Won't work if you are of the king sized geek variant like me. Hushpuppies lack the strength to give your feet proper support.
Try Doc Martins. Not nessecarily 10 hole Boot variant. The 3-holes ones are tough enough to hold up you foot and look like nice business shoes (If you go black like me and not the neon pink variant;-). I wear them all the time and 8 computers shows (including CeBit) as visitor and vendor so far support my impression.
Word of warning though: Buy them fairly tight (if wandering whether to go up or down half a size, go down) and break them in properly (for 4 weeks minimum), to avoid blisters. And breaking them in is sometimes a little bit painfull. But afterwards they last me 18-24 month absolutely blister free even on extreme use.
Yes 64-Bit Distros do a world of good. Because I do not have the time to do Linux-from-Scratch on those new Opeteron Servers. I am a professional who make a living of running servers.
Personally I don't get the whole 64-Bit apps lacking discussion. Most of the packages I use are open source. I can do a configure-make-make-install and have a 64 bit app, since most of them have been tweaked for all the other 64-Bit plattforms for years. Believe me OpenSSL in my Server does benefit from 64-bit words. I have never bevore seen such a real world performance benefit from having open source software. Everybody can do a 'rpm -ba somepack.spec'. Do a recompile and you can live in a better world too.
I make a living of people never noticing on what server they are working right now. And I LOVE Opteron!!! And Linux x86-64
IMHO the point of having a multitasking OS on the desktop, is that you can leave all applications that you are likely to use open. Or better yet, open them with the start of the system. Which, by the way, Windows is doing, in order to have Word to appear to load in seconds.
I don't get it. Why is everybody interested in the fast loading of a office suite? Or an Web-Browser for that matter? I start my computer, load mozilla, load openoffice (as part of my saved session) and it stays up. Do I hear you say memory restrictions? That the job of the virtual memory manager. The last time my system stayed up for 163 days until some work on the power system and a kernel update forced a downtime.
What difference does it make whether it takes 1 or 2 minutes to load?
Yes admin are in the business of providing customer service, but to the whole of the customer base. And how do you ensure that? Rather avoid troublesome customers than antagonize those legions that don't cause trouble. Thats why problematik customers (i.e. students) are not offered the service.
As to your question why the first option is punitive rather than educative: Because people only change their ways when they are either hurt or given extra attention (a love bonus). It may sound callous, but unfortunately it is true. Now, I do not have the time nor is it part of uni environment culture to pat everybody constantly who is behaving well on the network. And this will lead us to the other option.
We have alle the nessecary information availiable. Online and off. We tell them to read the stuff during induction week. The central NOC tells them when they register for web-mail access. But at some point you get very frustrated. And then the whip has to come out.
As to ownership and responsibility. I have a responsibility. to the 1500 normal users. Not the 15 that had services terminated during the last semester.
The Uni not only owns all the required hardware for the network, starting at that curious wall socket, they also pay for the bandwidth, pay the admins. You know what that makes the network? THEIRS!
The fact that you are on their premises or that you share the service, impacting the freedom of others, I will ignore for now.
Guess what, I am an Uni admin, and I had a lot of trouble with those special machines, some students just had to mess with, because they thought they new more than I, but never understood why pool machines are locked down. HARD.
I have been readings Eric's Letter and Halloween 9 just now, and one big light went on in my head: this has nothing to do with proprietary code in linux whatsoever
The authores of Halloween take great care to shoot down assumtions the updated claims make, but probably miss the point as much as people clamoring 'show us the code, and we will remove it'
IMO SCO doesn't care one bit if their code is in Linux or not. they want to achieve three things:
get IBM slapped down with a fine for contract violation
boost their Stock, so that IBM cannot simply goble them up in the process.
get license money from Linux users if possible, but this purely secondary as it is small change compared to the $3 billion for item 1
All the discussion in the press and the clamoring of an angry OpenSource comunity only serves item 2 and provides free PR.
I do not know if IBM has done the deed, but it will be pretty easy to prove if the code was properly 'seeded'. And all the legal archeology of old SysV code will become moot.
personally I enjoy the H9, as a piece of documenting Unix history.
Again, I want to stress if the GPL is held to the AGB then it will be only a couple steps further for EULA
The case is quite simple on that: 'Wandlung' or 'Nachbesserung' are the two terms that apply to GPLed software alike (this is AGB-contractual law here, not strict liability): IF you buy a piece of software and it is flawed, the customer may either ask the money back ('Wandlung') or ask the producer to improve it after the sale ('Nachbesserung'). This is law and no EULA or GPL may take this away in Germany.
But does this apply? No, M$ will quite gladly give back the money. People just choose to eat crud without ever complaining about it. And for the GPLed software you never paid anything, thus you are free to delete it, but you get nothing back.
As far as further liability is concerned, only gross negligence will get you liable, and both the EULA and the GPL basicly say 'never do anything dangerous with it, we are not sure it will work'. Thus without predemdiance, which YOU will have to proove there is nothing you can do about it.
In cases of premeditation the case is quite clear. If they catch you writing trojans, you can be held accountable.
And the concept of 'no legal relationship' doesn't fully fly if you post something on your website and somebody else downloads it. In germany at least you have a valid contract and liability applies.
So: OK, in Germany, everyone is liable to a certain extent for the software they write (we knew that), but Free Software is worse off.
Actually it is the quite the opposite. I am still reading the text, IANAL, but at least a native speaker.
Any (Software) Product is liable for damage in Germany. If you don't pay for it, then only gross negligence or premeditation counts, e.g. viruses/trojans. But the victim has to proove this. Therefore, Germany is o.k for individual developers, if they don't charge for the software. And Producers of any kind have to take care anyway.
Funny Fact: If you are selling to german end customers there are certain minimal rights as defined by the law that cannot be taken away. If a contract has clauses that take these rights away, they are null and void. That is why I am quite cool with EULAs. If they grant less than the law, the law is valid.
other interestng Tidbit I just found in the text: in germany de-compilation is legal for making individual pieces of software interoperate. While I may sign this right away as a company and probably do with the EULA, as a customer, this cannot be taken away. And as a individual developer, not making money of this, I sure as hell count as an individual customer.
You most often see people aflicated with this desease in large cubicle farms, keeping their head above the cubicle dividers and turning their head to and fro, sweeping their long sticky noses this way and that in striking resemblances to the guns of turrets, hence the name.
This is not to be confused with the Brownose Syndrom, as it resembles more the antics of a cruise missile
Actually your would not even allow anybody to see the black box. While it is in operating mode nobody enters the room.
And you don't put in the whole program. You have the vendor generate a hash of his program, sign it and mail it to you. Then you check his signature. If it fails, his problem, you reject. Then you sign the hash and send it back.
If the hash was incorrect, again the vendors problem, since the xbox will reject the programm anyway.
Maybe the better targer would not be the signing done by the actual master key, but any intermediate keys. They are ususally not protected as well. (I did PKI, but have no clue about the xbox specs)
As some people here on slashdot (an article IIRC) hinted at patches in 2.4.20 being in possible violation with the DMCA, and hence waiting to release.20, I guess these are all either cleaned up by now or not in the patch at all.
Can somebody give me a pointer to information on the actual problems and the resolution as well?
You would be right if the world only would consist of organisations that do a certain technology.
But the original question was what to do and what to learn. So my answer still stands: the basics.
Maybe my experience is somewhat skewed, because I go for the more consulting-type jobs. But if you do nothing but J2EE+B, don't be surprise when.Net or whatever takes of an people will tell you 'I am sorry but we are looking for somebody with experience'. The you will have a very tough time explaining that you can adapt to everything that is thrown your way.
I do not have that problem. While hunting for a job two month ago, I was explicitly told by a recruiter that he would like to hire me because of my wide experience.
But if you allready are a generalist, then adding buzz words to you CV is no problem. If you keep at it, by the time they answer to your query you will have ample time to do the reading up on what the flavor of the month does differently to any other technology of that class.
And who is to check. I know 3 object oriented languages, distributed systems and component technology. If you want me to do J2EE/w Beans, no problem. Even though I have never really done that before. But if you hire me I will know by the day I start.
Learn the basics man! The rest is syntactic sugar.
Well, currently mono-language education seems to be the order of the day. There are Java curriculums and there will be.NET curriculums in a short while.
And when you have no concept of separation between the syntax of a language and the semantics of a piece of code, you need a book in you language. Look on the bright side: More opportunity to make a buck selling another book in the language of the day. A.NET version of TAoCP anyone?
Me, this just gives another opportunity to feel superior, reading Gamma et.al in the original and being able to write Software in about 20 different languages.;-)
I doubt that this is an issue of ehtics or support costs.
It is an problem of the business modell of selling software as a boxed product. This modell is only viable if you have a snowball market like MicroSoft enjoyed in previous years. But they are not typical for other vendors that have fixed market size. There are only so many people in the US that use Bookkeeping software. And it cannot be sold abroad.
While the support cost are something that acrues only after you have sold the software, there is also the next development cycle to pay for. The worst thing that could happen to a vendor of boxed software is that the old version is 'good enough' for the customer.
Why do I use a emacs, an editor that is 20 years old? Because with version 19 it was just good enough to support what I need. That was like 6-7 years ago. Yes I now have v21, because it came with my SuSE, but while I would have payed for the v19, I would never have upgraded.
Microsoft has realized this problem many years ago, and has been mellowing the customers with rumours about 'only-by-subscription' licenses, ever since it became apperent to them that their market is about to be saturated and that people will stop bying new licenses. And that even with the Redmond-Tax on new computers, which ensures that units are sold everytime somebody buys a new computer. But guess what. That market will soon be saturated as well. Apart from OC-Geeks and Hardcore Gamers today PCs are just 'fast enough' for most users.
Wellcome to the new world of subscription based Software. Did you realize that this will put OpenSource on a even more even footing with the proprietory kind, as the costs become easily comparable. Maybe that is why Microsoft fears OpenSource. Not because of the Windows-Linux comparison, but because of the ability to sell support for StarOffice cheaply.
I am a great fan of auto* (the name that the company that I used to work for has given the whole suite, all parts of which are used extensively), and here is my story on how I came to be such:
When I started to work for my last employer, they where using RCS and static Makefiles plus a hand-crufted make and version control system that a prior contractor had introduced. The code base for the large integrated system was about 250.000 LoC c/C++ code that ran on a number of Solaris 2.5, Linux-Boxen and Windows maschines. It used GNU-Tools and libraries quite liberally and thus was dependant on the regular introduction of external code.
But since a number of developers didn't really grasp what make was doing, they would simply copy the makefile of one of the larger subprojects and tweak until they got it working. This led to each of the about 20 sub-projects having Makefiles of about 2000 lines each. Quite unmaintainiable.
I started to use auto* for my own library that, in the beginning, was fairly separate from the other projects. More from curiosity, than actual need (I know how to use make B-) ), I put first autoconf, then automake and libtool into the code that was at that time about 20.000 LoC. I also got everybody to switch to CVS, since it supports multiple developers on the same project much better.
It worked quite well I must say. For the following reasons:
not everybody is on a intimate level with make. If at least one person knows what they are doing the automake Macros allow encoding of that knowledge for others to use with new Makefiles.
Specific problems with one of the plattforms may be detected, together with the activation of workarounds, in a single place, which is configure.in. One earlier poster was saying that he was having problems with changing Makefiles. I allways found that if you take the log of what happend and debug from there, changing the behavior on a given plattform as needed becomes trivial.
You have a single place where to configure the inclusion of features, glues to other packages and the paths/names of libraries, config-files, etc. If you write your Makefiles and helper utils to do the same, it will just be duplication of effort with a smaller user-base. YMMV
with the config.status file you can save what you have configured in a separate place and reproduce the configuration just by copying it.
The war story ends with a system that has about 2 MLoc now, and whith the help of a script that one of my fellow developers wrote, will automaticaly pull itself out of CVS (using the supplied branch) and configure and build each of the sub-packages in the proper order and install the packages on
the proper machines (or at least schedule them for installation. Due to security concerns only 2 humans working together may actually install a component). My sub-project has grown to 140KLoC and the public part is on sourceforge now.
Could this be done with only some make magic? Yes, if everybod knew make well. But in the real world people that really grok make are few and far between.
would your own solution handle shared libs on multiple systems? Maybe you are that good. I am not. I use libtool.
like any software there are problems with these. For instance the handling of languages like java is suboptimal in automake. But this is opensource. If you have a problem solve you itch and trust that others will solve other itches.
If I take the message I recieved from the Microsoft 'Security' Mailing list as an indication the simple reason, why only the worm is hunted and not the virus, is that the virus doesn't hurt microsoft.
starting on the 28th. I saw articles (online and off) that hinted servers running Microsoft products would be targeted. And bosses would ask their SysAds the month before: 'Why has our server been attacked'
correct Answer:'Because we run IIS'. (The Answer:'Because I was not quick enough to notice the need to patch' would not be helpful to the SysAd, and there would not be given.)
The victims of the Sircam are only hurt by sensitive documents in isolated cases. Most of the time it will be the cantinas menu. This doesn't hurt the image of Microsoft. And they will do nothing to stop it. At least they never did in the last 20 years. So why start now.
I am missing some basics. I know, they are not fun to read, but invaluable when you are preparing for your computer science test, and also valuable when you want to really understand what some programs are doing. Thus I would add
The Alice Book: Introduction Automata Theory and Formal Languages
The Dragon Book: Compiler Design
The Wizard Book: Design and Implementation of Computer Programs (This teaches Scheme as well, but the programming basics are the most important part)
Patterns in Programming, (I don't have my copy handy, and I can never remember the real title, I just know that there are four authors: The Gang of four)
I would also include something on OOP/UML, personally I prefer the book by Jacobsen. But any later book by the three amigos will do
What I am mulling over is the question how the charge-for-content will impact on the add situation. Most of the sites I visit are bound to be free or cheap, since the content is provided by the users. Will they be able to cover their operation costs by getting the adds? Or paid for enough for showing them?
Some of the sites I visit are like slashdot, and they have different problem. Most links presented here are on sites that will charge for the access (cnet, cnn(?), nytimes, eetimes, etc.) because that is what they are in the business for. And will I be able to access the articles that are presented on slashdot? I cannot be sure that I have the same access to some info as CmdrTaco or the original poster have. I definitely will not have the same ISP, as I am not in the US.
And it also begs the question where the code for gemini is to be found. Maybe this is a GPL problem in addition to the trademark issue.
MySQL is GPLed, and NuSphere is _distributing_ (by selling it) an extension based on that code. Now, my understanding of the GPL and projects based upon it, would proscribe that NuSphere uses the opportunity of mysql.org to blast about the source code, if they don't talk about MySQL AB (and a small link don't quite cut it)
Am I the only one that is too stupid to find the link for the source of the gemini table types?
I wonder why they did not take OpenBSD as the starting point in the first place? After all, what good is some fance capability if you have not audited the framework to start with.
Slashdot Mirror
Won't work if you are of the king sized geek variant like me. Hushpuppies lack the strength to give your feet proper support.
;-). I wear them all the time and 8 computers shows (including CeBit) as visitor and vendor so far support my impression.
Try Doc Martins. Not nessecarily 10 hole Boot variant. The 3-holes ones are tough enough to hold up you foot and look like nice business shoes (If you go black like me and not the neon pink variant
Word of warning though: Buy them fairly tight (if wandering whether to go up or down half a size, go down) and break them in properly (for 4 weeks minimum), to avoid blisters. And breaking them in is sometimes a little bit painfull. But afterwards they last me 18-24 month absolutely blister free even on extreme use.
Yes 64-Bit Distros do a world of good. Because I do not have the time to do Linux-from-Scratch on those new Opeteron Servers. I am a professional who make a living of running servers.
Personally I don't get the whole 64-Bit apps lacking discussion. Most of the packages I use are open source. I can do a configure-make-make-install and have a 64 bit app, since most of them have been tweaked for all the other 64-Bit plattforms for years. Believe me OpenSSL in my Server does benefit from 64-bit words. I have never bevore seen such a real world performance benefit from having open source software. Everybody can do a 'rpm -ba somepack.spec'. Do a recompile and you can live in a better world too.
I make a living of people never noticing on what server they are working right now. And I LOVE Opteron!!! And Linux x86-64
I think you did not read my comment till the end.
IMHO the point of having a multitasking OS on the desktop, is that you can leave all applications that you are likely to use open. Or better yet, open them with the start of the system. Which, by the way, Windows is doing, in order to have Word to appear to load in seconds.
I don't get it. Why is everybody interested in the fast loading of a office suite? Or an Web-Browser for that matter? I start my computer, load mozilla, load openoffice (as part of my saved session) and it stays up. Do I hear you say memory restrictions? That the job of the virtual memory manager. The last time my system stayed up for 163 days until some work on the power system and a kernel update forced a downtime.
What difference does it make whether it takes 1 or 2 minutes to load?
Yes admin are in the business of providing customer service, but to the whole of the customer base. And how do you ensure that? Rather avoid troublesome customers than antagonize those legions that don't cause trouble. Thats why problematik customers (i.e. students) are not offered the service.
As to your question why the first option is punitive rather than educative: Because people only change their ways when they are either hurt or given extra attention (a love bonus). It may sound callous, but unfortunately it is true. Now, I do not have the time nor is it part of uni environment culture to pat everybody constantly who is behaving well on the network. And this will lead us to the other option.
We have alle the nessecary information availiable. Online and off. We tell them to read the stuff during induction week. The central NOC tells them when they register for web-mail access. But at some point you get very frustrated. And then the whip has to come out.
As to ownership and responsibility. I have a responsibility. to the 1500 normal users. Not the 15 that had services terminated during the last semester.
Welcome to the real world.
The Uni not only owns all the required hardware for the network, starting at that curious wall socket, they also pay for the bandwidth, pay the admins. You know what that makes the network? THEIRS!
The fact that you are on their premises or that you share the service, impacting the freedom of others, I will ignore for now.
Guess what, I am an Uni admin, and I had a lot of trouble with those special machines, some students just had to mess with, because they thought they new more than I, but never understood why pool machines are locked down. HARD.
The authores of Halloween take great care to shoot down assumtions the updated claims make, but probably miss the point as much as people clamoring 'show us the code, and we will remove it'
IMO SCO doesn't care one bit if their code is in Linux or not. they want to achieve three things:
All the discussion in the press and the clamoring of an angry OpenSource comunity only serves item 2 and provides free PR.
I do not know if IBM has done the deed, but it will be pretty easy to prove if the code was properly 'seeded'. And all the legal archeology of old SysV code will become moot.
personally I enjoy the H9, as a piece of documenting Unix history.
I agree with your evaluation.
I am only surprised that it has taken close to 30 years to implement the idea presented by John Brunner in 'Shockwave Rider'
The case is quite simple on that: 'Wandlung' or 'Nachbesserung' are the two terms that apply to GPLed software alike (this is AGB-contractual law here, not strict liability): IF you buy a piece of software and it is flawed, the customer may either ask the money back ('Wandlung') or ask the producer to improve it after the sale ('Nachbesserung'). This is law and no EULA or GPL may take this away in Germany.
But does this apply? No, M$ will quite gladly give back the money. People just choose to eat crud without ever complaining about it. And for the GPLed software you never paid anything, thus you are free to delete it, but you get nothing back.
As far as further liability is concerned, only gross negligence will get you liable, and both the EULA and the GPL basicly say 'never do anything dangerous with it, we are not sure it will work'. Thus without predemdiance, which YOU will have to proove there is nothing you can do about it.
In cases of premeditation the case is quite clear. If they catch you writing trojans, you can be held accountable.
And the concept of 'no legal relationship' doesn't fully fly if you post something on your website and somebody else downloads it. In germany at least you have a valid contract and liability applies.
Actually it is the quite the opposite. I am still reading the text, IANAL, but at least a native speaker.
Any (Software) Product is liable for damage in Germany. If you don't pay for it, then only gross negligence or premeditation counts, e.g. viruses/trojans. But the victim has to proove this. Therefore, Germany is o.k for individual developers, if they don't charge for the software. And Producers of any kind have to take care anyway.
Funny Fact: If you are selling to german end customers there are certain minimal rights as defined by the law that cannot be taken away. If a contract has clauses that take these rights away, they are null and void. That is why I am quite cool with EULAs. If they grant less than the law, the law is valid.
other interestng Tidbit I just found in the text: in germany de-compilation is legal for making individual pieces of software interoperate. While I may sign this right away as a company and probably do with the EULA, as a customer, this cannot be taken away. And as a individual developer, not making money of this, I sure as hell count as an individual customer.
You most often see people aflicated with this desease in large cubicle farms, keeping their head above the cubicle dividers and turning their head to and fro, sweeping their long sticky noses this way and that in striking resemblances to the guns of turrets, hence the name.
This is not to be confused with the Brownose Syndrom, as it resembles more the antics of a cruise missile
Actually your would not even allow anybody to see the black box. While it is in operating mode nobody enters the room.
And you don't put in the whole program. You have the vendor generate a hash of his program, sign it and mail it to you. Then you check his signature. If it fails, his problem, you reject. Then you sign the hash and send it back.
If the hash was incorrect, again the vendors problem, since the xbox will reject the programm anyway.
Maybe the better targer would not be the signing done by the actual master key, but any intermediate keys. They are ususally not protected as well. (I did PKI, but have no clue about the xbox specs)
mfg lutz
As some people here on slashdot (an article IIRC) hinted at patches in 2.4.20 being in possible violation with the DMCA, and hence waiting to release .20, I guess these are all either cleaned up by now or not in the patch at all.
Can somebody give me a pointer to information on the actual problems and the resolution as well?
You would be right if the world only would consist of organisations that do a certain technology.
.Net or whatever takes of an people will tell you 'I am sorry but we are looking for somebody with experience'. The you will have a very tough time explaining that you can adapt to everything that is thrown your way.
But the original question was what to do and what to learn. So my answer still stands: the basics.
Maybe my experience is somewhat skewed, because I go for the more consulting-type jobs. But if you do nothing but J2EE+B, don't be surprise when
I do not have that problem. While hunting for a job two month ago, I was explicitly told by a recruiter that he would like to hire me because of my wide experience.
But if you allready are a generalist, then adding buzz words to you CV is no problem. If you keep at it, by the time they answer to your query you will have ample time to do the reading up on what the flavor of the month does differently to any other technology of that class.
/w Beans, no problem. Even though I have never really done that before. But if you hire me I will know by the day I start.
And who is to check. I know 3 object oriented languages, distributed systems and component technology. If you want me to do J2EE
Learn the basics man! The rest is syntactic sugar.
..erm, piece of german here: it is 'Hakenkreuz', from hook, not 'Hackenkreuz', it has nothing to do with the heel of the foot.
And when you have no concept of separation between the syntax of a language and the semantics of a piece of code, you need a book in you language. Look on the bright side: More opportunity to make a buck selling another book in the language of the day. A .NET version of TAoCP anyone?
Me, this just gives another opportunity to feel superior, reading Gamma et.al in the original and being able to write Software in about 20 different languages. ;-)
It is an problem of the business modell of selling software as a boxed product. This modell is only viable if you have a snowball market like MicroSoft enjoyed in previous years. But they are not typical for other vendors that have fixed market size. There are only so many people in the US that use Bookkeeping software. And it cannot be sold abroad.
While the support cost are something that acrues only after you have sold the software, there is also the next development cycle to pay for. The worst thing that could happen to a vendor of boxed software is that the old version is 'good enough' for the customer.
Why do I use a emacs, an editor that is 20 years old? Because with version 19 it was just good enough to support what I need. That was like 6-7 years ago. Yes I now have v21, because it came with my SuSE, but while I would have payed for the v19, I would never have upgraded.
Microsoft has realized this problem many years ago, and has been mellowing the customers with rumours about 'only-by-subscription' licenses, ever since it became apperent to them that their market is about to be saturated and that people will stop bying new licenses. And that even with the Redmond-Tax on new computers, which ensures that units are sold everytime somebody buys a new computer. But guess what. That market will soon be saturated as well. Apart from OC-Geeks and Hardcore Gamers today PCs are just 'fast enough' for most users.
Wellcome to the new world of subscription based Software. Did you realize that this will put OpenSource on a even more even footing with the proprietory kind, as the costs become easily comparable. Maybe that is why Microsoft fears OpenSource. Not because of the Windows-Linux comparison, but because of the ability to sell support for StarOffice cheaply.
my EUR 0.02
When I started to work for my last employer, they where using RCS and static Makefiles plus a hand-crufted make and version control system that a prior contractor had introduced. The code base for the large integrated system was about 250.000 LoC c/C++ code that ran on a number of Solaris 2.5, Linux-Boxen and Windows maschines. It used GNU-Tools and libraries quite liberally and thus was dependant on the regular introduction of external code.
But since a number of developers didn't really grasp what make was doing, they would simply copy the makefile of one of the larger subprojects and tweak until they got it working. This led to each of the about 20 sub-projects having Makefiles of about 2000 lines each. Quite unmaintainiable.
I started to use auto* for my own library that, in the beginning, was fairly separate from the other projects. More from curiosity, than actual need (I know how to use make B-) ), I put first autoconf, then automake and libtool into the code that was at that time about 20.000 LoC. I also got everybody to switch to CVS, since it supports multiple developers on the same project much better.
It worked quite well I must say. For the following reasons:
- not everybody is on a intimate level with make. If at least one person knows what they are doing the automake Macros allow encoding of that knowledge for others to use with new Makefiles.
- Specific problems with one of the plattforms may be detected, together with the activation of workarounds, in a single place, which is configure.in. One earlier poster was saying that he was having problems with changing Makefiles. I allways found that if you take the log of what happend and debug from there, changing the behavior on a given plattform as needed becomes trivial.
- You have a single place where to configure the inclusion of features, glues to other packages and the paths/names of libraries, config-files, etc. If you write your Makefiles and helper utils to do the same, it will just be duplication of effort with a smaller user-base. YMMV
- with the config.status file you can save what you have configured in a separate place and reproduce the configuration just by copying it.
The war story ends with a system that has about 2 MLoc now, and whith the help of a script that one of my fellow developers wrote, will automaticaly pull itself out of CVS (using the supplied branch) and configure and build each of the sub-packages in the proper order and install the packages on the proper machines (or at least schedule them for installation. Due to security concerns only 2 humans working together may actually install a component). My sub-project has grown to 140KLoC and the public part is on sourceforge now.Could this be done with only some make magic? Yes, if everybod knew make well. But in the real world people that really grok make are few and far between.
would your own solution handle shared libs on multiple systems? Maybe you are that good. I am not. I use libtool.
like any software there are problems with these. For instance the handling of languages like java is suboptimal in automake. But this is opensource. If you have a problem solve you itch and trust that others will solve other itches.
starting on the 28th. I saw articles (online and off) that hinted servers running Microsoft products would be targeted. And bosses would ask their SysAds the month before: 'Why has our server been attacked'
correct Answer:'Because we run IIS'. (The Answer:'Because I was not quick enough to notice the need to patch' would not be helpful to the SysAd, and there would not be given.)
The victims of the Sircam are only hurt by sensitive documents in isolated cases. Most of the time it will be the cantinas menu. This doesn't hurt the image of Microsoft. And they will do nothing to stop it. At least they never did in the last 20 years. So why start now.
It is all about perception.
- The Alice Book: Introduction Automata Theory and Formal Languages
- The Dragon Book: Compiler Design
- The Wizard Book: Design and Implementation of Computer Programs (This teaches Scheme as well, but the programming basics are the most important part)
- Patterns in Programming, (I don't have my copy handy, and I can never remember the real title, I just know that there are four authors: The Gang of four)
I would also include something on OOP/UML, personally I prefer the book by Jacobsen. But any later book by the three amigos will doSome of the sites I visit are like slashdot, and they have different problem. Most links presented here are on sites that will charge for the access (cnet, cnn(?), nytimes, eetimes, etc.) because that is what they are in the business for. And will I be able to access the articles that are presented on slashdot? I cannot be sure that I have the same access to some info as CmdrTaco or the original poster have. I definitely will not have the same ISP, as I am not in the US.
MySQL is GPLed, and NuSphere is _distributing_ (by selling it) an extension based on that code. Now, my understanding of the GPL and projects based upon it, would proscribe that NuSphere uses the opportunity of mysql.org to blast about the source code, if they don't talk about MySQL AB (and a small link don't quite cut it)
Am I the only one that is too stupid to find the link for the source of the gemini table types?
I wonder why they did not take OpenBSD as the starting point in the first place? After all, what good is some fance capability if you have not audited the framework to start with.