For some reason I totally disregarded any warnings about this upgrade. I didn't uninstall the Qt scripting binding I had been told would break an upgrade and I didn't even bother to look up instructions. And as such, getting there was difficult. Now I am there, doing all of those things I should have let the upgrade task do (like hand edit menu.lst). I like it. Kubuntu looks great. And everything I have tried has worked. But it has only been 5 days. I am sure that others have had different experiences.
I don't see how this is clever. It actually causes the users and the hackers to work more closely and their numbers will always win out. I bet this concept dies too.
I will believe Intel's promises 2 or 3 years down the road when they have cleared the merger and they can do whatever they want with the company. Same thing goes for Oracle w/ the Sun merger. What they say today cannot be taken as fact because they are currently saying whatever they think they have to to get the SEC and stock holders to approve of the merger. But let's be hopeful. It would be good if Intel only improved WRS's real-time Linux stake and kept helping VxWorks get better.
I was in a class the other day and a technologist asked the question, "Why do we always pick VxWorks for our flight s/w OS?" The answer was, because once something flies, it basically always flies. If Linux, ecos, qnx or any other embedded OS flew once - it can then always fly. It is a strange problem. VxWorks should not be picked just because it flew. That is unless you need an OS for a flight system.
I have no love MSL. That project zapped roughly 30 MUSD from my project. But JWST is also grossly overbudget and it cost roughly 10x MSL. Oh, and MSL is actually mostly assembled, very close to ship to the cape. While JWST has not assembled a darned thing. MSL is going to fly before Obama's first fiscal year begins. This is not going to be a problem for that administration. JWST on the other hand...
A lot of the yes responses in this thread are dead on. The current crop of static analysis tools have improved tremendously over the previous generation. And the gold standard of this generation for C/C++ is Coverity Prevent. FindBugs and Coverity Prevent for java. Klockwork is gaining in C/C++.
Now, be careful. This is another tool. It means that the problem may still lie with the programmer. All reported defects should be seen not just as a bug to fix but the number of defects related to similar code may point to a design issue.
And to all of you punks out there saying there are a lot of false positives. There are way fewer false positives then you think. These tools can point out bugs that you don't understand until you have really sat down and figured out what is going on. Understand the defects before discounting them.
I work for a research laboratory for a space agency and static analysis tools are soon going to be a requirement for flight software. And this is after running these tools on a lot of flight code to see if these tools are any good.
Unfortunately, even after being very strict with compilers (-Wall -pedantic) and using static analysis tools until there are near zero defects bugs still appear. It is maddening. But having near zero defects almost makes finding these bugs easier.
First off, prevent is not strictly a security flaw static-analysis checker. It is a static-analysis checker that checks for all sorts of defects. Some of which are directly related to security. Second, I have used prevent extensively over the past year and have found it to be an invaluable tool. It has a pretty low false positive rate and fixing the defects it finds means your code is better. On the code I work on, I find that we have a much lower defect count. But we also have pretty mature code and we really do attempt to make it as bullet proof as possible. But we still have defects.
My experience is with the C/C++ version of tool. We have also been evaluating the java version of the tool and it is good. But some of the free alternatives like findbugs are still better. I would use findbugs w/ prevent for java if I wanted good coverage.
Just a me too! I use the N800 and fbreader (along with sunrise on the desktop) to do a lot of offline ebook reading. And the great thing about the Nokia is that it does everything else too! FM radio, mp3 web browsing, gps (with add-ons). The one drawback is that it doesn't work well in very bright situations (noon-time reading outside).
I generally use a rule of thumb that says: 1. If I am publishing pdf or html 2. If I am collaborating, is the collaborator a windows users - then.doc, otherwise openoffice.
Just a me too. I use MythTV and I only watch the commercials when I mean to. Like during a Super Bowl or the Oscars. Otherwise, I just go to the next break marker and watch my show. It works so well, it is amazing. Dang you MythTV! Now I am stealing TV by not watching the commercials. It has gotten so bad that when people talk about shows, I can join in. But when they talk about funny commercials, I am totally clueless.
Do you have any idea how much dark fiber is running through the US?
I do. Does even some of it go somewhere where it can be used for broadband? My guess is almost none of it, otherwise the corps that own it would attempt to use it.
I see AT&T hussling like crazy people in my area. They are building out relays and fiber to those relays like someone has lit them on fire. My guess, they wouldn't be doing that if they had fiber in the right places. Go figure, when they laid fiber the first time maybe they should have laid some in residential areas. Maybe they would have something to show for that mountain of debt they are carrying.
I do expect to have DSL2 by this time next year. It is something.
Here, here! The problem here is that both companies are competing for the same damn thing, data service to your house. The data might be voice, might be email/web or it might be video. But it is just bits. And FWIW, the stream goes down and up you shifty blighters!
Everyone's experience is anecdotal. I have Charter for cable and internet service. And they are horrible. My father has the same service (he lives nearby) and he complains about the same things I complain about. When calling Charter about their problems I am constantly blamed for running alternative operating systems and that the problem has got to be on my end. But strangely, the problem goes away without me changing anything on my part of the network.
So to answer your subject: Yes, you are the only one. And I will be tarred and feather before I let Charter provide me with any other service. I am just biding my time until someone can offer me something better (but don't expect me to hold my breath AT&T).
Thanks to Moore's law embedded systems have grown up enough to use CORBA. I know this because I work on a project which uses CORBA heavily (at least in the TAO and JacORB incarnations). Since CORBA has strong typing, it is attractive to developers who depend heavily on typeness to provide checks in systems where no one likes bugs. And really, who wants to write another middleware to deal with distributed systems? I sure don't.
There is no disclaimer in the article so I think it is worth mentioning that even though Michi was CORBA for all intents and purposes for a number of years, his current employer provides a competitor to CORBA and Web Services. And, you guessed it, that product addresses each and every flaw he outlines in his article.
To be fair ZeroC and Michi do put their money where their mouth is by supplying Ice in source form, licensed under the GPL. Although I do not see them putting this in front of a body like the IETF or trying to get Ice bindings integrated into something like boost. This would really attack that one point in the article talking about having real systems implemented and having it in front of a standards body.
Now that I have put in the proper disclaimers, I have to say that having used CORBA the last 5 years I agree with Michi on every point. Our knowledge of POAs is just now getting to the point where we are comfortable using it in complex ways. We are only now willing to entertain the notion that we are actually using CORBA the right way. We have spent weeks reading, coding, recoding, testing and testing again to understand the spec and the real world usage. The learning curve is easily the steepest and tallest of any technology I have had to learn. I said "Amen" out loud when Michi mentions that people really screw up when they don't do it right.
Using CORBA as a real distributed object system is not possible unless the system is in a network that you have complete control over. Even now we use cumbersome workarounds to develop our system remotely because we can't use CORBA like we were supposed to. Thank you very little script kiddies for making us use firewalls every where! But if CORBA had been built with security in mind in the beginning at all, it would be vastly more useful then it is now.
And we have not moved on to things like Web Services precisely because we do not want to move away from type checking and we can see the train wreck associated to security. So we use CORBA the best we can (and we have been largely successful, BTW).
Now I am going back to checking whether try blocks have been done properly for the naming service code we have to implement because of the exact reasons Michi says most implementers need the CORBA naming service.
Our waterless urinals were provided at no cost by the city our business is in.
We started out with a plastic frame flushless urinal. They did not last long. They exhibited clogging or backup problems almost immediately. Now we have switched to these porcelian jobs from Falcon. They seem to last much longer between filter changes and do a better job of catching splash.
> (Open||Net)BSD style approach to developing code: do it slow, do it right, and stop fucking around.
There is nothing slow about OpenBSD development. They churn out a new version on time at least every year but usually semi-annually. But I do agree with the other two criteria.
> Do slashdot readers see Sun being relevant 10 years from now?
It depends on whether you think Sun is turning the corner with these new servers. The original opteron line was basically a company on life support getting pretty much reference models out the door. While these machines show Sun's polish all over it. I think these servers compete well with HP and Dell's offering and they have Sun's polish. I am hopeful. But ten years is a long time from now.
> Will they survive by selling 'mostly' software?
Huh? This is a server line that runs Solaris or Linux. They are definitely still selling hardware and giving away the operating system.
> I know they sell hardware, but they no longer control the full stack like IBM with POWER.
Sun has almost never had control over the full stack. They sold you the hardware with a free (as in beer) operating system on it. Then you put on the application/server software. They might help you buy that application/server software. But they have never made it.
> Anyone know of a decent, powerful PDA with USB host capability built in?
Any iPAQ running a 2.6.9 kernel. It incorporates USB 'on the go'. Which is how a usb device can talk to other usb devices.
Expect this feature to only marginally work at first. And handhelds.org has not yet adapted this kernel. But over time any of the iPAQs out today could support this capability.
So, for $19/month total I get NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, Fox (soon), and WB (soon) all in HD. Granted, only the prime time stuff is in HDTV, but every new show is HiDef now (reality crap excluded).
This is what I think is the problem w/ the 'networks'. At the moment they are doing the minimum to provide you w/ HDTV content. They broadcast the signal, they produce some hidef content (some primetime shows and some sporting events). But largely most of the content was captured w/ analog grade equipment and the provided resolution is really no better then the analog signal. For example, CBS seems to have only one hidef capture set because only one football game in a given day will be hidef quality.
If the networks haven't bought in yet, it isn't time for me to make a large investments in HDTV.
Didn't someone buy S3 out because they had some rather nice patents that they purchased from another dead company?
Yeah, VIA. S3 coming out with new 3D hardware is entirely driven by VIA having complete converage of a computer.
All of the comments so far have neglected to figure that S3/VIA are selling EPIA boards like hotcakes. With 3D hardware worse then this chip included. Expect to see this part on the next gen of EPIA boards.
heh, don't get me started on corporations and their rights. Thank you for pointing out an obvious issue with having more representation.
is it really necessary to have quick counts? I don't think so.
No, I would settle for more accuracy and actually having my vote counted instead of thrown out by one of the Supremes.
But I do think that making voting easy could provide more flexibility with our current democratic process that is worth exploring. And that (barring difficulties that you have pointed out) could provide us with a better system of politics then we have now.
Slashdot Mirror
TESS was competing w/ another exoplanet survey instrument:
http://finesse.jpl.nasa.gov/
Roughly the same amount of money, same launch date, different people working on it.
Good luck to the TESS team, too bad it wasn't FINESSE.
For some reason I totally disregarded any warnings about this upgrade. I didn't uninstall the Qt scripting binding I had been told would break an upgrade and I didn't even bother to look up instructions. And as such, getting there was difficult. Now I am there, doing all of those things I should have let the upgrade task do (like hand edit menu.lst). I like it. Kubuntu looks great. And everything I have tried has worked. But it has only been 5 days. I am sure that others have had different experiences.
I don't see how this is clever. It actually causes the users and the hackers to work more closely and their numbers will always win out. I bet this concept dies too.
I will believe Intel's promises 2 or 3 years down the road when they have cleared the merger and they can do whatever they want with the company. Same thing goes for Oracle w/ the Sun merger. What they say today cannot be taken as fact because they are currently saying whatever they think they have to to get the SEC and stock holders to approve of the merger. But let's be hopeful. It would be good if Intel only improved WRS's real-time Linux stake and kept helping VxWorks get better.
I was in a class the other day and a technologist asked the question, "Why do we always pick VxWorks for our flight s/w OS?" The answer was, because once something flies, it basically always flies. If Linux, ecos, qnx or any other embedded OS flew once - it can then always fly. It is a strange problem. VxWorks should not be picked just because it flew. That is unless you need an OS for a flight system.
I have no love MSL. That project zapped roughly 30 MUSD from my project. But JWST is also grossly overbudget and it cost roughly 10x MSL. Oh, and MSL is actually mostly assembled, very close to ship to the cape. While JWST has not assembled a darned thing. MSL is going to fly before Obama's first fiscal year begins. This is not going to be a problem for that administration. JWST on the other hand...
I know it isn't a phone. But the N810 is a good choice for what you say you want to do.
A lot of the yes responses in this thread are dead on. The current crop of static analysis tools have improved tremendously over the previous generation. And the gold standard of this generation for C/C++ is Coverity Prevent. FindBugs and Coverity Prevent for java. Klockwork is gaining in C/C++.
Now, be careful. This is another tool. It means that the problem may still lie with the programmer. All reported defects should be seen not just as a bug to fix but the number of defects related to similar code may point to a design issue.
And to all of you punks out there saying there are a lot of false positives. There are way fewer false positives then you think. These tools can point out bugs that you don't understand until you have really sat down and figured out what is going on. Understand the defects before discounting them.
I work for a research laboratory for a space agency and static analysis tools are soon going to be a requirement for flight software. And this is after running these tools on a lot of flight code to see if these tools are any good.
Unfortunately, even after being very strict with compilers (-Wall -pedantic) and using static analysis tools until there are near zero defects bugs still appear. It is maddening. But having near zero defects almost makes finding these bugs easier.
First off, prevent is not strictly a security flaw static-analysis checker. It is a static-analysis checker that checks for all sorts of defects. Some of which are directly related to security. Second, I have used prevent extensively over the past year and have found it to be an invaluable tool. It has a pretty low false positive rate and fixing the defects it finds means your code is better. On the code I work on, I find that we have a much lower defect count. But we also have pretty mature code and we really do attempt to make it as bullet proof as possible. But we still have defects.
My experience is with the C/C++ version of tool. We have also been evaluating the java version of the tool and it is good. But some of the free alternatives like findbugs are still better. I would use findbugs w/ prevent for java if I wanted good coverage.
Just a me too! I use the N800 and fbreader (along with sunrise on the desktop) to do a lot of offline ebook reading. And the great thing about the Nokia is that it does everything else too! FM radio, mp3 web browsing, gps (with add-ons). The one drawback is that it doesn't work well in very bright situations (noon-time reading outside).
I generally use a rule of thumb that says: .doc, otherwise openoffice.
1. If I am publishing pdf or html
2. If I am collaborating, is the collaborator a windows users - then
Just a me too. I use MythTV and I only watch the commercials when I mean to. Like during a Super Bowl or the Oscars. Otherwise, I just go to the next break marker and watch my show. It works so well, it is amazing. Dang you MythTV! Now I am stealing TV by not watching the commercials. It has gotten so bad that when people talk about shows, I can join in. But when they talk about funny commercials, I am totally clueless.
I do. Does even some of it go somewhere where it can be used for broadband? My guess is almost none of it, otherwise the corps that own it would attempt to use it.
I see AT&T hussling like crazy people in my area. They are building out relays and fiber to those relays like someone has lit them on fire. My guess, they wouldn't be doing that if they had fiber in the right places. Go figure, when they laid fiber the first time maybe they should have laid some in residential areas. Maybe they would have something to show for that mountain of debt they are carrying.
I do expect to have DSL2 by this time next year. It is something.
It's all a load of crap at this point anyway.
Here, here! The problem here is that both companies are competing for the same damn thing, data service to your house. The data might be voice, might be email/web or it might be video. But it is just bits. And FWIW, the stream goes down and up you shifty blighters!
Everyone's experience is anecdotal. I have Charter for cable and internet service. And they are horrible. My father has the same service (he lives nearby) and he complains about the same things I complain about. When calling Charter about their problems I am constantly blamed for running alternative operating systems and that the problem has got to be on my end. But strangely, the problem goes away without me changing anything on my part of the network.
So to answer your subject: Yes, you are the only one. And I will be tarred and feather before I let Charter provide me with any other service. I am just biding my time until someone can offer me something better (but don't expect me to hold my breath AT&T).
Thanks to Moore's law embedded systems have grown up enough to use CORBA. I know this because I work on a project which uses CORBA heavily (at least in the TAO and JacORB incarnations). Since CORBA has strong typing, it is attractive to developers who depend heavily on typeness to provide checks in systems where no one likes bugs. And really, who wants to write another middleware to deal with distributed systems? I sure don't.
There is no disclaimer in the article so I think it is worth mentioning that even though Michi was CORBA for all intents and purposes for a number of years, his current employer provides a competitor to CORBA and Web Services. And, you guessed it, that product addresses each and every flaw he outlines in his article.
To be fair ZeroC and Michi do put their money where their mouth is by supplying Ice in source form, licensed under the GPL. Although I do not see them putting this in front of a body like the IETF or trying to get Ice bindings integrated into something like boost. This would really attack that one point in the article talking about having real systems implemented and having it in front of a standards body.
Now that I have put in the proper disclaimers, I have to say that having used CORBA the last 5 years I agree with Michi on every point. Our knowledge of POAs is just now getting to the point where we are comfortable using it in complex ways. We are only now willing to entertain the notion that we are actually using CORBA the right way. We have spent weeks reading, coding, recoding, testing and testing again to understand the spec and the real world usage. The learning curve is easily the steepest and tallest of any technology I have had to learn. I said "Amen" out loud when Michi mentions that people really screw up when they don't do it right.
Using CORBA as a real distributed object system is not possible unless the system is in a network that you have complete control over. Even now we use cumbersome workarounds to develop our system remotely because we can't use CORBA like we were supposed to. Thank you very little script kiddies for making us use firewalls every where! But if CORBA had been built with security in mind in the beginning at all, it would be vastly more useful then it is now.
And we have not moved on to things like Web Services precisely because we do not want to move away from type checking and we can see the train wreck associated to security. So we use CORBA the best we can (and we have been largely successful, BTW).
Now I am going back to checking whether try blocks have been done properly for the naming service code we have to implement because of the exact reasons Michi says most implementers need the CORBA naming service.
Our waterless urinals were provided at no cost by the city our business is in.
We started out with a plastic frame flushless urinal. They did not last long. They exhibited clogging or backup problems almost immediately. Now we have switched to these porcelian jobs from Falcon. They seem to last much longer between filter changes and do a better job of catching splash.
To see the latest generation of this work, check out their sourceforge page:
http://openvidia.sourceforge.net/
> (Open||Net)BSD style approach to developing code: do it slow, do it right, and stop fucking around.
There is nothing slow about OpenBSD development. They churn out a new version on time at least every year but usually semi-annually. But I do agree with the other two criteria.
> Do slashdot readers see Sun being relevant 10 years from now?
It depends on whether you think Sun is turning the corner with these new servers. The original opteron line was basically a company on life support getting pretty much reference models out the door. While these machines show Sun's polish all over it. I think these servers compete well with HP and Dell's offering and they have Sun's polish. I am hopeful. But ten years is a long time from now.
> Will they survive by selling 'mostly' software?
Huh? This is a server line that runs Solaris or Linux. They are definitely still selling hardware and giving away the operating system.
> I know they sell hardware, but they no longer control the full stack like IBM with POWER.
Sun has almost never had control over the full stack. They sold you the hardware with a free (as in beer) operating system on it. Then you put on the application/server software. They might help you buy that application/server software. But they have never made it.
> Anyone know of a decent, powerful PDA with USB host capability built in?
Any iPAQ running a 2.6.9 kernel. It incorporates USB 'on the go'. Which is how a usb device can talk to other usb devices.
Expect this feature to only marginally work at first. And handhelds.org has not yet adapted this kernel. But over time any of the iPAQs out today could support this capability.
> I love being able to play ogg file on my iPod..oh wait, no.
I enjoy a large collection of vorbis coded music on my neuros.
> I mean I love being able to stream them to my Tivo.
My mythbox plays ogg encased xvid4 rips of dvds just fine.
> Wait, no I mean, It's great that I can burn ogg files onto a cd and play them in my car mp3...er ogg...wait, no.
Did I mention my neuros? It has a built in FM transmitter. Childs play to take my music anywhere.
Open solutions exist, run well and will continue if I have anything to say about it.
So, for $19/month total I get NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, Fox (soon), and WB (soon) all in HD. Granted, only the prime time stuff is in HDTV, but every new show is HiDef now (reality crap excluded).
This is what I think is the problem w/ the 'networks'. At the moment they are doing the minimum to provide you w/ HDTV content. They broadcast the signal, they produce some hidef content (some primetime shows and some sporting events). But largely most of the content was captured w/ analog grade equipment and the provided resolution is really no better then the analog signal. For example, CBS seems to have only one hidef capture set because only one football game in a given day will be hidef quality.
If the networks haven't bought in yet, it isn't time for me to make a large investments in HDTV.
Didn't someone buy S3 out because they had some rather nice patents that they purchased from another dead company?
Yeah, VIA. S3 coming out with new 3D hardware is entirely driven by VIA having complete converage of a computer.
All of the comments so far have neglected to figure that S3/VIA are selling EPIA boards like hotcakes. With 3D hardware worse then this chip included. Expect to see this part on the next gen of EPIA boards.
includes corporations which have citizen rights.
heh, don't get me started on corporations and their rights. Thank you for pointing out an obvious issue with having more representation.
is it really necessary to have quick counts? I don't think so.
No, I would settle for more accuracy and actually having my vote counted instead of thrown out by one of the Supremes.
But I do think that making voting easy could provide more flexibility with our current democratic process that is worth exploring. And that (barring difficulties that you have pointed out) could provide us with a better system of politics then we have now.