My apology for using the wrong term. But my original line of reasoning stands. Wake me up if Jewish starts planning to question their bible and abolish it.
They are against evolution, and in general science, because science is all at odds with one of the most important fundamental "virtue" of Christian: faith. They want you to have faith in the Bible. But science is fundamentally against faith. Instead, science is built upon the lack of faith. Science says, don't blindly believe in *anything*. Science says, question the truth of *anything*, especially when what you see seems to go against it. And the progress of science is all from people disbelieving in common believe because of sound ground. All these, when applied to religion, reveals the truth of religion: something purely created by human beings to comfort their own ignorance.
(1) is not specific to coding, and for (2) it is simply not true. For a few tasks coding is being automated, for the rest it depends largely on lots of human being doing all the hard stuff. But I think neither address the original question anyway. The original question is whether everybody should learn some coding, and not whether everybody should do professional coding. I think asking everyone do at least a bit of coding is a good idea, because it is (1) an exciting experience, (2) eye-opening to understand that programming involving thinking in all details, and (3) a good weapon for anyone in the works to know what is automation all about.
I think the question being asked is, given a certain stack, what is the minimum number of flips required. 2(n-1) is of course an upper bound, but that is not the minimum.
In my case, it is because the people running those 10 servers want to have their freedom to set different kernel parameters, to install different OS packages, to run their own Apache server with their own hostname all looking at port 80, and to hold root account without fighting each other. Most importantly, top efficiency is not a concern as the servers are not heavily loaded.
If your OS isn't sharing duplicate memory blocks already, you're using a shitty OS. (Linux already shares dup read only blocks for many things, like most modern OSes).
That depends on how the memory gets duplicated. If it is duplicated because it comes from the same library or because it is the result of forking a process, you're right, every OS does that. But if it is because the memory content comes from independent processes doing independent things and the result happens to be exactly the same, it is new. In the former case, if two processes are sharing some memory, one process decide to write over it, and the other does exactly the same write, then the result is two unshared pages. In the latter case, they will also become unshared at that moment, but after a while the OS will notice that they are the same again and make them share again.
I think that there is not a lot of use cases of KSM actually apart from the VM use case. That's why nearly no OS provide that service until today. And even if Linux provide that, it is likely that most people running a Linux desktop will not enable the feature because it wastes clock cycles to ask the OS to constantly scan through your memory to find pages to deduplicate.
Hmm... if the instruction set structure is really such that I cannot make out a sufficiently small table and register the prefixes of instructions into it, I'll write a nice code generator to generate the "nightmare of branches" and then forget about it. I hate to maintain crap... the instruction set is going to change at exactly the day when you forget how the branches work!
Both of the problems are valid, but again, what you call "DM" is good enough for Microsoft to suck money, so there is no incentive for them to invest in engineering method to do what you call "WM".
Look at the competition. They are (1) Linux, and (2) BSD (including Mac OSX). Both are very generic OS, serving a wide variety of settings including the desktop, the server, laptops, and handhelds and at times embedded systems like routers. Both don't care that average user will use only a tiny fraction of the OS. This is general in software: things get generalized to all similar areas. There is no point for MS to create a "WM" from scratch, if MS need one it simply disables the unneeded features from Vista. Because it costs essentially nothing to Microsoft to make a new copy of Vista. Making a "WM", in contrast, means engineering efforts.
Incidentally, I'd call "just disable some feature of Vista" a good enough solution: it is good enough because the average computer has the capability to run Vista anyway (or so MS think), so they don't create a "perfect" solution to match the average desktop usage exactly.
I think Emacs shortcuts make a good amount of sense. Most short-cuts comes from the first characters of their respective commands, the more commonly used commands are used with just Control while the less commonly used ones are prefixed with C-x or C-c. If you ask me, vi commands make much less sense, and at times even Firefox shortcuts falls behind! (Who know why "bookmark this page" is Control-D?!)
The moment it gains the menu bar and mouse control, it ceases to be a valid criticism. You don't like Control-F? You have the arrow keys. You don't like Control-x Control-s? You have Menu File Save. You don't like Meta-F, Control-V and Meta-V? You can use you mouse to scroll and move to wherever you want. The Control and Meta are just one more way you can access the Emacs windows, albeit a very effective one. The other editors would have forced you to move your fingers to your mouse, in Emacs you can remain in your most efficient posture as long as you can remember all those key binding, otherwise, fine, use the menu just as every other editor would want you to.
Re:Decent text editor still not included right?
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
·
· Score: 1
Who the hell say that you have to use the best tool for each task you need to perform? Emacs is definitely not be the most decent calendar, but it can be a sufficiently effective one for those who already type into their Emacs windows day and night.
Once you start using one tool, you start getting the habits from it, and when you do another task, you want that habits to remain valid. For whatever reason, many Emacs users expects a cursor to be available on everything, expecting Control-F and Control-B to move that cursor, and expecting Meta-F and Meta-B to do that more quickly, and type Control-x k Return to remove it and continue working on something else without touching the mouse even once. I've yet to see a single other calendar that allows exactly that simple thing.
import slashdot.reply; public class Reply { public static void main(String[] args) { try { I hate Java for one single reason: to express any idea you need 3 times as much code. } catch (Exception e) { and the whole idea of checked exception is simply silly. } } }
> We had on average 4 bugs a week due to the > indentation bullshit
I'm still using it as the primary language, after starting a project with 3-5 people and working on it for 5 months. The number of bugs we have been checked into the repository which is later found to be due to indentation problem is exactly zero. We have the simple rules in place that every indentation level is 4 spaces, and tabs should never appear in the code at all. Perhaps that would help?
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 1
> Point is, managers manage people. You are there > to code.. not them.
Totally wrong.
In every other career, managers come from the ones below them. You will not find an HR manager who did not prove themselves good by doing all the paper work issuing paychecks for years. You will not see a chemical plant manager who did not go through the process of the hard designs of chemical processes.
Yes they manage people, but they manage a lot more than just their people. They make decisions, and to do so they have to accept inputs from various people, and they have to know how valid each of such inputs really is. To do so they need technical knowledge.
And don't forget, being able to "climb the career ladder" is one of the primary reasons for job retention. Without a reasonable chance of being promoted, the best staff just go for other opportunities somewhere else using the experience they earned in their position. I didn't see a reason why a company should benefit from it.
> If you run a self-signed certificate you still > can get the man in the middle protection.
> There is no difference there, the only difference > is that you don't have to pay for a certificate > from a well-known root CA.
I assume the CA must somehow verify (no matter how minimally) that the one applying for the certificate has the name written on the certificate. This is the only difference. If you visit a site and it has self-signed certificate, you know you are talking to somebody, and that somebody can keep the message secret if he choose to. But you don't know who that somebody is. If you are talking to somebody who poisoned the DNS cache, masquerade the site you want to talk to, using a different self-signed certificate, you are absolutely ignorant about it: your experience will be exactly the same.
That is, unless you have some alternate way to verify that the certificate you see is coming from the one you want to speak to. If you can contact that guy by phone and take the time to have that guy read out loud the MD5 of the certificate and you carefully check every digit in it, no problem. But most people would rather have a CA do the job. Even if the CA are somewhat lousy.
I think the real problem to make it earth-like is not surface gravity, but instead the distance at which it can still trap its atmosphere. The much thicker atmosphere probably means that the planet traps heat from its "sun" very efficiently.
> Linus's argument against odd/even numbering is > based on the premise that every released kernel > is a stable kernel.
As far as I understand, Linus's argument against odd/even numbering is not base on that everything is stable. Instead, it is an admittance that the current kernel process cannot produce something that can be said to be "stable" for most people. Since he has accepted that they can't do it, he no longer even try. Instead the whole "stable" game is put on the shoulder of distributors to put patches on top of particular kernel version, and the Linus tree only tries to be "reasonably stable" instead.
> Linux isn't going to be rewritten, except in > small parts and continuously,
On the other hand, small parts do build up to huge parts, and I expect that in around 10-20 (point) versions most lines of the code is changed. Major version changes mainly mean incompatibilities in other software, for Linux that makes no sense because (1) user-land is always "compatible" for all perceived use cases, and (2) kernel-land is always "incompatible" even for the third part change.
> However I kinda like the three-level A.B.C > numbering scheme.
This is, unluckily, unworkable for the current rate of change of things in Linux. Linus makes a very valid point to understand that the kernel process is not good in a long "stabilizing" mode: developers start to lose interest. So at the end releases become time based, and everything that can make the deadline will be shipped. Given the huge amount of interest in the Linux kernel, every merge window has a lot of very interesting and rather intrusive changes, so it never have a "only bugfixes" release.
> Major and minor numbers have their place, too. > They tell me something about the amount of > change. I'll update from 2.6.25 to 2.6.26 without > a second thought, as I expect nothing important > to have changed.
This is seriously wrong since 2004. Nowadays everything released are 2.6.x. A larger x means a later release, and that's it. There is no implication about the amount of changes. And indeed, the amount of code changes happening to Linux these days are so huge that it makes no sense to say 2.6.25 to 2.6.26 must be safe because they are "close" (they are safe for user applications, but even 2.6.5 to 2.6.26 is safe, since very few changes of kernel affect userland at all. But if you have a kernel module to compile that's completely unsafe even for 2.6.25 to 2.6.26). They are not close, every x increment means around 15% of the whole code base has been changed, of which many are very radical changes to code and data structures.
> Try this experiment: Get a normal thumb drive (a high quality brand so you know it has good wear levelling), and put run mkswap and swapon on it, and just run your system for a few hours.
For me it would do nothing. My swap is nearly never used except for hibernation.
If not for the greenhouse gas that we would release to the atmosphere, and if not for the water level rise that would result if a good proportion of either the Greenland or Antarctica ice sheets melt, I wouldn't care at all if people use up all oil and coal reserves. The problem is that the use of oil and coal is associated with some serious cost that people, whether or not being producers or consumers, must face. "The market" won't make it, the issue can only be dealt with by the governments, and by all governments.
I've got a friend who have been given one. In my opinion it's both good and bad. The good side is that if you must send an E-mail, you can, and you don't have to stop your leisure and go home or go to workplace. The bad side is that more people expect you to reply quickly. But if you don't start replying quickly, few get such expectation. So my friend end up not attending to that new gadget when peaceful moments are more desired (which is most of the time).
At the end of the day, it's just a tool. They give it to you, it's their right. You might watch for message in it every second you're not sleeping, or you might just turn it off unless somebody makes you a phone call and you decide it is urgent enough, it's your choice. They can fire you, but they can always do so anyway.
> The worry is that we've forced it off trend and > are heading for climate conditions which haven't > appeared since we started trying to feed six > billion humans.
The real worry is that modern human is not the ancient ones. They are much more reliant to the assumption that the earth stay as it has "always" been. If water level rise 15 meters 1000 years ago, nearly nothing would happen. Most people won't even notice it: they live by the river, not by the sea. For those who actually notice that, they just move inwards and rebuild their simple wood built house. For those who cannot do even that, they die, but it is just a small part of the population.
But nowadays huge mass of people lives by the sea. The housing and infrastructure are much more extensive. And the inland is much more filled. If the same thing happen to the South Pole, we will experience a 70m rise in sea level. What will happen? Everybody's guess.
Slashdot Mirror
My apology for using the wrong term. But my original line of reasoning stands. Wake me up if Jewish starts planning to question their bible and abolish it.
They are against evolution, and in general science, because science is all at odds with one of the most important fundamental "virtue" of Christian: faith. They want you to have faith in the Bible. But science is fundamentally against faith. Instead, science is built upon the lack of faith. Science says, don't blindly believe in *anything*. Science says, question the truth of *anything*, especially when what you see seems to go against it. And the progress of science is all from people disbelieving in common believe because of sound ground. All these, when applied to religion, reveals the truth of religion: something purely created by human beings to comfort their own ignorance.
(1) is not specific to coding, and for (2) it is simply not true. For a few tasks coding is being automated, for the rest it depends largely on lots of human being doing all the hard stuff. But I think neither address the original question anyway. The original question is whether everybody should learn some coding, and not whether everybody should do professional coding. I think asking everyone do at least a bit of coding is a good idea, because it is (1) an exciting experience, (2) eye-opening to understand that programming involving thinking in all details, and (3) a good weapon for anyone in the works to know what is automation all about.
malloc uses mmap for large memory blocks, not sbrk.
I think the question being asked is, given a certain stack, what is the minimum number of flips required. 2(n-1) is of course an upper bound, but that is not the minimum.
In my case, it is because the people running those 10 servers want to have their freedom to set different kernel parameters, to install different OS packages, to run their own Apache server with their own hostname all looking at port 80, and to hold root account without fighting each other. Most importantly, top efficiency is not a concern as the servers are not heavily loaded.
If your OS isn't sharing duplicate memory blocks already, you're using a shitty OS. (Linux already shares dup read only blocks for many things, like most modern OSes).
That depends on how the memory gets duplicated. If it is duplicated because it comes from the same library or because it is the result of forking a process, you're right, every OS does that. But if it is because the memory content comes from independent processes doing independent things and the result happens to be exactly the same, it is new. In the former case, if two processes are sharing some memory, one process decide to write over it, and the other does exactly the same write, then the result is two unshared pages. In the latter case, they will also become unshared at that moment, but after a while the OS will notice that they are the same again and make them share again.
I think that there is not a lot of use cases of KSM actually apart from the VM use case. That's why nearly no OS provide that service until today. And even if Linux provide that, it is likely that most people running a Linux desktop will not enable the feature because it wastes clock cycles to ask the OS to constantly scan through your memory to find pages to deduplicate.
Hmm... if the instruction set structure is really such that I cannot make out a sufficiently small table and register the prefixes of instructions into it, I'll write a nice code generator to generate the "nightmare of branches" and then forget about it. I hate to maintain crap... the instruction set is going to change at exactly the day when you forget how the branches work!
Both of the problems are valid, but again, what you call "DM" is good enough for Microsoft to suck money, so there is no incentive for them to invest in engineering method to do what you call "WM".
Look at the competition. They are (1) Linux, and (2) BSD (including Mac OSX). Both are very generic OS, serving a wide variety of settings including the desktop, the server, laptops, and handhelds and at times embedded systems like routers. Both don't care that average user will use only a tiny fraction of the OS. This is general in software: things get generalized to all similar areas. There is no point for MS to create a "WM" from scratch, if MS need one it simply disables the unneeded features from Vista. Because it costs essentially nothing to Microsoft to make a new copy of Vista. Making a "WM", in contrast, means engineering efforts.
Incidentally, I'd call "just disable some feature of Vista" a good enough solution: it is good enough because the average computer has the capability to run Vista anyway (or so MS think), so they don't create a "perfect" solution to match the average desktop usage exactly.
I think Emacs shortcuts make a good amount of sense. Most short-cuts comes from the first characters of their respective commands, the more commonly used commands are used with just Control while the less commonly used ones are prefixed with C-x or C-c. If you ask me, vi commands make much less sense, and at times even Firefox shortcuts falls behind! (Who know why "bookmark this page" is Control-D?!)
The moment it gains the menu bar and mouse control, it ceases to be a valid criticism. You don't like Control-F? You have the arrow keys. You don't like Control-x Control-s? You have Menu File Save. You don't like Meta-F, Control-V and Meta-V? You can use you mouse to scroll and move to wherever you want. The Control and Meta are just one more way you can access the Emacs windows, albeit a very effective one. The other editors would have forced you to move your fingers to your mouse, in Emacs you can remain in your most efficient posture as long as you can remember all those key binding, otherwise, fine, use the menu just as every other editor would want you to.
Who the hell say that you have to use the best tool for each task you need to perform? Emacs is definitely not be the most decent calendar, but it can be a sufficiently effective one for those who already type into their Emacs windows day and night.
Once you start using one tool, you start getting the habits from it, and when you do another task, you want that habits to remain valid. For whatever reason, many Emacs users expects a cursor to be available on everything, expecting Control-F and Control-B to move that cursor, and expecting Meta-F and Meta-B to do that more quickly, and type Control-x k Return to remove it and continue working on something else without touching the mouse even once. I've yet to see a single other calendar that allows exactly that simple thing.
import slashdot.reply; public class Reply { public static void main(String[] args) { try { I hate Java for one single reason: to express any idea you need 3 times as much code. } catch (Exception e) { and the whole idea of checked exception is simply silly. } } }
> We had on average 4 bugs a week due to the
> indentation bullshit
I'm still using it as the primary language, after starting a project with 3-5 people and working on it for 5 months. The number of bugs we have been checked into the repository which is later found to be due to indentation problem is exactly zero. We have the simple rules in place that every indentation level is 4 spaces, and tabs should never appear in the code at all. Perhaps that would help?
> Point is, managers manage people. You are there
> to code.. not them.
Totally wrong.
In every other career, managers come from the ones below them. You will not find an HR manager who did not prove themselves good by doing all the paper work issuing paychecks for years. You will not see a chemical plant manager who did not go through the process of the hard designs of chemical processes.
Yes they manage people, but they manage a lot more than just their people. They make decisions, and to do so they have to accept inputs from various people, and they have to know how valid each of such inputs really is. To do so they need technical knowledge.
And don't forget, being able to "climb the career ladder" is one of the primary reasons for job retention. Without a reasonable chance of being promoted, the best staff just go for other opportunities somewhere else using the experience they earned in their position. I didn't see a reason why a company should benefit from it.
> If you run a self-signed certificate you still
> can get the man in the middle protection.
> There is no difference there, the only difference
> is that you don't have to pay for a certificate
> from a well-known root CA.
I assume the CA must somehow verify (no matter how minimally) that the one applying for the certificate has the name written on the certificate. This is the only difference. If you visit a site and it has self-signed certificate, you know you are talking to somebody, and that somebody can keep the message secret if he choose to. But you don't know who that somebody is. If you are talking to somebody who poisoned the DNS cache, masquerade the site you want to talk to, using a different self-signed certificate, you are absolutely ignorant about it: your experience will be exactly the same.
That is, unless you have some alternate way to verify that the certificate you see is coming from the one you want to speak to. If you can contact that guy by phone and take the time to have that guy read out loud the MD5 of the certificate and you carefully check every digit in it, no problem. But most people would rather have a CA do the job. Even if the CA are somewhat lousy.
I think the real problem to make it earth-like is not surface gravity, but instead the distance at which it can still trap its atmosphere. The much thicker atmosphere probably means that the planet traps heat from its "sun" very efficiently.
> Linus's argument against odd/even numbering is
> based on the premise that every released kernel
> is a stable kernel.
As far as I understand, Linus's argument against odd/even numbering is not base on that everything is stable. Instead, it is an admittance that the current kernel process cannot produce something that can be said to be "stable" for most people. Since he has accepted that they can't do it, he no longer even try. Instead the whole "stable" game is put on the shoulder of distributors to put patches on top of particular kernel version, and the Linus tree only tries to be "reasonably stable" instead.
> Linux isn't going to be rewritten, except in
> small parts and continuously,
On the other hand, small parts do build up to huge parts, and I expect that in around 10-20 (point) versions most lines of the code is changed. Major version changes mainly mean incompatibilities in other software, for Linux that makes no sense because (1) user-land is always "compatible" for all perceived use cases, and (2) kernel-land is always "incompatible" even for the third part change.
> However I kinda like the three-level A.B.C
> numbering scheme.
This is, unluckily, unworkable for the current rate of change of things in Linux. Linus makes a very valid point to understand that the kernel process is not good in a long "stabilizing" mode: developers start to lose interest. So at the end releases become time based, and everything that can make the deadline will be shipped. Given the huge amount of interest in the Linux kernel, every merge window has a lot of very interesting and rather intrusive changes, so it never have a "only bugfixes" release.
> Major and minor numbers have their place, too.
> They tell me something about the amount of
> change. I'll update from 2.6.25 to 2.6.26 without
> a second thought, as I expect nothing important
> to have changed.
This is seriously wrong since 2004. Nowadays everything released are 2.6.x. A larger x means a later release, and that's it. There is no implication about the amount of changes. And indeed, the amount of code changes happening to Linux these days are so huge that it makes no sense to say 2.6.25 to 2.6.26 must be safe because they are "close" (they are safe for user applications, but even 2.6.5 to 2.6.26 is safe, since very few changes of kernel affect userland at all. But if you have a kernel module to compile that's completely unsafe even for 2.6.25 to 2.6.26). They are not close, every x increment means around 15% of the whole code base has been changed, of which many are very radical changes to code and data structures.
> Try this experiment: Get a normal thumb drive (a high quality brand so you know it has good wear levelling), and put run mkswap and swapon on it, and just run your system for a few hours.
For me it would do nothing. My swap is nearly never used except for hibernation.
> I'll believe Windows is getting more secure when
> I start getting less spam in my inbox.
I'd be a bit easier. I'll believe Windows is getting more secure once the anti-virus companies go out of business.
If not for the greenhouse gas that we would release to the atmosphere, and if not for the water level rise that would result if a good proportion of either the Greenland or Antarctica ice sheets melt, I wouldn't care at all if people use up all oil and coal reserves. The problem is that the use of oil and coal is associated with some serious cost that people, whether or not being producers or consumers, must face. "The market" won't make it, the issue can only be dealt with by the governments, and by all governments.
I've got a friend who have been given one. In my opinion it's both good and bad. The good side is that if you must send an E-mail, you can, and you don't have to stop your leisure and go home or go to workplace. The bad side is that more people expect you to reply quickly. But if you don't start replying quickly, few get such expectation. So my friend end up not attending to that new gadget when peaceful moments are more desired (which is most of the time).
At the end of the day, it's just a tool. They give it to you, it's their right. You might watch for message in it every second you're not sleeping, or you might just turn it off unless somebody makes you a phone call and you decide it is urgent enough, it's your choice. They can fire you, but they can always do so anyway.
> The worry is that we've forced it off trend and
> are heading for climate conditions which haven't
> appeared since we started trying to feed six
> billion humans.
The real worry is that modern human is not the ancient ones. They are much more reliant to the assumption that the earth stay as it has "always" been. If water level rise 15 meters 1000 years ago, nearly nothing would happen. Most people won't even notice it: they live by the river, not by the sea. For those who actually notice that, they just move inwards and rebuild their simple wood built house. For those who cannot do even that, they die, but it is just a small part of the population.
But nowadays huge mass of people lives by the sea. The housing and infrastructure are much more extensive. And the inland is much more filled. If the same thing happen to the South Pole, we will experience a 70m rise in sea level. What will happen? Everybody's guess.