Except it doesn't really help anyone but them. And later it turns out that they were only doing so because they were breaking the GPL. And then later that the code was shit and has taken a bunch of effort to get into decent shape and they've been completely ignoring emails on the subject.
Microsoft puts C# and the CLI under the "Microsoft Community Promise" and trumpets as it being a win for interoperability and open source. Except it only covers the core standardized parts. All the libraries specific to Microsoft's implementation that are widely used aren't included. As a result it basically only makes it easier to move from other implementations to theirs, and not the other way around, and the only one who wins is Microsoft.
It's still better than some other industry-standard languages such as, I dunno, C and C++. Show me their standardized network, threading, GUI libraries please? When did an open-source Java become useable: before or after Microsoft came with open-source C#?
Now I hate Microsoft as much as the next slashdotter, but let's be pragmatic please. Microsoft isn't Bill Gates, it's a thousand-headed hydra. Some heads may still be stuck in the old ways, but things are slowly improving.
In the old days, C# would never have been standardized, it would've been bundled with all their applications, and dev kits would cost thousands. They would've counter-sued to oblivion anybody complaining about their linux drivers. Yeah, OOXML is one of their myriad fuckups, but please don't single out the driver issue or C#, which are actually signs that things are improving at Microsoft, even if they're not perfect yet.
In an ideal world, you just recompile your C code.
In the real world, your code (indirectly) uses low-level libraries and system calls that only work on a given chip because they make use of specific hardware, either through assembly or through hardware-mapped structures.
More rarely, some basic C operations don't work as expected. A common gotcha on previous ARM architectures were that all memory accesses had to be 32-bit aligned (it saved transistors and power). That meant that you couldn't use a char[] array, you necessarily had to use an int32_t[] from which you'd then extract each byte.
Woops, looks like/. is hammering the server. Here's a copy of the text (as of now):
I've been taking a closer look at the WebOS side of my Palm Pre tonight, and I noticed that it periodically uploads information to Palm, Inc.
The first thing sent is intended to be my GPS location. It's the same location I get if I open the map app on the Pre. Not very accurate in this case, but I've seen it be accurate enough to find my house before.
2009-08-10t09:15:10z upload/var/context/pending/1249895710-contextfile.gz.contextlog ok rdx-30681971 2009-08-11t09:15:10z upload/var/context/pending/1249982110-contextfile.gz.contextlog ok rdx-31306808
There is also some info that is recorded when a WebOS app crashes. Now, I've seen WebOS crash hard a time or two, but it turns out apps are crashing fairly frequently behind the scenes, and each such crash is logged and a system state snapshot taken. At least some of these are uploaded, though if things are crashing a whole lot it will be throttled.
2009-08-09T17:01:22Z upload/var/log/rdxd/pending/rdxd_log_59.tgz OK RDX-30246857 2009-08-09T17:05:36Z upload/var/log/rdxd/pending/rdxd_log_26.tgz OK RDX-30249465 2009-08-09T17:09:11Z upload/var/log/rdxd/pending/rdxd_log_56.tgz OK RDX-30252374 2009-08-09T17:11:46Z upload/var/log/rdxd/pending/rdxd_log_70.tgz OK RDX-30253958 2009-08-09T17:16:29Z upload/var/log/rdxd/pending/rdxd_log_67.tgz ERR_UPLOAD_THROTTLED_DAILY 2009-08-09T17:17:28Z upload/var/log/rdxd/pending/rdxd_log_51.tgz ERR_UPLOAD_THROTTLED_DAILY 2009-08-09T17:20:40Z upload/var/log/rdxd/pending/rdxd_log_21.tgz ERR_UPLOAD_THROTTLED_DAILY
Each tarball contains a kernel dmesg, syslog, a manifest.txt listing all installed ipkg packages (including third-party apps), a backtrace of the crash, a df (from which they can tell I'm using Debian on the phone), and ps -f output listing all processes owned by root (but not by joey).
The uploading is handled by uploadd, which reads/etc/uploadd.conf:
The "HOST" this is sent to via https is ps.palmws.com.
My approach to disable this, which may not stick across WebOS upgrades, was to comment out the 'exec' line in/etc/event.d/uploadd and reboot. However, then I noticed a contextupload process running. This is started by dbus, so the best way to disable it seems to be: rm/usr/bin/contextupload
BTW, since Palm has lawyers, they have a privacy policy, which covers their ass fairly well regarding all this, without going into details or making clear that the above data is being uploaded.
Funny, the Sun being unsuitable for life is one of the ideas behind Passages in the Void, a series of SF short-stories about (among other things) living long-term.
In the long term, living around a star that will eventually gobble up your planet isn't a good idea. Better go make a home in the interstellar (or better, intergalactic) void where chances of stray asteroids or supernovas are much smaller.
Even though the most visible part of Google's activities is the search, I believe the corporate entity (maybe not the brand) would very well survive the demise of their search activity.
on a related note: whatever happened to Google's open-source VoIP thingy that incorporated with XMPP/Jabber? I think it was called 'Jingle', but I haven't heard a lot about it since then.
True, Jingle adoption has been very slow in other clients than GTalk, which is a crying shame. I expect it was for technical reasons: it isn't easy for client developers to easily integrate Jingle in their existing clients, and NAT-traversal (through the ICE method) drives people crazy.
But it's slowly getting there. The most popular Jabber-specific client, Psi, finally supports Jingle-Voice (though not video) in a cross platform way in the latest version 0.13, released a couple of days ago.
While the the summary is wrong on this subject, I can tell you that, yes, manual optimization is part of our work and can slow down the release of our product. If we told a customer that yes, we will be able to do VGA 30FPS H.264 encode. Code optimization on our custom core is going to take some time and effort. I work in the embedded multimedia field.
I think we're going to be very, very interested in this project.
I was initially skeptical because of your abusive use of "unpatented" all over the place, as if this is solely about patents. You don't provide any clear links here, but 2 clicks away, I found this:
The problem is caused by Vista's internals: There is some code that compares whether the name of the file system type is one of the following: "NTFS", "FAT", "FAT32", "CDFS", "NPFS", "MSFS" or "UDF". If there is a match, it is one of Microsoft's file system types and a lot of code is skipped in the Multiple UNC Provider (MUP) implementation of Vista. If the file system type is a third-party type, for example "Ext2", some code runs in the MUP of Vista that always generates an ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER error status code due to a bug of Vista.
My first reaction when browsing through the article was disgust about the measure being used. I couldn't see the value of graphs about the number of symbols used by different file-system modules. So vfat doesn't use kprintf, woo-fucking-hoo!
But then, the Hamming distance and hierarchical structure struck a chord. Huh, so NFS, uses a very different set of symbols than, ext3. (ok, this may be biased by NFS using a metric fuckton of external symbols where ext3 uses less), which implies that NFS is pretty different, internally, than ext3.
So now, I agree that such a visualisation, while very abstract from the implementation details, can be pretty useful to have a (very) rough overview of the filesystems and their code structure. And I think we need more abstract overviews like this.
Reminds me of Code Swarm, which creates a movie of commits to a repository.
A/. summary is a bit like a main page on a website. Make the organization clear. Don't pile on shortcuts to different parts of the website: the reader risks being discouraged trying to find out how best to get to the important part of your website. Less is better. I actually clicked on one of the links that appeared to go to the "Expedition" website (based on its similarity to other links, as shown in my browser's statusbar!), then changed the address in the address bar to get to the front page.
You actually didn't include a link to your article's front page, for heaven's sake!
Hope this helps for the next time you write a summary.
Actually, I think we're seeing a bit of a comeback. Hackerspaces are mushrooming around the world. (I like to believe the talk at the 24th Chaos Computer Congress in December 2007, Building a Hacker Space, helped provide impetus to this movement.) I also believe DIY culture is on the rise again, as spearheaded by Make.
So I'd say it's not so much that hacking is dying off rather than being handed over to the new generation, which has its own interests.
I don't think anyone outside the CoS's cultists will take such a comment seriously. All the +5 comments I see here are variants of "Bwahaha! Fool." in discrediting Miscavige's analogy.
However, remember that one way the CoS keeps its claws on its cultists is by appearing to them as a persecuted minority. This/. comment is enlightening.
Hence, I believe this comment rather serves to get his troops to hang tough and together.
Don't worry, though. On launch day the tools will be mature enough to use, and game vendors will have new ray tracing games that look fabulous on nothing but this.
Huh, that thinking sunk another of Intel's efforts, the Itanium. It was an architecture that required explicitly paralleled code (by the compiler). After sending the first samples to labs and universities and anybody interested in making a compiler for it, they thought everything would be good.
Except the awesome compilers didn't materialize. Itanic sunk.
Do. Not. Expect. Compilers to solve your problems for you. If we could, it would be done by now, and we could make awesome optimizing compilers that would target x86, PowerPC, CUDA, whatever, from that snippet of maintainable high-level code you wrote.
It doesn't exist. Don't wait for it. Toolchains suck and will always suck (relative to what you're expecting).
disc: I work for a company that supports Symbian. In fact, Nokia is our main customer, which is a secret to no one.
The main advantage of Symbian is that it is a known quantity on the market. Major manufacturers know it and its internals. Nokia (of course), but also Sony Ericsson, LG, Motorola have experience making Symbian phones.
Symbian is huge. 228 Million cumulative phones by June 2008, on 250 different models. iPhone: 2 models (EDGE and UMTS). Android: 1 model: G1. (I couldn't find precise sales numbers, sadly. Although the iPhone did hit 4 Million by mid-January 2008.)
Symbian is an established player, and Nokia is keeping it on the edge by open-sourcing it.
It is certainly not a too-late response to Android, but rather rather trying to cut off its market before it gains too much of a foothold. Though I'd like to trumpet Linux, I doubt it'll really challenge Symbian before 5 years from now. (exercise: count the Android phones on the market since it was announced in Nov 2007. Count the announced Android phones. Do the same for Symbian over the same time frame)
Another vital point to note is the main motivation with open-source Android and Symbian is not to please the geeks (hah!), but to provide a cheap OS through which Google and Nokia can sell their services. That is their business strategy, and don't forget it.
browsers should display a warning when submitting a form on an unencrypted page to an encrypted URL.
They already do. In fact, that's the very first thing I disable on a newly-installed browser. Otherwise I get this annoying and useless dialog everytime I use Google!
Maybe you mean displaying a warning on forms that include an input type="password" field, those where characters appear as stars?
It relies on the Stupidity 0.99995b RC12 Gold API, and it is here to stay.
I'd say it's not so much stupidity than human psychology, and that most people aren't educated to recognize these dangers. I'll refer you to what security and user interface designers refer to as the Dancing Bunnies problem.
The main workaround is to have users work in a sandbox. That way, if they blow something up, it's just their sandbox. The sandbox could be their home directory, or a virtual machine. Windows historically didn't sandbox (defaults to admin rights, which changed in Vista). Unix does (user permissions).
I find it hilariously ironic, because Windows has a sophisticated permission system (ACLs) by default since (at least) Windows 2k, whereas most Distributions I know still default to the User/Group/Other bits.
"trick me one time, shame on you. Trick me twice, shame on me." "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"
Microsoft's past practices burn strongly and painfully in geeks hearts. We can't yet be sure that Microsoft's current goodwill isn't just the "Embrace" of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
The examples you cite are encouraging*, but broken trust is extremely hard to regain. Why do you think some companies prefer to actually change brand name after a breach of trust? A lot of geeks still distrust IBM, the origin of FUD. It's going to be even harder for Microsoft, who are still under the same management that committed the previous backstabbing of standards.
*I'm not touching that "ODF support" with a 10-foot pole, not after the games they played with ISO last year.
Slashdot Mirror
Except it doesn't really help anyone but them. And later it turns out that they were only doing so because they were breaking the GPL. And then later that the code was shit and has taken a bunch of effort to get into decent shape and they've been completely ignoring emails on the subject.
Just like most other companies contributing drivers to the kernel through Greg K-H's Linux Driver Project, as Greg points out himself
Microsoft puts C# and the CLI under the "Microsoft Community Promise" and trumpets as it being a win for interoperability and open source. Except it only covers the core standardized parts. All the libraries specific to Microsoft's implementation that are widely used aren't included. As a result it basically only makes it easier to move from other implementations to theirs, and not the other way around, and the only one who wins is Microsoft.
It's still better than some other industry-standard languages such as, I dunno, C and C++. Show me their standardized network, threading, GUI libraries please? When did an open-source Java become useable: before or after Microsoft came with open-source C#?
Now I hate Microsoft as much as the next slashdotter, but let's be pragmatic please. Microsoft isn't Bill Gates, it's a thousand-headed hydra. Some heads may still be stuck in the old ways, but things are slowly improving.
In the old days, C# would never have been standardized, it would've been bundled with all their applications, and dev kits would cost thousands. They would've counter-sued to oblivion anybody complaining about their linux drivers. Yeah, OOXML is one of their myriad fuckups, but please don't single out the driver issue or C#, which are actually signs that things are improving at Microsoft, even if they're not perfect yet.
In an ideal world, you just recompile your C code.
In the real world, your code (indirectly) uses low-level libraries and system calls that only work on a given chip because they make use of specific hardware, either through assembly or through hardware-mapped structures.
More rarely, some basic C operations don't work as expected. A common gotcha on previous ARM architectures were that all memory accesses had to be 32-bit aligned (it saved transistors and power). That meant that you couldn't use a char[] array, you necessarily had to use an int32_t[] from which you'd then extract each byte.
Woops, looks like /. is hammering the server. Here's a copy of the text (as of now):
Funny, the Sun being unsuitable for life is one of the ideas behind Passages in the Void, a series of SF short-stories about (among other things) living long-term.
In the long term, living around a star that will eventually gobble up your planet isn't a good idea. Better go make a home in the interstellar (or better, intergalactic) void where chances of stray asteroids or supernovas are much smaller.
Google lives by its search engine, and people at Google know it.
Actually, Google's main source of revenue is AdSense.
We generated 99% of our revenues in 2007 and 97% of our revenues in 2008 from our advertisers.
(from their 2008 annual report)
Even though the most visible part of Google's activities is the search, I believe the corporate entity (maybe not the brand) would very well survive the demise of their search activity.
Keep that in mind.
on a related note: whatever happened to Google's open-source VoIP thingy that incorporated with XMPP/Jabber? I think it was called 'Jingle', but I haven't heard a lot about it since then.
True, Jingle adoption has been very slow in other clients than GTalk, which is a crying shame. I expect it was for technical reasons: it isn't easy for client developers to easily integrate Jingle in their existing clients, and NAT-traversal (through the ICE method) drives people crazy.
But it's slowly getting there. The most popular Jabber-specific client, Psi, finally supports Jingle-Voice (though not video) in a cross platform way in the latest version 0.13, released a couple of days ago.
Actually no, you're not smarter, you're just less ignorant.
"The difference between stupidity and ignorance is that stupidity is for life" :)
While the the summary is wrong on this subject, I can tell you that, yes, manual optimization is part of our work and can slow down the release of our product. If we told a customer that yes, we will be able to do VGA 30FPS H.264 encode. Code optimization on our custom core is going to take some time and effort. I work in the embedded multimedia field.
I think we're going to be very, very interested in this project.
I was initially skeptical because of your abusive use of "unpatented" all over the place, as if this is solely about patents. You don't provide any clear links here, but 2 clicks away, I found this:
Bug or on purpose? Who knows.
My first reaction when browsing through the article was disgust about the measure being used. I couldn't see the value of graphs about the number of symbols used by different file-system modules. So vfat doesn't use kprintf, woo-fucking-hoo!
But then, the Hamming distance and hierarchical structure struck a chord. Huh, so NFS, uses a very different set of symbols than, ext3. (ok, this may be biased by NFS using a metric fuckton of external symbols where ext3 uses less), which implies that NFS is pretty different, internally, than ext3.
So now, I agree that such a visualisation, while very abstract from the implementation details, can be pretty useful to have a (very) rough overview of the filesystems and their code structure. And I think we need more abstract overviews like this.
Reminds me of Code Swarm, which creates a movie of commits to a repository.
Dear submitter,
A /. summary is a bit like a main page on a website. Make the organization clear. Don't pile on shortcuts to different parts of the website: the reader risks being discouraged trying to find out how best to get to the important part of your website. Less is better.
I actually clicked on one of the links that appeared to go to the "Expedition" website (based on its similarity to other links, as shown in my browser's statusbar!), then changed the address in the address bar to get to the front page.
You actually didn't include a link to your article's front page, for heaven's sake!
Hope this helps for the next time you write a summary.
Actually, I think we're seeing a bit of a comeback. Hackerspaces are mushrooming around the world. (I like to believe the talk at the 24th Chaos Computer Congress in December 2007, Building a Hacker Space, helped provide impetus to this movement.) I also believe DIY culture is on the rise again, as spearheaded by Make.
So I'd say it's not so much that hacking is dying off rather than being handed over to the new generation, which has its own interests.
I don't think anyone outside the CoS's cultists will take such a comment seriously. All the +5 comments I see here are variants of "Bwahaha! Fool." in discrediting Miscavige's analogy.
However, remember that one way the CoS keeps its claws on its cultists is by appearing to them as a persecuted minority. This /. comment is enlightening.
Hence, I believe this comment rather serves to get his troops to hang tough and together.
Not sure if you're referencing it, but someone already made the link:
Cowboy Bebop / Weird Al Anime Music Video
No.
(long story short: Internet killed newspapers like Gutenberg's press killed Bible monopoly by the Church, newspapers just don't know it yet)
Funny, I learned about the power factor problem of CFLs back when I was in high school, at least 10 years ago.
I thought the problem was solved since then, seeing how CFLs are taking over.
Huh, guess I was wrong, and it was just that the economics had overtaking the "minor technical problems" ...
Slashdotted. Use Coral Cache.
Huh, that thinking sunk another of Intel's efforts, the Itanium. It was an architecture that required explicitly paralleled code (by the compiler). After sending the first samples to labs and universities and anybody interested in making a compiler for it, they thought everything would be good.
Except the awesome compilers didn't materialize. Itanic sunk.
Do. Not. Expect. Compilers to solve your problems for you. If we could, it would be done by now, and we could make awesome optimizing compilers that would target x86, PowerPC, CUDA, whatever, from that snippet of maintainable high-level code you wrote.
It doesn't exist. Don't wait for it. Toolchains suck and will always suck (relative to what you're expecting).
I never did take Slashdot too seriously, but I guess this feature brings my favorite time-waster fully into Alternate Reality Game territory.
Huh, I wonder what it takes to get the slashdot Amulet of Yendor...
disc: I work for a company that supports Symbian. In fact, Nokia is our main customer, which is a secret to no one.
The main advantage of Symbian is that it is a known quantity on the market. Major manufacturers know it and its internals. Nokia (of course), but also Sony Ericsson, LG, Motorola have experience making Symbian phones.
Symbian is huge. 228 Million cumulative phones by June 2008, on 250 different models. iPhone: 2 models (EDGE and UMTS). Android: 1 model: G1. (I couldn't find precise sales numbers, sadly. Although the iPhone did hit 4 Million by mid-January 2008.)
Symbian is an established player, and Nokia is keeping it on the edge by open-sourcing it.
It is certainly not a too-late response to Android, but rather rather trying to cut off its market before it gains too much of a foothold. Though I'd like to trumpet Linux, I doubt it'll really challenge Symbian before 5 years from now. (exercise: count the Android phones on the market since it was announced in Nov 2007. Count the announced Android phones. Do the same for Symbian over the same time frame)
Another vital point to note is the main motivation with open-source Android and Symbian is not to please the geeks (hah!), but to provide a cheap OS through which Google and Nokia can sell their services. That is their business strategy, and don't forget it.
They already do. In fact, that's the very first thing I disable on a newly-installed browser. Otherwise I get this annoying and useless dialog everytime I use Google!
Maybe you mean displaying a warning on forms that include an input type="password" field, those where characters appear as stars?
Nobody else will understand your reference to TMBG's "Particle Man"...
Then again, this is Slashdot.
I'd say it's not so much stupidity than human psychology, and that most people aren't educated to recognize these dangers. I'll refer you to what security and user interface designers refer to as the
Dancing Bunnies problem.
The main workaround is to have users work in a sandbox. That way, if they blow something up, it's just their sandbox. The sandbox could be their home directory, or a virtual machine. Windows historically didn't sandbox (defaults to admin rights, which changed in Vista). Unix does (user permissions).
I find it hilariously ironic, because Windows has a sophisticated permission system (ACLs) by default since (at least) Windows 2k, whereas most Distributions I know still default to the User/Group/Other bits.
That's 800W per home. That's very little. A fridge, a microwave, and you're quickly over it.
What is, actually, the average power draw of a home in Scotland?
"trick me one time, shame on you. Trick me twice, shame on me."
"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"
Microsoft's past practices burn strongly and painfully in geeks hearts. We can't yet be sure that Microsoft's current goodwill isn't just the "Embrace" of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
The examples you cite are encouraging*, but broken trust is extremely hard to regain. Why do you think some companies prefer to actually change brand name after a breach of trust?
A lot of geeks still distrust IBM, the origin of FUD. It's going to be even harder for Microsoft, who are still under the same management that committed the previous backstabbing of standards.
*I'm not touching that "ODF support" with a 10-foot pole, not after the games they played with ISO last year.