Apple buying the vendor for the fingerprint stack might have something to do with Motorola dropping the ATRIX 4G fingerprint sensor.
The ATRIX 4G was supposed to get an ICS upgrade. There was a "leak" of a partially functional version. My guess is that the licensing issues with Authentec/Apple broke down. Guess Motorola didn't negotiate any long-term contract options.
It's a shame about how AT&T handled pricing on the LXDE subsystem. The X server implemented on the NVidia framebuffer/compositing layer was pretty nice. In theory Android 4.2.2 should support non-mirrored HDMI better, so hopefully I can get a Linux desktop bigger than 1280x720 on this Galaxy S3.
By taking the high road and not pointing fingers he is able address an issue in such a way that a lot of the people who did contribute to this problem can recognize what they have done and own it, without being labelled, accused or feeling attacked.
But we aren't all bozos on this bus, and pretending "everybody contributed to it" is not necessarily the best way to fix this particular problem, or to reduce the likelihood of this kind of engineering failure in the future. Understanding how this happened is important.
My elevator version of what happened: the bellhead model of a communication service is a reliable circuit-switched connection. "Reliable" sounds good, and circuits are a familiar model. But the Internet is based on a model of best-effort delivery of packets. Every product group experienced in Internet infrastructure knew horror stories about confusing TCP. New entrants did not know this, or had system design teams tilted towards bellhead decision-making.
Cisco has all the cool toys for queue management in their routers. Are they bozos? People who have even skimmed the Linux traffic shaping HOWTO are sensitized to the issues. They're not bozos.
I have a copy of the first edition of Comer in front of me (the 1988 one that talked about the inevitable transition from TCP to OSI TP4.) The advice to implementors of gateways tells you to read RFC 1009 very carefully, which has a bunch of congestion cites, including John Nagle's (he's downthread) RFC 970 explaining why infinite buffers are a disaster. These are foundational documents of the Internet, and sure, they're from 1987 and routing to a T1 by processing over 9,000 packets a second is no longer something you would need a supermini for (you probably get faster computers free with your breakfast cereal.) But scanning forward through the RFCs you'll see lots and lots of very pointed advice to the effect of "please do not confuse TCP or you'll be sorry."
So some of the people building the network hardware with these problems weren't alive when this was being figured out. They didn't do their homework; fine. The people running the companies designing and building the hardware don't have that excuse, and it was their job to either get a clue or hire one. Their customers are going to be the ones paying to fix this.
So if you're buying Internet infrastructure, you might want to look for companies (and more particularly, product groups) hanging out on nanog and participating in IETF, since although that's not proof their products are not fighting the Internet, maybe it correlates.
My current guess is that organizational decision-making was tilted towards bellhead thinking for a variety of reasons (stereotype: they dress better and do nicer PowerPoint architecture.) Skimming through documentation of bearers such as 1xRTT makes it pretty clear that the design center was "reliable pipe first, then put packets on it." Which makes perfect sense if your company has history in non-Internet telecoms--your senior people are the ones who shipped products that did reliable circuit-switched pipes. But that's just wrong if you're doing IP, and for reasons known in the Internet communications world for decades.
I've been trying to figure out whether I wanted to link some version of this to the blog posts. I figure it's safely out of sight here and won't interfere with the public diplomacy.
Schizophrenia is hell, and I don't think I'm stretching that much. This is a geek audience, right? Well, let's just consider a world where you can do a scientific experiment and find a result that only you can confirm. Over and over again.
The standard narrative of schizophrenia that we've all internalized is that it's somehow a weakness of an individual. That can't be true, especially if it can be induced.
Back in the day there wasn't a "net"; we were worried about what would become of USENET. And the cry was "Imminent Death Of USENET Predicted", much like "Netcraft Confirms It" threads.
Yes, and this 23-year veteran of C now has exactly one goal when writing applications:
Get the hell out of C.
I'm sorry, I used to not care about checking error results or the sizes of allocated strings. But now I do. And it is just soul-killing to write one line of code and write five more to cope with the consequences of a function call failing. Not to mention the time sitting around worrying about whether I'm correct in my analysis of memory ownership in any function that allocates or frees memory and passes it to another.
So I dutifully write enough C code that is legitimately low level and has to care about stuff like system calls and memory allocation in a cold sweat, and then write the rest of my application in a scripting language like Lua, Python, or Tcl.
From then on, I can write code that I know will not bring down the runtime. Strings are no longer objects to be feared. The worst thing that can happen to me is a traceback.
Of course, I can still do stupid crap like evaluate strings coming from the network, but then again those kinds of risks don't show up every single time I touch a string.
Regardless of how practical this is, it's an awesome checkbox feature for corporate weenies advocating the POWER architecture superminis with no clue about their true strengths.
"Look, this machine is so powerful it can run qemu user-mode emulation of another processor in its spare time! Let's see your Dell cluster emulate an x86!"
I can't believe my TAs for Intermediate Slashdot Trolling For The Playstation Generation are actually deducting points for such an accurate depiction of them.
Normally we make fun of Slashdot editors for not being able to spell simple English terms familiar to a mass audience correctly. They loose there audience when they do that. Usually they can get their terms of art correct. Not this time.
Guys, it's spelled "0day", and it has been since before you l33ch3d Karateka on a catfur. Do have some sense of perspective.
If you let up on the gas, regenerative breaking kicks in, so even when you aren't breaking, it "sips" some of the kinetic energy for battery charging.
Yeah. If your foot is off the pedal, it's sipping. This is a reasonable behavior, since most people expect there to be engine braking, and there isn't any when the gasoline engine is disconnected.
One trick is to put your foot really gently on the pedal; at the right amount of pressure, the electric motor is neither consuming nor generating. This is tricky enough to do that I only do it when I'm in high score mode; it's most effective when you're explicitly managing and planning battery levels.
I'd like a button on the steering wheel that, when held, will disable the engine braking with foot off the gas.
The first rule of fuel efficiency is: BRAKING IS FOR LOSERS.
Absolutely, and that's still important in vehicles with regenerative braking.
The Prius has a bar graph of your MPG per five minute interval. It overlays cute little green car icons to show how much energy you recaptured through braking during that interval as well. But you shouldn't think of those car icons as part of your score. They're more like the bonus you get when the ball drains out of the pinball machine.
Consider this: when you step on the brakes in a Prius, you convert kinetic energy to electrical energy, which is then stored in a battery, which you then use to regain kinetic energy.
But oddly enough, the most efficient way to store kinetic energy is as....kinetic energy. Regenerative braking is a consolation prize for when you had to step on the brakes. Better not to do that in the first place, if you can manage it while being safe and courteous.
Oh sure, paraphrase Sealab 2021 without even a cite. When Quinn was a fish:
Whale: Did you know that the average fish today contains more mercury than a rectal thermometer? Quinn: Yeah, I think I read that someplace. Whale: Would you eat a rectal thermometer!? Answer me, damn you! Quinn: Uh... no. Whale: Well, I would. (eats Quinn the fish) Quinn: HEY! Whale: Ah, mercury. Sweetest of the transition metals.
This RFC proposes several protocols to be used in the transmission of IP datagrams using the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) of a television signal. The VBI is a non-viewable portion of the television signal that can be used to provide point-to-multipoint IP data services which will relieve congestion and traffic in the traditional Internet access networks. Wherever possible these protocols make use of existing RFC standards and non-standards.
[...]
Today, IP is quickly becoming the preferred method of distributing one-to-many data on intranets and the Internet. The coming availability of low cost PC hardware for receiving television signals accompanied by broadcast data streams makes a defined standard for the transmission of data over traditional broadcast networks imperative. A lack of standards in this area as well as the expense of hardware has prevented traditional broadcast networks from becoming effective deliverers of data to the home and office.
Of course, back in 1999 we all knew what Zork and null modems were. Oh brave new Slashdot.
...the new Cray MCX, an amazing new supercomputer with a 2GHz Core2Duo, That's just not funny. From the Wikipedia article on NUMAlink:
NUMAlink is a high-speed low-latency switched fabric computer bus used as a shared memory computer cluster processor interconnection in Silicon Graphics computer systems. NUMAlink was developed by SGI for their Origin and Onyx systems. It was initially branded as "CrayLink" during SGIs brief acquisition of Cray Research.
OK, that's a little more legitimate, but it did feel a bit like Cray was joining Pierre Cardin's bit of branding hell.
The first amendment protects you from the government taking away your rights, not corporations and individuals.
What we see here is a clash between two stories Americans tell about themselves. (All you dirty foreigners can now go off in a corner and quote Locke at each other or something; we've already l00ted all your political philosophers.) These stories are not just formal law; they express values that are part of our cultural identity.
The first is the right to one's property without undue interference. This is expressed in images such as the cowboys of the West, the Jeffersonian farmer, the iconoclastic captain of industry who crawled up from humble roots, and so on.
The second is the right of anyone to speak their own mind. I'm really not going to do too much better on the propaganda than Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" painting.
Notice this is phrased as an individual right. It's not we agree that facilitating freedom of speech and diversity of opinion is necessarily a communal good; the only thing we all agree on is just that nobody-can-shut-me-up.
I don't think there are many people here actually saying that the actions described in the article are illegal. However, what people are saying is that these actions seem to them contrary to part of the core American identity; the First Amendment is just one way this spirit is expressed.
Because these values are clearly in conflict, these kinds of stories are perennial money-makers for Slashdot. You can get a lot of page views debating the relative values of things core to the American identity. And as it happens, it seems like these values are also widely shared in the international geek community too....
Unfortunately, I can't give you an Insightful. You're already maxed on (non-karma) Funny.
In my box of rusting metal tapes, I have a cherished few from 1984 that were direct from CD. OK, a few years later I had a few more that were copied in dbx too, but judging from past experience, I shouldn't press my luck with that kind of nostalgia here.
Oh, why not. My first "portable" CD player was about the size of a dreamcast and it wanted something like 10 AA batteries split between two banks: its external AC adapter supplied both positive and negative 7.5v sources, through two separate coax connectors. Luckily, they were different diameters....
You're a rat, and the game keeps sending you to look for bigger pellets.
Towards the end of classic Diablo 2, the game was pretty much solved. With appropriate clever teaming, a serious problem for party members was being able to run fast enough to keep up with the carnage. Big D could die in *seconds*. In Hell/Hell, the last combat fun was finding unique monsters with new and interesting combinations of attributes. (Bring out the Multi Shot Lightning Enchanted Bastard Heph!)
Magic items (with single bonuses) were boring ages before this. Unique items were kinda fun, but there were a lot circulating in the economy. Rare items (with their characteristic yellow color) had *multiple* random bonuses, and on the far end of the bell curve, there were some truly outstanding items possible. But they were even more rare than the "unique" items.
Me, I didn't care about items much---I was never fast enough to grab 'em first. So I was mostly there for the comedy value of finding new and weird viable character builds. (Hey, I had a lance zealot paladin. Shut up.)
Still, most people were playing in the economy. The best summary of motivation was:
"I like to beat on monsters and make the yellow items pop out."
Psychologists will now point out only *sometimes* rewarding an action often is more powerful a training mechanism than predictable reward.
http://freedb2.org/ continues to thrive and grow and has been very well supported.
Cool. So where can I download your database?
I'm not joking. I can download wikipedia. I downloaded a couple versions of the original cddb back when we were all running off Sparcstations.
The way we got here was to freely exchange metadata about CDs we own. freedb2.org doesn't say anything about how to get at the data behind it. In fact, it doesn't really say anything at all about where its data came from. (Before you claim that you can't pay for the bandwidth to support downloads of your full database, trust me, I can find somewhere to host it for you.)
I typed in plenty of CD metadata. I showed you mine; so show me yours.
I'm running out of mana here, so there's not much I can do but agree; given the horrorshow of Xm, everybody fled.
I once wrote a dtksh script on a dare: Motif in ksh.
The place where Tk totally annoyed its foreign language bindings was in the -commmand argument. You got one %-interpolated string, and Tk was gonna eval it when the button got pressed. But what if you want to have it run a lambda? For a while STk (an integrated scheme system) had some patches where the lambda bound to:command wouldn't get garbage collected as long as the parent widget lived, but it was really ugly. Any foreign binding of Lua will run into similar problems, where liveness of function pointers is intimately tied to the disposal of widgets. I totally forget what I did about this in my lua-fltk binding for 4.0, but I'm pretty sure there were some places where C++ and Lua disagreed over whether an element of the widget tree was live.
Of course, Tk was fine with "eval some string"; it's not like you didn't already have enough namespace polution in Tcl.
It's funny that you bring up DHTML. From my point of view, there were a couple of lesser-known toolkits that could solve the Xm problem. But only Tk had the text widget, which was massively better than *any* competition, and I'm counting the $10k a seat libraries. I almost built a Tcl/Tk #include compatibility layer to bring "text" into lua-fltk.
"How good is the styled text widget?" is the first question I ask of new toolkits, including Eclipse's SWT.
Well, DHTML is the end of the world for that.
Then there's the canvas. Its design is extremely well-tailored to integrate with a scripting environment. It's the widget that launched a thousand grad students. (If not two thousand.)
[Don: obviously not for you, and I'm a little shamed I'm not URLing very hard]
If any of you lurkers are going to be following this conversation down this far, I'll add some context from at least my side.
I've been programming in C for entirely too long.
I've seen a *lot* of new environments come by.
As of about ten years ago, my first goal in any new C environment is: GET THE HELL OUT.
C makes me paranoid. I have to check every single return code, manually allocate all of my memory, and make sure any two strings I'm concatenating will fit in the destination space. And if anything fails, I have to free everything I've already allocated. And I'm always afraid I've forgotten something.
There's not much choice in the kernel. You get to use C. Been there, done that. But these days there is no reason to write apps in the same language you'd write the kernel.
There is some code that has to be opaque, like talking to device drivers, or running compute-intensive code at the core of an app. Most of what you work on is not that, and need not spend most of its lines of code checking for errors.
There was a period when Tcl was the best choice to escape to a less paranoiac language. You're looking at two bigots who have decided that Lua is a reasonable escape route in these modern times.
Python or Perl or Pike might have been the decision you came to instead. Not worth fighting, then. But if you haven't run away from C yet, take a look at Lua too.
RMS was right, but I think he overestimated the momentum behind Tcl. Tcl *did* have that essential quality of being easy to integrate with C's tiny little stdlib mind. (This was before Tcl reimplimented stdio.) But it was apparent to all of us that data structures any stronger than char* were not the forte of the binding. However, if your C code was sufficiently simple, this shouldn't be a problem....
RMS's solution to the impending Tcl hegemony was to take Sah's gedankenpaper and say there was a plausible common model between quasiquoted lists and interpolated strings. Therefore everything is Lisp. He failed to take into account how dirty real Tcl code is.
And now we're back to PHP, where string concatenation/interpolation is the same kind of subconscious reflex, and we're off to the land of XSS and SQL injection attacks, because nobody can keep track of whether some string "$s" is HTML code, a username, or an SQL clause. Just mash 'em up; I'm sure nobody would send us anything unexpected. Real data structures are too annoying to use in PHP4 anyway.
Lua is starting to wander into tidal eddies that full Scheme foreign function interfaces have to handle. Most notable is that you can't yield across a C function boundary (in stock ANSI C Lua). That is, if you have a Lua code that calls a C function that runs a Lua callback, that callback can't yield back to a lower-level Lua function. That sounds academic, but if you have Lua code that calls expat to parse XML you can't yield after getting elements. Meaning you can't rephrase XML parsing as "get next element", which is an incredibly natural, coroutine-y way to handle things. Not that this bit me or anything.
There are a couple of unofficial solutions to this. Since coroutines are less general than continuations, those solutions are much much simpler than for full Scheme....
As far as SWIG goes, well. By the time I made it to Lua, I was already committed. I think I remember that at my decision point SWIG support was a little iffy, especially for producing idiomatic Lua objects for clients. After a little bug fixing, I just switched to tolua. This was before the high-octane C++ templates too.
SWIG looks much much better these days, and I agree that getting all the languages into the party has really high benefit.
A great way to see how powerful it is, and learn practical Lua programming, is to check out and look at the source code of a sophisticated WOW extension like Auctioneer.
Good lord. That is a lot of Lua code, and very readable too. WoW might explain the broader interest in Lua my spidey-sense noticed.
I'm studiously ignoring WoW. Diablo II ate my life. See, if you party up a paladin with the right aura, a sorc, a cursing/arty necromancer, and a bunch of amazons, you can finish big D on hell/hell in THREE SECONDS.....
Slashdot Mirror
Apple buying the vendor for the fingerprint stack might have something to do with Motorola dropping the ATRIX 4G fingerprint sensor.
The ATRIX 4G was supposed to get an ICS upgrade. There was a "leak" of a partially functional version. My guess is that the licensing issues with Authentec/Apple broke down. Guess Motorola didn't negotiate any long-term contract options.
It's a shame about how AT&T handled pricing on the LXDE subsystem. The X server implemented on the NVidia framebuffer/compositing layer was pretty nice. In theory Android 4.2.2 should support non-mirrored HDMI better, so hopefully I can get a Linux desktop bigger than 1280x720 on this Galaxy S3.
By taking the high road and not pointing fingers he is able address an issue in such a way that a lot of the people who did contribute to this problem can recognize what they have done and own it, without being labelled, accused or feeling attacked.
But we aren't all bozos on this bus, and pretending "everybody contributed to it" is not necessarily the best way to fix this particular problem, or to reduce the likelihood of this kind of engineering failure in the future. Understanding how this happened is important.
My elevator version of what happened: the bellhead model of a communication service is a reliable circuit-switched connection. "Reliable" sounds good, and circuits are a familiar model. But the Internet is based on a model of best-effort delivery of packets. Every product group experienced in Internet infrastructure knew horror stories about confusing TCP. New entrants did not know this, or had system design teams tilted towards bellhead decision-making.
Cisco has all the cool toys for queue management in their routers. Are they bozos? People who have even skimmed the Linux traffic shaping HOWTO are sensitized to the issues. They're not bozos.
I have a copy of the first edition of Comer in front of me (the 1988 one that talked about the inevitable transition from TCP to OSI TP4.) The advice to implementors of gateways tells you to read RFC 1009 very carefully, which has a bunch of congestion cites, including John Nagle's (he's downthread) RFC 970 explaining why infinite buffers are a disaster. These are foundational documents of the Internet, and sure, they're from 1987 and routing to a T1 by processing over 9,000 packets a second is no longer something you would need a supermini for (you probably get faster computers free with your breakfast cereal.) But scanning forward through the RFCs you'll see lots and lots of very pointed advice to the effect of "please do not confuse TCP or you'll be sorry."
So some of the people building the network hardware with these problems weren't alive when this was being figured out. They didn't do their homework; fine. The people running the companies designing and building the hardware don't have that excuse, and it was their job to either get a clue or hire one. Their customers are going to be the ones paying to fix this.
So if you're buying Internet infrastructure, you might want to look for companies (and more particularly, product groups) hanging out on nanog and participating in IETF, since although that's not proof their products are not fighting the Internet, maybe it correlates.
My current guess is that organizational decision-making was tilted towards bellhead thinking for a variety of reasons (stereotype: they dress better and do nicer PowerPoint architecture.) Skimming through documentation of bearers such as 1xRTT makes it pretty clear that the design center was "reliable pipe first, then put packets on it." Which makes perfect sense if your company has history in non-Internet telecoms--your senior people are the ones who shipped products that did reliable circuit-switched pipes. But that's just wrong if you're doing IP, and for reasons known in the Internet communications world for decades.
I've been trying to figure out whether I wanted to link some version of this to the blog posts. I figure it's safely out of sight here and won't interfere with the public diplomacy.
You missed out on the PC Weasel 2000, a useful-looking video card that speaks RS-232.
PC Weasel 2000: Making servers run headless since 1999
You *have* to see their logo.
Schizophrenia is hell, and I don't think I'm stretching that much. This is a geek audience, right? Well, let's just consider a world where you can do a scientific experiment and find a result that only you can confirm. Over and over again.
The standard narrative of schizophrenia that we've all internalized is that it's somehow a weakness of an individual. That can't be true, especially if it can be induced.
Back in the day there wasn't a "net"; we were worried about what would become of USENET. And the cry was "Imminent Death Of USENET Predicted", much like "Netcraft Confirms It" threads.
Back in '89 the standard joke was "Imminent use of deathnet predicted."
Yes, and this 23-year veteran of C now has exactly one goal when writing applications:
Get the hell out of C.
I'm sorry, I used to not care about checking error results or the sizes of allocated strings. But now I do. And it is just soul-killing to write one line of code and write five more to cope with the consequences of a function call failing. Not to mention the time sitting around worrying about whether I'm correct in my analysis of memory ownership in any function that allocates or frees memory and passes it to another.
So I dutifully write enough C code that is legitimately low level and has to care about stuff like system calls and memory allocation in a cold sweat, and then write the rest of my application in a scripting language like Lua, Python, or Tcl.
From then on, I can write code that I know will not bring down the runtime. Strings are no longer objects to be feared. The worst thing that can happen to me is a traceback.
Of course, I can still do stupid crap like evaluate strings coming from the network, but then again those kinds of risks don't show up every single time I touch a string.
Regardless of how practical this is, it's an awesome checkbox feature for corporate weenies advocating the POWER architecture superminis with no clue about their true strengths.
"Look, this machine is so powerful it can run qemu user-mode emulation of another processor in its spare time! Let's see your Dell cluster emulate an x86!"
I can't believe my TAs for Intermediate Slashdot Trolling For The Playstation Generation are actually deducting points for such an accurate depiction of them.
you missed "spelled" , which should be "spelt"
Orthographic reform, do you speak it?
I'll show you a Royale.
Normally we make fun of Slashdot editors for not being able to spell simple English terms familiar to a mass audience correctly. They loose there audience when they do that. Usually they can get their terms of art correct. Not this time.
Guys, it's spelled "0day", and it has been since before you l33ch3d Karateka on a catfur. Do have some sense of perspective.
If you let up on the gas, regenerative breaking kicks in, so even when you aren't breaking, it "sips" some of the kinetic energy for battery charging.
Yeah. If your foot is off the pedal, it's sipping. This is a reasonable behavior, since most people expect there to be engine braking, and there isn't any when the gasoline engine is disconnected.
One trick is to put your foot really gently on the pedal; at the right amount of pressure, the electric motor is neither consuming nor generating. This is tricky enough to do that I only do it when I'm in high score mode; it's most effective when you're explicitly managing and planning battery levels.
I'd like a button on the steering wheel that, when held, will disable the engine braking with foot off the gas.
The first rule of fuel efficiency is: BRAKING IS FOR LOSERS.
Absolutely, and that's still important in vehicles with regenerative braking.
The Prius has a bar graph of your MPG per five minute interval. It overlays cute little green car icons to show how much energy you recaptured through braking during that interval as well. But you shouldn't think of those car icons as part of your score. They're more like the bonus you get when the ball drains out of the pinball machine.
Consider this: when you step on the brakes in a Prius, you convert kinetic energy to electrical energy, which is then stored in a battery, which you then use to regain kinetic energy.
But oddly enough, the most efficient way to store kinetic energy is as....kinetic energy. Regenerative braking is a consolation prize for when you had to step on the brakes. Better not to do that in the first place, if you can manage it while being safe and courteous.
Oh sure, paraphrase Sealab 2021 without even a cite. When Quinn was a fish:
Whale: Did you know that the average fish today contains more mercury than a rectal thermometer?
Quinn: Yeah, I think I read that someplace.
Whale: Would you eat a rectal thermometer!? Answer me, damn you!
Quinn: Uh... no.
Whale: Well, I would. (eats Quinn the fish)
Quinn: HEY!
Whale: Ah, mercury. Sweetest of the transition metals.
Oh right, there was:
RFC 2728: The Transmission of IP Over the Vertical Blanking Interval of a Television Signal
Of course, back in 1999 we all knew what Zork and null modems were. Oh brave new Slashdot.
That's just not funny. From the Wikipedia article on NUMAlink:
OK, that's a little more legitimate, but it did feel a bit like Cray was joining Pierre Cardin's bit of branding hell.
The first amendment protects you from the government taking away your rights, not corporations and individuals.
What we see here is a clash between two stories Americans tell about themselves. (All you dirty foreigners can now go off in a corner and quote Locke at each other or something; we've already l00ted all your political philosophers.) These stories are not just formal law; they express values that are part of our cultural identity.
The first is the right to one's property without undue interference. This is expressed in images such as the cowboys of the West, the Jeffersonian farmer, the iconoclastic captain of industry who crawled up from humble roots, and so on.
The second is the right of anyone to speak their own mind. I'm really not going to do too much better on the propaganda than Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" painting.
Notice this is phrased as an individual right. It's not we agree that facilitating freedom of speech and diversity of opinion is necessarily a communal good; the only thing we all agree on is just that nobody-can-shut-me-up.
I don't think there are many people here actually saying that the actions described in the article are illegal. However, what people are saying is that these actions seem to them contrary to part of the core American identity; the First Amendment is just one way this spirit is expressed.
Because these values are clearly in conflict, these kinds of stories are perennial money-makers for Slashdot. You can get a lot of page views debating the relative values of things core to the American identity. And as it happens, it seems like these values are also widely shared in the international geek community too....
Unfortunately, I can't give you an Insightful. You're already maxed on (non-karma) Funny.
In my box of rusting metal tapes, I have a cherished few from 1984 that were direct from CD. OK, a few years later I had a few more that were copied in dbx too, but judging from past experience, I shouldn't press my luck with that kind of nostalgia here.
Oh, why not. My first "portable" CD player was about the size of a dreamcast and it wanted something like 10 AA batteries split between two banks: its external AC adapter supplied both positive and negative 7.5v sources, through two separate coax connectors. Luckily, they were different diameters....
You're a rat, and the game keeps sending you to look for bigger pellets.
Towards the end of classic Diablo 2, the game was pretty much solved. With appropriate clever teaming, a serious problem for party members was being able to run fast enough to keep up with the carnage. Big D could die in *seconds*. In Hell/Hell, the last combat fun was finding unique monsters with new and interesting combinations of attributes. (Bring out the Multi Shot Lightning Enchanted Bastard Heph!)
Magic items (with single bonuses) were boring ages before this. Unique items were kinda fun, but there were a lot circulating in the economy. Rare items (with their characteristic yellow color) had *multiple* random bonuses, and on the far end of the bell curve, there were some truly outstanding items possible. But they were even more rare than the "unique" items.
Me, I didn't care about items much---I was never fast enough to grab 'em first. So I was mostly there for the comedy value of finding new and weird viable character builds. (Hey, I had a lance zealot paladin. Shut up.)
Still, most people were playing in the economy. The best summary of motivation was:
"I like to beat on monsters and make the yellow items pop out."
Psychologists will now point out only *sometimes* rewarding an action often is more powerful a training mechanism than predictable reward.
Best recruiting tool for io.com evar.
Jay Carlson
(former) root@io.com
The lesson is clear:
Don't shout "fire" in a crowded security theater.
http://freedb2.org/ continues to thrive and grow and has been very well supported.
Cool. So where can I download your database?
I'm not joking. I can download wikipedia. I downloaded a couple versions of the original cddb back when we were all running off Sparcstations.
The way we got here was to freely exchange metadata about CDs we own. freedb2.org doesn't say anything about how to get at the data behind it. In fact, it doesn't really say anything at all about where its data came from. (Before you claim that you can't pay for the bandwidth to support downloads of your full database, trust me, I can find somewhere to host it for you.)
I typed in plenty of CD metadata. I showed you mine; so show me yours.
I'm running out of mana here, so there's not much I can do but agree; given the horrorshow of Xm, everybody fled.
:command wouldn't get garbage collected as long as the parent widget lived, but it was really ugly. Any foreign binding of Lua will run into similar problems, where liveness of function pointers is intimately tied to the disposal of widgets. I totally forget what I did about this in my lua-fltk binding for 4.0, but I'm pretty sure there were some places where C++ and Lua disagreed over whether an element of the widget tree was live.
I once wrote a dtksh script on a dare: Motif in ksh.
The place where Tk totally annoyed its foreign language bindings was in the -commmand argument. You got one %-interpolated string, and Tk was gonna eval it when the button got pressed. But what if you want to have it run a lambda? For a while STk (an integrated scheme system) had some patches where the lambda bound to
Of course, Tk was fine with "eval some string"; it's not like you didn't already have enough namespace polution in Tcl.
It's funny that you bring up DHTML. From my point of view, there were a couple of lesser-known toolkits that could solve the Xm problem. But only Tk had the text widget, which was massively better than *any* competition, and I'm counting the $10k a seat libraries. I almost built a Tcl/Tk #include compatibility layer to bring "text" into lua-fltk.
"How good is the styled text widget?" is the first question I ask of new toolkits, including Eclipse's SWT.
Well, DHTML is the end of the world for that.
Then there's the canvas. Its design is extremely well-tailored to integrate with a scripting environment. It's the widget that launched a thousand grad students. (If not two thousand.)
SVG, you say.....
[Don: obviously not for you, and I'm a little shamed I'm not URLing very hard]
If any of you lurkers are going to be following this conversation down this far, I'll add some context from at least my side.
I've been programming in C for entirely too long.
I've seen a *lot* of new environments come by.
As of about ten years ago, my first goal in any new C environment is: GET THE HELL OUT.
C makes me paranoid. I have to check every single return code, manually allocate all of my memory, and make sure any two strings I'm concatenating will fit in the destination space. And if anything fails, I have to free everything I've already allocated. And I'm always afraid I've forgotten something.
There's not much choice in the kernel. You get to use C. Been there, done that. But these days there is no reason to write apps in the same language you'd write the kernel.
There is some code that has to be opaque, like talking to device drivers, or running compute-intensive code at the core of an app. Most of what you work on is not that, and need not spend most of its lines of code checking for errors.
There was a period when Tcl was the best choice to escape to a less paranoiac language. You're looking at two bigots who have decided that Lua is a reasonable escape route in these modern times.
Python or Perl or Pike might have been the decision you came to instead. Not worth fighting, then. But if you haven't run away from C yet, take a look at Lua too.
PS: people write videogames with it.
RMS was right, but I think he overestimated the momentum behind Tcl. Tcl *did* have that essential quality of being easy to integrate with C's tiny little stdlib mind. (This was before Tcl reimplimented stdio.) But it was apparent to all of us that data structures any stronger than char* were not the forte of the binding. However, if your C code was sufficiently simple, this shouldn't be a problem....
RMS's solution to the impending Tcl hegemony was to take Sah's gedankenpaper and say there was a plausible common model between quasiquoted lists and interpolated strings. Therefore everything is Lisp. He failed to take into account how dirty real Tcl code is.
And now we're back to PHP, where string concatenation/interpolation is the same kind of subconscious reflex, and we're off to the land of XSS and SQL injection attacks, because nobody can keep track of whether some string "$s" is HTML code, a username, or an SQL clause. Just mash 'em up; I'm sure nobody would send us anything unexpected. Real data structures are too annoying to use in PHP4 anyway.
Lua is starting to wander into tidal eddies that full Scheme foreign function interfaces have to handle. Most notable is that you can't yield across a C function boundary (in stock ANSI C Lua). That is, if you have a Lua code that calls a C function that runs a Lua callback, that callback can't yield back to a lower-level Lua function. That sounds academic, but if you have Lua code that calls expat to parse XML you can't yield after getting elements. Meaning you can't rephrase XML parsing as "get next element", which is an incredibly natural, coroutine-y way to handle things. Not that this bit me or anything.
There are a couple of unofficial solutions to this. Since coroutines are less general than continuations, those solutions are much much simpler than for full Scheme....
As far as SWIG goes, well. By the time I made it to Lua, I was already committed. I think I remember that at my decision point SWIG support was a little iffy, especially for producing idiomatic Lua objects for clients. After a little bug fixing, I just switched to tolua. This was before the high-octane C++ templates too.
SWIG looks much much better these days, and I agree that getting all the languages into the party has really high benefit.
A great way to see how powerful it is, and learn practical Lua programming, is to check out and look at the source code of a sophisticated WOW extension like Auctioneer.
Good lord. That is a lot of Lua code, and very readable too. WoW might explain the broader interest in Lua my spidey-sense noticed.
I'm studiously ignoring WoW. Diablo II ate my life. See, if you party up a paladin with the right aura, a sorc, a cursing/arty necromancer, and a bunch of amazons, you can finish big D on hell/hell in THREE SECONDS.....