One nugget of information that I think should be propogated around is that it is a common belief that the EU does not have software patents. Indeed I have been quite quietly smug about the whole thing until recently.
But this is not longer true. It appears that the European Patent Office does not issue patents not because they believe that "software is inherently unpatentable", but because originally they believed that they did not have the equipment of skills to judge their quality!
IBM (all hail the mighty patent machine) lodged a software patent with the EPO last year and had it turned down (as per their plan one would assume) and then lodged an objection and while the patent was still refused the appeal ruled that the exclusion of software from patents is not valid under all circumstances
Which all means that companies are falling over themselves to get software patents out in the EU as well, left the good times roll
I think I could die happy if I see networked audio in my time
I have a dream, a dream of quake or sommat like that churning away in the foreground plinking out that sound. My audio enhanced mail program simultaneously plays a little wav to tell me that something has arrived. Off in the distance sound output of a audio tweaked top is playing away giving me some sort of feedback of the system load
Multiple sound programs working together, sniff.
And all sound routes too mind, multiple networked midi port access as well. If I recall correctly sgi had a sound library that everyone had to use to access the sound device. Microsoft now has DirectSound which does the same thing (btw: the lead developer (possibly the only one!) on DirectSound is an ex SGI employee, so DirectSound could be said to be built on the expertise and experience of SGI)
C. (spurned by XAudio, broken on the wheel of nas, crushed by lack of esd documentation, impaled on the pain tree of sound editing under linux,/dev/audio, just say no)
Any plans to allow network transparency as an option for the library? It would be a wonderful opportunity to implement this now. At least allow the possibility though some mechanism to implement it, if not as a core principle of the library, at least as a possibility in a specification appendix.
All the other networked sound methods have fallen by the wayside to my mind, the Xaudio one because the X consortium stopped work on it, nas because it had zero documentation, and against nas and esd theres the problem that there is nothing that can be done with them except play static snippets of sound.
I reckon the problem is that noone who actually knows anything about sound or serious use of sound has even investigated network sound.
If OpenAl stuff could be routed to sound daemon on a remote machine then it would appear to fit the bill perfectly. Serious sound apps using OpenAL, and OpenAl supporting a network connection.
Quite remarkable. Is this the first time that a fully commercial nonopen source company has been taken over (or merged with) an open source company which promptly releases all the commercial software as BSD/GPL license. Sun's community license thingy doesn't count in my mind
What next, should Redhat and the other successful companies run around buying closed source companies and release their source, maybe they should do this immediately before their market price crashes:-). Even if they go belly up afterwards they still will have achieve opening up the source. A cunning idea methinks
So your saying the governments should pay for the backbone and leave it to the big corporations to make profit and monopolise the private market?
That's pretty much what Ireland just did. Though I view it in a more positive light than you would seem to see it. The government buys the link in bulk and gets it for a discount price and then sells it on to private enterprise passing the discount down to them, which a huge corporation would not have done
Abiword has spiffy word import capacity due to the wv library.
The wv library has working word import capacity right now
The basics of import are completed, i.e. word 95 and word 97 and word 2000 fastsave and fullsave support. Fastsave has always been the bugbear of word importation import, wv is on one level complete. It only requires some minor modifications here and there to complete its work, as abiword gains more features to equal word, then wv can be used to map the word features to the abi ones.
Koffice could also use wv for its word import, I wrote it as a library which should be reasonable easy to use from inside any word processor, the code to use it from inside abiword is pretty straightforward. I'd reccommend a look at it, wv has wvHtml as a standalone app to convert word docs to stylesheet enabled html which (if netscape wasn't so crap as using the data) would give almost identical html layout to the original doc layout
Its not perfect, but its as good in many aspects (or even better in some) as the commercial offerings
Just two stories that point out just how echelon has been used in recent times
Some suspiciouns German Thefts and closer to my heart is the story abount monitoring all Irish International Phonecalls, This one was pretty much suspected for some time, particularly by the IDA (Irish Development Agency in charge of convincing companies to invest in Ireland), they got terribly suspicious when a few large companies got slightly better bids to set up in Scotland, each time just a little better than the Irish bid. I believe that they ended up asking travelling diplomats to transfer their most valuable documents by diplomatic pouch rather than fax or email them. Though I can't find the story where I read this one, Sunday Tribune I believe but they don't have an online search engine
One item that would be of great benefit to people thinking about the change over from Word to a Linux wordprocessor is a feature by feature table showing if a particular word formatting ability can be properly imported or exported from a Word Document
Its something that is of particular interest to me as I have written the wv library(mswordview) which abiword among others uses to import word documents, along with a sample word to html program (which has a config file allowing word to latex and word to groff possibilities)
Such a table of all possible word features is painstaking to create, and repeating the process of importing and exporting word features from abi/so/corel/applix and kword so as to compare them properly is a huge task, but one that really needs to be done, it is no good saying "the import of word documents is ok, needs a bit of work afterwards to fix it", a company or other heavy word processor user that is thinking of linux needs to have better information, and more precise data as to how good or bad is the import
You can have the best little wp in the world, but you have to have very good word import to be able to interoperate with others and not go completely insane with the poor quality import, so we need to isolate the capabilities of word and address the import of each of them point by point. Text attributes, graphic capabilities, ole import, equations, tables, table attributes, language support, revision support, absolute layout, hypertext capabilities, forms, etc etc etc
This is a task that requires no programming ability only patience and a copy of microsoft word, create a huge amount of documents that are an example of just about every feature of word and make them available as a test suite for various wp's importers. It would help greatly to have a database of word functionality, then you would have some data of enough validity on which you could fairly judge which wp will provide the best value for users which need to work with others in an organization which runs predominately word, i.e. all of them
I recently returned to c++ after picking it up in college about two or three years ago, and boy was I surprised! New cast operators all over the place, new throwing an exception being the default behavior on failure. STL becoming core functionality and so on, not to even mention RTTI, bool types
Took me a little time to get back up to speed with it I have to say, but all in all I do like most of these features, I have great time for STL, we've been wasting our time writing sorts and searches for so long that its nice to drop kick that issue out the window. A bool type is cute, and even if the only use for exceptions was a throw from new its worth it, at least the guilt factor of not protecting every appearence of new with a NULL test can be dispensed with.
But on with the questions
One: One advantage of C over C++ which noone else seems to have a problem with is that when you are handed a huge stack of code and go to fix a bug or make a small modification, on viewing a chunk of code in C you can assume that most functions will only modify the state of variables that are explicitly passed to them. On viewing c++ code that has a function call, you have to refer to a header to determine if its a function call or a method belonging the the class whose code you are trying to read.. If its a member you have to read the code of that method to see if it is changing the internal state of the object, and if it calls other methods you have to chase all of those down as well to be assured that the state of the object will remain unchanged after a method call that takes no immediately relevent arguments (Obviously keeping an eye out of operator overloads as well, though to be fair you can assume that they will follow the normal behaviour and not modify the object, and behave intuitively)
In one sense from the perspective of someone trying to maintain c++ code, an attempt to understand its logic faces the same difficulties as understanding horrific global variable ridden c code.
Was there ever any actual language constructs considered for this problem ? Granted proper coding practice with consts etc etc can sort out a lot of the problem, but there is still the need to refer to the headers continually, but a good programming editor could sort that out, and so on, but it just strikes me that these are obvious external work arounds for a problem which might possibly be dealt with at a different level. Maybe something like...
Only member functions can be called from inside other methods unless a scoping operator is used, so you know immediately if a member or a function is being called
Some of the information about how the method modifies or does not modify the object is coding into the name of the method itself, yes yes hungarian notation and dragging me off to the stake, but you know what I mean anyway.
Two:STL was a definite change away from c's philosophy of minimum requirements and towards a more javaesque conglomoration of a programming language and a more feature rich standard api.
I could quite easily imagine threading becoming part of the c++ standard in the future, whereas I could never see something like that happening to c, likewise serialization (Id really like that actually), and a whole other set of currently specialized and large library addons. Would you favour this approach, STL allowed us to stop fiddling with lists, wouldn't adding other libraries to c++ make us more productive ? I can see that we don't want to get stuck with a library which turns out in a year or two to be worthless because of changing technology but then cannot be gotten rid of for 10 years because of standard complience inertia, but perhaps c++ complience levels, level 0 just the language, level 1 the iostream and friends, level 2 networing classes and level 3 a java style api
C.
RE: Worldforge Summary, great idea methinks
on
Perens on Patents
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· Score: 1
I think that the worldforge summary idea is a great idea. While I have my doubts about one or two points accuracy, the idea of a summary for particular topics is interesting.
Perhaps slashdot should consider making a feature out of this idea, for stories over a certain amount of postings (of non trolls), or maybe stories that reoccur regularly. Have some volunteer do a digest of the most popular articles, ala the kernel and wine weekly news sections.
Allows those of us who get swamped under by stories to get a handle on them again, and also maybe remind of us some of the more important points again. An idea worth considering.
For years I've felt the same way in the other direction. Books, movies games etc. Distributers seem to have neer gotten the hang of the modern world. Somewhere lodged in their mind they feel that a book or a movie must be released for months in one part of the world before it comes out in another. I assume that it allows them to hedge their bets as to how popular a book is. If it does crap in market a, they might not bother to release it in market b.
The mildly amusing issue is that many of us are buying our books online across national boundaries, so when the publishers of this book bring it out in the states it probably won't sell as well in the states as it would in days gone by when you couldn't easily buy it direct. So their figures will become skewed, assumptions now that a book will be very popular in say Europe because it sold a stack in the US will be just plain wrong unless the amount sold online from the states to Europe are factored in.
Its hardly relevent yet as the figures involved are still tiny in terms of the older distribution networks, but something to keep an eye on.
Maybe it will force smaller lead times on books to keep business away from amazon et al or maybe it will lead to the complete opposite where noone republishes an american book in europe or visa versa, but instead just posts the damn things around the world:-)
well theres a serious problem with importation, if staroffice could import in vb, that vb wouldn't make a lot of sense inside staroffice. The object model would be very different, and the feature set does not map 1 to 1 between different applications
Though it might be possible to have some sort of wizard which would attempt to guess what the vb was doing and suggest some starbasic to convert it into, that might be possible, but it would be very difficult I imagine
Finally staroffice could just attempt to import in the vba as starbasic comments and allow you to manually convert it over, not a perfect solution by any means but it might be worthwhile for users ?
Staroffice has starbasic, which is a vbalike basic based scripting language. It is supposedly of equal power and flexibilty to vba. So I suppose that answers that question fully. In effect there is a vba equivalent right now for linux. Though I havn't personally used starbasic or know much abount it yet. C.
Seems to me that the worst case scenarios are that
all the nice linux companies go completely bust.
huge nasty companies attempt to take over and their marketing machine convinces the public that linux == some uglycorp software.
the public interest falters and dies.
It would be nice for the interest to maintain and the existing "nice" companies to retain their ethos and go from strength to strength, that way we get ports of commercial software easier, some games say, and a much easier ride in convincing bosses to allow us to use linux at work:-).
But even take the worst case scenarios and examine them for a while, its still a win win situation. You still have your free linux, that source is stil free to use, you loose nothing. Whatever you had before the "commercialization" doesn't get erased when the "gold rush" ends. Sure a period of die back while the companies run away as fast as they can, but those of us who only wanted an os that they could afford that didn't suck and allowed them to plink around with some code don't loose anything.
Just rein back that panic and general frothing at the mouth and get on with it. Write some code it's very soothing and actually achieves something constructive. I'd recommend it to anyone.
You definitely are the only one as theres absolutely no difference anymore. altavista.digital.com is not a seperate entity at all. When digital finally bought www.altavista.com from whoever had got his lucky little hands on it they made both urls point at the same bunch of machines and consolidated the entity under the name altavista.com.
Though I must say that I did tend to use altavista.digital.com for purely snobbish reasons for ages:-) when altavista.com didn't belong to them and was just that cgi with a link to the real search engine. I felt it made a speed difference, which I suppose was completely illusionary now that I think about it.
The irish ecommerce law (first draft last august, second draft october) also gives digital signatures equal rights to physical ones, full online draft bill online at http://www.ecommercegov.ie/
It also has a hands off attitude towards cryptography as an extra bonus.
As far as I remember about this one, before richard took over they would wait until each calculation was finished before beginning another. Richard pointed out that they could begin another problem before the previous one was completed and pipeline the calculations behind eachother
This led to one incident when some very important calcuation needed to be done, and the powers that be said to richard basically, "seeing as you have four problems going simultaneously, please put them all on hold and do this important one instead of all of them, we expect it to be finished at one forth of the speed of all those other calculations that you are doing", and were a bit horrified to find out that there was no way to achieve this speed, they had begun to rely on the "extra speed" of the system, which of course had not become inherently faster
You really should pick up one of richards books, he has some hilarious material on lock picking and breaking during the Manhatten project, mostly social engineering, but great stuff. A wonderful character.
Thats a really bad example, Britain is one the most anti eu nations in the eu, and is furthest from the kind of privacy thinking that permeates nations like the Netherlands as a reasonably good example for that sort of thinking.
One other good area to look at is the troubles between the EU and the US on controls on companies selling your private details that they have extracted from you on to third party companies. The EU doesn't think its such a good idea for a bank (for instance) to see big lists of names and income details to the mail spammers so that they can direct market you with "buy this wonderful pen" offers.
The EU is having a big of an argy bargy with what happens to an EU citizens details once they hit an american companies computer.
Now that you mention boeing, One of the rumours floating around was that echelon(sic) was used to nick airbuses plans so that the US government could hand them over to boeing as a helping hand. Wierd story, a bit amusing I felt
Slashdot Mirror
C.
But this is not longer true. It appears that the European Patent Office does not issue patents not because they believe that "software is inherently unpatentable", but because originally they believed that they did not have the equipment of skills to judge their quality!
IBM (all hail the mighty patent machine) lodged a software patent with the EPO last year and had it turned down (as per their plan one would assume) and then lodged an objection and while the patent was still refused the appeal ruled that the exclusion of software from patents is not valid under all circumstances
Which all means that companies are falling over themselves to get software patents out in the EU as well, left the good times roll
EPO Appeal search engine, search on software
IBM Appeal (PDF)
C.
C.
I have a dream, a dream of quake or sommat like that churning away in the foreground plinking out that sound. My audio enhanced mail program simultaneously plays a little wav to tell me that something has arrived. Off in the distance sound output of a audio tweaked top is playing away giving me some sort of feedback of the system load
Multiple sound programs working together, sniff.
And all sound routes too mind, multiple networked midi port access as well. If I recall correctly sgi had a sound library that everyone had to use to access the sound device. Microsoft now has DirectSound which does the same thing (btw: the lead developer (possibly the only one!) on DirectSound is an ex SGI employee, so DirectSound could be said to be built on the expertise and experience of SGI)
C. (spurned by XAudio, broken on the wheel of nas, crushed by lack of esd documentation, impaled on the pain tree of sound editing under linux, /dev/audio, just say no)
All the other networked sound methods have fallen by the wayside to my mind, the Xaudio one because the X consortium stopped work on it, nas because it had zero documentation, and against nas and esd theres the problem that there is nothing that can be done with them except play static snippets of sound.
I reckon the problem is that noone who actually knows anything about sound or serious use of sound has even investigated network sound.
If OpenAl stuff could be routed to sound daemon on a remote machine then it would appear to fit the bill perfectly. Serious sound apps using OpenAL, and OpenAl supporting a network connection.
Sigh, in a perfect world...
C.
C.
What next, should Redhat and the other successful companies run around buying closed source companies and release their source, maybe they should do this immediately before their market price crashes :-). Even if they go belly up afterwards they still will have achieve opening up the source. A cunning idea methinks
C.
That's pretty much what Ireland just did. Though I view it in a more positive light than you would seem to see it. The government buys the link in bulk and gets it for a discount price and then sells it on to private enterprise passing the discount down to them, which a huge corporation would not have done
Everyone wins in this scenario methinks.
C.
Its a pretty good read, covers the Jackson Games Case as well as the other ones that occured aroud that time
C.
Came across this link at www.noamazon.com
C.
The wv library has working word import capacity right now
The basics of import are completed, i.e. word 95 and word 97 and word 2000 fastsave and fullsave support. Fastsave has always been the bugbear of word importation import, wv is on one level complete. It only requires some minor modifications here and there to complete its work, as abiword gains more features to equal word, then wv can be used to map the word features to the abi ones.
Koffice could also use wv for its word import, I wrote it as a library which should be reasonable easy to use from inside any word processor, the code to use it from inside abiword is pretty straightforward. I'd reccommend a look at it, wv has wvHtml as a standalone app to convert word docs to stylesheet enabled html which (if netscape wasn't so crap as using the data) would give almost identical html layout to the original doc layout
Its not perfect, but its as good in many aspects (or even better in some) as the commercial offerings
C.
Some suspiciouns German Thefts and closer to my heart is the story abount monitoring all Irish International Phonecalls, This one was pretty much suspected for some time, particularly by the IDA (Irish Development Agency in charge of convincing companies to invest in Ireland), they got terribly suspicious when a few large companies got slightly better bids to set up in Scotland, each time just a little better than the Irish bid. I believe that they ended up asking travelling diplomats to transfer their most valuable documents by diplomatic pouch rather than fax or email them. Though I can't find the story where I read this one, Sunday Tribune I believe but they don't have an online search engine
C.
Its something that is of particular interest to me as I have written the wv library(mswordview) which abiword among others uses to import word documents, along with a sample word to html program (which has a config file allowing word to latex and word to groff possibilities)
Such a table of all possible word features is painstaking to create, and repeating the process of importing and exporting word features from abi/so/corel/applix and kword so as to compare them properly is a huge task, but one that really needs to be done, it is no good saying "the import of word documents is ok, needs a bit of work afterwards to fix it", a company or other heavy word processor user that is thinking of linux needs to have better information, and more precise data as to how good or bad is the import
You can have the best little wp in the world, but you have to have very good word import to be able to interoperate with others and not go completely insane with the poor quality import, so we need to isolate the capabilities of word and address the import of each of them point by point. Text attributes, graphic capabilities, ole import, equations, tables, table attributes, language support, revision support, absolute layout, hypertext capabilities, forms, etc etc etc
This is a task that requires no programming ability only patience and a copy of microsoft word, create a huge amount of documents that are an example of just about every feature of word and make them available as a test suite for various wp's importers. It would help greatly to have a database of word functionality, then you would have some data of enough validity on which you could fairly judge which wp will provide the best value for users which need to work with others in an organization which runs predominately word, i.e. all of them
C.
I recently returned to c++ after picking it up in college about two or three years ago, and boy was I surprised! New cast operators all over the place, new throwing an exception being the default behavior on failure. STL becoming core functionality and so on, not to even mention RTTI, bool types
Took me a little time to get back up to speed with it I have to say, but all in all I do like most of these features, I have great time for STL, we've been wasting our time writing sorts and searches for so long that its nice to drop kick that issue out the window. A bool type is cute, and even if the only use for exceptions was a throw from new its worth it, at least the guilt factor of not protecting every appearence of new with a NULL test can be dispensed with.
But on with the questions
One: One advantage of C over C++ which noone else seems to have a problem with is that when you are handed a huge stack of code and go to fix a bug or make a small modification, on viewing a chunk of code in C you can assume that most functions will only modify the state of variables that are explicitly passed to them. On viewing c++ code that has a function call, you have to refer to a header to determine if its a function call or a method belonging the the class whose code you are trying to read.. If its a member you have to read the code of that method to see if it is changing the internal state of the object, and if it calls other methods you have to chase all of those down as well to be assured that the state of the object will remain unchanged after a method call that takes no immediately relevent arguments (Obviously keeping an eye out of operator overloads as well, though to be fair you can assume that they will follow the normal behaviour and not modify the object, and behave intuitively)
In one sense from the perspective of someone trying to maintain c++ code, an attempt to understand its logic faces the same difficulties as understanding horrific global variable ridden c code.
Was there ever any actual language constructs considered for this problem ? Granted proper coding practice with consts etc etc can sort out a lot of the problem, but there is still the need to refer to the headers continually, but a good programming editor could sort that out, and so on, but it just strikes me that these are obvious external work arounds for a problem which might possibly be dealt with at a different level. Maybe something like...
- Only member functions can be called from inside other methods unless a scoping operator is used, so you know immediately if a member or a function is being called
- Some of the information about how the method modifies or does not modify the object is coding into the name of the method itself, yes yes hungarian notation and dragging me off to the stake, but you know what I mean anyway.
Two:STL was a definite change away from c's philosophy of minimum requirements and towards a more javaesque conglomoration of a programming language and a more feature rich standard api.I could quite easily imagine threading becoming part of the c++ standard in the future, whereas I could never see something like that happening to c, likewise serialization (Id really like that actually), and a whole other set of currently specialized and large library addons. Would you favour this approach, STL allowed us to stop fiddling with lists, wouldn't adding other libraries to c++ make us more productive ? I can see that we don't want to get stuck with a library which turns out in a year or two to be worthless because of changing technology but then cannot be gotten rid of for 10 years because of standard complience inertia, but perhaps c++ complience levels, level 0 just the language, level 1 the iostream and friends, level 2 networing classes and level 3 a java style api
C.
Perhaps slashdot should consider making a feature out of this idea, for stories over a certain amount of postings (of non trolls), or maybe stories that reoccur regularly. Have some volunteer do a digest of the most popular articles, ala the kernel and wine weekly news sections.
Allows those of us who get swamped under by stories to get a handle on them again, and also maybe remind of us some of the more important points again. An idea worth considering.
C.
C.
The mildly amusing issue is that many of us are buying our books online across national boundaries, so when the publishers of this book bring it out in the states it probably won't sell as well in the states as it would in days gone by when you couldn't easily buy it direct. So their figures will become skewed, assumptions now that a book will be very popular in say Europe because it sold a stack in the US will be just plain wrong unless the amount sold online from the states to Europe are factored in.
Its hardly relevent yet as the figures involved are still tiny in terms of the older distribution networks, but something to keep an eye on.
Maybe it will force smaller lead times on books to keep business away from amazon et al or maybe it will lead to the complete opposite where noone republishes an american book in europe or visa versa, but instead just posts the damn things around the world :-)
C.
Though it might be possible to have some sort of wizard which would attempt to guess what the vb was doing and suggest some starbasic to convert it into, that might be possible, but it would be very difficult I imagine
Finally staroffice could just attempt to import in the vba as starbasic comments and allow you to manually convert it over, not a perfect solution by any means but it might be worthwhile for users ?
C.
Staroffice has starbasic, which is a vbalike basic based scripting language. It is supposedly of equal power and flexibilty to vba. So I suppose that answers that question fully. In effect there is a vba equivalent right now for linux. Though I havn't personally used starbasic or know much abount it yet. C.
- all the nice linux companies go completely bust.
- huge nasty companies attempt to take over and their marketing machine convinces the public that linux == some uglycorp software.
- the public interest falters and dies.
It would be nice for the interest to maintain and the existing "nice" companies to retain their ethos and go from strength to strength, that way we get ports of commercial software easier, some games say, and a much easier ride in convincing bosses to allow us to use linux at workBut even take the worst case scenarios and examine them for a while, its still a win win situation. You still have your free linux, that source is stil free to use, you loose nothing. Whatever you had before the "commercialization" doesn't get erased when the "gold rush" ends. Sure a period of die back while the companies run away as fast as they can, but those of us who only wanted an os that they could afford that didn't suck and allowed them to plink around with some code don't loose anything.
Just rein back that panic and general frothing at the mouth and get on with it. Write some code it's very soothing and actually achieves something constructive. I'd recommend it to anyone.
C.
Though I must say that I did tend to use altavista.digital.com for purely snobbish reasons for ages :-) when altavista.com didn't belong to them and was just that cgi with a link to the real search engine. I felt it made a speed difference, which I suppose was completely illusionary now that I think about it.
C.
It also has a hands off attitude towards cryptography as an extra bonus.
C.
This led to one incident when some very important calcuation needed to be done, and the powers that be said to richard basically, "seeing as you have four problems going simultaneously, please put them all on hold and do this important one instead of all of them, we expect it to be finished at one forth of the speed of all those other calculations that you are doing", and were a bit horrified to find out that there was no way to achieve this speed, they had begun to rely on the "extra speed" of the system, which of course had not become inherently faster
You really should pick up one of richards books, he has some hilarious material on lock picking and breaking during the Manhatten project, mostly social engineering, but great stuff. A wonderful character.
C.
One other good area to look at is the troubles between the EU and the US on controls on companies selling your private details that they have extracted from you on to third party companies. The EU doesn't think its such a good idea for a bank (for instance) to see big lists of names and income details to the mail spammers so that they can direct market you with "buy this wonderful pen" offers.
The EU is having a big of an argy bargy with what happens to an EU citizens details once they hit an american companies computer.
C.
C.