There is no language called POSIX. It's an OS standard, and software authors writing in high-level languages should not need to care about it. There are languages like C, C++, Java, etc. If you're writing Java, you should pay attention to the Java standard. If you're writing C, you should pay attention to the C standard (which doesn't include OS specific things like fsync()).
And if you adhere to the standard of the language you are using, you should have some reasonable expectation that things will work, instead of dying a horrible and gruesome death. A conforming HTML page should not fail. A conforming Java/C/C++/whatever program should not fail either, but the problem is, it will. This is like asking HTML authors to understand the low-level details of the browser rendering engine in order to write working HTML pages.
Some high-level languages (e.g. PHP) have no built-in fsync. Also fsync() is not part of the C standard, it's a POSIX extension. What you have in C is fflush(), but that will not fsync(). So books about programming in C usually don't cover fsync(), as it's not part of the language. I know that sounds like nitpicking, but truth is, if you've learned programming from books about some language, chances are you've never heard about fsync().
Basically, what happens is that you need to understand OS design in order to program in a high-level language, and nobody (at least none of the books) tells you so. This is a WTF on more than one level... either make it part of the language, or make sure it isn't needed.
An enterprise would likely want to use the LTS version (Ubuntu 8.04), but CFEngine is broken in Ubuntu 8.04 (can't figure out whether a package is installed). Don't know about puppet, but we're using Ubuntu on the desktop (70+ machines), and we're somewhat pissed off by the fact that Ubuntu completely neglects QA for enterprise use (issues with NFS-mounted home directories, failure to fix an entirely trivial one-line bug in CFEngine,...).
It's splint these days (at least on Linux). And using splint on any nontrivial large code base will bury you in tons of mostly irrelevant warnings.
If you dare to attempt cleaning up the mess, you'll find that you have to annotate your code. And then you have the problem that splint will only spit out correct warnings if your annotations are correct, so you have just doubled the potential sources of error (now it's annotations+code instead of just code).
Tools like splint just don't understand the flow of control in a program, which makes them next to useless. Static checking must be implemented in the compiler. Gcc is actually quite good already in that respect, and constantly improving - the version that ships with Ubuntu 8.10 detects the array overflow:
$; gcc -O2 -Wall -c -o bo.o bo.c
bo.c: In function 'f':
bo.c:4: warning: array subscript is above array bounds
As far as I can see the whole "real Unix" thing is primarily about meeting a set of requirements...
Yes. And as a developer, I can say that this means A LOT. It means that software will "just work", without having to care about obscure and stupid incompatibilities, and that's important.
Maybe the problem is that the Wikipedia editors think Der Spiegel is an authoritative source.
The problem is that Wikipedia encourages the use of secondary sources and discourages the use of primary sources. According to Wikipedia policies, it probably would have been "original research", and thus unacceptable, if an article author would have tried to get hold of the primary source (copy of birth certificate).
The problem is that wikipedia itself discourages the use of primary sources by wikipedia authors. The reason they give is that using primary sources may lead to "original research", which is strongly discouraged as well.
While open source software generally sucks big when it comes to privacy protection*, there's actually an Apache module to replace the connecting IP with localhost. Which means neither the logs, nor any web app running on the server will ever see the real IP adress.
*Yes, it does.. eliminating privacy violating information like IP adresses, as even required sometimes by law, is difficult, or even next to impossible with default software from your preferred Linux distro. I'm trying to run a server on a 'we log strictly anonymously' basis, and I haven't fully succeeded yet.
All low-mass stars, including the Sun and ranging up to F-Type stars (about 1.7 times solar mass) have an outer convection zone (meaning that outside the core, and up to the surface, energy is transported by convection). There's nothing 'bursty' in that mechanism.
Hard radiation of low-mass stars is generated in the corona, which is heated by magnetic reconnection events (the magnetic equivalent of a short), leading to sudden release of the energy stored in magnetic fields. This is what is called 'stellar activity': starspots, flares, X-ray radiation,...
Some red dwarfs are indeed much more active than the Sun, many are not. Activity is generally connected to the age of a star since magnetic fields are generated by a dynamo mechanism, and stars spin down slowly as they are aging, leading to a less efficient dynamo and a decrease of activity.
Actually, on my first notebook I used brain and pocket calculator to set up X. There was just a tiny bit of memory lacking to run it at a better depth with the standard resolution - so I tweaked/etc/X11/XF86Config to get better depth with a rather odd resolution. Basically sacrificed a few lines at the bottom of the screen.
I don't think it's that Germans don't "get" them.. it's more that they were invented to circumvent the 17th century backwardness of the US banking system. There wasn't ever any need for them in Germany, and the high charges (for the merchants) are not suited to make them popular if better solutions exist.
Note that you can overdraw your account anyway, so there is no need for the "credit" functionality either.. and since the account is balanced by the next payment from your employer, you are on average less due than with a separate "credit" account of your card.
Sure you pay with direct transfer.. at least in Germany. Who needs credit/debit cards if there is a perfectly working wire transfer system, with terminals in almost any shop?
If you think about it for a moment, SL (and virtual worlds in general) is a video-phone type software.
No. A video-phone, even if it's one of the expensive commercial offerings targeted at business video conferences (we have one, I know the stuff) always has some peek-through-a-hole feeling.. there's people on one side of the wall, people on the other side, and the screen is a tiny hole in the wall.
A 3D environment like SL is very different, and much more natural. The only major problem with SL is that currently there is no good way to present Powerpoint/PDF/whatever content inworld.
The problem with Ubuntu is that it's focussed on the private home PC, not at the PC in the enterprise, and not at the server.
6.06 had problems with NFS (timestamps on copy over NFS) and NIS (gdm login abysmally slow). These bugs were never fixed, i.e. not taken serious.. after all, they don't affect users on a private home PC.
8.04 again has problems if there are users with home directories on NFS (need to uninstall tracker). And the NFS doesn't play nice with our software server (hangs). And cfengine is broken, and nobody fixes it, though the fix is trivial and explained in the lauchpad bug entry.
And software that you need on servers (e.g. cfengine, or spamassassin for the mailserver) is in universe, hence may not get security fixes.
We do use Ubuntu, since it's more up to date than Debian stable, but we're not too thrilled.
You tried SL, but obviously you didn't get the idea. It's not a game with content dictated by a company, it's about the users being able to create what they like. (While you're at it, you could also complain about the lack of a storyline, which would equally miss the point completely.)
Scripts are a necessity. Textures can be atrocious, yes, so what? In RL you can also design your own clothes, if you like, and make them as atrocious as you like.
And yeah, the graphics may look 5yrs old, but unlike your 3D game, it can't come on a DVD (since it's user-generated, not made by the game publisher). There's a limit to what you can download over a DSL link.
I see that literally every time I get on SL: a new person gets on, says "so what's the goal of the game?" and when people say "there isn't one" the person says "that's dumb." and logs off, most likely forever.
The correct answer isn't "there is no goal", but rather "you have to define your own goal". And if someone can't do that, they're probably no loss if they leave.
Second Life is about sitting on your butt and catering to that which you already are. One of them at least requires a smidgen of imagination and activity.
Second Life doesn't have a storyline or a goal.. it's up to you what you do. Those who have no imagination are probably those who are used to consume a game like they consume TV... and they pretty fast discover that Second Life is not for them, and leave it.
Depens on what you're interested in. SL is not a game, it's more like a technical platform.. where you can implement games, if you like. What I like about it is that there's no fixed goal. You can just hang around, have fun roleplaying with others, explore creative builds.. be as lazy as you like:)
If the rumours are true, a staggering fraction of people abandon SL very fast because the can't get along with the client interface. It may well be that the pool of potential participants is much larger than the current SL population.
The key is: vacuum is not empty.. because of the uncertainty principle, it is full of random short-lived energy fluctuations ('virtual particles'). Imagine that at the event horizon, a matter-antimatter pair is created in such an energy fluctuation, and one particle of this pair manages to quantum mechanically 'tunnel out' of the horizon, causing the BH to lose mass. That's a simplified view of the basic mechanism.
And I'd better won't tell what I think about the sensibleness of your point.
It's perfectly sensible.. because it's realistic, rather than dreamland. Shit happens. All the time.
Also, in any civilized region of this planet, it is the recipient of your email who is rejecting it. Whether he sorts the mail personally, or has given that job to someone else is his own decision.. if the chief postal officer refuses the mail, the recipient has ordered him to take care of sorting his mail. Tough luck.
And yes, I am the chief postal officer over here. And I happily redirect spam to/dev/null if - and only if - a user tells me to do that. It's his decision and his risk. You may phone him instead.
As someone else has already pointed out: an archived email discussion is worthless without an indication whether the proposed solution actually worked. "Thank you, it works" is important.. not for showing your politeness, but for providing a crucial piece of information.
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There is no language called POSIX. It's an OS standard, and software authors writing in high-level languages should not need to care about it. There are languages like C, C++, Java, etc. If you're writing Java, you should pay attention to the Java standard. If you're writing C, you should pay attention to the C standard (which doesn't include OS specific things like fsync()).
And if you adhere to the standard of the language you are using, you should have some reasonable expectation that things will work, instead of dying a horrible and gruesome death. A conforming HTML page should not fail. A conforming Java/C/C++/whatever program should not fail either, but the problem is, it will. This is like asking HTML authors to understand the low-level details of the browser rendering engine in order to write working HTML pages.
Some high-level languages (e.g. PHP) have no built-in fsync. Also fsync() is not part of the C standard, it's a POSIX extension. What you have in C is fflush(), but that will not fsync(). So books about programming in C usually don't cover fsync(), as it's not part of the language. I know that sounds like nitpicking, but truth is, if you've learned programming from books about some language, chances are you've never heard about fsync().
Basically, what happens is that you need to understand OS design in order to program in a high-level language, and nobody (at least none of the books) tells you so. This is a WTF on more than one level... either make it part of the language, or make sure it isn't needed.
An enterprise would likely want to use the LTS version (Ubuntu 8.04), but CFEngine is broken in Ubuntu 8.04 (can't figure out whether a package is installed). Don't know about puppet, but we're using Ubuntu on the desktop (70+ machines), and we're somewhat pissed off by the fact that Ubuntu completely neglects QA for enterprise use (issues with NFS-mounted home directories, failure to fix an entirely trivial one-line bug in CFEngine, ...).
See above - get the most recent version of gcc, use 'gcc -O2 -Wall'.
It's splint these days (at least on Linux). And using splint on any nontrivial large code base will bury you in tons of mostly irrelevant warnings. If you dare to attempt cleaning up the mess, you'll find that you have to annotate your code. And then you have the problem that splint will only spit out correct warnings if your annotations are correct, so you have just doubled the potential sources of error (now it's annotations+code instead of just code).
Tools like splint just don't understand the flow of control in a program, which makes them next to useless. Static checking must be implemented in the compiler. Gcc is actually quite good already in that respect, and constantly improving - the version that ships with Ubuntu 8.10 detects the array overflow:
$; gcc -O2 -Wall -c -o bo.o bo.c
bo.c: In function 'f':
bo.c:4: warning: array subscript is above array bounds
Yes. And as a developer, I can say that this means A LOT. It means that software will "just work", without having to care about obscure and stupid incompatibilities, and that's important.
Maybe the problem is that the Wikipedia editors think Der Spiegel is an authoritative source.
The problem is that Wikipedia encourages the use of secondary sources and discourages the use of primary sources. According to Wikipedia policies, it probably would have been "original research", and thus unacceptable, if an article author would have tried to get hold of the primary source (copy of birth certificate).
The problem is that wikipedia itself discourages the use of primary sources by wikipedia authors. The reason they give is that using primary sources may lead to "original research", which is strongly discouraged as well.
That's what you get if you discourage the use of primary sources in favor of secondary sources.
While open source software generally sucks big when it comes to privacy protection*, there's actually an Apache module to replace the connecting IP with localhost. Which means neither the logs, nor any web app running on the server will ever see the real IP adress.
*Yes, it does.. eliminating privacy violating information like IP adresses, as even required sometimes by law, is difficult, or even next to impossible with default software from your preferred Linux distro. I'm trying to run a server on a 'we log strictly anonymously' basis, and I haven't fully succeeded yet.
Uhh.. pardon me, who moderated this insightful?
All low-mass stars, including the Sun and ranging up to F-Type stars (about 1.7 times solar mass) have an outer convection zone (meaning that outside the core, and up to the surface, energy is transported by convection). There's nothing 'bursty' in that mechanism.
Hard radiation of low-mass stars is generated in the corona, which is heated by magnetic reconnection events (the magnetic equivalent of a short), leading to sudden release of the energy stored in magnetic fields. This is what is called 'stellar activity': starspots, flares, X-ray radiation, ...
Some red dwarfs are indeed much more active than the Sun, many are not. Activity is generally connected to the age of a star since magnetic fields are generated by a dynamo mechanism, and stars spin down slowly as they are aging, leading to a less efficient dynamo and a decrease of activity.
Actually, on my first notebook I used brain and pocket calculator to set up X. There was just a tiny bit of memory lacking to run it at a better depth with the standard resolution - so I tweaked /etc/X11/XF86Config to get better depth with a rather odd resolution. Basically sacrificed a few lines at the bottom of the screen.
I don't think it's that Germans don't "get" them.. it's more that they were invented to circumvent the 17th century backwardness of the US banking system. There wasn't ever any need for them in Germany, and the high charges (for the merchants) are not suited to make them popular if better solutions exist.
Note that you can overdraw your account anyway, so there is no need for the "credit" functionality either.. and since the account is balanced by the next payment from your employer, you are on average less due than with a separate "credit" account of your card.
Sure you pay with direct transfer.. at least in Germany. Who needs credit/debit cards if there is a perfectly working wire transfer system, with terminals in almost any shop?
If you think about it for a moment, SL (and virtual worlds in general) is a video-phone type software.
No. A video-phone, even if it's one of the expensive commercial offerings targeted at business video conferences (we have one, I know the stuff) always has some peek-through-a-hole feeling.. there's people on one side of the wall, people on the other side, and the screen is a tiny hole in the wall.
A 3D environment like SL is very different, and much more natural. The only major problem with SL is that currently there is no good way to present Powerpoint/PDF/whatever content inworld.
Sure would be nice to have them. I suppose the gcc maintainers would never admit to someone from the openbsd group knowing what they're doing, though.
That belongs into (g)libc, not into the compiler. It's Ulrich Drepper who is blocking it (see this thread on the glibc mailing list).
The problem with Ubuntu is that it's focussed on the private home PC, not at the PC in the enterprise, and not at the server.
6.06 had problems with NFS (timestamps on copy over NFS) and NIS (gdm login abysmally slow). These bugs were never fixed, i.e. not taken serious.. after all, they don't affect users on a private home PC.
8.04 again has problems if there are users with home directories on NFS (need to uninstall tracker). And the NFS doesn't play nice with our software server (hangs). And cfengine is broken, and nobody fixes it, though the fix is trivial and explained in the lauchpad bug entry.
And software that you need on servers (e.g. cfengine, or spamassassin for the mailserver) is in universe, hence may not get security fixes. We do use Ubuntu, since it's more up to date than Debian stable, but we're not too thrilled.
You tried SL, but obviously you didn't get the idea. It's not a game with content dictated by a company, it's about the users being able to create what they like. (While you're at it, you could also complain about the lack of a storyline, which would equally miss the point completely.)
Scripts are a necessity. Textures can be atrocious, yes, so what? In RL you can also design your own clothes, if you like, and make them as atrocious as you like.
And yeah, the graphics may look 5yrs old, but unlike your 3D game, it can't come on a DVD (since it's user-generated, not made by the game publisher). There's a limit to what you can download over a DSL link.
I see that literally every time I get on SL: a new person gets on, says "so what's the goal of the game?" and when people say "there isn't one" the person says "that's dumb." and logs off, most likely forever.
The correct answer isn't "there is no goal", but rather "you have to define your own goal". And if someone can't do that, they're probably no loss if they leave.
Second Life is about sitting on your butt and catering to that which you already are. One of them at least requires a smidgen of imagination and activity.
Second Life doesn't have a storyline or a goal.. it's up to you what you do. Those who have no imagination are probably those who are used to consume a game like they consume TV... and they pretty fast discover that Second Life is not for them, and leave it.
Depens on what you're interested in. SL is not a game, it's more like a technical platform.. where you can implement games, if you like. What I like about it is that there's no fixed goal. You can just hang around, have fun roleplaying with others, explore creative builds.. be as lazy as you like :)
If the rumours are true, a staggering fraction of people abandon SL very fast because the can't get along with the client interface. It may well be that the pool of potential participants is much larger than the current SL population.
The key is: vacuum is not empty.. because of the uncertainty principle, it is full of random short-lived energy fluctuations ('virtual particles'). Imagine that at the event horizon, a matter-antimatter pair is created in such an energy fluctuation, and one particle of this pair manages to quantum mechanically 'tunnel out' of the horizon, causing the BH to lose mass. That's a simplified view of the basic mechanism.
And I'd better won't tell what I think about the sensibleness of your point.
It's perfectly sensible.. because it's realistic, rather than dreamland. Shit happens. All the time.
Also, in any civilized region of this planet, it is the recipient of your email who is rejecting it. Whether he sorts the mail personally, or has given that job to someone else is his own decision.. if the chief postal officer refuses the mail, the recipient has ordered him to take care of sorting his mail. Tough luck.
And yes, I am the chief postal officer over here. And I happily redirect spam to /dev/null if - and only if - a user tells me to do that. It's his decision and his risk. You may phone him instead.
As someone else has already pointed out: an archived email discussion is worthless without an indication whether the proposed solution actually worked. "Thank you, it works" is important.. not for showing your politeness, but for providing a crucial piece of information.