. America supports the dictator of Pakistan, Al Qaeda's biggest friend, rinse, repeat.
It is such a strange thing that as citizens we overwhelmingly want democracy to spread but so many of us vote for a neo-con puppet, the same people who write about establishing a Pax Americana and consolitating power with pretty lies. Anyone remember "Iraq will be a cakewalk", want to compare today's, "We knew Iraq would not be easy"...
Things are not helped by crappy papers like the NYT, whose international pages seem to be about as accurate as the "Voice of America" propaganda machine. Remember the protest in Venezuela? They showed a picture and story about the anti-government protest, but said nothing of the pro-democracy rally that had many many times the number of participants. Enough to remind me of the hundreds of thousands of protestors in New York last March which were not mentioned on the nightly news in New York, but a pro-Iraq rally consisting of 20 people the next week got a 3 minute segment. But I have to assume even those who vote for the likes of the current administration do read an international paper on the internet once in a while, and so have noticed what crap we are fed by our papers and TV news outlets.
While the Bush's may have stolen the last election, I'm more ashamed that it was so easy for him to actually win support of 48% of eligible voters who showed up at the polls, than less than half a million Democrats his brother illegaly removed from the rolls and a few hundred voting machines he rigged to swallow bad ballots in black districts and to spit out for revote in conservative white districts.
Until the CIA is dissolved and amnesty is given to lesser functionaries to provide evidence against the worst criminals in the agency, I won't believe we've taken Chile to heart. If the government needs better data on what's happening in the world let them subsidise the news media to cover foreign news properly.
Why is attack detection not given more attention than making users remember noisy passwords?
Because no one tries to login to crack a password anymore, the login programs have for a long time had a 1 second or longer pause after an incorrect password so that this type of attack just doesn't work. What one does is break into an insecure system and downloads the shadow password file, then one cracks that at one's leasure at 1,000,000 attempts per second. After you have a collection of these passwords you try them on other more secure systems where the same people have access. This way you only need need to break into a Windows machine to get access to the servers. This is probably the most important reason why users should not be allowed to use the same password on a Windows machine and the rest of the network. If the encoded password is cached locally, as is the default, the attacker just has to find one PHB who hasn't applied the latest patches or has no Admin password for easy access to the servers. This is especially terrifying if that PHB has just installed Windows 2000 or less out of the box and hence is still using MD-4 passwords, crackable in less than 10 seconds...
It is much better to make sure the PHB's have acceptible admin passwords taped to their laptops than to try to require them to memorize something. They won't, they will simply change it after you have left the room to "". The disk isn't encrypted anyway, if they lose their laptop you will hear about it within a few days and can then issue new passwords and look for security compromises.
VMS has never run on Sun hardware. OpenVMS runs on the DEC VAX and Alpha series. Just wanted to point that out. ;)
I think you're right, I never checked! The school let me and a friend of mine scour an old server they were trashing for useful electronics after the conversion to OSF/1. It was some kind of Sun in a 2+ meter high cabinet with a whooping 8 megs of RAM. But that must have been an old SunOS system being retired because they had all those new OSF/1 servers for the unix fans, not one of the VMS systems my first real internet e-mail was on. My roommate also got a Sparc 1 which he used as a terminal until the end of the year when we did the "what kind of crunching sound do you think this will make" drop test of surplus computer equipment. I used the old Sun server's motherboard as a room decoration and the 8 sticks of 1 Megabyte of SIMMs were sold to an interested party for a few months worth of pizza money. An I never got the "Girls vs. Boys" CD I lent that guy back, so I just consider that part of the transaction.
Science by press release is almost never ever good science.
Yes, but sometimes it is. I remember a molecular biologist friend of mine say that he thought Dolly would turn out to be another "cold fusion" experiment. I asked him when we would know, "five weeks, the mice are already pregnant." You know how that one turned out. He had tried a slightly different experiment himself as a graduate student and it had failed, but tiny differences in the experiment had made all the difference.
Overall, I help stop another hundred thousand or so Win32 users from pounding the net to death. I don't see how anyone could see this as a bad thing. (welcome input)
I would like my ISP to provide firewall services, but not in such an automated manner. Or, rather there should be a web interface like my ISP has for reverse-dns. There should be a checkbox for unfiltered, for autofiltering by ISP with or without notification of filter rule changes, and some way to block/unblock common things yourself by name with autofiltering on or off. This way if I have a locked down machine I can select unfiltered and not worry about strange IP failures, I can select autofilter for my windows machines with holes poked for what I use, and I can select autofilter with additional things like Kazaa blocked for my Wifi...
And, of course, this should be on a per IP basis.
By default the ISP could check 'autofilter without notification' for Mom & Pop, and tell anyone that asks about the "customer satisfaction" interface on your web page. I can certainly setup filtering myself, but I would prefer it was done for me so I don't have to have a machine on all the time and so that I don't personally have to block the latest Windows worm. Right now I have some filter rules in the DSL router, but the interface is a PITA, and it doesn't have the ability to block Kazaa but not something useful like passive FTP, like a more sophisticated stateful filter at the ISP could.
I tried an nfs mounted swapfile with only minimal success. It'd get further but it would go into some heavy swapping flooding the network, durring which time the access point was very unresponsive; just not practical for actual use.
Was the NFS mount over the wireless or the ethernet port? Is the ethernet port 10Base-T or 100Base-T? It seems like this should work... What were your nfs params? Maybe the linux network file system would work better? I'm actually interested in doing this for the playstation 2, it should be faster than a disk swapfile assuming your server can keep all the pages in RAM...
GeForce Fx 5600. Um, the original *loud* one.
;)
Have you tried anything else to cool it? I just got one hand as a hand me down when nVidia sent us a better one for one of the shared workstation. It was loud out on the lab floor, but is overwhelmingly loud on my desk...
[On Topic] I have a great deal of respect for Maddog Hall and felt good hearing he only tried Linux in 1994.. I was a big fan of the brand new pre-release Windows 95 that year but my music major roommate convinced me to try Linux as a dual boot option and my slow conversion began... That same year my university also switched me over from VMS on Sun hardware to OSF/1 on DEC, which was so much better, and soon being able to run the same programs on my home computer and the SGI's at the lab became a plus. As someone who had always tried to improve on the MS-DOS cli by using DR-DOS or the 4dos interpreter the tcsh default on Slackware was such a godsend that I begged the admins at the university to install it and switch me over. Before long Linux+GNU was a better unix than UNIX, irregardless of being cheaper. I even got excited by the Linux kernel by 1.3x... The GNU license didn't seem world changing at the time, but just a good hobbyist license. Able to inspire more development than BSD, because you didn't feel your ideas would be taken without compensation. It's amazing how this little thing has grown from something we had to convince the admins to allow us to use on the network in 1994 to something they use to run the network in 2003, and you don't need to make 23 uncorrupted floppies to install it anymore. For some reason the 18th or 19th floopy was always corrupted sending you back to download it and start over from #1...
not very many people can tell the difference between a 25 fps framerate and a 100 fps framerate.
This is undoubtedly true, but anyone is capable of telling the difference between 25 and 100 fps with a little training. And would suffer from 25 fps in a video game without knowing why. Then again I consider myself pretty good at eyeing it, yet I'm sometimes off on my guess of the framerate by 60%. You need to be able to move an object fast enough for the motion to break down to get a good estimate of the framerate. You can also fool most viewers into thinking you have a great framerate at 15 fps, just by animating something properly for that framerate and not giving the viewer interactive control.
I don't even play video games and I know the reason you need high FPS has nothing to do with the framerate at which you meld seperate frames into motion. It's all about response time. When the game can render at 500 fps it means you have to wait 1/76+1/500+'AI time' seconds for a response to something you do on the controler. This assumes your refresh rate is 76 hz. The 1/76 is fixed by your refresh rate because unless you can do the entire redraw in the vertical retrace period and have dual ported RAM on the video card you need to double buffer. Some rendering engines, not designed for games, are actually triple buffered for better throughput. Video games are all about response time, and here you you will sacrifice 1000 fps for that 500 fps to avoid adding an extra 1/76 to that timing sum. There of course is a certain point at which that number is high enough that you don't need to double buffer, in reality those nv FX-2000's and ATI 98xx's are way to slow to approach that kind of framerate with the visual quality people want.
TV has an effective framerate of 60fps*, movies are 24 and cartoons are usually 12 fps. Those can all show motion just fine as long as you don't move things too fast for the medium. The average PC monitor has a refresh rate under 90hz, not really much better than the 60hz of television, so you still can't let an object move as quickly from one side of the screen to the other as we can perceive it in real life. As someone mentioned setting the refresh rate ate 72 or 80 or whatever doesn't make your eyes hurt has nothing to do with our motion perception. In normal office use you want to set this as low as possible while still avoiding flicker so that you don't waste cycles on displaying that one character you just typed into emacs a few ms faster. If you are playing a game you want to set it as high as your monitor will take it (up to 120hz at decent resolution on some monitors), while still keeping this number below the number of frames the game can render per second so that it doesn't have to show the some frames twice and mess up the motion.
Film in a projector does not flicker like a monitor running at 24 hz. The reason a monitor flickers is because the phosphor brightess decays. A film screen is fully lit while the film is in front of the light. It flickers simply because it the time it takes to change frames is not zero, doubling the frames to 48 frames per second would increase the time the screen was dark between frames.
*yes TV has 30 'frames' but this is just how many times you redraw the phosphors, as far as motion is concerned you have 60 seperate images representing 60 different snapshots in time (assuming this is really shot as TV and not an up-converted film). Your eyes don't care that the samples are offset, it is not like you ever see one moment with the same receptors as the next, they need a regeneration time before they can sample again. And they are not synchronized at an specific FPS so the flicker explanation was all wacky. The reason you see those nasty line artifacts when watching TV on your computer without a decent TV application like 'tvtime' is because simple TV apps like XawTV are showing two fields sampled at different times at the same time. Often for a variable 2-3 frames if your refresh rate is between 61 and 89 hz. If you show those in the standard 60 hz interlaced with a TV compatible resolution you won't see those artifacts outside a freeze frame, though you will get more flicker than a regular TV because the phosphors in monitors decay faster to avoid ghosting at the higher frequency and contrast they deal with.
Again, CRT flicker has nothing to do with frames rendered per second(fps), and everything to do with how long lasting the phosphors are with respect to the screen refresh rate. Film projector's flicker is a completely different beast. Heck LCD flicker is completely unrelated to refresh rate and has everything to do with your backlight's balast(flourescent) or temperature(halogen). FPS above about 50-60 fps is all about res
Regarding electronic voting, sure, use a machine, but make the machine generate a voter-verifiable paper ballot. Insist that ballots be counted at the polling station *immediately* at the close of the polls, confirming the electronic result.
I think this is what all people who don't plan to fix votes are for. I've yet to meet a single person who didn't think it is workable to stick a couple printers in the voting machine in case one breaks down. Not that this is strictly needed, since you could have each machine switchable so if a polling station lost 3 of their 20 machines, some could be switched to a different precinct combo per person entering the machine. The old mechanical computers used in places like New York are at a disadvantage here as it takes a couple experts a few hours to reprogram one. Their advantage is that they are completely transparent, and verifiable on the spot. But with a printout the electronic voting machine is just as verifiable.
One thing that people miss is that a paper vote can be bought. It's easy to take a small camera into the booth and take a picture of yourself holding the ballot. But this can be overcome as well. Simply let the person vote on as many paper ballots as she wants to without poll worker assistance. Here you have an advantage over even paper balloting as you can print a unique randomized serial number on each person's ballots and throw out the votes of someone that voted several times. The 'randomized' number can be pseudorandom based on a seed the poll workers enter in the morning by coin tosses and can the 'random' numbers can be verified with that knowledge, but would need to be leaked to print fake votes (and now we're back to ballot stuffing being local, or requiring many co-conspiritors, and hence difficult.) You can publish the random numbers and time of vote after the fact so voters can verify that their vote was counted, or falsely overcounted if you see your vote on the list of stuffed ballots. As long as you don't publish the person's vote, and don't let it leave the polling station, only the local poll workers or voting software company can be involved in vote buying. Even the software company can be eliminated by using open source and a checklist of MD-5 signatures of verified code when the poll workers compile and install the software, with a verified compiler and system. I'd even make the ROMs verifiable prior to the election, it's not so hard to have poll workers from different parties load the ROM with their personal laptop and then have the others verify the ROM also in a random order, with a roll of dice for whether to do each additional verification after each party member has had a go at it, so the last person to verify doesn't load a pirate ROM instead. They don't know if they are going to be last.
I probably missed some procedure, so it would of course be best to publish the whole set of procedures along with the code, bios, etc, for public review a few years ahead of time so all the bugs can be worked out and there is no single point of failure. (The randomized serial number keeps down the ballot stuffing problem with paper ballots. This, for instance, would be supplimented by a poll worker observing you didn't put a bunch of ballots in the clear acrylic box.)
I hasten to add I think implementing this before the 2006 elections, considering how few of these common sense thoughts have been talked of, would be very pre-mature, and could only be an indication of intent to perpetrate continued election fraud on the part of any politician pushing for such adoption.
Or the softcore stuff you can find in your average record store (explicit Hip-Hop, softcore cover art, the scantily clad goth employee...).
What now I have to wear a parental warning label when I walk down the street too?
Why can't these anti-porn fundamentalists just establish a community like the Amish have done and leave the rest of us out of their sick schemes. No electricity, no TV, no Internet, no art, as long as they don't force anyone to live there they can ban sex or women or thought completely for all I care.
I don't agree about C# being an inferior Java clone. First things that come to my mind is that Java doesn't support properties, indexers, enums, attributes and multi-dimensional arrays.
Also, C# way of handling events is just so much simpler and powerful ! Listeners are a pain in the ass IMHO.
Except for multi-dimentional arrays I think of all of those as liabilities. Java has conventions for them that fit within a simple "everything is a class" paradigm. If you want a powerful OOP language that does everything you have C++. But then if you let any novices touch the code it seems to entropy insanely quickly; with Java you can let them go for weeks unsupervised. C# isn't as bad as C++ here, but I've seen a novice crash bluescreen the machine repeatably with a just a few well chosen errors in his most frequently called C# routine. Java just doesn't let you do that. I saw some bluescreens in the Java early days, but they were JRE implementation bugs, not spec bugs. The few spec bugs only crashed the app, sometimes holding some precious resources hostage until you killed the JRE, ahem thread.suspend().
About defining a UI in XML, it will be part of Longhorn release whatever when that be. Microsoft developped their own XML definition and named it XAML. Read more on Devx here.
Cool, this is good news. I wish Moroney had known about Qt though, using a GUI like Qt designer sure is easier for Q&D stuff than straight Mozilla XUL. It is probably what MSFT's Visual Studio support will be like too. Sounds like MSFT is trying to give Trolltech a run for their money on defining the future Windows platform for developers. (They of course own the user view, but it wasn't so very long ago that they grabbed the developers from Borland, and Qt beats the pants of ATL/MFC; and still seems to have significant advantages over
The people they interviewed all seem to be those VB scripters only refered to as "programmers" by the PHBs. I actually think the .NET classes are an acceptible wrapper around the ugliness of the Windows API.
.NET as a replacement for ATL/MFC is not so bad. I haven't tried C++ .NET bindings yet but if I have to implement a Windows version of some serious program, and can't use Qt, I want to look into it.
.NET when compared to Qt is the XML definition of UI's. This keeps down the level of that ugly generated code. If you want, you can even ship the XML instead of having it parsed into C++ and compiled (this gives you flexibility at the expense of keeping track of resources outside the binary, I haven't used it except experimentally, but I can imagine some enterprise applications where you might want to be able add a form to by just sticking some XML in your database instead of deploying a new binary to 10,000 desks.) I don't like having to run the Qt preprocessor though, but I don't know if C++ .NET has some of that uglyness too or if it is pure C++. The big downside of the preprocessor is that it makes it harder to write a crossplatform GUI class, like say one that used either a MFC or a Qt or a OpenGL or a Carbon implementation depending on what was available.
I don't really like C# because it just seems to be an inferior Java clone. But
Are there any programmers here that have given C++.NET a try that also know the joy of Qt? I'd like to hear about the advantages/disadvantages... The only thing that really seems missing from
If I have to try an alpha kernel to get what MacOS X has provided for over a year now, I see no point in trying it.
The point is MacOS X doesn't provide it, but you can get it in Linux with 5-10 minutes of work. If you just want to use the MacOS X hack just do "renice -10 xmmsPID" you could even put create a stupid little SUID script for it and make your xmms icon point to that instead of the binary. But I haven't encountered any skips with xmms since long before MacOS X was shipped.
I do now want to be a QA tester. I want to use software which works, and so do most users.
Troll. Troll. Troll. The TCP/IP stack is still not working in MacOS X! They took an old buggy FreeBSD stack and didn't patch for the known bugs before releaseing MaxOS X. And they still haven't, even though they've been sent patches. It has an off by one error in the MTU calculation that slows everything down and generates excessive network traffic when the host on the other end never gets the ACK it was supposed to and retries after the timeout. I lost days of my life dealing with this mostly because I couldn't believe such a serious bug existed in a TCP/IP stack in any software in this day and age. You may not be a "QA tester" but that seems to be mostly because you are oblivious to serious bugs in the software you use.
Cold Hard Cash.
Preferrably in small non-sequentially numbered bills.
Project Pink. Now everone say it with me: HAHAHahahAHAhahAHAHAHA! Get real. This has about as much chance to fly as an airplane made out of gauze, popsicle sticks, and chewing gum.
;)
It flew once, hundreds of inches above the water. So there.
I say Linux is dated for the DESKTOP due largely to both X Windows as well as the fact that it is based on many old ideas which have been changed and improved in newer systems. Think of it in terms of Apache 1.3 vs Apache 2.0. The new model does threading and can chain many handlers together to create a response. These features were not easily added to Apache 1.3 so they started with a new model.
MacOS X made certain adjustments to allow it to work well for a desktop. For example, I want to play mp3 music while I read email without the music cutting out due to lack of processor priority, so it has been given a high priority and it never cuts out.
I think you should give 2.6.0-testX a try. This version is in large part a complete rewrite of some major pieces of the OS. One of these is the scheduler. It can play that mp3 music file without any skipping while you are compiling mozilla, playing a video game and recording the Sopranos in the the background. And it can do all this without nasty hacks like the one where Windows XP starves everything but the thread running the foreground task's windowing code, or something like just running your mp3 player at a higher priority. (It's very interesting reading how it does this, it basically figures out what a task is doing and schedules it based on this. It also just has more time slices, and borrows the reentrability of drivers that Windows NT tries for.)
Though on second thought you must be a troll because every OS from Solaris to BeOS to MacOS X is severely dated when compared to Linux. Though I hear Windows 2006 has borrowed some Linux ideas, maybe it will compare favorably to 2.6.0...
Most contries are signatories to the WTO treaty. This gives all business located in any WTO country the same standing in court. A US corporation has all the rights of citizenship except for the vote (they are actually allowed to give more money to politicians than people are allowed to), so if you just file the papers to establish a corporation in your country you can sue anyone in the USA.
I deal with tough NYC gang members every day. That's right, I work at an elementary school. A polar bear wouldn't last 2 seconds in Harlem.
A friend of mine is teaching this fall in the Bronx through one of those industry to school programs, she was just telling me about how busy she's been this week. She has not been drawing up her lesson plans, she has been drawing up her discipline plan.
Still I think if you have ever run across a polar bear, outside of an enclosure, you might change your opinion. They could pretty much kill you just out of curiosity. Much like an eight year old might want to see what happens when one splits a worm in two.
...or mechanical engineers we'd face certain realities: you have to look for a job; employers want experience before they'll hire you; sometimes you can't find a job in your area--so you may have to consider moving...
I think the option of just moving to one of these "third world" countries is a severely underrated option. Civil and Mechanical Engineers have been finding good paying jobs overseas for ages. As you pointed out elsewhere in your post a lot of jobs won't move overseas because communications lags and language barriers can really interfere with a software project. Custom programming, which is and is likely to remain where most programmers spend their days, is for the most part going to stay near it's customers. I think application programming, where you need a large coordinated team spec-ing and producing the code will find the Miguel de Icaza's of the world to coalese around them in lower cost markets. I'd rather do application programming than custom stuff so I'm looking at the options. There are still plenty of jobs here for someone like me, but maybe not the most satisfying ones. (Neither IBM nor Microsoft look fun after you've spent a week in some of their labs. I'm thinking Sun, nVidia, etc don't either, Alias, ATI, etc would be a big move anyway (Canada is like another country).)
If you are one of those people and you are not tied down by school age children why not go? I've been looking at Peru for instance, you can live very nicely on a middle class salary there. It's in the same time zone as New York and there are many talented workers to be had for a song compared to american payscales, but nice salaries compared to the cost of living. Lima is a bit polluted, but there are already programming shops in cleaner middle class districts like Miraflores, near the sea. There are plenty of international schools nearby if you want to keep your children speaking English, French, etc. They are a WTO country so you can incorporate a business where you like and send your employees, such as yourself, there on a business visa ($10 per month, $30 minimum, convertable to workers visa) A glass of freshly squeezed orange juice is about 30 cents, but I recommend the pineapple juice it's about a $1 but it's so much better from the canned stuff you get from Dole, or even the freshly made stuff outside of Hawaii. Of course, the ceviche is just amazing; try the Peruvian Sea Bass ceviche with a side of warm Inca Cola and a cold beer, breakfast of champions. While the culture is not as late night oriented as Brazil, lunch is served 2-4 pm, dinner seems to be sometime after 10 pm. And there are enough 24 hour cafes and the like to keep the schedule some of us enjoy.
Most of the children of engineers I know had at least some of their childhood overseas and seem none the worse for it. Programming is not just an art but also a skill that is needed in other countries, and they sometimes pay better when the supply is shorter there. At this point our economy is in the crapper and we have an oversupply. India and Russia may have enough talented programmers, but other regions aren't that fortunate. I have an Indian-American friend that spends a few months a year in India doing very well compensated contract work so I'm not so sure even they have enough. A good programmer is still 10-20 times as productive as a less talented one. In the US he might get twice what the others do, in the more competitive global market the differential is much bigger.
Aside from the market reasons for moving, the legal climate for software just seems to be getting worse by the minute in the USA. It might be better to protest the DMCA by establishing a business that flies in the face of it outside the US's borders, and grow it to the point where the local government won't think to sell you down the river with another TRIPS like treaty. Europe seems set to go down that same road as the USA... it might take decades for these idiotic laws to be repealed, why suffer under them when you have a brain that will travel? You
For example, if someone made a video driver, refused to release it open source because of contractual problems, but made it relatively easy to pick apart a bit at a time, it would give them plausable deniability, but still help out the OSS community.
You mean like not stripping the binary and leaving full debug info in there?
It happens, I can't say it's intentional but it happens.