in terms of providing ways of verifying, at least *type* correctness.
In terms of verifying the correctness of the implementation of an algorithm... you have to accept that is a practice that will never exist outside of academia.
That's not to say we should never prove things about algorithms, but rigorous proofs should not be done on production code and on production languages. Use psuedocode if you want a proof. Correctness of algorithms in production code comes from the fact that those algorithms are 1. derived from well known and proven algorithms, 2. are "obviously" correct, 3. have unit tests to provide *empirical evidence* for the correctness of their implementation.
Real companies put more emphasis on empirical evidence of program correctness, especially unit tests, than analytical solutions. Type correctness is a powerful tool, but aside from that it's pretty much impossible to determine program correctness while still allowing for efficient low level programming constructs that are necessary in production code.
For the record I never said I considered the google IPO overhyped. I'm just saying, that while google stock (initially) did well, and everyone remembers that google stock did well, apple did even better. Significantly better. This is meant to impress upon the reader the fact that Apple's current strategy for high profit low volume production is working well for them.
On the contrary, I think Google is a very good company with a lot of value. In fact, I should know:)
Apple is not some IPO. They are only one year younger than Microsoft (76 as opposed to 75). For the past decade or so, their market share has been more or less stagnant. They have grown significantly, but they have not grown significantly with respect to microsoft.
The same is true of linux.
There's no indication whatsoever that anyone will get a larger marketshare than microsoft any time in the next 30 years.
by verizon. Verizon just rolled out fiber to the curb in my neighbor hood. Now I have a real alternative to cable internet. When this becomes more widespread comcast is going to have to stop dicking around with their customers.
and hasn't since Jobs took over. There was a period when Apple's main goal was to increase market share. When they licensed the mac os to run on third party hardware (I have a mac clone from back in the day). It almost killed apple.
Ultimately, to take any significant chunk of the PC space, apple would need to start releasing hardware on a much smaller profit margin in order to compete with Dell, Gateway, Acer, and Lenovo. This would destroy Apple's profits and company, as the Apple clones fiasco empirically demonstrated.
On the other hand, Apple's current strategy of releasing high profile hardware to a niche market has done phenominally well for them. They've stayed profitable, and have boosted their marketshare to an incredible high compared to historical values.
If you'd bought apple stock and google stock at the time google went IPO, your apple stock would have outperformed your google stock by 3 or 4 times. Apple is doing *very* well and has no incentive to move away from their current low volume, high profit margin strategy. They are essentially skimming the creme of the consumer crop with their products.
that they should be out and out cloning photoshop. Lets not kid ourselves, photoshop's design is good, and gimp hasn't had much success on coming up with their own independently. Places where they've deviated from photoshop in the past have been a mistake.
The article itself was vague, but the other linked page indicated that all that microsoft was doing was releasing an *installer* that would be available online for some software.
This doesn't seem in any way analogous to what they did with IE, since the article doesn't claim the software would be bundled with windows itself. This is much less than what the article title claims.
This slashdot article was so uninformative and fear mongering, I almost mistook it for FOX news. Seriously, some of the editors need to quit doing stuff like this.
As others have mentioned, the problem with the existing batteries is energy density. All fuel sources have the exact some problem, from capacitors, to uranium, to gasoline. They can release all that energy dangerously under the wrong conditions. This isn't a problem for which there is any easy fix, other than being really careful to insure those conditions are never met.
Existing capacitors in your computer can make quite a boom...
AIM is actually pretty nifty if you don't try to use the new clients from AOL (which installs crap in the backgrount). Most people I know either have an old version of AIM (installers for every version are available online) or use third party clients like trillian, gaim/pidgin/adium.
Google's trick of automatically signing you up for google talk and automatically adding your friends to your contact list will probably pay off in the long run though. I already sign onto both AIM and google talk on my pidgin client.
The point is that if facebook censors its site, it's a mark against them in the eyes of many of its users. The whole point of bulletin boards, usenet, etc is that it provide an open forum of expression. If they choose to remove some speech, they are devaluing the service they provide to their users, and harming the trust of their users.
I don't see enforcing censorship on a social networking site as being a good thing. Frankly, that would encourage *me* to leave the service. If they are willing to censor one topic, they are likely to censor others.
It's one thing to say something obnoxious, it's much worse to go around telling people they aren't "allowed" to say it.
X configuration is by far my biggest time waster on linux. If they manage to make the gtk based configurator half decent, they will finally make x as usable as mac was back in... 1984.
Seriously though, I'm happy *someone* is finally trying to fix one of the big problems in X, of which there are legion.
but it looks like a nice website. They have malthus on the first page and some kind of nifty flash reader.
What other sites are there like scribd? I'd seen project guttenberg before, but their documents tend to be in raw text file format, have typos, etc.
Also, are there sites that have fiction released under creative commons, or some such? A lot of people write fiction they probably couldn't make much money off of (fan fiction and otherwise) and it would be cool to see some massive moderated document repository that I could filter through for good stories.
People tend to focus on individual features that linux is missing most, but as a developer I have to say that what linux is most lacking is overall design.
Unlike other operating systems, linux lacks any kind of architect responsible for the overall design. Instead there are a bunch of competing groups providing specific components, and no one really responsible for orchestrating how they all fit together. This means that a lot of the underlying facilities in linux are either outdated (left over from early unices), munged together hacks, or are good systems, but aren't used by much of the system.
Some examples of areas that need improvement: daemons: The model for daemons used now is archaic and needs to be done away with. There needs to be a central place for registering and controlling all services. There needs to be a single system level API to support writing services. All this nonsense aboutlocking files to determine if another daemond is already running, and writing your PID out to a file needs to be done away with. Finally, someone has to actually take existing daemons like httpd, ftpd, etc and add support for the new model to them.
program configuration: Right now all the system level programs and even some user level programs use their own custom flat file format for even trivial configuration details. Gnome has a pretty nice configuration system used by most gtk apps called gconf. This or something like it should be used by everything. At the very least someone should introduce the X.org guys to something called "xml" for use in xorg.conf.
C++ support: Generally, linux is a crappy place to write c++ apps. The c++ abi on linux has broken numerous times, which means that people are afraid to write c++ on linux and a lot of libraries only have c interfaces. Even libraries that are written in c++ often only export c++ interfaces because of abi issues.
Build systems: Currently, most open source projects use something called "autotools". Does the following looks familiar?./configure make sudo make install
That configure script and the makefile are generated by autotools. From a users perspective, it aint too bad, and everyone's familiar with the install process. From a developers perspective, autotools is pure hell.
Autotools is essentially a really bad attempt at providing tools for writing crossplatform software on top of make. It is overly complicated, slow, most people don't really understand how it works, and it encourages developers to write heavily "ifdeffed" and totally unreadable code. Furthermore, despite the fact that everyone uses it, I don't think it's actively being developed anymore (kind of like cvs...).
Essentially, someone needs to identify a new standard for c and c++ build systems and talk a bunch of the existing open source projects to convert (which would be difficult) or at least make all *new* project under the new build system.
X: X is a major piece of linux architecture that most people will agree sucks. X is hard to configure and doesn't do autodetection of hardware configuration right even on supposedly good drivers. However, autodetection of good hardware configuration may be still a bit ambitious. The biggest bang for the least effort would probably be to just make X more configurable by doing away with xorg.conf and replacing it by either plugging into gconf or just using some kind of xml file. Once this is done, it becomes trivial to write GUI's to configure x.
Oh, also, I shouldn't have to restart my computer to change my resolution.
Sound: Sound support sucks on linux. However, all of the existing (non-driver related) linux sound problems would just go away if someone made/dev/dsp multiplex itself...
So really, what I think that linux needs is high level direction in terms of architecture. That doesn't really mean getting people to write some new piece of code so much as having someone step up and say "this is the right way to do things" and to talk to the existing projects and convince the maintainers that these approaches are the way to go and get their support.
you shouldn't expect to convey any evidence in 30 seconds, nor should you try to. Don't try to draw the candidate into debating your point when you won't be given the opportunity to respond to his criticism due to the format of the debate. The point isn't to educate, or even argue, but ask a question that forces the candidate to say plainly where he stands on evolution.
The fact is, this is the worst sort of question you can ask a republican candidate on any subject. The republican party is a patchwork of alliances between various groups that don't all believe in the same thing, even if they vote the same way. It's kept together by focusing on things that everyone hates, and avoiding as much as possible the areas where the party is deeply divided on ideology.
Belief in evolution is divided along lines of education, and there are plenty of educated people in the republican party. There are also plenty of uneducated creationists in the party. Forcing the candidate to pick sides means forcing him to pick which group's support he wants to lose.
whether windows vista graphics drivers run in kernel mode? I've heard both ways, and I'd like to hear for sure from someone who has actually written drivers for vista.
IIS has put out some nice features that are turning heads away from apache, and apache, or some open source server needs to step up and meet the challenge.
I've used IIS and apache, and the main feature that I see that IIS has and apache doesn't is ease of configurability.
Microsoft has made a commitment to configuration files all being XML, and having GUIs sitting on top of them, that makes getting an install working pretty trivial.
Apache on the other hand has its own flat file format, that nothing else knows how to parse. If you want to install support for a new language or something, the installer usually include a script that either nukes your old httpd.conf or appends something to the end of it. Either way, that's a good way to break things.
Aside from that, I'd say that apache is still pretty strong. ASP.NET is pretty good, aside from their screwed up event model, but there are a lot of other packages under heavy development to compete with that.
basically the entire software industry, even the open source parts, would fall apart without it.
I'm not going to say I've never pirated anything, but be honest. By pirating I'm not protesting some bad law, I'm violating an entirely valid law. The reason I, you, and pretty much everyone else violates the law on occasion isn't because it is moral, but because we have a high incentive to and because there's low risk we'll get caught.
I think that it is somewhat dangerous to try to ascribe some kind of moral purpose to all of our actions. Usually people just do stuff because it is convenient to them. People who think that everything they do is for some moral right are called zealots, and they tend to do a lot of damage without realizing it.
it was probably the easiest to use tool of its type, and all of the mac users that I knew that were interested in security used it. It really sucks that the main developer is going to be pushed off the project.
For those who haven't used it, it is significantly better than kismet for linux. It brings together kismet, and a number of other open source tools for wep cracking and integrates them into a easy to use UI. It is pretty trivial (point and click) to break a wep network with kismac. I've tried the same with the linux tool chain, and it is a pain in the ass in comparison.
I hope that someone else restarts development on this project. It really is a valuable tool that would be a shame to lose.
It sounds like the author is statically linking his library and running on embedded an embedded system. It is not surprising in that case that the c++ standard library brings in much more code than the c standard library, but it should be made clear that it is not relevant to desktop developers, pretty much all of which dynamically link with glibc.
Again, to be clear, dynamically linking with the c++ standard library is not going to increase your executable size. Please don't try to roll your own code that exists in the standard library. It is a real nuisance when people do that.
I should qualify that by saying that template instantiations do (of course) increase executable size, but that they do so no more than if you had rolled your own.
Slashdot Mirror
in terms of providing ways of verifying, at least *type* correctness.
In terms of verifying the correctness of the implementation of an algorithm... you have to accept that is a practice that will never exist outside of academia.
That's not to say we should never prove things about algorithms, but rigorous proofs should not be done on production code and on production languages. Use psuedocode if you want a proof. Correctness of algorithms in production code comes from the fact that those algorithms are 1. derived from well known and proven algorithms, 2. are "obviously" correct, 3. have unit tests to provide *empirical evidence* for the correctness of their implementation.
Real companies put more emphasis on empirical evidence of program correctness, especially unit tests, than analytical solutions. Type correctness is a powerful tool, but aside from that it's pretty much impossible to determine program correctness while still allowing for efficient low level programming constructs that are necessary in production code.
although as others have mentioned a discount would probably be a better approach.
For the record I never said I considered the google IPO overhyped. I'm just saying, that while google stock (initially) did well, and everyone remembers that google stock did well, apple did even better. Significantly better. This is meant to impress upon the reader the fact that Apple's current strategy for high profit low volume production is working well for them.
:)
On the contrary, I think Google is a very good company with a lot of value. In fact, I should know
Apple is not some IPO. They are only one year younger than Microsoft (76 as opposed to 75). For the past decade or so, their market share has been more or less stagnant. They have grown significantly, but they have not grown significantly with respect to microsoft.
The same is true of linux.
There's no indication whatsoever that anyone will get a larger marketshare than microsoft any time in the next 30 years.
by verizon. Verizon just rolled out fiber to the curb in my neighbor hood. Now I have a real alternative to cable internet. When this becomes more widespread comcast is going to have to stop dicking around with their customers.
and hasn't since Jobs took over. There was a period when Apple's main goal was to increase market share. When they licensed the mac os to run on third party hardware (I have a mac clone from back in the day). It almost killed apple.
Ultimately, to take any significant chunk of the PC space, apple would need to start releasing hardware on a much smaller profit margin in order to compete with Dell, Gateway, Acer, and Lenovo. This would destroy Apple's profits and company, as the Apple clones fiasco empirically demonstrated.
On the other hand, Apple's current strategy of releasing high profile hardware to a niche market has done phenominally well for them. They've stayed profitable, and have boosted their marketshare to an incredible high compared to historical values.
If you'd bought apple stock and google stock at the time google went IPO, your apple stock would have outperformed your google stock by 3 or 4 times. Apple is doing *very* well and has no incentive to move away from their current low volume, high profit margin strategy. They are essentially skimming the creme of the consumer crop with their products.
that they should be out and out cloning photoshop. Lets not kid ourselves, photoshop's design is good, and gimp hasn't had much success on coming up with their own independently. Places where they've deviated from photoshop in the past have been a mistake.
that moon.google.com has gotten really bad ass all of a sudden. Street view, for the *moon*.
How this is tying anything into the OS?
The article itself was vague, but the other linked page indicated that all that microsoft was doing was releasing an *installer* that would be available online for some software.
This doesn't seem in any way analogous to what they did with IE, since the article doesn't claim the software would be bundled with windows itself. This is much less than what the article title claims.
This slashdot article was so uninformative and fear mongering, I almost mistook it for FOX news. Seriously, some of the editors need to quit doing stuff like this.
As others have mentioned, the problem with the existing batteries is energy density. All fuel sources have the exact some problem, from capacitors, to uranium, to gasoline. They can release all that energy dangerously under the wrong conditions. This isn't a problem for which there is any easy fix, other than being really careful to insure those conditions are never met.
Existing capacitors in your computer can make quite a boom...
Things like IM are all about what social group you are in.
m -news/34413-im-market-share.html
In the united states, AIM is still by far the most widely used chat protocol
http://www.bigblueball.com/forums/general-other-i
AIM is actually pretty nifty if you don't try to use the new clients from AOL (which installs crap in the backgrount). Most people I know either have an old version of AIM (installers for every version are available online) or use third party clients like trillian, gaim/pidgin/adium.
Google's trick of automatically signing you up for google talk and automatically adding your friends to your contact list will probably pay off in the long run though. I already sign onto both AIM and google talk on my pidgin client.
The point is that if facebook censors its site, it's a mark against them in the eyes of many of its users. The whole point of bulletin boards, usenet, etc is that it provide an open forum of expression. If they choose to remove some speech, they are devaluing the service they provide to their users, and harming the trust of their users.
I don't see enforcing censorship on a social networking site as being a good thing. Frankly, that would encourage *me* to leave the service. If they are willing to censor one topic, they are likely to censor others.
It's one thing to say something obnoxious, it's much worse to go around telling people they aren't "allowed" to say it.
X configuration is by far my biggest time waster on linux. If they manage to make the gtk based configurator half decent, they will finally make x as usable as mac was back in... 1984.
Seriously though, I'm happy *someone* is finally trying to fix one of the big problems in X, of which there are legion.
but it looks like a nice website. They have malthus on the first page and some kind of nifty flash reader.
What other sites are there like scribd? I'd seen project guttenberg before, but their documents tend to be in raw text file format, have typos, etc.
Also, are there sites that have fiction released under creative commons, or some such? A lot of people write fiction they probably couldn't make much money off of (fan fiction and otherwise) and it would be cool to see some massive moderated document repository that I could filter through for good stories.
People tend to focus on individual features that linux is missing most, but as a developer I have to say that what linux is most lacking is overall design.
./configure
/dev/dsp multiplex itself...
Unlike other operating systems, linux lacks any kind of architect responsible for the overall design. Instead there are a bunch of competing groups providing specific components, and no one really responsible for orchestrating how they all fit together. This means that a lot of the underlying facilities in linux are either outdated (left over from early unices), munged together hacks, or are good systems, but aren't used by much of the system.
Some examples of areas that need improvement:
daemons: The model for daemons used now is archaic and needs to be done away with. There needs to be a central place for registering and controlling all services. There needs to be a single system level API to support writing services. All this nonsense aboutlocking files to determine if another daemond is already running, and writing your PID out to a file needs to be done away with. Finally, someone has to actually take existing daemons like httpd, ftpd, etc and add support for the new model to them.
program configuration:
Right now all the system level programs and even some user level programs use their own custom flat file format for even trivial configuration details. Gnome has a pretty nice configuration system used by most gtk apps called gconf. This or something like it should be used by everything.
At the very least someone should introduce the X.org guys to something called "xml" for use in xorg.conf.
C++ support:
Generally, linux is a crappy place to write c++ apps. The c++ abi on linux has broken numerous times, which means that people are afraid to write c++ on linux and a lot of libraries only have c interfaces. Even libraries that are written in c++ often only export c++ interfaces because of abi issues.
Build systems:
Currently, most open source projects use something called "autotools". Does the following looks familiar?
make
sudo make install
That configure script and the makefile are generated by autotools. From a users perspective, it aint too bad, and everyone's familiar with the install process. From a developers perspective, autotools is pure hell.
Autotools is essentially a really bad attempt at providing tools for writing crossplatform software on top of make. It is overly complicated, slow, most people don't really understand how it works, and it encourages developers to write heavily "ifdeffed" and totally unreadable code. Furthermore, despite the fact that everyone uses it, I don't think it's actively being developed anymore (kind of like cvs...).
Essentially, someone needs to identify a new standard for c and c++ build systems and talk a bunch of the existing open source projects to convert (which would be difficult) or at least make all *new* project under the new build system.
X:
X is a major piece of linux architecture that most people will agree sucks. X is hard to configure and doesn't do autodetection of hardware configuration right even on supposedly good drivers. However, autodetection of good hardware configuration may be still a bit ambitious. The biggest bang for the least effort would probably be to just make X more configurable by doing away with xorg.conf and replacing it by either plugging into gconf or just using some kind of xml file. Once this is done, it becomes trivial to write GUI's to configure x.
Oh, also, I shouldn't have to restart my computer to change my resolution.
Sound:
Sound support sucks on linux. However, all of the existing (non-driver related) linux sound problems would just go away if someone made
So really, what I think that linux needs is high level direction in terms of architecture. That doesn't really mean getting people to write some new piece of code so much as having someone step up and say "this is the right way to do things" and to talk to the existing projects and convince the maintainers that these approaches are the way to go and get their support.
you shouldn't expect to convey any evidence in 30 seconds, nor should you try to. Don't try to draw the candidate into debating your point when you won't be given the opportunity to respond to his criticism due to the format of the debate. The point isn't to educate, or even argue, but ask a question that forces the candidate to say plainly where he stands on evolution.
The fact is, this is the worst sort of question you can ask a republican candidate on any subject. The republican party is a patchwork of alliances between various groups that don't all believe in the same thing, even if they vote the same way. It's kept together by focusing on things that everyone hates, and avoiding as much as possible the areas where the party is deeply divided on ideology.
Belief in evolution is divided along lines of education, and there are plenty of educated people in the republican party. There are also plenty of uneducated creationists in the party. Forcing the candidate to pick sides means forcing him to pick which group's support he wants to lose.
whether windows vista graphics drivers run in kernel mode? I've heard both ways, and I'd like to hear for sure from someone who has actually written drivers for vista.
Isn't he just solving a NP polynomial problem with... a nondeterministic machine? So what? I can do that too...
IIS has put out some nice features that are turning heads away from apache, and apache, or some open source server needs to step up and meet the challenge.
.NET is pretty good, aside from their screwed up event model, but there are a lot of other packages under heavy development to compete with that.
I've used IIS and apache, and the main feature that I see that IIS has and apache doesn't is ease of configurability.
Microsoft has made a commitment to configuration files all being XML, and having GUIs sitting on top of them, that makes getting an install working pretty trivial.
Apache on the other hand has its own flat file format, that nothing else knows how to parse. If you want to install support for a new language or something, the installer usually include a script that either nukes your old httpd.conf or appends something to the end of it. Either way, that's a good way to break things.
Aside from that, I'd say that apache is still pretty strong. ASP
If the linux kernel had any up to date documentation at all... or even just comments.
Neither automatix site or the article clarifies where the "illegal" comes from.
basically the entire software industry, even the open source parts, would fall apart without it.
I'm not going to say I've never pirated anything, but be honest. By pirating I'm not protesting some bad law, I'm violating an entirely valid law. The reason I, you, and pretty much everyone else violates the law on occasion isn't because it is moral, but because we have a high incentive to and because there's low risk we'll get caught.
I think that it is somewhat dangerous to try to ascribe some kind of moral purpose to all of our actions. Usually people just do stuff because it is convenient to them. People who think that everything they do is for some moral right are called zealots, and they tend to do a lot of damage without realizing it.
it was probably the easiest to use tool of its type, and all of the mac users that I knew that were interested in security used it. It really sucks that the main developer is going to be pushed off the project.
For those who haven't used it, it is significantly better than kismet for linux. It brings together kismet, and a number of other open source tools for wep cracking and integrates them into a easy to use UI. It is pretty trivial (point and click) to break a wep network with kismac. I've tried the same with the linux tool chain, and it is a pain in the ass in comparison.
I hope that someone else restarts development on this project. It really is a valuable tool that would be a shame to lose.
It sounds like the author is statically linking his library and running on embedded an embedded system. It is not surprising in that case that the c++ standard library brings in much more code than the c standard library, but it should be made clear that it is not relevant to desktop developers, pretty much all of which dynamically link with glibc.
Again, to be clear, dynamically linking with the c++ standard library is not going to increase your executable size. Please don't try to roll your own code that exists in the standard library. It is a real nuisance when people do that.
I should qualify that by saying that template instantiations do (of course) increase executable size, but that they do so no more than if you had rolled your own.