I'd say online games are far more dangerous than singleplayer games. If you're playing Quake for instance, you first play for fun, but once you get 'hooked' and get to know more people, you're beginning competition. For some, being the best becomes everything - It's 16 hours a day training some moves or improving your aim in Quake/UT/CS, collecting items and gaining experience in EQ/Diablo 2 and so on.
Once you get admired by others, it's just a bigger incentive to train/collect more intensively to become even more popular. Even if you're not popular, trying to become it may develop into some kind of addiction.
Re:Could faster processors lead to better programs
on
CPU Wars
·
· Score: 1
True, but I guess this doesn't work in the real world. Just compile the latest mozilla (or any 50% of open source "projects") and count the warnings the compiler emits. These are possible pitfalls the compiler detected, but there are certainly enough others which didn't get detected and can someday bite somebody.
This happened to me: the latest mozilla would crash on me randomly and take the whole Xserver with it. I doubt something like that would happen, if it was written in some higher language (and properly designed).
But you're right, it's not really the languages fault - it's the coders. As much as I'd want everyone to be disciplined and smart enough to figure it out, real world sadly doesn't work like this.
Re:Could faster processors lead to better programs
on
CPU Wars
·
· Score: 1
Don't confuse so called "scripting languages" with high-level languages. Lisp is by no means a scripting language and can be compiled to native machine code. Perhaps Python was a bad example, so substitute Java if you like.
Further, I was not claiming that C prohibits laziness - It's just that laziness can produce disastrous result (buffer overflows are a good example). Laziness when writing code is _generally_ bad and should be tackled more.
You raise some valid points, but I'd prefer a little slower, but more stable and bugfree program over an slightly faster, instable and probably insecure one.
Could faster processors lead to better programs?
on
CPU Wars
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm looking forward to ever-increasing clockspeeds, as this could get us away from programming applications in a low-level language like C/C++. Let's face it: Most of the bugs in current programs stem from the fact that C was not designed to handle sloppy or lazy coding. Dangling pointers, buffer overflows, memory leaks etc. result from the low-levelness of C (that's OK - for it to be efficient it needs to have the ability to do all kinds of things with the hardware directly). C should only be used for developing operating system kernels and device drivers, as no other higher language would handle the task well.
Faster processors and more memory would make higher languages such as Lisp or Python viable for applications (such as Browsers, Desktop environments etc.), which in turn would result in less bugs and increased stability when applied correctly. The current state with software makes me sick. I don't blame it on C per se, but on programmers using the wrong tool for the wrong job.
Writing in such a higher language would probably even increase portability (which C can't fulfill by a far shot) as you would program at a higher abstraction level. No need for autoconf/automake or ugly defines scattered throughout the code, making maintainance more difficult.
I hope that more coders switch to some better suited language than C/C++ for application development. I've switched to Lisp myself.
Re:Why aren't there more rendering engines?
on
Galeon 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
It's not only about simple HTML; a good rendering engine has to handle all the other things besides that like CSS, DHTML, JavaScript etc.
I'd say that these cause 70% of the headaches and amount of code (some would say 'bloat').
Please note that I don't see compiling from source etc. an issue. And yes, I know about the binary packages.I'm just stating that I don't see any SIGNIFICANT advantage over binary packages, as some people _always_ bring that up when something about linux packages or distros gets posted.
First, He didn't help me out at all, as we meet in IRC and I managed to do all that by myself. I installed FBSD over PPPoE on my only machine, so no help there.
Second, Who said ANYTHING about me using 'some ncurses based app to load the modules'. I'm compiling the support into the kernel and it works sometimes, sometimes not. And guess what? It's always some other error message about not being able to map the device address space, or the device being busy, or the AC-97 codec not being available and some other weird things I forgot. And I didn't even TOUCH anyting, just rebooted a few times.
Third, I updated the ports and it STILL didn't work.
I wonder why you assume I'm some insecure fella who needs someone to fix a problem for him. I read documentation very well or ask on the freebsd lists if absolutely necessary. It's NOT always the new users (who uses OF COURSE uses kloadmodule and kconfiguresystem) fault when something doesn't work.
I'd say you're one of those people who constantly bash Linux and enjoy their wannabe elitism.
Well, from former experiences with debian this was the FIRST thing I did. I wrote a supfile, added it to/etc/make.conf and ran 'make update', but this problem remained for about 3 weeks and was resolved only recently. I wanted to compile WindowMaker 0.70.0 and it depends on gettext-0.10.38. Problem was, that not one server specified in the ports Makefile had this file (they all were at 0.10.39 as this is a development version).
Further I didn't mean to say anything against cvsup or ports as I'm using them and I am happy. I just wanted to point out, that they aren't flawless and have problems from time to time just like their package equivalents in Linux distros.
I guess I'm just fed up with people, who tell you about the superiority of FreeBSD, but never admit any problems it may have.
Yes, FreeBSD is a very nice OS and I'm using it right now, BUT it isn't THAT much better.
Let me explain: I've been using Debian Linux for 3 years now and got fed up by constant instabilities in the linux kernel (VM) and the package chaos. At the end I had like 150 packages installed, half of them being some obscure library on which some obscure package I needed depended. It worked, but it wasn't nice. So I gave FreeBSD a try. My Friend is a FreeBSD advocate (or should that be zealot) and he finally convinced me of FreeBSD. I backed up some data, wiped the discs and installed. It worked and after some adjustments I was feeling right at home.
BUT...
Many features that are advocated by advocates (or zealots..) weren't relevant to me or just plainly don't work.
- XFree86 DRI support doesn't work if you don't install X11 CVS. So no ports for this.
- Sound (emu10k) would often not work, needing a few reboots (mind you.. this never happened with Linux, so it shouldn't be a hardware issue).
- Ports would often not fetch or build, because they depend on some other port with a specific version, which in turn isn't available anymore.
- Securelevels are nice, but as soon as you rise em one above the lowest you cannot start X anymore, so this gets ruled out for workstations.
- CVSupping the source is nice, but what for? I got the same with apt-get upgrade and it finished faster.
- Compiling from source is nice, but I didn't see any improvements over binary packages.
I could go on for a while now..
Bottom line is: FreeBSD is a nice OS and I like it, but it isn't that great compared to e.g. Debian. Both have their shortcomings and had I known about them beforehand, I might have not switched.
I'm writing this to contrast the "FreeBSD is soooo much superior to Linux"-posters and give people a little less biased picture from my experience with BSD.
I don't think there is that much demand for it. In ancient times the Internet served purely academic purposes and was used for sharing of information (in post-military and pre-commercialism days). I believe the same is true for Internet2 now.
I don't need no fancy GUI in a webpage, I don't need fancy movies, I don't need shock-the-monkey etc.
And plain HTML does a good job of giving me what I need.
I'd say they have a LineFeed (or was that CarriageReturn? I always forget which one) at the end of each line. Just like the rest of the sane coders on this planet. So one line is from one LF to the other.. Makes sense doesn't it? Otherwise you could just make your window 1 column wide and claim a simple 'Hello World' to be a 100 LOC monster:)
The poster raises a valid point which reflects Linus' attitude pretty good. IIRC Linus himself said, that they should rather fix the CAUSE of those latencies instead of the symptoms. This is one of the reasons, why Linux is against kernel debuggers. They tend to lure the coder into fixing symptons on the surface instead of perhaps rethinking the design (off by one errors are an example).
IBM states that the 6 hours are a product of optimizing the underlying OS. They also say that they target day-long battery life by further research.
Perhaps one of those kinetic powersources in some of todays watches could further prolong battery life. I think slashdot carried a story about those while back, but a quick search didn't turn anything up.
Hopefully some of the aerodynamic technology can be applied to commercially available vehicles (cars, maybe?)
I don't think this would be so beneficial for more modern cars, as they are pretty advanced in this particular field. The new Mercedes R230 (SL) has a really low cw value of 0.29 for an open roadster.
Macros and scripting are a very useful thing. I wouldn't want to miss them. The only thing, which Microsoft should avoid is letting simple documents contain (pot. dangerous) macros. They should be cleanly separated. This would eliminate most of the recent macro attacks.
Is this really a surprise? I was under the impression, that all macro-enabled applications under windows (office suite) shared such vulnerabilities, because they most probably use the same scripting engine.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say online games are far more dangerous than singleplayer games. If you're playing Quake for instance, you first play for fun, but once you get 'hooked' and get to know more people, you're beginning competition. For some, being the best becomes everything - It's 16 hours a day training some moves or improving your aim in Quake/UT/CS, collecting items and gaining experience in EQ/Diablo 2 and so on.
Once you get admired by others, it's just a bigger incentive to train/collect more intensively to become even more popular. Even if you're not popular, trying to become it may develop into some kind of addiction.
True, but I guess this doesn't work in the real world. Just compile the latest mozilla (or any 50% of open source "projects") and count the warnings the compiler emits. These are possible pitfalls the compiler detected, but there are certainly enough others which didn't get detected and can someday bite somebody.
This happened to me: the latest mozilla would crash on me randomly and take the whole Xserver with it. I doubt something like that would happen, if it was written in some higher language (and properly designed).
But you're right, it's not really the languages fault - it's the coders. As much as I'd want everyone to be disciplined and smart enough to figure it out, real world sadly doesn't work like this.
Don't confuse so called "scripting languages" with high-level languages. Lisp is by no means a scripting language and can be compiled to native machine code. Perhaps Python was a bad example, so substitute Java if you like.
Further, I was not claiming that C prohibits laziness - It's just that laziness can produce disastrous result (buffer overflows are a good example). Laziness when writing code is _generally_ bad and should be tackled more.
You raise some valid points, but I'd prefer a little slower, but more stable and bugfree program over an slightly faster, instable and probably insecure one.
I'm looking forward to ever-increasing clockspeeds, as this could get us away from programming applications in a low-level language like C/C++. Let's face it: Most of the bugs in current programs stem from the fact that C was not designed to handle sloppy or lazy coding. Dangling pointers, buffer overflows, memory leaks etc. result from the low-levelness of C (that's OK - for it to be efficient it needs to have the ability to do all kinds of things with the hardware directly). C should only be used for developing operating system kernels and device drivers, as no other higher language would handle the task well.
Faster processors and more memory would make higher languages such as Lisp or Python viable for applications (such as Browsers, Desktop environments etc.), which in turn would result in less bugs and increased stability when applied correctly. The current state with software makes me sick. I don't blame it on C per se, but on programmers using the wrong tool for the wrong job.
Writing in such a higher language would probably even increase portability (which C can't fulfill by a far shot) as you would program at a higher abstraction level. No need for autoconf/automake or ugly defines scattered throughout the code, making maintainance more difficult.
I hope that more coders switch to some better suited language than C/C++ for application development. I've switched to Lisp myself.
It's not only about simple HTML; a good rendering engine has to handle all the other things besides that like CSS, DHTML, JavaScript etc.
I'd say that these cause 70% of the headaches and amount of code (some would say 'bloat').
Please note that I don't see compiling from source etc. an issue. And yes, I know about the binary packages.I'm just stating that I don't see any SIGNIFICANT advantage over binary packages, as some people _always_ bring that up when something about linux packages or distros gets posted.
Gnah,
First, He didn't help me out at all, as we meet in IRC and I managed to do all that by myself. I installed FBSD over PPPoE on my only machine, so no help there.
Second, Who said ANYTHING about me using 'some ncurses based app to load the modules'. I'm compiling the support into the kernel and it works sometimes, sometimes not. And guess what? It's always some other error message about not being able to map the device address space, or the device being busy, or the AC-97 codec not being available and some other weird things I forgot. And I didn't even TOUCH anyting, just rebooted a few times.
Third, I updated the ports and it STILL didn't work.
I wonder why you assume I'm some insecure fella who needs someone to fix a problem for him. I read documentation very well or ask on the freebsd lists if absolutely necessary. It's NOT always the new users (who uses OF COURSE uses kloadmodule and kconfiguresystem) fault when something doesn't work.
I'd say you're one of those people who constantly bash Linux and enjoy their wannabe elitism.
Well, from former experiences with debian this was the FIRST thing I did. I wrote a supfile, added it to /etc/make.conf and ran 'make update', but this problem remained for about 3 weeks and was resolved only recently. I wanted to compile WindowMaker 0.70.0 and it depends on gettext-0.10.38. Problem was, that not one server specified in the ports Makefile had this file (they all were at 0.10.39 as this is a development version).
Further I didn't mean to say anything against cvsup or ports as I'm using them and I am happy. I just wanted to point out, that they aren't flawless and have problems from time to time just like their package equivalents in Linux distros.
I guess I'm just fed up with people, who tell you about the superiority of FreeBSD, but never admit any problems it may have.
Yes, FreeBSD is a very nice OS and I'm using it right now, BUT it isn't THAT much better.
Let me explain: I've been using Debian Linux for 3 years now and got fed up by constant instabilities in the linux kernel (VM) and the package chaos. At the end I had like 150 packages installed, half of them being some obscure library on which some obscure package I needed depended. It worked, but it wasn't nice. So I gave FreeBSD a try. My Friend is a FreeBSD advocate (or should that be zealot) and he finally convinced me of FreeBSD. I backed up some data, wiped the discs and installed. It worked and after some adjustments I was feeling right at home.
BUT...
Many features that are advocated by advocates (or zealots..) weren't relevant to me or just plainly don't work.
- XFree86 DRI support doesn't work if you don't install X11 CVS. So no ports for this.
- Sound (emu10k) would often not work, needing a few reboots (mind you.. this never happened with Linux, so it shouldn't be a hardware issue).
- Ports would often not fetch or build, because they depend on some other port with a specific version, which in turn isn't available anymore.
- Securelevels are nice, but as soon as you rise em one above the lowest you cannot start X anymore, so this gets ruled out for workstations.
- CVSupping the source is nice, but what for? I got the same with apt-get upgrade and it finished faster.
- Compiling from source is nice, but I didn't see any improvements over binary packages.
I could go on for a while now..
Bottom line is: FreeBSD is a nice OS and I like it, but it isn't that great compared to e.g. Debian. Both have their shortcomings and had I known about them beforehand, I might have not switched.
I'm writing this to contrast the "FreeBSD is soooo much superior to Linux"-posters and give people a little less biased picture from my experience with BSD.
Whoa, don't jump on that article just because something was formulated a little unclear.
I'm sure the "final words" were meant as the final conclusion of his friend after the test month and NOT his final words on phone..
I don't think there is that much demand for it. In ancient times the Internet served purely academic purposes and was used for sharing of information (in post-military and pre-commercialism days). I believe the same is true for Internet2 now.
I don't need no fancy GUI in a webpage, I don't need fancy movies, I don't need shock-the-monkey etc.
And plain HTML does a good job of giving me what I need.
Comparing the total size with dependencies, graphics, sounds etc. of evolution to the size of the binary of sylpheed isn't exactly correct..
I'd say they have a LineFeed (or was that CarriageReturn? I always forget which one) at the end of each line. Just like the rest of the sane coders on this planet. So one line is from one LF to the other.. Makes sense doesn't it? Otherwise you could just make your window 1 column wide and claim a simple 'Hello World' to be a 100 LOC monster :)
You do realize, that adequacy.org is a satire site, do you?
Yup, using it right now and posting with Mozilla under WindowMaker while listening to xmms. Sounds pretty 'desktopy' to me..
your god isn't everyones god
whoops.. seems i have forgotten, that netscape.com was remodelled to be a portal. sorry
erp.. you really sure? Isn't that some kind of catch-22 ?!
Here's what I found on the kernel cousins:
. ht ml#4
http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/kt20001002_87
Why was this modded 'flamebait' ?
The poster raises a valid point which reflects Linus' attitude pretty good. IIRC Linus himself said, that they should rather fix the CAUSE of those latencies instead of the symptoms. This is one of the reasons, why Linux is against kernel debuggers. They tend to lure the coder into fixing symptons on the surface instead of perhaps rethinking the design (off by one errors are an example).
IBM states that the 6 hours are a product of optimizing the underlying OS. They also say that they target day-long battery life by further research.
Perhaps one of those kinetic powersources in some of todays watches could further prolong battery life. I think slashdot carried a story about those while back, but a quick search didn't turn anything up.
I don't think this would be so beneficial for more modern cars, as they are pretty advanced in this particular field. The new Mercedes R230 (SL) has a really low cw value of 0.29 for an open roadster.
Macros and scripting are a very useful thing. I wouldn't want to miss them. The only thing, which Microsoft should avoid is letting simple documents contain (pot. dangerous) macros. They should be cleanly separated. This would eliminate most of the recent macro attacks.
Is this really a surprise? I was under the impression, that all macro-enabled applications under windows (office suite) shared such vulnerabilities, because they most probably use the same scripting engine.
;)
One exploit serves all
He'll whip out the Chewbacca Defense and win the case hands down:
"Dear ladies and gentleman of this supposed jury I have one final thing I want you to consider: this is Chewbacca.."