Look, as much as I resent the RIAA, I have to say that they have a total right to fill up P2P networks with bogus files that look like copyrighted material. Isn't that what they're putting on the CDs they sell?
*One* compiler. *One* OS. *One* machine code. Can be done so I'd never find it. *Multiple* compilers. *Multiple* OSs. *Multiple* machine codes. Too damn many things to trip over. While it should be possible to "fix" gcc, I don't think it'd last very long without somebody smelling it out. For the conspiracy minded, every wonder just *why* Microsoft has been dropping support for all the non-Intel platforms;-)
The problem is that it's the source Microsoft wants me to see when Microsoft wants me to see it. The advantage of Open Source is that I get to look at whatever I want to look at, whenever I want to look at it, and for whatever lame/stupid/paranoid reason or lack of reason I choose. Now I don't really know what to look for, so if *I* don't see anything wrong, it doesn't mean all that much. But. There are people who do, and people who are paranoid, and people who will scream their heads off if there is *anything* suspicious, particularly anthing that *should* be there but isn't. What Microsoft is doing will help. A little. But there are too many ways that what I'm seeing is a *sanitized* version of the source, that I'd still be more than a little bit suspicious.
The simplest switches will be nothing but a backplane and special purpose hardware to connect each link up to the backplane. Impossible. Hub, maybe. A switch is capable of running all links full duplex, which means that the switch must have the processing speed and storage to store and forward packets that would collide if it were just a hub.
Given that the conditions won't be executed in "production" code
Hmmph. The hardware equivalent would be using like using IBM's stunts of parity traces on all lines and CPU comparators ON THE TEST BOX and NOT ON THE PRODUCTION MACHINE.
The hardware giveth and the software taketh away.
If something goes bump in the night, I am much more concerned with discovering it on the production system than the test system. Of course the debuggery stuff exposes the system source so closed-source people won't like it.
Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. The format is linking to stories of interest. The reality is that at least some of us almost never read the linked articles and read the comments instead. The assumption is that with so many comments and limited time it's best to concentrate on the higher ranked comments. It's not just nerds reading Slashdot. Astroturfers with mod points know this and will mod down significant comments detrimental to their cause. Doesn't always work though:-) Slashdot isn't rotten, but it is a war zone and sometimes the good guys will take a hit.
You might have a cache. Your upstream provider almost certainly has a cache. His upstream providers likely have caches. Their upstream providers likely have caches. Depending on the exact path taken, a name request might be erratic as to whether (and to what) it resolved. It would probably take a week for killing all the root servers to take down the internet, although some breakage would be noticeable after about 24-36 hours. Things working off of fixed ip addresses would continue to work. If intermediate caching DNS servers keep used stale addresses until a fresher valid address is known, a lot of the internet would keep on going indefinitely.
Wow. You guys must really live in alternate plane of reality. Hardly. However we do live in different realities, several of 'em.... I'm truly speechless at how unsatisfiable you will ever be. You will never satisfy all of us with any *one* thing. The flame wars of vi versus emacs, Linux versus BSD, Gnome versus KDE, etc. are primarily for entertainment value. They also serve as a reminder that no one solution can solve all problems.
In search of poetic justice. Those of us still using Microsoft products can still dream, can't we?
I take it as a point of pride that I *fix* Windows, I do NOT reinstall it. The whole object of repairing a client's system is to AVOID data loss. Emphasis added. Stay away from bean counters. Intelligent PHBs should note that this ATTITUDE is probably the secret ingredient in actually achieving five nines reliability.
Point made. There's a lot of stuff that is taken for granted.
I want to code something, what should I do?
That's like asking "I have some dirt in one place that I want to move to another place, what should I do?"
The answer can range from grabbing the nearest aproximation to a shovel to setting up a massive dragline and conveyer system. What's big? What's little. A big pile of dirt in your yard is much smaller than a tiny mining operation.
How much programming do you need to know to do what you want to do? One anecdotal point. Way back when, we taught an engineer in one afternoon enough Autocoder (IBM 7074 assembler) to write a subprogram. This subprogram was relocatable on a machine that did almost nothing to support relocation. The subprogram worked. Might have been a typo or two, but no logical or structural errors in the code.
With the example of a CD that costs $1 to make and sells for $20. 1900% of the cost of manufacture is going to something else. (Pretty inefficient if the object is to move a lot of CDs.;) 5% of the retail price goes to manufacturing cost. Say, something like 50% goes to the retail store's gross margin, which has to cover rent, utilities, saleries, etc.
I suspect debuggers are somewhat like console debugging a mainframe. While there are times it is the only expedient mechanism, the less one has to do it the better. For almost everything, there is a better way to do it, usually by including enough consistency checks or such and output of enough state to conveniently tell what's going on. Against debuggers is that they occupy address space and time space. The program being run under the debugger is not the same as the production program. Each will have a different set of bugs and anomalous behaviour. After being burned a few times by debugging the wrong system, (with debugger instead of production), I would imagine there are more than a few developers who have a strong dislike for debuggers. One strong argument for Open Source is that, assuming they don't take up too much resources, there is a tendency to just leave the bug-catchers in the production systems.
Sounds completely plausible, and not at all restricted to SQL. The slow run time is due to the way the work is organized.
This is a contrived example to show what is possible. You have a document on a screen on one computer that you want to copy to a different computer. To save time and preserve accuracy you will copy this letter by letter. Only thing is the computers are in different buildings and you have to walk back and forth.
What you do is to knock out the incredibly vast amount of (re)wasted motion.
Ok, I'll bite, seeing as there seem to be no real answers. Short answer is performance. Not the small differences shown in benchmarks but differences of several orders of magnitude.
Long answer probably involves representation of data and the nature of theoretical versus real-world. Theoretical, regardless of how complicated, is always a vast oversimplification of the real-world. Take something simple like a date. Everybody knows what a date is, right? You have a table of people including dates of birth and death. Guestimated dates and partial information cause trouble. Bad example, but real data is not as clean and exact as one would like. Putting that data into a system that demands that everything be clean and exact doesn't really work.
You're hungry. You need food. Do you starve because not everything is done to perfection?
Viral? Yep, in the sense of almost alive and uses its hosts to regenerate itself. So is a smile. So is yawning at a party.
Seems like a GPL'd program improves its chances of survival dramatically. As long as someone, anyone, is interested enough it will survive. The question is how long it will take for big business to understand the nature of the beast. I suspect that some higher-ups at IBM already do. Interesting times.
Any evidence to support those claims? Other than Microsoft has been caught out a few times, there is evidence in the posts themselves. The pro-MS posts have a tendency to be devoid of any "hard" information content. The posts that are actually informative about Microsoft products tend to show something of an anti-Microsoft bias.
Methinks you're onto a key point here. The final result is derived from the HTML original and also the fonts, the placement scheme, and the image rendering. It's not derived from *one* source, it's derived from *several* sources. Probably why the GPL or some such wins out in the end. Too many things to try to keep track of.
The end-user plays little to no role in information technology. The individual end user may have little voice in matters, but if the end users are not doing what they are supposed to be doing, the system is pretty much worthless.
If he kills all of a user's processes and deletes all of his files, and the user is so grateful he treats the admin to lunch. I got a chuckle of of that one. The sysadmin just succeeded in turning a major disaster in something rather humdrum. The "system" is the users and the corporate infrastructure as much as the hardware and software. It doesn't matter how good the system is if it isn't being used that way.
Methinks it's much better to arrange things so you do not have problems to be solved. When you do have problems, it's probably much more important to understand what the problem is than the skill at solving a problem. Solving the problem you don't have isn't going to help very much.
Creating. You sit at a keyboard and create a program. Right? You did not make the keyboard. You did not design the layout of the keys. You did not design the conventions of which pulses mean which character. Most everything involved in the creation of that program you did not create. However, you are responsible for the creative whatever that makes the difference between whether the program comes into existence or not. Without Al Gore's initiative you would not have the internet. You *might* have a few unused pieces gathering dust in a few university labs. Would you say that Eisenhower created the Interstate Highway system? Seems reasonable even if he never poured any concrete.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, as much as I resent the RIAA, I have to say that they have a total right to fill up P2P networks with bogus files that look like copyrighted material.
Isn't that what they're putting on the CDs they sell?
*One* compiler. *One* OS. *One* machine code. Can be done so I'd never find it. ;-)
*Multiple* compilers. *Multiple* OSs. *Multiple* machine codes. Too damn many things to trip over.
While it should be possible to "fix" gcc, I don't think it'd last very long without somebody smelling it out.
For the conspiracy minded, every wonder just *why* Microsoft has been dropping support for all the non-Intel platforms
The problem is that it's the source Microsoft wants me to see when Microsoft wants me to see it. The advantage of Open Source is that I get to look at whatever I want to look at, whenever I want to look at it, and for whatever lame/stupid/paranoid reason or lack of reason I choose.
Now I don't really know what to look for, so if *I* don't see anything wrong, it doesn't mean all that much. But. There are people who do, and people who are paranoid, and people who will scream their heads off if there is *anything* suspicious, particularly anthing that *should* be there but isn't.
What Microsoft is doing will help. A little. But there are too many ways that what I'm seeing is a *sanitized* version of the source, that I'd still be more than a little bit suspicious.
The simplest switches will be nothing but a backplane and special purpose hardware to connect each link up to the backplane.
Impossible.
Hub, maybe. A switch is capable of running all links full duplex, which means that the switch must have the processing speed and storage to store and forward packets that would collide if it were just a hub.
Given that the conditions won't be executed in "production" code
Hmmph. The hardware equivalent would be using like using IBM's stunts of parity traces on all lines and CPU comparators ON THE TEST BOX and NOT ON THE PRODUCTION MACHINE.
The hardware giveth and the software taketh away.
If something goes bump in the night, I am much more concerned with discovering it on the production system than the test system. Of course the debuggery stuff exposes the system source so closed-source people won't like it.
Algol68 may *still* be ahead of its time. :-(
Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. :-)
The format is linking to stories of interest.
The reality is that at least some of us almost never read the linked articles and read the comments instead. The assumption is that with so many comments and limited time it's best to concentrate on the higher ranked comments. It's not just nerds reading Slashdot.
Astroturfers with mod points know this and will mod down significant comments detrimental to their cause. Doesn't always work though
Slashdot isn't rotten, but it is a war zone and sometimes the good guys will take a hit.
I *assume* there are readers who don't check out Slashdot at least daily.
If so, it makes sense to repost stories of major significance.
Think of Slashdot like a soap opera. Major plot twists need to be repeated for the benefit of sporadic listeners.
You might have a cache.
Your upstream provider almost certainly has a cache.
His upstream providers likely have caches.
Their upstream providers likely have caches.
Depending on the exact path taken, a name request might be erratic as to whether (and to what) it resolved.
It would probably take a week for killing all the root servers to take down the internet, although some breakage would be noticeable after about 24-36 hours.
Things working off of fixed ip addresses would continue to work.
If intermediate caching DNS servers keep used stale addresses until a fresher valid address is known, a lot of the internet would keep on going indefinitely.
Wow. You guys must really live in alternate plane of reality. ... I'm truly speechless at how unsatisfiable you will ever be.
Hardly. However we do live in different realities, several of 'em.
You will never satisfy all of us with any *one* thing. The flame wars of vi versus emacs, Linux versus BSD, Gnome versus KDE, etc. are primarily for entertainment value. They also serve as a reminder that no one solution can solve all problems.
In search of poetic justice. Those of us still using Microsoft products can still dream, can't we?
I take it as a point of pride that I *fix* Windows, I do NOT reinstall it.
The whole object of repairing a client's system is to AVOID data loss.
Emphasis added.
Stay away from bean counters.
Intelligent PHBs should note that this ATTITUDE is probably the secret ingredient in actually achieving five nines reliability.
Point made. There's a lot of stuff that is taken for granted.
I want to code something, what should I do?
That's like asking "I have some dirt in one place that I want to move to another place, what should I do?"
The answer can range from grabbing the nearest aproximation to a shovel to setting up a massive dragline and conveyer system. What's big? What's little. A big pile of dirt in your yard is much smaller than a tiny mining operation.
How much programming do you need to know to do what you want to do?
One anecdotal point. Way back when, we taught an engineer in one afternoon enough Autocoder (IBM 7074 assembler) to write a subprogram. This subprogram was relocatable on a machine that did almost nothing to support relocation. The subprogram worked. Might have been a typo or two, but no logical or structural errors in the code.
With the example of a CD that costs $1 to make and sells for $20.
1900% of the cost of manufacture is going to something else.
(Pretty inefficient if the object is to move a lot of CDs.;)
5% of the retail price goes to manufacturing cost.
Say, something like 50% goes to the retail store's gross margin, which has to cover rent, utilities, saleries, etc.
I suspect debuggers are somewhat like console debugging a mainframe. While there are times it is the only expedient mechanism, the less one has to do it the better. For almost everything, there is a better way to do it, usually by including enough consistency checks or such and output of enough state to conveniently tell what's going on.
Against debuggers is that they occupy address space and time space. The program being run under the debugger is not the same as the production program. Each will have a different set of bugs and anomalous behaviour. After being burned a few times by debugging the wrong system, (with debugger instead of production), I would imagine there are more than a few developers who have a strong dislike for debuggers.
One strong argument for Open Source is that, assuming they don't take up too much resources, there is a tendency to just leave the bug-catchers in the production systems.
Elevators are nicer and easier than stairs.
Let's do away with the messy stairs.
but
The elevator is broken.
Use the stairs.
Can't. No stairs.
Sounds completely plausible, and not at all restricted to SQL.
The slow run time is due to the way the work is organized.
This is a contrived example to show what is possible.
You have a document on a screen on one computer that you want to copy to a different computer. To save time and preserve accuracy you will copy this letter by letter. Only thing is the computers are in different buildings and you have to walk back and forth.
What you do is to knock out the incredibly vast amount of (re)wasted motion.
Ok, I'll bite, seeing as there seem to be no real answers.
Short answer is performance. Not the small differences shown in benchmarks but differences of several orders of magnitude.
Long answer probably involves representation of data and the nature of theoretical versus real-world. Theoretical, regardless of how complicated, is always a vast oversimplification of the real-world.
Take something simple like a date. Everybody knows what a date is, right?
You have a table of people including dates of birth and death.
Guestimated dates and partial information cause trouble.
Bad example, but real data is not as clean and exact as one would like. Putting that data into a system that demands that everything be clean and exact doesn't really work.
You're hungry. You need food. Do you starve because not everything is done to perfection?
Viral? Yep, in the sense of almost alive and uses its hosts to regenerate itself.
So is a smile.
So is yawning at a party.
Seems like a GPL'd program improves its chances of survival dramatically. As long as someone, anyone, is interested enough it will survive. The question is how long it will take for big business to understand the nature of the beast. I suspect that some higher-ups at IBM already do. Interesting times.
With Bill Gates the richest man on earth, or something like that, and planning to get richer still, the M$ seems quite natural.
Any evidence to support those claims?
Other than Microsoft has been caught out a few times, there is evidence in the posts themselves. The pro-MS posts have a tendency to be devoid of any "hard" information content. The posts that are actually informative about Microsoft products tend to show something of an anti-Microsoft bias.
Methinks you're onto a key point here. The final result is derived from the HTML original and also the fonts, the placement scheme, and the image rendering. It's not derived from *one* source, it's derived from *several* sources. Probably why the GPL or some such wins out in the end. Too many things to try to keep track of.
The end-user plays little to no role in information technology.
The individual end user may have little voice in matters, but if the end users are not doing what they are supposed to be doing, the system is pretty much worthless.
If he kills all of a user's processes and deletes all of his files, and the user is so grateful he treats the admin to lunch.
I got a chuckle of of that one. The sysadmin just succeeded in turning a major disaster in something rather humdrum.
The "system" is the users and the corporate infrastructure as much as the hardware and software. It doesn't matter how good the system is if it isn't being used that way.
Methinks it's much better to arrange things so you do not have problems to be solved. When you do have problems, it's probably much more important to understand what the problem is than the skill at solving a problem. Solving the problem you don't have isn't going to help very much.
Creating.
You sit at a keyboard and create a program. Right?
You did not make the keyboard.
You did not design the layout of the keys.
You did not design the conventions of which pulses mean which character.
Most everything involved in the creation of that program you did not create.
However, you are responsible for the creative whatever that makes the difference between whether the program comes into existence or not.
Without Al Gore's initiative you would not have the internet. You *might* have a few unused pieces gathering dust in a few university labs.
Would you say that Eisenhower created the Interstate Highway system? Seems reasonable even if he never poured any concrete.
I think the comment originated with Churchill, probably after he got razzed for dangling his preposition.